Macro/Micro Existential Crisis

A light went out in the distance, quietly, without commotion, explosion. Why did a light go out? I thought, unhurried. Once a light goes out it does not turn back on. There is plenty of time.
I look out into the vastness, at the countless lights I can see, nearby and in the distance, and to the patterns, swirling, infinite, of lights which are too far away to distinguish.
I might not have noticed that one solitary light disappearing into the black, among so many others still burning strongly, but I have time to look. I have enough time.
There will be no great change in the sky now that that light is no longer with us. There are so many, each one so small and insignificant.
As I think about that light, now missing, if not missed, I watch my own personal timekeepers as they fly around my being, quickly, never pausing. One, two three, the nearest one flits. Slower, the outer rings drift. They have only passed by a few times when I decide. It is important to me to know why that light went out.
I begin to prepare myself to communicate.

Without looking at the paper the graduate student hands me, I stuff it into my bag, not wanting to compare my score with the eager participants on either side. I will read the comments, written in green ink to avoid bruising my precious young ego, once I am alone. I stand up to leave, swinging my bag over my shoulder, smoothing out my rumpled sweater and see the bus at the bus stop, nearly empty. I could board it, ride it home, retreat to my own room, a quiet womb free of people who expect me to know what it is that I want to do with my life. Hoards of students with majors, plans, aspirations flow by me on their way forward. Everyone seems to be moving forward.

We are warm. We feed here in the warm darkness, all together. It is comfortable. We are comfortable. Now we eat. Soon we breed, then we will become more. We are already many. We like it here.
My feelers cling to the fibers which I know well. I have not been here long, but I am one of many, and this place of dark warmth is as familiar to me as it was to my father and my fathers father. We stay generation after generation. We like it here. We are warm, the fibers are soft and good to cling to and there is plenty of food. I see more food over there. My brothers shift to allow me to reach it. We are content.

I begin to communicate. My awareness stretches out toward the space where the light once shown. There are are other lights nearby. I direct my consciousness to them.
“Why” I begin. It is not polite to communicate quickly, and so I pause, letting the farthest time keepers drift by me again and again. I continue
“does that light no longer glow?” I can tell that the other lights understand. They do respond yet. Things happen slowly here.
As I wait for my answer I look out to my timekeepers. Sometimes it is hard to concentrate on something so close, it is much easier to look beyond them, but I enjoy them as they circle me. They do not communicate, they are too small, but I feel as though we understand one another. They keep me company while I wait.

I pass by the bus stop, resisting the temptation, and continue on to my next class. I find a seat near the back, I am early and the room is nearly empty. With a sigh I retrieve the essay and turn it over. That is not my name. This is not my paper, but everyone is gone now. I will have to wait until tomorrow to correct the error. “Scientists Observe Death of a Star.” I read it while I wait.

A cold sweeps through the warm fibers. My tendrils wrap and grasp, clinging on to my dark home now threatened for the first time I remember, my father or my fathers father remembers. As the fibers once again settle, I look around and see that many of my brothers are no longer beside me. Thought I am not alone, for the first time there is space between myself and my family. Too much space. We huddle together, a momentary pause in our life of eating, breeding and feeling the warm darkness. The cold and the dangerous movement begin again and my tendrils come loose. I am flung upward, a direction of which I was not previously aware. My claws catch on more fibers and hold on. My brothers are far below.

I have come to understand that many lights do not have timekeepers. Perhaps they do not desire them. My own desire for the comfort they provide, circling me endlessly, marking the passage of time, draws them to me, keeps them near. Perhaps the lonely lights do desire company, but the timekeepers do not desire them. I am grateful. I am humble. I count them again. One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight... Nine. The ninth timekeeper is shy, he hides at the outskirts of my love but I smile my warmth at him anyway. I wonder if he feels it, sometimes.
I continue to wait.

I read the paper twice, ignoring the incorrect punctuation and the awkward sentence structure and concentrating instead on the miracles contained within, which I have not taken the time to think about in so long. In this quickly filling lecture hall it seems as though I am quite large. I fill an entire seat. When other people climb over me to reach their friends in the center of the room, my legs feel awkwardly long and I tuck them away under my chair to make more room, but I have been reminded that I am in fact very very small. 100 light-years away a star died. Compared to that, what am I?

I look down at my brothers who managed to cling to the fibers. They have returned to their lives, eating, breeding, enjoying the warmth. I could climb down to them. I could join them, and resume my place in the world. It would be difficult, but possible, I think. From above I can see that there are other families like mine. As far as my sensors can detect there are more fibers, more food and more like me. I turn around, surveying a vast world I had never experienced before. I could climb down to my brothers, but instead I turn away, to explore and to discover.

I feel the lights in the distance, I feel them begin to answer.
“The light” They pause, and I watch my friends spin.
“ran out of fire. It had to stop.” I understand. I can feel it inside of me, the fuel that I burn in order to glow. I have plenty. I will continue to glow. The light in the distance did not, and will not.
After we stop burning are we simply gone? I do not know. I do not think so. I am comforted that I will continue to watch my timekeepers for many more rotations. I send my warmth out to them. I imagine that I can feel them smile. They are beautiful and they are mine.

I feel as though the world and I are reaching some kind of understanding.

The dark warmth is comforting but as I move forward, in a direction I have come to associate with up I am beginning to feel myself die. My reality becomes colder and lighter the farther I climb. Even though I will die I will discover what lies beyond the warm fibers. I believe that there is something beyond the warmth and the darkness. I believe that I will reach it and then I will know.

I have accepted the space now. There used to be a light there and now there is not. There used to be a light everywhere, and if they all continued thru out time there would not be enough room to shine at all. It is very crowded here. If I concentrate I can see things even smaller than my tiny timekeepers filling up the spaces between the lights. It is more comfortable to look out at the far lights and accept the illusion of space that they give. Perhaps it is good that there is one less. There are so many things.

I have read the essay seven times now, and have not heard a single word from the professor standing in front of me with his projector and bullet points. I can identify the feeling that I have been trying to grasp for so many months now, as I wavered and remained undecided about what I wanted to do with my life. I am feeling crowded. There are too many things in this world, crowding me out and making me claustrophobic. The sciences they study here, with their atoms and microscopes just make the world seem even smaller than it is already. It is obvious what I was missing. I pick up my sweater which has fallen to the ground and shake it as I walk out of the class. I feel sorry for offending the professor, but I know what I have to do. It is time to turn my face up, away from the ground and away from the world. I need more room. It is time to turn to space, where there is room to stretch out in between the few but fascinating things.

My body gets weaker the farther I climb. It is so cold. I pass by food that my family will never eat but I do not have the energy to stop and enjoy it. The light is becoming blinding. I rely on my feelers alone to find fibers to climb. My body reacts against the cold as I finish my ascent and feel something beyond fiber food and brother. I stretch out my feelers, experiencing the rest of the world. My claws release their grip on the fiber. As I expire I grasp the emptiness of the world beyond that that I have know.

There is nothing.

Sometimes things are in disarray. Sometimes the tutu, which sat so nicely on the lamp, making the room glow rosily whenever someone leaned all the way over the couch to turn on that particular lamp, falls off, landing halfway on the Buddha in the corner. Sometimes it becomes necessary to clean.
I thought, sitting on the couch, the selfsame one over which a person would have to lean to pick up the fallen tutu, remove it from the table in the corner, from the right leg of the Buddha, from its accidental resting place. I thought about all the things that need to be done and the fact that I am not doing them. Not one single solitary one. Not going to class, not doing the dishes, not even getting dressed, not really.
And on that couch, that selfsame couch, I came to the conclusion that I could give one succinct reason for not doing any of the things that I really should be doing instead of looking at my messy apartment, my ballerina Buddha and my inside-out pajama pants. I can excuse them all with one simple want, desire and fact. I do not want to be wet.
To say that dryness is my one desire would be, of course, false, and would, in fact, prove, if true, that I was completely content. Here, on this couch, I have succeeded in dryness, succeeded completely. However, this state would be compromised by any of those things that I need to do, want to do, have to do. As follows; in order to get dressed, first I would have to shower. Wet. If, say, I were to decide that I could get away with not showering for a few more hours, and wanted to go to class in the state that I am in, I would need to go outside. Into the rain. Which is wet. But without leaving this room, without wearing anything different, I could begin to clean, starting with the dishes, which need to be cleaned in the sink, with a sponge and warm faucet water, which has the tendency to splash, all over my makeshift pajamas. Leaving me, as it seems is unavoidable, wet. And that, simply can not be born. I’m sure you understand.
There is one thing, though, which it seems I can rectify without breaking any of the statutes of limitation with which I have trapped myself. And so I stand, carefully, to avoid spilling any of the cups piled so precariously on the coffee table, or any coffee on the cup table, step onto the nice white couch with my slightly dusty bare feet and return the tutu to its rightful, if accidental, home atop the lamp in the corner by the Buddha, so that, if anybody asks, I have accomplished something today, after all.

I've always wanted to keep a record

Now, this seems a little negative, even for me, but I would love to have a list of the things that I absolutely can't stand.
I suppose that I could, you know... do things I like as well.
But for now.
I do not like:
Beeping
Tapping
Blinking.
I do not like them very much indeed!

Very. Tired. Girl.

I was born in the right age.

This morning I got up with the idea that my class was happening some time around noon. It didn't worry me that I couldn't put my finger on exactly what class that might happen to be or exactly when around the hour of 12 o'clock that I was supposed to be attending it. (I take the same bus to all stops and it only comes once an hour, so I knew which one to get on.) It didn't really seem necessary. Until, that is, I showed up at my first guess and met a dark, empty classroom.
Is this the classroom for my... Psych Discussion? I ask myself.
... Yes. I believe so.
When is your Psych discussion?
Noon. Ish. Maybe.
Oh yeah? Huh. Well.
What is a girl to do? My brain can't formulate another better answer to the question, and in any other age I would have had to sink down onto the cold cement, put my head in my hands and think. really. hard. until I was able to wake up and deal with the situation, probably missing my... um... class? this morning which I was *almost certain* meant that I wouldn't be getting that... one test back. From that... once class. That I... have this morning.
But no! I was not limited to my own sad spent brain power which would still be on strike for a few days after this weekend (oh man) I had the entire internet at my disposal.
And now it's time to get off the internet and go to my SOCIOLOGY discussion (praise Google!) and collect my Sociology Midterm! At 12:30, which is, indeed some time around the hour of noon, thank you very much.

Now, this is not very interesting.

Sherlock Holmes doesn't know how many planets are in our solar system, but he knows the minute difference between different cigarette ashes. Hmm.
And he's famous for his deductive reasoning, and most of us are not. Now, he's also fictional, but that is beside the point.
College (and school before college) teaches some very useless information. Or, at least information that will become so completely unuseful after college that it seems kind of... irresponsible to crowd our brains with it.
(Because yeah, we can store as many bits of knowledge as we want, I'm not arguing for limited memory storage but recall DOES get harder. That's about as fact-y as psych gets...)
I guess what I mean by all that babble is:
Scientific Calculator v Graphing Calculator v Calculator you get as a free gift from some finance based business. I know difference! I didn't think that was weird. But after going home and requesting to know where in the hell my scientific calculator had been stored and being met with blank stares and then three (yes, three) graphing calculators, I'm beginning to realize that it's not really standard. Standard knowledge, I mean.
And why would it be for a non-math profession? (And why on earth would one turn down a graphing calculator in favor of one that doesn't do as much? Precalculus tests- Also, why would someone spend a quarter on something when they could just plug it into their big shiny machine...)
So I think I'm going to try to forget it. Because this is not something that I need to know.

EDIT:: 4/28/09 "Also, why would someone spend a quarter on something when they could just plug it into their big shiny machine..." I just read that again. It didn't make any sense. At all.

Conclusion: I appear to have meant "Who would someone waste a quarter in college (10 weeks) on a class to teach them something that can be done by a calculator." Which does make sense.

Sunday

Saying your very first word aloud at 5 in the evening is such a weird feeling. Maybe that's why I almost make an effort not to go out into public on Sundays, just to have that jolt of oddness in my life every week.
I'm pretty sure that I developed the Sunday outfit: badly fitting jeans and this one old green shirt, because it's the one thing that transitions seamlessly from couch to grocery store and looks great with unwashed or brushed hair.
As I get older and refine this weekly ritual more the only things I can think that I'd like to change are, having a sunnier kitchen and living room to curl up in, and have an inside radio that picks up NPR without my having to work too hard at it.

Funny little habit.

I've developed a habit, and it's gotten much stronger now that I on my own. I think I should preface this with a bit about my parents. They were never into being proper. They taught me right and wrong as best they could and when to say thank you and to keep my elbows off the table, but I took an interest in learning when to say "May I," and "whom" all by myself. I could have gone my entire life saying "Can I have that cookie," and it would not have bothered them at all.
I still refuse to put a napkin in my lap, which irks them slightly, but that is another story.
Back to the habit.
Now that I live nearly alone (with a mostly absent roommate with her own room) I find myself giving myself instructions.
"Now, you know you have to get up early in the morning. Not just early enough to get to class, mind you, but also to wash your hair. No excuses, it must be washed."
"Oh, I suppose you may listen to your ipod if it helps you fall asleep, but you know you really must stop relying on things like that. You're getting a bit old for security blankets you know."
It's as though I have an alternate personality that chimes in with good motherly advice, in a vaguely trans-Atlantic accent, that my mother would never actually give.
How strange.
I wonder if other people have imaginary nannies on their shoulders telling them to eat more broccoli instead of another piece of chocolate. Or maybe they just call it a conscience and don't feel the need to personify it with it's own specific accent.
"But you must stop dragging this whole blog-posting out just so you don't have to go to bed! Lights off! I mean it!"