The Summer of My Discontent
It is Amalgam Day at this journal! You are hereby warned - I am feeling so random.
I stretched my fingers in the blue non-latex gloves, and ran distilled water over them. Before me, in the large sink, stood a ring stand. A sieve. A funnel, which the sieve rested in, and which was held up by the ring stand. The sediment in the sieve had ceased to antagonize me. I spent the first weeks of working in the lab in dire fear of that sediment. It's important stuff, and I was terrified that I would screw up and knock the sieve over into the sink. I didn't, though, and grew comfortable with the silt between my fingertips.
As I became comfortable with my job, my mind found other things to dwell on than the fear of spilling sediment. Oh, and how painful it is to be thinking for four hours. Becca used to tell me that she just had too much time to think by herself working at the Library, and I scoffed at her and couldn't understand how she could dislike time alone to think. It sounded luxurious to me. But I figured it out on my own how dangerous it can be to spend so much time thinking.
You have no control over what you think. They just happen to me - floods of self doubt, waves of blood curdling jealousy, but mostly I am thinking Incredibly Inane thoughts. The inane thoughts are the worst - they cause an unrelenting din. I was thinking about the reasons you can't tickle yourself. And I was thinking that it's the same reason you can't surprise yourself with email you've sent to yourself. I know this because I've tried. (Yes. I've sent email to myself. Stop laughing at me!) There's just no thrill in receiving email you have sent yourself. You expect every word, and just like you can't surprise your own close-to-the-surface nerves, you can't surprise yourself with email from your new hotmail account.
Worse than any inane, self doubting, or upsetting thought is the lack of original material I come up with. I stare at the sink, go through my duties in the lab mechanically, and mull over what I mulled over yesterday. And the day before. I tend to think about the Internet often - a topic that frustrates me deeply privately but I try never to let on publicly anymore (for reasons that are absolutely beyond me, mind you). I carry around more Internet-angst than you might ever believe if you just read my journal. It all festers - gets rubbed thin and threadbare and twisted and turned over, over, over, and over again in my mind as I sieve.
In the afternoons, I complain that I'm sad. And JA will say "You sure you aren't just bored?" And I stop and look at myself and say "Oh yes. I really am bored." It happens every summer. I'm bored, and restless, and discontent, and anxious, and have been spending four hours a day talking in my head over a sieve of Pacific sediment.
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I've lost track of time. I don't know what day of the week it is. I don't know the date. Every summer, I've lost track of time, but it's been for different reasons this summer. I used to lose track of time during the summers while I was bundled up in the business of a lax summer camp schedule. Days lost their carefully crafted structure. At camp, one day feels like two. By evening, breakfast seems like it happened the day before. The constant activity tricks you into feeling as tired as you normally would at the end of the week. But it would only have been one day. Or two. Maybe three. One and a half? It was so confusing, so I gave up all together on time.
This summer, I've lost track of time, but it's so different. I don't want to think about August First, when my housing assignments and roommate information will be mailed. I don't want to think about August Nineteenth, when I'll turn eighteen in Boston. I don't want to think about August Twenty-Eighth, when we will pack the station wagon with lamps and floor pillows and sheets and computer gear and head for Pennsylvania. I don't want to think about August Thirtieth, when I will move into my dorm room.
So I don't. I don't think about any dates. Some days I don't think about them because I'm terrified. I don't know what to expect. I might not find anyone I like. I don't know what courses I want to take. I don't know if I'm going to be able to handle it. And some days I don't think about them because I cannot bear the wait.
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There's a child crying out in the street. There are more children than there have ever been in past years. When I was six, and we moved to this quiet street, it really was quiet. I was terribly lonely for other children - a neighborhood gang was a foreign concept. Our yard has always been the picture of wilderness to the old women who had ChemLawn on speed-dial. To me, our grass had always looked thrillingly wild or just comfortably unkempt. To them, it was an abominable mess. But where elderly folk once carefully groomed their lawns, young couples groom their brood and their dogs.
I hardly noticed the fade of the elderly population, who softly moved to convalescent homes, or died. There was a rash of yard sales and estate sales and tag sales and garage sales in April - but every April sees such a rash. Now there are children, and dogs. Who I can hear cry, whinge, cackle, and chortle from my seat in the computer room. Of whom I am deeply envious: there isn't one of them who is the only kid on a street of older men and women, like I had been.
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The cat is on my left thigh. He's just perched there, and maybe he's the reason I feel like I'm about to jump out of my skin. I can hear shouts and murmurs coming from the sleeping members of my family. Someone is mewling somewhere - another cat, an animal, my aunt. The cat has relaxed, fallen into my lap and decided to stay there awhile. He smells like the insides of a fortune cookie, vaguely sweet. I wish he could ravel away the fears that are knitting themselves tonight. I wish someone, anyone, could.
I'm know I'm not making any sense.
2000-07-29, The Summer of my Discontent
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