reintroduce

Blogs are so strange because you can drop them for years upon years and come back to them and post something new right along a written version of yourself from five years prior. That's really mind-blowing, to see and recall your brain process before major life changes leading you to become the person that you are in the process have occurred and remember it exactly, and to juxtapose it against who you are now. Really weird.

I'm struggling with some heavy topics in my mind lately, not in a negative way but just struggling to think through them and figure out my perspective. There are really so many, but I'll write about a few that I can remember and articulate.

I want to get back to being the soul that I used to be, if that makes sense. I want to come through this enlightenment and regain my self-identity that I once knew clearly and strongly, but only act the way I would in light of this new knowledge. I lost myself in the process for a long time.

chop suey

My joke of 11/25:
Girl 1: If I don't go to the bathroom now I'm going pee right here in my seat!
Girl 2: She's pissed, isn't she?
Me: Not yet!

The bus I ride to school is grossly overfull by the time I board it in the morn, and equally packed by the time it leaves in the afternoon. Typically I find myself atop the lap of some punk due to the scarcity of seating during my daily commute and consequently forced to converse with him for an uncomfortable ten minutes on the details of his musical tastes. As I strain both to hear this poor schmuck and feign interest in his band (which he describes as "a cross between Korn and Chiodos") over the screams of hysterical hispanics in the background and the blasting of Lil Wayne from ipods in the fore, the bus inevitably stops not to relieve itself of its literal piles of school children, but to actually add more. Incredulously, my bus driver opens the gluttonous mouth of the vehicle to allow it to engulf another three students into its bursting belly. By this point in our pilgrimage my only thought is of the expulsion of my body from the pit of this prison-on-wheels like the happy vomit from the stomach of an idiot bulemic.

Quite symbolically, some anonymous fellow rider scratched the phrase "Help Us" into the frost on the window this morning. I smiled at this unknown claustrophobic companion for the duration of our journey, and hoped he or she gasped the cold air of the outside as joyously as I did once free from the repression of the school bus, and that he or she secretly, like me, danced in the spacious, expansive openess of nature, of the outside, of our freedom from confinement in these quick precious moments between leaving the bus and once again entering school.

shivers

Standing at the bus stop before school requires garb fit for weathering Siberian winters. The temperature today, however, was gracious and permitted open toed shoes in place of my usual black boots. I am thankful for these small mercies on my feet.
My thoughts, as of late, revolve around the mechanics of human relationships: expectations and choices and their respective consequences. In human interaction nothing can be expected. Obligation is a farce! Obligation never prevails!
I see my altered view as a product of reading Frankenstein, oddly enough. The logical interchange between characters effected me in a way I did not foresee. I am liberated from the dictations of my imaginations and free to exercise the phrase "we'll see what happens".

I sound fanciful and I DON'T GIVE A FUCK; I love my elevated style of writing and I will never denounce it for Puritan plainness.

gaudy

Sometimes all I can write about is a thesis, and a terribly concise one at that. Within those handful of words I can see pages of an argument, but I restrain myself from adornment and allow them to remain minimal, pure and precise. These statements are perfect in and of themselves – why mask the flavor of a well roasted chicken with too many spices? Why overpower a beautiful dress with a fist full of jewels? Excess is vanity.

initially

As a kid (and to this day) I had a tumultuous relationship with sleep. When I was five or six I had an ancient portable t.v. set in my bedroom. It had an antenna and a radio dial which I could manipulate to receive a very limited handful of channels in black and white on a six by six inch screen. Due to the finite options my t.v. offered I watched Jeopardy on it every night at seven, Wheel of Fortune at eight, and then ghost stories or "stranger than fiction" type shows until maybe ten o'clock. Although given the selection presented by cable I may have favored the Disney channel over tales of tortured spirits I absolutely adored having the shit scared out of me nightly before bed, and especially before I awoke for kindergarten at Catholic school. But any ways, I didn't sleep. I watched dramatizations of demonic possessions and abductions by aliens late into the night, in seclusion and privacy.

When my parents realized some months later how late I was staying awake watching television they took the set out of my room. I haven't had a tv in my bedroom since, more than ten years later.

But I still didn't sleep, so to take up the three hours between bed time and when I finally felt I could close my eyes was Harry Potter. The first book I can really remember reading was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and I remember LOVING it. I also remember thinking it was the most massive thing I had ever seen, and that it was immensely impressive.

Eventually my parents realized yet again that their six year old was calling it a night some time around eleven, so they periodically grounded me from Harry Potter. I found nothing to fill time with then. I just remember lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to think of as many different things as I could so that I would forget that I was trying to fall asleep.