For weeks I have read. Read and read and read. Pablo Neruda took twelve hours from me today. He is pretty well known in most circles, Nobel Peace Prize winner, life-long communist, suspected conspirator in Leon Trotsky's assassination attempt, a very well-rounded person. I would read a verse. Roll it over my tongue, picture the audience, screw up my eyes, fake intent, and then move my cursor over to the Google toolbar and type in "Margaret Atwood." Oh Margaret, how I relate so easily to you! A woman in charge.

Neruda's history of political radicalism, fallacious love affairs, and dangerous crusades would slap me in the face with their strange red tentacles just as I began to trust his prose. I found that going back to Atwood would reaffirm my distrust of men. Neruda would always start me off nice and easy, like a professional baseball player showing an 8-year-old how to play catch. "Fleas interest me so much," Neruda wrote in 1945, during the last moments of World War II. Little does the child know that Neruda is not interested in fleas at all. In fact, I'm sure he is quite opposed to fleas. "Passive aggressive" is an interesting term for it, coincidently coined by the United States military during that very same war when psychiatrists noted the behavior of soldiers who displayed passive resistance and reluctant compliance to orders.

Before I sent Neruda back to the shelf, I tried to get to know a few of his friends so as not to feel judgmental. I had two cups of coffee with Federico Garcia Lorca. He was a nervous but handsome man. Took his coffee black and tended to keep one eye on the doorway. He told me of his good friend,Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, who was gored by a bull. Thus began a reluctant comradery, a lifetime of free therapy, and a strange encounter with a surrealist revolutionary.

The Favourite Poet, 1888

by Sir Alma-Tedema

I like Lorca better than Neruda, and Atwood better than all of them. I would invite them all to my party, but would expect that they would leave by 11. Margaret would have left of her own accord by 10. Her poem Boredom has always been a winner for me. Have you ever felt like you have left so much unsaid that you want to violently shake your lover..or former? I find myself doing the opposite and then vowing never to sit in silence again. I can remember moments when I was young and of course stupid, staring forward like an un-hatched queen bee stuck in royal jelly, while old boyfriends would drone on about their infallible skills on the bass guitar, or worse yet, would chastise me for what they viewed as imperfection or weakness. As Atwood put it, "it was looking, looking hard and up close at the small details. Myopia." Burning holes with my eyes through the thin air between us, through my shoes, through blank walls, the toneless scream resonated in my own head but was expressed primarily in resentment or endless silence. The act of concentrating strictly on the present, on the details closest to each second and losing a grasp on a situation as a whole is what I get out of Boredom. And this is by no means a personal attack. In fact, it speaks more of my own fears and weaknesses than of your chauvanistic tendencies. :) Promise. And this is not to you (though you think it is for good reason...I'm a very complicated woman), it's to the one before you..and maybe the one before that. I keep a lot pent up, you can't blame me.

A wolf in sheep's clothing

On any given afternoon, I have to make the trek from downtown Lowell to my house, which is just north of the Tyngsboro bridge. It is in this time-frame that I question which brain trust is handling my hard-earned tax dollars. To simply pass by the Franco American School and make a turn on the green arrow would send jolts of serotonin directly to my brain at this point. "Why?" you ask. It would seem like the obvious course of events: following the signals and moving with the understood flow of traffic. Alas, there is an ant in the Jell-O, an unwanted visitor at our motorized picnic. Traffic cops.

Waving flags and halting cars, the Big Blue succeed in interrupting what was once a working system. To give you an idea of the problems that occur when you add these overpaid and over-inflated targets into the mix, I will lay down the course of events as they unfolded last Tuesday on a typical journey home from school.

Intersection of Pawtucket St. and School St: I sit in a line of traffic coming from the downtown area. Three other lines of traffic come to a head making a snow-flake of aggravation. I finally make my way to the front; the bridge is just feet away. A police officer stands in the center of this circus. The group to my left gets the wave. Ten cars trudge through. The group in front of me is then signaled to make their way across. To my right, another wave. Okay, so it's my turn. I've waited patiently, just like the rest. I look hopefully at the cop and he waves along the first line of cars. Yes, the one he already let pass, our friends to the left. I blink and look again. This is not an oversight on his part, he did not simply forget that he had already let this line of cars pass through. No. Two cars from the front of this line-cutting crew is his buddy in a unmarked police car. I have yet to move an inch. They wave to each other and grin as I am now late for work .

These officers are biting the hand that feeds them. The salary of a police officer in Lowell is between 35,600 and $59,880, all of this money coming from Massachusetts taxes. They may not realize this initially, I am losing 15 minutes of work, 15 taxed minutes of work, which means that they are losing money. Perhaps this is karma, and we are but a caravan of sacrificial lambs. Or better still, sheep, lining up and dumbly waiting for the herders to usher us through traffic. Looks like it's my turn to go, or perhaps theirs.