Screws (bus ride to Chicago)

I look around and notice the screws.

Holding everything together

The entire bus held together by screws.

If I had a Phillips head screwdriver, I think I could take apart this whole bus.

The blue and yellow Megabus décor theme throughout would cease to be part of their brand as the shiny banana yellow metal rails and the fuzzy royal blue seat cushions would be scattered and apart.

It all fits together so perfectly

But if they were apart, they’d become unique.

A cold vibrant yellow railing hanging on the clean white wall of an art gallery, in between paintings of love and soup cans and death and anguish.

A soft blue seat cushion saturated with wet mud in a puddle in an alley, with pallet splinters, dirty crumpled newspapers, and discarded plastic packaging floating around it.

A gun gray grate being fixed onto the inside panel of a new Megabus, recycled into a new but entirely similar atmosphere.

A dull green ceiling light being fiddled with by a rough fifth-grader in a science class.

But I’d keep the screws. Clinking them all into a glass jar as I unscrew them one by one, the tiny pieces of metal, the skeleton that seats, armrests, engines, doors depend on for structure.

Taking them out one by one, pieces that traveled together as a unit falling apart and away from each other, being tossed to the different ends of the earth, but the screws stay in the same place, my jar, which I bury in the deepest depths of the ocean.

I don’t know the girl next to me.

I barely glanced at her. She was black, about my age, I think.

We won’t exchange more than ten words between each other but we will be sitting next to each other, with our upper arms grazing, for two and a half hours.

She’ll accidently bump me out of my sleep, and I’ll look up at her bleary-eyed and surprised and she’ll nervously smile and wave her hand close to her body and softly say “Sorry” and I’ll smile back and say “tsokay” and close my eyes again.

I’ll jerk out of sleep and surprise her then act like nothing happened and go back to sleep.

I don’t know anything about her other than that she owns an iPod like me, has a not-quite-designer purse, an average-priced pea coat, and her hair looks like it’s done at a pretty decent salon.

I wonder if she noticed my iPod, my coat that looks like it could be from a second hand store but was actually bought by my mom for me for a good amount of money, my gray sweatshirt that I wore under the coat, which matched my gray jeans that I wear all the time because they fit me the best, but since they clash with gray sweatshirts I don’t usually wear them together except for on days like today when I don’t care because I know I’ll be traveling next to someone I’ll probably never see again and I don’t care much what I look like anyway.

If I see the girl sitting next to me again I probably won’t even recognize her. There are tons of girls that have the same or similar things she was wearing and that’s all I can remember. An instant image conjured up from the corners of my brain that remember the things I see at shops and stores and worn by people and advertised on the internet. Everyone buys the same things even though no two people look alike, not even identical twins. It’s a shorthand to determine what someone’s like before you even start talking to them.

Bulky, puffy, plain white shoes, classicbluejean-blue jeans that fit baggily, a plain color, poorly fitting t-shirt, a jean jacket or a shitty leather jacket…I know this person. I’ve seen thousands of them. And even though they might have some differences in what kind of tv shows or movies or books (if they even read) or videogames they like, I’ll have a basic idea of them.

Same with ugg boots, tights or jeans, a northface jacket, straight hair, big sunglasses and a designer-looking purse. I can assume a thousand things about them, even though some might not be true, I can still tell what kind of person they are. People say things that they don’t mean, but they rarely own things they don’t mean.

Not giving a fuck

After listening to the story, and immediately before going to have coffee with his girlfriend, he typed “Morality” into Wikipedia and read. Instead of following his usual routine of debating what to wear for a few minutes before leaving his apartment, he grabbed whatever was closest. He wasn’t thinking to himself “What do I look like”, but rather, “What will the world look like after it sees me”

On the subway, considering the morality differences between Korean and American culture, he decided that they were too divergent to make a truly moral decision in his situation. Instead, he decided, as some of his most admired idols had, to not give a fuck. He realized that not only had the Tucker Max-like characters he had seen, read about, or met in his life subscribed to this philosophy and thrived due to it, but almost every success story had the same spirit about it (although their catchphrase philosophy might be more politely called “Carpe Diem” rather than “Don’t give a fuck”).

He realized that his whole relationship had been based on the premise of “giving a fuck” and that this was precisely what was sucking the life from his bones and shackling him down.

Alex - student story idea

IN most groups of young children, there is one child who doesn't fit in. In our story, the group of young children is a class of fifth grade elementary school students. The child who doesn't fit in is Alex.
Alex wasn't ostracized because he was smarter than the other students. On the contrary, he had some of the worst grades in the class. He wasn't strange in any particular way. For example, in the same class, Kevin's feet were bigger than the teacher's, Sarah was teased because of her cartoon mouse voice, and Daniel farted loudly and often. Each of these children were teased for their weird characteristics, but they still fit in. The other studetns understood them; every human has something strange. The problem with Alex was that no one could put their finger on what was strange with him.
It was the last class of the day on Friday when all the students realized that Alex was different. It was Mr. Gates's math class, and since it was Friday and the smell of the weekend was driving the kids crazy (like a group of sharks smelling blood in the water), Mr. Gates decided that his lesson could wait until Monday and he let the kids be kids for about twenty minutes. Once he wrapped up his brief and half-hearted lecture (he was looking forward to the weekend even more than his students), his announcement "Free time!" was met with cheers and animation more fitting to a Roman crowd in the Colusseum than a class of eleven year olds.
Alex stayed in his seat, looking at his textbook, although not really studying it, but still focused on it. Almost everyone else was out of their seats and talking, moving around, and doing any number of things they'd been told all week they couldn't do. The girls were mostly chatting in small groups, the boys were laughing and hitting and kicking each other. Some students sat and read comic books or played videogames alone, but were soon swept into the chaos when a friend came by and slapped whatever they were looking at out of their hands. Everyone except Alex, without much reluctance, joined in the noisy, frenetic mass of children. Kevin, the one with the big feet, fat body, and (by the admission of everyone in class, including himself) ugly face, was shooting spitwads at everyone. Some dodged, some were hit. Of those, some would simply laugh as they wiped the glob off their faces, others would scream, many would throw something back at him, a few looked horrified, and at each reaction, he would let out a deep ogre bellow of a laugh, which got louder after each consecutive scream, laugh, wail, or revenge strike. He was whipped into his own furor, drunk off of the effects (negative or otherwise) that he was having on his classmates. At the zenith of his excitement, he wadded up a big piece of paper, summoned the last of the mucous from the deepest reserves of his sinuses and throat (truly the last, as he had already expended so much on the faces of the other children), muddled them both together in his big, puffy mouth, and, with his face red and eyes wild with excitement, rashly spat directly into Alex's eye.
He froze, realizing what he had just done. The groups of girls, the running, laughing, hitting boys all fell silent. All eyes were on the dripping gob covering Alex's eye, and then on his other, uncovered eye, waiting for a reaction. nothing came. Not fear, not anger, not sadness, not a tear, not even much surprise.
Mr. Gates didn't know what to do. Kids usually sort this out themselves. One kid gets hit with a spitball, then he hits back in retribution; justice is served. Or the kid cries, which is annoying for Mr. Gates, because then it is his job to dispense justice, otherwise he'll hear from the poor kid's parents about why the teacher is allowing this sort of thing to go on in his classroom. But he had no clue what to do in Alex's case. He wasn't crying, so he might not (probably wouldn't) tell his parents what happened, which meant Mr. Gates wouldn't get a call. But Alex wasn't doing anything himself to pay Kevin back. After about five seconds (which seemed like much longer), Mr. Gates said, "Alex. Don't you need to ask me for the bathroom pass to clean up?"
Without a word, with the wad still covering his eye, but now leaking spit and snot down his cheek, Alex got out of his desk, picked the pass up off of Mr. Gates's desk, and left the room, which immediately turned into a beehive of murmurs and whispers all about the same thing.
That weekend, since no one in the class could make sense of what happened, no one talked about it, although they all thought about it. It was terrifying. Kevin had a dream that Alex was stabbing him with a butcher's knife. Mr. Gates kept fighting the idea that Alex would come to school on Monday and flip over desks, tear maps and posters off the walls, and break computers. Kathy, who had almost cried when she saw what happened to Alex, had a dream that Alex himself was crying, crying so much that his eyeballs were floating in a lake of his own tears.
When Monday came, Alex was still on everyone's mind. The students still only talked with their friends, but everyone was looking at Alex out of the corners of their eyes. Everyone was waiting for him to do something, to show them something, to confirm or deny their suspicions or their theories about him. but he just sat at his desk like any other day. He never raised his hand to be called upon, and he always sat at the back, out of everyone's way. That's why no one had ever really noticed him before. but now it was impossible for him to be ignored.
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday the other students and even Mr. Gates watched Alex in apprehension and wonder, but on Thursday, things lightened up in class. Again, Kevin was the one to shift everyone's ideas about Alex. He was the only one bold enough or dumb enough, or maybe was just the person who was the most anxious about waiting to see what would happen. So he knocked Alex's pencil case off his desk as he walked by. The sound of the wood pencils and metal pencil case on the hard stone floor rang throughout the room. Everyone braced for the few seconds of awkwardness they were expecting; the same few seconds they experience last Friday. But before it could happen, and because he knew he had to do something differently this time, Kevin said, "You idiot," loud enough for everyone in class, even Mr. Gates, to hear. The rest of the class laughed lightly, a slight snicker, then Kevin kicked a few pencils across the room, at which point the snickers turned into cackles. Even Mr. Gates smiled and felt relieved.
Imbued with the confidence Kevin's stunt had given them, the rest of the class started picking on Alex. Jimmy hit him in the head with a paper airplane when Mr. Gates wasn't looking, and then Peter flipped Alex's book shut when he was.