Hi, Judee!
I came home from working at the lab for plenty of 0’s (and nothing else), distressed about the status of my bank account. Yes, this all starts as any perfunctory life-altering story might, with me, a 21 year old discontent living in a flat in the Castro/Upper Market area of San Francisco for the summer, able to spend two and a half months volunteering in a lab (“it’s the economy…”) and complain about it. Well, it’s more complicated than that; I guess I can’t satirize myself (or others for that matter), too completely…you’d probably start to suspect something about the veracity of my self-knowledge and truth and ego, and the rest of that ‘blah blah she thinks she’s holier-than-thou and wise for her age as all self-deprecating 21 year olds writing about themselves do’ bullshit. I’d spent the money that had been originally intended to subsidize my third spring semester at Wellesley College, a semester which I (Instead) decided to take off due to a plethora of woes: temporal lobe epilepsy, sick mom, dirty feminist housing, organic chemistry. To use even more words, things were somewhat expendable, and so-granted, I’d spent them on an egregious flat and alcohol and fine-ish dining. All that and a bag of…plenty of (used!) books at Green Apple. I would think of it more as the Poison Apple as the summer stretched on and I pulled a Jean Valjean at work. This is all more or less beside the point. But it gets me going! Isn’t this the ‘point in itself’? The point to most anything in life, to live and love life in and of itself, on and on, to eternity. Life as an infinite, solitary point: Fuck the rest–The End. Why am I even writing this? “Good question,” you’re probably expectantly thinking, “Ayn Rand already did.” Or you’ve stopped reading. Maybe you are laughing. Wait. Who cares what you are doing! I am positively busy living and loving life right now, not sleeping and sort-of-almost-barely moving on to something of an answer besides the point….
I came home from work utterly distraught about my financial situation, staunchly (for a 21-year old with exceedingly generous and compassionate parents) opposed to contacting my exceedingly generous and compassionate parents for assistance. During this period, I believe I tweeted/twat/twittered/twatted? (to go ahead and inject a considerable bit of post-post-modernity’s [i come from the future] personal branding into the fray, and ostensibly date myself):
11:44 pm Thu Aug 6
now inarticulate about how terrible shit has become. need to stop drinking sometime soon. even after overdrafting $0.82, somehow still managing to get shitty
11:55 pm Thu Aug 6
Babysitting for my boss and his doctor wife saturday night will at least put some piss in the bucket
I came home from work utterly distraught about my financial situation, and also mildly distressed about meeting up with a high school friend who’d decided to cap off her summer of London fashion internships and trips to the Bahamas and clearing out of (multiple!!?! how couture!) bank accounts by coming to visit me and my girlfriend (‘Flat-mate’ to anyone who makes me feel mildly uncomfortable) in an already-already been said monogamous lesbian (to add to the redundancy)-inhabited gay couple’s (and here’s a paradox!) flat in San Francisco. Crystal-clearly enough, I was weary, please take my words for it! I implore you.
Now that I have your trust….
Upon coming home, I hugged my friend and launched into a dramatic conversation of catch-up, which largely impaled my conscience on the fact that my brother’s girlfriend of 10 years (starting at the age of 12, how mature!) was and maybe is entertaining the ‘idea’ (the penis) of men who are not my brother. Perhaps I should have been relieved at the generation of this image as opposed to the former? Yes, my friend was hooking up with a member of The Entertained, and imploring me not to speak a single word of this to “any other Bellachs.” I commit no perjury in saying that I did not speak a single word of this to any other Bellachs. After some Dostoevskyan (in my world, as an adjective he becomes Armenian), morally-confused debate on the matter, I was utterly (utterlessly?) at a loss for words (“Rare,” you say) and so mumbled something about being hungry. We all decided to go out to eat burritos (“Lesbos,” you say) and at the precise moment we began to leave the homo-flat, a kind of internal alarm bellman screamed “POOR!” inside of my head. “Guys, hold on. I just want to check my BoA account.” I choked when I realized that I had overdrafted 82 cents on a Turkish mocha latte at Celtic Café; unbelievable on so many levels. Instantly the bellman laughed. I felt his sneer spread across my chest, then an acrid and painful burning, akin to that of hot chai milk tea being spilled all over your abdomen, right in that place where your ribs are only thinly insulated by your skin. You know the feeling? That’s EXACTLY it! “Emptying your change-purse at Starbucks.” I could not have thought it better.
this is where the train stops derailing and i sleep. questions left unanswered:
- who is judee, and why are you saying hello?
- what time is it, really?
- why do you insist on talking to me as part of your story?
- can you please stop this list and go to bed?
- okay, um? that was seriously all you. i wasn’t even thinking that.
Until next time; Death is just one more night.
