blue canary in the outlet by the lightswitch who watches over you
Who is procrastinating?
That's right! Lots of people! But right now, right here, the salient answer is me, Julia A. ! I am procrastinating-- though, actually, I did manage to hand in two four-page assignments on time this week, and one poem revision early. But I've still gotta write two separate very large medical history research essays, one for Monday and the other for...I forget when. And then I have to do all of this compiling and fabrication and whatnot because two of my classes require portfolios. Anyway, in an admirable display of willpower, I did not check out Lauren Slater's part-fiction, part-memoir novel/book Lying from the "recent purchases/new arrivals" shelf in the school library, even though I could tell it would be wonderful just by flicking through it. "No," I said to myself, "I'm going to make some headway on that Mary Toft essay tonight!"
Instead, I took in the bodice of a thrift-store dress that had been much too big for me in the shoulders and chest, added a sort of decorative fabric scrap ribbon belt...thing...at the waist of said dress; ate pizza with pineapple and artichokes on it; did my laundry; went to the nurse to get eardrops; drank tea; wandered around in the dark; deliberately avoided a girl I find agreeable and a boy I dislike somewhat; thought about things that you'd make fun of me for thinking about if I told you, and wasted copious amounts of time on the internet. (Mostly that last one.)
There's a lot about the world that I don't understand. Love, for example. Oh, I know what I believe it feels like, and how I try to procure it from others, how I try to keep it, how it tethers me, makes me remember to be a person and want to become better at it, how it's always this enormous joy and this deep sadness all tangled up together in a knot that moves from the base of my spine to the divot between my collarbones to the hairs on the backs of my arms to the corners of my mouth and sometimes it's a huge knot and sometimes it's so small I can barely find it; then it'll catch on some part of me, and pull. Or, less dramatically, there are people I like to think about because thinking about them makes me feel the way sitting by a radiatior on a cold day makes me feel, or the way unexpectedly hearing one of my favorite songs in a public place makes me feel, or the way pictures of nebulae make me feel. The part I don't understand is the relationship part, and, to a slightly lesser degree, the sex part. It all seems so scary and complicated, and both evolutionary biology and popular magazines have proved laughably unhelpful in relieving that impression. Scary. Complicated. Overwhelmingly based on the assumption that women are attracted to men, and most especially to muscley men with chins like bricks, sexually dominant men who are smarter than they are and who will impregnate them with genetically robust babies, and then they'll all go live in a house with a lawn like a bright green buzz cut and eat artisan cheeses and the men will start sleeping with very young, intellectually vacuous blondes who have high waist-to-hip ratios as soon as those babies are grown and their mothers aren't pretty or fertile anymore. And if the mothers should have the temerity to start fucking sad-sack UPS men out of frustration, their husbands (of course the men and the women get married; everyone wants to get married) will one day burst in on them in the act of coitus. Then the husbands will shoot the pantsless UPS men and their own unwanted wives.
I painted my fingernails light silver and my toenails dark silver. Like the moon and the sidewalk at dusk.
On the bus last weekend, Freesia, Rex, and a couple of other kids kept talking about the TV shows they liked in elementary school, prompting me to search for and watch old Hey, Arnold! episodes on youtube while avoiding my essay. I'm pleasantly surprised; it's still about as good as I remember it being when I was ten. (And weirdly gritty in some ways, for a children's cartoon-- I mean, one character's mother is obviously an alcoholic, even though, of course, nobody ever uses the word "alcoholic" because it's TV-Y7. There's also an episode that's about a character having obsessive-compulsive disorder, except nobody ever says "obsessive-compulsive disorder," and his germ phobia, at least, is easily cured inside an eleven-minute time frame. Oh, children's television programming of the late 1990's and early 2000's.)
....Holy crud! It's two in the morning! How did that happen!? I'm not even tired!