I woke up in a closet.

I’m in a Media Theory class right now and I’m sick of it.  I wrote a paper for the class for four hours last night and I don’t think I learned anything.  I think I made myself angry.  While I was writing the paper, I watched America’s Next Top Model and played with the kittens that live in the apartment I am house sitting in.

The apartment is in Park Slope.  This is a neighborhood I used to want to live in until I did live there for three weeks while watching the kittens.  Every morning around nine o’clock, doormen lead people out of their apartment buildings, and, all dressed in North Face jackets and pinstripe, people walk to the subway.  An hour later, a brigade of nannies walk on the same sidewalk with strollers.  Even worse: on the weekends, everyone goes running on that sidewalk on their way to the park.  What’s so wrong with running you might ask?  I think constant exercise, aside from wanting to be healthy, shows that people are not happy with themselves.  I know there must be people in Park Slope that aren’t entirely unhappy with themselves, but maybe I just feel bad about myself when I’m not out there in Under Armor running too. 

If there’s a good thing about Park Slope, I guess it’s that there aren’t many overtly depressing people.  Sure, a lot of those people running must be on Lexapro, but I mean – when you go to a bodega you don’t have to pretend to be really concerned about a crackhead’s story about his wife trying to kill him for life insurance.  Wow, I guess that is pretty sad and I do care and I do wish he would change, but for my sake, I like to avoid hearing about the turmoil of the crack spent in Brooklyn.

Yesterday I had a conversation with someone about song writing.  I have a friend who tells me, “Sharon, I just wrote a song, come check it out,” and I expect to be played a song on the guitar.  Instead, he shows me a pad of paper with words on it.  One of us is mistaken.  He wrote lyrics, a component to a song, and I believed that he had written the entirety of something he could serenade me with. 

Here is a little-known secret: I had a band when I was in the seventh grade.  It was called Gas Like Mixtures and we abbreviated it as GLM.  My band name was Ciggie and my band mate’s was Kerosene.  We only wrote lyrics.  We made a website for ourselves and posted the lyrics – just like many bands at the time did – but we didn’t play instruments.  I’m so embarrassed that I didn’t know the difference between songwriting and lyric writing.  Maybe I’m still wrong.  I can’t be sure of anything when ambiguity and misunderstanding is involved.  I also tried to play the violin in the sixth grade because I thought it would make me smarter.  If anything, I believe giving up made me smarter.  I had more time to watch the Simpson’s after dinner.

I hope L.A. is treating you nicely, but I think you should return to the other LA.  Louisiana!  I read in a magazine that your mom wants you to come home so she can make you jambalaya.  That’s a musical word if I ever heard one.  Hey!  Internal rhyme!  Keep safe and stay out of public restrooms. 
Your friend,

Sharon