Rabbit: Boram and I went shopping for wigs today.

Mama Walch: Oh? Did you find anything you like?

Rabbit: ...that's your first question? Not 'why were you looking for a wig'?



I didn't find anything, though, cos most of the beauty supply stores cater to black people hair. It was going to be one of my birthday presents. I have to think of something else, now.

Nine dollars and thirteen cents in my bank account! Heyo!

1, 2, 3, something something 180 degrees... Good for you, Britney. I really like that song.

Soooo, I'm withdrawing. And taking next semester off. I'll be working full time, trying new things and teaching myself to cook. Because I'm not in the right place to be going to school right now.

It hurts a little, but more than the hurt there is indescribable relief. I'll finish school and graduate, just a little later than I originally planned. This way I can pay back my folks and save up money for when I return to CP, and I won't have to dread getting my ass up everyday and facing the inevitable panic attacks that are starting to break me down in earnest.

So maybe I'm not as strong as I thought. Oh well. Rabbit will get stronger. I'll be 22 years old in a few weeks. If things won't change, then I'll change myself.

Grandma told me that when my mom was a kid and they were still living in Japan, there was a very pretty young man who lived in the apartment above them. He would come down and visit with another neighbor, and every day when they saw him they would say "Tomo-chan, is it boy or girl today?" And he would smile and say 'boy,' or some days he would say 'girl.'

He was a transvestite. My grandmother knew a transvestite. She didn't know the word in English, but Mom and I figured it out eventually. She comes out with these stories at random, usually in the car when we're talking about something completely different.

Btw, I made a pie. My very first pie, and the photo makes it look weird but it was GODDAMN DELICIOUS. It was a Paula Deen recipe, and I made the crust from scratch. I tried to do the lattice design but I ran out of dough halfway through.

After Julie left, I went into my folks' bathroom and sat down on the edge of the tub. Dad was on the toilet while my mom dyed his hair. I started to very methodically pull off my socks.

"Did you tell your father you got a B on your Greek midterm?"

Dad grunted his approval from beneath the chemicals on his head. "How'd you do on the others?"

"I, ah. I gotta tell you something."

There was a patient, pregnant silence. I bunched up my socks in my hand.

"In one class I'm doing okay... the other three... I'm gonna fail."

"What do you mean you're going to fail? You only just had midterms."

"Yeah, well. I missed a lot of points from stuff so no matter what I do now, I can't make it up. I'm gonna fail."

Dad scrunched his eyebrows, either from the ammonia or the news. "Go away, I gotta wash this crap out."

Mom and I went into the bedroom where she told me to fold laundry. I wiped my eyes with my socks and waited.

"I don't care if you fail, you know? You just keep going to class and you learn, and even if you have to retake it you thank the professor at the end and you just sign up again next year."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay."

"Good. People who fail aren't failures. People who give up are failures."

"This has been killing me for weeks, you know."

"Emily, I don't know why you don't just tell us these things."

"Yeah, well."

"And stop playing with your damn socks."

Mom poked her head into my room at 6:45 this morning, blinking away the effects of Oxycontin. I was sitting at the desk, scrolling through Japanese serial killers on Wikipedia for no better reason than they kept linking to each other in 'see also.'

"Did you go to bed last night?"

"Erm. Not really."

"Oh. Well, you should."

"Mm."

I did get myself in the general vicinity of the bed around 7:30, and then k-pop came blaring through the phone at noon. It was Mom calling me from her room.

"You have class soon, don't you?"

"Mm."

I drove down to CP, but I didn't go to class. I did, however, get my glasses fixed and picked out a pair of big Dior frames to buy later, like when I'm not stone broke. So it might be much later.

Out of 24 hours I sleep a few and sleepwalk through the rest of them. This is the middle-class life, I suppose. Or just mine. I want to graduate, but I'd rather get my degree by eating the most hot dogs in an hour or winning a hot-air balloon race or really anything other than sitting in a room and listening to men tell me things about things. Most of my profs are men, I dunno why. This semester they're all men. I think one of them is nailing his TA, and if he's not then he's stupid cos she's super hot.

I have to get my act together, whatever that means and entails. This week I really want to start teaching myself how to bake.

Why?

Because I do.

Keeley: I hate it when reasonable women get knocked up and become nothing more than what is about to come out of their cunt.

Rabbit: ...Promise me something.

Keeley: Wha?

Rabbit: Never have children.

Keeley: No problem.

Seven years, and there are things inside me that still haven't changed.

First midterm tomorrow, in Classical Greek Lit. Today I plowed through Homer and Apollonius like a fiend.

Reading that stuff always makes me cry, not the usual kind of why do I have to read this shit crying but the actual emotional sort of crying that I can't do much about. I cry when heroes die, mainly, but also when the other characters are crying, or when I wish that the twenty-first century wasn't so crap unromantic.

Hero deaths hit me the hardest, though. We don't really have those kinds of legends here, just Michael Jackson getting buried in a solid gold casket because he danced funny for thirty plus years.

George Washington, maybe. But there aren't too many stories about him eviscerating an enemy from nipple to groin.

The Japanese have crazy heroes. Abe no Seimei and Momotaro and stuff. I dunno who the other parts of my ancestry have. ...Hiawatha, maybe. Roland. Hildebrand.

American heroes just don't pop the same way. I guess we haven't really been here long enough, but I wish I had some Greek in me so I could be proud of the long-haired Aecheans and their mighty thighs with which they straddled the corpses of their fallen friends.

Not that I'm like... turned on by godlike men cleaving each other in twain and flaying the thighs of sacrificial bulls to curry favor with their deities or anything. Definitely not. Completely barbaric, not attractive in the least.

...but it's pretty exciting...

After (almost) 22 years of life on this interstellar soccer ball, I've come to the conclusion that I'm just not the intellectual type. Really, all I wanna do is work on a farm. Or a sugar cane plantation. Or arrange flowers in some little Southern town with a population less than that of my high school graduating class.

I read the guidelines for my Victorian Lit term paper tonight and then stared at it blankly for a while, absently wiping drool from the corner of my mouth. I have no idea what the hell he's talking about. Our thesis proposal is due Tuesday and we're supposed to do in-class critique of each other, which is worrisome. I haven't been to class in a month, which is more worrisome. Worrisome-er.

So the farm idea is looking good. I can't do math. I never understood osmosis. I can't write 8-10 pages about the practice of ekphrasis in Robert Browning's Men and Women.

I can, however, milk a cow. Honestly, I learned how on a field trip in middle school. Squeeze and repeat. Sit on the left side so you don't get kicked.

Moooooo.

Moooooooooooo.