as queer as a clockwork orange

I know it’s awful to get sick when you have a major exam looming ahead of you but for some reason, getting sick works for me. I work better when my immune system is being attacked. It seems to me that the sickness somehow fuels itself into full-blown masochism. It’s like my pain threshold suddenly drops and sickness and studying become a wonderful combination. As I suffer the continuous sniffling and madly flipping of the endless pages of my orgo textbook, I feel a sense of accomplishment. My sickness and my mind share a mutual suffering that somehow projects itself as efficiency. It’s nice. I like it. I hope this team effort continues during the exam too.

A few days ago the sight of french fries triggered a memory. It happened many years ago when my family went on a tour in Australia. We were on the bus on a long ride to another boring site, and tired families were starting to drift off into a shallow sleep. The sky was turning a deep orange as the sun started to set. Everything was bathed in a soft sepia tone. I remember waking up hazily to the silent drone of the moving bus. In the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me was a paper bag of stale ranch fries we bought on the way at some stop a few hours ago. There were only four fries left in the bag so I decided to eat three of them and leave one so I wouldn’t feel guilty for eating all of them. They were so good. After munching on them, I fell back asleep.

I wonder if those ranch fries still exist somewhere out there in Australia. Are their frozen selves still being dumped into a fryer and seasoned with ranch seasoning and sold to tired tourists? I wish I remembered the place that sold those fries, but I don’t. And I will never be able to get another bag of those ranch fries. Maybe those ranch fries weren’t that great and simply tasted amazing because we were tired hungry tourists, but they were what they were to me at that time, and I miss them and wonder if they’re still alive. It’s almost like how I always look at the people in the pictures in old textbooks and wonder if they’re still alive. I wonder about the life of the little baby being subjected to some psychology experiment in the photo. The statistics say that half of the population of the US suffer some mental disorder some time during their life. Maybe that baby is now a middle-aged man suffering from major depression and his wife is about to leave him. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe my favorite fries in the world are dead. If only buying all the ranch fries in Australia in search of my long lost ranch fries wasn’t so unrealistic.

She stood up slightly and looked over her cubicle to see if Ingrid was still there. She saw the top of Ingrid’s head just a few cubicles down. She sat back down quietly and looked out the window of the library. It was getting dark and only the lights of empty buildings bled out to illuminate the paths. She had been here since the early morning, working robotically through her list of assignments, watching as people came and went, their lives brushing past each other under the quiet hum of the fluorescent lights. Now it was nearing one in the morning, and she and Ingrid were the only ones left in a sea of empty cubicles, studying for a life to be filled with illness and death.

She turned away from the window and stared at her open textbook. She was always known as second best to Ingrid, and she didn’t want to be anymore. It was getting dark outside. She closed her textbook and pulled out a pad of post-its from her bag. On it she slowly scrawled a note in her perfect handwriting in the middle of the square yellow post-it. She heard the scrape of Ingrid’s chair and watched as Ingrid enter the bathroom. Unhurriedly, she shoved each book back into her bag, pushed the chair in, and slowly walked down the aisle of abandoned tables until she reached Ingrid’s cubicle. She peeled off the post-it with her note and stuck it dead center in the middle of Ingrid’s notes. She stood there awhile, looking at the post-it and the surrounding mess of books that was Ingrid’s life. Then, she turned and walked away. The unforgiving fluorescent lights above shone brightly on the yellow post-it. The note read, “Your patients will hate you.”

This is a marathon and I don’t want to smash into a wall right now. I want to finish it even if I puke, get hyponatremia, dehydrate, get run over by elite runners, suddenly cripple from my own weight, hallucinate men peeing on a bridge (but they’re real!), begin to think many existentialist thoughts, or start seeing my life play out in flashbacks. I am not going to get on the bus and feel like a lame loser. I am going to run all 42.195 km of the darn marathon and keep going just so I can make the marathon feel like a lame loser. Bring it on, marathon, bring it on.

Earthworms annoy the heck out of me. They must either be suicidal or plain stupid. Every time it rains, they wriggle out of the earth onto the sidewalks just to be squished to death by rainboots. Some bloat out after being immersed in the water and eventually explode with their innards spilling out of their disfigured body. Some shrivel up in the sun the next day. Every time it rains, not only do I have to walk 15 minutes to class and carry an umbrella, I also have to keep my eyes trained on the path in front of me and jump around to sidestep these lowly creatures. It’s not the idea that wriggling things disgust me that I so passionately try to avoid them. I just can’t stand the sight of mutilated wriggling things, and I certainly don’t want to be the mutilator. Why can’t they just stay in their happy little homes in the earth and spare themselves from such torture and spare me from having to care so much about them?

Today’s orchestra rehearsal annoyed the heck out of me. Why is there always that one obnoxious freshman kid who thinks he’s all that? He always continues playing after the conductor and everyone else have stopped. He always argues with the section leaders after he writes the bowings in incorrectly and thinks he’s right. He always likes to remind the whole orchestra what solo piece he’s working on while everyone else is tuning.  Oh, what plots of bloody murder go through my mind every time I hear the screech of his violin, and he only helps perfect them every time I see him. But I can never do better than shooting him an extremely subtle look of disapproval. He probably wonders why I keep staring at him.

Freshmen complaining about General Chemistry annoy me like no other. I know I used to be one of them but to hear them telling stories about lab, comparing notes, sharing tricks that might help them, freaking out before the exams, calling the professor a douche, just tears me up inside. I really miss General Chemistry. I miss how much it pampered us with TA’s, recitations, help sessions, a clearly structured curriculum, PLTL. I feel like the teen who finally realizes she forgot to appreciate her baby years, and I feel bad for projecting my sophomore bitterness on these innocent naive freshmen, but I can’t help it. Besides, their average on the first exam doesn’t help much even though it probably wasn’t their fault.

Today, all of these things just had to happen in front of my face and I became little miss grumpy, drowning in annoyance with every single thing. I have no idea why I was so easily annoyed today, but don’t worry, I have never outwardly expressed my annoyance or carried out any of my plots.

I really hope earthworms and freshmen don’t read my blog.

I have always carried around with me the philosophy that people disappoint. At some point signs of flawed character start to emerge from the people you care about. They tend to betray you in a silently murderous way. On the surface it would have been an action no one would ever have taken seriously, but underneath lie the unexpected selfish motives that wrenches your heart clean of any previous love you had for that person. I have grown to expect this. Or maybe I’ve grown into it. Whenever you think you’ve seen the worst in people, there’s always worse. So, I tend to treat everyone equally and indifferently. I place everyone an arm’s distance away just for my own selfish reason of not wanting to get my heart mutilated by insensitive people.

Have you ever wondered if you would  jump in front of a bus to save a friend? George O’ Malley’s martyrdom in Grey’s Anatomy really makes me wonder. I know it’s just an overly dramatic situation created by the producers of Grey’s, but it makes me wonder if it is easier to die for a stranger than a friend. Completely ignorant of who the person is. Completely heroic because the saved is ignorant of who the hero is. Untainted by ulterior motives. Untainted by memories. A pure act of heroism. It could get messy for a friend. The split second before you jump in front of the bus, you think of all the experiences you’ve had with the friend. You think of all his/her flaws. You calculate their worth. You judge, using your mental storage of data about this person, whether he/she is worth the risk. Nah, my life is more valuable and he/she gets run over by the bus.

But of course, that’s just one way to think about it and I suppose it requires a great deal of twisting your sense of right and wrong (and a lack of true friends) to think that way. This was the way I used to think. But now there are some people in my life that make me not want to disappoint. They are the ones who completely obliterate my emo world of sadly disappointing people. They are the ones who don’t just make my day. They make my life. I would step in front of a stupid bus for them.

“Are you trying to go all gothic on me?” – Violin teacher

I know my hair is getting long and my bangs are falling over my eyes but I didn’t know they could change my look so drastically.

If you hear excited squeals coming from a suite harboring the four Asian girls, you will probably think we are gossiping about guys. You might imagine us being introduced to a hot friend on skype by a friend halfway around the world. You might think, “Oh, they’re probably celebrating the fact that they all aced their exams.” You might be wondering, “Wow, they actually have voices.” You might finally realize, “Wow, they actually exist in this suite.”

But no, you’re quite wrong about us. We don’t squeal about guys or exams. Guys and exams…nothing special about them. They aren’t sweet enough to satisfy our cravings. They aren’t that perfect slice of beauty packed into a nice translucent plastic box. They’re always the stress causers, not the stress relievers. They don’t evoke that irrational impulsive reaction upon seeing a Boston cupcake. Yes. We squeal about food. We cry in agony when we don’t have good food. Conversations revolve around food. We are still mourning the death of Bear’s Den.

This is why I love my suite like no other. And we do exist, maybe just not in your world.

It is running through everyone’s arteries and veins, flooding our body with fear. It has engulfed every crevisse of our brains. It has infected our every thought. It has warped our vision, our sense of smell, our every touch. It is immersed in the air. Everywhere we swim through these invisible particles. We hear it in the coughs that resonate through the lecture halls. As we wait in line for lunch, we feel it on the back of our necks as the person behind us sneezes. We pray that it won’t sneak up our nostrils and consume us. The paranoia is almost unbearable.

But the plague is already in us. No squirt of Purell will kill it. Obsessive use of Lysol wipes won’t kill it. Long before the disease arrived we were already infected with the plague: the psychological plague of fear. It is even more contagious than the disease itself and it is killing us.

It’s not flu season yet and so many people have gotten their flu shots. So why does it feel like everyone is getting sick? I have ample reason (ie the cacophonous orchestra of coughs and sneezes during lectures) to believe that the fear and paranoia of getting swine flu is getting to us. It is making us more susceptible to the commonl flu. This almost obsessive fear has lowered our immune system probably because it’s causing unnecessary mental and physical stress (from constantly cringing at the lovely sounds of sickness). Sadly there doesn’t seem to be a socially acceptable cure as long as H1N1 decides to stick around. It really is a psychological case that should be studied. It’s kind of crazy how many invisible things can have such power over our lives.

Today was my first violin lesson of the semester and I wouldn’t say I was looking forward to it. I had hastily put on my powerpuff girls t-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops and rushed to catch the bus to the 560 building. Nothing unusual. Until I saw my eccentric violin teacher. He always manages to make everything unusual (ie slightly inappropriate, slightly awkward, slightly comical)

I waited outside the classroom until my teacher opened the door and let the student before me go. So I went in and just as I was about to start playing the stuff I hurriedly practiced for an hour before the lesson, he scanned me from top to bottom and said, “You look good.” Obviously that was a nice compliment but he just successfully managed to make me feel utterly self-conscious and created a slightly awkward moment for me. You might think what he said was kind of creepy in a pedophilish kind of way. But it wasn’t that he could possibly be creepy in that way that disturbed me. It was the fact that he checked me out from top to bottom and judged me. He’s my violin teacher for crying out loud. Violin teachers aren’t supposed to care what form or shape your body looks or what crap you’re hanging on your body. I believe the music should be the main point.

But my violin teacher’s from Romania and I don’t know what Romanians are like but they must be really straight-forward people because that’s what my teacher is. Straight-forward. No shame. At all. On a musical level, the criticism becomes extremely valuable. On a socially normal level it can be kind of disturbing…and actually kind of funny too.