thatsthegreatpuzzle

This is almost similar to people leaving their own secrets in the Post Secret books. Except I don’t feel that other people need to know my secrets. While I’m sure that it may be special to them, I get more inspiration from my favorite quotes or poems. Some of them are famous quotes, while others are more obscure. Some are just a single line, while others are full poems. I try to make the poem or quote marginally related to the book. But in general, I think the feel of getting a handwritten note from some stranger is special enough. Just knowing that someone loved this string of words enough to write it on a note card and tuck it away from someone one else to discover. I mean, the quotes are famous for a reason. The thoughts they entail are inspiring. It is a very small way to better the world, but I think it does it—one book and one person at a time.

I started school early, so I celebrated my 18th birthday while I was in college. My friends planned a surprise for me, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was. I had tried to think of the various places they could take me, but they weren’t the type of kids to go to a strip club, so I dismissed that thought immediately. I thought they were going to take me out to a night club or a hookah bar. We took a taxi out to a seedy part of town and when I got out I immediately saw where I was. After laughing about it, we all went in. I’m sure the patrons were a little confused by the sudden crowd of straight laced college kids. I should also explain at this point that I am female and straight. This was no chip n dales. The first girl came out and she was really nice to us. She chatted with us about why were there and when she found out it was my 18th birthday, she offered to give me a lap dance. She stuck dollar bills in my shirt and pants and retrieved them with her teeth. She also let us take pictures, which look hilarious. She’s on the ground, smiling at the camera while I’m sitting a chair cringing away from her and laughing. After she left we kept to ourselves and waited for our cab to arrive. After a while another girl came up to us and asked if we had any more money. We told her no, we had given all of our money to the first girl, but we had paid the cover. She immediately turned to the bouncer and said, “They don’t have any more money. Kick them out.” The bouncer shrugged and said that he had to when we protested. We hadn’t even been watching her at all. My birthday happens to be in the dead of winter, so it was FREEZING outside. We all pile out into the cold to wait. And we wait. And we wait some more. The cab company keeps on telling us that someone is one their way. Finally, after two hours of waiting, they tell us that since we were so far out, no one picked up our signal. They could send somebody else right now, but we would have to wait another hour. At this point, the strip club closed and all the seedy men inside started to come out. Our group was composed of five girls and three guys. We decided to go across the street to wait, at the very least. We ended up huddling under a street lamp outside of a storage warehouse. I called on of my friends and asked if he could pick me up outside of a strip club at three in the morning. He finally arrived and all of us sprinted towards the car, glad to be close to warmth and safety. We then piled 9 people into a toyota prius—one in the drivers seat, two in the passenger seat, five in the backseat, and me, in the trunk. As we were driving home I thought, “I’ve just gone to a strip club, gotten a lap dance, gotten kicked out of a strip club, waited for three hours in the frigid cold, and now I am in a trunk. This is certainly a memorable 18th birthday.”