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in her small hatchback, with the stereo playing at a reasonable level, she is equally stricken with feelings of apprehension, nervousness and excitement. the sun filters through the car's windows as cigarette smoke fights to drive it away--whisper-thin strands straining to form clouds. she is smoking too much, too fast. but she can't relax. in her head: she sees herself taking long slow drags, then settling back into her seat--eyes closed as the smoke washes over her in spectral waves.

she's early. she knew she'd be early--that it would be a possibility, a very likely one at that--when she left her apartment an hour before the interview. it's a twenty minute drive downtown. twenty minutes: even on a bad day. when traffic stops moving and the busy city streets become five minute parking lots--each vehicle creeping up inch by inch in synchronicity--a robotic vehicular dance soundtracked to the day-to-day reality of motor vehicle congestion.

her father's voice won't stop repeating itself in her head. the image she associates with this voice: his white fibrous moustache, the smokey pall of a saturday or sunday when she was still a child, the murkiness of this mental photograph. "always show up early. no matter the occasion." his advice always seemed trite. still seemed trite. but it was never wrong. at times when she ignored this voice, times when she could hear her father's voice in her head, imparting situation-specific cliches but still chose to disregard them--those were the times she really kicked herself. when her father's face seemed to take on a new sort of told-you-so prudishness in her mind--she felt like a tragic figure in a moral fable, her dad: the all-knowing narrator smugly recapitulating the story's simple lesson.