It’s quite possible that I will skip the bean burrito I had planned for dinner.
And I’ve thrown out the kale salad I had made for lunch.
I rifle through my purse. Do I have any Beano?
I am speaking at Metro State University tonight, to a creative writing class, and my biggest fear is not that I will get lost on the way there or that I will have nothing to say, but that I will develop gas roughly at the same time I say “Hello. My name is Pearl, and I’ve been writing the blog “Pearl, Why You Little” for the past five years”.
Frankly, I don’t need the pressure.
I e-mail my sister with my concerns.
“Have you considered plastic pants?” she writes. “The kind with the elastic around the leg holes?”
“So sweaty,” I write back.
“Well it is fall,” she says. “You can’t be too warm.”
“I’m going to write about this,” I say.
“And I will be inaccurately quoted, as usual,” she says. “Oh, well. Purple monkey elevator.”
I nod at my screen.
Maybe she has a point. Maybe plastic drawers isn’t a bad idea…
But no. Plastic pants lack the professorial dignity I’ve been working on for, oh, the last 45 minutes. Besides, the rustle of plastic under the fweep-fweep-fweep of a chubby-thighed woman in corduroy pants would be overwhelming, possibly detracting from the solemnity of a college lecture…
I have very important things to say, you know.
I check my watch. I leave in an hour.
I’m sure it will all be fine.