Indecision

"Here," says the wizard, handing me a ladle bubbling with liquid. "Drink this."

What is it?

"Why, a magic potion!" He clears his throat. "Brewed painstakingly for many weeks, it is my finest work, a paragon of excellence and craftsmanship. May I draw your attention to its vivid colour, its subtle hints of elm and oak. No wizard alive could produce its better."

Yes. But what does it do?

"It works, my dear girl, as a sort of catalyst. Its exact outcome is difficult to predict, owing to its potency and great complexity. But there is a chance it will fulfill your dearest desires and lead to great happiness."

Just a chance?

He looks at me with impatience. "Well, yes, what do you expect? I did my best to filter out unwanted consequences, but there was only so much I could do. You must understand that in so potent an elixir it is impossible—it is against the very laws of nature!—to entirely eliminate risk."

What risk, exactly?

He sighs. "The potion may give you great happiness, but it may instead cause intense—though, I must assure you, shortlived—humiliation."

I look down at the ladle and at the eerie green liquid swirling within it. That faint whiff emanating from it—is that sweetness or is that rot?

"Well? Don't be such a coward, girl. Drink up!"

Still I hesitate. I bring it to my lips, then stop and lower my arm. If only I had more information. If only I knew for sure.

Familiar Things

Each day I walk into my classrooms and I sit where I sat last week. I squint at my prof from the usual angle; see the usual side of his head. The people around me (who are always the same) say some things they've said before. And then it so happens that the lecture has ended and I walk out the very same door.

(Inevitably, of course, there is given some new information. But I note it down with the pen that I always use.)

Solace from Solitude

I work in a library where nobody goes. It is quiet and the sun shines in. When I am here alone I expand outward solipsistically until my head brushes the rafters and my fingers bat against the ceiling fans. The sun touches me (reaching its rays through the skylights) and like a chubby baby I giggle and squirm. I swell warm and roly-poly into the room and flatten the freestanding shelves. The space is all mine; there is no one else but me.

I remain expansive until there comes a noise. Noise pricks my ballooned happiness and shrinks me back into the meanness of myself. I do not like noise; I much prefer silence.

Digesting the Past

It takes about a decade for my life experiences to process through my gastrointestinal tract. At time of writing: my stomach leeches nutrients from my early college years; high school still squeezes through my intestines. (Thank goodness, I am shitting out my adolescence. It gave me bad gas.)

Just last June I bit off another chunk of my lifespan. I'm almost done chewing it now. It was not bad, but a bit tart, also maybe too much salt. I will wash it down this summer with red wine and white noise.

Ah, Romance!

There once was a boy and he was sweet on a girl. She was sweet on him too. They went on a date, kissed, and fell immediately and passionately in love. They got married and lived happily ever after.

There once was a boy and he was sweet on a girl. She was sweet on him too. He was shy and never expressed his feelings, and neither did she. They never discovered their affection for each other, and they went through their lives feeling lonely and alienated.

There once was a boy and he was sweet on a girl. She fucked him only because she was lonely and he was there. Afterwards she found him hard to get rid of. She tried not to think of how she had hurt him because she preferred to forget that she too could be cruel.

There once was a boy and he was sweet on a girl. She found him attractive enough and his attention flattered her. But he soon got bored of her and began to ignore her. Suddenly cut off from her source of validation, she became obsessed with getting him to notice her again. He never did.

There once was a boy and he was sweet on a girl. Her love for him waxed and waned: sometimes her heart overflowed with affection for him, but sometimes she would look at him and feel only disgust. There was something vaguely sickening about his clinginess and his childlike faith in her. But she didn't want to hurt him and so she faked her love. She felt guilty for living a lie.

There once was a boy and he was sweet on a girl. He was loving and kind to her but he rejected her sexually. Was he gay, she wondered, or was there just something wrong with her? She was frustrated and unhappy, and her self-esteem withered.

There once was a boy and he was sweet on a girl. She took him for granted until he was forced to break up with her. Only when she could no longer have him did she find that she wanted him after all.

There once was a boy and he wasn't sweet on a girl. She threw herself at him so he slept with her a few times, but then he rejected her. Afterwards it was exceedingly awkward between them, and even worse, she had to see him every day. It hurt her to watch him act friendly towards everyone else but distant (though scrupulously polite) to her.

There once was a boy and he was sweet on a girl. He hit on her even though he was already engaged. She liked him but felt morally uncomfortable with their involvement. After she moved away he called her and left a message but she never called him back.

There once was a boy and he was sweet on a girl. They had a beautiful romance but it turned sour. When they broke up she cried for days. She indulged frequently in nostalgic thoughts about the way things had been between them. Though she was too stuck in the past to find someone else, he had soon fucked several new girls, all more attractive than she was. She stalked them on facebook, and although she had never met them, she was certain they were bimbos.

There once was a boy and he was sweet on a girl. She was sweet on him too. Maybe this time, she thought to herself, it would work out. Then it didn't. Well, shit.

Allegory pie, allegory pie

Imagine my brain is a countryside and through it run many electric impulses, or messengers.

One day from outside my ear there comes a message. My ear receives a collection of sound waves—or perhaps a telegraph arrives by Morse code, top secret, to be delivered to the centre of my consciousness straightaway. The messenger, roused from soft slumber to do his duty, is ready as always: he grasps the sealed envelope in shaking hands, mounts his fine steed, and gallops away into the night.

The countryside is at war: corpses litter the roadsides and everywhere orphans bewail the loss of life. Doggedly the messenger rides past the wreckage, narrowly escaping gunfire and the eerie screech of stray arrows. His proud stallion spooks at the fires in the distance and balks at the booming of canons—until finally he must dismount and continue on foot.

He runs, he walks, he runs again. At last he reaches the palace and, being brought inside, bows before the grim, war-wearied face of his sovereign. "A message, my lord, from the land of Ear."

He collapses in exhaustion and dies on the spot, but—thank Providence!—not before he delivers to his betters this important message: That Letterman said something funny last night, and isn't that neat.

[All I can do is depetal millions of metaphorical daisies.]

A Mildly Flattering Ride Home

On the subway this evening I got hit on by a rich guy. His name was Serge and he worked in a bank.

Maybe it wasn't a bank, but it was something financial. He worked at King and Yonge—my milieu of yore—and did something involving charts and graphs and tables of numbers. I know because he showed me them. And then he said, "I'm not bullshitting you—this is really what I do."

He told me several times that he worked in finance. He told me about how he had two bachelor's degrees, one MBA, and was working on getting his CFA. After he got that, he said, he would go back to school and get a second master's in finance. "I want to be more competitive," he told me, "so that I can get a nice seven-figure salary." He said this several times—the part about the seven-figure salary, that is. I wondered if perhaps he'd meant to say six, but I didn't bother asking.

Then he gave me his business card and told me to email him sometime. "I might do that," I said, politely. To which he replied, "If you do, I just might respond."

I briefly toyed with the idea of contacting him. In a world of careful image construction, you've got to respect someone who wears his toolishness on his sleeve. I'm quite sure he would make a show of taking me somewhere lavish, and, you know, I don't mind putting out for a free meal.

But, not surprisingly, I decided against it. I would have a lot more casual sex if I didn't dislike people so much. I am far too misanthropic for a life of sin.

AMZB vs. Disease/Self-Pity

[Copied over from facebook for consistency.]

My great achievement of the day is not blowing chunks. For the second time in two weeks, I am facing an epic battle against nausea, dizziness, and fever.

Feeling sick gives you lots of time not to do the work you're being paid to get done by Tuesday. Instead, you get to hang out by the toilet (in case you should need it in a hurry) or else lie down because you feel weak and dizzy.

Since both these things are a little boring, I eventually needed a little entertainment. So I allowed myself to get sucked into an online conversation with a friend of mine. The gist: he's fucking someone boring, irritating, and stupid. Having woken up to her faults, how can he now get rid of her?

I could sympathize with him. You misjudge someone initially, and then whoops, a few months later you're miserable. You need to end it, but every way out requires that you be an asshole. There's no way to reject someone nicely. So do you break it off now or later?

This is a really fun conversation to have when you can easily imagine someone saying the same shit about you. Got me thinking about my persistent sense of intellectual inferiority within my own social group. About the disconnect that seems to exist between me and other people. About the termtime sense of isolation/alienation that I can't seem to shake.

So I decided to throw a pity party. Location: the bathroom. Invitees: my sense of self-worth, the bile rising at the back of my throat. Fun-filled activities: pin the vomit on the toilet, hide and go freak.

In the end I didn't throw up, but I was left once again with the feeling that I need to prove my worth to the world. Also perhaps to myself. Unsure how to do that. I can't think of anything in my life that I am currently proud of.

In order to feel better about myself, I decided to play a few rounds of Prolific, currently my online boggle-like word game of choice. I wanted to feel like there was something—even something fairly useless—that I could do well. I played six rounds with people whose ratings were lower than mine. I lost every time.

I think the only possible thing I could do to feel more pathetic right now would be to broadcast my momentary sense of self-pity to tons of people on the internet. It would be shameless and incredibly tacky. Good thing I'm not doing that.

Defensiveness

Teeth bared, growling, I feel as though I have something to prove. Amidst a community of movers and shakers, I am merely trembling.

It seems these days that everyone is trying to change the world. I have never thought myself capable of that. Why I am not trying: despair, laziness. (Are they perhaps the same thing?)

How can I say to the world: My existence is worth your notice. I have ideas and thoughts too, even if they are on a smaller scale than yours. My experience is real. I am real. I may not be trying to save the world, but I am watching it like you are. You are watching the big things. I am watching the small things.

Why I Want to Post but Never Do

It is a problem of translation. I have lost the ability (if I ever had it in the first place) to translate my thoughts into words. To translate my thoughts into thoughts. To transform a vague, instinctual sense of importance into quantifiable, measurable thought-units. To break down the whirling into elements that my rational mind can understand. To untangle the matted mental hairball into recognizable strings of thought.

I don't have time and I can't be bothered. In the next few days, before I can write or think or tackle the tangle in my mind, I must:

packboxesfactchecksaygoodbyesweepcleanhavemeetingswrapthingsup

But I would rather sit alone and think. Too many thoughts are waiting to form. I want to let them.

My New Toy

Enjoy: amzbhates.blogspot.com

Mixed Metaphors

My house is full of stinging things. Wasps and hornets, poison ivy, ants wherever I turn. Through dinner I rub myself with nettles till my skin turns raw and red. I eat spiders for lunch and they bite me on the way down. I scratch and itch and shudder and twitch, but still with zeal I expose myself to irritants.

I have been trying to remove stressors from my life. I have been lopping them off like so many gangrenous limbs. But is it too late? The poison has got to my blood and it swirls around in my body. How did a stubbed toe turn into this?

One metaphor ran out of steam so I switched to another. The beautiful thing about blogging is that I can write poorly if I damn well want to.

April Is the Cruellest Month

Daytimes are all right once you're up and moving. There is the delight in daily things, in things you learn and foods you eat and people you see. Every few minutes brings a tiny surge of excitement that propels you forward, so that you jerk onwards through the day in spurts and sprints that flag only when you run out of novelties. Then you have nothing left to react to, nothing external that'll squat in the rooms of your mind. Instead your insidious thoughts ooze up through the floorboards and under the door.

This is evening. The energy has not yet run out but the happiness has. The fresh flow of delight is curdled by a growing awareness of your own faults. There is the agitation, the racing thoughts, the struggle to get through the evening intact. The daily fight of your body versus your mind. Sometimes your mind wins. Your body's best tactic is to go to sleep.

You wake to the hollow inertia of despair. You wake early because you slept early, having decided that sleep was less harmful than anything else you might do. You lie in bed in the morning for maybe one hour, maybe three. Sometimes you don't get up at all.

You never do anything much because you are never calm enough for thinking. Even your daytime excitement is a crazed sort of agitation that you can barely control. You wonder, in those despairing morning hours, whether there's anything you can do to fix this. You think not. How can you eliminate turmoil when everything in the world is a trigger?

Rejection?

You walk into the room sporting a burgundy five-buttoned vest over a crisp white shirt. You balance your serving tray in one hand and approach the nearest group of dazzling jet-setters. Offering it to them, you say, "Would you care for some pussy?"

"Oh, you must try the cunt, dear, it's delightful!" exclaims a fat and bejewelled one to her balding husband.

"Darling, I couldn't possibly. I had three pieces of it earlier and I'm positively stuffed."

The greasy man to his right says, "They look just scrumptious." You wait patiently while he hesitates over the fresh, quivering vulvae, his bulbous fingers poised in the air. You get your hopes up. Finally: "You know, I really shouldn't. These days I'm watching my weight."

Onto the next bunch you go, holding up the offering each time. It is not a very popular dish. Every once in a while, someone will say, "All right, I'll give it a try, if you insist," and half-heartedly select a juicy morsel. But most of the time they do not. It is a disheartening task, and the routine, the repetition, the predictability becomes tedious.

You begin to wonder if you are catering to the wrong crowd or if the dish itself is merely unappealing. Could you do something differently next time? Add a little salt or some lemon zest? Rosemary, perhaps?