Symbol Dizziness, Capulálpam de Méndez, Oaxaca 2009.

Stream of consciousness for a change a day of TOEFL exam writing I am that asshole whose existence you vaguely wondered about as you cursed the passage on the SAT about deep sea vents and I am so tired around four from squeezing my brain to fit standardized tests that I’ve gotta go downstairs and binge on Japanese peanuts which Oaxacan style are actually coated in lime and then it’s back to the bright upstairs room with the window slats which lets in all the light of Oaxaca, bright bright blue and white and orange and that smell of wet pavement drifts up around five when it starts to rain, lightly.

Breath.

There are too many things on my fragmented mind to formulate an essay. Dog training. Crochet. Pretension? Relaxation. Formatting. Making a living. Grad school. Grad school. Grad school!!! Beer and beans – the supermarket grocery list. Should’ve left it out in the rain for Found magazine. Fall. Apple cider and woodsmoke. The romanticized ideas I get about the U.S when I’m not there.

Blogs. Internet life. Sometimes after a day on the internet I feel like the life has been squeezed out of me (lots of squeezing imagery lately for some unconscious reason). I feel like I’ve crammed in a lot of frenetic mental motion but done nothing, learned nothing. It’s an emptying feeling like watching a ton of images stream before your eyes but being unable to focus on any and then feeling the urge to vomit or have a beer. That’s how I feel about the internet sometimes. But then I miss it. Drug or friend? Both? I grab snippets and I suppose snippets aren’t a bad thing as long as they’re woven into a larger framework. I miss the consistency of books, the way te involucran, to use one of those Spanish words that supersedes any of its English equivalents. The way books wrap themselves around you and leave you a bit dazed, as if your temporary lover has just left on a bus and you’re still a bit tired and hazy with a light light body, and with the air of someone else still clinging to you. I miss that feeling of putting a book down and letting my eyes and mind readjust to the world. Gotta find someway to balance the two, grounded book world and drifty internet world.

“I like it better without the giant Jesus” I find myself saying to Jorge as he goes trolling through photos.  We glance over our shoulders and give these kinds of back and forth insights throughout the afternoon, the surreality of a lot of these exchanges sinking in only later when I put them into written words.   I think there’s a little Sarah-Menkedick-This-Is-Your-Life voice that comes through sometimes, a faint echo behind certain moments whose comic bizarreness resonates, even (especially) when I’m actually taking them seriously.  Example: Oftentimes in the afternoon I give a slight over the shoulder glance and say, with burly and grave seriousness, “Gordo! Chicle!” the way my parents used to say to me “Sarah! Tone of Voice!” I’m telling him to stop chewing his gum so loudly it makes me want to scream; my parents were telling me to stop being a know-it-all condescending sassyass teenager.  Curt, familiar, vaguely comic warnings.  I wonder if they felt a little comic reverberation each time they had to tell me that – I doubt it, because they were probably too busy trying not to pull their hair out over the joys of my teenagerhood.  They were fighting an uphill battle. I once corrected a friend of my mother’s when I was four – “it’s not the floor, it’s the ground.” Only a cocky four year old would really claim to know the difference.  Although, if cornered, I’d probably still be cocky enough to attempt to do so now.

Gordo isn’t really gordo but it’s such a great round word like a potbelly that we’ve gotten addicted to it. I’m gorda he’s gordo and the dog is gorda. This is a bit problematic if I dial the wrong number, which has happened a few times, and I crown someone “Gordo!”

Whew. Made chili the other day, but it lacked beans. Hence the beans and beer run to the supermarket, and now, when the sky has gone all sour cream and grey, it’s dinner time, then movie time, then bed time, and then the wake up at 6 a.m. to run through the city and whew, whew, whew, whew.

And now: the creative flow has just stopped. I’ll end with the plants on the balcony. Germaniums hanging on, begonias, and a spindly spoon-leafed plant extending a sultry tendril towards the mint.