2002-02-04 || 7:53 p.m.

|| in this office we listen to the bone. but only after five o'clock. ||

channing way is squirrels and pigeons and tarot card readers, chainsmoking. the same homeless man over and over, hippie drums, boxes of unloved records. i sit by a window above a cookie shop. i sit looking out at a record store. below is the thick of students and tourism and drug deals and hand bills. i compose background and shadows. no one looks up to catch me looking at them.

the tarot reader directly below me got one customer in six hours. he consumed roughly twenty-seven cigarettes.

i don't have to talk to anyone. i read reports and rearrange data. i have the most beautiful phone, heavy and plastic and red and black and beige, all lit up in different places. it reminds me of the power plant. it reminds me of battlestar galactica.

my manager is not much older than i am. we are playing office. she hands me reports with xerox slips bearing peppermint pattie and snoopy and deadlines. i am to stamp the slip with 'completed' and place it in her mailbox. she sits eight feet away from me. my first project is due on march first. i finished it today.

it is very quiet, so much so that the sirens rattle office supplies and i can mouth the words to the music coming from the bumper sticker vendor across the street. i have to use a key if i want to go to the restroom. i have been told that if i am more than four minutes late i am to deduct that time from my breaks or lunch. there is looking at watches here, subtraction, keeping tabs, progress reports. numbers.

(i went down to my work ladies' office today to pick up some things. it was like i have been gone for two years. hugging and nudging and comments on my hair. i stood with my back to the copy machine and had a rapt audience, my work ladies, all seated at their swivel chairs, hands clasped, wanting to hear about the weekend and what awful color i have dyed my hair (eee.) and what it's like over there. two blocks away.)

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