I’m not good at folding shirts
27 May 2008 
Drizzle dotted my arms as I walked to the coffee shop. I had to caffeinate myself before going to my mundane job of folding t-shirts. After ordering a house coffee, I realized my hands smelled like cat in a very bad way. The source: my umbrella. With a protective layer of cat spray. (I told my roommate to neuter her cat at least six months ago. She never did.)
I needed to wash my hands.
After folding t-shirts for five hours, I needed to leave. For one thing, there were not many more shirts to fold. But mostly, I don’t like folding shirts. In fact, I’m not good at it. Case in point: my boyfriend will not allow me to fold his shirts when they come out of the drier. He would rather delay his dinner by folding each one himself than have me attempt to live up to his shirt-folding standards.
I needed to give up the shirt-folding.
I had parked my car in the same place I have every week day since the city planted meters along the street I used to park on, just one block away. The signs telling me I required a neighborhood permit to park on the street never bothered me until I turned the corner onto the tucked-away street just in time to see a police officer walk away from my car and saw a pink and white slip of paper sticking out from my windshield wipers.
I needed to find a new place to park.
I need to wash my hands of this college lifestyle, need to find a new job so I can buy my own cat and neuter him (and buy a new umbrella), need to work somewhere that has a place for me to park my car. Need to stop folding shirts and do something I am good at.
Another notch in the stick
18 May 2008 
I’m going to back to one of my old favorites, the unattainable in the dating world. For the most part, you often know he has no intention of commitment when you begin. After all, you’ve seen it happen with other girls. He takes them out for breakfast, he takes them to Kroger with him to go shopping, he won’t even protest when they hang around all day. But when it comes down to it, they’re each just another notch in the stick.
And you know that. But when he smirks at you, your hostility eases. You smile. He tells you his secrets, insights into his family, his worries about his friends. He trusts you. He is so genuine, you forget that you knew he was a rake. You think that maybe the other girls were just too clingy, too immature, too crazy.
But what happens when he casts you aside like the other girls? You wonder if all those intimacies were in your head, or worse, if they were the same intimacies he shared with all the other girls. Are you just another notch in the stick?
I’ve been one of those girls. I know your anger, your longing, your frustration. But recently I’ve talked to the unattainable. He did smile at you and think you were beautiful. He did confide in you. He wanted to know you as a person, not just a body. You should not have tried so hard to get him to date you and commit to you, because while his heart is still broken from his last committed relationship, this is his way of dating safely.
You may feel like he used you. He did, but it was his alternative to taking you out to dinner and a movie several times before deciding that it wasn’t going anywhere. He isn’t heartless, he just hasn’t found the right girl. And you have yet to find the right guy. So take a lesson from him and start putting more notches on your own stick (though hopefully they’ll be of the dinner/movie variety instead of his weak excuse for a date).
A timeline of boys
9 May 2008 
Time passes in funny ways. Looking backward, I don’t remember a point in time by the where the hands were lined up on the clock but rather by what clock I was using.
Most things in my life stay constant: the daily changing relationship with my mother, my close friends (I’m living with one of my best friends from nine years ago), my favorite female musicians, my reoccurring urges to write.
So I keep track of time through boys. I know the Backstreet Boys CD came out when I was in 8th grade because that was the year I had a crush on Ryan, a squirrely little skater boy obsessed with boy bands. I know I started working at the pool the summer before I entered high school because I drooled over one of the lifeguards my entire freshman year. (He threw a Sweet Tart at me during school one day. I saved it until I graduated.) I remember my junior year in college was the first year our football team went to a bowl game because that was the year I was single and Chris — a Sinatra-esque sex god — left the hotel he had already paid for in the bowl game city and drove home to see me.
I ran into Ed last week at a coffee house, outside of our usual work encounters, and a flash of memories whipped quickly through my senses. He was with a new girl and refused to make eye contact with me.
As when I see any of those boys from my past, I took a step back in time and a weird feeling crept up in me. It wasn’t jealously or regret. But I glimpsed a piece of my past walking by, and I felt overlooked because it was indifferent to the mark it left on the time line of my life.
