tell me about it, morgy.

needless to say, my older sister's karma is that she gave birth to me. me on girlpowerdivanessandwit steroids. so, the above is a physical representation of how morgan feels today. she's sick. it hurts in her "throat and the middle of my brain." which must suck. also, she wants to color but will only color along the right hand side of the notepad. she's even, apparently, inheriting my OCD.

my own house is making me stupid, the adult form of sick. i can't work here. am only able to watch the secret diary of a call girl and the soup. my greatest ambitions here are to unload the dish washer and frame my seamus heaney print. but i must critique the thirty-four poems my students gave to me friday. by tomorrow.

so i go out for a drive. and there's no better time than the four-dollars-a-tank present. only, in the outback, i have two emotional temperatures warring with one another: one begs to blare l'il wayne's "lollipop" and M.I.A's "paper planes" (thanks to the seniors who exposed me to it). the other is listening to "if it's the beaches," by the avett brothers, and crycrycrying.

finally, i settle on the sushi bar. for a glass of red wine (to which i am allergic) and some edamame. my eyes cross after working on four poems. it feels like i've crossed out the word "abyss" 800 times. i turn to the outlining of a nonfiction piece i'm forever outlining and not writing.

the jacked up bartender says:

"you know what's cool about you?"

it's rhetorical, and yet i look at him, annoyed.

"everyone else seems to come here to rock out hard."

i stare at him, trying to keep my eyes open. the men beside me take shots of "gran mon."

"but you, you come to relax. it's SO WEIRD."

in the background: a singer-songwriter covering matchbox twenty...