20:15 - June 16, 2002
tear ducts
Yesterday, while trying to teach myself to swim in the pool, I couldn't help but overhear the conversations of three men that were in the jacuzzi. They were comparing ages, joint movement, and posture. The first man eased himself out of the water and stood unsteadily by the side of the hot tub. Shakily, he demonstrated how he could turn his knees to both sides, bend over and touch his toes (well, shins, to be completely honest), and then hopped up and down a few times. �I am seventy-seven years old,� he announced to the other two men.
�Yeah?� said the other old man. �Well, watch.� And he got out of the water and did jumping jacks, then helicoptered his arms from side to side. �I am eighty-one years old. Four years older than you.�
The first man nodded gruffly, then turned his attention to the third man, sitting unassumingly in a corner. �How old are YOU?� he barked.
�Forty-two,� he answered uneasily.
The other two men were silent for a long time. Then they lowered themselves back into the water, sighing and groaning from the strain of their old bones.

As of about 3:30 today, I am officially a high school graduate. The hand-shaking, diploma-handing, long-speeching ceremony didn�t do much for me; I only really felt it at the reception, seeing all my friends in gowns with their diplomas, and hugging and congratulating until I got sick of it all and went home. I don�t owe for books, I don�t have to sign up for classes, I don�t know how many credits I�ve completed and I don�t care, either. It�s a clean severed ending and a clean severed beginning. In four days I fly to Boulder and choose my classes for fall, possibly meet my roommate, and officially become a college student. It�s a big, anonymous school. I�ll have my corner of it. And if I mess up? There�s twenty thousand others. I should be worried, but all odds are against it; for once, logic overrules.

Since it is now officially in the past, I can post the following analysis up here and if anybody complains, they can reassure themselves that everything�s changed. And maybe it has, hm?:

It is rising in my head, this level of avoidance and insipidness and empty phrases, since the root lies obviously exposed to anyone not terminally naive; it is a soap opera threesome dilemma, the ideal television tearjerker. Cue �awww�s�: I want him, he wants her, she wants no one, (no one has stopped to consider the meaning of �want�) so there is no solution, not even the moneymaking threesome, because this is not the WB. It�s nothing so real as �want� anyway, we never thought farther into the future than an hour, two hours, a day. What would we do once we �had� what we �wanted�? I supposed abstractly we picture sunsets and urgent stolen kisses and rumpled sheets and roses, but it�s so faded and abstract as to be, effectively, nonexistent. The puzzle here is not he nor I; we all know and recognize the almighty impossibly maddening crush, but she, who wants no one at all and is still as tangled as either of us. It�s �empty�, she says, or was it �searching�? �Aching�? It�s flat for her, growling from lack of pain, joy love, hate, anything. Ours, on the other hand, filled, spilled, and turned sour.
I almost want to grin impishly at both of them and say �Erik handled it, didn�t he?� but it�s not the same at all, and that was five years and in five years I�ll be 23, having forgotten everything, no doubt, and also it makes anybody�s interest sound like a steel chain around his and her necks (endless chains, endless one-ways), or possibly hands. Hearts. If I were smart, I�d drive away from it all.
As I said, and if I didn�t, I should have: we click perfectly and effortlessly by ourselves, until we get mixed up with someone that throws off the balance. It�s not his fault, having tumbled headlong into the inexplicably calm stream, being a waterfall through a choice only half his.
And sometimes she�s the only one who I don�t want to just disappear. Sometimes.

I had an unrelated thought last night while waiting to fall asleep: I think about Pavlov�s dog and wonder if tear ducts can be as well trained as salivary glands can, and if so, what has happened to moment by moment?

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