Momentous Occasions!

Isn't this momentous? This moment, right now? Shouldn't I be documenting it for safe-keeping, or at least as safe as I can online.

(I apologize. Though I update, I cannot take my blogs seriously and everything comes out tongue-in-cheek. Don't expect me to be the sincere narrator that you may have imagined me to be.)

Tomorrow I declare a major. So what?

I'm twenty years old and I am an undeclared major. Is one-fifth of my life over? Like that? I've spent a fifth of my life undeclared! Quelle horreur!
Well, thank God above and the WCAS Advising office, because tomorrow I will take one step forward in life with a so-called direction and therefore justifiable footing! I travail, I succeed, I fail! Who cares? I can stand up, one legged bent up, propped up on the soapbox in front of me and cry out: So what, World? I've got my major and I've got my skin, and you've got nothing on me.

The funny thing about all this is that I've known all along that I'm okay. But in the grand showcase of Northwestern, it helps to say: I'm majoring in biotechnicalpsychopseudomacrotheologichemical studies!
I have three plans. Three futures. I blow on the dice and let the divine hands of various Northwestern administrative officials determine my fate. May they bless the academic land we all walk upon.


It would be sufficed to say that there is another theme to my life lately. A strange, dreamlike clarity to all that happens to me. I sometimes reach these moments of lucidity where I am all ages of myself at once, with heightened sense and sharp thought. I'm not sure it so much helps me academically, but that's not so much what's important.

If I can feel like I'm six years old, gap-toothed with chocolatey fingers from baking, twenty, blossoming and ready to declare a major, and forty-three, relishing in work and maternity (here I go predicting my future), then I am someplace good, because I am someplace good in all those places.

This theme correlates with another, a sense of coming full-circle. The inhalation and exhalation of one void of air, big enough only to fill a pair of lungs. The strange circuity of seering pain, embered anger, and the lifting smoke where there is release. The sudden collapse of breath when first touched, the heated and heightened breath of ecstasy, the quiet breath of common understanding. One touch can circle a wrist infinitely. The wrist requests what it wants.

A man stands on a rocky beach by a small lake. In his hand, he works a stone over and over in anger. With each skin-rawing revolution of the stone in his palm, he justifies his anger by replaying what happened. But like sand through a sieve, the memories fade as he recalls them. They sift in confusion, falling upon one another grain upon grain, indistinguishable from the rest. Soon he has lost the justification, the reasoning. He is left with only the feelings, or more accurately, the chaffing of the lake-rock between his fingers. He turns the stone faster, almost manically, forcing his energy against its bumpy surface and irrationally imagining the fatty grooves of his fingerpads disappearing. With that last thought, he suddenly lets his hand go limp, the rock dropping blankly back to the rocky beach earth. He stares at the lake that stretches complacently before him. Will the loons come again this afternoon? he wonders. Their soft-spoken laments often please him in a quiet way, drawing pleasure from their common expression of sadness. Maybe they miss something. He looks down by his bare feet where the rock had dropped and realizes that he cannot distinguish his rock from the other dull-faced stones staring up at him. Without thinking, he digs his toes into the stones, thoughtlessly scattering them with a jolt of his foot. Breathing deeply, he turns away from the lake and walks toward the car, his mind a steamy fog lifting to reveal remnants of lost thoughts. The fact that one of those tediously gray stones on the beach was still hot from the friction of his fingers doesn’t occur to him. He absent-mindedly rubs his right hand, raw from he-doesn’t-know-what.


I have lost faith in backspacing.