How to be a Flake

I’m sorry, I totally spaced out can you say that again?  Something about your dying pet?  Someone is having a birthday party?  I wasn’t listening.  What do you think the back of my head looks like to that boy by the soda machine?

I don’t think I can make it, but have fun!  Why?  Well.  Ok, listen, buddy.  Your a cappella concert or acoustic guitar jam or whatever is pretty far away from my bed and it is cold/icy/snowy/rainy and the Midd Rides dispatcher is AWOL and you’re just not worth the trek.

I literally would rather stand in line at the Mail Center for the rest of my life than attend this 8 a.m. Renaissance poetry lecture.  So let’s call it sick.  I’m sick.  I’m deathly ill, but I am kind enough to shoot you an email from my deathbed.  Gastro.  It is gastro, I think.

No, I didn’t feel like going out.  My roommate is out of town, so I’m going to try to have a “me” night?  So I lit a bunch of candles and ran a bath and listened to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for like, 20 minutes?  Then I got bored and I forgot my roommate’s dad’s HBOgo password, so I went to sleep.

No I didn’t make it to Viva Ross Vegas.  I guess you can tell me about it.  I mean, yes I know it looks like, I’m making a Zen sand garden out of my mashed potatoes with my fork while I latch on to your every word, but I’m not listening, not one bit.  I am scheming.  I am plotting my getaway.  I am thinking about how I could pay my friend in laundry card swipes to take me to Burlington, and there’s a flight, leaving tonight, $300 one-way to Bermuda.  Bermuda!  What’s happening down there?  I don’t even know!  But I bet a wise mentor will take me under her wing and teach me to surf and sail, and I will become tan and rail thin and live off fish and Vitamin D.

I didn’t do the readings.  I was attending a funeral reception for my friend’s dead pet.  Or a birthday party.  It was a combination funeral reception-birthday party.

I am so sorry I didn’t meet you for the improve show; I fell asleep in one of the blue chairs in the library.  No, not the ones in Bi Hall; that atrium is too drafty.  The chairs in the Davis Family Library.  Yes, it was a reclining one.  I don’t know; I got there early.  If you get there early, you can snag one.  Three hours.  Yes, that long.  That’s never happened to you?  When I woke up the windows were dark and all my dreams came rushing back.  My sister was a pirate, a cabal of merry Russian Satanists drank all of the wine, I got a tattoo on both the front and back of my wrist, both miniature scenes of birthday parties, and I was so wracked with regret in the dream that I had to wake up and double check that I didn’t actually have those tattoos in real life.  I’m sorry I missed our meeting.  Tomorrow?

I’m sorry I missed your Symposium presentation, but I would rather Oedipus my eyeballs than watch one more Powerpoint this week.  Is that too dramatic, in light of the content on the front page of the New York Times?  I’m grateful to be here, I am.  I want to be here, I do.  I want to hear your concerns about the word count of the assignment at breakfast and watch people play the Steinway in Wright and read 300 pages of feminist theory and attend that performance art lecture and always possess an impossible to-do list that flutters around in my backpack like a Yoko Ono Wish Tree wish.  But sometimes I also I want to wander around and look at snow-covered trees and impressive icicles.  I want to sit and stare into space and not think about anything at all.  Just give me like 20 minutes.  I’ll be there in 20 minutes.

I’m going out of town, so I’ll have to miss class next week.  It’s my birthday?