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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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Sleep, why don't you?
You're too tired to sleep, but you try anyway. Of course it doesn't work, so you read. You just plan on reading until you're tired enough to sleep but then the sun starts coming up and the fucking birds won't stop singing. Fucking birds. Thank you, Universe, for fucking birds. It's two hours since you woke up, bladder full, knowing that you had to get up and pee because if you didn't, your full bladder was going to keep you up. So you get up and pee, knowing that getting up is getting up. Period. And two hours later, you're up. Showered, dressed, and you're emptying the dishwasher and reloading it with last night's dishes. And you're eating a bowl of cereal and drinking a cup of coffee and putting together lunches for yourself and Max. And you're turning on the lights in the tanks and feeding the sleepy fish. And you're giving the cats their breakfast and you're making the turtle his breakfast and you're feeding it to him, sad little thing that he is, already sitting in his food bowl from yesterday waiting for your sorry ass to come out and give him a worm. And it's getting to be about time for you to start getting ready for work. And you're exhausted. You're wondering if there's ever going to be a time in your life when you don't start a day exhausted. Where you don't have a nine hour work day ahead of your exhausted self. And that's melodramatic, because you've felt rested before. But rested is just a tease. You're on the road with a cup of coffee and some Ozomatli, trying to stay awake until you can get to the coffee shop where SophII will make you a triple skim latte which should hold you until the afternoon's double Americano. Outside of the coffeehouse there are a trio of robins. SophII looks like you feel, and you say so. She hasn't been sleeping either. She is counting the days until her vacation when she will be closing down the coffeehouse and then what will you do on mornings like this? You have your triple skim latte and a cookie--chocolate chip because she's out of peanut butter. You talk to SophII about things. Offer to watch the counter while she naps for half an hour on the couch. She laughs. You have to go talk to the people in accounting, which you dread because, well, they're university employees and no matter what kind of torture they apply to you, it's almost impossible for them to lose their jobs, so you suspect that they spend their in-service days thinking of new torture methods designed to make your life miserable. Last year, Soph didn't get paid for three months, and she was like a moth, eating woolen clothing practically, in an attempt to keep body and soul together until her miniscule paycheck came through and she could gorge herself on pad thai. But it's not that bad this morning in accounting. There's only the one woman--the one woman you need to talk to which is a miracle you can hardly believe--and she's annoyed enough at the woman who sent you that she doesn't really torture you per se, just stares at you after you explain why you're there, just stares long enough for you to get the idea that she thinks that you're pretty worthless and that if it weren't for all these university students needing to get paid for their work that her job in the accounting department would be cake. She does what you need and then apparently goes back to whatever evil ritual she performs every morning that allows her to remain soul-less in this world. You're dismissed. You take a different route to the lab--not a whole lot different, but some different--mostly so that you can finish the cigarette you shouldn't be smoking. In the grass is a bird feather. You thank the Universe for birds, adding the robins outside the coffeehouse. Your day is endless tasks done in silence or near silence. Only Zaphod and DD speak to you all day. If you spoke Chinese, this would be different. But you don't, so it isn't. You work in the morning, exhausted. You have lunch. You work in the afternoon and try to sleep at your desk. But you can't sleep, remember? Have a cigarette, you. Your experiment that should have been finished before lunch is nearly done when you go at five for your Americano. It's five ten when you get back to the lab, and five fifty when your half day experiment is finished. It's you and Feng who makes you laugh by speaking to himself in English (saying "oh, shoot!") It's probably the only English he's spoken all day. At five fifty five you get to leave. You're no less exhausted. Try to sleep, why don't you?
More lies:
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