hiatus, part 3

Lauren wakes up. She’s really glad they never show her waking up on the show. Sometimes they show her right after she’s woken up, but never right when she wakes up. She’s really glad they don’t show that. That’s a private moment. There are some things that have to be private in life. Like the only people who should see you when you wake up are God and your boyfriend and your mom, that’s it. Because when you wake up, you’re not awake. Like that’s stupid, like, duh, you’re not awake, but you’re not awake, you’re not presenting yourself to the world the way you want to present yourself to the world because you’re not awake enough in your mind to think about the way you want to present yourself to the world and you’re not awake enough in your body to move the way you think you want to present yourself to the world. Also, you are probably not that well dressed. Some girls buy really nice pajamas but Lauren doesn’t really see the point of that. Like obviously if you are having a boy over but besides that who cares. There are limits to fashion, people are so uptight, people care way too much about what other people think of them and their appearance. Obviously you have to care some, it’s important to care some, it’s important to care a lot, even, very important, but it’s important to not care too much, because too much is too much.

Lauren’s really glad they never show her waking up on the show. A lot of people would say that the reason not to show a scene of her waking up is that it’s a boring scene, that’s there’s nothing interesting about seeing a person waking up, but Lauren thinks that’s wrong. A scene of someone waking up is the opposite of boring. When you’re waking up you’re more real than when you’re awake, at least more real in the way some people who say real mean real. Real is a complicated word. Lauren understands this. Complication is the spice of life, like nutmeg.

Lauren wakes up because of the sunlight through the window. Lauren bought her new house because of the sunlight. Well she really bought her new house because her dad said it was a good investment and it would something with interest and you never know with the economy, buyer’s market, but really really Lauren bought it because of the sunlight. She bought it because there are a lot of windows and the house is facing the right direction for the sun to come in (left?) and the sun comes through the windows and it’s nice. Lauren believes that everything is better with good lighting.

Lauren looks out the window. Through her sleepy eyes, LA looks hazy and blurry and warm. It doesn’t look real. She’s been here for years now but sometimes it still doesn’t look real. It looks like looking at the world through a car window when the car window gets all foggy and you can’t really see anything specific. Or like when people have glasses and they have to wipe off their glasses because they get foggy. Lauren remembers in study group in high school how ugly Kristin looked in her glasses and sometimes she would take them off to wipe them with a little yellow cloth. She had a bunch of different pairs of glasses in different colors and different styles but they didn’t help any, they didn’t change the fact that she was wearing glasses. Glasses are glasses. There are two kinds of people in the world: people who wear glasses and people who don’t wear glasses. Some people try to cheat, but they can’t, that’s not fair.

Lauren goes downstairs to make breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but breakfast is also the easiest meal to skip. This is a difficult and complex issue. Darfur is also a difficult and complex issue. When Lauren did the public service announcement about Darfur, she felt good. People in Darfur don’t have enough to eat but they also have a lot of other problems like rape. Lauren remembers when Jason had been drinking too much. He would look at her when he had been drinking too much and he would have this look in his eyes that was different. Lauren knows a lot about how to control the way her eyes look, but Jason didn’t look like he could control the way his eyes looked then. Because of her life experiences and personal beliefs, Lauren can identify with the problems of all the people in the world and she wants to, she wants to identify with everyone, she wants to listen to them and understand them and help them be stronger and more independent and not get raped and dress well and make healthy eating choices.

Lauren decides to have a container of low fat banana yogurt with two spoonfuls of organic granola. Discipline is important in eating. Counting calories is fun, and easy, too, ever since she got an application for her iPhone. Discipline is important in everything, not just eating. Once there were people called Stylites who stood on really really tall columns for a really really long time to get closer to God. Lauren wonders if she could stand on a tall column for a long time. It’s important to stand up for what you believe in, that’s a saying. Maybe if she was allowed to take an iPod. Probably if she was allowed to take an iPod. Leg press is her favorite thing to do at the gym and she has to stand for hours and hours when she works shows, so how hard could it really be? It’s just standing, right, it’s not like walking on coals or needles like on “Fear Factor” or something. Especially if she was allowed to take a video iPod or an iPhone.

(although how would she charge it? could they get a bunch of extension cords and run them up the length of the column, could they wrap them around like a may pole?)

Lauren looks out her front window. LA still looks hazy and blurry and warm, but it doesn’t make sense now, because she doesn’t have sleep in her eyes anymore. Is sleep really a physical, touchable, seeable thing, like do some people have a disease where they get too much sleep in their eyes and they have to go to the doctor to get the sleep taken out and the doctor takes it out and puts it in a little jar like tonsils? What does sleep look like?

Lauren opens the front door. LA looks hazy and blurry and warm, but wrong somehow, not real. Not real in a bad way, not not real in a good way. Unreal. It’s like there’s some problem with her eyes, except she knows she has perfect 20-20 vision – she never needed glasses, not even for reading. She steps out onto the lawn and then she sees it, everywhere, some kind of translucent sheet covering her entire house and stretched out over her yard. It’s like saran wrap on a piece of cake, except the piece of cake is her beautiful new house that cost 2 million dollars. 2.2 million dollars. The plastic extends out over the roof and over the tops of the palm trees she had put in and out to the sidewalk. There are poles at the edge of the yard that prop up the sheet at the sides and the corners. Lauren approaches the sheet. The grass is wet from the sprinklers and it soaks into her socks and makes her feet feel gross. The sheet is somehow sealed tight into the ground so that she can’t pull it up or crawl under it. She hits one of the poles and it makes the sound a metal pole makes when you hit it and also her hand hurts. She runs her hand over the plastic and it feels smooth and clean. It’s kind of like a cheap shower curtain in a motel, which obv. she has never been in a motel, gross, but like a shower curtain looks in a movie with a motel in it.

Lauren puts her face up against the sheet, but she can’t see any better, she just sees her neighborhood looking hazy and blurry and warm. It looks kind of like a Monet. Monet always painted paintings that looked hazy and blurry and warm. When Monet was old, he lost most of his vision but he kept painting and his paintings got even hazier and blurrier and warmer. He painted water lilies, Lauren saw them in Paris. She bought a coffee mug for her mom and at the hotel room that night, she made the water lilies her desktop background because they were so beautiful. Every time she looks at her desktop background, it reminds her of Paris and that’s why she made the water lilies her desktop background and that’s why she’s kept them as her desktop background since then, even though that’s a pretty long time to keep the same desktop background with all the new images that are being created every day. Lauren squints into the sheet, even though it makes her look ugly, like someone who wears glasses. It looks like there are more sheets on the houses on either side of her, and more poles, but she can’t say for sure.

Lauren doesn’t know what to do. She walks along the edges of the yard, running her hand along the sheet. When she was in high school, a teacher recognized that she was intelligent and smart and had lots of good qualities and nominated her to go to leadership camp, but Lauren didn’t go because Stephen’s parents were out of town that weekend and he was having a barbecue and he wrote her a note specifically inviting her. Like, he didn’t run into her by the cafeteria and say, “Hey, I’m having a party this weekend” and he didn’t send her a text or an IM, he wrote out an invitation on a piece of clean white paper and drew a red heart in magic marker and glued it shut. “I’m having a party this weekend and it won’t be a party without my Lauren,” he wrote to her. Lauren doesn’t know what to do. A girl in a movie would probably scream, but Lauren knows her scream is really unattractive and you never know when someone is waiting around in the bushes to put your unattractive scream on Youtube and Lauren does not need that kind of stress right now. Lauren goes back in the house without screaming and turns on the television. Her cable is out. Lauren doesn’t know what to do.