Showaaaaaaaahh

This post brought to you by: I need to shower.

I'm sitting here, still in half of my running clothes, with probably a constant and low buzzing 35% of my brain raggedly chanting, youneedtoshoweryouneedtoshower. It's so annoying and yet I can't muster the activation energy necessary to pass the energy barrier to my clean state. It's really rather gross.

(The mixing of science with day to day speech, see: activation energy, substrate, etc etc, gives me a feeling of simultaneous pleasure and self...ridicule? What's that word that describes the feeling you get when you see an earnest I Only Sleep On Organic Angel Hair Sheets Made With Baby Smiles From Urban Outfitters person? Not exactly contempt. When you know someone is being pretentious. Damn. Now 24% of my remaining 65% of brain processing power is going to be devoted to finding the word and annoyance at not being able to.)

And on the the parenthetical topic of brains/thinking--brain failure! Not even brain failure along the lines of memory fail, or test-taking fail, but brain failure like this: It is so interesting to me that we exist in planes of consciousness that cannot ever truly touch, like alternate universes. For example, in your current state of consciousness you can think about being stressed. You can characterize what stress looks like, emotionally, physiologically, socially. You can say, gosh I was so stressed haha that was crazy, let's not do that again. It's a rational frame of reference. However, when you are IN that stressed state, you simply won't be capable of having thoughts to this specific (rational?) frame of reference. You will be first hand experiencing all those symptoms; but more importantly, your brain/consciousness will be wholly engaged in them. Even if you say, okay, you are stressed, what can you do about it, you haven't stepped out of it.

This holds true of happiness, or sadness, or any other emotion. At any other state of being, we can perceive the others, but when we are in one of them, our consciousness is shifted to a different norm. That's what I'm trying to say.

Then again, perhaps this is a failure simply of me.

MY MEMORY IS THE SHITTIEST THING. If it were to be bartered on the internet, it's worth would probably be a beer bottle cap and half a pencil. I was skyping with Eva, during which we talked about Ms. Schwaegerl and how her class was amazing (ahh, I don't think I could ever forget her though, her chain-smoking, diet-Coke, popcorn-imbibing, sixty-year-old-version-of-a-Who. what a woman). I asked Eva if she'd ever been truly moved or changed by reading a book; she said that the discussions we had in Schwaegerl's class made her think, and especially when we read Heart of Darkness she remembered Schwaegerl's question for everyone: "Are you one of the people in the boat who are asleep or are you awake?" I have no memory of this.

Turns out, she said this in reference to how Heart of Darkness is a story told after the fact (which I'd forgotten), to a boat full of travelers, some of whom fell asleep and some of whom remained awake. Her comment is so encapsulating of what I think about life! Life should be lived awakened, be it to your experiences or those of others, whatever truth you come upon or are imparted with.

And I forgot it. How much more have I forgotten? And can life be trusted to give the same wisdom again, though perhaps in a different way? Or is a path to, call it whatever, enlightenment, once missed never found again? Well, no. I don't agree with that. But perhaps the path would have been more straightforward and didn't require crossing a rickety rope bridge over a canyon at flash flood during a thunderstorm. It may have lead to a completely different place.

The problem with thinking like that is inherently, every point in space/time has infinite paths leading from it to take and choosing one (which is life, choosing) necessarily loses you others. There was always something different you could have done, some potential, some Schroedinger's cat still alive. Therefore, focusing upon the could-have-beens guarantees you, if not depression because the could-have-beens all could-have-been better, then at least stress.

Full circle. WhaBAM.

Hm. Guess it's not studying physics and rambling time. Running today was surreal, being back in my own neighborhood. Noticing changes. Feeling time. I end up always running the same couple of routes, and I intensely dislike retracing, so I had to do Rosa Rd today. Now that's a motherfucker of a hill, because the truly steep part comes after you've already toiled up 2/3rds of the way. That wasn't too bad, JKJKJKJK!!!

It was a beautiful day out. I sat and read for awhile at that one bench by the concrete canoe launch on my walk back from the hospital to the bus stop home. Why do I write like I don't know how to grammar?

Okay. Enough. Fin.







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