Cell Phones.

I.

Damn you and your 0 missed calls.

Despite desperate punching of buttons

no messages vibrate in my hand.

II.

Gone are the glorious days of the land line

when the phone rang furiously all the

while I was away

and the shy young pursuants,

too timid and overwhelmed by my charm,

hung up without leaving a message.

III.

Cingular has single-handedly slashed

my mind's romantic construction

of courtship where imagination

prevailed over knowledge

IV.
Now I sit, chained to this phone

unable to squash the glimmer

of possibility of a technological failure

hoping beyond hopes that misalignment

of some distant satellite has caused

your message to fail to register

V.
Slipping the phone into my pocket

for my short walk to pick up my mail

I wonder if maybe-- just maybe--

it's me, not you.

So I got a job. It turns out it is as easy as walking in the door and asking. I'm currently a full-time student and part-time caterer. Yes, I am paid to wear a sort of penguin outfit and smile at rich people who say things like: "Sweetie, can you bring me some ice tea with less ice in it?"

Yes, the outfit. Well, I wear black pants, black socks, black shoes, a white button-up with a clip on bowtie. I'm allowed to wear earrings (one per ear) that are smaller than a quarter. This rule has been broken already with a lovely turquoise pair called "dazzling" by on of the line cooks.
I wanted comfy shoes, so I bought a black pair with a white rubber sole, whose whiteness sort of glows about 1 inch around the bottom of the shoe. Ghetto-style, I took a bit of permanent black marker to it-- now they are all black shoes. Two-tone, but all black.

As for other exciting moments, I've been lurking in courtrooms after a class assignment to cover a court case. It's rather crazy how mundane deciding the fates of people's lives has become to the judges and lawyers who work there. I sat in on an abuse case where a man beat his wife with a lead pipe, but tried to lessen the charges by claiming he beat her with a plunger (apparently a less lethal weapon would be a shorter prison term).