It's been a WEEK? Holy carp.
Something occurred, or must’ve done, to keep me away from
this pleasant activity of posting daily. That’s fine; all that we are is
irrefutably older. But the atoms and molecules that comprise us are ever assiduous in so doing, and they seem still to be keen on it, even if it is
January, which it definitely is.
I’m pretty sure that I took my SATs on this day in 1991. (It’s
astounding to me that that was twenty-one years ago. Babies that were conceived
to a soundtrack of Michael Bolton, or Wilson Phillips, or Richard Marx, or the Pretty Woman soundtrack, can now legally
purchase hooch. And, why not? They need it bad, I bet.) I remember those
anniversaries and details like that to demarcate the passing of time, during
both this onerous winter and this clustrophobic vastness of a life-and-living apparatus. I
guess that you’d call something like that calendular—like
the flower, maybe, but made of iceberg lettuce. Wait.
I’m putting myself to sleep
with how excruciatingly boring I am. I’d like to say that it used to be
different, but my thoughts are stale units of torpor, like rotten things float, by the time they surface, all gussied
up with such idiocies as sentence structure.
Anyway, as pivotal experiences go, that SATurday morning was an especially vivid
one, all cruxy and such. Such mundane situations as that frightfully cold and
sunny, standing awkwardly in a high-school parking lot with a bunch of
other middle-school students (I was 12 at the time), waiting to take our SATs
and pretending that I hadn’t underdressed, commenced a change in the course of my life.
The SAT? It’s a test, alright. I forget its length, but I
recall it as having been 4 hours in duration. Like nobody ever had a blanking
bladder. At any rate, this was the work of a nameless Smartypants organization so as to kinda, you know, objectify the aptitudes of others. Because I had an extremely difficult time reading under fluorescent
lights (and nobody but me knew this, because I had no wish to be humiliated), I
filled in random dots on significant portions of my test. And this
changed everything, because I did pretty well, and I received a scholarship for
a college course. I didn’t use that for a couple of years, until just after
I’d failed 9th grade. I took the only course that was available—Feminine and Feminist Ethics—and it was
stunning. Noy only did I love it, but I was given the first “decent” grade (out of charity?) that I’d received in several
years. It made sense for me to do something different, so I did, and I stopped
going to high school, which was the most.
All that bygone superfluity aside, we experienced yesterday the ballyhooed
JANUARY THAW. (It’s happened both later than usual and rather precipitously, even thoough Brunswick has been about 7
degrees above “average” for months now, so it’s just like the more-merciful-but-nonetheless-cruel western Maryland that I know so well. But, what a glorious
and disruptive havoc it was here! The puddles were positively enormous. The sun was bright.
It was interesting to see that, despite this anomaly, everybody
wanted for it to be even warmer than it was, and at last, I realized: the thermal
spectrum of what a person can withstand diminishes with age. I mean, I knew
that, but what I hadn’t realized is that the threshold of temperature tolerance
on both sides (hot and cold) recedes incrementally. Observing the ways in which I am less robust than before, I did some informal
projections with whatever stunted and haphazard mathphysics awareness has voluntarily gone dormant inside of me, and the conclusion landed me—finally, flatly, and firmly—at
one place on the thermometer:
Seventy (70) degrees. ROOM TEMPERATURE. Next thing they'll tell me is that the afterlife is climate-controlled.
Ewwwwwwwww.
THE END
