Where's the Candid Camera?

Posted by Minni

“Where’s the Candid Camera?”
Something happened this year, and I cannot point it out as a constellation in stars or a definite point of a graph. But something (lets call it a luckybug for all adorable purposes) crept into my life, and stayed there. If this year could have been made into a slideshow, the slides would start out slow, black and white, with maybe as much as an hour between slide changes, and end in and in a motion picture, complete with color and sound.

Slide 1: Me in a miniskirt wearing something pink and something green, looking
like maybe I stepped out of the Delias/Alloy catalog

Thirty minutes….
Slide 2: A picture of me dressed in the OU Housing Staff black polo, unkempt hair, sporting a fake smile.

An hour…

Slide 3: Me wearing a lifeguard uniform, kept hair, and makeup done.

An hour….
Slide 4: Me looking tired.

An Hour…

Slide 5: Me sleeping
Slow transitions, silent. No genuine life. I got up in the morning to go to work. I slept in my dorm so I wouldn’t fall asleep in class. I ate because I needed energy to work. Hunger was a distraction. Never in my life had my schedule been so chaotic. That semester I learned how to nap.
Slide 6: Me Voting

Fifteen minutes:
Slide 7: Me walking to work in the rain looking disgruntled to say the least

Then the slides began to change more rapidly, colors filled in the dark spaces and sounds flashed by. I met Kerrie in Theatre class. The Man Who Came to Dinner project, we were partners. She was a colorful person, animated, which rocked the foundations of my slideshow. And she had curly hair, like mine. And then we got high. One night, work and leisure met face to face, shook hands…and then, as if in some agreement had been reached, for one brief moment, work stepped aside.
The ground felt spongy that night, and I was fully entertained by depth perception. The signs of the city seemed to overlap and fly past each other, yellow, red, yellow and sometimes green. The windows were foggy, and Fall bowed out...the leaves were gone, the warmth was gone. So was work, class, and all my worries at the time, just for that night if not at all. And when I got back to Vandenberg there was music. Matt Kelly held his choir practice at Nightwatch that night. Either this choir was phenomenally talented, or I was phenomenally high, I’m not sure which, but either way it was good to me, so I sat on the bench in front of the Beer Lake Nightwatch station listened, stuffing my face with vanilla cookies. I ate so fast I could hardly taste them but I am sure they were good. I was not eating for energy; I was eating because I felt like if I didn’t, I would swallow myself. When I went to sleep that night it was not so I would not because I had to be awake in class the next day, and when I got up in the morning it was not because I had to work.
The slideshow projector was rattling at the speed at which my life wanted to process and display the slides, it stared smoking and, eventually, it exploded. I was asleep for the explosion; sound asleep when the luckybug came into my life. I suppose the benevolent, imaginary insect either repaired the slide projector or replaced it with a candid videotape recorder. Perhaps the one Mary Cha referred to last night….but that’s for later on in the slideshow. Right now I have to clean up my Nightwatch Station and go to sleep…and no, I don’t have class tomorrow.
~to be continued