I Went Running and The Front Fell Off

We're being random and throwing transitions out the window in this post. Just so you know.

I went running again today. This is the part where you're proud of me. You should be clapping right now. I went running. Aren't you impressed?

Was this the first time that I've gone since the last time that I told you about it?

Um. Yes.

Did I last longer than five minutes?

A little. Maybe.

Am I going again tomorrow?

You know what, I really don't want to talk about this anymore. Moving on.

I have something for you. It's a youtube video.

What? I'm cheap.

We watched this in our writing class. Our teacher turned to us afterward and asked with a totally straight face, "Was there anything wrong with his argument?"

That made you smile, right? Good. We can be friends.

But only if this makes you feel soft inside: After her father's death Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend and mentor (a Mr. Higginson), "I am glad there is immortality, but would have tested it myself, before entrusting him."

I wonder if she spoke like that. Is it possible for language like that to come to a person as naturally as speech?

People Will Talk

More quotes for you, my friends. I was saving up for the end of the semester... and then I realized this was already going to be a giant post. So I'm giving it to you now! Happy Sunday.

“I held his hand… He held my hand too! It was a mutual thing.”

“I’m going to be a doctor and really rich. I’ll buy Starbucks, and Google, and possibly a small European nation.” 

“I’m sorry if you think I offended you.”

“The reason academic debates are so fierce because the stakes are never so low. Pettiness never so high.”

“I thought it would settle down, but there was too much intertribal warfare among the linguists.”

“Tolstoy’s books can be used as doorstops and weapons.”

“God didn’t retire.”

“Hate to see you go—love to watch you walk away.”

“She didn’t want to have a date with me. Stupid girl. I hate her anyway.”

“God loves all waffles. Great, small, and holey.”

“I wasn’t making a joke. You’ll know when I do because it will be followed by total silence."

“My boredom distracted me.”

“It’s as if there’s a crack in the ice, he falls through, and is decapitated. Something like this.”

“OK. I need your pants.”

“You know if you’ve lived in the Middle East. Or Phoenix.”

“We’re brought up to believe that there are no stupid questions. You’ve spent enough time at a university to know that’s nonsense.”

“War and Peace is not a metaphor of pineapple. That is pithel.”

“That has to be true. I’m certain it’s not, but it has to be, because it’s so great and psychedelic.”

“No, it’s a pizza that rolls around and crushes skeletons. You get to decorate it. It’s illuminating.”

“I know my wife and I are on the right track when she doesn’t take me seriously. I throw my temper tantrum and she pats me on the head and says, ‘Want a cookie?’ ‘No. Maybe.’”

“A year ago, I looked like a drug dealer. Well a year ago I was a drug dealer.” (Said during fast and testimony meeting.)

"My atoms ache."

“Balloons are evil. You don’t know it until they’re all over your floor. They’re like peanut butter that way.”

“Men insist on the independence that requires total attention from others.”

“I am very, very suspicious of these people who say they don’t watch television. These are people, I think, who are not to be trusted.”

“You can’t redeem zombies.”

“An hour later I heard our baby crying and I wouldn’t get him. I was like, ‘I know this trick.’ There’s a zombie waiting down there.”

“Give into jealousy. Throw a temper tantrum. Throw a shoe.”

“Hey there… insert suave, manly, piano-relate pick-up line here.”

“When Martha Stewart speaks the world listens.”

“It’s nice to see your… profound forehead.”

“I am running for President and my platform is self-interest and an indifference to the common good.”

“Sometimes I’m funny.”

The Thing About Time Machines

So, thought:

If you went back in time what could you really tell them?

Me: "One day, in the future, we'll have machines that fly in the sky."
Person in the Past:"What's a machine?"
Me: "Um... It moves. By itself. And it's metal."
Past Person: "How will metal fly through the air?"
Me: "It has an engine."
Past Person:"What's an engine?"
Me: "It's this thing... that makes things move... with gas..."
Past Person:"What's gas?"
Me: "Old dinosaurs. In the ground. Except now it's liquid."
Past Person: "What are dinosaurs?"

or

Me: "You can talk all the way across the world to people through phones and the internet."
Past Person: "What are phones?"
Me: "They're these things you talk into, and people who aren't there hear you."
Past Person: "How?"
Me: "They send out, like, waves or something?"
Past Person: "Waves?"
Me: "Um. Yeah."
Past Person: "What's the internet?"
Me: "....I have no idea."


When we finally invent a time machine ("What's a time machine?") may I be the first to not volunteer to be the first one to go back. I think the best I could do for them would be a hot air balloon.

Me: "The heat. Pushes the balloon up. Because heat rises."
Past Person: "Why does heat rise?"
Me: (getting into my time machine) "Listen, the earth goes around the sun, put cream and sugar in a bag of ice and shake it up, and standardized tests are going to destroy the world, OK?"

My Dad Laughs at Me

I'm really enjoying my beginning writing class.

It may sound snobbish (it probably is snobbish) but I don't feel like I've learn anything new about writing yet. I mostly just appreciate the opportunity it gives me to write, often for writing's sake. It isn't something that happens as much in other classes. In my other classes we don't pull out our writing journals and write furiously for a few seconds and hope that it's coherent.

I've missed that. The feverish brain-to-pen writing and the hope that there is a complete sentence or two in there.

On Valentines day we were supposed to write about how we knew someone loved us. Love in an unromantic way, my professor clarified. This is what I came up with:

When I'm having a truly terrible day, one of those I-hate-the-world-why-did-I-bother-getting-out-of-bed days, I call my mom, and then I call my dad. My mom comforts me, sympathizes, understands, and tells me she loves me. My dad laughs at me. That's how I know he loves me. Because he reminds me not to take myself to seriously, that the world isn't all bad, and getting out of bed was probably a good idea, even if it doesn't seem like it just then. He tells me that hard things are good for me, that I can figure it out on my own. All these things, which rankle my woebegone soul at the time, later remind me that my dad thinks I can do hard things. He thinks I'm smart enough to figure it out on my own. And he loves me.

(i know you love me too, mom. next time i'll write about you ok?)

Crushes on Characters and Social Scripts

If people are defined by their relationship to the world then I may have some very serious problems.

Me and the world don't exactly hit it off. We have communication issues. And possibly a personality clash. That's OK. I see it as a sign that both me and the world have personalities. Which is good. I guess.

I just felt like telling you because I've been feeling minorly anti-social lately. Not majorly! Just minorly. I think I'll marathon three seasons of In Plain Sight, wrapped in my ugliest hoodie and most comfortable blanket, feeding my crushes on fictional characters, and making muffins on a Friday night minorly. See. Nothing to worry about.

You think I have problems now, huh? Yeah, so does my peer mentor.

I should probably stop typing now. What is really scary is that I probably won't.

Maybe this is why I have crushes on fictional characters. They don't judge me. They never think I'm weird for having crushes on them. That must be why I love them. Well, that and they totally rock. No real guy has anything on Rory Williams, because they'll never be endearingly dorky in the same way, or wait for their girl for two thousand years. No real guy has anything on Marshall Mann, who knows random facts about the invention of danishes and would take a bullet for his best friend.

How can a real guy hope to measure up? The only advantage he has is that he's, you know... real.

My friends are going through boy drama right now. She likes the guy and he doesn't like her back (probably?), the guy likes her and she doesn't like him back, or she can't decide which guy she likes. Or some combination of all of the above. I'm sitting on the sidelines enjoying the show. But, I admit, every once in a while I wonder if I'm supposed to be participating. It's like someone handed out the social script before I got here and now I'm twiddling my thumbs, wondering if I'm missing my lines.

I was talking to one of my cousins about this, relating my friends' dramas and talking about how I'm enjoying it. We were in the car and she turned around to look at me. "Marissa," she said, "you are not supposed to be watching. You're supposed to be doing." One of the guys I'd been talking about passed and I pointed him out to here. "He's cute," she said.

"Yeah," I agreed. "He's a really nice guy."

"No. He's cute." Then she tried to set me up on a blind date.

Dear person who hands out social scripts. I don't appear to be on your email list. Please rectify the matter before I do something truly terrible, or omit to do something terribly important.

P.S.

You're Welcome

I’ve been thinking recently about the peculiar kind of psychological damage that comes from being the daughter of college professors. (i am peculiarly attached the phrase “psychological damage.”)

I started thinking about it when my Tolstoy professor (i love my tolstoy professor) was telling us about how his daughter’s history text book makes him want to tear out his hair and rent his clothes.

He said that the textbook makes things too neat. Everything in history (in textbooks) was pre-planned, and happened exactly the way he was supposed. He said, “The textbook is like, ‘George Washington got up in the morning, then he was at the Delaware, and now we have a constitution!’ And I’m like, ‘No! It didn’t happen that way! Well, it did, but it didn’t really.’” And his daughter, his lovely middle-school-er, looks up and says, “Dad. I don’t care.”

Ah, those words.

I have said those words before.

So I mentioned it to my dad today. He said, “What blessings!”

“I didn’t say I resent the psychological damage,” I told him.

And I don’t. Not really. Most of the time it makes my life more interesting.

Like this one time last semester. I was walking across campus and came upon this saran-wrapped statue of an America Indian. I stood in front of it for five minutes thinking, “What does it mean?”

Is it a condemnation of modernity? The U.S.’s treatment of Indians? Capitalism, ensuing materialism, and its binding affect on individuals?

I walked away without coming to a conclusion and was still thinking about it in my class when my teacher said, “Hey, did you guys see that they wrapped up the statues for spirit week?” Apparently there was some concern that a rival school would come spray paint them.  Part of me felt stupid for spending time thinking about the significance of modern art that was not, after all, modern. But most of me enjoyed it. I mean, if my parents weren't professors I probably would have missed out on thinking about the symbolism of a saran-wrapped Indian. 

Heaven forbid.

 As a side note: how much are we expecting saran-wrap to help? If I drove all the way down to a rival campus to spray pain their statue, I don’t think saran-wrap would be very deterring.

Not that I would ever do that. I snuck two loaves of Jewish bread into a no-eating zone of the library two days ago, and felt really guilty about it. Is it sad that this is the extent of my rebellion as a college student? I didn’t even eat the bread while I was there.

I seem to have dropped the thread of continuity in this post. Not that that’s unusual. It is why I’ll never take up knitting, though.

You drop threads in knitting, right? Or is that crocheting? Or… something else?

And is crocheting the things you do with needles or balls and wire loops in the ground?

Wow, the thought process in this just keeps deteriorating, doesn't it? I’m going to stop now. This is what happens when I get less than eight hours of sleep. If I ever pull an all-nighter I promise not to write a post the day after.

You're welcome

Run

I don't like running. I never have.

In elementary school my friends and I played freeze tag, boys against girls. The boy I liked then always chased me as soon as the bell rang (ah, elementary school) and tagged me before anyone else. Once I asked him why. (i wasn't just fishing for confirmation of affection, i was also distracting him from my friend who was attempting to un-tag me.) He told me, "Because you're slow."

And I was. I am.

Over Christmas break I went with my cousin to a special store for tennis shoes, and all other things running. They had her run on a treadmill, analyzed the way her feet hit the ground, and brought out six paris of shoes for her to experiment with.

It made running look cool. Like when you look at those special blenders they demonstrate at Costco, and suddenly cooking is so much cooler. Because--Look! You can make smoothies, and soups, and world peace in that thing. They never mention the clean-up. I bet it's killer.

In any case, that trip to the highly expensive tennis shoe store convinced me that I should like running. I was meant to like running.

So yesterday, in a fit of self-righteous productivity, I went running. I don't think I lasted five minutes.