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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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part IX: things to lose, things to take
hello, dearest, i should, even as we speak, be working on my physics homework. but i just left the four person can't-make-eye-contact class and have to sort of sort through the usual amount of crap that accompanies presence in said class. today's news is that i actually spoke to the boy, asking him to bring a book he had offered to bring last time (the offer to which, last time, i replied nothing). but now i'm in this state of mind of trying to keep some line of heart (and perhaps therefore communication) open. the response was a blush, and a longer statement than i expected: an explanation of why he hadn't brought the book and a question as to whether i'd rather he just returned the book to the library so that i could then check it out. and, walking away, i replied that he should do whatever was least likely to embarrass him or cause him trauma. then i went and got the professor so that she could open the door to the classroom for us, and thankfully, she kept me talking so that i didn't have to stand there looking at the floor or at a furiously blushing boy. because i hate this crap. i really do. i'm so not about confrontation, but i so just want to whip out one of those conversations that begins, "Look--" and ends, "so let's just try to make the best of it, okay?" would that be wrong? please advise before thursday when the class is to meet again. so then, this morning (i'm running all of this backwards, i know, but that is how brain is working these days), x showed up for robin's lecture and delivered his by now patented opening line, "so i talked to sophistica." this is then followed by a period in which we both try to ascertain just how much information the other has and what the quality of said information is and what can be revealed as known and what must be kept as unknown. today i flinched, mistakingly revealing to him that he was expected to be perceived as the gay friend, which prompted him to ask: "does that mean i should wear my pink socks with my suit?" so then he leaked the brian p.r. dilemma, which he knew i knew (or did he? cue the squinty eyed examination of one another as though we were poker players at some high stakes vegas game). and then after lecture, he walked with me over to the humanities bldg. where the neo class is. and then x almost declined riding up in the elevator, which would have meant a two-person ride up in silence as neo had just arrived and entered the elevator. so i broke down and begged, asking x, "what could be more fun than an elevator ride?" and, thankfully, he agreed that an elevator ride up was just the thing that he needed to round out his morning, because he then cheerfully climbed aboard and tried to engage neo in conversation. and since neo knows not the rules of conversation, it went about as well as one would imagine. (incidentally, x knows nothing about the neo situation (or does he?), so that it all seemed relatively natural or relatively unnatural, depending on how one wants to view the matthew and the resultant situation). i seem to be talking a lot about the neo, probably because i have come to the decision (after deciding to do the exact opposite of whatever mayflower--more on her in a moment--advises. and her advice in re the situation is to stay as far away from him as possible and, if not possible, to treat him in a "very professional manner." she thinks he's about three repression levels away from serial killer, but as he never revealed a childhood furnished in early cruelty towards animals, i'm not inclined to agree--only then that would make me that woman in all the news stories who says, "neo? i don't believe it. he was such a nice man"?) so my decision is to acknowledge (to myself at this point generally) that i don't want to be the kind of person who makes decisions out of a place of hurt or fear or anger or bitterness or resentfulness. that said, i have decided at the moment to go with a turn the other cheek policy. i don't know that i necessarily like (or know even) the consequences of this policy, so i don't know if i'll be able to sustain it for any appreciable length of time, but there it is. and i guess the realization of this all came from the realization that holding on to things like anger and hurt and resentment and bitterness really hurts no one but myself in the long(est) run, so that i'm really trying to save myself the consequences of that. this i know from experience, having tried for years to destroy myself from the inside out by hanging onto such things in what i thought would be an indefinite (or maybe infinite) time scale. (and this scene from one hundred years of solitude keeps running through my mind: it's the scene in which ursula's husband (i can't recall his name at the moment) kills a man who insults ursula. and, later, when another man insults her, he (the husband) picks up the insult-er and carries him to the edge of town, tells him never to return and explains, "i'm carrying you now so that i don't have to kill you and carry you around forever.") so this seems like a good place to introduce the mayflower news of my spending all day in the lab with her on sunday. (well, it was only from 3 to 7:30, but when you're in a mofo lab with nothing to do, you know how those 3 1/2 hours can feel like months and months and months? well, that.) actually, i had offered to come and help her aliquot out reagents--many, many reagents --for the molecular methods lab she's ta'ing (because the p.i. is nice but insane and wanted not for everyone to learn how to share a dna extracting kit, but wanted mayflower to make each and every person their own mini kit in which each of the reagents was aliquoted out into little labelled tubes and placed in a little labelled bag and so on), but so when that was done (after about 45 minutes), she invited me to stay and go to dinner with her and enforcer. i agreed to this and sat down to at the lab computer to surf the internet for animal porn. (no, actually, i composed a long email to you about the woman who was working there, full of insults and so on, and which was then promptly karma'd out of existence when the computer crashed. micky-ficky computer.) and that, along with a lot of nothing else comprised my weekend. actually, it turned into a three day weekend, as yesterday, i couldn't actually compel my brain to compel my body to leave the bed. and it's p.m.s. week, so it seemed like a reasonable thing to stay in bed all day long, missing chemistry, but finally getting up for my p.e. class (otherwise to risk the wrath and/or silent anger of an ama), and lifting actually made me feel better. so maybe i'll be trying it out some more as a mood elevator. because it certainly works better than a two-person elevator ride in embarrassed silence ever could. full circle? i think that means enough. but i will write when there is more to say. if ever. all my fluvin'-- sublingua
More lies:
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