Break ur heart 2 the beat
I walk to the bathroom at 11:23 and going through my tiny kitchen notice the smell of an entire bunch of rotting bananas. I do not think I ate one banana because they were green and therefore not good. But due to my negligence, they passed through the valley of tasting good and back to not good to so not good that they are bad. SAD!
In the bathroom, I clip my toenails while I pee—the ultimate multitask. It is dark and I keep it dark so as not to re-initiate the eye-adjustment process. I do have a lamp, because this past weekend I went to the thrift store I bought a lamp and lampshade that don’t match and don’t even fit together because the lampshade sticks—which I’m sure have a term in some artisan world—are too short. I thought it might magically work out somehow because of earlier evidence of good fortune working in my favor, and a trust in that kismet-y feeling. The evidence? I’d pulled something off like this before when my roommate and I bought two halves (one top and one bottom) of different synthetic (aka FAKE) Christmas Trees from Philly AIDS Thrift. The differences between the two species of fake tree were almost indistinguishable and, also, endearing. Most importantly, they had fit together. This is not the case now. I’ve tried to force the lamp and lampshade to be compatible by MacGyvering them together with two pencils and tape and the result has been... wobbly. It was doomed from the start.
As I return to bed from my late-night pee (remember, in darkness), the new lampshade takes a dramatic leap towards gravity, breaking away from one of the pencils and its tape. This is a bit startling in the dark considering yesterday was Halloween and I listened to, not one, but TWO scary story podcasts. And somehow, the lampshade did not fall due to a giant gust of wind caused by… my body getting back into bed(?). HEY, I’M NOT THAT BIG so I think idk maybe it was… like… a little ghost? (Cognitive scientists might say this is just my hypersensitive agency detection device going off but regardless: GULP!) I turn on the overhead light. The lamp now looks like a funny Pixar character with a lightbulb head and two pencil arms, one of which is holding the lampshade like an umbrella, performative-ly. My paper on Locke is due Wednesday, P.S.
It’s November 1st, almost 2nd, and about this time seven years ago I was posting a photo of Freaks and Geeks on Facebook that you would later comment on. (P.s. I no longer have Facebook.) This, of course, would lead to an invite to your band’s show in December and the start of how things started. On the 1st of November, however, seven years ago, I was calling someone else to tell them we couldn’t talk anymore, not at all, because I had unrequited feelings for said person AND HE KNEW THAT AND HAD STILL BEEN WRITING ME LETTERS (handwritten) WITH POEMS. That, my little lamp, is called cruelty. (I did not tell him I had unrequited feelings by saying unrequited feelings. I said, “yeah, kinda still not over you and feeling sad” or something equally nebulous, as one does when you’re only twenty.
Anyway, lesson one for hurting a person helplessly in love with you: write them letters. But poetry? That’s actually pro-status torture. Anyway, Hurricane Katrina had also been blowing through the northeast that weekend. That was seven years ago. That is relevant. It rained and rained and rained.
John Locke seems extremely overrated and I’m the first in my class this semester to say so. His whole dealio is that all our brains are blank pages as little newborn babes, and therefore just ready for our senses to fill us with ideas, inherently blah blah blah, But! (And I paid attention, because a paper pointing out flaws in an argument writes itself) By page 78 he’s changed his tune, going on and on about intuition and things we just ~know~ somehow, and he really could have used a fact-checker or annoying internet commenter-type person to say, “Uh, hey dude, remember page 12?” But instead, he died. And now a MILLION philosopher grad students have the opportunity to tell him instead. JUST KIDDING, GOTCHA!! There have never been a million people so stupid as to go back to grad school for philosophy. (Just a few sad ones, I think.)
Here in my little apartment where I now live alone (who thought it would be possible!?) with only my lovely Finnish landlords upstairs and, until recently, the horse in the back pasture. Sadly the horse has just left to go back to its winter home because the back pasture is only its summer vacation home. The horse’s name is Sugar and so is the wifi password. I’ve blasted the space heater too high and am now overheating in a Steelers crewneck that is grey. My pants are also grey. Locke would say that the color of the outfit is a secondary quality and therefore not inherent in the outfit itself. I say Locke has really killed my weekend plans. The lamp is amused and laughs at me as he waves his umbrella.
My Finnish landlady once took pictures with me and Sugar in an impromptu photoshoot. It was her idea. It crosses my mind that you are in Pittsburgh and I don’t think you are anywhere taking photoshoots with horses and I think you would laugh if you knew. My landlord thinks I am sweet because she has seen me take photos with Sugar the horse and buy fun Halloween balloons and because I’m extremely silly and curious have a lot of quirky knick-knacks (aka tchotchkes). She has not seen me be a total PMS monster who hits someone with flowers after he gives them to her and won’t let him call her his girlfriend even though he has written her a deeply moving and unforgettable-even-after-seven-years love letter. I think I’ll leave that out in future conversations.
Not eating even one banana of a whole bunch results in extreme food-waste guilt and I ponder if the bananas are still just at the precipice of over-grossness and might be saved by some meager attempt at banana bread. As I think of banana bread and its necessities and I hear funny sounds in my apartment and try to ignore them. I don’t have flour. I don’t have flour and I don’t have vanilla or sugar or a baking pan or a mixer or another person to live with who might help me eat banana bread. And that is a sad thing a person says to make others have pity on them. This is like someone posting a status on Facebook back in the day like, “oh man, why does everything have to go wrong?” and ur reading it like, lolwut? (P.s. I no longer have Facebook. Did you notice? DID YOU LOOK?)
I’m a T.A. at school. Are you impressed? Don’t be because I didn’t even have to apply and even when I started I told them, hey I think I’m probably not qualified and they said, you’re a grad student you’re qualified and I said “oooohhhhkaaaaayyy” with uncertainty and trying to seem a little humble and likable at the same time. But then I turned in my first paper for this Empiricism class and it was apparently so bad that the professor did not even give me a grade and, let me tell you, I am back on the for-sure-not-qualified train, and now, also, the please-help-me-oh-my gosh-I’m-freaking-not-going-to-pass!-help!-omg train. (That explains the import of this Locke paper.)
Anyway, I am a T.A. and I tell these poor students of 18 and 19 years that they could, “develop the idea” and “show the evidence” and “watch for complete sentences” and then stick a big ol’ numero in the grade book and hope they don’t recognize me on campus. That’s right—I have not been to a single class. I am supposed to go to one and it will be a funny experience. (You know not, “ha-ha” funny, obviously.) I wish I could tell them about the terrible no-good grade I got on my own paper—so bad it doesn’t even get a grade. But, ALAS! then they will probably have existential crises because HOW IS SHE A T.A.?! and we can’t have that because I need $CAD.
Grades are a strange strange peculiar strange thing. We either continue to subject ourselves to them or break out of academia early, but all students seem to have some sort of weirdo relationship (servitude, mainly) with them unless we were homeschooled or in a commune, etc. How about that?
Hurricane Katrina is relevant because that was the reason the aforementioned letter-writer had reared his head back in the day (the day that made me totally single again, the day that prepared me to post about Freaks and Geeks on Facebook and somehow attract your attention). The letter writer had been hanging out in Mississippi and smoking cigs while waiting to help save people from natural disasters. And that’s why he called. Katrina WAS the disaster.
It is 12:25 and the lampshade has just made its final descent to the floor in the dark with a startling noise. My heart is now racing because gosh gee that was unexpected AFTER AN HOUR of gravity doing its work. Slow and steady. It’s now tomorrow, anyway.
Katrina came. It didn’t blow anything away but, somehow, I think it brought you.
And it rained and rained and rained and rained
and rained
and rained
and rained
and rained
and rained
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