ahhh resolution. for most of today, i was a sun-frazzled victim of august. my site refused to show up; my brother adam and my father had a loud over-dramatized argument about israel -- a friend of adam's is determined to study abroad there. my father declared that commendable while adam decried it as foolish self-aggrandizement. as they were getting nowhere except into ad hominem attacks, i ushered adam out the door. we had to get our passports renewed. what should have been simple took forever: in the midst of correcting the first flawed set of prints, the person helping us left the store. "where'd he go?" we asked the lady behind the counter after he didn't return. "oh, he went to buy a magazine," she said. another employee eventually finished up the job. we went from there to the post office to fill out forms, and then, relieved, walked back to the corner of wisconsin avenue where we'd parked. for a moment or two, we just watched the traffic whoosh by.
"isn't this where we parked?" said adam. "uh-huh," i said. ... "shit. shit shit shit."
we hiked down to the police station, got the address of the place where our car had been towed, hiked there, paid the $75 fine and pocketed the additional $35 ticket. it would have been funny, at least in a life's-a-bitch kind of way, except that it was over 100 degrees outside and adam and i, by the time we were done w/ the whole mess, were like melted canvases. he dropped me off back in the heart of bethesda where ilana, laboring as always in the seed, gave me water and a fan and restored my equilibrium. my writing class assignment was to write a rant and an opinion on the same subject; i hadn't done either, so after i cooled off, i delved into the topic of beauty. creating the rant was so much fun that i never got to the opinion. it didn't matter ultimately: we didn't even discuss them in class. once i polish it a little, i'll post it here.