Blast from the Past with a side of Indigestion

I was having a really stressful day on Tuesday, eg: the bus was late to take me to class, I had a meeting/interview with LInda Clement to write my recommendation for an internship at NIH, my friend is moving to Dubai so I had to him in DC for the last time before the move, I had to go to help center, pick up Nick from class, and make a $130 deal with my brother. All this in one day. As you can imagine I was having mad anxiety, plus dealing with my brother is never a pleasant experience.

And that was just the context for the thing that put me over the edge: While I was getting ready to go over to that 70s house after I'd gotten back from DC, my phone rang and I picked up an unknown number, but had a really bad feeling. No dice. It was Kyle. That promptly began a downward spiral into a fulblown panic attack. Yes, pathetic. So I told him I'd call him back.

I was waffling back and forth between calling and not calling. Felt like I owed him the chance, just like, human-to-human, to hear him out. But I know that I'm a very all or nothing person, so I pretty much saw it going one of two ways: either I was going to shutdown entirely and be completely unaccesible emotionally, or I was going to have an emotional breakdown, something close to hysterics.

Being that shutting down has been the general trend for quite some time now, I saw that as the more likely of the two, but the issue with going all cold/numb is that it fucks you up in the future, you know? ie. not so human. But in the end, I called back, still in the throes of a pseudo heart attack & what actually happened was totally unexpected.

At first I kind of tried to deal with it like I was talking to someone at Help Center, which is pretty much how I dealt with his dad, when he called back in January to update me on his and Kyle's rehab situation (AND also guilt trip me and tell me that the family loves me and misses me, etc). But at some point in the conversation, he said something that made me laugh. Essentially, after that point, a huge change happened in me, and even though I was and am acutely aware of falling into the old routine and all of the angst that being in a relationship with him entailed, I shit you not: I felt better after talking to him.

Not just better. I felt like all the stress was deal-with-able. All the anxiety just kind of wiped clear. The more I mull it over, the more my feelings sound like an addict finally getting a fix after months and months of withdrawal. I don't like that idea. Even though I'm not technically doing anything destructive, the idea of being that connected to someone, especially that that someone is Kyle, is pretty terrifying.

I'm not entirely sure what to think about any of it. I couldn't talk to Nick about it, because I know how he would think it's stupid for me to even give the guy the time of day, and his erratic, ambivalence towards me is no less confusing in terms of biasing any possible answer.

So, pretty much, I'm just asking for you to philosophize over the situation. If you have no response, that's totally OK! and to be honest, quite understandable. If I were to talk to my mom, she would just tell me everything I did wrong. I'd rather focus on trying to figure out my feelings on the matter, cuz not being 100% sure of my feelings certainly hasn't done me any good.

End Long-winded-and-incredibly-ridonkulous-hyperanalysis-of-a-probably-completely-unimportant-event-in-the-life-of-mandy.

Props to your dedication to my mental health if you got all the way through this! You're probably higher on God's scale than Mother Theresa.

apotheosis

The word of the day is agape & I am writing from on bed of lofty thoughts; It is so easy to love, but much harder to do it well.



There is a skepsis in the notion of love proper, but when you stumble upon it, it is the verdant overgrowth of friendship. Compassion, admiration and not loving your own reflection someone else's eyes, but grateful for their existence, striving to their essence.

Very Nessessary

"The word of the day is soporific." - a cross between sleep and terrific, horrifically soporous...

The world equidistant-
the input to each sensory modality at the same degree of separation from the subjective experience-
the celestial bodies all orbiting in concentric circles of the same diameter, the focal point on a different plane of existence, despite being amidst it all.

Induce/Birth a visceral energy, an emotive response, to anything at all-
though no thing elicits any thing.

Follow a course through any route preset by another self-disclosing testimony of disconnection-
find failure in the forced efforts of others & the danger
of empty assurance in projecting the nothing into something, self-created, born from imagination.

When you rest still-
"let the chips fall where they may"
-there is still nothing. A chaos
in the silence. Fall to sleep
without pain, without grace,
without contentment or extacy,
nor blind acceptance-
but a resilient knowing that you
are of a lone privation.

Modernification of Words

Word History: The lowly kiosk where newspapers are sold or advertisements are posted is like a child in a fairy tale raised by humble parents but descended from kings. The word kiosk was originally taken into English from Turkish, in which its source köşk meant "pavilion." The open structures referred to by the Turkish word were used as summerhouses in Turkey and Persia. The first recorded use of kiosk in English (1625) refers to these Middle Eastern pavilions, which Europeans imitated in their own gardens and parks. In France and Belgium, where the Turkish word had also been borrowed, their word kiosque was applied to something lower on the scale, structures resembling these pavilions but used as places to sell newspapers or as bandstands. England borrowed this lowly structure from France and reborrowed the word, which is first recorded in 1865 with reference to a place where newspapers are sold.
- Dictionary.com

In our day and age, it seems like language is probably the aspect of life most taken for granted, next to family, central heating, and grocery stores. The evolution of language is an absolutely fascinating phenomenon: what words are appropriated into new forms, what words are (like google), how (and which) words make their way into the languages of other cultures but still retain the basic sound from their origin...

These are interesting things that the average person completely takes for granted. Another example, pointed out by a wonderfully blazed individual, was the cleverness of "Cheez-Its" which verbed a whole subcategory of dairy products as a marketing strategy that makes you feel active while you're eating a processed snack with high salt content.

Or take, "conversate," a word that pretends toward more formal language, but has actually made its way into the dictionary as slang, an appropriation of conversation instead of using plain old "converse" (which is already more formal than it would be to say "We talked" or "We spoke").

Who makes these rules? How many times does a word need to be spoken for it gain enough prestige to enter anything from Dictionary.com to Merriam-Webster? And when that word is entered, how does one definitively decide its spelling? How does this affect communication between generations?

special languages

we imbibe special languages,
all lost in the sauce, pseudonyms
and nick names align morphemes
into sonic synchrony, as a chorus
of frequencies coalesce in fractions
of consonants and vowels the angle
between an "a" and an "o" as in a whistle
mouth-made just for your best friend
who gets all of your pillow talk since your
peers pickled like preserved pork rinds
in the blistering surface of your cerebrum's
unforgiving neural loops as they rewind
over and over and over until there are only
levels of nonesense to engorge your staunch
second stomach. man, you will eat away
and never fill.

man, you incredible creature, fit with an art so sublime,
and yet you convolute its processes with the onslaught of time.