eyevee lyf
November 2010
22 posts
Can't I Just Have One Nice One?
In my dreams last night, I was always trying to get to French at 10:30 but never quite getting there.
For a couple of nights, my dreams have had this meandering quality; I keep trying to get something, I know where it is, for the most part, but something else keeps me away.
B made an appearance, I ran into him with some of his sports buddies, at exactly the same corner in another dream. This isn’t unusual or surprising; all I’ve been doing is running into him in real life, yesterday, surprisingly, at Hallowed Ground’s.
By now my dreams are beginning to have a logical University of Chicago of their own.
CI now almost always makes a cameo, although he does not actually appear in any of the dreams as a talking, thinking, feeling person. Which is funny because that’s not the way I think of him at all. I think of him as thinking, talking, and feeling—just not about me, and if about me, then slightly off, never to my favor.
What was my point?
J’ai oublié.
“
I sleep like a dead man. When I wake up in the thin early-morning light the girl is lying curled up on the floor. I touch her arm: “Why are you sleeping here?”
She smiles back. “It is all right. I am quite comfortable.” (That is true: lying on the soft sheepskin rug she stretched and yawns, her neat little body not even filling it.) “You were tossing in your sleep, you told me to go away, so I decided I would sleep better here.”
“I told you to go away?”
“Yes, in your sleep. Don’t be upset.” She climbs into bed beside me. I embrace her with gratitude, without desire.
“I would like to sleep here again tonight,” I say. She nuzzles my chest. It occurs to me that whatever I want to say to her will be heard with sympathy, with kindness. But what can I possibly say? “Terrible things go on in the night while you and I are asleep”?
” —J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbariansoh, this again
I’m pretty upset that the quarter has gone by so quickly. I realized with a shock yesterday that I’m actually going to have to buy a plane ticket soon, and that once I buy my ticket, I’m going to go home and then I’m going to be home and then the inertia that school has will have let off and I’ll just be at home, completely still.
I’m excited to be seeing carlos, pablo, and mindy again, and I hope I see a lot of them, although Mindy isn’t going to be staying in El Paso very long because she’s going to go back to Austin.
Things are complicated here, of course. My future really does hang over my head, uncertain and demanding certainty. Some days I feel ok with this uncertainty, other days I’m trying to keep a sort of panic from consuming me.
Academically, this has been one of the easiest quarters here, if it weren’t for my BA work and my studying for the LSAT, and my job.
I always hate Christmas-time. The other day they were putting up the decorations in Hallowed (where I am now) and I had this weird feeling. It was almost a good feeling, though. I kind of wish I could experience a Christmas in a place that was more suitable to it than I think El Paso is. Somewhere where there’s green pine trees and white snow.