Summaries

Synopsis

Richard (John Hawkes) is a shoe salesman and recently separated father of two. After being thrown out by his wife Pam (JoNell Kennedy), he gets an apartment of his own to share with his children, Peter (Miles Thompson) and Robby (Brandon Ratcliff). Pam was brutal during separation and keeps everything that came from her side of the family. Richard is in a daze during the whole process, and wants to talk, but Pam shuts him down. In frustration, Richard burns his left hand by pouring lighter fluid on it.

Richard meets Christine (Miranda July), a senior-cab driver and amateur video artist, when she takes her client Michael (Hector Elias) to shop for shoes, and the two develop a fledgling romantic relationship. Richard notices that Christine has low ankles which are scraped and sells her a new pair of shoes.

Christine is working on a video project that she hopes to send to the contemporary art museum for display. The snobbish woman Nancy Harrington (Tracy Wright) at the art museum can't tell the difference between art and trash. This point is made when an artist throws a burger wrapper in his display & the women think that it's a piece of art.Nancy refuses to accept the tape even though Christine is right there trying to hand it over and asks her to mail it in instead.

Christine visits Richard at the store and watches him selling shoes to other customers. She later walks with Richard when he leaves the store at the end of the day to his car. They start talking and suddenly start planning their future 6 months together. But then Christine gets into Richard's car, and this freaks him out as he doesn't know her, and she doesn't know him. Richard asks her to get out of the car and drives off.

Robby, six years old, and his 14 year old brother, Peter, have a joint online chat which he later depicts in another chat session as "))<>((", an emoticon that means "pooping back and forth". This is a real thing where the 2 participants exchange the same feces through their anus, back and forth, forever.This piques the interest of the woman at the other end and she suggests a real-life meeting. When Robby and the woman meet at a park, she realizes he's a child and kisses him and walks away.A neighborhood girl Silvie befriends Robby. Silvie lives with her parents (Colette Kilroy and James Kayten).

Two of Richard's neighbors, 15-year-olds Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend), develop a playful relationship with a much older neighbor Andrew (Brad William Henke). Andrew approaches the 2 girls and strikes a conversation about how he believes they are sisters who are also girlfriends. Although Andrew stops short of talking dirty to them as he does not want to be a pervert or a pedophile. The girls can feel that Andrew is masturbating to them while looking at them through his apartment window and proceed to kiss each other just to excite him.Andrew doesn't say much, but he keeps leaving signs on his window about what he would do to each of them. On one of the notes, he says that he would like "The tall one" (referring to Rebecca) to give him a blow job. This infuriates Heather as she thinks she is much better at giving blow-jobs.

As a result of this relationship, Heather and Rebecca ask 14-year-old Peter, Robby's older brother, if they can practice oral sex on him, so that he can tell them which of the two does it better; so they do. He says both were exactly the same. The daughter of a neighbor Silvie (Carlie Westerman) peeks in the window and sees what happens at the time, and quickly leaves.

The women at the art museum reject Christine's work as it is not from a colored person & because they had already featured a local person earlier in the year.Heather & Rebecca later come to Andrew's house intending to have sex with him, as practice, which shocks him, and he pretends not to be home.

Meanwhile, Christine's work is rejected by a contemporary art museum, but then later accepted by the curator, who turns out to be the woman who was instant messaging with the brothers.

The plots come together in the end, with Peter developing a friendship with Silvie, having been introduced to the hope chest that she has (the hope chest contains a lot of kitchen stuff which the girl wants to be considered as her dowry when she gets married).Christine and Richard displaying a show of mutual acceptance of their attraction to each other, and, as a final plot device, Robby finding that the noise he'd been awoken to every morning very early was that of an early rising businessman tapping a quarter on a street sign pole. When asked why he's doing it, he stops and turns around, saying "just passing the time", and gives Robby the quarter.When his bus drives away and Robby tries it out himself, the sun heightens with each tap, time literally passing as he does it.