Have you ever caught yourself talking to someone and wondering, vaguely, as you talk, who you are? I mean, not so much the existential question, or wondering whether or not that high pitched voice really belongs to you. I mean the general amazement at the the things you know, and the ability to use the information you have gathered from wherever you have gathered it over the years in conversation that manages to make you sound knowledgeable?

Sometimes I find myself, in the midst of conversation (or often way after it), surprised at the things I know and can refer to. This is of course extremely useful in a situation where, for instance, while working in the library a parent asks a question like "When did the colonization of America happen anyway?" Or when I find myself explaining how or why I teach a particular thing the way I do, or while leading a discussion in class. I've sort of always been of the mindset that I write better than I speak because I'm able to explain myself better and in a more dynamic way. But apparently I can talk good too. Who knew.

I've commenced operation "Rule October aka Make My B-day Month the Best Month Ever" by cutting my hair in what a classmate calls "a sassy urban style". I'm not entirely certain what that means, though I'm pretty sure she meant it as a compliment (which probably explains why I potentially shrugged it off). Though my new hair currently smells like smoke and singed leaves because of the s'mores bonfire I went to at a classmate's place last night, I still love it. In two weeks I'm getting highlights, getting my fabulous green dress (a dress I bought on a whim almost a year ago and determined to wear for my 25th birthday on the 19th) fitted and having a hopefully wonderful celebration. There will be pictures.

Now I'm off to attempt to sound knowledgeable to a bunch of 7 year olds.

*edit* On an entirely random note, there's something simultaneously cute as well as torturous about being asked dating advice. Particularly when the girl asking is so young and...happy.

Because I don't feel like doing any serious thinking or writing, because I'm trying to avoid grading 22 papers, and because I was so graciously tagged by my buddy vanedave, I'll go on ahead and write, in no particular order, about things you either will care about...or not.

1. I have three middle names, but only one of them is used on a semi-regular basis, including on places like my credit cards and my driver's license.

2. I do not enjoy squishy or slimy animals, and I am, in fact, deathly afraid of earthworms. And octopi...though I must admit I've never seen an octopus in person. I think I'd faint.

3. I started off being a reaallly reallly bad driver, and now I can balance a bag of chips on my lap while driving with one knee and opening a bottle of fruit punch with both hands. Without hitting anything or anyone (you're probably thinking I'm still a really really bad driver. Hey, at least I don't put make up on while I drive. Probably because I don't wear makeup).

4. There are lots of places I want to visit before I die, including India and Greece and if possible the entirety of South America. There are, concurrently, some places I have no inclination to visit at all. Many of them end in "istan".

5. My favorite color is green. Not like..lime green, or that nasty pea green, but you know, green. I also kinda like rust. The color, not the thing that happens to moist metal.

6. My older brother once told me if he had to pick between my younger sister and I about who'd survive living in the city, and who'd actually like it, he would have chosen my younger sister. Turns out she has no idea how to cross the street, and I ended up living in Philadelphia for 5 years. Without once getting hit by a car.

7. I once fell off a tree in my great-aunt's back yard and hit some branches on my way down, as well as some metal used for roofing (in the Caribbean) once I hit the bottom. I was ok (obviously) except for the scar on my right rib cage.

8. My sister once got caught on a nail in a wooden ladder while climbing up a plum tree because she was trying to flee from a little green lizard, the kind that lives in trees in the Caribbean. She was wearing her school uniform, and ended up being suspended upside down by the hem of her skirt for a few minutes before falling off. She, too, was ok. This story isn't about me, but I'd like to point out that I never had my underwear exposed because I was fleeing a little green lizard.

9. When my grandmother died I couldn't sleep for weeks because I was terrified that she was in my room watching me as I slept. I was almost convinced that I could feel her in the room, not physically, but..something.

10. I do not see dead people. And for good reason. Again, I'd probably faint.

11. I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I don't really know whether I want to grow up.

12. I sometimes have a hard time accepting compliments, and I have a knack for being sarcastic about things I can't bear to be honest about.

13. I am terrified of marriage.

14.I am not a dog person. Dogs are needy and wag their tails a lot and have a tendency to lick hands and faces. Cats are disdainful and picky and sometimes just down right mean.  I like them much better.

15. Some day I plan to write a novel that will wow the world for a time, and then be forgotten (only to be resurrected after my death).

Today is not supposed to happen this way. Today is the first day of October, the month that belongs to me (it's mine by way of birth, and though there may be others with a similar claim mine is the one that counts here). It's my month, but it has already begun so badly. I won't go into the amount of suckage that went into teaching today. I'll just say that the broken photocopier and my exhaustion didn't help. Worst day ever! And it's only just after 8:30am.

I'm worried that this will be a forecast for my month. That's a large assumption I know. There are 30 other days left for October to redeem itself, after all. Still. I can't help but wonder. I like October plenty, it being the month I was born in and all. I even like the harvest decorations and allusions, and eeriness of Halloween (though I don't dress up and have never been trick or treating). I want to like October. I really do. But I have a strange sense or foreboding and premonition that has made me want to cancel any thought of celebrating my birthday with a largish to-do and just sit at home until November.

I've really been in a weird state of existence since the beginning of the fall, and I'm growing weary of it. I'm tired of the angst, the constant internal chatter. My brain needs to shut up.

The only thing cheering me up today is the thought of skipping class and going to Philadelphia to stalk my favorite author who will be reading a chapter of his newest book there, and whose work makes me happy. Of course, I won't have time to read his new book after I buy it, but at least I can look at it and dream.

I blame Virginia Woolf for the ways in which I think about the world now. I have, perhaps, no right to do so, mostly because stream-of-consciousness is not really a novelty. It does not belong to one author, but is the process by which our minds operate on a daily basis. And yet, I can't help feeling that listening to To The Lighthouse on CD while driving to and fro in my car daily has something to do with my awareness and my observations lately.

Like the way, at a dinner I attended tonight in honor of a friend's birthday, I was intensely conscious of the man sitting next to me, his discomfort at being the only one who hadn't had his plate brought out to him yet, his irritation at the fact the he may be the reason for the delaying of other folk's meals (since it's rude to eat when not everyone has a plate in front of him), and his further annoyance when, after a few more awkward minutes of waiting people seemed to pick up a fork here and there and sample and soon devour their meals (I was guilty of eating some ceviche). Or the way that Bill, across the table, whom I've met once before and who was the only one at the table I knew (my friend sat at the other table, and since we were a large party I spoke to her only twice throughout the night), kept looking at me when he thought I wasn't paying attention. How easy it was for me to pick up on his mannerisms, his eyes, his smiles. And the irritation I felt at being noticed in that way at all (which has nothing to do with him really, and everything to do with me). Or the way that Uriel, the nice man on the other side of me insisted on staring directly into my eyes as he talked of Columbia where he's from, which of course reminded me of how awkward I feel staring directly into someone's eyes as they talk, and which resulted in a flutter of eyelids as though a fly had just landed on my pupil.

I am intensely aware of everything tonight and I am slightly irritated by it all. The person I spent hours on the phone with last night called me again today and I couldn't wait to get off the phone.The obvious things are too glaring, too forthright and the small things, tonight, make all the difference. The simple things are sexy. Like a man's forearm wearing a nice heavy watch. And small crooked smiles.

Tonight I wish all I had was simplicity.

I don't particularly feel like being on campus today. It may or may not have something to do with my missing steam (a la yesterday's post).In any case, I feel like whining about it, as evidenced by a second post in two consecutive days, as though I had nothing better to do. I went out and bought a bottle of zinfandel and another bottle of white wine, and today I'm feeling slightly ashamed of myself. Does living by myself = alcoholic? Truthfully I haven't opened either bottle yet, mostly because I'm anticipating a not so good day sometime this week...in which case I'll probably break them both open at the same time.

It's one of those days though where you'd much rather look at the beautiful sunny day from the comfort of your own bedroom window instead of walking around in it. A day where the voices in your head are much more preferable to the actual voices of other people, or your own interacting with said other voices. A day when any further planning for class or for work or for life is banned, and nothing prevails but a slovenly afternoon on a couch watching Oprah. And eating cheese curls (I had some of those yesterday).

In essence, what I'm saying is blahh.

I've run out of steam. It's not quite 9am yet. I let my class out early this morning because I had quite exhausted everything I could say about how to respond to an essay. I think I knew last night as I was preparing the lesson plan how my day would go. I think I knew this morning too, which could be why I overcompensated with a pair of nice gray slacks and my black pointy-toed flats. Pointy-toed shoes, after all, are a sign of the competence and preparedness that teachers must have. Lets hope they were all looking at my shoes and not listening to me today. My steam is officially gone.

I still like teaching tons more this semester than I did a few months ago, the terror having subsided. But I'm tired most of the time now, and more than likely when I'm on campus I'm daydreaming about being asleep. On an island somewhere. I had a nice amount of ambition for this semester (and I suspect I'll get it back at some point), so much so that I volunteered my free time (ha!) to run an informal class for ESL students where we sit around discussing things like marriage in America and where our names come from. I also decided to audit a third class, so that even though I already had two classes worth of reading to do on a weekly basis (reading a Victorian novel a week is not the business by the way) I now have three classes worth of reading to do (though if its any consolation I don't have to write the lengthy seminar paper at the end). I took some good advice and overextended myself, made it so that I would barely have time to sit in my apartment and watch paint dry (I did actually, at one point, consider painting a wall in my apartment), and I am grateful because I'm already a much more well rounded person. But I am tired. And I haven't even really gotten into the swing of all the other things I really have to do (applications to PhD programs, studying for my comprehensive exam in January).

I miss my steam. I am going to go the bookstore to buy a book I desperately need, I am going to walk to my car and go home, and despite the little voice in my head opining that I had much, much better things to do, I am going back to sleep.

You either love or hate airports, which is largely dependent upon whether or not you love or hate people, because there are such people at airports and in airplanes! There are, of course, those people separated by that blue curtain of elite luxury who, though I sort of despise them, are quite enviable (some day first class...some day). But they too are people, and even as I sit in coach slightly jealous in between two other people (the man to my right clad in ripped jeans, affording an interesting view of his left knee, and the other man to my left in neat gray slacks) I smile. I love people.

Throughout my five hour excursion from North Carolina to Atlanta, and from Atlanta to Philadelphia I saw and heard various people. Like the loud, and apparently witty man on his cell phone retorting back and forth sarcastically with his unseen conversational partner. And the comedic and friendly gay flight attendant with the pretty gray eyes. And the man from Manchester, England who desperately needed a smoke and who apparently "had one of those faces" which resulted in numerous security stops.

And soon I got so caught up in looking and noticing people, so overwhelmed (in a good way) by it all that, once on the plane and busy reading my Travel and Leisure magazine (I felt a sort of irony or cliche-ness to pulling out a travel magazine, which I subscribe to, while on a plane but that didn't stop me), that I started humming Chrisette Michelle's "Best of Me" song quietly to myself (partly because it played on every flight I was on that day, and partly because this was the best of me, amongst people) amid the din of loud airplane engines. I began to tap my foot and even, at some points (though I can't honestly say I know any more words from the song other than "the best of me") mouthing the words and rocking slightly from side to side.

It is becuase of this odd behavior that I think I understand a little better the nature of those termed "crazy". They too, probably, were overwhelmed by the nature of being human, or being a person amidst all these other people. And soon they too started tapping their feet and humming a song, and eventually, because they weren't too coward to do it, ventured to talk to themselves outloud in public, gesticulating occasionally to punctuate a sentence here and there. Maybe they are the only people really true to themselves, and to the nature of being people.

Body

I noticed my body today because it made me. I must have gotten about 5 hours of sleep (I was up attempting to translate an Old English translation of the Bible into Modern English. Yay grad school). I taught this morning from 8am-9am, held office hours from 9:30am-10:30am, then read in the library from 10:30am-noon. I attended class at 12:20pm and sat there until it ended at 3:20pm. I went home, changed, attempted to make some semblance of a meal (but  had no time to eat so I ended up eating a blueberry bagel in the car), and then left to head to work. I will be here until 9pm. My body is protesting. Not vehemently, not the way it would, say, if I were dehydrated or in need of warmth, but it is unhappy. I know this because my left knee is throbbing, and I can almost picture it like an old man, grumpy with a surly, gravelly voice going "I'm not pleased. Not at all." My eyes are heavy. I am tired. I looked down at my right middle finger, at the spot where, in haste on the first day of teaching, I slammed my finger in a drawer and essentially ripped of a part of my nail bed. It is healing nicely (odd how skin pulls in on itself and heals), and will probably leave a scar, but now and then if I move too quickly I pull the wound taut and it hurts just a little. My body makes me aware it quite often.

Mind

Oddly enough, we are able to conceptually separate mind from body. I say "my body makes me aware it", separating immediatelly my body and me. I am, essentially my mind am I not? I am the voice that narrates what I see, I am the author, the thinker, the analyzer. My mind is a large portion of my personality. It endears people to me, once I get them to smile or to feel comfortable around me. My mind makes me me.

Spirit

But what of my spirit, which essentially is synonymous with soul? My mother says that we are mind, body and spirit. We are things that think, and move, and...love. Is love then the proof of a spirit? We do not love with our bodies (well, I suppose we can, and do, but it is an expression, not the origin of the thing), and we do not love with our minds (well, we ought not to anyway). So what enables us to love? There is something in between physically feeling and thinking. Some people believe in auras, in another way of seeing people, in not seeing only their physical selves but the other bits of them, represented in hazy color. I used to sit quietly for minutes at a time and stare at the bathroom door. Somehow it seemed like I existed in various ways doing that. Physically yes, because I could see the door, the little patterns the wood made. Mentally, because there were words forming, thoughts. But also in another way. I felt, sitting there quietly, and turning my head this way and that, that I was existing in another way, that I was beginning to understand what it meant to be a person, to be a thing that could look at its fingers and know that others could see my fingers but not feel them the way  I could. That there was another part to being me that was more than possesing fingers and being able to move them with my brain. That I was Tricia. And no one else could be Tricia because I already existed. I was probably around 6.

This is probably one of more random thoughts I've had today, and it sounds terribly like something you contemplate on a plane or on a beach or on a mountainside in South America. I could blame it on my fatigue if I liked, but the truth is that I like existing as Tricia. Because no one else can.

The thing that makes us whole people is that we are, in fact, made up of bits and pieces of various sorts of people and personalities. We are like the cyborg, a collective surviving in one skeleton, one skin.

I was my other self today. I smiled less, and disingenuously when I did smile. Because I felt like it. I sat in class today almost like an undergraduate would, slightly slouchy and almost disinterested. I did not pay attention. I could not pay attention. My other self does not like to pay attention. My other self does not like to smile either, and prefers the work out frowns can offer, since it utilizes so many more muscles in the face. I took my time getting out of my car, fiddling with this and moving around that. When I got out I walked slowly from my car and on my way back to my car I also walked slowly. My other self does not enjoy walking quickly, or making haste. She prefers to be late. Fashionably or otherwise. I got home and did not prepare a healthy meal. Nor did I start in on homework or lesson plans. I abruptly, as abruptly as my other self would allow, got back into my car and went looking for unimportant things. A pumpkin scented candle. A heating fan, though it is still in the 60's at nightfall. My other self does not like to be cold, afterall. Ever. I also drove to the Jamaican place down the street and ordered wings, and a beef patty. My other self does not like vegetables and will not eat them. I went to pick up another bottle of dessert wine, less cheap this time...slightly bubbly. My other self is a spendthrift and cares nothing for student budgets, nor does she care for the inappropriateness of having been inside the same liquor store twice in a week. She smiled sourly at the attendant who, though recognizing her, still carded her. My other self is not pleasant, is aware of it, and is unconcerned.

I hope she doesn't stay very long.

I've been sleeping, or perhaps not sleeping, oddly lately. By that I mean, I have been going to bed, laying my head down, pulling the cover over my shoulders and closing my eyes. I have no idea what happens after that.

I woke up this morning feeling vaguely as if I'd been drinking (and no I didn't have any more dessert wine, though I was tempted). I feel a bit dehydrated, as though my body hasn't had water for a few days after a grueling walk in a desert and is now exercising it's protest by making my brain hurt. My muscles feel off, a little rubbery. I feel tired. Perhaps I had been walking in a desert.

Yesterday morning I woke up after what felt like a fitful night of sleep. I recall turning over and over in bed, in that vague remembering way we have in between sleep and waking. When I finally woke up my day seemed a bit off. The sun too bright, sounds too loud. People too mean and life too cruel. In the span of an hour I had a woman give me the finger from her car, based on a series of events I wasn't able to have a meal until 5pm, and I drove around aimlessly looking for a spot at work only to find one miles away from the door. When I got out and trekked to the front I walked past an empty spot, about two feet from the door. The off-ness of yesterday pulled the wool over my eyes.

The night before that was characterized by dreams of the odd sort. Then again, I typically have odd dreams, the type which can be easily turned into a bizarre little sci-fi short story. But these dreams left me feeling the effects of them the next day. I dreamt of a beautiful woman and a room like the bigtop of a giant circus complete with a circular floor and a chanting crowd. The woman was on parade, the people chanting and cheering her on. I watched, awed by her beauty. She was walking towards me. Then she abruptly turned to the side, and it was then I saw that she wasn't human, that she had the backside of a bee or an ant, which was being dragged around behind her on a cart with wheels. She was large, pregnant with more of whatever was chanting for her. My heart started to beat quickly, and someone (something?) turned to me and said "Stop. They can hear your heart, and if it beats too fast they'll know you're afraid and come for you." That, of course, only increased the pounding of my heart, and eventually there was a small crowd forming around me. There was a small voice in my brain assuring me that if I screamed I would make it that much worse, and would certainly end this quickly. I rationalized in my head for a few seconds, acknowledging that screaming would do nothing for me, but before I could really control it I let out a howl of terror. And then I woke up.

Today I feel the effects of my week of non-sleep. Maybe I'm not actually sleeping at all, but shutting my eyes and then going elsewhere. I have no one here to tell me that I remain in bed all night, and not walking through deserts or finding myself in odd circus tents. Who knows. My life may be more interesting than I think.