My mini fridge is an overachiever.
Its ambition has rendered my grapefruit juice to slush, my milk to an ice block, my apples to icicles and my baba ganoush to a solid mass. I think it had dreams of being so much more than a mere mini…it probably intended to become house size, but the world is tough, and a mini fridge it shall ever be.
But it strives hard anyway.
My heating system is no slacker, it makes sure my duvet is unnecessary and that pants are cumbersome over heated things. It doesn’t need to be so intense. Yes, it’s winter, but the winter isn’t really so cold that it justifies all this effort. And yet it heats on anyways, probably wishing it was protecting tenants in the middle of an intense Russian sub-zero temperature. It keeps on going, never really stopping to think if its labors are necessary or not.
But my bathroom roof? It’s giving up and giving in, right about where the fan is.
I’m sitting on my bed in shorts and a tank top, to my left is John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding with a hairband keeping my spot on the chapter concerning words and random associations. To my right is Lawrence Sterne’s great novel, and in the middle, jumping off the bed and floating sheet by sheet onto the floor are notes: notes from class, notes from both books, notes for this essay. But my mind is blank. I don’t know what to say, and I’m not sure if I even care about this topic anymore…what are the limits of language? Are the links between words and people’s random associations something that Sterne is mocking? Or agreeing with? How does this relate to sentimentality and obscenity? Gestures convey the most meaningful moments in the text, and association provides most of the sex jokes in the text, so that’s a limit of language, but at the same time this is a book that constantly refers to it’s own book-hood, and needless to say it needs words in order to convey any of this…
Sometimes I lie back, and I want to submit to my energetic heating system. It’s so cozy in here…I could just nap. Sometimes I go a little crazy, I don’t want to be thinking, I don’t want to try and organize all these ideas…I’d rather haul my juice out of the fridge and chip away at the ice with a fork until I have enough to call what I have a 'slushy'.
What is the point? I graduate in June, and I haven't applied for any graduate school programs. Why bother trying to be interesting or intelligent? Is there a reason to really push myself?
I’m feeling an affinity with the bathroom roof. I really just want to cave.