so it works that way, does it?

elvis shoes
Originally uploaded by kristalynn.

a homeless man was sitting on the ground, begging for change outside of a liquor store. another homeless man walked out of the store with a bottle of hooch. the homeless guy on the ground held out his hand for money, and the homeless guy with the hooch stopped and handed over a small handful of change. this money was obviously what was leftover from the bottle of booze.

i dunno. don't you think it would just make more sense to keep the change to get a headstart on tomorrow's bottle of booze?



in unrelated news, i heard a newscaster (probably on fox news) actually say, "hellooo? newsflash..." in response to something that, i guess, she thought was dumb.

ode

newfoundland
Originally uploaded by kristalynn.

i often sit around with my best friend - who's a guy - and talk about all the dumb mistakes he's made, namely the wonderful women that he's dated and subsequently pushed out of his life.

"i really liked robin..." i lamented.

"i know. she was fun." he concurred.

"i have this feeling that i'll meet up with her one day. and we'll go out for drinks..."

"drinking with robin was fun."

"... and we'd get TOTALLY wasted and call you up and tell you how much of an asshole you are."

"i can see that happening."

"she was fun."

"you'd probably make out with her as well."

"yeah, probably."


so he turned the tables on me the other day, examining my roster of ex-boyfriends.

"what was it about dude #6 that you liked?" he inquired.

i looked at him like he was crazy. "are you kidding? he was so unpredictable - anything could happen. it was great!"


i once drove from coast to coast with dude #6. he called me while i was vacationing in vancouver and told me to meet him in san francisco. after i somehow made the 3-day trek in a converted hippie bus called the green tortoise, i met him at the bus station in SF. our trip started as such:

Me: "hey cool! where'd you get the car?" (it was a 1970-something fiat spider, convertible).

Him: "some guy just sold it to me. $600. c'mon, we gotta get outta here..."

we tended to have a pretty late ETD on our cross-country road trip. this lead to us arriving in cities and looking for a place to sleep in the middle of the night. this also could have been a contributing factor as to how we accidentally checked into a prostitute motel in dallas...

and no, the bulletproof glass at the reception did not seem out of the ordinary...

on another occasion we found ourselves at the very end of our trip, at around midnight, with nowhere to sleep.

"my grandmother lives about an hour or so from here," he said.

"oh yeah. can we sleep there?"

"no, we shouldn't wake her. but we can camp out on her lawn."

his grandmother didn't really have a backyard - it was more of a sideyard, right off of a busy street. it was once a sleepy connecticut town, but now also serves as new york city suburb. what, being only 2 hours away and all.

we pitched our tent in her sideyard at 2 in the morning.

her motion-sensitive light woke her up. she came to the front door in her housecoat, holding a frying pan.*

"mom-mom, it's me - micky. don't be scared," (real name and real name).

she noticed the pitched tent in her yard and saw a grizzly mountain man tippie-toeing out of the shadows.

she screamed.

"no, mom-mom. it's me. and krista. we're going to sleep in your yard."

"oh HUN, it's you. oh, look at that tent. all right then, goodnight."

it was around noon when we rolled out of our fermenty, overheated tent. i stood and scratched my belly and wondered at the commuters who were stuck in traffic a mere few feet away.

"c'mon. let's see if there are any pancakes…" suggested dude #6.


*frying pan may or may not have been present.

that is no trinket you carry...

my mother told me as i was growing up that the only person i can rely on is myself - that i shouldn't learn to trust anybody. so needless to say, i have trust issues.

i recently came out a maddening depression. i remember my boyfriend one night sitting on the bed next to me, asking, "what IS it? what IS wrong?" there was no way to explain what was going on, so i cried instead. for about three weeks.

when you're lost, you tend to look in the oddest places for answers.


one of my favorite stories comes from a friend who lives and works in new york as an actress. during a production of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat", she tripped on an errant cable and fell down a small flight of stairs right before she was to go back on stage.

although she was able to aim the fleshy, meaty parts of her body to take the blow of the fall, it still hurt like hell - the kind of pain that immediately brings tears to your eyes. she lay on the ground, stunned and breathless, while the music played on - signifying the beginning of the second act.

at that point there was no turning back without stopping the show completely. her mind raceed while trying to figure out what to do. if she couldn't get up, her understudy would have to go on ("but she had no costume and couldn't sing it - and she wasn't memorized at all").

she closed her eyes and that's when aragorn appeared in her mind. he was also lying face down but was outside in a muddy pool of water. he raised his face out of the water, dripping, and said, "you know what you have to do. and you don't want to miss me tonight, do you?"

my friend, being the movie nerd that she is, had 10:30 tickets for the opening of "return of the king".

my friend thought about everything aragorn had done up until then - and not just for frodo and the fellowship, but for the people of rohan as well. and she knew there were many more sacrifices that he was willing to make for the greater good.

after a cursory examination of her body parts, she realized nothing was broken or sprained. she thought about what she had do physically in the second act. except for a series of conga lines and some ponying, which was going to be a little painful, it was nothing like what aragorn put himself thru at helm's deep.

she limped to center stage, the curtains opened, she smiled brightly, and began to sing...


because i look very, very highly upon people who live hand to mouth, audition 10 times a week, and SING in front of people, i found myself reanimating that story in my mind one day when i was feeling a tad overwhelmed.

however, the voice in my head wasn't my friend's - it was aragorn's. he had one again found the strength to selflessly channel himself to transmit his message of self-reliance: that we all know what it is we have to do.


"It is said to be the age of the first person singular." - Ralph Waldo Emerson