Pascal, Katie and the kids

Pascal, Katie and the kids
Originally uploaded by Daisy72580.

Sophie (right) and I were making a circle of her plastic array of animals, insects, and automobiles - setting up for a game she has yet to explain to me, whereupon Adele (left) walks up and taps Sophie on the head with the beak of a small plastic airplane.

That wasn't very nice, Adele. Sophie says. Matter-of-factly.

Adele steps back, ruminating over having being chastised, pondering her next strategic maneuver.

She advances once more, taps Sophie again with the plane, and then kisses her on the head. Loud smack.

The absurdist play that is Pascal's Children. I hope they never grow old. (well maybe I do)

Austin, Baby

There something amiss about Real World. How every season, unfailingly, the two best looking people (in the conventional sense) become a couple (one of whom inevitably is in a (often shaky) relationship already). And the show proceeds to portray their romance as something miraculous, fateful, and as inevitable as R&J. There is the necessary banter about "feeling each other from day one", or "feeling a connection." Maturity and class nonwithstanding (the girl did moon 2 of guys AND made out with another girl in the hottub on the first day, and the guy, not to be outdone, nabbed a zygomatic fracture worthy of surgery during a drunken brawl on the first outing), they are a match made in heaven. Ahh, destiny. Who is to mention the obvious, that they are pretty boys and girls, and this is what pretty boys and girls do -- mess around, cheat, and fling it out in front of the cameras, pretending as if there were more substance than the mutual discovery of pretty-ness -- as if more meaning were to be derived from the most primal kind of lust that brews when you put several fuckable persons of similar age in one house.

Here is to making meaning out of frivolity, as only MTV can. I am officially addicted to Austin.

Normalcy

Each period of respite that follows a intense marathon of study brings with it a certain restlessness, laden with more anxiety than the one preceding. It is, at best, irritating and at worst, suffocating. Like a drug-induced state of formication (note the m rather than the n in the previous word) it is unresolvable, persistent, and unbearable. As if normal life has become phenomenon rather than baseline. The mundane - esoteric and intensely disconcerting.

I make of it best I can, telling myself, nearly obsessively, that there need be no reason for guilt. That this hiatus is well-deserved and necessary. (Though playing dual roles as both pathetic defendant and cynical jury proves to be somewhat of a challenge.)

But I have manged to distract myself today from these neuroses. A lovely 6 mile run with the sister, in which we trespassed into the idyllic corporate park of Hubbell. Began reading electroman's copy of What's the Matter with Kansas (having my father wonder of this sudden interest in American politics). And picking up the third movement of Bach's Italian Concerto, for the 5th time (maybe this time I will learn it in its entirety).

It felt like summer vacation -- strangely anachronistic, albeit beautiful. I run the risk of becoming addicted.

Need for Speed

I can no longer wear high heels - for the mere reason that they impeded my speed. Over this last year I have progressed from speed walking to scurrying, perhaps as an adaptation to being on the floors. Miss a beat and the resident you're supposed to follow is nowhere to be found, leaving you with a handful of notes and orders to be signed, because without that MD after your name you are utterly and pathetically dependent.

But it is not only in walking. My love affair with speed, although present my entire life, has really accelerated to torrid extremes. I can no longer read, wanting to reach the end upon starting. Anticipating the end of movies. Racing up escalators. Pumping up the treadmill. I have become a fan of bullet points, newspeak, and the 5 minute man. But for good reason. The need for study. It seems like the entire goal has become to reserve time for that which I need to do above all.

So it comes to be a problem now, when in between studying, this need for speed can no longer be justified. And I realize now this obsession is really not functional, rather pathological - when pleasure is derived only from efficiency and completion, and never process. Even without necessity, I have become, at baseline, impatient, anxious, neurotic, and on caffeine.

It makes waiting the bane of my existence. Because unlike a book, I cannot turn to the last page and see the outcome (which incidentally is why I never finished Great Expectations). And so I sit here, tortured, things out of my control, waiting, with pessimism, no less. I'd really rather be studying.