Flashlight

Here's another recycled photo from last year. This was my favorite piece of grafitti in Iowa City, and the bastards cleaned it up.

You and your cousin have been planning this weekend forever... Well, at least for a couple of weeks now. Your cousin lives in Muscatine and she is so much cooler than you. She swears more, she wears sluttier clothes, she says she knows a guy who's in the Latin Kings' gang, and her mom is rarely home, so she can do whatever she wants.

Your mom, who is always home and seems to know exactly what kind of shit you're going to get into before you even try, suggests you wait for a different weekend - one that won't include an ice storm. Your cousin doesn't want to wait. After all, you've already made all those plans. Your cousin's mom has agreed to drive her both there and back. You miraculously get your mom to relent, and your cousin arrives on Friday night.

You wake up to the storm on Saturday. The ice is already so thick, that you can't see out the windows. Your trip to the mall gets cancelled. Plan B is watching an America's Next Top Model marathon with your cousin, while switching between eating green grapes and white powdered sugar doughnuts.

When the electricity goes off, you are stunned. What will you and your cousin possibly do without it? Your mother lights about 100 candles and suggests you read, paint or make clothes. Your cousin doesn't like to do any of those things. At first, you both text your seperate friends on your seperate phones, but your friends all seem to have electricity, and therefore, better things to do.

Finally, you ask your cousin if she wants do make-overs, and that is something she's actually interested in. Your mother digs through a cupboard and finds stuff you can use to do manicures and pedicures too. At some point, the lights come back on, but neither you or your cousin can really think of anything you'd rather be doing. For the next few hours, you talk, and soak feet and hands, and exfoliate, and paint nails, and your cousin suddenly doesn't seem that much cooler than you. She even admits that being allowed to do whatever she wants, feels a little lonely.