how to be mentally interesting
Friday 18 May 2007 | I like a cookie
1. Brood. Everywhere you go, no matter how bright the sunshine, allow it all to feel Very Serious. Stalk around darkly, like Hamlet, but in stripy socks and a hoodie.
2. Drive slumped over. Listen to mid-divorce Ani DiFranco and brood at red lights, at stop signs. Drive by the Librarians’ house going over everything you said and didn’t say. Drive the speed limit because it’s exhausting to press down the accellerator.
3. Cease to derive pleasure from formerly enjoyable activities. Determine that Tofutti Cuties, strawberries, good books, phone calls with friends and even blogging are more trouble than they’re ultimately worth. Pick up your new pink fountain pen, stare at it, put it down again and close your journal without writing a word. Fall asleep trying to read.
4. Also stop enjoying ordinary not-particularly-enjoyable activities, like doing dishes, bathing, or changing clothes. Decide sleeping in jeans isn’t that weird.
5. Watch in horror as Great Extinguished Passions spontaneously rear their hoary heads. Toy alarmedly with the idea of developing a crush on one of the Brujo’s musical colleagues. Admit it would be too much work and drop it. Have vivid involuntary images of putting your fist through something breakable.
6. Feel a large blank absence. Feel an enormous big nothing, like a jar. Feel distant and disconnected. When the Brujo kisses you and asks you what’s wrong, drop your eyes and struggle to say, I don’t know. Pause. Struggle further and garble out, I’m just undermedicated. Go to see him drumming in the children’s opera, which is very funny in parts, but watch with a stony unmoved countenance. Bark with laughter only once, when a kid nearly falls over. Dislike yourself. Wonder what your life would be like if the skinny little blonde girl were yours and the Brujo’s. Don’t look at the musical colleague. Stand outside talking with the Brujo in the rain while he sucks down a cigarette and cup of coffee before the second show. Blush when he refers to the lascivious activities of the night before. Notice his spontaneous remark that when you were little, you probably looked like the skinny little blonde girl.
7. Go by the drugstore. Refill the goddamned prescription. Pay $76.89.
8. Reason that while Mandarin might just advise you to wake the fuck up, which would have the added advantage of being cheaper, you probably have a better shot at doing that while popping aripiprazole, even though it also unfortunately makes you feel like you’re tied to an airplane wing.
9. Go by the grocery store and buy the frozen enchiladas that remind you of home, and a box of raspberry tartelettes on sale. Back in your car, stare out at the rain. Notice distantly how the DiFranco periodically falls into measure with the windshield wipers, then moves away, out of time again. Imagine what the Brujo would say, or remember what he’s said so many times before.
10. Return home, put the enchiladas in the toaster oven, set the timer to sixty minutes and check email, hoping for a voice crying from the wilderness (though you already have a dozen unanswered messages). Feel resigned when the DSL connection fails. Eat a raspberry tartelette. Cut an Abilify tablet in half to take in the morning, because three days without mood stabilizers is not an experiment you particularly want to continue. Wish the Brujo weren’t playing poker after his second show. Write a sadly derivative-of-Lorrie-Moore blogpost and prepare an Ani DiFranco song to upload, hoping its purely morose melody line will help faithless readers understand, or at least not blame or judge. Be unable to post any of this for an hour because the DSL won’t work when it rains. Burn your tongue on the enchiladas. Feel dumb.
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