Desire, lightness, idle flights, and Saturday
This week I've been running on very little satisfying sleep and eats. The desire for the former was keen while for the latter was almost non-existent. There had been no time for sweet suede little naps at the library's blue fuzzy chairs lately and I decided to not eat (lovelessly assembled and costly crocks on campus anyway) unless I desired and thus could enjoy food. It sounds a bit extreme and careless, but it felt like the right thing to do if I wanted to live consciously. The down side was that sometimes, my body was plain panicking due to sudden seizures by hunger or weariness. Other times, I would float over the grounds and be surprised to find I have so soon reached my destination.
Today, I began writing a story called... It's not entirely clear, but I'm certain the word, "accident", will appear in the title. Lots of Longjing tea kept me going till past three o'clock, when hunger finally wheeled around. It was crushing. My forehead and neck became clammy within minutes and the sole occupant of my attention was finding something I wanted to eat. As often happens with traffic when one is pressed for time, the line at the Bookstore cafe was not only long, but being dealt with at a snail's pace. My watch seemed to speed. I pressed the back of my hand to my throbbing head. Finally, I ordered a chai latte to go and impatiently drained almost half of it before I got to the bottom of the stairs. Wushu class, a demanding two hours of all-round physical exertion, was at 4:30 and I had no strength for it.
A lot of milling around the various "cafes" around campus revealed that few of them opened after lunch. I came back to the Treehouse (which disappointingly doesn't have any adventurous planks, rope swings, or Tarzan tendrils of hoary green) and had an increasingly familiar serving of chicken teryaki. Next week, I shall definitely have to start bringing in my own lunches. It gets to a point where even reasonably tasty things can be hard to swallow. Still, that lunch saved my life because though it was consumed in a hurry, I immediately felt more clear-headed.
Miraculously, when I just made Wushu class on time and we began the dreaded long jog, calisthenics, and kicks through the gym, I didn't feel faint or cranky. To my consternation, after my body warmed up, I found myself at the front of the queue because most others had slowed down. My legs felt all right, not leaden and impossible as on previous occasions and my lungs were open and happily greedy. Everything was light and I felt as if I could have gone on forever. How could this be? People have recommended fasting to me before, but it doesn't sound healthy for the body or mind. Nevertheless, there was a lightness to doing today's leaping drills I'd not known before. Lightness or not, sometimes it's fortunate there is no mirror in the gym to confirm visions of oneself sailing through the air like a catapulted elephant... Still, the body learns like a particularly slow viola and eventually produces the desired movements with less hesitation and difficulty.
Quasi-randomly, now that winter holiday creeps near and I've an unreasonable length of time in rainy, wintry North Europe, I am dreaming of places I've never been anew: Minsk, Budapest (kind of on a Slavic kick today), Kyoto, the S. Korean mountainside, Ushuaia and the rest of Patagonia, Tunisia, Botswana, Avignon, Aix-en-Provence, Mongolia, Brasil, Iceland, C*U*B*A!
Off to sing and strum a little because something is stuck in the heart and needs to come out. Apparently, the struggles between lavender lyricism, authorial ego, and realism of a supposedly everyman narrator in "The Accident" will have to wait till tomorrow evening, when I shall have returned from an afternoon at the holy City Lights Bookstore and perhaps an educational, infallibly depressing documentary on secretly GMed food playing at the Castro, the Cleopatra of local landmark theatres.
Today, I began writing a story called... It's not entirely clear, but I'm certain the word, "accident", will appear in the title. Lots of Longjing tea kept me going till past three o'clock, when hunger finally wheeled around. It was crushing. My forehead and neck became clammy within minutes and the sole occupant of my attention was finding something I wanted to eat. As often happens with traffic when one is pressed for time, the line at the Bookstore cafe was not only long, but being dealt with at a snail's pace. My watch seemed to speed. I pressed the back of my hand to my throbbing head. Finally, I ordered a chai latte to go and impatiently drained almost half of it before I got to the bottom of the stairs. Wushu class, a demanding two hours of all-round physical exertion, was at 4:30 and I had no strength for it.
A lot of milling around the various "cafes" around campus revealed that few of them opened after lunch. I came back to the Treehouse (which disappointingly doesn't have any adventurous planks, rope swings, or Tarzan tendrils of hoary green) and had an increasingly familiar serving of chicken teryaki. Next week, I shall definitely have to start bringing in my own lunches. It gets to a point where even reasonably tasty things can be hard to swallow. Still, that lunch saved my life because though it was consumed in a hurry, I immediately felt more clear-headed.
Miraculously, when I just made Wushu class on time and we began the dreaded long jog, calisthenics, and kicks through the gym, I didn't feel faint or cranky. To my consternation, after my body warmed up, I found myself at the front of the queue because most others had slowed down. My legs felt all right, not leaden and impossible as on previous occasions and my lungs were open and happily greedy. Everything was light and I felt as if I could have gone on forever. How could this be? People have recommended fasting to me before, but it doesn't sound healthy for the body or mind. Nevertheless, there was a lightness to doing today's leaping drills I'd not known before. Lightness or not, sometimes it's fortunate there is no mirror in the gym to confirm visions of oneself sailing through the air like a catapulted elephant... Still, the body learns like a particularly slow viola and eventually produces the desired movements with less hesitation and difficulty.
Quasi-randomly, now that winter holiday creeps near and I've an unreasonable length of time in rainy, wintry North Europe, I am dreaming of places I've never been anew: Minsk, Budapest (kind of on a Slavic kick today), Kyoto, the S. Korean mountainside, Ushuaia and the rest of Patagonia, Tunisia, Botswana, Avignon, Aix-en-Provence, Mongolia, Brasil, Iceland, C*U*B*A!
Off to sing and strum a little because something is stuck in the heart and needs to come out. Apparently, the struggles between lavender lyricism, authorial ego, and realism of a supposedly everyman narrator in "The Accident" will have to wait till tomorrow evening, when I shall have returned from an afternoon at the holy City Lights Bookstore and perhaps an educational, infallibly depressing documentary on secretly GMed food playing at the Castro, the Cleopatra of local landmark theatres.
posted by greenyew at 10:19 PM
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