Sometimes . . .

it just seems so hard to be with yourself. Like maybe you are way harder than any other person in your life to deal with, but you're stuck with yourself, so you better just get used to it.

Here are my musings from yesterday on this particular issue (from a letter to a friend in SF). Please be advised that the language is not school appropriate. I would apologize, but it's exam week, and I have to conserve my apologies for other things. (laughs)

~


I keep wondering why I seem to have such trouble establishing a wider group of peer friendships, other than my laziness about being a social butterfly, which I will admit is an issue. I am a lazy butterfly. I am that one butterfly that just sits in its cocoon waiting for something else to try to eat it. So it doesn't have to work too hard to get loose. The kind of butterfly that figures: well, if I don't get eaten, I won't have to shove my way through these walls, and if I DO get eaten, then it'll work out, too, because then I won't have to pretend I have any desire to exercise my freedom to fly. Or exercise anything. That's what kind of butterfly I am.

O God. Seriously, when they were assigning people souls, I think I got the one with the bum wheel -- like that cart you always seem to wind up with on a long shopping mission because you enter the grocery store believing you have superhuman strength of purpose and that you are gonna be in and out of that store like a greased comet even though you haven't been to the store for five weeks and only have a plate of crusted-over pasta in your fridge at home, and you truly do believe that one bum wheel on a lousy shopping cart isn't going to get in the way of your superior musculature. So you take the bum-wheeled cart anyway, and halfway through the store you're panting and your neck is spasming, and you've already jammed your second toe on your right foot into the wheel like a jackass twice because it stopped moving just as you thought you were getting up to a decent speed past the vegetables and the wheel is trailing those ratty gray strings that break off the mops they use to clean the floors, and human hair, and a plastic sticker from a banana peel, and the other shoppers are eyeing you like you're a NUT JOB, and you can't say anything to them, even though you want to holler, "Mind your own beeswax, BONEhead," because you are out of breath from pushing the gimp-cart down the shopping aisle and trying not to let the metal ram into the glass cases of ice cream, but it's happening anyway, and everyone is staring at you like you're doing it on purpose, and a guy who is clearly not in line for a management position rushes over looking all superior and asks if there is something he can, uh, help you find, and you say, "Yeah, a better fucking cart, buddy," even though you feel guilty when he runs away from you; and then you have it. The epiphany. As you shove the cart like a disabled snowmobile toward the impossible line of smirking customers at front register number 4, giving up on collecting anything -even toilet paper which you really do need- between aisles 5 and 12 because you're too freakin' tired to do it and you have Kleenex left that you can use for a couple of days if you have to, and your left arm is showing signs of some kind of deep vein thrombosis from the pressure. You realize: I did this to myself.

It comes to you -- no one FORCED you to take this lame, sorry-ass, crap-wheeled, mental-complex cart that wants to be driven around like Miss Daisy as your passenger or perhaps CARRIED along with all the groceries to the front of the store . . . you choose it. You choose that cart.

Just like this soul.

I hope everyone there in Virginia is enjoying the summer and that your souls have all four wheels fully functional right now.

Congratulations on the house, Bop.

love!
(laughter)

emily