Saturday, December 09, 2006
(9:39 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
What happened
Yesterday, I did nothing. I filled my time, certainly, but for me, "doing something" (properly so called) must be academic in nature -- or, secondarily, involve making money in some way. I was totally exhausted due to my newly active social life, so I slept late and also took a nap. I read A Softer World. I watched Robot Chicken episodes on YouTube. I returned the movie we watched the night before and bought some milk, two bottles of Gatorade (one to drink yesterday, one to keep on hand for future emergencies), and an ice cream sandwich. I picked up Middlesex again, having let it lay dormant for probably close to three years now -- earlier this week I had finished my first novel in several years, Philip Roth's Plot Against America (good, not superlative).I had some mild insomnia last night, probably due to having slept so much during the day. I was told that one way to cure insomnia is to actually get out of bed and watch some mindless TV until I started to fall asleep, but I never manage to pull that off. The best I can do is to get up and go to the bathroom, hoping The New York Review will calm me down. The only thing I "need" to "do" in the next week, aside from sitting there and watching the students in History of Christian Thought take their exam, is to study for my philosophy final. That's not until Thursday, so it doesn't feel urgent. In fact, ever since I got back from the AAR, that has been basically my only fast-approaching task -- a nice coincidence.
So much free time all of a sudden -- I even went to see a movie last week, in the theater. I've probably been going to the movies less than twice a year lately -- the only one I remember clearly was the one I mentioned to the person I was with this time: my "friend from Milwaukee" (as the ladies from work called her) was having some kind of leg-related problem, and she wanted to stay at my house for a week. She said it was because there were too many stairs at her house, but I tend to believe it's because she knew that I adored her and would wait on her hand and foot. That's what she said one time when -- because she was sick, presumably -- she simply showed up at my door, that she knew that she could come over and feel taken care of.
When I picked her up at Union Station at the beginning of this week of convolescence, sitting silent in the car for a while to allow her space to get over her embarrassment at having imposed on me in this way, she asked if we could go to the Indian restaurant in Orland Park, a place we'd been a couple times. We went there. Then she asked if we could go to the movies. It was in the middle of the summer, oppressively hot -- the movie options were pretty bad. We watched The Manchurian Candidate, the remake -- the only people in the theater (2 in the afternoon on a Monday or Tuesday) aside from an elderly couple who thought we were the cutest thing in the world. Little did they know that we weren't even a couple.
After a couple months, I "broke it off," started seeing someone else almost immediately. After a series of breakups and reunions, the person who had initially seemed to be the "rebound girl," the person I cautiously held at a distance, turned out to be a vastly more important and better person for me. But I still think of them as a pair, even though they never met, even though the latter would probably want to kill the former -- those two are my history, the history that actually happened, that had some effect outside of my own racing mind.
I've seen the friend from Milwaukee a few times, and it never really goes well. The last time I saw her, I felt very irritable -- I blamed it on the stomach troubles I was experiencing at the time, but that wasn't it at all. I wanted her all to myself. It wasn't even a matter of sex -- I just didn't want to share her. That was how I knew her, just me and her, the house to ourselves, the long drives to Union Station or Milwaukee or Kalamazoo or Iowa -- just me and her. It still seems wrong to me that that kind of thing can't last, or that we can't somehow recapture that, just this one time, just for a couple hours -- but it would never be long enough. | Main Page
