Momentarily Color Blind

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I constantly evaluate other people's outfits while I'm waiting for the subway or on the subway. Saw a girl today wearing ripped up white tights under cut-off denim shorts with cowboy boots and internally tsk-ed at her. Then I realized while I was sitting in the brighter lights of the Market Street subway car that I was in fact wearing a gray skirt and not a brown skirt as I thought in the dim lights of my bedroom. Whoops! Luckily, I was wearing a tank top (I am almost always wearing a tank top) and had a black cardigan in my office so I was able to pull my colors together, but just barely.



The other thing I think about on my subway ride is if the people in my car can hear the music from my i-pod. I wonder this especially if I'm listening to something corny (the theme from Oklahoma) or something wildly inappropriate (Liz Phair's "Hot White Cum"). No one ever seems shocked or offended, so I guess it's contained.



Screenwriting class tonight. Our final assignment will be to turn a short story into a screenplay. The teacher gave us the stories we can choose from and I don't particularly like any of them. For one thing, they're all written by men and focus on subjects like robbery, adultery, and world domination. Pretty much all of the stories have the "ah-ha" twist ending where something unexpected happens (the man who has killed his wife's lover ends up being killed...The deputy tracking down the bank robber decides to let him go...The king and his minions are all burned alive by the midget court jester, Hopfrog, the observant narrator has learned, like his colleague, how to blow things up from a-far). Why can't I turn Lorrie Moore's "Terrific Mother" into a screenplay? That's got a great opening: a woman at a party who accidentally kills the hosts eight month old baby. Our next assignment is to write a 3-5 page scene where two unlike characters get into a car accident. My initial idea was to have a guy crash into a family SUV and everyone is killed except for the baby so he takes the baby and leaves the scene of the crime. But you know what, I think Denis Johnson already wrote that story and it was made into a movie. Right?

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