flood
Originally uploaded by Daily Assumption.

This being my first job in an office you start to notice little things that don't make sense. Take pens for instance. Everyday there are more and more pens in this building and none of them are good. The Bic, the nameless brand, the advertizment pen for Viagra, the pilot roller ball ,the EF highlighter 4009, Papermate Write Bros. All these pens feel like the pens at a bank, or the stick pens that you get with your check at Ruby Tuesdays. But today I found the mother load! Someone mentioned the art department supply room to me before, but I thought it was off limits. Everything you could ever want to use to draw with is in that room. In fact I saw a just slightly used set of Prismacolors yesterday. I wish I had needed them for something. But office supplies are supposed to end up going home with you at some point. The post-it notes that help you plan a trip, the paper clips for the articles your family emailed to you, the blank CD-R's for the I-tunes play list. If you didn't steal these then the supply boy wouldn't have a job.

So far I have only taken 3 CD's 2 pens and an office max yellow ledger with me. I was eyeing those envelopes earlier, but decided that it would be such a silly thing to take.

I remember going with Dad to westvaco so he could photocopy things. The rotten egg overly sweet smell of a paper mill hitting us as we drove up. Always yellow-gray skys at night because of all of the factory lights. Inside I envied the safety mat with a humerous drawing of a man falling down stairs that read "caution deverves a raise!" And in a metal cabinet on the second floor was where I first pilfered rubber bands. The two things that were of the most interest to me were small rubber bands and butterfly clips. Such a beutifull object that worked like a grown-ups transformer. While he photocopied, I weighted myself, looked at the syrofoam leftovers in the fridge, rubbed my feet against the rubber safety mat, and thought long and hard about the "eyewash station." After he finished stapling his lessons together, he let me put my face on the copy machine with the strict instructions to close my eyes. But you could still feel the light as it passed by. It wasn't hot, but some of the light passed through your eyelids. On the bottom edge of the paper he would write the date, and my age.