Я - застенчивый графоман. И это прекрасно - потому что "если бы мне нравилась спаржа, мне бы пришлось ее есть, а ведь я ее так ненавижу".

...Зайдя в общую душевую, она недовольно поморщилась, но только мысленно - заявлять всем о своем нежелании мыться среди голых коллег и студенток казалось еще более неловко, чем "себя показать, на людей посмотреть," а в двух заштореных отдельных душевых еще вовсю плескались. Запнувшись взглядом на широкой попе одной знакомой учительницы, где сбоку ютилась застенчивая татуировочка, она нашла место на влажной скамье, устроила там полиэтиленовый кулек, вытащила шампунь и мыло, оставив бритву, и, еще раз воровато вскинув глаза на заветные занавески, начала стягивать майку.

Being a hypochondriac is exhausting.
Being an aware hypochondriac isn't much better.
One way to make it worse is to think that you will soon develop a terrible illness as punishment for not being sufficiently grateful for your health.
Or you could think that this has already happened. 

Fifteen minutes of panic attack works out your heart like fifteen minutes on a treadmill.
Deep breath on the count of four, hold for two, breathe out for four, hold for two. Repeat. Picture puppies.
"Puppies for peace" - a mural on Laguna street - we walk past it single-file on Easter Sunday. First put down the heel, then the toe. Breath-per step. Heel. Toe. Heel. Toe. Heel. Toe. The cars at the intersection wait patiently - they will now have a story to tell when they get home.

When I picture puppies, their heads blow up. No, seriously. I guess I'm more of a cat person.

Count to a hundred. Are you still alive? Yes, but what if... count to a hundred. Are you still alive? Yes, but... count to a hundred.
Around forty-seven, you chew up a pill, helped along by three-day-old Starbucks tea. "Aged Starbucks drinks in moderate doses can help alleviate panic attacks when enjoyed together with tranquilizers. Please see your doctor  for details."
Around seventy two, you call The Doctor and tell him that this time, you're really dying, and could he immediately come and pick up our child. He says sure-sure, but you'll need to wait a few minutes, he's on the phone with work. You count, pace and rage. Rage, pace, count. Count, rage, pace. Cage, race, pount. Pant, rant, recant. 

A tombstone in a toy ghost village: "i told u i was sick"

I am tired.

                                                                                                                                     



It's 6:45 a.m. There's a preschooler, a toddler and a cat. The preschooler has to get dressed, brush his teeth, pee and wash, not necessarily in that order. The toddler has to be changed, dressed and, yes, washed. The cat needs very little - some food and to be left alone in the rocking chair with the books.

The preschooler and the toddler cannot be washed together (one of them will most definitely throw things in the toilet or unravel the toilet paper roll). The toddler cannot be in the preschooler's room while the preschooler is doing anything out of the room (overall toy-driven anxiety and petty greed on both ends). The toddler cannot at any time be where the books are (he has taken a liking to chewing on limited-edition crappy Russian poetry). The preschooler needs to complete all tasks before the toddler (otherwise he escapes downstairs and all remaining tasks are at risk). The cat needs very little - not to be locked in with the books. Just like the GRE, this problem has a time limit.

I used to be pretty good at these... as I assist the endless tooth-brushing, I close all the room doors, leaving the toddler in the hallway with some toys - within sight and outside my immediate field of action. Twelve hours later I find out I got the answer wrong. The husband lets the cat out of the room and we spend a friendly 20 minutes cleaning up cat pee (hey, I wouldn't expect anybody to hold it for 12 hours). I write in livejournal to finish off the evening.

I think there is a very fine line between academic nuance and academic nit-picking.

I think I am walking that line with my eyes closed, for fear of seeing that I'm on the wrong side.

...And to think that I could be working 9 a.m.-2 p.m., with summers off...

"There can be no doubt that we have here a new type of linguistic use - phatic communion I am tempted to call it, actuated by the demon of terminological invention - a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words. ...

... Are words in phatic communion used primarily to convey meaning, the meaning which is symbolically theirs? Certainly not! They fulfil a social function and that is their principal aim, but they are neither the result of intellectual reflection, nor do they necessarily arouse reflection in the listener. ...

... Each utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of some social sentiment or other. ...

...Again in pure sociabilities and gossip we use language exactly as savages do and our talk becomes the "phatic communion" analysed above, which serves to establish bonds of personal union between people brought together by the mere need of companionship and does not serve any purpose of communicating ideas... indeed there need not or perhaps even there must not be anything to communicate."

-Bronislaw Malinowski, 1923

via e-mail, 01/10/09

"Lyena,

Ah, dearest of siblings, most oblivious of readers. As they say in yeshiva, you've missed the boat. But you know, there are different ways to miss the boat. Sometimes you can have missed it in the way that you have to shove the fellow on the docks to the side and still get on the walkway up, or sometimes you have to get in at the end of a movie and make this fantastic leap off of the pier where you end up dangling by one arm on the railing (while killing Wesley Snipes with the other one), but sometimes the ship has really gone off too far and it would be foolish to jump, just foolish, and there's nothing there waiting for you other than the icy arms of the Atlantic and a few more feet to Davy Jones'.

This is all assuming you can still see the ship.

And that is assuming that this country has a harbor. Perhaps it's landlocked.

You, I think, were somewhere in the middle of the Sahara, but not the modern-day Sahara, I'm talking about the Sahara at a time when ships hadn't been invented. Try getting to the New World from there. Columbus came conveniently late onto the scene.

However, the lone lighthouse in all of this is that I think I see how you got there... "

(...and another few pages on what he actually thought was wrong with my previous point...)