Curator

Down familiar curves of the museum,
extinct footsteps echo from two galleries away.
Some days, our travertine floor
sings only for my wingtip shoes
as we waltz around your pedestal.

Your gypsum face won't smile,
but your lips touch softly as flesh.
The white folds of your dress, carved
onto your skin, may not change
with the seasons, but your beauty
is as rare as the day I met you.
You are my alabaster empress—
though you bend the hairs on my arms with sight,
I can feel you like a bird feels a shadow.

Surprising Disappointment

As a Tuesday surprise, I took my morning class a bag of Chips Ahoy Cookies. I thought the students could use a sugar rush before lunch to help them power through the grind of grammar.

The students sauntered into the room, and I greeted them with: "I have a surprise for you today. It's very special." They brightened with the unexpected news. The anticipation caused the students to take their seats quickly and murmur quietly.

I know. The surprise wasn't that good. In fact, I bought the cookies mostly because I like them, and I could eat the extras. But cookies are cookies, no?

As I was reaching into my briefcase for the crinkly, navy-powder blue bag of cookies, I heard one of my students say, "I know what the surprise is." Of course he couldn't know the surprise; Chips Ahoy Cookies are one of the most random things to pull out of a briefcase. But still, I postponed my unveiling to see if his guess was correct.

"The surprise is a Nerf Gun." The pod of boys clustered around him all started shouting with excitement. "Yeah!" "Sweet!" They started high-fiving each other. I was confused. Why would I buy a Nerf Gun for my students? But then again, Chips Ahoy cookies are no more logical for a grammar class.

I heard myself rasp, "Sorry," as I pulled gift from my bag. Most of the kids looked fairly excited, but the group of boys looked noticeably deflated. Their faces left the traces of their Nerf-gun smiles, but their eyes dulled with the revelation of cookies instead of weapons.

The class sat quietly eating their one-cookie ration. While crunching on my cookie, I too felt a bit deflated. Brushing the chocolate bits from my tie, I began to understand how my mother must have felt all those years ago when I shouted to open the big, green present under the Christmas tree. The present that I was sure held a Super Nintendo. The present I shook every day since it appeared under the tree. The present that turned out to be a desk chair.

Retail Trash

I am distressed and ashamed to report that fellow members of my society have been treating the world with intense selfishness and malignant apathy.

I'm not quite sure why, but people in retail stores are constantly leaving their food trash on the shelves. At first it was a simple Jamba Juice cup in Target. Then it was an annoying Target cup in Toys 'R Us. And then my rage boiled over with the free Coscto samples strewn about the warehouse.

Maybe this problem has been around my whole life. Maybe I'm just becoming more aware of the problem like a scab I've been picking at for the last few months, bleeding more with every aggravating scratch.

Retail stores have trash cans to use if we are sensitive enough to take a few seconds and search. And if there aren't trash bins in the store, the cashiers almost always have trash cans under their checkout lanes.

This retail littering is completely irresponsible. Leaving trash in the stores wrongfully assumes that it is the employees' job to clean up after the wanton disregard for cleanliness. When employees are forced to act as garbage collectors, time is taken away from their other, more important, customer-service duties.

I sympathize. It's easier to throw our trash on the ground than to find and touch a sticky waste receptacle. But it's also easier to steal what we want rather than to purchase. To use violence rather than forgiveness. Surrendering to our own selfish instincts leads to a breakdown in functional society. Part of living in the world of Targets and Costcos is sacrificing our own selfish needs for the betterment of the other retail shoppers.

Ordering a Chipotle Burrito...

is a bad time to woo a woman. After a particularly difficult Friday at work, I decided to treat myself to a Chipotle burrito for dinner. I walked the familiar four blocks to the Mexican Grill only to be surprised by a stunning new employee preparing the food.

I don't usually associate Mexican-food establishments with beautiful women, but, dear reader, believe me, she is beautiful.

It was her eyes; blue is not a color typically found in the metallic chromes and dusty maroons of Chipotle decor. She had enchantingly curly hair that most women pray for with curling irons and $50 bottles of hairspray. And I smelled the hint of white plums over the stench of carnitas fat and steamed tortillas.

I approached her ashamed that I chose to wear a white tank top and basketball shorts from the 1990s.

"Can I have a chicken fajita burrito, please?" She nodded her head and smiled. Her shiny pink lips curled into a crescent smile. She pulled a tortilla from the bag and flipped it into the steamer. She pressed down and waited.

This is my chance. I have 15, maybe 20, seconds to catch her attention.

I asked her, "How's your day going?" You'd be surprised how such a simple question receives such a friendly response from most women. Perhaps the non-sexually aggressive nature of the question is the root of its genius when trying to converse with women.

We chatted while my tortilla steamed. She laughed when I gently made a joke. She responded when I asked her 1st-date questions. Things were going well...

And then the burrito came between us.

"Can I have more sour cream than that?" Why would I ask such a question? All my planned smiles. All my carefully chosen words. All my effort and charm lost on a question that made me look prissy and picky and fat.

"Umm. Sure." She dolloped on another few ounces, but the tone noticeably changed. No more eye contact. No more playful tug-of-war. It may sound ridiculously fickle on her part, but all single people out there will confirm that a wrong word can mean the difference between affection and rejection.

She and I seemed to have a natural rapport. Any other place or time, things would have gone better. I love women. But I love big burritos too. I just wish I knew how to prioritize my desires.

Wallowing in my failure, I saved half my precious big burrito for Saturday night dinner.

The Odd Couple: Toilets and Mirrors

In a public restroom over the weekend, I noticed this toilet-level mirror reflecting back my full-body profile of me urinating.

Why have this four-foot mirror in the restroom? The typical vanity mirror was intact, so for what was this extra mirror?

Finishing up my "business," I started feeling like one of those criminals in the interrogation rooms at police stations. I felt like a gruff David Caruso was watching me through a one-way mirror. I felt like there was an extra person in the room watching me, scrutinizing my every action.

I'll admit that I was more concerned about my posture while using the toilet than my actual aim. Maybe that is why the bathroom floor was so yellowishly disgusting. Again, I'll admit I did nothing to help the situation.

It's like when you go to your friend's house, and the entire wall behind the toilet is one giant mirror. If you're a guy, it's hard to know where to look while you use the bathroom. You feel weird watching your genital area from a third-person perspective, but it's also weird to stare into your own eyes while you're peeing.

It seems obvious that mirrors in bathrooms need to be eye-level and not reflect anything below the bellybutton. Too much is at stake to place reflective surfaces haphazardly in such a sensitive location.

The Sting

Every week or so, my school administrators require a standardized vocabulary exam from each grade. These tests are basic, multiple choice synonym and antonym questions. Grading these tests is very empirical, and, often times, I don't even read the answers; I just make sure the appropriate bubble is darkened.

Today, I handed back one such vocabulary test. Excluding some aberrations, the students did very well. One such case was a girl who obviously forgot to complete the multi-paged test. Her 100% score was defaced into a 70% with her six unanswered questions haunting the last page.

When I handed the test back to this student, she was silent. She didn't even look at me. Perfection except for one non-academic mistake. Her eyes darkened. She pressed the palm of her hand to her forehead, and combed her hair with her fingers trying to massage the embarrassment and frustration away.

"It's okay. It's just one test." I wanted to tell her that I can't even remember my entire year of 8th grade. I wanted to tell her that one test, particularly this one stupid vocab test, meant nothing in the larger context of her life.

But she was unreachable in her own depression.

For the rest of the day, she left the test on her desk, open to the back page. She allowed the six blank questions to taunt her, and she stared right back into her self-proclaimed failure. It was masochistic.

It would be easy to say "life is easy" to an 8th grader. In hindsight, failed tests, unrequited love, and all the other milestones of middle school seem so juvenile and forgettable. But digging deeper, if we are truly honest with ourselves, we remember that the tears of our 8th grade youth were just as painful as the ones we shed now.

The scope of the past might be slightly more narrow, but the sting dulls only because we have deluded ourselves to trivialize the actual importance of 8th grade.

If a Hostess Cupcake Was a Woman...

If a Hostess Cupcake was a woman, she would be the financially poor girl you dated during college. She wasn't rich by conventional standards, but her inner sweetness, her inner white purity, attracted you.

The cupcakes you usually ate were the $5 cupcakes from specialty bakeries—circular, curvy, and decadent. The elegant cupcakes wore silky liners, strawberry powdered sugar makeup, and bodices of buttercream frosting.

But not the Hostess Cupcake. You met her in Target while shopping for sale items. She moved in smooth glides like the glazed frosting crowning her chocolate body. And even with her generous proportions and armload of clearance, Hostess products, she entranced you with her wildly spongy skin, dark brown complexion, and her sweet personality.

She didn't wear expensive cupcake liners like the "beautiful" women you usually dated. She was confident leave the house in clear plastic wrap. And when you took her home for the evening, you pulled apart her individually-wrapped dress and slid her out. You inhaled the milky-sweet scent of her dark brown hair, and you gently caressed the unmistakable swirled white frosting that looked like eight cursive "e's" all in a row.

You leaned in a for your first kiss right on the border of the cocoa frosting and the touchable cake. She accepted your advance, and when you pulled away, you saw the pocket of white, sweet personality you'd uncovered. In the blackness of dark chocolate lay a center of creamy-smooth personality.

You leaned in for another taste; dense chocolate and fragrant vanilla lips pressed against yours. She taught you that a cheap cupcake can give a rich kiss.