arachne's surprise

i will graduate college in less than a year. i have done nothing amazing by normal standards. i have a vague ambition, which is to pursue that feeling i get when i'm silently reveling in something beautiful and nobody knows it because i'm just sitting in some coffee shop, reading some silly words. there's some couple in the corner breaking up and some harried student sitting next to me and neither party is aware that my world just shifted just a bit. i look up, shocked that no one has noticed that there is a crazy girl crying into her book, but i look back at my book and god is still waiting in the margin. if i'm late for something, i shut him away and promise myself later. if i'm not, i order another iced mocha and wedge myself sturdily in those words.

i want to spend my days, 9-5, in barnes and noble. i want to greet the woman who is at the first stand, trying to sell the b&n version of the kindle, like a next door neighbor who's watering her flowers. i'll take a sneak peek of the magazine section while i walk to get a coffee. then i'll begin the day with the heavy stuff, like A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn and try to get through everything David Foster Wallace has ever written and take a crack at Anna Karenina one of these days, maybe even Vanity Fair. i'll take a quick glance at Joyce, sigh, and say not today damnit, it's friday. then i'll spend an hour or two on pop culture stuff, maybe work my way through oprah's book club and the bestseller lists and whatever Michiko Kakutani liked most as of late, even though she's a bit harsh for me. (ps, did you know she won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism?? i mean, obviously literary criticism is implied, but damn, i didn't even know they awarded pulitzers for that kind of shit. isn't that the prize for being the biggest bitch of them all?)

with my hectic morning done, i will abscond to the sections with big picture books about Warhol and Escher and the roman emperors and how to draw manga and the books of 1,000+ personality tests and fluffy bits on astrology. back to the coffee section for a quiet lunch paging through a book called Sex with the Popes, shooing crumbs away from the crease. i round out my day in the journal section, smelling the books bound with leather and writing all my thoughts in the oldest looking ones, aka definitely not the Ed Hardy one, which is pretty janky. same goes for the one with audrey hepburn on it, because i'm just kind of over her, and because sequins have no place in books.

by the end of my days i will have woven the most gorgeous tapestry. i will weave, even if the best weaver is an ungainly, unremarkable spider. even if the only one who can appreciate the beauty is the spider herself, because that will be worth enough.