Excuse me if I seem a little too provincial, but it occurs to me that there are few things as marvelous as a well-proportioned peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I just had one such jellied marvel, sitting in my car on my lunch break and reading from the very thrifty book of Willa Cather stories purchased for me by my quite obliging boy friend.
I am not usually quite that anti-social in my lunching habits [a combination of chattiness and a fear of the weird spider webs that always develop inside my slick ride] but I had just emerged from a morning of finding misplaced files and was feeling mildly distrustful toward my fellow-clerking-man. It’s not that I’m an automaton of productivity and phone-voice pleasantries. No, I’m surly as hell, and I spend just as much time gossiping with my co-workers about how weird those spam messages in Chinese characters are as anyone.
However, lately at work I have been assigned to a very unfortunate task that involves moving many cheerfully colored folders and files into the dark bowels of the building. Trapped in this chamber of exposed wiring, the only company I have is the mistakes of my co-workers, a pink boom box and a piece of hulking machinery that I will refer to as a furnace, as I do all electronics bigger than a microwave and uglier than a Gameboy.
On further consideration, it might actually be a furnace. All I know is that it is hot as the dickens down there and even my heartiest green Dual-Tip HI-LITER dries up in about 3.5 seconds. But I digress.
So after a morning of cardboard cuts and the numbing knowledge that there are people in the world who will use a Post-it will a happy face on it to mark their filing turf, I retreated to my grubby drivers seat with my grub. Shortly afterwards I retreated further still to the passenger seat, because it was less sunny than the drivers side.
A short pause and I will get back to peanut butter and jelly. I just realized (while considering whether or not it was appropriate to amend the word “note” to the end of “Post-it”) that I have mentioned the commercially volatile names of the Hi-liter and Post-it in this post already. Soon I will be whoring myself out to Staples and receiving my blood money in color cartridge refills.
As might not surprise you, given the violently one tracky way my brain has been working as of late, while relishing my peanut butter and jelly the evil specter of graduation-and-related-concepts reared its hideous head. It’s not entirely my fault; it’s only that I was planning on returning to my computer and ordering my cap and gown, while simultaneously thinking about the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I was likely to have for dinner.
Suddenly it occurred to me that the cutely dingy habits of a college student (disdaining bleach, stealing napkins from Chipotle and printer paper from work, eating only carbs, getting back-pack shaped sweat markings while biking) will slowly regenerate into just dingy habits. Without the redeeming aura of half-baked education, it seems that college students are just plain uncivilized.
As a good friend of mine shouted into the phone on Monday, “When we graduate, we will stop being poor college students, we are becoming the regular poor!”
I am not usually quite that anti-social in my lunching habits [a combination of chattiness and a fear of the weird spider webs that always develop inside my slick ride] but I had just emerged from a morning of finding misplaced files and was feeling mildly distrustful toward my fellow-clerking-man. It’s not that I’m an automaton of productivity and phone-voice pleasantries. No, I’m surly as hell, and I spend just as much time gossiping with my co-workers about how weird those spam messages in Chinese characters are as anyone.
However, lately at work I have been assigned to a very unfortunate task that involves moving many cheerfully colored folders and files into the dark bowels of the building. Trapped in this chamber of exposed wiring, the only company I have is the mistakes of my co-workers, a pink boom box and a piece of hulking machinery that I will refer to as a furnace, as I do all electronics bigger than a microwave and uglier than a Gameboy.
On further consideration, it might actually be a furnace. All I know is that it is hot as the dickens down there and even my heartiest green Dual-Tip HI-LITER dries up in about 3.5 seconds. But I digress.
So after a morning of cardboard cuts and the numbing knowledge that there are people in the world who will use a Post-it will a happy face on it to mark their filing turf, I retreated to my grubby drivers seat with my grub. Shortly afterwards I retreated further still to the passenger seat, because it was less sunny than the drivers side.
A short pause and I will get back to peanut butter and jelly. I just realized (while considering whether or not it was appropriate to amend the word “note” to the end of “Post-it”) that I have mentioned the commercially volatile names of the Hi-liter and Post-it in this post already. Soon I will be whoring myself out to Staples and receiving my blood money in color cartridge refills.
As might not surprise you, given the violently one tracky way my brain has been working as of late, while relishing my peanut butter and jelly the evil specter of graduation-and-related-concepts reared its hideous head. It’s not entirely my fault; it’s only that I was planning on returning to my computer and ordering my cap and gown, while simultaneously thinking about the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I was likely to have for dinner.
Suddenly it occurred to me that the cutely dingy habits of a college student (disdaining bleach, stealing napkins from Chipotle and printer paper from work, eating only carbs, getting back-pack shaped sweat markings while biking) will slowly regenerate into just dingy habits. Without the redeeming aura of half-baked education, it seems that college students are just plain uncivilized.
As a good friend of mine shouted into the phone on Monday, “When we graduate, we will stop being poor college students, we are becoming the regular poor!”
The thought was almost enough to disturb my utopian lunching experience. Thankfully I was reading nice story where the model small town people were predominantly near-sighted and sought to torment the wild-eyed romantic boy. Thus my joy of easily grasped symbolism overcame my fear of PB/J based poverty and the consequences of actually buying tissue, and my panic subsided to await another meal.
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