That Damn Haley

-
"Haley! Haley! HALEY!"

Haley is the four year old across the street from my house. I hate her. I know you're not supposed to hate children or babies, but I do not like Haley. Or maybe it's that I don't like her parents who spend half their time calling her name, telling her not to go into the street, asking her if she wants to go inside, begging her not to scream because has the most annoying, bratty sounding scream you've ever heard and it goes off every five minutes without fail. I guarantee that she hears her name at least 500 times a day. At least. She will respond only after the third "Haley." I bet they even spell it some stupid way like Heylee or Haillye or Jualee (though who am I to talk). For our Halloween party, I've been thinking about going as a Fishtown person, but that just seems too easy and pretty mean and not very clever in any way. Every year, I obsess about Halloween costumes and every year I wait until the last minute. My criteria for Halloween costumes are:

*Must be somewhat cute, but not too cute--not like a fairy or a princess or anything. Jodie does not care about cuteness. Neither does my friend Liz, who once came to a party dressed as Dustin Hoffman in his role as Tootsie and bore a striking, uncanny resemblance. Jodie once went as a balding, moustached Gus, the Rotarian.

*Must be somewhat clever or have a twist. Hence "Miss Fortune," and the Freudian slip costume and, less cleverly, Condom Girl and the conceptually interesting but poorly executed "Mermaid Caught in a Net."

*Must be somewhat violent. I just like to have blood on me.

Send ideas.

Comments

Anonymous said…
you can be part of my dead cheerleading squad--we got into a car accident on the way back from a bonfire after the Big Game?? Where we drove off the road, crashed through the guardrail into a lake? thereby allowing drowning make-up AND fake blood. yes, yes, yes.
5:10 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Candyman: Race, Class, Sexuality, Gender, and Disability

-
Candyman hits on almost all of the sections we discussed over the last six weeks. Let's start from the most obvious and move from there.   Race: A large part of Candyman confronts the anger and rage of the Black community after years and years and years and years of systemic racism. Candyman is an embodiment of all of the men who have suffered at the hands of whites (white police man, the white community, white systems that have set them up to fail such as the housing projects of Cabrini-Green). The monster of Candyman is a tornado of retribution, a hive of bees swirling angrily and containing the men who have been lynched or tortured by whites, starting with the original death of a Black male painter who dared to fall in love with a white woman whose portrait he painted. This monster, like the original, can be summoned by anyone who dares to say his name out loud in front of a mirror five times. Until the very end, the only people who do this are white--and every one of them is
Read more

Short story by Lauren Groff, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"

-
Image
You have to maintain a much more focused attention when reading a good short story versus a novel, because if you skim, you might miss something.  For this reason, I find it a little more difficult on my brain to read short stories.  But if you're going to write in the form, you should read in the form (and others--I have yet to memorize a poem as was suggested in my workshop last week), so I've been trying. Lauren Groff has a story called "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" in Best American Short Stories, 2014. You might have read her novel The Monsters of Templeton, or her other short story from a previous Best of collection, "Delicate Edible Birds" (also the name of her book of short stories), I have a vague recollection that that story was about World War II or possibly World War I and a dinner party where the people invited are living it up . I seem to also remember a line about the crunching of tiny bird bones. The Monsters of Templeton
Read more

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

-
Image
It’s all about the recaps. It’s a show made of recaps from previous shows. I purposefully skipped the first 40 minutes. These guys are all a bunch of idiots. They are turning on one another. Wes has not shown up, because he will probably come in at the very end for some kind of surprise. They are all trying to humiliate Jake because he is too perfect and too sweet (however, he just referred to himself in the third person; kind of irritating). I don’t remember any of these guys, to be honest. Who are these women in the audience? Oh, okay time for a short break because the show has been on now for three minutes. You know what, I’m going to go ahead and time the difference between the commercials and the actual airtime of the show. >Show returns at: 8:47 p.m. Don’t forget the 20 minutes of clapping in between the scenes. I can’t tell you how much hair mousse has been used in the making of this show. Dave is the crazy dude who has decided to grow a beard for the recap Juan is being atta
Read more