slices of everything, catch in my chest!
Miranda July understands what a book cover ought to promise.
Anyway.
I forgot how weird it was to have brain-based disabilities and be in a psychology-related class where nobody knows you have brain-based disabilities, and maybe it doesn't start off as a secret, exactly, but it becomes a secret sooner or later because you want to be treated like a peer and not like a case study or a specimen. Still, I'm excited! Excited for classes! Excited for grammar, even! Descriptivism, you are my friend! Unless I wanna be pretentious about something! I like...ohgosh, I like knowing the parts of things. I like knowing the way things work. Someone was saying the other day that he didn't enjoy thinking about the mechanisms that underlie his use of language because it took all the magic out of poetry for him, somehow. I don't understand that at all. I find that my awe and wonder and love for a thing only increase as I learn more about its pieces and workings and sequences. (And sometimes my horror and sadness increase too, but let's leave that for now and anyway, I don't get more bored.) As I learn how much I still need to learn, how much I don't comprehend the way the world goes at all. And there's this sublime satisfaction for me in categorizing and ordering and seeing patterns and, and playing with them, and just. Visualizing all these layers of complexity in any little thing, and slipping between them and sinking through them and striving to inhabit the whole at once. And I can't tell you how much magic there is in the world for me a lot of the time, how much mystery. For example, I still can't divine the source of or solution to my computer's recurrent problems, and this has brought to my attention the fact that I really only have the vaguest idea of how computers actually fucking work. I could probably tell you more about how your brain works than I could about how your computer works, and that's not a testament to my comprehensive understanding of modern neuroscience, believe me.
I'm just reading my books and decorating my wall with pictures I cut out of old magazines I've scavenged and trying to keep my space neat & clean and freaking out about this amazing album I just rediscovered (which, unfortunately, will probably never not remind me of relinquishing my virginity and working long nighttime hours developing prints of bad photographs in a tiny darkroom-- though, um, not at the same time). I kind of want to write stories based on it. (Also, the cover is, no hyperbole, one of the most gorgeous I have ever seen.)
Oh, and I guess this is fairly old news, but in my magazine back issue wall picture hunting, I ran across a (very respectful) article and (quite pretty) series of photographs about this tiny teenage subculture of people who consider themselves "wolves" or "werewolves," wear wolf tails, and run in heirarchical packs. (And hang out in shopping malls for some reason, which doesn't strike me as a terribly wolf-like thing to do, but anyway.) Actually, I thought it was sort of cool, or, I mean, I really love the idea of animal-people & teenage werewolves, not so much the execution of the archetype in this case, so I did some internet searching and discovered that one of the wolf-girls was accused of killing her neighbor's dog last winter and there was this big kerfluffle about it and I am honestly mystified at the level of vitriol and the fever-pitch that some of the coverage seems to have reached, as there seems to be no actual evidence that the young woman killed the dog herself rather than simply taking the head from its dead body and preserving it via taxidermy. I didn't realize that being a morbid, geeky eccentric with goofy taste in clothes made one an instant criminal. It's an interesting story, though.