READING THE INTERNET
ISSUE FIVE: July, 2020
READING THE INTERNET
🤣🤣Someone please play to distract us from COVID-19. I like reading these. I find out something new about you. 🤗 😀
1) 👩🏻Sisters - 2 halves don’t make a whole but we don’t really acknowledge this
2) 👨Brothers - 1/2 but he’s a whole
3) 👶🏼Children - When I was handed the consent form granting permission to test the baby’s tissue for chromosomal abnormalities, I had to ask the nurse which line to sign on because I didn’t quite recognize myself as “Parent ____________”
4) 💉surgeries - 1 evacuation of a dead fetus, 2 procedures where needles poked through my vaginal wall to retrieve eggs from my ovaries, wisdom tooth extraction
5) ➰Tattoos - 0 (I don’t like permanent things)
6)🌴 Been to an island - Yes
7) ✈️Flown on a Plane - Yes
8)🚑 Ridden in an ambulance- yes, with a stomach full of vodka and Tylenol PM
9) ⛸Ice Skating- Yes, and I’d wanted to go this winter but I was scared of falling
10) 🛳Been on a cruise- yes
11) 🏍Ridden on a Motorcycle - no
12) 🏇🏽Ridden on a horse -yes
13) 🚓Ridden in a police car- yes, and I screamed at the police officers from the drunk tank. they threatened to strip search me.
14) 🏥Stayed in a hospital- Yes, where they taught me to trick my brain by fake laughing. where some man told me that my problem was I thought there was only one way to fold a towel. where I lit my cigarette through a hole in the wall. where my parents delivered the pack of cigarettes to me and my father said “now would be a good time to quit.” where they didn’t visit again until I was discharged, and I wasn’t ready to go but someone who had bigger problems than towels needed the bed. no one visited me at home for a long time after. Hahahahahahahahahahaha🤣🤣
15) 👁Eye Color- Brown (dominant allele)
16) 🍉Favorite fruit - I craved watermelon
17) 📞Last phone call - window sales representative confirming an appointment to come look at our bay window whose wood is so rotten it could fall out and shatter any day now. It wouldn’t even take a big storm, just a slight rattle would do it.
LEAH M. VAN VAERENEWYCK earned an MFA from Lesley University, where she is now a Senior Lecturer in the Humanities. Her work has received an award from Glimmer Train and appeared in IthacaLit, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and various academic journals. She is a 2019-2020 Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Fellow for Higher Education. She lives in a rural town outside Boston with her husband and two rescue pups.