Laundry night.

As she walks down her apartment hallway, rumpled sheets in hand, a man at the end of the hall yells, “Hey neighbor!”

She stops, turns, smiles, and waves back with her face. Her arms are holding rumpled sheets, remember? She keeps walking.

Then, “Uh oh.”

Monique turns again. “What?”

“Somebody’s got a boyfriend,” he sings.

“Who?”

“You. I noticed a little sass in your step.”

Monique smiles again, blushes a little. “That’s not the reason for my sassy step.” She keeps walking. Sassily.

“I’m happy for you!” he yells one final time as she rounds the bend at the end of the hall and approaches the laundry room, out of sight.

Her first thought: since when does sassy step mean sappy schlepp? Maybe she’d lost three pounds. Maybe she’d just gotten a stunning new hair-do. Maybe she’d gone four days without a single nail chipping. The possibilities are endless. Our main character is, I might add, no feminist, but she certainly felt slighted by this man, this male neighbor of hers who had assumed she was happily sashaying down the hall for no other reason than because she was now ‘taken’. As if no other solitary thing could have caused this no-nonsense hip strut. As if her very happiness  depended solely on the affections from a single man.

Please.

She’s merely happy because her Klout score went up 2 points on Twitter. And these dark chocolate peanut butter cups from Trader Joes are absolutely fabulous.

acidcow.com

She doesn’t pause to drink, only walks in and straight for her computer. There were at least 15 thugs loitering around the front steps of her apartment entrance when she got home, and if that one entrance were the only way in she probably would have slept in her car.

There’s a termite on her bathroom floor. She kills it quietly and changes her toilet paper roll. Then she goes for the computer, without pausing to drink. Where has she come from? A walk, five long miles in the cold for a little fitness. There’s a half-marathon in June she’s shelled out $140 for, so come hell or high shin splint, she’ll be there and she’ll be ready.

She pauses to drink here.

Monique is in a very good mood. The work out has somehow caffeinated her spirits and the energy broiling inside her rib cage just might lift her off her seat. She wants to use that energy to study for the GMAT because she is clear in mind and body and ready to take on rational numbers and irrational thoughts about lifting off her seat and also failing the GMAT. She furiously digs her teeth into her thumb knuckle, scratches a non-existent itch on her wrist and gets lost for a full minute in all the unread books on her bookshelf.

Today she discovered the magnificent tweets of Jen Statsky and almost had a stroke upon waking this morning to the realization that it was still not Friday. On the bright side, she also woke with a radiant stream of words at the tip of her tongue, all of which, if strung together properly, formed quite the poetic verse. And the poetry stayed with her throughout the day, right on the bridge of her nose. In fact, the first email she opened read, “Good morning, I am out of pens,” and it was from a complete stranger. Monique found this oddly poetic and stored it for later. Now.

“I need a manicure,” she says aloud. Anything to keep her from staying on topic. The topic of which is, well, your guess is as good as mine. And then she saved this blog post and attended to her poetry, once again, shirking the novel in search of a less task-oriented task.

Walk away from this post knowing that this is the first line that popped into her head this morning: Never, ever, ever, ever give up doesn’t apply to every, every, everything.

Ascension is her priority, but distractions persist like a dry itch, and each night she must reaffirm her mission, her quest–to write a novel. To be something great. This entire blog is dedicated to one directionless twenty-something, trying to be something great. Here’s how all of this began.

It all started on a cool, smoky night in Vegas at some posh club.

Monique was sitting down on the sidelines because her feet were experiencing a pain threshold only Jesus himself could identify with. Like many women aged all-of-them, she felt it was her civic duty to sacrifice agony for elegance, and so it came to pass that she was seated all alone, with only a half watered down cranberry-vodka as her consort. And so she sat, and every once in a while, her toes nodded in agreement.

A lady in white approached. “I absolutely love your hair!” (See hair —–>)

“Thanks!” Monique replied. “I’m cutting it tomorrow!” The exclamations are used for effect. It’s to give the reader the feeling of being at a club where the music’s so loud, you can’t even feel.

The lady in white did not make a face. Her carefully tweezed eyebrows raised with delight instead. She smiled and said, “It’s going to look gorgeous!”

This lady is definitely drunk. But Monique keeps going on about the hair, because she’s all alone with her toes and there’s no one to talk to. She expounds upon topics such as: the length of time it took to grow such a stream of brunette, as well as her fundamental reasons for doing away with it (see left).

It was at this pivotal moment when she realized that the lady in white had heard nothing of her drawn out hair spiel. The lady in white stood there (admirably), nodding, pretending to listen to this poor, afflicted damsel who at this point was going on at a terrific speed about this split end or that when suddenly, the lady in white leaned down slowly, put her lips to Monique’s ears and said softly, “You’re gonna be great.”

There was something in the way this lady said this one single line. It was as though the music stopped, and all the people disappeared. The entire universe took a breather so this stranger could whisper this single thing into Monique’s ear…

And it was the way she made me feel. Great.

It was at that moment, and many moments before that moment I assure you, that Monique decided she was destined to do something with her life. Not just any something, but something great.

And so, while she’s not sure yet where this path to greatness ends, you’d better believe she’s traveling barefoot, with this blog as her sole companion.

Why do you blog in third person?