bloody exhausted and resentful but snooze kills there is no magic but snooze kills head hurts with a choke collar of pain but... i do hafta pee though, hangon yes, i am your teacher and yes i did assign that assignment for you, but we’re bumping up against the crux of avid. congratulations, you’ve made it this far. here’s the thing--i wasn’t asking out of snark or smarm or disinterest or ignorance. i was asking because you’re an intelligent, self-actualizing young man and i want you to start practicing a skill called “not just waiting to be told what to do” or “thinking for yourself” or “knowing what’s needed and then delivering what’s needed on time” or “there’s more to life than just doing what the teacher says” or something. well, we’ll work on what it’s called. (warning. mixed verb tenses ahead. fix later) so let’s say she did get a job. what would it be? should we flash WAAAAAY forward? she’s like some kind of techer now? a real-estate agent GOOD GO HELP ME, NO. a gymnast. Haha. A waitress. No, too typical and expected. this isn’t somesave the poor peasant girl movie. a thief. a revolutionary. Hmm.. now we may be getting somewhere. how about a teacher, a thief, a revolutionary. or is that too self-serving? Well, wish fulfillment might be a little pathetic and transparent, but it’s not against the law. being a theif generally is against the law though. but so is being a revolutionary, unless you’re just a fashionista revolutionary. if you’re a REAL revolutionary, not even your fans like you very much. that’s the price you pay. if she’s a teacher, how did she get to be a teacher? oh you know, one of those alternative, emergency programs. the state she is in has relaxed their requirements because of a fairly illiberal government at the time. you could do some research on those alternative programs, and base it on that plus liberties. you could flash way forward, and then periodically or even just one good time flash midway back towards her being in the program. or how she got into it in the first place. if you’re just determined to have her work in a fucking restaurant, maybe a hotel restaurant, you could flash back to the encounter there that got her started. maybe it was a borrowed room full of books. maybe it was when she got started talking to the lady that comes into the restaurant every morning and orders eggs and burnt toast. she’s working on a book about the brain. this is an old hotel. there is a swimming pool. she swims in it at night after the restaurant’s closed and no one is down there. it’s quiet and moonlight and reminds her of the solitude of the stars. swimming alone in black water under a derelict sky; it reminds her of the aching freedom she felt when she first hightailed it out of that other hotel, so many moons ago. it’s scary too. preternatural childish sensation of sharks and untold depths and being sucked down into the unknown... and yet that’s part of the appeal. it gets her heart going, and that’s something that needs to be done sometimes. it is getting chilly now, this time of year, she had traveled all through that winter, and spring, and into the summer, before she basically got to this partiular hotel by default; this was the one where she really didn’t have enough money to keep going, and so she talked to the manager, and found out she was actually a pretty good talker, and the manager it turns out had a lot of influence over the owner (and that’s another flashback, or flash-side anyway), and so she managed to get a job. is it too much to suggest that maybe the manager was reminded of her own duaghter? or neice? or self? and they worked out an arrangement where she got to stay in one of the hotel rooms, on the first floor, near the pool, as part of her compensation. that’s a pretty good benefit, she had to admit. maybe not so good as things like insurance, or... what other benefits are there? she’s never really had a real job before, so she doesn’t really know what to compare this too. but she’s able to save a little bit out of each check. she doesn’t really have anything to spend money on. there’s nowhere to go shopping around here really anyway, except a clumo of generic chains and franchises if you go closer to the highway, and if you go the other way, closer to town... but she doesn’t generally feel inclined to do that. it’s hard to describe how someone with such a free flying, wide ranging mind could be content in such a small sphere of physical space, but there it is. did she maybe just feel a little safer that way? the hotel manager’s neice moved out not that long ago, well, actually it was quite a while ago, but for some reason she never gave away the rest of her old clothes, so guess what? they fit. sometimes it’s tv dinners and old tv reruns in the manager’s rooms. sometimes the manager has a friend or two over, but usually it’s just the two of them. and what is that like when the friend or two is over? i would think it would be a little unnerving. but that’s another flash-side, potentially. she was swimming in the hotel pool one night and it was warm but it was also coming on fall and so the warm was glazed with a layer of the promise of a cold snap to come. a few leaves already floated in tight circles in the skimmers; she would have to clean that out in the morning; her duties had expanded beyond the restaurant. there was almost nothing she couldn’t help out with around this place now. she was swimming around, alone, in the dark, sumptuously feeling that taut-skinned, hard-nippled seal-like state that only swimming alone in cool black water could bring. she was in her mind, she was beyond her own mind. it was that state that she loved so much, when she noticed something. the square panel of glass, submerged a few feet below the surface--she had always seen it as a light that didn’t work, that never turned on, but there was a shaft of moonlight tonight, cool clear like a single piercing note, and it illuminated that square of glass, and she swam up close to it and opened her eyes and looked more closely and that’s when she was sure she had really seen it-- it wasn’t a defunct light-- there was no big dead ridged light bulb behind that glass, but there was something-- shapes, incongrously rectangular and irregular and dry-- those were-- there were *books* behind that glass panel! an uneven row of books, like a row of british teeth (haha, ok, maybe edit that later man). she stopped, hovered, stared until the chlorine bit her eyes. old library bindings; the glass too thick and the light too dim and the covers too faded to make out titles. but unmistakeably a little row of books, just there, on the other side of that glass. and that discovery, well before the conversation with the burnt-toast writer lady in the cafe, was definitely the beginning of something. she wheeled about like a languid baby blue, and cruised through the scary black water, heart beating hard as always, thankful to have made it back to the shallow end without being gored by an orca or harpooned by a mad bearded humanoid, or... heaving herself up and out, she stood dripping for a moment, shivering in the moonlight, and then she grabbed her towel and wrapped herself in its luscious comfort. its rough textured warmth. she had to get some sleep, beautiful silken warm sleep, the remains of the water’s coolness making the warm blankets indescribably delicious. yes, the gratitude. yes, the awareness of being in a golden moment; no, she hasn’t forgotten to be humbled by that, but right now, something else grips her and makes her almost able to forget about that for a moment. she had to get some sleep, but tomorrow--tomorrow, she’s got a little quest to go on!