July 12, 2003
Carpentry
I can admit this now that my speech class is over. Part of me was looking forward to it before.
The first few days of summer are always exciting for me, but on about day three or four the lack of structure and lack of people variety starts to get to me. So I was looking forward to my speech class if only because it would throw me with new people that would do things and when someone asked me "What did you do today?" I could answer more than work, read, write, tan, and work out. I was afraid that the lack of human contact was going to make me weird.
Once I was in my speech class I was right, I did have more interesting stories to tell. But it felt like speech, for three weeks, became my life. It became the source of all stories I told for those couple of weeks and not only did I feel like a boring person, I felt like a dork that was overly enthusiastic about her summer school.
I am a girl of many plans, so I have already designed a sort of schedule for myself for next week. Most mornings next week I will be working, so I will do that except for Tuesday and Friday. If you pray, pray for my mom because she goes into surgery for a hip replacement on Tuesday. If you do not pray, just send good wishes her way. Good karma and all of that.
So Tuesday I will be with her for most of my waking hours, except when I am throwing together the gala for Kenji.
After work I plan to chain myself to a treadmill and do the whole workout thing. Last night when I was hanging out with my friends there was a lot of talk of carbs being bad for you that depressed the hell out of me because I could easily live on bread alone, so I am considering going on a liquid diet of sorts. Maybe clear my system. So part of my plan for next week is to work on my body.
I also plan to work on my head. Usually my policy is to not break into summer reading until August hits, but with my Creative Writing class starting in the not-so-distant future I need to at least make a dent into my list. This is my most massive summer reading list but the fact that there is very little for me to write fools me into thinking that I do not have much to do. I always trick myself into stupidity better than anyone else can.
Believing that I am more than body and brain, I also plan to work on my soul next week. I started to scrape the surface of something that has been bothering me and since there are very few times that I get these large gaps where I get to plan most of my time I am going to start to dig at it until it bleeds. My thinking is something along the mentality of using leeches: I want the bad blood out.
Or at the very least I want to see it for what it is.
If there is still time left over I will look to my heart. I do not even want to think too hard about the fact that I put my brain, body, and soul far above my heart. It is merely a footnote of my existence at this point.
Last night a few friends and I went to a lovely outdoor mall around town. My favorite part was wandering around the over-priced stores and predicting how much things cost. Who pays $118 for khaki capris, honestly? If it is you I do not want to know. Sure the stuff was cute, but no matter what my purchase is I always spend the next ten minutes following it justifying it. To compensate for dropping that much cash on capris I would have to spend an hour justifying it and who has that kind of time?
Saturday mornings always bring me the most thought and the most hot air to make these entries blow into dangerously long lengths.
While I was in the shower this morning I realized that I put everyone in my life on pedestals. At first I thought it was only the people I liked that I did this too, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that I do not allow anyone to set their feet on the ground. It is only when someone has deeply disappointed me or hurt me that they get knocked off of their pedestal and so far no one has been able to climb back up. Anything not on a pedestal I consider to be dead to me, which is a horrible way to be.
The obvious and painful thing is that if anyone were to be asked if they could be placed on a pedestal, they would emphatically say no. But I never give people the chance to state a preference, I only build the pedestal under their feet. No one in my life, especially not me, is allowed to have enough stability to have their feet firmly placed on the ground.
Instead all of wait on our pedestals, talking to each other but never really touching, until someday we are knocked down. The best thing to do would be for me to take a saw and turn the pedestals into splinters and sawdust. Sure we would all be bruised in the fall but we could help each other get back up again with our toes touching the dirt and our hands outstretched towards each other.
The problem with thinking in symbols is eventually meaning and tangible objects need to be attached to them. So far I do not know what my saw looks like.
Love,
Mandy