:: a.whisper.in.water ::

:: Wednesday, March 10, 2004 ::

[ home / home again / i like to be here when i can…]

The Usual:
Given how occasionally Herculean a task justifying my being worth sending to Haverford (as opposed to UMD or an equivalent cheaper school, quality aside), one would think that I certainly ought to have a great time there, and that coming home should be as avoided as 4 Privet Drive. Oddly enough, this semester has found me anywhere between almost-content to periodically psychotic. I’ve sought explanations from the seclusion of my room, my classes, my relationship with Jenn, my parents, and my own hardwired imbalances; I can only settle on some unknown, seemingly-untreatable combination thereof. Neither can I establish precisely to where I’ve been running, where my escapist routes take me, save seemingly everywhere. Being home, then, is especially welcome, given how many bad habits needed breaking with a drastic change of scenery.

(And again I make the same empty resolutions, the same shapeless assertions to Change, to Grow Up, to Mean It This Time, to justify my worth to myself. Looking back, it’s terrifically easy to make myself sick with my inability to do these things.)

The (probably) good news is that I’m finally, legitimately staring at a bottle of Aderol to call my own, prescribed by a Dr. Milan Joshi, who didn’t seem at all bothered about sharing his first name with a major Italian city. Quite frankly, I’m pretty apprehensive about the whole thing. Part of the reason is that this seems so extreme. Hell, I’d take one a night and work my ass off. They expect me to take two a day, every damn day. I’ll ramp up a tolerance in half a week. God. I’ll run myself ragged coming up with (occasionally pointless) things to do.

Or, perhaps I’ll finally have time to enjoy myself, guilt-free. If and when I actually finish 4 problem sets spread across Quantum and E&M, the accompanying sensation will probably be appraised at near a cool million.

The nature of the Why Aziz Can’t Fucking Concentrate question is sort of a chicken-and-egg affair: did something cognitive/developmental inspire avoidant behavior, which manifested itself as ADD-like symptoms, or did an extant ADD (ignored through high school since good grades could mask it) cause avoidant behavior that was perceived as simple laziness when work got stressfully hard?


The Fixture:
I foresee many an hour spent in front of a computer or cradling a book (I’m aiming to finish Reefer Madness this break. The irony is sickening, and the foreshadowing explicit.) while listening to great fucking gobs of new music: the voluminous (if nothing else) haul from Haverford’s annual Spring Storage Looting will take at least a day to listen to straight through. I imagine most of it will be left in a drawer to collect dust, only at my house, rather than in an apartment basement. Oh well. One kid’s trash is another kid’s eventual trash that he treasures for perhaps twenty minutes.

It seems the term “Cod Rock” (taken from the army of summer homes in the Cape Cod area at which my high school’s Cod Rockers seemed to always rock out) isn’t catching on with you kids. Personally, I regard it as an applicable term that neatly encompasses the staples of upper-middle suburban high school “rock.” Examples include the ever-loathsome: Dave Matthews Band, John Mayer, Guster, OAR, Dispatch, and Phish. Honorable mentions go to late-nineties RHCP and Led Zeppelin, though that could just be regional to Whitman’s Lacrosse team. The litmus test: can you imagine it blasting from the speakers of an idling Jeep Grand Cherokee? I guess the notion of a rich white kid with a summer home in Cape Cod is a little too inaccessible for my terminology to hit the streets running, though if a term as oblique as “Shoegaze” gets circulated, I don’t see what’s stopping “Cod Rock.”

My computer is again on the fritz as far as its sound card connections are concerned. There is no cure, save the immortal blowing on the insides (á la an old NES cartridge) and sharp punches in carefully chosen random locations. I resolved to make this laptop last until the end of Undergraduate Studies, and without any violent outbursts on my part cracking the screen, it ought to be easy enough to do, despite my year being the worst year in recent history to get a computer due to the short-lived spread of ::grimace:: Windows ME.

Frodraveh (3:59:31 AM): I haven't crashed in a year in ME
SetKittensToStun (3:59:45 AM): Mine crashes itself weekly.
Frodraveh (3:59:56 AM): just have to have the right touch :-)
SetKittensToStun (3:59:57 AM): Like, upon introduction of a CD.
Frodraveh (4:00:04 AM): that's just ridiculous
Frodraveh (4:00:10 AM): you really need to give ME love
SetKittensToStun (4:00:19 AM): Look, no operating system should need "the right touch," or "love."
SetKittensToStun (4:00:26 AM): It should fucking OBEY.

The Utterly Bizarre:
Oh, so most uncharacteristically, Friday night I smoked myself damned near senseless with Christian and Anne, who seemed rather put off by my failure to embrace the novel sensations/reality that ensued. I’d have been more receptive to the whole thing had I any idea of how fucking high I was going to get. Honestly, I don’t know what I smoked with Landau the first time, but it hardly falls under the same family of substance; the two experiences were pretty much completely different. I was expecting a far tamer, gigglier giddier sort of high rather than the profoundly-disorienting scribble-fest that saw me (sadly, I admit) scrawling frantic notes to my future-sober self about what the whole thing was like. I read them later; they’re nearly-wholly approximated by “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?? Whatever it is, it’s REALLY IMPORTANT. I should write this down.” I was distressingly out of it for at least the next two days, prompting the affectionately-button-pushing nickname “Stoned Kitty.” Luckily Tifa managed to sort things out upstairs: I’d consider myself close to tip-top shape and ready to get physical, save a literal lack of blood.

Troublingly, the doctor recommended blood tests to make sure that I’m not going to react negatively to consistent, daily Aderol use. (Gosh, I can only hope they don’t find any residual THC wandering around, asking various denizens of my circulatory system how high they are.) So, 2:45 p.m. finds me sitting in a chair with an elastic band on my right an arm and a failed attempt at drawing blood on my left. I can only assume each test warrants a fresh sample. I guess Dr. Milan Joshi ordered seven tests, because I had to fill seven test tubes with the very essence of my being alive. I was dizzy as all hell. My eccentric-but-kindly-in-a-gruff-way blood-drawer kept asking me if I was okay, and wisely distrusting my wavering “I’m fine”s. She wound up swathing my neck and face with soaked paper towels and telling my worried family to get me some water. Apparently I was downright green, which is quite an achievement for a brown kid. I didn’t pass out or hurl (hooray vomit streak!), so I managed to leave with a sizable fraction of my dignity, though I definitely left WITHOUT a sizable fraction of my BLOOD.

Music: The New Pornographers – The Electric Version. An enjoyable indie-pop album introduced to me by the ever-elsewhere Ram, though I fear it doesn’t quite compare to the fantabularasmic indie-pop Broken Social Scene album You Forgot It In People, introduced to me by the ever-on-AIM al3x. Ask me to send you “The Laws Have Changed.”


:: Aziz 12:20 AM [+] ::
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