Flesh, otra vez

On a morning after a night where I was awake until 5 a.m. I get up and take a shower. Blurry eyed, and more tired than I can express, unmotivated to work although I know I must, I slip off my t-shirt, the sweatpants I wore to bed and casually toss them on the floor in a place where I will not step with my soon-to-be-wet feet. As I stand up again, I see it.

I don't know where it came from, what I did to myself to cause three inches on my left leg to suddenly be black and blue (and purple and green). I must have done something - there is a knot underneath the bruise, painful to touch. Did I run into something yesterday? Not that I remember. I fell down the stairs a week ago - wouldn't I have noticed it by now?

I am a hazard to myself.

This bruise is strange, mysterious, beautiful in its pain. It reminds me of a flower, how it blooms - yellow and green underneath, flecks of blue on top of that, then a purple so bright as to be almost pink.

Still, I'd like to know how I earned it. Or perhaps for it to go away as soon as possible.

Another post for this nocturnal night

I've had just enough caffeine to ensure I will not sleep tonight

And I am pondering whether this final cup will push me into the territory

Of unproductive sleep deprived shakes

Not conducive

To theses or Portuguese

I wonder how much milk and sugar I've consumed since 6 pm

I wonder whether I'll actually be productive

Or just awake

I delay my work for metapoetry

And Shakespeare

And think about how I'd love to go for a run

How to write a thesis in twenty simple steps

1. Don't do enough research.

2. Read through the pages you've already written, decide it's talking about the wrong stuff.

3. Suffer writer's block for at least 4 weeks.

4. Watch your computer's hinge break.

5. Take your computer to the apple store to get it fixed.

6. Try to work on your thesis on someone else's computer and feel lost without all your bookmarks on Safari on your computer.

7. Pray your computer will be fixed quickly.

8. Get your computer back, jump for joy, be $200 dollars poorer.

9. Make an appointment with your advisor to turn in your chapter and an outline of the next chapter.

10. Do your other homework.

11. Watch British comedies.

12. Start to fret a bit.

13. Check out another book that talks about exactly what you need it to talk about.

14. Don't have time to read that book.

15. Order cheap (ish) chinese food, preferably spicy. Eat said food.

16. Make coffee.

17. Put on comfortable clothing.

18. Ignore the cat, whether it bangs its head against your door, throws up on your bed and/or computer, eats your food, pees on your rug, or sleeps on your books.

19. Don't sleep.

20. Typity type type.

Want a surefire way to wake up and stay awake?

Discover that there are FUCKING JETS OF FIRE in your closet!!!!

Why, why oh why is there a furnace in my tiny little closet? Why does it make my closet glow both orange and blue when it kicks on? Why are there (sort of) open flames SHOOTING AT RIDICULOUS SPEEDS THAT MAKE BURNY BLUE FIRE NOISES?!

This tops the self-flushing toilet, the whistling fridge, the creaky floor, and the dishwasher that randomly smelled like dead chickens one night.

JETS. OF. FIRE.

Do you think Steve Jobs answers prayers?

I know what it is to fear now. I didn't know before, but in that moment when my computer suddenly and without warning decided that hinges were unnecessary and went flat, I knew what it was to fear.

My life is on my computer. I never thought I would be one of those people - addicted to the internet, communicating almost if not entirely through email, facebook, the like. One of those people who reads blogs instead of newspapers, who blogs instead of doing their homework (oh look at that meta reference right there), who stays up late into the night watching british clip shows instead of reading books.

On the other hand, what else am I supposed to do? Music is digital now, photography too. One doesn't write a thesis on a typewriter, one uses Microsoft word. When one can stay in touch (for free, more or less) with friends across the world through a website, shouldn't one do so? The letter is so much slower than the wall post, than the tweet. And when the world is so exciting and life moves so fast, one needs the constantly evolving web to know what's happening.

At the same time, when I returned home from the Apple store (where they promised me they would repair my baby for only half a month's rent) and I felt uncomfortable because I could not immediately check my email, I felt like I had a bit of a dependency issue. I'm borrowing a friend's old, spare, in-case-her-computer-self-destructs laptop for the time being, which will hopefully help me to ease my addiction - I'd feel guilty using someone else's computer 24/7. If I'm working (or at least mostly working) the use of this computer feels legitimate, even necessary. But I think I shall not watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog for the seventh time tonight.

Like endless rain into a paper cup

I must confess that sometimes it feels like I've run out of things to say. I've hardly written lately, so consumed am I by the thousand other things I'm supposedly supposed to do. But I need to be writing - oh, how I need to be writing. My thesis haunts me. I have a story due next week. The overly ambitious wanna-be-author in me decided to try to write a novel this month (like the rest of the world) yet hasn't done a thing this week as this month finished a fourth of itself.

Oops.

Well, does it really matter, in the end? Any of it? These things that are pressing for my time?

I'm going to write a thesis. Whether it will be a good one or not - whether I will just be regurgitating theory at a set of historical events, whether I will make up fifty pages and bullshit the rest - is yet to be determined. My classes are fine - this story due will be done soon enough. And really, nobody's watching if I just ignore NaNoWriMo.

Sometimes it is nicer to slow down. To cook a full meal for dinner, to take a walk in the park. To go to a party where I am alone, not bound to anyone, free to flit between friends as I please. Free to wear what I want - a slinky dress, heels if I so choose - and have none criticize me. Free to take the forty minute freezing walk home when I - and I alone - decide I want to slip away early. To watch the moon glow, impossibly full, on a perfect Halloween night. To feel myself walking slower and slower, to take off my heels, to walk barefoot, avoiding leaves and acorns and broken glass. To arrive home at last and drink coffee at midnight. To know that the soul of me - renewed in such small moments - is stronger and more eloquent each time that I walk and I talk and I sing to myself.

And that's what matters. I can think again, I can phrase, I can manipulate nouns into verbs and use too many commas and dashes and too much alliteration and reference my writing in my writing.

Without the soul of me, I cannot be a writer. I cannot be what I am, do what I do. I cannot exist that way.

So I am being the soul of me.

I've been busy

Inspiration strikes at the worst possible hour, leaving me desperate to scribble but needing to argue, coherently, about the relationship between performance art and social activism in Mexico since 1988, since that is what I so cleverly decided to write a thesis about.

Why write the thesis, I wonder? I always assumed I would write one, never questioned it for a second. Yet I find it so hard to motivate myself to work on it. Perhaps I've simply gotten out of the habit of being excited about research, but fiction is calling me lately.

There's a story screaming in my ears, just waiting to be written. It's got a name, already, and everything. I know how it ends, I know how it begins, and I know most of the things that go in the middle. But I resisted writing anything down for a week, because I was supposed to be writing my thesis.

And then I procrastinated. I did other homework, less pressing. I got sick. I slept a lot. I wrote on my thesis, but I spent a good deal of time doing nothing productive. I could have been writing this story, and yet I felt guilty, because the thesis wasn't finished.

I resisted. And I continued resisting.

And today I stopped resisting and started writing, and it was the easiest and most natural thing I have ever done. The words came tripping through my fingertips and keyboard, word after word after word. I saw where the pieces fit together, the places I have yet to fill. It felt good, a relief to get those words, those pages out of my head and onto the screen.

I shouldn't deny myself when I know what I want to be writing, should I?