Author and Columnist
Buddy, you know you can write separate entries for different topics, right? It is better for all involved.
And we are all alone in our booth with no one to supervise us. Well, that is not precisely true.
No, that's true. Rosaliza kept to her area, aside from telling you once that bongos might scare away the customers.
Every weekend, you both assumed she would fire you because you made so few sales. It was not worth her effort to employ either of you, which was barely your fault.
I am not exactly sure how the payment situation works. Emily and I have decided with some degree of certainty that we get minimum wage plus commission. However, we did pull this out of thin air, so we could possibly be wrong.
You are wrong. You each get a hundred or so dollars in cash Sunday afternoon. No commissions.
If this is not so (or better), I will feel less inclined to actually hawk the goods.
You do your damnedest because you feel overwhelmingly guilty that people are not flocking to your kiosk and not one of the thirty others selling similar things.
Guilt motivates you more than self-interest.
Kendall, dear doozer Kendall, is working selling fairy dust somewhere at the faire. She amuses me greatly, as you know, and this should be frolicsome.
I'm not sure that you are properly friends at this point. Or you are friends, but you are not the inexplicably close best friends you were a few months ago when you kissed.
I suppose life moves fast at your age.
Namahs, as we shall call him, who has behaved in a less than gentlemanly fashion in the past, present, future, (A proactive cad!) also is apparently working there.
You'll forgive me if I ignore your naming scheme when I remember someone's name. Tim does not play any part in my memories of the Faire.
He was one of those people in the Pagan community who set your teeth on edge. Everything he did seemed slimy, as though he was only using the disguise of being a witch to get into someone else's pants or otherwise defraud them.
I don't know that this is necessarily true, but it is how you felt about him from the moment you met him at New Paltz. Your intuition of who should be trusted has been imperfect in the past.
Okay, brief explanation of Namahs. He was introduced in tale to me by my friend Louise, I believe, who called him the evil version of me.
I trust Louise more than you.
Supposedly, when asked by friends of his if he would like to spark the illegal seven-leaved plant of dubious origin, he replied that last time he did so, he ended up pleasuring five women in an hour to orgasm, so he had better not.
Yes, "slimy" might be an accurate descriptor.
Your way of writing is distractingly affected.
Maybe he is a wonderful guy, but people I have respect for use his name in conjunction with arcane foul language.
You are an imperfect receptacle of the goddess's love, but this is enough to give him a wide berth.
We will call her Venti, because we can. She has prided herself on being a burr in my saddle particularly, though she isn't really.
Who could this be?
I can think of three people at the Faire you know already, none of whom fit this description.
Your naming scheme is opaque.
But, I think that she does not know Emily or me on sight and certainly would be less inclined once we are adorned in faux-antiquarian vestments.
So, she doesn't know what you or Emily look like, but she thinks she is obnoxious to you?
You know how unfathomable you are sometimes, right? This doesn't make sense to me, and while you are being needlessly expansive on trivial matters, you could spare a few seconds to explain yourself.
Only once did I feel compelled to play a carnival game in recent years and that is wholly because Chester the Alien needed to be liberated from his slack-jawed oppressors and the cloth diaper in which they put him.
Chester made it into my novel, Artificial Gods, though not by name.
Plus, I found it slightly off-putting to be referred to as such because I have long hair and was wearing an unbuttoned shiny shirt. I am merely eccentric of dress!
What I wouldn't give to prune your wardrobe and possibly give you a more suitable haircut. You would have been markedly more attractive, and it would have opened doors that otherwise shut in your face.
First off, you are a size medium, not extra-large. I do not know why you think oversized clothes are fashionable. I doubt they ever were.
Yes, you can even have shiny clothes that will look better on you. I will make that concession, though I would keep it understated, one shimmery object and only a couple of rings.
Evidently he found Emily's transformation from the girl be met at (as M put it) "Jew Camp" to the duel tattooed heathen comparative religions major slightly unsettling. Or so Emily told me, I got only bits and pieces of the tension.
Things that happened in reality and that happened in Emily's head and retellings do not always overlap. Chalk it up to the burden of being intrapersonal and possessing a few mental illnesses.
I can say this because you are no stranger to it.
This is why, after meeting me, Emily informed her mother via cell phone that she had met the man she was going to marry. Please note, I was not given a say in this matter.
She got you within a few months of that. You knew you had made one of the biggest mistakes when you proposed -- because of the relationship's momentum more than your thinking it was the right thing -- but convinced yourself the year before the wedding that you could be happy together.
She did not feel the same. She had not felt that way for years and vented this with several people (you decided that the number was six, but I can only recall two definite ones as I write this). She said that if you married, you would immediately need to get into couple's counseling (for her infidelity, though surely other things).
She does marry the guy from whom she leaves you, so one could mark this as rightness once removed.
She said -- and was right -- you would consider her leaving you one of the best things that could have happened to you. You fell profoundly and healthily (eventually) in love with the young woman who followed Emily and then met your wife, whom I adore daily, so let's at least give credit to Emily for that.
Aside from Emily and I shattering the ceiling of cuteness by getting matching photo key chains, not much was of note at the fair.
You keep getting these keychains on vacations. I have a box full of them. I'm not sure what one does with them, even if the relationship persists. I am not inclined to throw them out.
I don't know what it was about the movie, though I think that rereading the book helped, but it completely fucked up my mental processes. I could barely drive my whack was so out.
You have a radical empathy by dint of your mental illnesses, so you imagine yourself into other people's perspectives too completely -- even fictional characters. Great for a writer, but less helpful for those trying to be functional people.
I think that is why I have dealt so well with the deaths I have been experiencing. I just accept that this is now the reality which I must abide and move on.
That's more a melange of radical acceptance and repression.
If I dream about someone, I begin thinking about him or her consciously. Often I touch base with them just at the right point.
You aren't psychic. You call people, and it is the right point because there are many right points in life. Correlation is not causation.
It is psychologically damaging to think you are psychic. You take your neuroses for intuition.
While sitting under a tree during one of our stops, Emily gleed that she liked being with me because she was proud to be seen with me. She liked that other people were jealous that she had me and no one else did. I do not believe anyone has ever said that to me or about me. It is possible that it was felt, but the verbalization put me pleasantly off-kilter.
It is indeed flattering that she would say this. I do not know how often someone would think this at first blush.
However, as dear Nancy told you, you become more attractive once someone gets to know you. So, I can see people envying her based on your personality -- which is not without copious flaws, but I have promised not to rag on you too often. I cannot based on seeing a scrawny, baby-faced boy with clothing two sizes too big and a tendency to succumb to being "random funny" (i.e., intentionally weird).
You go up one and a half stars when you put clothes on that suit you and decide being sweet and witty instead of "rawr means 'i luv u' in dinosaur."
The way home was fraught with peril. Well, not so much peril as sleepiness. But it was a perilous sort of sleepiness that made Emily hit of rumble strips on the side of the road. So she forced me to stay awake and talk to her so she would not fall asleep.
She intentionally hit the rumble strips because your sleeping while she drove irritated her.
I state this as a fact.
Evidently she had a kidney infection, resulting in sad nephrons and a build up of unpleasant poisons in her system.
SHE HAD A WHAT?
I was expecting you to say she was kicked in the head or something of that sort -- this will not be infrequent, but she is a martial artist. One must expect a broken bone or two.
Wait, let me google "kidney infection" and another search term.
Ah, yes. I see how this happened.
Side effects of this will also not be infrequent.
It was nice to be there for her and care for her in her time of need.
No one ever said the two of you were not cute together or sweet with one another most of the time.
But I have trouble hiking even the shortest distance. This I find pathetic and, rather than whining about it alone, I figure that I brisk hour bike-ride after the sunset would do me quite a bit of good.
Your bike might need a tune-up. Whenever I despair that I am weaker than I think, it turns out the wheel is wobbly or the chain needs lube.
Bike maintenance is not usually the advice you need, but let's extrapolate further. You should not always think problems are based on your weakness. Sometimes, other things are broken and will be less useful until repaired or replaced.
Another odd and, I'll admit, pleasurable side effect of my two-wheeled constitutionals is that girls who see me actually check me out. The first day, I passed one girl, who clearly gave me the once over. When I returned that way, she had two friends who began asking my name and the like. It was flattering and innocent. It is nice to know that I am attractive.
That's great! Maybe I am wrong about your level of attractiveness.
Once fall comes, perhaps I will be in the shape to hike mountains once more.
I hike when possible, so you must have managed this at some point.
If you had a fitness band and diet tracker, I imagine you would have had a better time of it.
