Lessons From the Kissing Booth

There's something about this time of year that makes me want to go pawn your old trumpet for a hot air balloon. It makes me want to go someplace that everything is not. But even with a flying contraption, you really never get anywhere. I have been up all those stairs and down all those elevators, and at the center of it all is the same damp heat and the same plastic palm tree.

I cannot figure out how to keep my white cotton skirt from wrinkling. I tend to spend the day preoccupied with smoothing it. Not sitting is just not an option.

I spend these notsleeping nights sitting at my little blue table, going over my options with the Space Needle. The Space Needle gives the best advice by not giving any advice at all, by standing there and flashing sympathetically. I haven't really got any options that need going over at the moment, no big decisions looming, no little decisions waiting in line. I don't need to be doing anything aside from what I've already got going, but I do like to keep in practice. You never know when a choice will need to be made.

To some of them, I would say, 'No, you may not bench press me. You probably could, but you may not.' To one or the other of them, I'd say, 'Girls, like plants, do a whole lot better when you talk to them now and again.' To others, I would say, 'Just because you remember what jeans I was wearing when we met doesn't mean I'm going to let you put your hands down them.' To a few, I would say, 'Thanks.'

You know, though, a point I never quite make is that my name means 'listener.' I could cobble together some sort of forced line about that, but I've done enough of such things for the day and there really wouldn't be a point, anyway. I just thought I should point it out in case anyone wonders what it is I'm really doing up in the middle of the night.