I Think Joe Should Marry that Deaf Chick

The sexual tension between them is so obvious.

In case you're wondering, Joe is the new guy on Blue's Clues. He stepped in when the old guy had to "leave for college," not caring, apparently, about the lifelong commitment he made to his DOG. Even a weird, brilliant, preschooler dog with a fetish for stamping things with her feet. Even a dog who won't just say what she wants, but makes you wander the house peering under the bed and jumping into picture frames until you collect enough clues to sit down and put it all together. And after all this is over, you have to actually DO whatever it was she was trying to tell you. God, having that dog in the house would be exhausting.

Anyway, Joe is much cuter than the old guy. In fact, Joe appears to have frequent female visitors, if you know what I mean. But I can tell he really has a thing for the deaf chick, the one who comes by to "teach Joe sign language." Yeah, I can see right through that little act, my dear. Sign language... right.

I think this whole bachelor theme is getting old. Do you think Blue actually has it out for the lady friends? Maybe she relishes all this attention a little too much... not hard to guess, considering how much effort she makes Joe put into figuring out what game she wants to play for her birthday. Anybody that self-centered would have a difficult time incorporating a whole new person into her household, especially a HUMAN BEING, one with breasts, that Joe might just enjoy spending some of Blue's precious time with. In fact, Joe might even like her better than Blue. MAYBE Joe would even realize that these bizarre little games are exactly that - bizarre - and send Blue to the animal shelter, where no one would put up with her passive-aggressive crap. Or maybe he'd just send her to a nice farm. Who knows.

At least Joe's getting some action. Caillou's parents are about as shapeless and asexual as two people can be (but they are very, very nice). It kind of bothers me, really, how neither one of them seems to have a job and they can just hang around and pay attention to their kids all day. What assholes.

I have to wonder how much of the average American parent's insecurity stems from genuine keeping-up-with-the-Joneses and how much of it is generated through children's programs. I mean, that's why the kids are watching tv anyway, right? Because it's more entertaining than you are? I think that just about sums it up. All the parents on tv have all the time, all the patience, all the enthusiasm and caring in the world, and you! You're just an average slum, working all day and coming home to your kids at night, tired and cranky and not all that into figuring out whose toy was whose. Just send them all to bed! That's what you want to say, but you don't, and then later when you're reading your kids stories and they're yawning and snuggly you'll remember why you did this in the first place, and it isn't because they're about to climb into bed.

It's because they're lovely.

Glad I Didn't Sell That Bicycle

The last thing I need right now is coffee.

"Don't you have any juice?" He points me to a little cooler in the back of the cafe, nearly hidden by an overgrown fern. I stare at the contents. Pennywort juice, grass jelly juice... chrysanthemum juice, basil seed juice. Aloe vera juice. This isn't what I meant. For the second time today, I wonder if I'm dreaming.

I go with the pennywort.

I fish out a buck twenty-five and pay him. He wants to know if I'll buy his basil cookies but I'm already out the door, heading back to the shade. At least I have something to drink. From the picture on the can it's hard to imagine how anyone could squeeze juice from such a plant. It's good, if not quite refreshing, like someone made tea from mustard greens and then added too much sugar. Not bad, anyway.

I look over at the car. A pool of red liquid is forming under the grill and I don't know what it is. Jasper's bleeding, I think. Poor kid. The tow truck's already here for the other car. I try to dial again - network busy. Now is not the time, network. I need to call someone. I need to get home.

They say if you think you might die your life flashes before your eyes. I always figured my last thought before impact would be something shallow, like "my face!" Something honest. But it wasn't either of those, just a simple acknowledgment: Here we go. And then we did.

I'd later learn his name was Ivan. He doesn't want to look at me, but there we both are, standing there. His wife is still in the car. She looks strangely serene. He says he doesn't know whose fault it was, but we both know; we both know you don't try to turn left if you can't see. Praying doesn't help you here. Now we're both looking at the rear passenger-side door, and I wonder if he's thinking the same thing I am - how if he hadn't hit the gas, how if this had happened just a moment sooner, his wife wouldn't be smiling at us right now. I feel sick.

He looks worse, though.

I couldn't get out of the car at first. My instinct was to call 911, but that was all I had - I try the door and it won't open and I just try it again. I can't get out. I climb over to the passenger side but it's even worse. Cars don't explode like they do in the movies, I tell myself. I finally climb to the back and I'm free and I'm smiling and shaking peoples' hands like this happens every day. "Yes, I'm fine, I'm fine," I hear myself saying. "Are you ok?" And the police come and everyone's fine and they leave and I'm here with my car and my phone isn't working. Damn network.

Finally I give up and drive the car home. It's miserable but it drives and we meander down the backstreets until we finally get to my house. I go inside. Chris looks up but I don't say anything, I just head to my room and change my clothes. Look at my face in the mirror. I go back downstairs and he's still sitting, head kind of cocked to the side, wondering why I'm back so soon.

"I'm going to try this again," I say, meaning that I'm leaving. "Also... the car." He wants to know what happened but I'm still not thinking yet and I head for the bus. I text my friend - finally the network relents - and I tell him I'm not coming downtown. He wants to know if I'm ok, and where am I going? I don't answer. For the moment, the question doesn't make sense.

Later I'll take a shower. The shock has worn off by this point, and I'll feel selfish for having felt so surprised, like this wasn't supposed to happen. People die every day, I'll think. People live in fear and then they die. Some people might even wish traffic accidents were the worst thing they had to worry about. But me, I get hit and I'm fine - we all walk away - and the best thing I can do is go down to Powell's and wander the aisles for a few hours. You might think it's comforting to be surrounded by all those books, the immortal imprints of their authors - a tribute to the people who lived.

Really, I just like the smell.

I'm not even paying attention to where I'm going. A book stands out, My Life Through Tarot, and I think, there's a wonder. I pick it up, open it to a page. Death.

"What if I'm not ready to have children?"

"Then don't."

"But what if I'm just afraid of having children because I'm afraid I'll get divorced? What if I screw up my children forever?"

"So what if you do?"

"What?"

"So what if you do ruin everyone's life? Life's an adventure - your adventure. What if you don't and you sit there thinking about what your life could have been?"

And that's all I need to read.

There's a Reason I'm Not in Sales

Me: Hello?

Total Stranger: Hi, I was calling about your bike for sale on Craigslist.

Me: Oh, ok.

TS: So...

Me: Yeah?

TS: Can I have your address?

Me: Why?

TS: ...so I can take a look at your bike?

Me: Do you want to buy it?

TS: I'd like to take a look at it?

Me: Oh.

TS: I can come right now.

Me: Oh. Sure, yeah, my address, hmm...

[This is actually me stalling. He sounds like there's the teeniest chance he could be a serial killer. At the very least, he sounds kind of old and very scruffy, in an Appalachian mountains sort of way. At least, that's what he looks like in my head.]

Me: Sorry, I forgot, I already sold that bike.

TS: What?

Me: Yeah. Maybe next time.

*click*

Trying to Keep it Superficial and Light

Most annoying thing about being a writer: redundantly dictating every minor action you take.

She hesitates: grapes or nectarines? She reaches for a nectarine; inspects it before tossing it in the cart. Realizes she's never bought nectarines before. Oh well, let's try something new, she thinks, scratching her foot with the tip of her toe... that girl has nice socks! I wish I could pull off socks like that, she wists. Girl envy... qua sock envy.

She's jerked back to reality - while writing that sentence, the neighbor, possibly drunk, screeches into his driveway and hits the side of his own house. Roommate decidedly pissed. She wonders what this world is coming to.

Remember when you first thought you were all grown up? I do, I remember exactly where and when and why, even, taking the first few puffs of my third or fourth cigarette, realizing that I had all this freedom. Suddenly writing wasn't something I did hidden away in my room, it was something I did in public, with beer, with a cigarette. The cigarette made me a better writer. I could feel it.

The faux french-existentialist that never was. If only I had a hat.

Nevermind that I was sixteen and couldn't write worth a damn. The point was that I tried, I channeled this overwhelming emotional energy into words and pages and more words until I had to replace the plastic inkwell on my fountain pen. It was more than cathartic; I thought I had found myself. I knew who I was. I knew who I wanted to be.

Now, not so much. The certainty of teenagehood is replaced by a nagging doubt that doesn't really take hold until you're well into your twenties. Am I good enough? Before, the "goodness" was just an assumption; you didn't question your obvious and admirable talent. Now - later - you look back over your own writings and seethe with mortification.

I didn't think I wrote like that.

Curse of the critic within.

Segue-that's-really-an-ending: Chris asked me what was up with my cryptic endings to my posts. I stared at him with what I hope was a mixture of how-dare-he-pry and general mysteriousness, but in the end I told him that I've always been bad with endings. I don't know where stories end. Ask my sister: when I was in fourth grade I told her I couldn't end this story I was working on, and she convinced me to add a bit after the Native American boy and his shadow-wolf lean in close to share a secret. (This is the climax of the story, by the way.) Anyway, they lean in close together and the boy is whispering his secret when - all of a sudden! - the wolf jets away into the bleak black of night. (This is the part where the audience is supposed to get really anxious!) And indeed, the wolf soon comes speeding back in a whirlwind of wolflike fury... a pack of tic-tacs dangling from his lips.

Ha ha ha.

You should have seen my poor teacher's face when she read that story out loud to the class. I was supposed to be the smart one - the serious one! But no. Curse you, no endings.

I Need Gumbo... I Need Help!

I don't know if it's Firefox; I don't know if it's Facebook. I don't know what it is, but I have access to every subject line ever written by ANYONE. And it's fabulous.

Because Your Couch is Ugly, That's Why

Back when I was poorer than I am now I would rent these beautiful but tiny apartments and then die a little inside when I had to move in all my crappy furniture.

Now my situation is a little different. I, again, have a beautiful but tiny apartment and I have to go through the reverse agony: choosing which pieces of furniture to take and what to leave behind. I can take the red couch, for instance, but can I also take the matching chair? What would the couch without the chair look like? Would the piece-here-piece-there symbolically represent something... bad? Should I scrap this blog-post and start over?

Probably.

I shouldn't even be worried about this. There's an unspoken agreement about whose is what, and then there's the mutual rejection of, say, that baby-blue dresser. Whoo boy. Start a fire, as far as I'm concerned. But all of my things are so obviously mine: they reek of me, really (not in the smelly sense; I am a clean and delicate lady), and if I don't take them, they should probably go somewhere... else. No one wants to invite a woman over for dinner only to have her say, "Hey... where'd you get those weird couches?" and then you'd have to explain your ex-girlfriend's bizarre theory of living room aesthetics, and how she should have seen the LAST set of couches, and how much the old girlfriend really LOVES these couches but they didn't fit in her new apartment, and how she would fly into a murderous rage if anything were to ever, EVER happen to them. And then the woman would be like, I think those couches are watching me.

Crazy lady. They're just couches!

But! Those couches are such a bitch to move, I thought I'd look around for something affordable and pleasingly new to my sensibilities, but YOU KNOW WHAT? PEOPLE ONLY SELL UGLY THINGS ON CRAIGSLIST.

This post is dead.

That's Whack!

Gaming Reverie questioned the impossibility of blogging about the minutae of one's existence and have it be anything grand. My first reaction was more or less isn't that what blogging is? I mean, if we thought we really had anything interesting to say, wouldn't we write a book? But that was too simple, so I thought about it and decided I'd see if I could get to the really nitty-gritty of my daily life and see if I could pull it off.

Prepare yourself. Boredom is imminent.

So I wake up. Damn, it's bright. I left the curtains open. What time is it? Crap. Eight-fifteen. I should have taken the bus ten minutes ago. The only philosophy major in a philosophy class and I've been late 50% of the time so far. Poor professor; can't even get the philosophy major to show up. But I'm out of bed. I'm going.

This is where it gets rough. Every day I stumble out of bed, brush my teeth, suffer paralysis. WHERE ARE MY JEANS? WHERE ARE THEY? Why do clothes go missing? I wonder. It's not like I just get naked in random locations. I wonder if I own enough pairs of jeans to qualify as a girl. Probably not. But still, they should be right here. RIGHT HERE.

I go with the plaid pants. When in doubt, wear plaid, that's my motto. (And a good motto it is, too.) Ok, I'm dressed enough to go outside. Still freaking cold, I remember. What month is it? July? Right: birthday month. It's July, but it's cold. I remember the guy on the bus, the one that stared at me with something too much akin to anger for my own comfort before asking, "Why are you wearing a sweater? It's fucking July." To which I replied... actually, I didn't reply. I pretended I didn't realize he was talking to me. Better that way. Didn't matter, within five seconds he was making out with his girlfriend.

Back to today. I hate having standards, I'm thinking. I'm waiting for a bus and thinking about how I hate having standards, how it does little for my quality of life. Stupid standards. I can't even remember the last time I had sex. It feels like a million years ago, and you never think when you're having sex that it's going to be the last time for a long time; maybe you should make it memorable. Stupid sex. Stupid people talking about all of their stupid sex.

These are the wondrous thoughts coursing through my mind.

I make it to school, a minor miracle. Professor is nice, too nice to teach philosophy, but then everyone in the class is a business major. Ethics is required for business majors. He wants to know what we think about Plato's segregated society: would we consider this ethical today? What are the myths that we adhere to as Americans? Kid next to me thinks the whole thing's whack.

That's what he says. "Whack."

"Hmm," says Professor. "That's good. But that's not really an argument." And I'm stunned; I've never heard a teacher say such a thing. Maybe right now it's the only thing TO say.

Poor Professor. He's so gentle, so kind. I don't know how he ever made it this far. Like a teddy bear of a philosopher, teaching the masses in his teddy-bear ways. I like him. He doesn't seem to mind, doesn't seem to need to require more from his students except to gently prod them towards speaking. And then I realize that his students DO speak; they're not afraid of what's going to come out of their mouths or how it'll be received. Maybe he's onto something.

He gets tired of talking about Plato, lets us out of class early. I'm eating breakfast in the sports bar nearby because I gave up Market Street. They're playing "Love Train" on the radio. The service isn't as good here, merely perfunctory but fine enough in it's way; I don't get free beer or free conversation or anything else but I can hang out and write my blog and for now that's all I want to do. Maybe I should sort through some clams later and listen to "Atlas Shrugged" on tape. What I really want to do is go home and take a shower, the one I missed this morning. I wonder when I'll finally get to move. Never, it feels like.

The last few days I've been thinking about how I'm not really an adult in many respects, how I'm still a student and live off a student's income, how I don't really make money in any traditional respect. This is ok, this is fine - this is necessary - but at the end of the day I still feel like a child. And I do for other reasons, too: my propensity to waver, my tendency to see things in black-and-white, my still-selfish nature. I wonder when I'll finally grow up, and whether I'll ever really see myself as an adult.

Then I remember that all of these thoughts - the good, the bad, the mundane - are all to keep me from thinking about something else, something I can't get off my mind.

Courtship Behaviors of the Intimidated Male

This is pure commentary, keep that in mind at all times.

I'm at school. I'm standing. This generally means I'm smoking a cigarette, because if I'm not smoking a cigarette or getting lunch, I'm walking. I have this bizarre habit of walking when I'm trying to kill time. It's like pacing at home. For whatever reason, I can think while I'm walking, so I walk. People don't talk to me when I walk.

Ok. So I'm standing somewhere, at school. Somebody ambles up. They strike up a conversation. We're at school, so the initial how-are-yous-who-the-hell-are-yous invariably turn to what's-your-major. They're probably in business. I'm a philosophy major, I say. Then I wait. One of three things will happen, ordered by common occurrence:

1) Oh, you're a philosophy major. You know, I always loved phil-o-so-phy. [That's how they say it. Totally draw those precious syllables out.] I always loved thinking about how reality isn't necessarily what it is, you know? I mean, that's crazy.

Guys assume that because you're a philosophy major you're attracted to intelligent men. Which, obviously. Maybe it's not that so much as that they're willing to project themselves into this idea of what they think you think an intelligent man looks like. And, ok. I know a lot of incredibly intelligent men. I have a dear friend who got his degree in what amounts to "rocket science" from MIT. But do we TALK about engineering when we're together? No. Not so much. Is his long-time girlfriend an engineer? Nope. Not a whit.

That said, philosophers do have an edge. Still, there's another approach:

2) Oh, you're one of THOSE people. [Ouch. Thanks, buddy.] Don't you think philosophy's kind of ridiculous? I mean, you just sit around all day and talk about things. Now, business, that's an interesting field....

These chaps aren't quite as endearing as the first group. They still think you want an intelligent man, but instead of trying to make themselves seem smarter, they try to convince YOU that you're not really as smart as you think you are. This allows them to either a) open up the possibility that you've realized the truth about yourself and run into their open arms or b) if you reject their phone number, as you surely will in about ten seconds, they can rest assured that you weren't really interesting in the first place.

Last group:

3) Cool. I'm blahbiddy-blahbiddy-blah. How do you like philosophy?

There you go. That's my cue, because then I get to tell them how little I know about philosophy, but that it's great because you can be any kind of philosopher, and I can tell them about how ethics makes me drowsy and how I knew it was love when I realized I could be a scientist and a philosopher AT THE VERY SAME TIME. And then they can tell me about neural networks, or physics, or whatever the hell they're into that day, and I can learn something too.

Of course, I never date these people, either, because I think I'm allergic to dating, but I can least have a good conversation and sometimes we even stick as friends. It's really the only way to act intelligently, regardless of your IQ: open to new ideas, willing to learn, trying to think about things and asking questions. There are no power-plays; it's Idea Land, pure and simple.

I loaned out a book recently to a friend who possibly wanted to take a philosophy class next term. I didn't say anything when I lent it to him; I wasn't trying to give him any strange ideas or pass off the book as THE TOME OF ALL BEING but later, when he said he was having a hard time reading it at first, I had to go back and give him an instruction: just read. Don't even try to comprehend, or get frustrated, just read. If anything was interesting, read it again. If not, life is short, read a different book.

I think I've been guilty of making this same mistake, too, but neophytes such as me always want that "click" that tells you you know what you're doing, that you understand. That's why math is great: you get it or you don't. But with philosophy, when you try so hard to comprehend the details you miss the gigantor idea-fruit that the author's actually offering forward for you to enjoy or inspect. If you can grasp just the idea (and you still care), you'll want to know the specifics: how do you propose this actually works? and that's where the rest of the work comes in (all those... words!).

I don't know when philosophers got such a reputation as being judgmental toward others (except that they have to be, by profession, judgmental to ideas). Believe me, I know what getting clobbered feels like, but usually it's in an effort to better my own thinking and reveal my own mistakes, not to make me feel small and insignificant (although it works for that, too, in a pinch). I guess the point that I'm trying to make - which isn't at all related to the point I was going to make fifteen minutes ago - is that there's nothing to be afraid of. Philosophy can be totally nebulous if you look at it that way, but then I guess so can science-in-any-form if you're in a group of philosophy majors (don't even get me started - philos shrink with the violets, too).

But really it's just a method; just throw it on something and see what happens.

Oh. Also... nobody really cares.

You Try Explaining It To a Three-Year-Old

Explanations designed for young children are fraught with weird metaphors and "don't worry; I'll tell you the real truth when you're older" substitutes. I used to think parents were just being silly. Tell the poor children the truth! But - no. Those cheesy cartoon books explaining pretty much everything under the sun from sex to quantum physics really do serve a valuable purpose.

It's just hard. Watch:

Lyra: Mom? Why does it get dark?

Me: It gets dark because the earth rotaa... because the earth spins around, but the sun more or less remains in the same place... sort of, not really, but rela... um... the sun stays in the same place and the earth goes in a big circle around it and... ok, this would be a lot easier if I had some styrofoam balls and a flashlight. And then we could do moon phases! But anyway, the earth spins, so we only get daylight on half of the surface at a time, so when it's daytime on our side of earth, it's dark on the other side. Isn't that neat?

Lyra: Moon phases?

Me: Yeah! It's so awesome. Completely blew my -

Lyra: THE EARTH SPINS?!

Me: Wha... yeah! The earth spins. Oh wait, did you know that the earth is sph... that the earth is a ball? It's shaped like your soccer ball! Neat, right?

Lyra: The earth spins... so we have air up in the sky and we're people and Ginger's a dog and everything else is earth?

Me: Umm, most things aren't earth, but yeah, there's a lot of earth out there, the ground and... whatnot.

Lyra: Everything is earth.

Me: No... no, there's just a LOT of earth.

Lyra: EVERYTHING IS EARTH.

Me: Oh. Right.

I could go on for days about our weird dialogues. Mostly the problem is getting the proper information in without going overboard with silly things like exactness. This is hard for me. Also, I need a better vocabulary.

Lyra: I have a brain in my head.

Me: Why yes, yes you do.

Lyra: Why is my brain in my head?

Me: Umm, well, it isn't there for a reason, exactly, but... I mean, it's certainly useful that... Ok, so your brain is really important. And you have a lot of senses on your head -

Lyra: Senses?

Me: Yeah. You see, you smell, you taste, you hear through your ears... those are types of senses.

Lyra: My brain goes down through my neck, to my heart, and gets sent all over my body before it comes back up to my head again!

Me: Whoa. You mean blood. Your blood gets pumped through your heart up to your brain and all over your entire body. Blood's great. Your brain, though, that stays put.

Lyra: No, Mr. Reggie said my brain goes down to my heart and...

Me: No.

Lyra: No, my brain! My brain goes through MY BODY.

Me: Oh goodness. Unless you're talking about neural... no. We'll talk about this later.

This reminds me of the time I tried explaining sound to a six-year-old. She was a really clever kid, and always talking about science, so when she asked me how we hear I thought she'd enjoy a slightly more technical answer. And kids, they do this thing where they get really quiet and an adult (that's really more into what they're saying than anything else) assumes that means they're really riveted by all this exciting new information you're giving them, when really it's highly possible that they just imbibed one fragment of information and started daydreaming about Pokemon. Delivery is crucial.

I had just gotten to the inner ear when we got to her house.

Bonnie: Mom! Guess what!

K: What?

Bonnie: Jenny says my head is full of air!

K: WHAT?

Me: No! No I didn't! I was explaining sound!

K: What - what did you tell her?

Me: Just... you know... that it's a vibration, and some stuff happens and it gets interpreted as sound by... our brain.

K: Yeah. You know she's six, right?

Me: She was listening!

Sigh. But I mean REALLY, do you ever remember learning these things? No, probably not, because little kids are about as inquisitive as you get and they ask "WHY?!" about a billion times a day. And that's good - that means you learn so many things about the world. It's just... exhausting. For the parents, obviously.

Living the Examined Life

Today would have been our wedding anniversary. Seven twenty-two, I liked that date. I liked it so much we had the ceremony on a Sunday, inconveniencing everyone, and I didn't care. I made everyone fly cross-country so they could watch me marry someone else, someone I had spent the last five years of my life with, someone I would leave within eight months.

Eight months.

The justice of the peace was late. I had five minutes to take her book and cross out every reference to God. I didn't want God in on my wedding; He had nothing to do with this. I didn't know how I felt about God then and I don't know how I feel about God now, but I will tell you this: He was not invited to my wedding.

Why do people stay in a relationship for years, only to break up the moment they're married? Everyone knows someone who's done this; I know myself. You ask them before they decide to take the plunge and they tell you marriage is just a piece of paper; it doesn't mean anything. Then you turn around and see the couple that's been together for less than a year getting married on their first anniversary. To them, marriage is anything and a piece of paper, but it's not the piece of paper that they want. It's the anything. The everything, even.

Yesterday I took the bus home. Sat in front of two teenagers, dissecting the love lives of their friends. "He said he loved her - really loved her - and I was like, you CAN'T love her, you're only sixteen. You don't even know what love is. It's biologically impossible."

Biologically impossible? I couldn't help thinking that she sounded just like me when I was sixteen. She would have sounded a lot like me when I was only four months younger than I am now, if only she had said no one can love, period. But these feelings that we have for certain other people, whatever name we give them, they're not unreal. They're not imaginary. And surely when you're sixteen you can't know if it's not "real" love if you believe you're inherently incapable of making a comparison. "I think I love you, baby; I'll call you in twenty years to confirm."

God.

Maybe it's the insufferable optimist rising up from within, but now I think that maybe people do find that... person. Or that thing-within-a-person. And maybe you even know right away, even if you're willing to take the time to make sure. I don't know. Maybe I'm just making stuff up. But I want to believe that these people getting married - you know who you are, all ridiculously and somewhat insanely in love - really do have something that I've just never had the time or good fortune to find. They better. Because if they call me in eight months, I am not going to rub it in their face. I'm going to be really sad.

I'm not sad for myself, though. I never thought that I had that-thing-whatever-it-is, so I didn't lose it, didn't have to grieve. I do hope that he finds it with someone else, though. He's a good person (a great person, even). And I hope she's kind, and that she wants him and appreciates him on a level he never thought possible.

Anyone that endured five years with me deserves at least that, and I don't mean that in a self-deprecating way. I mean that in a very honest, I-know-exactly-who-I-am way. I'm hard to deal with. I'm erratic, moody, and stubborn. I'm non-cooperative. I'm anti-social. I have a hard time accommodating someone else without showing resentment. I'm preoccupied with my own goals.

In other words, unless my partner has an ego of steel, I can be pretty horrible company.

Chris, though, he's a trooper. He's nice, in a very genuine sort of way. He likes people. He's willing to set aside (I think I referred to it as "derail") his own goals and plans, at least temporarily, for someone else to follow their own dreams. (That irritated me to no end, actually, but most of the things that irritate me in a partner are generally considered assets, so I'm putting it down as one.) Most of all, he's loyal, and he will work through anything at all that's thrown his way. That much, I am certain, is definitely a good thing. For some people.

I just read this over. It seems so abrupt - I was just going to end it there - but somehow that doesn't seem like a dignified ending to an entry acknowledging the beginning and the end of my last relationship. I didn't mean it that way. I don't know what a fitting ending would be, though, except to say that it's a day, it's a day that meant something but it wasn't really what it should have been. It was a day that I tried to do something I couldn't do. And, I'm sorry. I guess I never said that before, but I am. I didn't mean to try so hard, didn't mean to think so much about what I thought I should do and so little about what I could do.

I'm sorry.

Sleepyhead

This is my "say no to all-nighters, say yes to sleep" face.

How Not to Write a Term Paper in 15 Easy Steps

Step 1. Begin your research weeks before the rest of the class has even daydreamed up a topic. Read the relevant books and papers, highlight and take notes. Congratulate yourself excessively.

Step 2. Relax.

Step 3. When the rest of the class appears to engage in research-like behavior, organize your research and write a fabulous outline that needs nothing more than to be fleshed out and peppered with notable, relevant quotations. Congratulate yourself excessively.

Step 4. Relax.

Step 5. Feel threatened when, long before the paper is due, your former best friend attends class fresh-faced and fancy free... with the completed project casually dangling from their fingertips. "Oh, it's not done," they say. "I still haven't written the bibliography."

Step 6. Stop relaxing. You have a paper to write, you twit.

Step 7. Three days to due date. Three-quarters of your paper is written. Scores of mostly-mangled articles litter your desk. Decide this topic is boring, yawn, and pick a new thesis - the one you "really wanted to work on all along."

Step 8. Begin to panic. Skim abstracts at the speed of light. Print, staple, scan. Print, staple, scan. Furious highlighting and page-marking follows.

Step 9. Panic. This isn't you. You are not your paper. You are not a grade. Yes... wait. Yes. Yes you are.

Step 10. Transcend panic. Drink more coffee. Coffee is good for you. Take a break and compose blog: How Not to Write a Term Paper. Transcribe this upon a very necessary piece of paper that you will soon destroy with errant coffee-spill. Don't worry - at least it wasn't your laptop.

Step 11. Curse yourself excessively.

Step 12. Wriiiiite damn you!

Step 13. You're done. Hey - you're done! When did that happen? You don't remember - too much caffeine and no sleep.

Step 14. Congratulate yourself excessively. Tell yourself never to do this again.

Step 15. Repeat.

Responsibility

I'm feeling a bit under the weather today. Two all-nighters and little progress will suck the morale from a person, and I've reserved the next few hours of this day for a little rest and recuperation. Relaxation will hopefully follow.

Right now, at this moment, I'm wondering if it's possible for a person to think too much. I heard a bit of advice (directed at myself): feel more, think less, work harder. Is that good advice? Possibly. Hard to dissect it without thinking.

Bad joke.

Throughout my adult life and as I've grappled with an occasionally debilitating fear of commitment, I've had only three stable expectations for my career: my work must be useful, thought-oriented, and I must be able to write. That fear of commitment, though, it's not a light fear. It's one that has embedded itself so fully into my personality as to have become not simply a pattern, but a serious rut, one that I have a hard time climbing out of (assuming that's how you get out of ruts, by climbing). There are so many interesting possibilities in this world, how do you know you've found the right one? Is there even a right one? Do soul mates manifest themselves in careers?

Probably not. But then, neither do people. Or so I'm told.

Had a conversation with Tim. First, the back-story: I was so intent on being free of my previous relationship that I expected the first thing I would do, once I was free, was date, or at least sleep around like a teenager, or something. Neither of which I've done, and my unwillingness baffled me until I realized that... I'm kind of a prude.

What an awful word, "prude." Sounds kind of like "prune," but with an even more unpleasant phoneme at the end.

I could probably go on at length about why, exactly, this is the case, but I'll restrain myself and you'll just have to believe me when I say it's true. At any rate, Tim and I were having this conversation, and he came to the conclusion that I'm not looking for a person - a real, live human being, in other words - I'm looking for "the perfect pack of cigarettes." Which, frankly, is a strange metaphor that breaks down in so many ways (so many ways!) but what struck me as completely odd is that even though I understood his point, I wasn't slightest bit phased. Sure, I said. Maybe so.

This blog is remarkably narcissistic.

In reality, I know there is no such thing as a perfect person. The reason this doesn't bother me is because, in love, I'm remarkably forgiving. It's not a lack of character flaws or strange idiosyncratic behavior that makes someone imperfect (I don't even want to accuse anyone of being perfect OR imperfect, those simply aren't words that can ever apply to human beings). But what I want, whatever it is, in a person - I just haven't found it yet. I can list a few random ideas of the top of my head, sure, whatever that means. Ideas aren't an apt comparison to real people, either.

What I'm trying to say is that I suppose this is where feelings come in. There are practicalities to every relationship, but mostly... mostly I just want to like someone. I want to like someone a lot. I want to like someone so much that there isn't even a "but" to the equation. Is that too much to ask?

I don't think so.

Seriously

Any academic who quotes long paragraphs in another language without offering a translation and then goes on to build off of those CRUCIAL ideas is pretentious, opaque, and just plain mean.

I wonder if neurobiologists that expect their audience to be trilingual suffer from the same condition as those boys in high school that drove the twenty-foot-lifted trucks with those ridiculous monster wheels. What did we call them? Oh, yeah: COMPENSATING.

This is Me, Blogging

I don't know if you've noticed, but I haven't been writing much lately. That's fine, with me at any rate, but I've received so many of what I've decided to interpret as complaints that I felt that, perhaps, I should string a few words together.

Alright then. Update: I had a birthday; forgot to get completely drunk. I assume this is because I'm so much more mature and rational than I was a few days before. But the birthday was lovely. As was the cake.

A few days before my birthday, something happened and I can't remember what. This isn't because I blocked it out and am now in denial, rather, I simply can't remember what it was. I believe it was something that could be described as a subtle change: I'm more relaxed now than I've been since March, more at peace with myself and the world around me. This is fine. The dust has settled, so to speak.

More updates: I need a new laptop. Ole Trusty here is going to bite the dust any day now, and I've been uploading my articles and anorexic writings as quickly as I can find them. Lyra's gotten into the habit of saying, "Thank you, suh," whenever anyone hands her anything, and I find that rather amusing. Ginger continues to shed at an enormous rate. The sun has risen and set a few times.

Yes. My life is boring. I'm no longer the exhibitionist I once was, and this is entirely due to the fact that I know who's reading this blog. I could wax nostalgic for the good old days of anonymity but I created this, and I will be the one to decide what sort of thing it will become. I'm still unsure of next year (here's something), after I graduate. I wasn't sure before, even, but I didn't like what I was doing, so I went to school. And I'm in love with these ideas, these topics, these areas of concentration, but I don't feel that "click" that tells you to forge full-steam ahead - to hell with these other options, these other ideas, these other possibilities. I don't know yet.

I have this bizarre fantasy of getting a job. Mostly I feel the pining sting of it when I'm watching a movie and the characters gather around the coffee machine and talk, usually of their sex lives. Maybe it's the idea of coffee, but at those moments I long for a simpler existence, one where I trot off to work with a briefcase and fulfill my civic duties until the time comes to go home and I make dinner and sleep a dreamless sleep.

I'm not depressed - there's no need to send me emails of concern. I'm not even frustrated. I'm just cautiously examining my dreams and wondering, for the first time, if perhaps I've dreamt too big, wanted too much. Maybe it would be easier, and more comforting, to dream smaller.

Then again, perhaps there's a nice middle ground that I can't see just yet. My other fantasy - the one involving an appropriately rustic cabin by a lake - that's sort of the grounding prerequisite for the rest of my life. Or, for some point in my life.

This is me, having a question: has anyone else noticed how quickly the moon travels across our sky? Because I looked up and out my window while I was in the middle of the sentence, and watched our growing-rounder moon sink from full exposure to complete obscurity behind a rooftop, all in a matter of seconds. And now my moon is gone.

Blargh. We each slowly navigate toward whatever we naturally do, one way or another. We rarely do what's difficult without having some sort of passion, the kind of passion that would be more difficult to overcome than accomplishing the thing itself. I suppose whatever it is, I should just do that.

Patriotism

We left too late. By the time we got downtown the streets were packed and the parking garages too full. Lyra sang songs in the backseat about the fireworks, and she's dressed in her dinosaur costume from Halloween last year. She hears more than you think she does. She heard me say that this was her first year to see the fireworks. The first year we could keep her awake is more like it. She was excited.

Someone was waiting for someone else to pull out of their parking spot - I know that wait. Five minutes before they're supposed to go off and I'm in a parking garage with a kid who's here to see the fireworks. I send Chris and Lyra off to get a spot. I don't want her to miss them. I personally don't care. I don't care about the crowds and I don't care about the fireworks. Maybe I'm too depressive these years. I used to cry when I'd hear "God Bless America" but those were the days when I still put my fingertips together to pray. Kids believe what they're told, you just can't lie to them, because they'll remember. Kids can lie. You just can't lie to kids. It breaks all the rules, suddenly they don't know who to trust or whether you mean anything you say.

Stupid kids. Lighting off firecrackers with babies around, doing somersaults in the air on a steep incline, slipping and falling. These kids are as old as I am. They don't know any better. Lyra wants to go somewhere else, so we take her closer to the waterfront. They're playing music with the fireworks, in case the one wasn't enough. In case the show wasn't good enough. I know it before she says it: people are everywhere but that isn't the problem; the music is loud but that isn't the problem. The problem is the same as with the thunder - she won't like it. And she doesn't. To her the sounds of our patriotism reek more of the sounds of gunshots and hand grenades. I don't blame her. I don't know what we're celebrating either. She asks to go home and I take her.

Hey, at least we're beating the crowds, Chris says. Yeah. The lady in the car in front of us is screaming - screaming - at the vw van that's winding down the parking garage too slowly. It's brakes are probably bad, I don't know. That thing's old.

On the way home the air is gray and smells of sulfur. I'm coughing. Lyra apologizes. My first fireworks and I don't like them, she says. I tell her it's ok, I don't like them much, either. I tell her she doesn't have to like anything if she doesn't want to. She's not just disappointed, but maybe she is. She's shocked at the boomingness of it all, and all the pretty lights and fancy colors in the world won't make up for it. I'm irritated. Not at her but my own trying. I hate going downtown, paying eleven bucks to park, and dealing with humans en masse. She hates it, too, but instead of thanking her I tell her it'll be great, get her excited, then I take her home when she's horrified. She's not me but she's like me, and I don't know how to act except how my parents acted. Like normal.

I keep trying to love her like she's someone else's child. But when I really love her, and maybe like her is a better way to put it, it's when she's doing nothing different but I'm looking at her, not as a child, but as someone who didn't figure out how to behave out of a book. Who hasn't learned all that yet. And sometimes I don't want her to be different; I don't want her to turn out like me, but then I look at where trying to be someone else has gotten me and I wonder what she'd be like if she just never bothered to try. Smarter, maybe. Definitely.

But where do we go when we only know how to act like normal? How do we act like ourselves? How do we raise our children to become who they are when we don't even know how to become who we are? I don't know.

Anatomy of a Sunset

My feet had already hit the floor by the time I came to, my toes tipping into the moisture that had pooled in from the open french doors. I grabbed my blanket, throwing it over my shoulders and wrapping it tight before I remembered I had been shivering, the fan still humming away. Lightning. The entire house had shaken - where were the others? Lyra would wake up soon enough, not used to the thunder, not accustomed to the room filled for an instant with brilliant white light nor the rumbling that would follow. She didn't know that you can count the distance of the lightning by the seconds it took for the thunder to come. In a few minutes, she would be afraid.

In this moment, I am only still shivering from the cold.

You can feel a thunderstorm before it begins, how the pressure builds until you feel damp and tight with humidity. I had woken up only an hour before, having intended to watch a movie but awakening with the remote still in my hand, the television airing a nondescript show on a nondescript channel. Two-thirty in the morning. Stiff. It was still hot then.

Now I'm awake again, not remembering the thunder but knowing it had left me here with wet feet. Chris will come upstairs, ask if I want the doors closed, and I will project everything upon that moment, that moment that I do not want the doors closed. I do not want the doors closed.

Ginger will lay panting upon my bed, her short-legged heart racing to a finish line I hope it will not cross. No one likes the loud noises but me - not Lyra, not the dog, maybe not even Chris who came upstairs. And I think only that it's too soon while I listen to the drumroll of the rain, that it isn't my birthday.

That this present isn't for me.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream...

It's unfortunate, perhaps, that our dreams efficiently mirror our waking mind-states. This can mean that never will you have to spawn a bipolar existence; but, on the other hand, should you be going through a particularly mundane period of your life, your dreams will also offer no vacation.

My dreams, lately, have dealt with repetition and frustration. In one dream, I washed and broke a dozen glasses, one after another, by haphazardly placing them on a wet windowsill, my frustration mounting as each new glass shattered. In another dream, I tried to have sex with four different people (not all at once), but each time something strange and disagreeable would happen: one partner grew a rather pinocchio-like nose, except much more frightening; another sprouted thick black hair all over his face; yet another fled when I suggested she take a shower (!); and the last, I fell asleep in a pile of clothes.

For a while, from about mid-March until quite recently, I wasn't sleeping. When I did sleep, it was restless and for months I hadn't been able to remember my dreams. Perhaps that's why they stand out so clearly to me now, these strange but frustrating dreams: very much like real life but exaggerated and with bonus special-effects. Yet in my dreams I am much more conscious of the forces at work than I am in waking life, despite being unable to change the inevitable outcome of whatever path I've taken: I'm aware in these dreams that I'm missing a piece of information or that I'm not looking at the situation in the proper way to achieve clarity. In waking life I merely bumble about. I may be suspicious that I'm missing something, but then again, we're all missing something - it's just whether that something is particularly relevant to what we need to know. Or what we want to know.

Right now, I'm awake. It's five twenty-five in the morning; still cool out. I think I'll make some tea.