For English, I've got to write a descriptive paper; the subject I've chosen out of her list is "first day on the job", but what I'm really going to do is write about my work as a day laborer throwing bricks out the back of a junk guy's pickup truck at a dump. It was kind of a fascinating experience for me, and while I don't pretend to flaunt any really fantastic skill with storytelling, I think I'm allright at describing stuff, if I really sit down and subjectively tell about something that I've experienced. I think it's good that I'm doing this now; the weather is beginning to get cold, so I should write about work while heat and exhaustion are still fresh in my blood. In any case, if it's any good, I'll post it.
Stuff has been going great this week. The fall concert absolutely wore my ass out (as all performances do), but I think it was pretty spectacular. My only grievance is that my voice was already not doing very well when we began because of so much damned rehearsal, but I managed to pull through all eight songs, expecting to cough up a little blood and maybe a bass clef on that last God Bless America chord.
Afterwards my mother and I went to Sonic for burgers, which I have not done in a veritable eternity. I'm really not big on fast food. In fact, I prefer to ferociously avoid the stuff; I will eat a sandwich at Jack-in-the-Box in the middle of a lawnmowing Saturday simply because of the requisite energy for pushing gargantuan leaf-slicers around--I will even eat some pretty awful food at the school cafeteria if offered to me--but it's out of hunger. Once in a blue moon I like to get a burger somewhere. It's oddly satisfying, but it also gives me a sharp reminder of why I, home alone, will prepare a blackened salmon with lemon garlic sauce along with a spicy pineapple-base stirfry over a Mexican TV dinner with more cholesterol than Rush Limbaugh's studio audience. I very often live for the satisfaction of eating something warm and familiar, and even more so for giving such a thing to other people.
For some reason today I went outside, mowed, edged, and blowed my lawn off, and then proceeded to remove a hundred pounds of branches and vines from the azaleas in the side yard. I admit it, I'm a weird son of a bitch, but I enjoy working on things like that. There's something about manipulating things with your hands that can be a lot of fun. Besides that, I got to employ the help of gas-powered small engines, which is probably a dumb male fascination which I will never, never be rid of.
Speaking of ridiculously brutesy, testosteronic endeavors, I've recovered from my blood loss and increased my bench press to 165. It's another addiction to physical effort I've got, but it's wonderfully satisfying to know that you can lift 20 pounds more than your body weight with your upper torso. I think I went too far tonight, however: I actually tried my hand at jogging around my neighborhood, that peculiar pasttime where you bounce around in shorts and expensive shoes in an effort to strengthen your blood-pumpy thing and lose weight. I've done this several times in the past and hated it. The same happened tonight. I got a quarter of the way around my subdivision and then just jogged my way right back. Even if I do have decent shoes now, I happen to value greatly the use of my knees, and I came to the conclusion this evening that I can do the exact same workout on a bicycle and go fast enough to race my friends' cars anyway. Therefore, running is silly, but by working my legs out anyway through cycling and various weightlifting gruntmucks, if I ever really need to run the hell away from something (huge angry guy, explosion, 80-pound rabid rottweiler angry at me for flyer distribution), I probably can.
I have a homecoming date now, the cute and literature-savvy editor-in-chief of the newspaper. ^.^
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