fall

happened really quick this year. maybe it's because i spent most of my time indoors, reading, studying, watching television. cause yesterday i just hopped into my car to drive down to the best buy and all the trees were glossed over with rain water that had been pouring down all afternoon and the leaves of the trees were just so... not perfectly green. so in front of the unsettling, homogenous backdrop of a light gray and diminishing afternoon--but behind the cars and the slicked down roads and the fog building up on the inside of my windshield--there were oranges and reds and mauve-tinged, dying greens catching my rambling thoughts and forcing me to come to the realization that another summer was over and that the next one would be the last i'd ever have. i didn't like the feeling because it felt like i was suffocating under the outstretched, choking hands of bad news. the only good memories i could correlate with autumn only reinforced how long ago it had been since i was consistently optimistic during the months of october through april. i was growing up. fall used to be swimming longer hours, of getting back to school, flirting with my boyfriend, descending into winter depressions. i could smell the bleach of the natatorium i woke up in every morning at five-thirty; i could smell homeroom with its mix of anxious sweat and freshly baked, commercial bagels; i could smell the detergent that had to have been tide but i could never find it anywhere else besides his cheap polo shirts; i could smell my room and the cinnamon candles i burned in there for no reason except i was a bored pyromaniac. where had the time gone? it had been eight years. so long. and yet, here i was. only twenty-two.

you know what's really unfortunate?

how turned off i am by certain people. i kinda wish i was a hermit.

you're a failure

good. now it's been written down.

Winning the Game

I have this saying that's simply, "I'm gonna win the game."

The problem is, I have no idea what that would even begin to look like. And the biggest problem about the phrase, is that it makes me focus on wants that are heavily socialized. Winning the game wouldn't let me be a single mom or married to a woman. Winning the game would be much more boring than that.

Don't get me wrong--even heavily socialized, my day dreams are still exciting and clearly ridiculous and highly implausible. But if I didn't think about winning the game all the time, I wonder where I'd be.

Okay, so winning the game. I'm married. To a man. Based on his attributes, my children will either play Water Polo, Football, or Swim. I've had two sets of twins, and they have awesome names. I'm a pretty successful doctor. I'm probably married to a politician. I work my way up the ranks of Chicago bureaucracy, and I become the director of health, making Chicagoans the healthiest urban dwellers in America--or at least happier. Chicago is a sad city. A proud city, but a sad one. I've written a couple books. I've appeared on the news a few times. Maybe I'm on one of the national morning news shows. I'm skinnier than I am now. I wear nice jewelry.

Okay, so not winning the game. I'm a pilot. I don't know how this would even happen, or what routes I'd fly, but I fly planes and it's amazing. I am technically a doctor, but I spend all my time in the tropics or Seattle, doing things that aren't medically related. I write. I write novels. They are exciting. They are not bestsellers, but I have a small group of fans who love my work. My wife is the most gorgeous woman I've ever met who was also interesting to talk to. We have two kids. We tell them that they're twins, but they're clearly not. I made them beaded crowns when they were adopted, and I tell them fictionalized accounts of my family history every night before they go to sleep. I make a mean basil bisque.

So which one is more exciting? I always tell myself when I fail that one day I'm going to win the game. I'm going to ask more people out. People are going to respect me. I'm going to be famous or loved or both. But I'm getting older and I just don't think any of this is plausible anymore. I hope my life ends up being stranger than fiction, but if not, well I guess I won the game. It's not exciting, to win. But it makes you feel better.

is everything teleological if you're reasoning in a circle?

There's something weird with the people here. I'm not quite sure what it is, but it's something. I'm scared and alone. Oh wait, I know what it is. It's my blood sugar. And it is very low. This explains every little thing right now in my head that isn't making perfect sense. Because usually everything is sensible or understandably close to making perfect sense. And when it doesn't, well... then you end up like me right now, not making any sense and scared out of her mind unable to move.

Or, you end up like I did, on a mattress on a bunk bed in the middle of the Central American rain forest, scrawling words on a page while your tongue felt faint and thinly spread over your mouth and under your molars, and when you finally read the words when your blood sugar, somehow, who knows, made it up to around 60 mg/dL, you were shocked to see that in your heightened fear from low glucose, epinephrine, and phosphorylation, you were able to write your last will and testament and it wasn't pretty. Some bullshit like, "God, please forgive me. If you're there. Just know, that I would do anything to make me seem more pure in your eyes. I am sorry. Don't let me die." And on those soggy, moleskin pages then, I discovered the answer to religion and humanity quickly and with mild psychosis. Nobody wants to die. This fear makes you say and believe things that you'd never say and believe. It motivates you to kill others and to lose yourself.

But eventually, you'll wake up to consciousness and feel sucrose on your tingling tongue and you'll know that you're life has been a lie--if you find the evidence. What is the evidence? It has to be words. Anything else and it's misinterpreted. It has to be full sentences, too, otherwise you're left with whatever the hell someone stronger than you thinks whatever the hell evidence you've found is. We're not all writers. I leave myself behind as often as possible so that when I'm judged or when I'm judging myself, I'll know what's going on.

poets anonymous, or -- alcohol dehydrogenase oxidizes ethanol into acetaldehyde and requires Zn2+ as a cofactor

make my blood, alcohol
that is all.

water to wine?
lame.

parlour trick.

this classic miscegenation,
this mixology of hard and non-fermented,
this hedonistic chimerism,
this is dedication.

to an art,
a passion:
humanity's first commercialism;

humanity's first love.

humanity's only love if love is just chemicals,
which it is.
as a scientist i deduce this because when i stop--
and i revert--
there is no longer love,
because there is
no
longer
toxicity.

which is when i realize:
i hate my tissues
because i hate histology.
this existence is made worse
because i am conscious of it.

all the filaments and all the flesh,
unfortunately fertilized,
now compete with the other nine ova
that would have been prettier
smarter, nicer,
heavier, healthier, happier,
kinder, lovelier.

betterer?

bliss, which is just ignorance,
is justly achieved.
i throw a wrench into the metaphor
when i pour
out the liquor.



libations are statements and this one is all that i need.

cutsies

So this morning, at around 8:50, I walked up to the front of Rhoade's Auditorium to ask our lecturer a question. A lot of people want to do this, but today there were only two other people in front of me. Well, only two people in front of me until two short yet somehow really attractive South Asian girls cut between me and the question askers. I was mildly put off. This "mild" put off-ense increased as their question proceeded to take some five minutes (we only have a ten minute break). Finally, they went back to their seats and I asked my question, which was spectacularly dumb and answered with little effort on the part of the professor.

I was further vexed when the next lecture hour began with the professor saying something like, "During the interim I was asked a good question that I would like to clarify..." I don't know exactly what he clarified. I was blacked out from bitterness.


So tonight, around 8:50 pm, I've collected my required groceries from Dominick's and proceed to make my way into a check out. I'm wearing my "drug rug" which cost all of $10 somewhere south of the mason-dixon line and I will later discover that my hair is very astray. But the contents of my shopping cart are excellent signifiers of my current status. Yes. A tub of coffee, three frozen personal pizzas, pasta, canned tuna, more pasta. Graduate Student. Anyway, I am probably two meters from jumping into the only check out line when a young girl whose acne smacks of foundation hops in front of me. True. She only has four or five contents, but I have to act awkward as I stand behind her and she wastes time by not putting her five contents on the conveyor belt while she idly looks at candy items. And the smell of her cheap perfume or expensive deodorant gets me thinking, How young is this person? That quickly leads to, How old does she think I am? 

Because it occurs to me then that barging your way in front of people seems fine when your younger. It's still rude, but it seems more... appropriate. Young people are full of life. That life expresses itself by not following appropriate social customs and being "rude." When you age, hopefully you start learning what you can and cannot do, which is why law enforcement rarely gets involved when seniors get into a scuffle. By knowing what's appropriate vs. inappropriate, one would hope that situations won't as surely devolve into fist fights. Older people learn how to use their words. I'm sure if I was twenty years older I would have garnered either respect from appearance alone or respect by voicing my opinions that "I was in line first."

But that seems so weak. So instead I just waited, feeling powerless as some awful smelling girl mis-communicated with the cashier a couple of times. Then I tried my best to be overly nice to the cashier, who was quite easy to understand.

Is it my time to give up my rights as a youth? Have I finally gotten so old that my life is no longer as "precious" as that of a child's? Is this the kind of treatment I should expect for the rest of my life? What's wrong with children these days that they no longer care for the lives of their elders?

And then I realized something: I still look and feel and act like I'm twenty-two. I'll have plenty of time to harp on teenagers when I'm eighty-six. For now, I'll just continue to hate being cut. Because one day, when I'm older, I won't accept it anymore. Then, with my hopefully non-arthritic, non-osteoporosis invaded limbs, I will smack bitches upside the head if they dare place themselves spatially in front of me.