Supererogatory

Clock in 2 or 3 extra hours a night. Send your last email at half past eleven. Come in on Saturday. Eat lunch at your desk. Do everything you can to be the best, to get ahead, to get noticed.

It's no longer extra. It's essential.

Fallible

Believe in me, that I won't let you go.

Faith is a fallacy.

Melanie had given up long ago on the idea of true love.

The only thing that is certain, is death.

Temerarious

He always wanted to be a superhero. As a boy, he would tie our bedsheets around his neck and run around the house. He begged me to get my head stuck in the banister or to climb up a tree. "I'll save you!" he promised. It wasn't that I didn't believe him; I've just never been the damsel in distress.

Last week my brother pushed me out of the way of speeding car. Last week he finally got to be a superhero, and now I am a damsel in great, great distress.

Aplomb

"I wish I had what you had," she said.

"What, a zit?" Marcia leaned in closer to the mirror to examine the offending bump.

"No," Lily said, rolling her eyes. "Confidence. Pride. Sex appeal."

Marcia stopped prodding the pimple and turned to her friend. "You think I'm sexy?"

"Don't you?"

"Well... yeah."

"My point exactly. If you asked me that, I could never say 'yeah' or 'yes' or even 'maybe,' not in a million years."

"I think that's your problem," Marcia said. She faced the mirror again.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that you're trying to get the chicken before the egg." She frowned and gave up. Her bag of makeup would have to do the trick. "Just relax and think you're sexy. Say yes even if you don't mean it. Soon enough, you will."

Lily leaned back against the wall. "Hmm" was all she managed to say.

Lissom

She crept along the rooftop, invisible against the dark night. Had anyone been looking, they might have caught the flash of her teeth as she smirked, or the shine of her hair in the starlight. Nothing more.

Irrupt

Caleb burst into Michelle's dorm room, chest heaving, laughter bubbling through his full, wide mouth. He slammed the door behind him and locked it.

Sandra glared at him.

Michelle tried to smile at Sandra and quickly jumped off her bunk to meet Caleb. "Hey," she whispered. "Now is not a good time."

"Dude, Jason's gonna towel-whip me! I'm not leaving this room."

"Um..." She glanced over at her roommate, who was doing a poor job of pretending to not be able to do her work. "Okay, you can stay, but only if you're quiet."

"Who, me?" Caleb grinned. "Silence is my middle name."

"No, Andrew is your middle name. Now shut up already. Use my computer or something."

He kissed her on the cheek. "You love me."

She shot him a withering look, but inside her heart hiccuped. Did he know? Sandra's pointed stare told Michelle that she knew. Michelle swallowed.

Caleb was already logged into his email, still grinning from ear to ear. Michelle picked up her pen and her psychology textbook, ready to resume her notes. Instead, she started to sketch the profile of Caleb's face, which was all she could see for now. Making sure to shield her paper from anyone else's sight, she had to admit, she was more than happy her view.

Dissolute and nettlesome

A desert isle. Adrift at sea. These are the places I have left my secret self, the one who indulges, who excites, who saturates. But this is not where I meant to keep her. She is not to be a prisoner, not to be abandoned. I have rented this dinghy, and I will sail to her. Slowly but surely, I will arrive on her shore, and I will rescue her. Then I will be whole again. Then I will be free of this distress.

Relegate

Priorities. Where do Z, X and Y fall in my life? Have I tripped over them and stumbled? I sometimes do the wrong things first, trying to avoid difficulties. But in the end I create stress, and disappointment in myself. I have to end this. I have to get things straight. X, Y, Z, baby. X, Y, Z.

Abominate

Lately you wake up and hate yourself. You think, What am I doing? Or rather, What aren't I doing? Why aren't I doing it? Is it that I can't? I want to. But I'm not. Where's the hang-up? How do I fix it? Why do I have only questions and no answers?

This is the cry of a generation.

Factitious

When boys look at me, they think of me a in a certain light. They think I dress this way because they want me to. They think I do my hair and makeup like this because it's fashionable. They assign values (not the numerical kind) to the shade of my lipstick, the number of buttons on my blouse, the height of my heels. And they like it.

The question is, do I?

Sine qua non

I think what scares me is that every day it becomes more and more obvious what I can and cannot live without. And you might think that knowledge would be helpful, liberating even. And it is. But it isn't at the same time. Because knowing what's not essential, that's great. You weed those things out of your life, and voila!, a garden. You need not worry about them, spend time or effort on them, or let them affect you in any way. But knowing what's essential, that's like telling someone when they're going to die, and how. You begin to speculate who's going to leave you, what's going to change or go wrong, all the ways you could lose yourself. You become this big lump of paranoia, curled up on your couch wrapped in a giant blanket watching shows you recorded on your DVR so you can escape reality for just a little while.

At least, that's what's happening to me. My psychologist says it's not normal, but the look she gets in her eyes when I tell her what I'm feeling and how I'm reacting, that look tells me it is.

Pestiferous

In this world, no one gives you what you desire. You must seek it, earn it, and in some cases, take it. Whether it is food, money, freedom, or anything else.

The only thing you cannot take is love.

Today a nation took its independence. They broke free, and yet their hope must be mixed with fear, anger, doubt, because the world will not give it the freedom it desires. Another country wants to possess it. Other countries fear the consequences of supporting it. Everyone has their own agenda, their own motivations, and they do not care about the nation that wants its freedom.

Greed, politics. These are the poisons our world feeds upon nowadays. We steal other people's food, we work ourselves to death for a dollar, we imprison our enemies and sometimes our friends. We cannot see past the clouds to the blue sky above. We think it is a dark day. We forget that the sun is always shining. We are sick, and we spread our sickness to the rest of the world.

Love is the only cure.

Virago

My mother had a reputation. It wasn't the kind you usually think of: slut, timid housewife, over-zealous soccer mom, boring librarian. No, unfortunately, it was nothing that simple to understand, or easy to deal with.

My mother was known as a virago. I didn't know what that meant until I could read a dictionary, and figure out how to spell the word, and care enough to look it up.

I guess it's not the end of the world, but at least if your mom were a slut, timid housewife, over-zealous soccer mom, or boring librarian, people wouldn't avoid her in a supermarket or un-invite you from their kids' birthday parties. They wouldn't say they pitied you and your father. Your teachers wouldn't cancel every parent-teacher conference, refuse to let your mother be a field trip chaperone, or use some old, antiquated term to describe her.

I asked her once why she is so outspoken, so angry, so difficult. She looked at me as if she had no idea what I were talking about. In fact, I think she genuinely didn't.

What do you do with that?

Ennui

They say boredom is usually the cause of death for relationships. I think it's really the death of an individual's soul. And how can one soul engage with another if it is dead?

That's a really morbid way of putting it, she said.

But do you agree?

... Maybe. I don't know. I don't think about that kind of shit.

What do you think about, then?

She bat her eyelashes. Brad Pitt and chocolate cake and the cute skirt I saw in the H&M window the other day.

I hate you.

She grinned. But at least we're not bored.

Amative

"We've got it all wrong," he said.

"What are you talking about?" she asked.

"Valentine's Day."

"Oh. Of course." She rolled her eyes.

"No, really, listen to me! We should be fighting on Valentine's Day."

"I think we're about to," she said, shaking her head at his insistence. "Why are you so crazy?"

"Am I crazy? Or is everyone else?" He looked at her in earnest. "Couples fight 364 days a year, but then they want this one day to be happy, to be harmonious, to be romantic, to be perfect. That's so backwards! We should all be fighting on this one day, and happy, harmonious, and romantic on the other 364."

She paused. "You know, most guys just want sex."

He paused. "Yeah, well."

Perdurable

I like cookie bunnies.

They are long-lasting.

And durable.

And tasty.

Bonzai!

(Note: this entry was guest-written.)

Copacetic

Take a sip of this fine wine, to forget your day, forget your sorrows. Bubbly flavor, better times. This is what you are drinking.

The man next to you, he's drinking too. Everyone wants to forget.

What are we doing to each other that no one wants to remember? Why can't we change?

Ersatz

For you, this way thinking, so easy. One doll not good, you take another. No matter who belongs to. No matter where come from. You not happy, you need to make self happy. Whole world is yours. This your thinking.

For me, not so easy. For me, one doll not good, I thinking, how sad. Poor doll. I want to make better. I keep doll, I try to fix, I try to love. I can fix whole world, I can love everything. My love can fix. This my thinking.

Who is right? No one know. Maybe no one right. Maybe everybody wrong. Or maybe everybody right. Only need working together. You give away bad doll, I take it. Whole world is yours. I fix whole world.

Raiment

The rain poured from the skies, drenching Shelley from head to toe. She squealed as her felt her toes squish in her heels, and again when she ran through a puddle and splashed herself. Her bright red trench coat was now a rich wine plastered to her body, the fat newspaper she held over her head useless.

When she finally made it to her apartment building, she shook herself like a dog, letting droplets fall onto the welcome mat in front of the doorman's station.

"Beautiful day we're having," he said in a deadpan.

Shelley shot him a glare and tossed her soggy newspaper onto his marble countertop. Then she walked to the elevator, heels clicking gratefully on the hard dry floor, and took it to the top floor. The penthouse.

Lubricious and extempore

She shrugged the robe off of her shoulders and watched his expression. It was satisfyingly shocked.

"C-c-can I ask what you're doing?" he stammered.

"Nope," she said, her voice sultry.

He'd never seen her like this -- imagined, yes, maybe, a hundred times yes, but witnessed with his own two eyes, never -- and now he didn't know what to do. It seemed so out of character. Like she was someone else. But he didn't think that she was.

Did he want her to be?

He certainly wanted this.

Aberrant

"How do you expect me to be spur of the moment when you're so busy planning every goddamn detail of your life?"

He blinked at her. "What are you talking about?"

"You say you want me to be more spontaneous, more sexual, more assertive. But if I do anything without telling you first, you get upset because you didn't know about it. Like I'm an inconvenience to you."

"I never said that."

"It's not always about what you say."

Ineffectual

It just doesn't work that way, she said. You can't tell me one thing, do another, and expect me to understand. I'm not a mind-reader, and I don't want to try to be.

That's not what I expect, he insisted.

But I bet you'd enjoy it.

He refrained from commenting.

She snorted, smiled ironically.

Just don't worry about it, he said. Worrying doesn't accomplish anything.

Easy for you to say, she muttered.

Magniloquent

The truth is, saying it loud isn't necessarily saying it true. The truth is, you already know everything I have to say. The truth is, it's what I'm not saying that you could never understand.

Perquisite

"Perks," he said. "It's all about the perks."

At 21, Candace had been wide-eyed at the prospect. First class flights, five star hotels, room service, limo service, the works. She would whisk through every line, dress like Audrey Hepburn, and rise through the ranks until soon she ran the department, if not the company. It wasn't just a dream come true: it was THE dream come true.

Or so she thought.

After a few months of sixteen-hour work days, meals that even a rabbit would starve on, and so much jetlag she would still be tired when she was sixty, Candace began to wonder exactly what perks her manager had been talking about.

Mien and subterfuge

The thing I can't stand about girls like her is how fake they are. The way they do their hair, their nails, their clothes -- everything reeks of falsehood. I just can't trust it. I can't trust them.

So when Sophie came up to me that day, I already knew. I knew I should turn around and walk the other way. Or run. Running probably would have been smart.

Instead I just stood there, curiosity getting the better of me. I wanted to know what she wanted, what she was going to say to me. I figured I would hear her out, then turn around and walk.

But she got me. With those fake nails, that fake smile, that fake nose. Hook, line, and sinker, I'm not proud to say. She got me, and I'm stuck with her, and it's easier just to stay.

Canorous and irascible

Scherezade had a thousand tales. Angela had only one voice. But whenever her father got angry, she used it. It was her only defense.

She would begin to hum. Softly at first, so he didn't really notice, so he wouldn't suspect. Then as he got calmer, she got louder. Soon she was proudly belting out whatever song had struck her fancy, whatever song she thought might save her that day.

Eventually he would fall asleep, slumped over in his great big ugly chair. But she kept singing, until her voice hurt. It was a smaller pain than the one she lived with every day. It was a smaller pain than living without her mother.

Neophyte and sylvan

Larini came in the cover of night, with the moon glimmering through her wings. The Wudmen did not hear her arrive, and so they did not stir from their sleep. By their minty scent, Larini knew which tree burrows they inhabited, and she kept a wide berth from those. She would wait to confront them in the morning, the only time Wudmen were known to be even somewhat reasonable.

At last she found an empty burrow where she could make her bunk. She drifted in and landed softly on the burrow floor. There were a few cobwebs in the corners, and she pulled them down to use as bedding. Then she lay down, wrapped her wings around herself, and closed her eyes. She knew the Wudmen would not easily welcome a newcomer into their fold, but for tonight, her only problem was the dream.