Nurse Ratchet It Up

How Emo am I? I don't have to take the quiz. Less than zero. I'd put a barrette in my hair after three seconds of an angle bang hanging in my face. I like to laugh. Rripped jeans and shrunken sweaters is so the clothing of the Depression that it doesn't belong on people who have options. It is poser-wear. I hate poser-wear. There. I've learned a new word and over-used it.

Two bedridden people in the house for four days now. I'm a bad nurse. One needs ice, the other needs blankets. One is to eat, the other can't. Each is on a different medicine and has a unique sleep clock. One is to get up as much as possible, the other needs to be tied down. Keeping all this straight might be an issue if I remembered to check on them. Four days. Last night I went to a high school musical. It wasn't in my school district. I didn't know a soul in the play. It was a musical put on by high school students and high school musicians. Remember those? That's how much I needed to get out.

Actually, it was pheonomenal. The musical director at this school gets vocal chords in ninth grade and bends them to his will. He is crazy demanding, and three of the twelfth graders on stage last night sang better Idol contestants. The girl could be performing on Broadway. The two boys could be in time. And all this from those who sign up for chorus from the district's few hundred nothing special, second-ring outlying suburban whatevers. He presses their bland carbon into dazzle. It's a phenom. Gossip has it that he was a piano genius as a kid, but then choked or suffered performance anxiety and now survives by confining himself to this tiny segment of the world. Or so the story goes. Yesterday we passed one of Lex's teachers walking one of our city streets. "There he goes," she said. "He walkds everywhere. He never had a phone until the school made him get one so they could reach him. He doesn't have a television or radio. I guess he reads all the time. I wonder if he has lights for night. They say he got left at the alter." I looked at this older, slightly bent, somewhat bohemian gentleman moving with enough determination to signify sanity, thought of the alter and reading by candlelight and heating the end of the bed with bricks, and began contemplating whether the fleeing woman had a hand in creating his current ways or if she decided that there was nothing fundamentally evil about an occasional TV dinner. "But I suppose it could be a myth," Lex added. "One of my other professors said that to was a waste to have graduated from high school without taking one of his classes."

I had to approve the senior year book layout design ordered by Lex and her friend. I traveled to a photography studio and stared at walls full of poster size family portraits set in groomed back yards or beach fronts. Every family had a color theme: either light blue or white. The family dog would be well groomed. Everyone looked well groomed. And pretty. Everyone was so pretty. There were pet portraits, too. They were mostly of dogs, but my favorite was one of a three black dogs on a white ground, hanging out beneath a black cat atop a white pedestal. The cat was looking down on the dogs, as cats do. That one I liked. I liked it because it may have actually been tough to time. And there was sarcasm in it. None of the other images had sarcasm or irony, except for maybe the one of the pretty Mom in white. She was surrounded by six perfectly coifed boys between the ages of two and nine, all in matching light blue polo shirts. The photo was perfect. Everyone was perfect, except that the man responsible for all this Y chromosome damage was missing. It would have been more fun to see the boys appearing as themselves in that photo, with the mom up on a pedestal, holding a cell phone that never seems to connect to the father.