Falling In Love Again

What have you been doing this past week? Because this is what I have been up to:



Jealous yet? His name is Eliot (after T.S., the poet who created the poems that Cats is based on); he's about six weeks old; and he is the result of a convenient birthday present from a coworker who couldn't keep him anymore. I never expected my roommates to agree to him, but oh they did. Who could resist?







I panicked the day after I got him when I realized I'd just signed on for a 16-18 year commitment; but then he curled up on my pillow next to my face and I watched him drinking me in, and I thought, hey, sixteen years of this isn't a bad thing.

The downside? He wakes up several times a night wanting to play, so he entertains himself by chewing on my fingers. Ah, kittens.

<3

Snickering In The Background

Snickers bars. No, no, wait, hear me out. I'm going to rant for a little bit about the Snickers bar, and you will not stop me. Because, this candy bar? Is frankly waaay too much work. All the peanuts you have to chew through, I mean, COME ON. My point in eating a candy bar is NOT to waste my energy, OR my time. I want deliciousness, and I WANT IT NOW.

I just get bored with all the chewing, and so maybe I stop midway and frustratedly try to swallow, and I choke a little bit (a lot), and it's tedious. So so tedious. Which is why I will always choose Milky Way over Snickers. And what was that thing with the "high protein" Snickers bar, like they were trying to make a candy bar healthy, or something. Trust me, people: learn from the grave errors of Mr. Krispy Kreme and do not try to healthify something. Americans will be distrustful at best, and mass riots with hugely obese women lighting their undergarments on fire in protest and the such at worst. It's happened before. The calories and the fat of the candy bar cancel out any good adding extra nuts does to us, and the nuts cancel out the sweet sweet taste of melty caramel, because there's no more room for any deliciousness with all those fricking nuts packed in there.

It's stupid. I'm glad you've discontinued it. Now just take out the nuts altogether so I can blithely swallow my way into nougat-filled cardiac arrest, and we'll all be good.

One Year Older

Embrace the drama.

Those are the words I have chosen to represent this new dispensation - that examination that comes with a birthday (if you choose to recognize such a date). Embrace it. It's the only way you will learn to survive it.

Okay, so that may have just come from a discussion I'm having with Bree about Grey's Anatomy, but I thought it sounded all wise and worldly, the way a twenty-two-year-old should sound. And by wise and worldly, I mean dumb and herdish and faux-intellectual, which is exactly the sort of thing I despise, so I owned up.

Tonight is a midnight slushie run to the gas station to ring in my birthday. Then maybe laying out by the river and enjoying the weather, and late-night outline writing when I come back. I can only imagine what the professor will think when he tries to make sense of my tired thoughts.

I have two days off this week. TWO. I'm planning on enjoying them to their utmost, in a way that none of you slackers out their can really appreciate. And THAT is a great feeling.

Maybe If I Dyed My Hair Too

My roommate's mom came to visit over the weekend (she has purple hair; PURPLE!), and we all fell in love with her warmth and her motherliness and her...frickin' purple hair, really. But also, she brought us presents: these gorgeous little journals with such beautiful covers that whatever you write on those pages must be significant and transcendent and life-changing. You must channel Camus to write in these books, really.

Which leaves me with a problem: What do I write in my book? Do I collect quotes into it? Do I die in its pages? Do I enfold those deep, spiritual experiences I am lucky enough to have? Whatever I do, those pages will be filled. (Which probably means I will eventually put it on a shelf to take out every so often and stare at the cover, then replace on the shelf, overcome by the sense of my own non-genius.)

Still A Little Hard To Say What's Going On

I am supposed to come up with something to Say. Something to explain myself, something Important. If life were like television, my well-crafted script would be executed flawlessly, and the recipient would consider my words carefully, and a change would be wrought, in everyone.

Wroughting change. Wrighting change. Something-ing change. That's what words are for, right? But we're too stubborn and stupid in real life to do that. We mess up our lives blindly, happily forging away at some small, useless corner of existence, when we could be living in the entire extended sphere of our potential.

Potential. What a silly word. Potential. I quit believing in it months ago, when I realized my own fatalism (in the fate sense of the word this time, not the fatal), and embraced the idea that we can only do whatever we know how to do. It's why people run faster to break shorter records these days, and why more and more kids are succumbing to anorexia. There is no such thing as potential. There is an is, and there is a was, and there is perhaps a path to a can be.

The end of the story is, words are useless, and I expect no change wrought in anyone, until that change is good and ready to happen. Which pulls me back to time.

His Isolation Grows Defined

It's funny how this morning, just this very morning, I was worrying about what to do with Herman, my one remaining tetra fish, whom I can no longer find the time to care properly for.

That is small change. Cheap, insignificant, dirty old pennies.

Because now? Now I have somehow acquired ink stains on my pants. (This was my attempt to make a joke, make a joke out of something that is not funny, with the ink stain crisis. I really do have ink stains on my pants, but a little hairspray will take care of that right away.)

Here is what I don't understand: relationships. How do two people with two different brains possibly come together on any level and create any sort of real understanding? It just doesn't seem possible. Two perspectives, two voices, can continually be engaged in a dialectic, can even see something in similar ways, maybe, but words are too transient and too confusing, connotation is too significant, and that just covers verbal communication. The present. This does not touch on the past in the slightest way, and heaven forbid we even consider the future.

As someone who studies relationships, who is passionately involved in the understanding and the connection of people, and cultures, and ideas, this problem seems like one I should have dealt with a long time ago, should have solved and moved on to other things; should have made my peace, at least, and not continued a hypocrite, believing that we can understand the metaphor of truth without believing we can understand anything outside our head at all.

I'm helpless and watching as things spin out of my control. As I step out of the shower and go to towel off to watch my favorite earring slip off my ear and down the drain, too far to catch it and recover it, and matter-of-factly pull the other one out and set it on the counter. As in, Well. As in, Of course. Watched, knowingly, half-cocked-smilingly, feeling like a clairvoyant. Perfect.

It Was Salieri!

Mozart's Requiem has been dogging me for days. Three times in the last twenty-four hours I've awoken to it; jarred out of sleep by its intensity, and familiarity, probably. When I deflate after work, I pump those strains through my speakers while unpiling the stack of books from bookbag to bed where I pore through them, hour after hour.

I don't know what it's a sign of; I think the universe is just having its comedic little moments with me. I'm laughing away, universe. Oh, I'm laughing.