3 Mugs of Tea

Tea for Two, originally uploaded by The Waters of March.

I am sick. Today I moved from my bed to the bathroom to my bed and then to the couch at my mother's house. Now I am doing my laundry. To be quite accurate, my mother's washing machine is doing laundry. I am writing thank you notes.

I hate thank you notes.

It is a physical manifestation of societal pressure. Any true friend or family member whom I actually care about doesn't need a thank you note. They need a hug or a phone call or even an email. Thank you notes are usually not personal, they are usually not sincere, they aren't me. They are too formal to be meaningful. I feel guilty for wasting the paper and the postage.

But I am 22, almost 23, and I have apparently reached the age at which a verbal thank you isn't enough. It's polite to go through the motions, to write out my insincere babbling. Some of these people probably forgot they got something for me as soon as they checked my name off of their obligatory shopping lists.

I really like this song. I'm listening to Devotchka to drown out the TV coverage of the fiesta bowl as I sip on my third cup of this surprisingly good sweet orange tea. I say surprising because most pre-packaged tea tasted kind of....meh....after you're used to loose leaf tea, but this stuff hits the spot. I guess it's like how sometimes you crave some bad diner coffee even though you have some perfectly good fresh roasted Guatemalan goodness at home or how sometimes you'd rather watch Clueless than read a perfectly good book.

But I digress....

What I meant to say, is that as I was writing a thank you note to my grandmother, I had a brilliant idea. My 500 installments have been kind of haphazard and terrible since I don't really know what to write about. I'm still not comfortable with prose, but 500 words is really long for a poem. So I've been sort of in need of a kick start. Anyway, my grandma got us this game called “Liebrary” for Christmas. Basically, there are a bunch of cards that represent books. They have the title, author, first line and short plot of hundreds of books. Everyone playing writes what they think is a convincing first line for the book and the person who drew the card writes the real one. They read all of the first sentences and you have to guess which one is real.

It just dawned on me that this is an AWESOME writing exercise. Two awesome writing exercises actually. Either do what the game intends, and write a first line based on the plot and then simply keep writing or you could use one of these first lines as a spring board to start off a story totally unrelated to the original book.

Tonight I used the first line from 'Like Water for Chocolate' by Laura Esquivel:

“Take care to chop the onion fine.”

Excellent advice.

Goodnight, friends.

Word Count Today: 503

Word Count Total: 2303