Saturday, March 19, 2011,10:06 PM
3° A Day in the Life.
Huma ♫ I Can't Sleep In Silence.
by five each morning i'm already in my car, headed southbound on I-35. i buy a coffee at the gas station on the old farm-to-market road, and cruise through the darkness in silence. after the usual traffic in Florence and Round Rock, at 75mph i reach the Austin city limits before i know it. i take the offramp at exit 231, flash my badge at the checkpoint, and leave my purse in my locker. i scan my key card, grab my US TREASURY DEPARTMENT, and my first bin of files. my workday officially begins at 6:30, and for the next eight hours i'm a government agent represented by a four-digit number stamped on all of the tax documents i process. in a florescent-lit room reminiscent of a call center, i extract mail, organize paperwork and do quality control research on corporate returns. most of us listen to our iPods as we tear open envelopes and quickly scan for remittance, signatures and errors. it's a world completely different from retail or waitressing, and i enjoy it more than any other position i've ever held. there are no annoying customers, no dress code - only the expectation that you maintain the standards of confidentiality and excruciating attention to detail in a highly secured area. the people who sit in my row of cubicles are especially friendly, but nobody expects you to make conversation. i'm just Clerk 1543, separating 1040NRs from 1096s, and when i finish my timecard at 3pm, i'm nobody's girl and out the door.
the windows are rolled down. my music is on loudly and the sun heats my thighs. the afternoons in central Texas are long, and it takes a long time to get back to my house... i have dinner with my parents. we talk about work and i think about London. i feel low tempo and smooth. when they go to bed after the evening news, the lights are turned off. sometimes i fall asleep quickly afterwards but on other nights, i creep back out into the livingroom and bring our television to the netflix screen: i scroll through the 80-odd films on our queue and watch another episode of
Skins. i like the blue ambient flicker that suffuses the dark room. the volume's turned down and i'm at ease. there's nothing much to do in the next six months, i realize... wake up, do my eyeliner, drive to work. make pretty stacks of paper, stamp checks, drive home. lay out in the sun until dinner. have a cold glass of water, watch the local weather reports and see if the dow jones fell. pet my cat, curl up on the couch. watch Dr Reid on
Criminal Minds or Effy on
Skins. take a sleeping pill or an anxiolytic, wait an hour for the effect to take hold. brush my teeth, wash my face, turn on my bedroom ceiling fan and fall asleep against the white noise...
these are simplistic moments. in them i'm finding a deep release of tension. this might change in September, when school starts. but for now i'm exploring the deconstruction of an
ism, the loss of certain uncertainties and the negation of idiosyncrasy. in essence i'm smearing my canvas over with an even color, preparing for what comes after this interregnum of anxiety. in this, i'm discovering the difference between impermeability and strength. my father says i'm disaffected and distant, emotionally complex. sometimes i think just the opposite: that there's nothing really there to complicate.
but maybe that's a pretense. i find myself pretending i'm as neat and controlled as a script on some page, that my life can be defined by location or accent, by hair color or job title, by fancy degrees and distinction or lack thereof. but nothing's ever that clean or perfect, is it? we all search so hard for some tangible meaning to ascribe to ourselves, to make some mark on history. but the reality is, we never can. what i wrote above about my Typical Day - in dry, laconic prose - was meant to convey a connotation of redundancy and futility. it's not to say that our pursuits and dreams, as trivial as they are in the end, ought to be abandoned. i only mean to suggest that sometimes, style does resonate louder than substance. i try so hard to be some character bound in by the celluloid of film, but all too often
break through the fourth wall instead.
The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference…all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency.
—Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
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Tuesday, March 15, 2011,4:45 PM
2° childhood
so it's a bit past midnight now, and i have to be awake in just a few hours to make it to Austin by 6:15am. i've been tossing and turning in my bed, trying to fall asleep against the alternating sounds of my cat
purring snoring and the cars rushing by on this very busy street we live on.
and then it hits me: tomorrow is my first day at the IRS, while spring break starts for everyone else. in a very short while i'm going to be at work, wearing an ID badge and organizing files at My Real Office Job, to save up for My Future & Tuition & Airplane Tickets & All Of That. i'm turning twenty-three in four months, i'm beginning graduate school, and i'm moving to a new country entirely alone. i opened up another bank account on Friday, i filed my taxes, i changed the oil in my car. i pay for gas and shampoo and cigarettes, have a nose piercing and color my hair and do all of these autonomous things...
this is the same house i lived in some twenty years ago. we've moved dozens of times since, but my family kept this house and rented it out for supplemental income. when my father assumed command here at Ft Hood last summer - as a Colonel in charge of an entire battalion - we moved back into this same place he bought brand new as a young Captain in the spring of '91. he left for the first Gulf War soon after. so much has changed and everything feels different, but i'm in the same bedroom tonight...
it's a lot to get my head around, i suppose. and i felt a bit silly lying in bed, squeezing a heart-shaped pillow and thinking about my best friend. i'm not a little girl anymore. i can say No or Yes whenever i'd like, or nothing at all. i'll be in London in six months, and this time next year i'll be working on my dissertation. sometimes out here in the desert it feels like time is a nonentity: the colors don't change at all and the only thing that passes are the cars. but when i start to put the pieces together, it all moves too quickly. i'm just a kid, you know? i'm not an adult. i'm off the rails more often than not. i always manage to burn whatever i try to bake and never know what wines go with what meals. i don't know how to find a flat or apply for a visa. i don't know what specialization to study in my masters program or how to fall in love or choose a mobile carrier overseas. i don't know how to do any of this "stuff" that ought to be reserved for grownups. it's overwhelming and strange. i know i'll get through it, of course i will. the only direction is forward, yeah? but there comes this moment, and perhaps i've had mine tonight, when you realize that something you once took for granted is lost, and lost for good.
I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can. → C. S. Lewis
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Wednesday, March 9, 2011,7:26 PM
1° well then, I suppose it's official.
I found out via email on the 22nd of February that I got in. On the 8th of March, I received the official information package via post. This means I can walk into the credit union, sit down with my notebook and acceptance letter, and politely ask the banker to
help me make this happen. £15,888 for one year's tuition, plus another £12,000 for living expenses and £1000 for the flight... I find myself leaning towards the "practical" these days, almost to compensate for how
impractical I fear moving to London might be. I've becoming increasingly deliberate in making good decisions for Career and Education, because I'm a bit of a tearaway when it comes to my emotional stability and personal life.
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