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19:34 - Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2015 I mean, I can see how it was frenetic and irrational and probably came off self-absorbed and obtuse, but, well, I noticed things. Did I really live how it reads like I lived? I remember thinking at the time how quiet and uneventful my life was, just like I tend to think now. But now I don't write stuff like that. I for sure do not notice how light plays off people's sleeping eyelashes, or hallucinate people in sleeping bags on night-darkened steps. Things do not curl and fuzz before my eyes. I do not stare at my sweat-smeared Halloween horns in the mirror or get whisked off to the ER in the middle of the night by my hypochondriac roommate or run into mysterious piano-playing dudes in lounges. I wake up, I go to work, I climb rocks or play racquetball, I come home, I cook dinner, I go to bed. Today I got promoted. A pretty major promotion. Oh well. It gives me nowhere near the dopamine jolt I got ten years ago from, you know, stonedly staring at the dewdrops on my friends' forearms or whatever. I now mostly reserve my wonder for exotic or exciting food. The joy of that wonder is real, but it's limited in terms of percentage of time spent wondering. I'm trying to think of how my 19 year old self would see my day today. I spent part of my afternoon glancing through my cracked office door at one of my students, who was smiling dreamily and somehow also tensely through his classmates' jokes about dick pics. I thought about how kind he is, how thoughtful, and how much his unease and transparent desire to appear normal reminded me of myself at his age. A stray thought in the back of my mind fluttered through and whispered that my younger self would have been more likely to fall for him than to be him. My younger self fell for even more people than she tried to emulate - an impressive feat given that she had no idea who she wanted to be, so tried everyone on for size. At lunch I filled my office with the smell of exorbitantly expensive smoked Alaskan cod, layered on a bagel with cream cheese. It filtered out into the rest of the office and caused wrinkled noses. I love that. I love bringing leftover Khmer curry frog or kimchi spicy pork burritos or whatever into work and having people react to it. I guess I'm still that person who likes having a 'thing'. I like it over and above the pleasure I get from eating these things, which is significant in and of itself. And then in the afternoon I closed my door for a brief ten minutes and took a child's pose in my darkened office. The sun was setting, or would have been if there hadn't been a thick blanket of foggy clouds in the way. But I couldn't just HAVE the pose, I had to NOTE that I was HAVING the pose, and contemplate what that meant. I feel like maybe I should do this again for awhile, and see what happens (note me noting that I am resolving to do something of note).
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