Archives for March, 2010

All I want to do is sleep all day every day. It must be exam season.

Approximately once a year I go see a doctor and whine about never not being tired and never not having a headache and sundry other wonderful things, including, this year, dizziness. Every year said doctor sends me out to get tested and someone pumps blood out of my arm. This year the list was a little longer than usual. But like every year in the past, the blood tests come back normal, and I am disappointed. Because what else am I supposed to blame my uncontrollable bouts of narcolepsy on?

In related news, I am pretty amazing. When I fall asleep in class, I keep writing notes. Or, more precisely, I keep pushing pen to paper (I’m one of maybe five people in an incoming class of 150 who doesn’t use a laptop in class), even if they leave no marks.
This is one benefit of having observant but slackerific (and sentient) classmates. They tell you about yourself.

But screw all this! Listless me resolves to eat fruit! Bring on the mangoes!

Sunday morning neo-Nazi counterprotest in New Westminster;
Saturday night quasi-Khalistani concert in Surrey;
impromptu dinner and dessert with family friends of friends in Richmond, “you sound so nice when you say aunty and uncle;”

telling highschool students about lawschool;
listening to lawyers tell lawstudents that the legal aid cuts make them want to stop being lawyers;

jail support twice in one month;
running through unfamiliar alleys, looking for one specific copcar;
learning the difference between undercover and plain clothes police, and wishing they’d teach me this in school, so I wouldn’t look a fool at protests;
signing off as emergency contact after the fingerprinting;

emailing an instructor to tell him his pedagogy in the last class had been problematic;
next class he was great about addressing it;

mooting while my partner absented himself to vomit in the washroom two minutes before his turn;

meeting my friends’ parents when they were drunk;
missing the funeral of someone I’d never met;
essentially becoming a secondhand smoker;

forgetting I’d left a bowl of yellow split peas to soak for a week on the kitchen window sill and wondering what that awful stench was;
washing and washing and washing said lentils to make dahl, but gagging;
a return to grilled cheese sandwiches with red pepper flakes and too much ketchup;
brunch in some hipster diner, unwashed and hair uncombed, this morning mouthwash stood in for toothpaste;
jugs and jugs of ginger tea, cookies;
more free sushi than I can remember, daily cravings for wasabi;

allegedly forthcoming salsa;

“one of these days someone is going to buy you chocolate;”
red lipstick;
white tees;

buttondown shirts and hightops;
vs. skinnyjeans and construction shoes;

these mountains and this sky;
the kinds of hugs you feel tight around your shoulders for days after, that memory imprinted into your bones;

one poetry reading of the names of killed Arabs, and then their ages;
I didn’t know that was what she’d be reading, or who she was, and was unprepared, so I froze;

astonishment at the quality and quantity of things that can be shared via text message;

one doctor advising me to drop out of lawschool and recommending a counsellor;
another doctor’s hand soft on the scar on my shoulder, indistinguishable from a caress on that deep hollow, my body tensing under the irrelevance of his touch there;
being the only girl in a group of straight brown boys after the show, these musicians and performers hopped up on adolescent adulation, hearing how our every word becomes reduced to trope, watching how bodies move differently backstage behind the curtains, and again shrinking from the touch of strangers, someone’s hand on my arm, the tips of someone else’s fingers on the small of my back, fleetingly marked territory;

late nights in coffeeshops, later nights in libraries;
waiting and waiting and waiting for hypersaturated summer days, waiting until I can almost feel the sun on my naked skin, until the longing is palpable and painful.

The answer is always the same to the question howareyou: busywithschool. There are so many things I could be doing if I weren’t in school.

Today I watched a flower the size of my hand tumble off its treebranch.

I dislike Lil’ Wayne.
There. I said it.

Every time Community does an episode about Abed’s family I want to die. It hurts, so much. Somebody make them stop.

Favourite text of the last week:
“Im texting you from on a horse”
– mirasar, March 7 12.11PM.

I’d forgotten what it feels like to feel passionate about what you do. And he keeps reminding me. This has the effect of making me sad. I’d forgotten what purpose feels like, how it gives form to intelligence, making it a little less smug, a little less self-serving. Is this what people like him do — make the rest of us sad, just by being?

I actually enjoy running. But you wouldn’t know this if you were to judge by the death wheeze I get after 30 seconds of spirited jogging.

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

– David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (1917)