Kiss and Tell

I had skipped my final period math class, biked two miles, and arrived at her house.  She opened the back door for me and we stashed my bike in the big pine tree in her front yard.  No one was home except her her and me.  She led me up to her room, smiling warmly, a little nervous.  Of course if I said I wasn't nervous, I'd be lying.  I'd never done anything like this before.

She sat me down on her bed.  She had a plush pink comforter with matching pillows.  She sat next to me, and we waited for some grand force to tell us when to kiss.  I turned towards her, closed my eyes, and leaned in for a kiss.  

Our mouths danced awkwardly against each other, a improvised recreation of Sixteen Candles, hopefully, my seventh grade mind thought, going towards something more American Pie.  Her mouth tasted like Listerine, lip gloss, and artificial grape.  She pulled back taking with her a long string of shared saliva.  After an awkward laugh, we kissed again, this time longer, more experienced I suppose, as their was no spit hanging from our lips when we finished this time.  Making out was so new and exciting, so we kept kissing until her sister caught us, and chased me out of the house with a heel.

After you lose your virginity, and everyone starts shtupping, no one seems to kiss any more.  Long gone are the make out sessions of High School in favor of an informal fuck with none of the run around.  There is something to be said about the beauty of a kiss, and if I were a better writer I would say it, but I'm not so here is clumsy attempt at an explanation.  

The kiss is like a handshake between lovers.  It has subtle tells which allow you to know someone more deeply sexually.  The amount of tongue, lip biting, the passion, the aggression, all of these create a sense of someone's sexual identity. A kiss is something both intimate and sexual.  An expression of attraction, love, wants, and needs, all in a silent exchange between one another.

  

David Sedaris's "Me Talk Pretty One Day"

I have to admit when I saw David Sedaris's name in the table of contents, I was pretty excited.  Holidays on Ice remains my favorite collections of essays, even better that Rudolph Bourne's Radical Will.  Anyways, now that I'm done being pretentious, "Me Talk Pretty One Day," (181)  is really good.  It centers around a French class Sedaris took while living in France, and how horrifying the teacher was.  She is constantly either insulting, belittling, or physically hurting her students, and has created such a hostile environment that Sedaris finds himself too self-conscious to even speak in public.  It is a really funny story of the struggles of learning a different language in extraordinary circumstances with Sedaris's trademark wit.  One device which really struck me was his use of gibberish to simulate not understanding another language.  It kept the flow well, is used very effectively, and added a certain uniqueness to the essay.

To the Young Woman who Lives on the Other Side of these Paper-Thin Walls

For a short while after high school I lived in a rather run down apartment in Cleveland with a friend of mine and his brother, who I believe still lives there.  It was an exciting experience, constantly wondering when the crack dealer down the hall would get busted or which one of the other tenets wasn't just weird and was actually completely insane.  It was all ruined, however, by our neighbor, a terrible shrew of a woman who I hope bad things happen to and no one else.  This is an open letter to that woman.

Of Nicotine

 Of all the earthly pleasures that doth persuade the soul to destroy the body, tobaccos, in particular cigarettes, are of the most alluring and glamorous sort, and it is cigarettes that I have indulged in and adopted as my own-

     “classy way to commit suicide,” -Kurt Vonnegut.