Scrupulous

Someone was cooking food in the apartment building. They were either ventilating too much or too little, she couldn't remember what the supervisor had told her caused the problem, all she knew was that she could smell food--a vague in specificity, but definitely meaty type of food. God fucking fuckers. What the fuck was this? She glanced out her window. She didn't see anyone barbecuing across the street in the open park. Why would they? It was winter. Either way her window was closed. She was keeping her apartment as hot as possible and didn't want any heat escaping into her surroundings.

She poured another glass of Chardonnay from the box she had bought two days ago. The entire thing contained 3,135 calories, give or take about two hundred Calories because she had heard from public radio that the FDA did a piss poor job of making sure commercial food items contained the number of calories they said they did and this wine was imported, so it was even more untrustworthy. She felt guilty for finishing it in seven days, because she was going to finish it in seven days. That was what? Four hundred calories a day? That was atrocious. A little past a quarter of the way through now, so if she tried to let it last just a little longer she'd be able to think she was only consuming eight hundred calories a day, but any way she thought about it, it was an excessive lifestyle.

She had stopped writing down what she ate in a little journal she kept by her bed because she found the zeroes adding together made for a very depressing spreadsheet.

So she kept track in her mind. Her mind. It was plagued by cloudiness and dizzy spells. Her mind. She had about two or three hours of relative clarity when she woke up in the morning so she spent that time finishing school work. She spent the rest of her day slowly drinking Chardonnay because for some reason she was less hungry when she was drunk--the only good thing God had granted her.

Still, two days ago, two days ago was the worst. Two days ago was Tuesday, when she had a night seminar who's sole defining characteristic in its otherwise mundane course description was the lovely instatement of mandatory attendance. Because she had to leave her apartment on Tuesday, she often did all her shopping on that day. Sometimes Tuesdays were beautiful days and she revelled in the noise of the small city and in the presumed attention of other people, of complete strangers. She spent thirty minutes picking out an outfit and thinking about how she would do her hair. It used to be longer. Now she had less options and for some reason fewer options took more time to curate.

But sometimes Tuesdays sucked and she just wanted to get everything over with as quickly as possible but found herself unable to do anything at all. Take for example two days ago, two days ago being the worst Tuesday yet of this year--all forty-six of them. She had no yogurt in her fridge. She had eaten it all. Evidently. So she had to buy more yogurt. But she had to go to the registrar in the morning to hand in her second term paperwork. So she made a decision to go to a cafeteria in one of the student centers for her yogurt breakfast.

Their selection was meek and unadventurous. They stocked light yogurt in two flavors: vanilla and peach. Two flavors was romantic at best. No. Not romantic. The other type of ancient civilization turned adjective: spartan. Spartan at best and making her even more upset that today was a Tuesday. Vanilla, of course, made her feel like gagging on every bland spoonful. Peach, meanwhile, left an alkalotic taste in her mouth for unbearable hours in which the urge to eat anything else simply to rid herself of the experience was... well, unbearable. She stood in front of the display with other refrigerated delights for uncounted minutes, until she began to shiver from the cold. Shivering was bad, she knew, because it made you hungry, regardless of the fact that it burned calories. So she selected vanilla, and prayed to her unkind God that she wouldn't be vomiting it up somewhere. Because fucking fuckers thought that vomiting in a bathroom was a sure sign you were bulimic, because apparently teenage girls had never had the fucking flu before. Lesson learned. In high school. Besides, vomiting the vanilla yogurt up would only cause her to experience her day similar to the parallel day in which she might have picked peach over vanilla--spending the rest of the day begging herself to eat anything else to evacuate the taste of peach, instead of stomach acid, from her highly selective palate.

While she waited in line she was bumped into not only by the girl with the oversized backpack in front of her, but also by the boy who was reading some sparknotes--so intently he had lost all notice of personal fucking space--behind her. They both looked like first years. She wanted to strangle both of them. She fantasized about it while she looked at her canvas shoes, scuffed by her continuous ungraceful shuffling and drenched in melted snow.

Then she had to wait for the morbidly obese monster standing guard as teller to count out the change broken from a five. With her fat fingers. Counting under her breathe, expelled from jowls held open by cruel gravity. No. No. No. She wanted to start crying. This woman wasn't obese. This woman was probably just overweight. She had a singular censor in her brain that held her back from thinking completely awful things, because, whether or not she remembered, she had once been a kind person. Still, the length of time it took the woman to hand her three dollars and seventy two cents was almost unbearable, only adding to the excruciating anticipation for the moment of opening up the yogurt and consuming it. So why was this person taking up her valuable time? Even though she knew it would take fifteen minutes to eat the damn thing. Slowly. Making sure every plastic spoonful was as small as she could bear to make it. She thanked the woman, the woman then promptly wished her a good day even though the woman's kindness made her want to cry much more. So she ate a bit of the unholy vanilla mush before throwing it out and escaping to a park that was deserted in early winter.  She could sit down there and put her head in her lap and attempt to cry in the most inconspicuous way manageable.

She made it to the registrar literally five minutes before their lunch break. She was in the park that fucking long.

She laughed about it, now thinking about it in the safeness of her apartment, in the comfort of her bed.  How strange it would have seemed to anyone else watching her. Crying in the park. Alone. For a few hours. How strange. And staring at the glass she held in her hand, she felt like laughing even more. The glass held an off white liquid that caught the light from her bedside lamp, concentrating it at a constantly moving nexus buried deep within the wine, a center of light moving every time she raised the glass to her mouth. You are right. She realized that this was not funny at all. So she stopped laughing and chucked the glass to the opposing blank wall.

It seemed to happen in slow motion. The decision to throw it, the actual physical process of throwing something she did not want to break across the room. Even the sound of the glass breaking against the wall seemed to echo along the rest of her room, seeking nooks between furniture to bounce off of, rebounding back to her. She let whatever feelings she might have had of the event wash over her, just like the sound of the glass and the smell of aerated wine at its extreme. She giggled again, this time slower, longer. She wanted to draw it out for as long as possible. She had nothing to throw this time. Then she said, "Good night," to no one in particular. Closing her eyes to fall asleep made her feel like she was falling through her bed, dissolving through it, disappearing from reality into the liminal space that lurks underneath all children's beds. She fell asleep with a facial expression caught between a smile and a growl.

Someone had once told her she was beautiful.

Cycles

I may have forgotten what I wanted to say, but I am going to try and say it anyway. I've lost many beautiful thoughts to time and forgetfulness. I've lost innumerable words in between the tiled walls of swimming pools. An hour ago I lost beautiful thoughts to a highway. I can't get them back, but I can try to mimic the feeling.

I was home. I had gone home to spend time with my childhood friends. My house is falling apart. It is falling apart on the inside. There was a small flood on the second floor and now things have been moved and are out of place. It is, disconcerting. Mostly so because when I go home now, usually, no one else is there. On vacation or working. So I am alone, again, in my house, wondering what could have caused its newest injuries. My mind wanders to unhappy places--unlikely events but still unhappy.

But besides the house, it is my neighborhood. My dreams will always take me back to the way it feels to be driven down my street, or to drive oneself at the age of seventeen--speeding again, cocky as fuck. I could navigate around my block blindfolded, I know it so well. But it isn't really my neighborhood anymore. It is changing. There are a new batch of elementary school kids now. I don't know them, I don't know where they came from, but they look cute and bored. I imagine that's how I looked when I played with my neighbor from around the block, when we were only nine or ten. Bored. And there are new neighbors now, too. Parked in driveways are cars I've never recognized before. There are dogs being walked that I haven't seen. It is a slow change, like how both of my parents have allowed their hair to thin and gray just a little longer before dying it back to their unnatural blonde and brown. It makes me uncomfortable to realize time has passed. I want to be able to tell myself that I've come a long way, but maybe I haven't. Maybe I'm still that miserable little girl and I just can't see that through all the drugs I'm taking. I try not to think like that, but I'm just so terrified that I'm going to fall back into the little kid I once was. I was once a little kid who needed someone, just one person, who would not leave her. I would like to think that, as flawed as I am, I have become the person I needed, just ten years too late.

And so when I drive around my house, nothing seems right. I don't know how I fit into the story anymore. I don't see myself living in the house. The house with the little plaque on the door to that reads, "Bless this home and all who live in it," a sentence that taught me irony through years of experience, a sentence that made me laugh even when a natural human response would have called for crying. I have no home anymore. Even the two things that made life bearable no longer exist there: my sisters have left. I have nothing. I have no one. I have no place to be. I just have myself. For the first time, that may actually be enough. It is terrifying.

It would be grand if I could pick one of the happier days of my childhood and reside in there for as long as possible, if time could move more slowly so that I wouldn't be constantly fumbling over my identity crises. So that when I go home I don't feel unease, but instead sense a continuity between then and now. But no. No, time is a bitch. I am still not old. I have held onto a lot of anger, seeking proper avenues for its expression, and I will hold onto it for just a while longer. But if I wait to long, there will be no one left to take it out on other than myself. And that is terrifying. If, as an older person, I manage to feel this same abject loneliness and diffuse melancholy... But that is still a long way aways. Just as the time between me driving a Barbie, battery-powered jeep and me driving an actual, engine-powered convertible crept slowly in reality but in reflection passed suddenly, I am hopeful that I will remember this time, around age 22, as being something of an important stage in my life.

All the things I have forgotten should remain that way.
All the things I remember should try to fade.
The only thing that was ever important was knowing who I was.


(ELYSE! If this sounds depressing, don't worry about it. You can just call me instead.)

I like singers from the South Pacific

Iambic Pentameter.

Google "Define as-"

I get:

1. assimilation
2. asexual
3. aspergers
4. assonance

Sounds about right.

Fuck You...

Random Chance. 

I'm onto your games.

Everything's Going to be Alright

Once in a while, and I don't know how, things just seem to brighten up. And I'm not even exactly sure what's getting brighter. My mood is so precarious that even though I have tricks and trade secrets to make sure I never sink into an unimpressionable melancholy, any given stranger on any given day can ruin my entire week.

And even though that is accurate--a flawless statement--it is dangerous to think that way. I realize that now. Every once in a while, even if it's just for a few moments, even if it's a complete daydream and you've actually been spending your entire day sloshing through the blandest of assignments that you're sure will never get you to what you actually want to do, it's harmful to be hyper aware of you're every action and not see that it is just as possible to fail as it is to succeed.

I suck at sewing. Sometimes my sewing machine will jump into a setting that I can't get it out of. I've thrown away so many strips of cloth because I've scavenged and re-arranged them until they no longer consist of anything of value. I never use patterns, and I often curse to myself as I'm pinning something straight onto my body--that life would be so much easier if I could just follow rules and set everything out as it is meant to be. But then every once in a while I make a dress that actually makes me look beautiful. Fuck. I own a ton of dresses. But only the things I make actually fit me in a way that is pure transcendentalism. It's not that I have weird proportions. I have weird everything. My arms are too big, but I have nice shoulders. I'm not the color of the people companies traditionally tailor to. And although that is changing, I still have to guard myself against buying disgusting "colors" that would look disgusting on me. Yea. Beige? You were so IN last year! But you are totally a white person's problem. I have curves, but in a way that is not normal... for example, I love pencil skirts, but if they're made of an unstretchable material, they end up leaving way too much space around my waist which is... a waste and obnoxious and hardly as professional as pencil skirts should be. But I've made three dresses now that I absolutely love. Only one of them is actually suitable for wear outside of my apartment, but I don't even care. Because just having a mental image of me looking spectacular in something I spent at least five hours on is enough to make me believe that all the vagabond strands of thread that get stuck in my vacuum cleaner are worth it.

Little things like that make it so much easier to believe that you're going to make it. I don't know what I'm trying to make it to. I'm intuitive, but I have no idea what's going to happen to me after this. I spend a lot of time worrying about my future, but in the moment of a hundred little things, just as easy as it is to forget that such things ever happened, it is plausible to take such moments to piece together a more hopeful narrative of everyday events.

Determining that you're really good at landscaping just because you play the sims. Promising yourself to keep using a catchphrase until the end of time (sparingly) just because your friend thought it was tearfully hilarious. Developing a new accent. Learning you look good in orange. Remembering a childhood dream that you've fully realized. Life can be incredibly plain, and this often makes things feel much more depressing. Being alone isn't depressing if you're not bored, just as failing isn't depressing if you're doing other things of merit. Being overweight isn't depressing if you live an active life. Hell, I'm an incredibly vain person, but I would be half as attractive if I could have twice as many adventures.

How dull days can be when you've planned them out to be as successful as possible. How tiresome it is to continue guessing whether or not you're truly fucked, if maybe this time you've messed up so much no one will ever take you back.

How much time do I spend gauging whether or not I'll survive my next set of trials? Instead of actually... preparing myself for my next set of trials? How much more fun could life be if I just stopped thinking and started... actually doing something? I love being stuck inside my own mind--this is not sarcasm--but after days of it, anything, even things of little value, seem more enjoyable than being alone with myself... thinking. Perhaps this is why I like drinking? Perhaps this is why I like hurting other people? Perhaps this is why I watch so much television and read so many useless blogs? Perhaps this is why I write in a blog? Perhaps this is why I play video games that actually suck? And all of this could be avoided if I just told myself, or if I just spent ten minutes arguing with myself, that "everything's going to be alright."

I used to think saying that was like a ridiculous form of escapism with little practicality. But I realize now just how useful saying that, hearing it, thinking it... how useful that phrase is.

All my fears seem more easily dealt with. I may be a crappy writer. I may be a crappy friend. I may be a crappy doctor. I may not be intelligent. But I am a writer, I am a friend, and one day I will be a doctor. My intelligence is rarely explicitly questioned, and at that time, my ability to lie will surely help if my own intelligence is not sufficient. I already know I'm in love with myself. And sometimes, even if you doubt how many people in your life actually care about you, being able to respect yourself to deal with your own insufficiencies for a bit longer is all you need to get yourself through anything.

Literally.... anything. Everything's going to be alright. Literally. Everything. You'll forget about the little insignificant failures along the way. You vaguely know what you want. You know who you are. You know your options. You have your thread. Everything's going to be alright.

Thematic Apperception Test

I think I'm in love. There's a website attached to the book, "The Secret Life of Pronouns." One of the things it does is look at your own writing samples and then assess your personality. I am, apparently, very optimistic, not very anxious, and psychologically distant. I am not incredibly outgoing. I am incredibly concerned about power dimensions. And I apparently do not care at all about talking about achievements.


Ellen was busy pipetting when Barbara opened the laboratory door and entered. Walking over to Ellen's work bench, she noted that her shoes were scoffed up, presumably with hydrochloric acid, and that she was still hungry. Ellen, meanwhile, wasn't actually pipetting anything of importance. She could have said she was practicing the pipette technique, although that wasn't quite true. She had been practicing earlier in the week, but now she was just tired of being in lab and anything was better than watching her titrated samples turn an innocuous shade of pink or green or blue. It was all very tiresome, she realized, this work to become a scientist. 
True--Ellen still wanted, very badly, to wear the lab coat and to walk around like Barbara walked around... infused with an unseen power one could call "professionalism." But no, Ellen had not been enjoying this week in lab and she was starting to wonder if she would ever enjoy another week in lab for the rest of the semester. 
"How are you doing?" Barbara asked, in her unplaceable and shrill voice. Ellen had found herself standing up straighter when she heard the door open and now, even though she knew her professor, Barbara well, she was still maintaining a rigid posture. She put the pipette she had been playing with in a large, otherwise empty, beaker and returned her hands to her lab coat's pockets. "The samples are going to be another" Ellen glanced quickly at the clock on the wall "forty, forty-five minutes." She kept looking at the clock. Why did it tick so slowly? Hadn't she already been here for ten hours? 
"That's good. But how are you?" Ellen had not realized that her professor might actually be enquiring about her--what an odd thing to enquire about with the samples promising much more. Any lab grunt could do Ellen's work. "I'm fine. A little tired." Ellen thought that sounded satisfactory, although she always hated whenever she admitted she was exhausted, as if saying such a thing would make her day that much more difficult to get through. 
"Are you sure?" Barbara had not moved any closer to Ellen and yet, Ellen thought that her tone had just breached a little bit of the over- formalized professor-student barrier. Ellen couldn't think of doing anything but shrugging. That's all she ever felt like anymore. Shrugging. 
"You have forty-five minutes of free time," Barbara must have noticed that her student's saline samples and the pipette were all distractors, "let's go to lunch." 
"Why?" Ellen realized that must have sounded rude so she softened it by continuing the doomed sentence, "If you don't mind me asking." 
"We need to talk about your future." Ellen thought that this sounded intimidating. She looked at her professor, right in the eyes, and she noticed that her professor did not look intimidating at all. Still suspicious, nevertheless she said, "Okay," and began walking over to the wall that held all their lab jackets, proceeding to take hers off.

The Others

Every thought is a shortcut like this. I've been fantasizing for the last two hours about what I would do if I ever saw you again. But then, for some strange reason, my blood sugar went low and I can't remember you as just you, I remember you as everyone who has ever done this exact same thing to me. People are all the same, more or less. Everyone has the power to hurt you. Everyone will. You just try so hard to find the people who can make you happy about as often as they break your heart, and you've found a friend. You try so hard and then this thing happens: it's a cold panic, it's a long day, it's a little depression, it's a little mania, and now I can't help but think that I hate you. I must hate you a lot. What's wrong with me? What's wrong with you? This should have never happened. I want to erase everything I ever knew about you. I've done it before. I've done it well. But then this thing happens, and I remember every single time you ever touched me, literally, from a handshake to a hug, and it seems so insignificant in comparison to all the other people I have ever loved in my life and what are friends even for anyway? Why? I am my best friend, why can't I be my only friend? I remember that one time, years ago, you only loved her, but then why did you tell me...? This is how people....

star trek cartoons and too much insulin is like a drug

I leave the space time continuum
All my thoughts are echoes of themselves.
Nothing is real until i force myself into orthostatics.
Then i remember what time was like before there was none.



SERIOUSLY. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS PLACE AND HOW DO I LEAVE?