• tab Tanya lay on her front lawn, watching specks of dust float through the sunshine. A pair of bulky black headphones shielded her ears and trailed downward to the iPod resting near her hip. It wasn't actually an iPod, but a cheaper unknown brand. She referred to it as an iPod because she hated the way the phrase "mp3 player" sounded. The other solution would have been to call it by its brand name, but Tanya could think of no benefit to that beyond a false sense of individuality. Somewhere along the way, she'd come to the realization that owning an actual iPod would have made her an anonymous consumer, while her obscure brand made her a super-cool "indi" kid. To the best of her knowledge, being an "indi" kid was simply a different style of conformity. So rather than spurn iPods because of their popularity or flaunt her obscure mp3 player, she went with what sounded the best to her - and that was to say "iPod" rather than "mp3 player."
    tab The band blaring through her headset broke into an extended guitar solo. Restlessly, she skipped to the next song and discovered that Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" had snuck onto the player. It stuck her as odd that on this sun soaked day anyone should choose to lie in the grass and listen to this somber piece of a broken heart. She plucked the iPod from its tiny nest of dandelions and set it to repeat the song. It ran seven times through while she listened intently to every note
    tab "Languid." The sweltering summer humidity spontaneously tossed the word into her mind, where she caught it and released it into the heat. Tanya slapped her iPod into pause to trace the word as it passed through the stagnant air. She said it again, slowly this time, her tongue caressing each individual letter before allowing them to flow away. "L a n g u i d."
    tab Tanya propped herself up on her elbows, turning her gaze toward the empty black street that caused the air to vibrate with reflected heat. She tugged at the white ribbed tank top working its loose way up over her bellybutton. Her jeans too had slid from their original location, resting just on the curve of her hips, but she let them stay where they chose. Her attention was now focused across the street, where the leaves on a young maple tree danced in a breeze that was nothing more than the light bending as it passed across the steaming asphalt. Despite the simple fact that she knew exactly what was happening, the leaves moving through the still air mystified her. She watched them move and change until her bare elbows began to ache from digging into the stony ground, when she relieved them of their burden by falling back to the grass and hitting play on the iPod.
    tab As her vision focused, Tanya frowned. Sometime while she'd been occupied with the leaves in the heat shimmer, a cloud had moved into the bold blue sky above her. It sat there, smug and fluffy, like a freshly groomed poodle that now expected her full admiration. She rolled over on her stomach and refused to look at it, choosing instead to pluck at the grass in front of her face. She pulled three of the longer blades and braided them together before flicking the completed strand away. After another moment of resistance, she glanced up to check if the cloud was still there. It was. Defeated, she rolled onto her back and traced its curves with her eyes in search of the Rorschach shapes hidden within.
    tab The cloud was utterly unsatisfying. She found something that resembled a slightly mutated rabbit and another puff that looked something like a turnip, but nothing else. Tanya blinked and kept her eyes closed in the hopes that maybe - maybe - the cloud would be more interesting in a few minutes. She waited until "Moonlight Sonata" had cycled through its mournful melody twice more before looking back to the cloud. Hopes were dashed. The cloud had dissipated, spread across the sky by some forceful breeze that could not deign to come down and move air closer to the earth.
    tab Tanya climbed back up into some semblance of an upright pose. Her head lolled back as she examined the scenery behind her upside-down. A thick bush blocked any particular view, but she took the opportunity to run her eyes along the hedge’s twining branches.
    tab "A productive afternoon in June," she murmured. Immediately, she followed with "languid" to get the taste of the cutesy rhyme out of her mouth. Still it lingered in her thoughts, a perfect description of what from an outside perspective might have seemed like pure laziness. As she returned to her supine sky watching position, it occurred to her that perhaps she should be doing something useful with her time, like reading or feeding stray cats or creating some masterpiece of art. To think that she had spent an entire day lying on her front lawn doing nothing - an atrocity. Something must be done.
    tab If anyone asked, she'd say she'd been meditating.
    tab Problem solved.