Mind: Hey, why are we awake?
Body: I don’t know. Eyes are heavy. Aren’t you in charge of putting us to sleep?
Mind: You would blame me. I want to be asleep.
Eyes: Uh, guys?
Mind: Not now, eyes!
East-facing Morning Window: What up, motherfuckers? That’s right, the sun!
Birds: I’m a bird! I’m a bird! I’m a bird!
Yeah, this is why I don’t take classes at 8 in the morning. I’m fucking nuts.
Lately I’ve been catching up on what has become one of my favorite tv shows, Little Mosque on the Prairie. There is a couple on the show who are engaged and it’s so cute how the smallest things they talk about seem so important. I watched this little exchange over about five times…
Rayyan: I’m so excited. It’s our first joint purchase.
Amaar: And it’s a bed.
Rayyan: Where we’ll be sleeping.
Amaar: Together.
Rayyan: Presumably.
I totally stole this from Tumblr, but I had to post it here so I could find it again.
BURT: For most guys sex is just, you know this thing we always wanna do, you know, it’s fun, it feels great but we’re not really thinking too much about how it makes us feel on the inside or you know, how the other person feels about it.
KURT: Women are different?
BURT: Only because they get that it’s about something more than just the physical. When you’re intimate with somebody in that way, you’re exposing yourself, you know, you’re never going to be more vulnerable and that scares the hell out of a lot of guys. Believe me. I can’t tell you how many buddies I’ve got who have gotten in way too deep with a girl who said she was cool with just hooking up.
KURT: But that’s not going to happen to me, Dad.
BURT: No, it’s gonna be worse okay, because it’s two guys. With two guys, you got two people who think that sex is just sex. It’s going to be easier to come by and once you start doing this stuff, you’re not gonna wanna stop. You gotta know that it means something. It’s doing something to you, to your heart, to your self esteem even though it feels like just having fun.
KURT: So…you’re saying I shouldn’t have sex?
BURT: I think that on your thirtieth birthday it is a great gift to yourself. Kurt, when you’re ready I want you to be able to do…everything but when you’re ready I want you to use it as a way to connect to another person. Don’t throw yourself around like you don’t matter, because you matter Kurt.
“We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.”
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, readers are treated to a unique idea in the form of the Tralfamadorians, a race of aliens who capture Billy Pilgrim to put him in their human zoo. They teach him how to become unstuck in time. These beings do not experience their lives in the way that we think of as “in order”, that is birth to death, but instead as if all their life is happening and has already happened all at once. This idea of all moments, or time travel if you will, becomes the major structure of the novel. What interests me is how the Tralfamadorians acknowledge that the idea of free will is taken out of the picture by this conception of time, but fail to see how that should bother them. The quote at the beginning comes from one of the beings telling Billy Pilgrim that one of their people will shortly do something that will cause the whole planet to explode. Billy asks why they don’t stop him, still thinking in linnear time.
What if all things that happen are already predetermined in some way? I don’t know if I mean by any sort of higher power or just by natural events. If we think about it rationally, any time something happens, even something shocking, upon reflection there are always events that lead up to it, causes for the effect. Every moment in our lives is cause and effect. I can explain every facet of my personality by relating it to something that happened to me when I was younger. I am very uncomfortable with my face getting wet in the shower, the rain, or swimming because once when I was eight, I almost drowned in a neighbor’s pool. I didn’t drown, of course, because the moment wasn’t structured that way. Even if as people we are unable to become unstuck in time and live our moments out of sequence, we can still relive them through the way we remember them. I can still feel the cranking pain in my mouth as my mother expanded the crank in my palate when I had braces. I can still see the three brightly colored sailboats on my third birthday cake. I can still smell the lilac tree that flowered every summer outside my school.
I do begin to wonder if our lives are planned out in some way. A couple of weeks ago in Ruth’s tarot class, I drew the 6 of pentacles, a card that I was told is a positive message of prosperity or something of the sort. I did not see this at all. Instead, I became very concerned by the images I saw on my card. I became very suspicious of the being handing out the glowing orbs to the smaller beings waiting with outstretched hands. I particularly became concerned for a small, innocent looking gnomish man at the bottom of the card. He looked so beguiled by what he had been given, so childishly excited. I didn’t trust these gifts and I became taken over by a desire to help this small gnome man. I told the class that I felt the underlying message of the card was not to trust things that seem too easy, that I shouldn’t deny feelings of unease just because it would make others happy. I remember thinking nothing more of it at the time.
A week later, I started talking to this boy. He seemed very intelligent and keen on me. A tiny part of me felt very surprised, a tiny feeling that this was all too good to be true. I pushed it aside. He and I agreed that since I was graduating in a couple of months, there was no real point in our getting too serious, but we could entertain a sort of casual dating relationship anyway. This seemed eminently agreeable to me. Everything seemed to be going fine when he suddenly flipped out over something I had written on my personal blog, a very casual play-by-play of what we had been up to in the past few days. Though I thought it was an innocuous description at best, he told me it was extremely personal and that I had broken his trust. Look over it as I might, I could not figure out where he was getting this impression. The whole time we were talking, I thought he would suddenly reveal it as a joke. At first, I was feeling very bad about upsetting him, even if I didn’t understand how I had done it. Then he sent me a message saying we shouldn’t communicate any more because it was clear I was “falling for him”. I wasn’t. I became very furious that he couldn’t see my writing as an exercise in self-reflection, but only a lovesick girl mooning. He told me he knew from the beginning that he shouldn’t have started anything with me, but that he had against his better judgement. I was angry because I hadn’t liked him that much at the beginning and I definitely didn’t then.
You see, from the beginning I had already lived out the possible end of that relationship. I had seen myself at graduation, walking off back to my house and driving off back up north without a tear in my eye. Now, as it turns out, that isn’t how the acquaintance ended, but it is definitely true of how I will feel about him when I leave. If I remember him at all. I think back to my card, back to my concern with trusting something that seemed too easy, and realize that on some level my subconscious was trying to tell me something. When I saw a story of caution and concern in a card that means the opposite, maybe somewhere else in my timeline I had already lived the moment where a boy decided he knew more about my feelings than I did. Maybe when I distrusted the large fairy woman passing out the orbs, I was already feeling the echoes of the pretentious jackass who would make me feel bad about liking what I like. Maybe when I wanted to save that leprechaun from falling for the fairy orbs, it was because I knew I couldn’t. He would accept the orbs and I would waste a week on a patronizing idiot. So it goes.
I had a dream last night that I was at some kind of school-sponsored fight at Cary-Grove. My plan was the same as for dodgeball, hang around toward the back and emerge as the last one standing at the end. My friend Jena, who actually lives in Pennsylvania was there and she tossed me a bag of those “hope” rocks to hold for her while she jumped into the fray. Suddenly, Amanda’s ex Russell came up to me and started choking me. I was unable to get loose, so I swung with all my might and hit him in the back of the head with the bag of rocks. I ran away and later learned that I had killed him.
A singer I like, Jason Mraz, has a blog at http://freshnessfactorfivethousand.blogspot.com/.
He says many things I like. This was one of them:
“Once in my hotel room I begin altering the place ever so slightly. The first thing is to get some music on. At Burning Man I make a promise to myself that I will never listen to music at a low volume ever again. Music is for dancing – for penetrating your subconscious and having sex with your soul. Music should leave you feeling satisfied and full, like you’ve just had a big meal and need to take a nap. or a crap.”
My regimen for a date? Same as any day, but with slightly more concealer and a touch of mascara. I am very low-maintenance.
There are many things about this world and about the people around me that I do not understand. Many things I think are normal that turn out to be strange or vice versa. I’m not sure how this happened exactly; my parents are objectively normal members of society. I don’t know where I got these ideas.
When I was little, I never thought fart jokes were funny. I was never amused by quips about bodily functions. I’ve seen in movies and books the idea that every kid finds fart jokes funny at some point, and burping too. I never did. I legitimately don’t understand what could possibly be funny about them. I don’t want to try to ask anyone about it, but I suspect the answer might be “They just are” or something to that nature, as if the humor is inherent.
I never liked the random games people would play, because I didn’t like rules that would inconvenience me. If someone ever “jinxed” me, I would roll my eyes at them and give them a derisive stare before I would go on talking. If I were playing truth or dare and I was asked or told something I didn’t want to do, I wouldn’t do it. The others would be upset with me that I wasn’t “playing by the rules”, but I would get so frustrated because I didn’t want to play in the first place. I was only there joining in on their activities because I felt like it was normal, like it was something I was supposed to do. I tried to pretend like I was having fun, but I really wasn’t.
Though I am in college, I see no appeal in alcohol. Though I am very shy, I force myself to go to the parties held by people at school that seem to at least nominally accept me. I sit there while all they do is flip over cards or roll dice that tell them how much they get to drink. It makes me feel so sad because I literally cannot fathom why this is fun. “Let’s destroy our internal organs with liquids that will literally make our stomachs reject them.” Why is this entertainment? Why can we never do anything else? Maybe I’m strange, but I really enjoy a good challenging board game, or a card game that doesn’t involve how many shots my “friends” can throw down without passing out. Oh, sometimes they’ll have a couple people playing video games or something, but usually if we’re doing something that doesn’t involve alcohol it’s because we’ve gone out to do something, like eating at a restaurant. So I have to pay not to sit and watch my friends drink? Last night was one of those get-togethers, everyone in a circle with their own aims to get plastered. I sat there watching them, because I felt like I was still “supposed to” be there even if I wasn’t having any fun. The night dragged on and everyone stopped talking to each other and instead shouting about how one person or another had to drink. I wanted to go home so badly, to not be there, but I felt trapped in my chair, like it would be some kind of “serious party foul” if I tried to leave. I was there probably an hour longer than I wanted to be before I finally summoned up the courage to rise from my chair and grab my jacket. If this is how other gatherings are going to go (and precedent seems to be set up for that), I’m not sure I want to go next time. I will, though, because even friends that make me feel uncomfortable and awkward are supposed to be better than spending the time alone in my room. That’s supposed to be the case. Why doesn’t it feel that way? I don’t understand.
I buy and make things for my friends a lot. I even do this for friends I don’t know as well, ones to whom I don’t owe that social obligation. I always say that my favorite part of a gift giving holiday is watching the recipient’s face light up upon oppening my present. Only, I sometimes wonder if that’s less just from a selfless desire to see them happy than it is a feeling of security that they won’t leave me.
I have had several friends leave me over the years. I don’t hang out with anyone from SSPP. I had a group at CG that abandoned me in a cruel way. I’ve had friends who just stopped contacting me, friends I gave up on because I hated feeling like I’m forcing them to spend tim with me. Gift giving has become a sort of self-preservation. If I make them happy, they won’t leave me. If they feel taken care of, I won’t have to be alone. Only, I still feel alone mostly.
My brother’s Christmas gifts to me this year represented the first time in a long time I’ve felt like someone really cared if I was happy. Sure, he got the ideas off a wish list, but he still chose 5 items off 6 pages and managed to find some of the best ones. He remembers what I tell him as if it matters.
Sure, I’ve had other presents in the past that I’ve liked okay, but for me it’s really all about the thought. I consider gifts in advance and put in hours of labor creating them just so someone can smile. I never believe them, never think I’ve done quite enough to keep them. I can’t help but feel as though they will all leave me some day. In my worst fears I end up old and alone, dying in my house with no one finding me, noticing I’m gone, until I’ve started to decompose.
Maybe that’s a little morbid, but I can’t help it. I don’t know how to feel better.
Hyperspace Portal 