Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts
By Alyce Wilson
I am actually posting this entry doing old fashioned HTML from my sister's State College pad. Do I get any geek points for that?
I'm in town visiting her because she was having her last big party before moving on to a smaller place. She's lived in the same terrific house -- huge windows, hard wood floors -- for several years.
Maybe it's just me, but I found it refreshing that her friends were more
interested in cracking jokes and discussing literature and politics than
they were in polishing off the beer. There's still plenty of that left;
but the food's all gone.
One of the guys — the same one who showed up in a red smoking jacket to her last shindig — came in a white and gray gabardine jacket. By my count alone, he had at least five compliments.
My sister and I got to giggle with a guy named Tim, who was a lot of fun. He and I checked out the guys together and I confessed that I've had a bad habit of falling for gay guys. He falls for straight men, so we decided that whoever we liked at the party, we should trade them.
Later on in the evening, when Tim took his leave after a kiss on my cheek, he decided to borrow half of my sister's peacock statue which was decorating the basement stairwell. "You just want to ask people to touch your peacock," I teased.
I must have spent several hours talking to someone named Rebecca who reminded me of myself at her age (19). After we'd exhausted the literature conversation (Camus, Shakespeare, Louise Erdrich, the Beats, Hemingway, Gwendolyn Brooks, etc. etc.), we moved on to confessions like how we both have mostly guy friends and how she used to bury her Barbies in the mud.
My dog, Una, was a real social butterfly. She was circulating the room, licking her new friends and then cheerily coming back to me with a huge smile on her face. One new friend, a woman who owns four pugs, made sure to say good-bye to Una when she left.
At the end of the party, one of my sister's roommates tried, fruitlessly, to convince everyone to jump a fence and crash someone's hot tub. But the idea of running from police, naked, did not appeal.
Just when I think my visit couldn't get any better, my sister tells me the annual UUAW sale is today. This is a huge book sale benefiting an educational society for women's scholarships. They collect books all year and then sell them in a warehouse-sized building on the Penn State campus.
My hands still smell like books.
Well, it's time to dash; my sister's making a special chicken dish and needs help, and then it's off to XMen 2.
Ah, the life of a Consummate Hipster.
Moral:
Dogs are flirts at parties.
Copyright
2003 by Alyce Wilson
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