Livin' the Luxury Brown

I am spending yet another night in the house I spent so many years trying to escape. But frankly, confronting family conflict is easier than sitting alone on an empty college campus thinking about how everyone else is at home or on vacation below the Tropic of Cancer. And I am here, made insignificant by the falling snow.

My boredom could have fueled countless other creative endeavors. Parts of me wanted to splatter paint all over canvas, but too much effort and emotion are required to produce anything worthwhile through painstaking brush strokes. Other parts craved clay between the finger nails, wielding control over its malleable flesh. Yet that requires equipment I do not have and I am not daring enough to break into high school land's finely equipped pottery lab like we used to do. I do miss those quiet Sunday's where Bob Dylan played on and on as the wheels turned, the clay spun and our dreams floated about like they one day might be achieved.

Now that building makes me feel like I am walking through my own tomb. Dreams had in that classroom, ideas born in that library, pride found in that teacher's office. All dead and forgotten now, all terrible reminders of how I have let so much slip away these last few years and how I have given up on myself in a lot of ways.

Enough of that.

Stupid T.S. Eliot and your pretencious initials, making me form all of these thoughts about past, present, and future. Well I don't want to because you might actually be right and I hate you for that. Hate is supposedly a strong word but I'm not sure art can have much of a middle ground, so if it isn't love it must be hate.

For the last five hours I have been putting silly words together into even more obnoxious sentences that having nothing to do with ones before them or the ones that come after them because that is how T.S. Eliot makes me feel. So instead I wrote my sister's application paper to the high school honors program about the Pony Express and how it changed my life, I mean her life and I kept asking her would you use the word subsequent, the word revolutionize, the word recipient, etc etc etc because I have no idea what kind of words thirteen year olds use to talk about culturally relevant historical events. I wrote my other sisters application paper too and she was admitted to the program so if this sister gets in that means I will have been admitted to the honors program three times. I am so consistent. My paper was about the moon landing and sister #1's paper was about sputnik. What original ideas, I know.

I tried to tell her that the honors program will ruin her life. She wouldn't listen. All of her friends are doing it. I told her to make new ones and enjoy being naive without worrying about the consequences while you can. I don't regret my high school career, not at all. I wouldn't have been happy any other way. But it isn't for her and I think she knows that.

I secretly hope she doesn't get accepted.
Just so she can live her life and not mine.