Germophobe
He carried a bottle of Purell everywhere
and a package of handiwipes.
He had started with just the Purell,
but one day a stranger asked to borrow it,
and since he wasn't a weirdo
just a germophobe,
he had been quite willing to relinquish it temporarily.
But when the bottle was returned
it came with a little bit of doubt.
Where had that man's hands been?
It had been his practice to apply Purell
after every contact with the vast, germ-filled world,
but now the bottle of Purell
belonged to that world.
He couldn't very well Purell his hands
after every time he used the stuff.
He'd be Purell-ing perpetually.
So now he had the handiwipes.
Poem:
I thought of that poem literally four minutes ago as I was typing something else, so I guess if you were wondering what my writing looks like unedited, you have a prime example. I'll leave it that way, but I'm pretty sure I'll change the ending when I go back to it. It seems too clean. I feel like the life of a germaphobe shouldn't end cleanly like that. I didn't get into the real conflict the man might experience. But I do love the phrases "Purell-ing perpetually, and "just a germaphobe." I know germaphobe isn't the technical term. There are two different things "germaphobes" might be suffering from. The most obvious is OCD, but there's also a more specific term, mysophobia. Either way, I wanted to write a poem about it, but I am not in a serious mood. Maybe I'll re-write it in a serious way in the future, but for now, that's what we've got.
Observation:
There's nothing like playing sports with girls to make you feel better about yourself. I would assume it's pretty common knowledge by now that men and women are built differently, so hopefully I won't be harangued by people who think I'm being sexist. It's really just the fact of the matter. I'll leave that debate for now and move on. The sport I'm talking about in this case is ultimate frisbee, which in case you don't know, originated as a sport for hippies to play together and feel good about themselves. And then we took it and put it into the competitive arena with shouting matches, intentional fouling, and grudges. The objective is to move a disc (frisbee, to the less enlightened) into an endzone without letting it contact the ground. But the important detail of this story is that I am a boy and the people I played with yesterday were girls.
Now, the women's team at Iowa State is a good team. They went to the national tournament two years ago, and some of them play on a team from Ames that won the mixed division world championships in Prague. But we still needed some rules to equalize the playing field. The first rule was that I would play left-handed. I am not left-handed. In a sport that revolves around throwing (and involves a rather complex throwing motion to boot), this was a pretty big setback. The next rule was that if I played defense on a girl, I wasn't allowed to jump. When things still weren't quite evened out, jokes were made about blindfolding me and making me run backwards. All in all, it was quite a boost for the old ego. Not that it needed it.
Exercise:
"Magical Furniture"
This is a little exercise in magical realism. With realistic detail, write a scene in which your character had a conversation with a piece of furniture. Assume the person and the piece of furniture disagree about something.
She didn't know the bench was so immature. That might have surprised her even more than the fact that it started talking when she tried to clean it.
"Hey hey hey. What are you doing?" were it's first words. They were pretty unimpressive, to be honest. Until you remembered they were coming from a wooden bench. That fact added a certain something.
Julie responded with surprising poise. "I'm going to clean this bench," she said, looking around a bit. Now, granted, if she had thought the bench was actually talking to her, she might have reacted with a bit more incredulity. But she was poised nonetheless.
"No! I don't wanna be cleaned!" Had the bench possessed arms, it would have crossed them defiantly, and if it had eyebrows, it would have frowned. As it was, if you squinted really hard, you might have been able to notice a slight shift in the grain of the wood on the top surface.
"Oh!" She approached gradually, eyes flicking everywhere in an attempt to isolate the source of the sound. She knew speakers could be made awfully small these days. "Why not?"
"I just don't." The four legs tried their darnedest to stomp for added emphasis, but to no avail.
"It will make you shiny and pretty. That sounds nice, right?" She had paid extra close attention that time, and either this prank was unbelievably elaborate or she had some serious reevaluating to do regarding her preconceptions of benches.
"No!" The petulant bench showed no sign of backing down.
Julie had never been one to force things upon others, but she also had never been one to have a dirty entry hall. The conflict threatened to compromise her very identity. More so than any fact of the bench talking, this dilemma made her sit back and think things through.
Me:
I'm fine, how are you?
I don't have a lot to say about me. When this occurs, I will simply provide a random fact from my past. I used to juggle. My mom taught me because I wanted to give a presentation on how to juggle in the fourth grade, but couldn't actually do it. So I learned, and eventually it led me to exciting places like Madison, Wisconsin for an event called "Madfest." It's a pretty awesome experience. Anyone could come up to you at any point and ask you to juggle with them. At this level, juggling can involve intricate patterns passing clubs between people at odd intervals, and crazy tricks. I got okay at juggling, and even juggled in our middle school talent shows. At one point I tried to bike across the country with a juggling group to benefit the Shriner's Children's Hospitals. I crashed at 30 mph and lost a good portion of my skin, which ended that. I can still juggle, of course, but I haven't done much with it for years. It's a good skill to have, I think.
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