cold face, carved in stone, amongst friends but all alone. why do you hide?

it's amazing to me that a day can start off in a certain way and end up metaphorically GALAXIES away. yesterday, i was considering magnets...yes, the pieces of iron or other alloys that contain atoms that are ordered to attract like components (you're welcome, michael.) THOSE magnets. in particular, i was thinking about the nature of attraction. take two magnets, one in each hand, and hold them gently between the thumb and the forefinger. notice the pull...that pull when they get close to each other. that pull is what makes them so very remarkable. they have something innate...something intrinsic that pulls them together (holy personification, batman! [holy allusory interjection, english teacher!]). perhaps this is why people like to use the expressions "magnetic personality" and "animal magnetism"--because there is something unexplainable tuggingtuggingtugging from the core. here is where the analogy (hopefully) falls apart, however. if you take those two magnets and move them e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ever so slightly past the point of "attraction", the pull disappears. it's like, if the two parts are not close enough, the attraction doesn't register. this is the way i ALWAYS feel when i leave. every nerve is mousetrap-tense, dreading the longing to return. sigh. a swift turn of the head from rearview mirror to windshield and the feeling goes away little by little. wishing only hurts if you let it. frankly, wishing can kiss my ass.
so...
seven hours of caged, complaining cat (poor moo), halitosis and neck crick-inducing airplane sleep, and a tree-blurring car ride home, and i was SO READY for a shower (the shower in my mother's house feels like a cross between a clogged watering can and a group of evil children spitting on you in unison. hardly satisfying.) imagine my surprise/horror/terror/anguish when, upon hearing the screee-eee-eee of the rusty faucet the line leading the water from drain to shower head EXPLODES, sending the scalding water
directly
into
my
face.
i screeched and made that pblblbththttllppbpbblltthth!!! aack! aack! noise and hand-flapping gestures (because, you know, you can slap water into submission) one makes when confronted a faceful. tres graceful. seriously, you would have thought i was on an episode of "i love lucy". it was too funny to make me terribly angry, though my laughing fit almost drowned me again (IDIOT!)
sigh.
and that, my friends, is how one can go from being in a charles baudelaire poem to being in a charlie chaplin skit in two seconds.

today's word of the day is...clodpate