Okay, i hate the phone. Got that? Hate it. If i ask you for your number, i really don’t want to have an at length phone conversation where i can make a complete ass out of myself for an entire hour without being able to do anything endearingly cute. This is not to say that i don’t want to talk, it’s just to say that it’s hard to have a meaningful silence on the telephone and so i fill them all with a ton of meaningless blather until you contrive a reason to hang up on me.
Not that she contrived a reason to hang up on me; i’m not that inept.
Yes, this means i got up the guts to pick up a phone and call her. No, i do not have an actual time for our lunch date. Yes, i suspect i am absolutely moronic enough on the telephone that any tiny inkling of attraction she might have had has now been flushed down the toilet. Yes, this means i have to call her again some other time if i ever want to see her.
Girls. What was wrong with asexuality, again?
I am in my green lawn chair, but my systems are shutting down for bed regardless of my physical location. First the vision started to fuzz, which lead to my discovery that my mouth was no longer in operation. Next to go were my legs, which quivered and quavered on my way to the bathroom to much that i was afraid i’d be discovered upen daybreak wrapped around the porcelain god in a defeated slumber. Back in my room my stomach gave out, which left me feeling somewhere between full and hungry … which is to say i feel like i am missing a chunk of insides, and the signals that that sends are decidedly mixed. Finally, my neck altogether stopped necking, which leaves my head lolling on the back of my funky green lawn chair, trying to offer my eyes a viable vantage point upon the screen. As for the eyes, i suspect that they’re the next to go; right now all i can see is the white of the screen, and everything around/behind it is a swirling vortex of blackness.
It is sleep; i am asleep except for glowing white box of blogger and clickity clack hands and even they are starting to go, hitting delete as much as they are finding the right things to say. It would seem that (whoops, eyes are shut now, this should be fun) all systems are ready for a recharge save for one: my brain. Leave it to old wrinkly to be racing at a time like this, when everything else is in a decided mutiny against it’s slavedriving will. (Head seems to be sliding off of the back of the chair, perhaps in an attempt to spill brain onto floor through ear. Doesn’t seem to be working).
So, like i said in the beginning of this strange narrative (see last post, silly), this is an experiment. Actually, my paper was the experiment, and i’m sure the results will be painful (at best). This is… it’s companion … my attempting to do something that’s usually a simple simple thing for me just to see how it turns out … of course, that’s not anything i can ascertain right now, but this should be amusing as hell to read tomorrow morning.
(The body says: ha! tomorrow morning? remember that bit about not waking up? you’re not the one who gets to decide… oh dear, i’m talking to myself, that would seem to indicate that mind has joined the fray of … um… oh, dear, i seem to be walking towards bed. uh, goodnite).
Today was a day wholly without purpose until 11:57, which is not the time that i would suggest that you set when it comes to acquiring a purpose — not just in the sense that technically the day ends a scant three minutes later, but also because it clearly means you wasted a whole gaggle of useful hours doing absolutely nothing. Which, and i’m not going to split hairs about it, i did. All day. In fact, i almost decided not to wake up; at the time it seemed like a conscious decision that i could make and stick with. Just… don’t open my eyes. Turn over a couple more times. Wake up on Monday, check my email, and go to class.
Please excuse any incoherencies that emerge as this rambles on. It is an experiment.
The two things that occurred to me at 11:57 were really one thing with another bigger, fatter thing sitting on top of it. The primary thing was that i almost surely had a paper due within the next two days, and that i should figure out which of the four papers i have due this week it was. The hulking thing that was standing in the way of this was my room. Or, more specifically, the mess therein.
My room is/was a mess; i do not attempt to deny it. I am the only person that has to live here, and ostensibly the mess makes it impossible for me to bring anyone home with me from a party because i might lose her on the way to the bed. I don’t necessarily mind all the stuff i have scattered around, but at the same time i somewhat enjoy order (and an unobstructed view of freshly vacuumed green carpeting). Thus, cleaning commenced shortly before midnight.
With me, cleaning is a circular exercise… it’s never just one thing or one place i have to tidy up. Instead, one thing leads to the next and the next until picking up a penny turns into my unearthing my desktop from the mess of cds and bills that it was submerged in. So, it’s not as though i could just find the paper that would tell me the relevant facts about my papers so much as that i had to circle (like a starved vulture over a decaying hunk of carrion) my room until it turned up. And circle i did… and circled and circled.
(This is where i skip over the part about my learning that the Latin American Lit paper was due tomorrow, the Theory one on Tuesday, and the incredibly daunting one on International CopyRight and the Internet due on Thursday. I’m sure you can imagine how fun it was.)
Dr. Ibieta asked for a 750-1000 word paper, and i intended to deliver one. However, around 845 i found myself getting a wee bit weary … both of staring at my monitor and of being awake. Contrary to what you might expect, such weariness motivates me not to quickly reach a summation in my academic wanderings, but to instead blather in a more circuituous route until i finally run out of steam altogether and wind up ending in an unceremonious heap wherever i fall. That’s what happened. To further prolong my weary misery, i decided that i wasn’t just interesting in writing the paper, but also in the paper making some small amount of sense, so i endeavored to read it back to myself. Upon attempting such a feat i discovered that even with my reading glasses weighing in heavily on the bridge of my nose i was basically seeing the screen in triplicate, and that my only hope in untangling the web i had woven with words was in reading it aloud to see if it made a single lick of sense.
My next discovery was that my mouth had stopped working at some point during my typing-spree. I read and re-read my hulking paragraphs, but all that came out was a weary drone that increasingly lacking ennunc- and pronounc- iation. I tried to force my lips to comply with the onscreen syllables, and i was rewarded with a feeling akin to the hinges of my jaw weeping. The proceeded to weep through three consecutive readings of my paper, during which i combined several paragraphs and excised 200 spare words that i had accumulated along the way. The result is a paper of perfect size and shape with a somewhat tenuous grasp on its own narrative (which isn’t a very good thing, since its supposed to be a paper about narrative)…
AKA Music also has something blaring very loudly when i am shopping there. The first time i ever walked in they had Keep It Like a Secret playing much louder than i had ever heard it, and i took it as a good omen and proceeded to spend $100 dollars there. Subsequent trips have produced equally loud music and large expenditures.
The music is always especially loud in the back by the used section because one of the waist-high speakers is located right next to used soundtracks. That’s about where Rabi had gotten in her browsing, while i had drifted over to where ‘Y’ and ‘I’ face each other — alternately looking for Hum and Neil Young’s Decades. I was saying something, and then she was saying something, and then the music turned off and i found that we were standing in the middle of a record store screaming something at each other from across and aisle in a (suddenly not-so-) futile attempt to be heard over non-existent blaring music.
“Rabi, we’re shouting!”
It only felt a little like Clue, but everyone was watching us and we were yelling something stupid about records and it was hilarious. I left with an Ivy record, a Tori single that i quite enjoy, classic NIN from $4, and a Bright Eyes EP at a Rabi approved price. Rabi left with stuff i didn’t even vaguely recognize the name of. Otherwise, there was a lot of walking, kvetching about lemonade, talking about crushes and of ears, and giggling. Oh, and the couple on the bench next to ours at Rittenhouse did a lot of making out. All in all, it was a wonderful evening.
The trees were lit up with colored balls that we spotted from blocks away, and as we spoke my gaze kept wandering away from our wooden bench and out into the forest of glowing spheres. I can’t believe i’ve only met her four times. I can’t believe it’s been an entire year.