March 22nd, 2005
111144964829688853
“What are you doing?”
If you asked my dad this (as I often did) at a time of mundanity, he would more likely than not, reply, “Building a space shuttle”, or something equally obtuse.
If I were to ask “What am I doing?”, I probably won’t have the synapses patched in series to be able to muster such a concocted response. I’d probably stare at you for about twelve seconds, at which point my perpetual lag would give way and I could answer your question. This of course would not be followed with an immediate, coherent response, but a another good ten seconds of stammering and conjunctions, and then finally if you were lucky, your number would come up in the rusted, tumbling bingo ball of my mind and I’d be able to string together enough hard consonants for you to infer that I was indeed the most exhausted I’d ever been, that I was indeed quite nearly the most depressed and crushed I’d ever been, and that I had been doing SOMETHING (or was it nothing?) with my life for the past half year other than having my physical, emotional, and interpersonal life rot away like the spider plant I used to love so much outside my window. Something indeed.
There are two questions that interest me now, and anything beyond that is virtually inconceivable: 1) will this process permanently damage my mental and/or physical health, and 2) will I have a major, violent episode before the discs are pressed? For those of you craving insider knowledge on the dead pool that is my sanity, it has been observed that in a mild, twisting pain my heart tends to race from time to time, and I have developed a habit of regularly muttering the word “fuck” under my breath every ten seconds when I make another stupid mistake and have to recompile.
But we have to be professional. There’s a job to finish here and a responsibility to those in the company.
[For those of you who don't like tragic stories, it may make you feel better to know that several weeks ago I clipped two small, sprouting buds from the spider plant before brown death descended all the way down its limbs. They are now in separate whiskey glasses of water, one in a window facing south, the other west. They're growing, and though the spider plant as we knew and loved will probably die before the summer, these perfect, innocent clippings of love have dreams of a great, beautiful future, twice as grand as anything before.]
