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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