Don’t Look Now…
Okay, things were getting heavy here for a second. Too much seriousness is bad for… well it’s just not good. Seriously. We’re talking certain doom if you’re serious all the time! Between work, not sleeping well because of the TMJ, NCAA Bracket Mania, and writing two new reviews for LTR, and another article, my brain is pretty much pea soup. I’ve never actually had pea soup, but I can only imagine that it’s not a good thing to liken something else to (See? I just ended my sentence in a preposition! The world is ending!!).
So lack of sleep tends to make me a bit silly. Well, loopy, really. Don’t believe me? I’ll give you an example. Today I was taking a break at work and I went outside to see if I needed to build an ark yet. When I went back inside, I was confronted with this:
It wasn’t there when I went outside. I come back a few minutes later and there it is glaring up at me from the floor. Of course I stopped and just stared at it for a minute. We were sixing each other up, and I think the strange plastic square got the better of me. Or at least I let it believe it did (You can’t trust randomly appearing plastic squares. They’re a very shady bunch). I actually started to laugh. I mean, where in the nine hells did it come from? I was completely perplexed. It was clearly a plastic binding of some kind (you may have seen it in such films as Phonebooks of Doom and Oh, you wanted to open this box? Yeah, good luck with that!) But what was it doing in the middle of the hallway floor? How did it get there? Suddenly dozens of theories started firing off in my head, so I stepped around the mystical square and slid along the wall back to my office. I knew the drill, and any of you writerly folks out there would recognize it too–random thing occurs + overactive imagination = storylines crowding normal thoughts out of your mind.
So here are the only logical explanations I could come up with:
1. I’m being stalked by plastic. (On Monday some festive green plastic St. Patty’s Day beads mysteriously appeared on my front door knob. I’m pretty sure Plastic is ticked off that I’m recycling. Did you rat me out?)
2. It was the outline of a gateway to another time and/or dimension. Please note: You should never step inside these randomly appearing outlines unless you want to wind up fighting the Huns in your stylish boots, or risk damaging the present by your confused actions in the past. And no. I didn’t step inside the square. You’re still here, aren’t you?
3. It was trying to get home and was playing dead so I wouldn’t kill it. This isn’t as odd as it might sound. Plastic squares are quite intelligent, and they know that most people will either not see it if it doesn’t move (they maintain the T-Rex theory), or will be terrified of fighting Huns if they do happen to notice it. Either way, I’m pretty sure I surprised it. See number 2.
Maybe you have a better explanation? You know you want to share…
Write well,
~Dawn
