Ten Things I Take For Granted

Now that I'm home

back in the city where the air smells different

and the pizza place and about 7 different Chinese 

take out joints are within a one block radius

Wah Lung, Golden Forest, Six Happy Kitchen etc

if I owned a Chinese take out place I would name it

Favorite Panda

that sounds like a perfect name

and I would personally sit in the back steaming dumplings

and making homemade duck sauce

and my priority would be

making the fortunes for the cookies

I would probably say mean things like

"Today you will experience some sort of spill"

"Learn Spanish! bacalao=very salty codfish"

etc

Anyhow, here is my list

1. Clean toilets, and not waking up for a 9 am religion class and sitting in someone else's pee that is sprinkled all over the toilet seat

2. My mother watching Spanish soap operas on Telemundo and yelling at the TV at 11 at night [Learn Spanish! novella=soap opera]

3. Rice & Beans, real island style, not the type they have at the Vegan Station in college

4. The scowls and fast cell phone talk of everyone in Grand Central

5. Dogs that don't exactly know how to play fetch

6. Orange juice, in a carton, and not a dispenser-it feels so much more "fresh from the grove"

7. Walking around barefoot and free, showering with no shower shoes and no hair balls that look like centipedes [that really freaks me out]

8. The view out my window, a bridge and lights and cars and civilization....not an all girl's dorm and a sad snowy quad with the occasional penis snow structure

9. Not having to wait in a large stinking mass of kids to cram into a shuttle to a mall with tiny sized stores, I can leave my house and go shopping immediately 

9 1/2. 99 cent decadent loves of chocolate cake [that look like the cake the fat kid was forced to eat in Matilda]

10. My couch [the new love of my life]

I literally feel like a plump dreaming puppy

on this love seat right now

not a care in the world

just wrap me up in a fleece blanket

peachy as a pup.