Amyunimus

Five years ago, I sent myself a series of emails to be delivered at certain intervals in the future. Going through one of my old accounts this evening, I found that I'd received the first of these "time capsule" emails. It hadn't been that long ago that I sent it and I had a good sense of where I was at in life when I wrote it, so the email wasn't really surprising. If anything, it was written a little earlier than I'd remembered.

In the email, I predicted that I'd be mid-way through a PhD program or finishing up med school... though at the time, I had no idea which path I wanted to take. There was a sense that there is a set track to follow and I completely hadn't taken into consideration the detours and stops I'd take along the way. So no, I am not even close to "mid-way" through a PhD program now. But I'm working on it.

When I finished reading, I almost opened up an email to start a reply, in which I'd talk about where I ended up and what's happened in the meantime ... before remembering, duh, this email time capsule thing doesn't work both ways.

For now, I can just listen to a few conspicuously standard descriptions of Fall 2005, knowing very well what comes next.

Late scans mean I miss the early trains. I inhaled a carefully crafted turkey sandwich on the way to the hospital, only to call my subject at 7-- he was asleep. Somehow, I've had to wake up two people before a scan and I've only been at this job a couple weeks.

The fMRI plugged away until quarter to nine, as I flipped uninterested through some shitty girly magazine and nervously monitored the progress of the several experimental 'runs.' This was my first real unsupervised scan, and after a very long day and almost not having the subject show, I felt like it was just a matter of fate that something would go wrong.

But it was fine, and soon I was ejected from the closed container of a hospital. A shielded hospital basement no less. And now it's dark outside. I have two hours or so before my train.

So I wonder around, taking in the strange feeling of a city at night by oneself. Familiar feeling. I cross one of the bridges across the river, and looking downstream (is it?), yellow lights reflect from a parallel bridge and from restaurants along the waterfront. And it could be Kyoto. Only fewer people, fewer lights, less action at the river. But enough to make me wonder if there comes a time when we stop experiencing truly new things, and instead relive past experiences over and over, with only slight changes and a lot of denial and self-delusion. Or maybe it's just me and vivid over-encoded memories following me around like shadows. Omnipresent, inseparable, and always coating the ground I walk.

I convince myself I am not in Kyoto as I wander past a huge stone church. But I pass a restaurant called the Devil's Den, which I recognize as a place I stopped, had a drink and something to eat the last night I was in Philadelphia. I remember people watching and commenting to my boyfriend how I looked forward to joining the twenty-something crowd. That was a couple years ago, and now I find myself exactly that: a twenty-something living in Philadelphia, walking past the same place I had made this comment.

I am only reliving past experiences, over and over and over.

I wander through a CVS looking at skincare products, obviously brainwashed by the nonchalant paging-through of Glamour earlier as the fMRI probed the inner workings of the brain with its amazing correlational, phrenologic technology. But I'm cheap to the nth degree and susceptible to brainwashing to only the n-1th degree, so I didn't buy anything to combat wrinkles I don't yet have.

Then back across the bridge to 30th street station. I make my company with stray people walking slower than normal. Men sit alone at tables by the late night Dunkin' Donut station store. Despite their relatively clean clothes, their ragged faces and one too many bags give them away as homeless, and they sit drinking their coffee and reading the newspaper with an uncharacteristic contentment in a place for people with destinations. Boarding announcements are obscured to incoherence by the echoes that bounce of the thick stone walls and obscenely high ceiling.

I wonder when this station closes. My last train is at 10:45, getting me back home at 12. But what of the others? Part of me would like to stay here all night. What could I find here in Philadelphia, as it slips slowly into tomorrow, into the quiet hours of night?

Instead, I board my train, homeward bound.

I had dinner with several other students at the house of the Dean of the College this evening. It was a "wrap up" dinner for preceptors-- which is a fancy word for a fancy type of TA. Post-catered-salmon and chocolate cake, we sat in the living room, along with the associate Dean of the Faculty talking about what it takes to transform the minds of freshmen and sophomores. "It doesn't happen in the first year or so," was the consensus..."it takes time, " we the students thought.

These students sitting around me are the most involved of the involved. So what am I, apathy incarnate, doing contributing to the discussion?

I question my motivation for participation in my college life. On some level, none of this "engaging" is ME. I prefer to work quietly by myself and let things happen as they may. My engaging is often completely forced, and made in an effort to connect with the school, faculty, and hell, maybe even other students.

I think more than anything, I feel that I have a responsibility to contribute. I recognize in myself that oh-so-desired transformation of mind, and feel that, if nothing else, I need to show my teachers and administrators that they have done something right.

As I grow, I expect that this sense of responsibility will shift. Although I may always seek intellectual fuel to feed my maturation into a Real Person, someday my attention will no longer be focused on making myself visible to those who helped me attain this satisfying position. I will look around me and see others within whom the structures by which they live can be built upon, modified, and even shaken.

They will be my students.

For now, I have not reached this point. In this grand cultivation of minds, I think I'm just beginning to grow out from the ground. I'm one of the fortunate ones, but there is still a long way to go.

Pedagogy is an art, and not a science. This thing called "college" is actually an experiment, and these professors of ours win some and lose some. "Maybe this is all worth it," I saw in the face of one of the Deans this evening. Maybe he's right.

Happening upon dead things never ceases to startle me. It's probably not an unusual reaction, but nevertheless I'm always a little surprised at how something that is doing nothing but lying there and not moving can startle me just as much as something that were to jump out at me. I suppose it's that death is something private and unseen most of the time, at least with animals, and so even though it's natural and not something with which I'm uncomfortable, it interrupts my usual meandering thoughts and can stop me dead in my tracks.

Generally, these dead things will catch my interest momentarily. Like I've said before, I'm guilty of "checking its status" if it happens to be on my daily walk to campus or work. And generally, after that initial startle, these dead things don't haunt me.

But not always.

Walking to work, I saw a dead squirrel. Its head stuck out of a drain pipe, where it must have fallen in from a gutter. I imagine it survived its fall and tried to escape through the bottom of the pipe, only to get its head through, get stuck and eventually crush itself as it struggled. I hate it.

I hate that I know it's lodged in there well enough that with all the rain the back half of it is submerged in water and bloating. I hate the flies around its little squirrelly face. I hate that even if I consciously walk on the other side of the street I still know it's there. I hate that I can see the silhouette of its head when I can't keep from looking that direction from the other side of the street. I hate that I must be subconsciously afraid of getting my head stuck because of a traumatic incident I had in my childhood but don't remember. I hate that it makes me consciously think of how easy it is to fall in Something all encompassing and dangerous and how a struggle to free oneself only results in a slow hopeless compression. Even if you manage to keep your head out of it all the while.

Night-time sharpens, heightens each sensation.
Darkness stirs, and wakes imagination.
Silently the senses abandon their defenses.

Solitude is hard-won ally, faithful and patient. It's walking home with nothing but the rhythmic sound of my steps, echoed by my flip-flops and my keychains clicking against each other, with the subtly nauseating smell of petals and garbage in spring. The streetlights change for cars that aren't there, and I am told not to walk in flashing orange letters, a warning I causally disregard. There is no one.

When I was in high school, I walked home from the bus stop one evening. The mile-long walk was something I had to do often. But this time, it was after 12 at night. My mom was gone somewhere. Part of me didn't want to bother my dad for a ride-- after all, it would mean having to explain what I was doing at a "Gay Evening in May" drag show. But more so, I wanted that walk. I took the Davenport bus-- an hour ride as it were. One by one, the small handful of riders got off until it was my turn. The night was mine. A young girl, all by herself, walking along the road in the middle of the night, with the only streetlight at the bus stop, whose light was quickly swallowed by the forest.

If I had a car right now, I'd leave this dead street behind and drive until there was no light. I'd like to find myself alone on some back road. Lost, where no one knows where I am. Give me that singular experience, that release. I need that self-reliant moment, where it's so easy to panic. On this caffeine high right now, I'd like to drive until my mind went hazy and I fell into that surreal Space Between that comes with no sleep and endless road.

But instead, I sit here in the dark listening to the first 3 mins and 4 seconds of the same song over and over. I think I have for hours. I catch my sad, ugly, finals week reflection in the mirror, and realize slowly that the mirror no more switches left and right than it does up and down. It switches front and back. Damn looking glass mocks our accepted "natural" progression of space and time. But I guess it has that in common with the darkness as well. My heightened sense of perception comes hand in hand with a lack of things to perceive. No colors. No visual acuity. No one. In many ways, darkness kills reality daily. Maybe that's why I enjoy it so much. It's so infamous, after all...

I guess I should go to bed. I guess I should stop looking in the mirror, it only makes me feel worse. I hate that if I live to 80, at least 20 years of it will have been spent asleep. I hate that all people don't live to 80. I hate that this is probably just the beginning.

I guess I should go to bed. I have no car and no endless stretch of desolate country back road to swallow these feelings. Instead, I curl up in my bed hating myself and that fucking mirror, and fall asleep to the ghost streetlight color changes and the uncomfortably comfortable knowledge that everyone knows where I am.

Goodnight.

There is nothing quite like the quiet, small satisfaction of getting through a difficult day or two. There is no real sense of closure, and I'm too exhausted to even pat myself on the back for surviving this far. But there is a little bit of acquiescent peace. Makes me think of dying.

I went to the BodyWorld exhibit in Philadelphia this weekend. It was a good display of what I've thought all along-- 1) Humans are beautiful, if for no other reason than being impossible feats of biology and 2) Preservation of this biology even after life has ceased is a work of art.


And what a final act of vanity! I realized mid-way through the exhibit that even if you took off my skin and my fat, I still probably wouldn't look like these gorgeous specimens. The plastination process attracts a certain type: If you've spent your life loving your body and keeping it perfect, why not preserve it for all to see and admire? It's reported that these guys can last a thousand years. Would I do it? Sure. I'm a bit of a narcissist after all... and a science whore if nothing else.

One thing I found surprising about the exhibit was how the visitors reacted:

"See that bone? That bone is pushing up against that nerve in my back..."
"I guess that's what my grandma's lungs look like..."
"No wonder it takes me so long to recover from knee surgery..."
"That's the type of cancer he has..."

There was a bonding of reality with mortality-- but not really in a depressing way. Just everyone looking all this death and disease in the face (literally) and bringing that biology into their present lives. Connecting with the corpses, so to speak. I guess I was expecting to be the only one not creeped out. Even all the kids seemed to really enjoy it. I'd bring my kids to see it.

I'd like to experience myself dying. Not anytime soon, but I don't want to die so suddenly that I never know what it feels like to die. Of course I don't want to waste away and I don't want to live if I can't tell I'm living. But so many of us take for granted our nearly perfectly functioning bodies. I want to feel mine break down. I guess that's the ultimate Raw.

That being said, I'm much more comfortable with myself dying than any one else I know. I don't like sitting on the sidelines for a slow degrade. But that makes me human. It means I enjoy the people in my life, no matter how central or peripheral. And "that's what's important." I'd add that it's also important to always know you're going to die. Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust, and all that.

Unless of course it goes a little more like Acetone to Polymers, museum to museum.