Another submission from a friend of TFTF, sent at 8:56 p.m. on a Monday

A girl tries to look good when she leaves the house, but, heaven knows, it isn't always easy when she's a full-time college student and hasn't gotten eight uninterrupted hours of sleep in, oh, about two years. If that's the case, no matter what, she's going to need a little help.

So this is for you, Frisc bathroom. You're killing me here. You bolt a bare fluorescent tube on each side of the mirror, it's going to look like backstage in Guantánamo's dressing room. You're washing your hands after your fifth mugful of totally necessary coffee sends you hurtling in there to empty your bladder. You stand there, rubbing that translucent pink industrial soap on your hands, and you DIE. Every pore, every imperfection, all of the sorry streaks of redness veining your eyes from exhaustion and caffeine: it's all there for you, marvelous and loathsome.

At the same time, that inhuman light somehow perfectly captures the depressing, cold grossness of the pools of water stagnating around the sink, not to mention each sorry wad of paper towel or toilet paper littering the floor. You were wrong, Jean-Paul. Hell isn't other people. It's this mirror.

This is not what I need, Frisc. I expect better. Make a girl feel proud to be up at 3 a.m. on a Thursday, staring at the blank Microsoft Word page where her French paper ought to be.

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