What Is This Quintessence of Cotton?

Do you ever get that feeling while in the middle of a massively intense and long essay-based test that you are SO in the zone and everything you're writing is brilliant? Most people do. But the extra-special Mary aftertaste is the paralyzing rush of paranoia that maybe you've just been at this so long and had so many Diet Dr. Peppers while working on it that at this point you're writing jibberish but you're too out of it to know it.

So yeah, long story short I rocked my take-home Shakespeare test. I think.

But all I could think about while doing the test was how much I wanted to blog about Al Pacino. I know, I'm insanely lame. But I felt super strongly about it! So to make myself finish the test and not blog about how much I loved Scent of a Woman I went down the street to Denny's at one in the morning and stayed there until almost five with my Shakespeare materials and was the weird girl in the corner and loving it. So now I can do what I please.

Except now I don't want to talk about Al Pacino. Although he is basically a god. Hoo-rah. Instead I want to talk about my hoodie.

This hoodie is the essence of all hoodies. It does what every hoodie aspires to do: protect and serve. I was my guardian angel and safety blanket on my way home from Afognak Island. It deserves a blog devoted to it.

I was stuck in Kodiak for a full day before my plane left at 7 pm, and I had nothing to do but wander the streets for five hours before it would even be worth it to arrive at the one-room airport. Since I was too young to even chill in the bars I was stuck on the one little tourist strip looking at all the pieces of driftwood. And it was there that I picked up my little unwanted friend. We'll call him Doped-Up Fisherman Boy.

He was a 23-year-old hard core drug user right out of rehab ("It's all good now cause I just smoke weed now") who was working the fishing boats to try and stay out of trouble for the summer. And apparently it had been a slow couple of weeks cause he had washed ashore here in Kodiak and didn't have much to do except follow me around and try to convince me to come and check out his vessel. Pretty sure there was some tricky double talk going on there.

The leering was starting to get majorly out of control, as was the accidental brush-past moves, but I really had nowhere to go or even anyone to look imploringly at since it was drizzling and I was the only shopper in most of the stores. I had already had a terrible couple of weeks and I felt like if he looked down my shirt one more time I was going to scream.

And that's when I saw my hoodie. Size XXL made for mountain men out to kill the bear and eat heap big fish, it was soft and hung down to my knees and stretched out so far on either side that the slightest hint of a curve was completely obliterated. Plus it had a nice deep hood that I could pull up so that there was no hair and hardly any face to prove I was female. It was sixty bucks, way more than I even spend on jeans, but I bought it in an instant. Doped-Up Fisherman Boy did not approve, especially when I said I didn't need a bag and just pulled it over my head.

The hoodie brought me comfort, and I think it had enough wiliness inherently in the fabric to find a pay phone and call a taxi while DUFB was getting crazy fascinated by something shiny. Yeah I was at the airport four hours early, but the hoodie made the seats comfortable enough to sleep on. Since then the hoodie has been my constant sleeping/vegging/snuggling companion, and I hope one day to submit it for display at an office for a good cause, like the Castration of All Leering Fisherman Institution.

PS I know that I'm not supposed to post during the day but since I was only allotted a two hour nap while working on the test it still feels like four a.m. so please let this slide. Al Pacino is the man.