Vile Chemicals from Monrovia, CA

The following was written yesterday.

Today was a pretty interesting day. Not really that interesting in terms of what I did, but rather what I thought in my little head. There was one key event that affected the rest of the day, and it was last night's visit to Traderous Joe that brought about this event.

I got to work at around lunchtime, and, feeling a bit guilty about it - though not too guilty mind you, considering the late nights and weekends I sometimes work, insufferable office neighbor, and poisonous cafeteria food - and so I got to work instead of getting to lunching. Peckish, I set about a box of chocolate-covered espresso beans. Appetite, they say, arrives during the meal. And so, one after another, my caffeinated friends met their doom.

The rest of the day was me putting a spin on the jittery delirium. There was some work done. I dove deep into webcomic archives. I read Wikipedia entries for malt and Admiral Akbar. I penned a politically-motivated blogpost for no readily available reson. I discussed stylesheet-imposed relative and absolute positioning with Rando Commando. I guess the best word to describe what I was feeling was upset. We tend to use that word when something is wrong, but its actully its etymology does not suggest any grief. My mind was knocked off course by a chemical imbalance, and I was thankful for it. Thank you, coffee bean friends!

Nothing focuses me better than discomfort. Conversely, it's not surprising that lately my mind has been hazy, resilient to change, minimally creative, and generally useless. It's just too damn comfortable lately.

I remember I was on a car trip with Lyuba, my older sister. It was a barren Indiana winter, and her shitty Neon's heat was turned up to max, but it wasn't helping, because Lyuba had rolled down the window so that she could smoke. The cold was seeping into my spots - secret and otherwise. I was cussing intermittently, mostly out of principle. When we tired of the music, Lyuba had me change tapes. Tapes. I got some York Peppermint Patties to make the truck stop coffee go down easier. I don't remember how many winters ago this was, but I imagine that I had the eternal thoughts in my head - about one girl while getting text messages from another, about what to do with adulthood, about what it takes to be happy, and whether I had it in me, and whether there was really anything wrong if I didn't. Lyuba was probably talking about the usual things - the grad school annoyances, why all the men she met were big losers. And, since we were headed north, we were discussing our crazy family. Everybody's got a crazy family, it's true, but I'd enter mine in any contest that requires defying rational thought.

So why is it that in my cozy corporate job with the medical insurance, a sharp car, and a bigass TV, why is it that I look back wistfully on those few shivering hours?

I was getting tired of the mental whirlwind. Again, "getting tired" is used mostly as a euphimism, but I mean that I was just exhausted of getting my thoughts scattered. I thought that a Guinness would relax me a bit. Nah, it just tasted good.

Tasted good like when we kept our Guinness cool by putting it in the water as we went swimming in a reservoir at The Red. Tasted good like the beer that I smuggled into my dorm room after my astronomy lab group left the field where we mapped constellations, and went to a field where partook in herbology.

It was getting late, so I went home so that I could put more wear in my sofa cushions. So I can pace, brew some tea, pull a book from the shelf, read a page, put it back, wonder about what else I should buy like a good little consumer to introduce some change into my life, write a random letter to a random lost friend, who's probably married now.

I ate my vegetarian stew, listened to some newly downloaded music, and wrote this. Conclusion: the last De La Soul album blows, while Prince Paul decidedly rocks.