smells like confusion
While I was in Iowa, my 14-year-old cousin asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.
When my response wasn't immediate, he added, 'A housewife, or something?'
A housewife? Damn, I simply cannot fathom the infinite intelligence and skill that is required when one so loftily aspires to be a housewife. Damn, that's right up there with a secretary (and yes, I was questioned about that one, too).
I think the part that worries me the most is that we're not talking about a 6-year-old, here. This isn't some vacant-eyed child who seeks security within inanimate objects with felt noses and cotton innards. Everyone -- and 'everyone' includes those so delirious with Alzheimer's that they put their coats in preheated ovens -- is keenly aware of the aura of wisdom and insight that a 14-year-old possesses.
Sure, you laugh now, but you won't be when you discover that I'm a 14-year-old.
Or if you knew that already, you're still laughing anyway to spite me.
The day previous to my career interrogation, my mom slipped in the room as I was getting ready for bed. By this time, my cousin had apparently been trying fruitlessly to get me to do something with him for the past two days or so.
'Kyle thinks all you ever do is talk on the phone and stare blankly into the computer screen,' my mom explained. 'He thinks you're completely devoid of friends and mull around the house when you're not in school.'
She paused for a second to grin with amusement and chuckle, then continued: 'He thinks you're extremely lonely.'
I snorted in mock surprise and smiled hollowly.
'Strange,' I muttered.
I can carry on a conversation with my own parents while I'm sobbing and they'll be completely oblivious to my depression, but a boy I see once a year at best glances over his shoulder at me and instantly knows that I'm dead on the inside.
What's wrong with this picture?
But yeah. That's not the purpose of this entry, much less this diary.
Anyway -- there's this thing called a theory exam, you see. My piano teacher's been encouraging me to take it for a few months now, simply because I'm able to and that sort of experience will serve me well.
I took the said exam yesterday, but I never really got around to transposing it into the diary entry format.
This year, the level one theory exam was held in Mora, Minnesota, in a small, chilly Methodist church adorned with colorful stained glass windows.
It's a four-hour round trip from the described Methodist church and my house.
Four hours. Just to take a damn theory exam. I bet the MMTA (Minnesota Music Teacher's Association) purposely did that, conspired some sort of way to rob high school students of all of their free time on their blessed weekends.
The journey to Mora was disturbingly similar to the breathtakingly beautiful scenery of Iowa. I could tell we were really out in the boondocks once I started noticing silos, barns, and dead corn fields. Needless to say, I was frightened.
Despite the complete lack of civilization, there were billboards set up at 300-yard intervals on either side of the road. What sort of audience could they hope to target by locating their advertisements there, anyway? The crows perched on telephone wires?
But no, it gets better than that. Most of the advertisements weren't really advertisements at all -- they were public service announcements.
'If you're sad, talk to someone and you'll soon feel glad.'
The last one had child-esque handwriting with multicolored crayons, except you could read it and the letters weren't backwards.
Speaking of crayons, has anyone ever seen those bigass crayons that're about five times the size of a normal crayon? Back in the day when I attended kindergarten, everyone was instructed to bring crayons to school and place them in soup cans. The soup cans had construction paper wrapped around them, so we could easily identify which can was ours. Naturally, the teachers had to write our names on the soup cans, so, you know, they'd be legible. I was the only kid that had the aforementioned bigass crayons, and it was pretty embarrassing. I felt like my grandpa, who, at the time, was still alive. He was staying in this nursing home, and his eyesight left much to be desired. The telephone he had in his room had these huge buttons on them, so he could easily tell which number was which. After he died, it spooked the hell out of me seeing the same phone by the back door, which is where we keep all magazines and such that we plan to recycle or throw out or whatever form of disposal is necessary.
Moving on, this prominence of suicide billboards makes perfect sense, too. The abundance of corn is bound to shove anyone into the ravine of insanity.
Bored off my ass and staring out the car window, I somehow managed to get 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' in my head.
Damn, at least it was Nirvana and not Christmas music.
But anyway, I wondered why it is that everyone's forever bitching that Kurt Cobain mumbles and, therefore, they can't understand what he's saying.
My response to that?
What good is it to understand what he's saying when what he's saying makes no sense?