keeping it real. fo real fo real.

I’ve stopped carrying a purse. I now shove everything I need into my pockets and hope for the best. Considering my purse is being held together by safety pins–and still has big gaping holes in some places (a safety pin is no magic wand, after all)–I figure this is a good decision.

I don’t understand what it is that makes strangers talk to me, but it happens all the time. Just now, when I was about to walk down to the subway, a man blurts out to me, “My wife hates me.”

I stop; those are powerful words, after all.

“I doubt that,” I say. But now that I think about it, I shouldn’t doubt that statement. Many husbands and wives end up hating each other. Love fades so easily. It’s the perfectly healthy, stout little frog that jumped into my very messy closet when I was a little girl. Poor thing had no chance in that maze of clothes with no food or water. I found a sad pile of little frog bones much, much later.

We wonder why, after we’ve hopped blindly into a dark closet–away from any and all nourishment–we find our relationships no longer in tact. Not that I’m an expert. If I’m an expert at anything, it’s finding the frog skeleton. Someday I’d like to find the healthy little frog; someday I’d like to say LOOK! I KEPT HIM ALIVE! And then live happily ever after. I’ll even do the dishes. Well, when I remember. But I probably won’t mow the lawn and I definitely won’t watch tv every night. Sorry, there are just some things I will not do.

The details of our lives are so good at keeping things in perspective, huh? So many people–mostly those who I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting in real life–tell me to please “keep it real.” And maybe these people don’t realize that I am the girl who walks around with a large chunk of cheese in her bag. Sure, it’s because I met friends at Whole Foods for dinner, and, seeing the cheese on sale for $2.79, simply had to buy that along with dinner and then stick it in my bag for the rest of the night–but, the fact remains: cheese. In my bag. All night long. Sexy, I know.

I guess what I am saying is that if ever started to think too highly of myself walking around in my super cool earmuffs that make my ears all squishy and warm, then all I need to do it glance into my canvas bag and see a large and orange hunk of cheese. I mean, I don’t think the glamorous women of the world carry around cheese. I might be wrong. Perhaps Madonna, cheese in hand, would say otherwise.

Also, this: every night I go to sleep wearing a retainer in my mouth.

So, I guess my point is that I have found a dead frog in my closet. Both for real AND metaphorically speaking. I walk around with cheese in my bag. I sleep with a retainer. If those things don’t keep it real, then God help us all.