In return for nothing
Lethargy is settling in like amnesia. I have a terrible compulsion to stare at MTV all day, somehow summoning the energy to blink between shows. When I was much younger - nearly too young to have a memory - I spent countless hours constructing a palace inside the cardboard box our fridge came in, with my imagination. Now, instead of making things that entertain me, I demand prepackaged, instant entertainment. Internet, movies, music. Microwave-meal entertainment. It frightens me that I can barely remember what I did with my time before MSN and MTV.
(Not that I watch MTV much. I haven't watched it in months, but sometimes in an epilepsy of regressive intelligence, I'll turn it on to scorn all the plastic people and how mindless it all is, and then, thoroughly disgusted, I'll turn it off - two hours later.)
It's either that, or watch the curt spindles flay the seconds off the clockface.
I need to get in the car and just drive. Drive until the skyline is no longer cliched, until the roads lack substance and roadsigns blur into uncertainty. Hunt down some unnamed playground and kick the treetops on a swing, or stretch out my arms and keep the two ends of a seesaw off the ground.
Some days I feel as though if I could have my way, I'd curl fetuslike into a cardboard box, and you'd never hear from me again. Then I remember things like my three monster-sized essays due in for the start of term, and crawl back into the stark world. Mortgage my cardboard box and my sense of self (two for the price of none!), and limp back into the rat race, because the circle of life is sticky with obligations.
Still, some days, it's hard to find a reason to get out of a half-empty bed.
Just sitting here, watching the minutes peel off my life in strips of misdirection.
In other less depressive news, random photo on the sidebar now works, thanks to Calum, who is uber :) I have many memories of us, but the most tangible one is the "us" in that living room, stroked with long crimson shadows from a sky scorched with a dying bushfire. Us, sprawled on perpendicular couches - him buried in code, me grappling with epistemology - and the silence is as warm as sunsets and brewed coffee. Amongst other things, I remember thinking, I can be silent with him.
Programmer and philosopher. Like nutella and cheese, they don't look like they work together, but they do: surprisingly.
(no, really. Nutella and cheese is like, awesome, and I don't care who disagrees).
Enough. I'm off to balance some seesaws.