Do you want to know who I am?
I don't want the world to see me
'Cause I don't think that they'd understand
This is a post full of mundane things. Things that actually make up my life.
When my alarm rings, I have invariably not had enough sleep. I have to cross my room, a veritable minefield of mess at this time of year, to retrieve my cell phone and turn off my alarm. I used to set my alarm (one of several bouncy latin tunes) twice in the morning, but I'm trying to break that habit, and succeeding some days. I stumble across my room in a fog, sometimes in the dark, then stumble back and crawl back into my bed where I can be securely wrapped in an electric blanket - I usually turn it up higher at that point - and turn on my light, blinking until I adjust to being awake at whatever hour I've awoken. Anywhere from 7am to 1pm, depending on the day.
When I finally get dressed at least 15 minutes later, I bemoan how little time I have to get wash done and I try and do at least a minute of sorting, partially keep to keep my floor pathway cleared of random items like dress shoes left there after a late night... I unplug my phone from the charger, I take my iPod out of the cradle and put it back in the purple case, plug in the tiny FM transmitter and consider and dismiss various ways of attaching it. I check my pockets for keys and cards. Sometimes I look for something I've misplaced, sometimes I even find it.
When I get to the front door and observe both my car and the relative temperature and conditions of the outdoors, I am usually very displeased to find a layer of frost - or better, snow - on my car. Especially lately since my defrost has been sporadic in its helpfulness, and my sleep has been sporadic in actually offering me rest as well.
I remember one day last week coming out and almost bursting into tears at the 4-5 inches of snow that I had to clear off my car. At least it's a small car, I remember thinking. Sometimes when that wave of tired hits, you can't handle anything. I also remember that it was that day my energy came back.
My parking spot on campus is about an 8-10 minute walk from anything art-related but the sculpture studio, which being out in the far reaches of campus is right near my car. After a great deal of work I've managed to keep my lateness on the level, except for a streak of two weeks where my unparalleled exhaustion prevented me from coherence or ability to make it anywhere on time due to my sluggishness - even leaving an hour and a half.
That morning walk - I walk even if I'm late - changes daily. Sometimes I can see my breath, sometimes I have to avoid slush, sometimes the air freezes my flesh inside and out until I am bone-chilled and don't warm up for hours. Sometimes the frost covers everything and I wish fervently that I had nothing better to do that to dress warmly and softly brush the crystals off the trees and watch them fall, glittering, when I pass with my camera.
I go to class. I like all my classes, content, Profs, classmates. Hard to like anything when a person's that tired, though.
Monday nights I work at Printmaking, which is usually due on Tuesdays. Usually I go to the Library computers for a bit first and organize my Gmail. I have a folder entitled "Links For Better Days" where I relegate all the interesting stuff for later. I've packed off anything remotely resembling a newsletter until after I'm done school. I have a draft in Gmail where a books-to-read list is piling up. And that's just personal life stuff. Usually I spend my Gmail time frantically trying to reduce the emails in my inbox to under a hundred by killing the irrelevant ones and filing the relevant ones I'll remember without them in front of my face. It's about this time I give up, feeling that my life is stupidly complicated, and take off for Printmaking to do grunt work until too late in the evening.
Tuesday evenings after Printmaking the class is officially over I sometimes start work on the next project, but when 6:45 rolls around I take off for Ballroom and after Ballroom I often go out with classmates for snacks and drinks. Wednesdays and Fridays I don't have an official schedule and so it ranges from hardcore art work to paid work to essays to reading to visiting to errands, but on Wednesday nights I have C&C. Thursdays I have Care Group. Fridays are different every week. Sometimes I just stay home. Weekends are often either completely full of work or volunteer work or travel or ballroom.
If I make it home early enough in the evening, it's fairly obvious that my parents are still all excited about the new Wii. They play games on it constantly, and being excellent parents generally ignore my protestations that I have work to do and force me to have some fun on the Wii instead, if only for a little bit. I like the Wii, I just have other things to do - more paid work than I can handle, more school work than I can handle, and just enough volunteer work to make the whole thing disgusting. I spend hours just trying to sort my life out enough to actually get work done when it needs to be done.
I spend stupid amounts of time with friends to preserve my sanity. I try and incorporate them into my work time when I can, or I save certain days and times for them - usually my evenings so I only do schoolwork during the day - or more realistically, during the night.
I like working in the labs when there's only one or two people there, or none at all. I'm not really creeped out by empty spaces, rather I find them comforting. I know that my attraction to the night is partially because I'm actually a severe introvert - by which I mean that people, even people who I don't have to interact with whatsoever but exist in the same space, drain my energy. I build up energy inside my mind. I am what the world may term as gifted - high IQ, as if that means anything. Emotionally and physically sensitive, and a synesthete. I say things that others find odd, and I have a tendency of commenting on things: that the feel of the waxy sheen on a a leaf is one of my favourite textures, or that lemons and limes are NOT the same, a lemon tastes sharp and it tastes like the color aquamarine, or maybe it tastes like a slightly out of tune high C# note on a flute, whereas limes actually taste like bright yellow and are more like an F# minor chord in the third octave from middle C when played on a piano. Despite the sharpness of both, I love each flavour, and partly because it is all things to me. Some flavours, the duller ones, do not evoke such multifaceted color. Most of these things I keep to myself. Too weird for most people. Doesn't compute.
I notice all these things more when my routine is off. When my keys are out of my pocket, when I deliberately change something and create a habit of it. When, like today, I take my car in to the shop at 8am on a Monday - a time I haven't visited on that day of the week for nearly 6 months - and watch the sun rise as my mechanic (the owner, who gets ride privileges) gives me a ride to school.
This is the substance of my life - my arms covered in black streaks of ink, my fingernails each in various states of disrepair, often ripped off after being cracked while at work, my glasses usually at some level of a disreputably oily state because I just don't think about them half the time.
And when I look in the mirror in the morning, I wonder absently, and nothing really special passes through my head as I examine my face, which has barely changed since I was 5. Sometimes I think I don't really look like me, or, more often, I'm in there somewhere.
Sometimes I just stare into tired eyes and wonder if I'll ever slow down for longer than a snatched moment to really enjoy the world I live in.
When everything's made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am
'Cause I don't think that they'd understand
This is a post full of mundane things. Things that actually make up my life.
When my alarm rings, I have invariably not had enough sleep. I have to cross my room, a veritable minefield of mess at this time of year, to retrieve my cell phone and turn off my alarm. I used to set my alarm (one of several bouncy latin tunes) twice in the morning, but I'm trying to break that habit, and succeeding some days. I stumble across my room in a fog, sometimes in the dark, then stumble back and crawl back into my bed where I can be securely wrapped in an electric blanket - I usually turn it up higher at that point - and turn on my light, blinking until I adjust to being awake at whatever hour I've awoken. Anywhere from 7am to 1pm, depending on the day.
When I finally get dressed at least 15 minutes later, I bemoan how little time I have to get wash done and I try and do at least a minute of sorting, partially keep to keep my floor pathway cleared of random items like dress shoes left there after a late night... I unplug my phone from the charger, I take my iPod out of the cradle and put it back in the purple case, plug in the tiny FM transmitter and consider and dismiss various ways of attaching it. I check my pockets for keys and cards. Sometimes I look for something I've misplaced, sometimes I even find it.
When I get to the front door and observe both my car and the relative temperature and conditions of the outdoors, I am usually very displeased to find a layer of frost - or better, snow - on my car. Especially lately since my defrost has been sporadic in its helpfulness, and my sleep has been sporadic in actually offering me rest as well.
I remember one day last week coming out and almost bursting into tears at the 4-5 inches of snow that I had to clear off my car. At least it's a small car, I remember thinking. Sometimes when that wave of tired hits, you can't handle anything. I also remember that it was that day my energy came back.
My parking spot on campus is about an 8-10 minute walk from anything art-related but the sculpture studio, which being out in the far reaches of campus is right near my car. After a great deal of work I've managed to keep my lateness on the level, except for a streak of two weeks where my unparalleled exhaustion prevented me from coherence or ability to make it anywhere on time due to my sluggishness - even leaving an hour and a half.
That morning walk - I walk even if I'm late - changes daily. Sometimes I can see my breath, sometimes I have to avoid slush, sometimes the air freezes my flesh inside and out until I am bone-chilled and don't warm up for hours. Sometimes the frost covers everything and I wish fervently that I had nothing better to do that to dress warmly and softly brush the crystals off the trees and watch them fall, glittering, when I pass with my camera.
I go to class. I like all my classes, content, Profs, classmates. Hard to like anything when a person's that tired, though.
Monday nights I work at Printmaking, which is usually due on Tuesdays. Usually I go to the Library computers for a bit first and organize my Gmail. I have a folder entitled "Links For Better Days" where I relegate all the interesting stuff for later. I've packed off anything remotely resembling a newsletter until after I'm done school. I have a draft in Gmail where a books-to-read list is piling up. And that's just personal life stuff. Usually I spend my Gmail time frantically trying to reduce the emails in my inbox to under a hundred by killing the irrelevant ones and filing the relevant ones I'll remember without them in front of my face. It's about this time I give up, feeling that my life is stupidly complicated, and take off for Printmaking to do grunt work until too late in the evening.
Tuesday evenings after Printmaking the class is officially over I sometimes start work on the next project, but when 6:45 rolls around I take off for Ballroom and after Ballroom I often go out with classmates for snacks and drinks. Wednesdays and Fridays I don't have an official schedule and so it ranges from hardcore art work to paid work to essays to reading to visiting to errands, but on Wednesday nights I have C&C. Thursdays I have Care Group. Fridays are different every week. Sometimes I just stay home. Weekends are often either completely full of work or volunteer work or travel or ballroom.
If I make it home early enough in the evening, it's fairly obvious that my parents are still all excited about the new Wii. They play games on it constantly, and being excellent parents generally ignore my protestations that I have work to do and force me to have some fun on the Wii instead, if only for a little bit. I like the Wii, I just have other things to do - more paid work than I can handle, more school work than I can handle, and just enough volunteer work to make the whole thing disgusting. I spend hours just trying to sort my life out enough to actually get work done when it needs to be done.
I spend stupid amounts of time with friends to preserve my sanity. I try and incorporate them into my work time when I can, or I save certain days and times for them - usually my evenings so I only do schoolwork during the day - or more realistically, during the night.
I like working in the labs when there's only one or two people there, or none at all. I'm not really creeped out by empty spaces, rather I find them comforting. I know that my attraction to the night is partially because I'm actually a severe introvert - by which I mean that people, even people who I don't have to interact with whatsoever but exist in the same space, drain my energy. I build up energy inside my mind. I am what the world may term as gifted - high IQ, as if that means anything. Emotionally and physically sensitive, and a synesthete. I say things that others find odd, and I have a tendency of commenting on things: that the feel of the waxy sheen on a a leaf is one of my favourite textures, or that lemons and limes are NOT the same, a lemon tastes sharp and it tastes like the color aquamarine, or maybe it tastes like a slightly out of tune high C# note on a flute, whereas limes actually taste like bright yellow and are more like an F# minor chord in the third octave from middle C when played on a piano. Despite the sharpness of both, I love each flavour, and partly because it is all things to me. Some flavours, the duller ones, do not evoke such multifaceted color. Most of these things I keep to myself. Too weird for most people. Doesn't compute.
I notice all these things more when my routine is off. When my keys are out of my pocket, when I deliberately change something and create a habit of it. When, like today, I take my car in to the shop at 8am on a Monday - a time I haven't visited on that day of the week for nearly 6 months - and watch the sun rise as my mechanic (the owner, who gets ride privileges) gives me a ride to school.
This is the substance of my life - my arms covered in black streaks of ink, my fingernails each in various states of disrepair, often ripped off after being cracked while at work, my glasses usually at some level of a disreputably oily state because I just don't think about them half the time.
And when I look in the mirror in the morning, I wonder absently, and nothing really special passes through my head as I examine my face, which has barely changed since I was 5. Sometimes I think I don't really look like me, or, more often, I'm in there somewhere.
Sometimes I just stare into tired eyes and wonder if I'll ever slow down for longer than a snatched moment to really enjoy the world I live in.
When everything's made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am