Peripheral · Vision

That's it, then: it's gotten pathological.

On my way back from the post office (who knew that they close for Remembrance Day? I didn't!), I passed the little bookshop that has been closing down for at least two months. It is owned by a friendly ginger-haired faun with a graduate student beard and a winning smile. It was my third time at the shop, and each time the books were cheap and plentiful. The slow death continues, but not without good cheer.

Even on my previous visits the great finds were few and far between. Still, I had gamely perused the emptying shelves and lugged home a stack or two of well-worn volumes. A few respectable or promising literary titles, some Tom Wolfe, the Khaled Hosseini book and the like. The others were oddly assorted.  Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder, of Prairie fame. A lovely, mint-condition hardcover copy of Anne of Green Gables, complete with embossed Anne on the front and never-before-seen illustrations within. It wasn't the first time I'd brought home versions of my favourite childhood books, and I knew it wouldn't be the last.

Today, I browsed the shelves once again and came away happy, because I'd hit the Children's Section by accident again and come up with That Scatterbrain Booky by Bernice Thurman Hunter and yet another Laura Ingalls book. My arms were already laden with two fairy tale compilations and one book about a teddy bear revolt. For good measure, I also snapped up a Judy Blume and a Gordon Kormon. There were a few I couldn't justify taking home, however.  For one, I finally decided to leave behind Emily of New Moon - it was the same edition I worn out with repeated readings as a pre-teen and there is a chance that my copy is still at the parental home. As I placed the faded brown and yellow book back on the shelf, however, the ache in my heart was surprisingly intense. It was a book, and yet my conscience was aflame.  What was that about?

It hit me as I was leaving the shop, a plastic bag laden with books - mostly children's books that I've read before - in hand. I wasn't just buying books.  I've been buying books the way other people (Angelina Jolie, for one) go to orphanages and adopt children, or the way animal lovers go the pound and take home a lucky pooch, looking back with guilt and sorrow at the others they left behind. I can't adopt them all!  But my sickness goes beyond that.  I leave the bookshops with the guilt of a daughter leaving her aged parents - nay, her parents and childhood friends - consigned to a nursing home. 

The realization was somehow enormous.  I'm not leaving behind dusty books in those second-hand bookshops, I'm leaving behind the loves of my life, the people and situations that formed me, my best and most familiar childhood companions.  Many children are avid readers, but being an ostensibly-paradoxical people-centred bookworm I consumed words as something more than wholesome entertainment.  At the time that I learned to read, I was a fundamentally anxious and easily overwhelmed child, split between languages and realities. My family was new to the country, and my parents were consumed in the grueling, self-sacrificial early stages of the immigrant experience.  Fortunately, my mother made time to take me to the library weekly; from there, capable agencies took over my upbringing.

Books taught me to animate English like a second skin and socialized me into a new culture. They reassured me, against the backdrop of a haphazardly organized home life, that individuals could assert order over chaos. Books paraded before me a host of clever, able, kind, and resourceful playmates, on whose values I patterned my own.  Adrift and desperate to know the logic of people and society, I read like the words were my salvation...and really, did they not save me?  

In an earlier epiphany, I realized that my childhood favourites fell into two camps: historical fiction, or science fiction and fantasy.  The reason soon resolved into perfect clarity: what more could an anxious immigrant child want to know than where her society had been, and where it hoped or feared to go?  The Laura Ingalls' and Anne Shirleys resonated with authenticity - respectively, they are the quintessential old-time American and Canadian girls.  As for books about far-off planets and hypothetical magics - a culture's collective technological projections, folklore and fantasies are richly informative for a little alien in its midst, especially on the subconscious level.

So in leaving behind the poignantly familiar books, I was subconsciously betraying a deeply personal relationship. Intellectually I saw the absurdity of feeling compelled to buy 90s-era library staples, but it felt distinctly unfilial to harden my heart.  Having moved five times in the seven years since high school, my own books are scattered. They are alternately lost, loaned out, accidentally donated or - at best - packed away in my parents' house.  This not-knowing makes me uneasy; it feels having friends you have not called, seen, or drawn comfort from in ages - so long, in fact, that you cannot be certain that they still exist. 
Hence the guilt. What kind of person walks through a forlorn institution from which inmates cannot freely depart, glimpses old friends, and leaves them to their fate?

I'm irrevocably grown up.

This sobering realization has hit me hard of late. In the past month, I've begun a Real Job that will likely launch an Actual Career; said job entails being a Classic Authority Figure with a Professional Reputation to Uphold. I finally have a Regular Paycheck plus the much-sought-after Benefits, albeit no time to enjoy either. All this (and more!) has triggered a red-letter memo to the psyche:

"Your youthful days were numbered, and now they are done. Kindly turn in all Juvenile Fantasies, Hoop Dreams and unused Irresponsibility. Henceforth all thoughts and opinions should be expressed in the mature and considered manner befitting an Adult. Indulgences previously granted for naiveté, balking at assigned duties, arrested development in areas both general and particular, or time-wasting are hereby rescinded. From this time forward, indulgences will be issued only for nostalgia. Requests for occasional relaxation will be considered provided that said relaxation is exercised in moderation."

Facetiousness aside, this change brought no small trauma. A terrible inversion plays out in my mind: a feverish, distended child grows limp as the half-formed adult within her emerges stillborn. Wavering on the threshold is not an option.

The weeks clatter by like frames in a relentless reel, my inadequacies looming large in the playback. The nightly fade-to-black is merciful but brief. Each morning in pre-dawn darkness, I drum up courage and try to smile. Each day, ready or not, I take on 115 restive students and a terrifying role as the one in charge of content, of decisions. On most days, I pull back from the edge of panic and get by. This is the hardest thing I have ever done.

Chatting with a friend about her intentions to design an outfit for a contest.

Friend: "I think the last girl who won did something with a Canadian theme. I'll probably do something based on the group of Canadian painters - the Fantastic Five."

Me: "...Who were the Fantastic Five?"

Friend: "Oh, that Emily Carr lady and a bunch of dudes who painted snow."

* Silence *

Me: "Uh, I think you mean the Group of Seven. Emily Carr wasn't one of them...
The Fantastic Five is a band of superheroes, and well - there are actually just Four."

Consolidated multiple smaller bags of rot into two large garbage bags. Household tumors amalgamated!
Done and done.

Fretted away the knot of clangellant pot lids and colanders in the sub-sink cavern, wheedling tunelessly along to Jolene. Behave, you nesting-doll pots, stowaways all.

Dust motes are whirling dervish dancing through the apartment, goading me onwards. That corner, the clutter, tussle it up!

A Dove Cream Oil Bodywash ad ripples out in tasteful grayscale, featuring an array of radiant women with a secret in their eyes, robed in suds. A swingy singer is crooning "I'm...blowing bubbles..." as the women smile coyly over bare shoulders.
The smooth female voiceover lets you in on "our richest blend of cream and caring oil," it's all very delicious and in-the-know.

That got me to thinking: in this age of public-health campaigns, we've been trained in the discipline of denial - a virtuous diet is the new holiness. What is clean, and unclean, that which will elevate cholesterol and that which will be your talisman against cancers...all these have been made known. Out with saturated fats and creamy sauces; with what they'll do to your heart, it's downright sinful.

This is good news for overtaxed health-care systems and problematic for purveyors of goods. Luckily for consumer society, marketers rise to the challenge: If a woman's desire to eat her emotions can't be exploited, why not encourage her to sublimate cravings for rich foods? Desires are easily transposed.

I suppose that explains the proliferation of edibles in cleaning products, cosmetics and skin creams. Satiety is a topical application. The more you evoke decadent consumption without the messy guilt-triggering of actual ingestion, the better. On the menu we've got whipped coconut-lime creams, oatmeal-and-brown-sugar scrubs. What we can't take internally, we'll take in by osmosis. How cathartic to lavish one's skin with forbidden fats and carbs! Drugstore aisles are virtual cornucopias, overflowing with mouth-watering new combinations.
Naturally, the idea is to indulge liberally and often. What are flavours for, if not for sampling?

Disembodied in the fluid night their vehicle only a projection they slide only two bodies only two receptive faces staring rapt into the night
the beaming screens tilting their way as the rail slides serpentine into skyscrapers, whispering past living rooms and precarious multi-level car parks
up the city spinal cord
through its bowels and surging like a slow nerve message stop-go at the greens and reds
the lights diffuse their messages heaven-ward into dark liquid night
lights incandescent and fluorescent convey truth in advertising, beauty and eternal youth
their retinas hear and obey, faces bathed in the glow of gentle commercial love
voices hushed in reverence they wind their engine hum down slow to the white wash of the parking bay, home.
sit another moment in silence, he in reverie for the smooth gear and skill of the ride, she holding on with eyes closed to the poem in her heart, before the afterglow fades to black.

I've been sitting home alone all day and now, after nightfall, it occurs to me that the anxiety is surging up and around me. My chest feels tight with it, my hands and legs are twitching with the unease of too much silence and too much time alone with my own inadequacies, failures, and perennially unmet potential.

Who knows how it creeps up? A lazy afternoon in the sunny apartment was comfortable enough, until the hours smeared by and deep inside the inarticulate fretting rose to a roar.

How am I anxious? Let me count the ways:

I am mourning as ever for words never strung out on screen or paper, images that flash up and light a smile to my face but then disappear, the things I'd dreamed to do, the places I've tasted but not in person. Everything is crowding up in my mind and I need to excuse myself, find some respite in action or fulfillment. But where? How?

This terrible weight of passivity anchors me to low deeds and hopes.

My body doesn't carry me, and every other day I'm looking at people who, even in middle age, have the strong and steady beats of their hearts to set a pace for courage in mundane lives. My breath is short and so too is my ambition. How far can one run when the very engines of will are feeble and erratic? Heart, lungs, limbs, nerves, eyes, stomach - pillars of the constitution, under-appreciated until they fail the mind.

So many dreams aborted and stillborn.

I swear

there would have been

beautiful things

In the last year, I have often gone on my own to the City while the boy stayed behind in our apartment. In our first months of marriage, he inhabited the place alone for three months as I worked my last stint for the City bureaucracy. In all the time since, I don't think I've ever had a night here without him.

Now the boy has left town to look for work. It is only for a week.
The hall light burned out the day the of his departure. When I make my customary glance down the hall to our bedroom from my desk, it is strange not to see his lamp burning bright. There is only more dark after the tunnel.

Naturally, I have let myself go. Kicking around in one's apartment out of graduate student melancholy is ideally a solitary pleasure. Today, after watching the entire first season of Mad Men in between bouts of laundry - four fragrant loads! - I wanted a small day-ending snack.

So I stood at my kitchen counter in my underwear, listening to softly emotive music and eating lychee with detached rapidity. I took a serrated knife to their gnarly, jurassic hides and watched the translucent fruit's tapered ends emerge one by one, like blind snouts. Lamb flesh in predators' clothing. Freeing the cloudy globes and bringing them to my mouth took on an element of ritual, I thought; it was a series of deliberate acts. Slice, peel, pop, maneuver, separate flesh from seed, expel seed, chew. Select another from the dish of supplicants, repeat. I ate enough to clear the middle of the metal dish, sparing a single solemn ring. Let them sour my stomach another day.

Tonight, I may again sleep curled beside a quiescent mound of the boy's laundered socks and sundries, his towel on the pillow like a placeholder. Last night, my small white laptop, dubbed Babybook, kept vigil with me. It is a surprisingly adequate proxy for one absent. Her soft white status light waxes and wanes in the unmistakable breathing rhythm of a sleeper. Laid on the towel-topped pillow, I had the sense of a companion at my side - one whose waking mind, like my own, was at rest while furtive inscrutable logics churned on below.
My flesh-and-blood husband thus approximated by a heap of garments and an electric brain, I slept through to morning.

I'm crawling off to bed now, need to rise before the sun hits high noon.
I anticipate an important and productive tomorrow.

"Greetings, earthlings!

My name is Xorfla#$%@fch899$$vnwitz and I hail from the land of Europe. It is also my favourite band. I don't even like mayonnaise. In writing this blog, I aim to lure in the entire world with stories of my exceptional bacon-eating skillz, and then I plan to become the world's greatest tap dancer. It is a foolproof plan. I will document this journey. My entries will contain subliminal messages."

A brain that's churning out a mammoth essay deserves no less than the best artery-clogging Canadian fat money can buy, right?

Well, maybe that's why I bought a "slider" from the campus chip truck for my mid-day meal. A slider is, incredibly, a poutine (that's right, fries, gravy, melty cheese curds) with grilled bacon in a whole wheat wrap.

What really gets me is the whole wheat wrap. Like it wasn't just an option, as in "white or whole wheat wrap"; "whole wheat wrap" was written right up there on the board as part of the description. Nothing like the virtue of whole wheat to wrap up that sopping mess of a poutine - a wolf in sheep's clothing, it is.

Anyway, I feel like the python that's swallowed a pig and can't say I regret it.

Doesn't essay-suffering justify anything?

Entering the final stretch of end-of-term paper madness, possibly for the last time in my life, induces the usual close belly-gazing.  It must be a function of too many mental processes up-ending the not-so-neatly ordered contents of the old Attic, strewing them about for examination.

I thought this morning as I forced down soup that I must be a constitutionally happy person.  Even when I'm in the proverbial depths, and facing down the prospect of yet another all-nighter with such dread that I want to throw up in my mouth a little bit, it's not difficult to summon some maniacally cheerful thought to generate some surge of joy in my heart.

There's a buoyant cheer that comes so readily when I really need to summon it - anything to keep me afloat.  For a moment I can crowd out the anxieties and doubts and nothing but that hard, bright joy funnels through, and gives me respite.

I suspect that I get this from my mother, who - for all her human fallibilities - has the same teflon cheer that deflects the slings and arrows as she barrels through life.  I suppose in excess it might make one callous.  Everything glances off and you are bulletproof, insensible to misgivings.  On the plus side, it is a life preserver when one more tremulous thought of failure could do me in.

So, steely good nature, I'm invoking you against the next 48 hours of essay grinding!

I get a funny feeling when sitting in Stauffer and the custodial staff come by, slowly pushing the big garbage and cleaning supplies carts.
They come up behind and beside us silently - them with the blue coveralls and gloves, us all plugged into our computers with earbuds and eyes transfixed, our computer cords plugged in turn to electrical outlets.
The just-perceptible rustle of food wrappers and paper scraps being swept away to my right, in my peripheral vision, then the flash of dark blue.

The person goes back to his cart, having cleared the detritus left by us silent unthinking ones, and trudges onto the next bank of carrels.
What must he be thinking, watching all of us, our faces to the dear little screens and fingers flying at so many dear little words, is he scoffing at our softness? Does he resent the fact that us brats do leave behind anything to clean - coffee cups, crumbs?

Why should we go on tapping while he has to clean up - what's with me sitting down in the chair unmoving as he moves past? I feel somehow that I should have made eye contact and nodded thanks.
My parents have done what he's doing now, for other spaces and other silent, careless leavers of crumbs.
What if he were somebody's dad? Does his child have a place here, too, among those of us whose parents by and large no longer clean up after others? Would she also feel uneasy, watching another custodian go by quietly removing the traces of our affluence and irresponsibility?

How did it get to this point?

I am non-writing my second 35-page essay in Stauffer in less than a week, in between "breaks" consisting of checking the Gamer Widow forums for another hit of cuddly commiseration and consolation.

I just want a hole to lie in, and someone to pull the sod back after me.

The feeling of long-term gloom is definitely cramping my ability to rise above short-term gloom.

There's a compelling title to start off my current Stauffer binge, the long-dreaded second crunch towards finishing Paper #2.

This is the type of time in a student's life when she, by virtue of having torn from her brain one feeble, mewling essay before facing the seemingly insurmountable task of generating another, wants nothing more than soft, sweet escape. Any kind will do - oblivion would be nice, as would indulgence in a senseless blockbuster film, or the mindless peace of making cupcakes.

The worst, worst feeling is the sensation of being trapped. There is no way to move backwards, to secure oneself more time; there is certainly no way forward without confronting the obdurate reality of the Unborn Essay.

One grows desperate. Perhaps the Ostrich method, of frantically postponing the inevitable by refusing to think of it? Or else fretting at the edges of the behemoth, playing at productivity while getting no closer to vanquishing it? There is always the self-destruct option: gnawing off a limb, forsaking the program at a late stage, begging insanity, incarceration, traumatic kitchen mishap requiring hospitalization.

All these things and more, I have considered in the course of my career as a student.

Everything passes.

I tell myself: This too, shall pass! Before you know it your conscious self will have encompassed this experience, and it will not have destroyed you.

Oh, to be a machine until then. Nothing but circuits and ordered processes working speedily towards the mission's end...

Depositing now:

a) Walking past a bank of study carrels in Stauffer and seeing a temporarily unmanned carrel strewn with personal belongings and study gear, including a STACK of four (five?) large size Tim Horton's cardboard coffee cups. Either somebody really wants to rrrrroll up that rim to win, or he/she is counting on the liquid sleep to get through exam period.

b) Quote of the day from Gawker blog entry, "A Field Guide to 2008's Douchiest Cliques", in which writer Nicole gives the lowdown on The New (New) Bohemians:

"If these people are bohemians, then we're a goddamn mango."

http://gawker.com/5005296/a-field-guide-to-2008s-six-douchiest-cliques

My belly is a-stormin'
Fraught with currents of the abstract variety
Shall I focus on class, or rather take arms against a sea of
criticisms and by opposing them
simply write the damned thing, to hell with the problem, problematizing
and complicated implications of
whatever the schmucking hell is the nonsensico-gibberish, politico-socio-
working-class hegedemonic spectacular spectacular
it comes bubbling out of my throat like some noxious
elixir, the fountain of life and tree of knowledge
gnarly roots in my throat, heaving it all up
It all comes back up,
my cerebellum and gut snarled up in a nasty, nasty
knot in the stomach,
knee in the gut
sucker punch
heavy laden
violent broil, storm's a-comin'
brew it out, bear it out.

Here begins my transformation into a twitchy, irritable library-dweller who stares daggers at loud and cretinous undergraduate students who dare disturb my concentration.

I am ensconced, as usual, on a hard wooden chair at a third-floor Stauffer study carrel. This floor, like the ones above and below it, is strictly QUIET STUDY ONLY. The gossiping, meet-and-greeting, and general conviviality is supposed to stay on the first floor of this most academic of facilities. As per my previous entry, I am content to listen to the soothing wash of keyboard-tapping, water-sipping, and general productivity that comes with the third floor experience.

Alas, the cretins!

I spent the last hour trying affably to ignore the increasingly loud chatter of a group that had - for some baffling reason - decided to stand just inside the forest of bookshelves that make up the interior section of this floor, and discuss at full conversational volume their plans for the evening. As an unwilling witness to their aggravating indecisiveness, I can tell you that there is party tonight, at which there may be drinking, and two girls do not know whether they will First Go Home and Change.

They didn't stand there equivocating for five minutes. It was a good half hour of stage whispers, giggles, and semi-serious efforts to decide on their next move. The sections of study carrels run along the outer edge of the library, bordering the bookshelves. These people were chatting about two feet into the shelving, perhaps fancying that if they could not quite see most of the people trying to study, then their voices must somehow stop with their line of vision. Did I mention that these people were Chinese? Did I mention that their voices were singularly irritating to me - perhaps by virtue of their familiar and awkwardly-accented tones?
Did I mention that I wanted to throttle them, but was instead a coward and only seethed in silence?

I tried shooting a few meaningful glances in their direction, but was thwarted by their ostrich strategy of not looking in the direction of everyone they were disturbing. Finally, half the group moved on and two girls remained behind in the row of carrels behind me. I thought they were done, but I was wrong.

The two girls proceeded to continue conversing at regular speaking volume in the middle of their otherwise empty carrel section. Unfortunately, their section is directly attached to the section on either side of it, so the rest of us continued to be privy to their chatter.

I finally got up, walked past them with a baleful stare, and then having scouted out a quieter location a few sections down, proceeded to move my belongings.

Ahhh. There was peace.

...but not for long.

Not one, but two Loud and, apparently, Stupid Boys arrived on scene within five minutes to join their respective female friends, who had heretofore been working quietly in my section. Boy A chatted in stage whisper with his friend behind me for ten minutes before mercifully leaving the library with her.

Boy B, now sitting directly to my left, beside the girl on the far left carrel, continued to piss around happily "whispering" (re: talking at regular volume but while altering the tone of voice to suggest whispering) to his female companion about his dinner, his last exam - on which he got a 55% when he expected 80% - and all sorts of nothing.

I writhed. But oh - there was more.

Boy B takes out a styrofoam container of what has to be the loudest possible dinner one can bring to a library - an assortment of crunchy bagel chips, celery, and carrots with dip. He chomped his crusty, caveman-scarfing, lip=smacking, container-squeaking way through all of that a good 15 minutes ago, and TO THIS MOMENT he is still making audible stifled-burp and heavy-breathing digestive sounds two feet from my left elbow.

* Silent scream *

Ear plugs. Must...bring...ear plugs!

Grumble grumble, grouse and gripe.

I can't help but think as I tap importantly at my warm white notebook, that I am breathing in privilege, humming with it, hearing its distinctive soft clatter in a genteel wash.

The crisp drag of laminated textbook pages, notepads, torrent of agile fingers raining on resilient keyboards. The muffled plastic or aluminum clunks of thermal cups, premium earth-friendly water bottles absently replaced on desktops. The pad of comfortable footwear on institutional carpet, an odd weary sigh. Backpacks zip open and shut. Wood chairs, faint clicks and soft exhalations, someone laughing soundlessly at a web clip.

The silence is full, full up in here on the third floor. Bent heads all around, faces lit up with screens and with knowledge.

How much have I paid to be here tonight, electronic dollars into electronic coffers, to buy my place in this bank of cubicle-carrels, my part in the choir?

Brow a-furrowing, back a-slumping,
Glumly staring down a nemesis, the sullen screen
Dim bulb glowers from behind an essay, my best attempt.
To essay is indeed to try - to be tried, judged, found wanting.
What tribulation to tease out some viable thread
Anything to testify for the existence
of meagre intellect.