The last bit of advice my mother gave me before I left the continent was to not do anything stupid or get myself hurt.
In the past week and a half, I have basically told my mother to shove that advice up her ass.
List of things that have broken beneath the _Of Mice and Men_ hands of Lucas Jonathan Chance:
1) The pull out couch bed. I now sleep in the divot that my bed has created because on the slats in it has come loose. I find it comfortable so I don't really complain.
2) A chair. I sat in it and started telling a story (more than likely one about my childhood or a horrible story from my love life) when the chair caved under me.
3) My ass. I have fell on it, busted it, and creased and grazed so many times that it now looks like Marlon Brando's face after a bar brawl.
4) My pride. After the second or third fall and the payment of euros, I'm starting to see the money as a reminder of my terrible, terrible sense of balance. Luckily, my falls tend to happen at the climatic moment of my hubris ("I can beat everyone to that door," "I know so much about movies," "These steps aren't that slippery, I don't know what everyone is bitching about," etc) so I kind of deserve it.
5) The clay pot of some poor little old lady. I tried to solve this problem myself and threw my money at her as a form of imperialist penance, but she said everything was fine in very fast and very advanced Italian.
6) The metal chain outside the apartments. I didn't actually break that, but I'm sure that it was pretty rattle emotionally.
I don't want to break Italy bit by bit, like some conquering Visigoth or a Polyphemus throwing mountains at Odysseus. It's not intentional. I just...yeah...
This could work, Lucas, this catalog of things you've broken. The last entry is lovely. "I don't want to break Italy bit by bit." Thing is, though, you have to write yourself out of the rather shallow humor that this could easily become. That will be your challenge this term, I think. You can do more than just be humorous. Humor, when married to gravitas, can be startling. Humor, when it's its own end, is at best a fleeting laugh.
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