I Ain’t Been Home To See My Baby In 99 And One Half Days

Due to a complex and uncontrollable course of events, I don’t have shoes to wear at work today. And I’m trying to see if I can make it to one thirty without anyone in the office noticing that I’m wearing mismatched striped socks and nothing else. This to my brain seems to have been translated into a creeping, pointed-toes-first sort of saunter that is certainly the polar opposite of stealth.

Luckily my path to and from the printer is largely unobserved. I’m already psyching myself up for my trek to the break room when this can of Diet Coke runs out. That route is a veritable minefield of bored workers who might take it into their head to closely observe all trans-offices pilgrimages for any deviations from routine. I believe the neurotic fool who overcompensates for a lack of rubber-soled footwear by prancing like she could launch into a pirouette at any moment would provide too much fodder for them to handle without a shovel.

I’ve decided that 60s rock-blues is the perfect accompaniment to this drizzly, dank, droopy weather. Joplin, Velvet Underground, and Jimi have been very heavy in my rotation of albums at work the last few weeks. And since Janis has been such a sweetly melancholic balm while the sun refuses to shine, I was more than a little appalled that they named the weather pattern that has killed over one hundred people Tornado Joplin. Too soon, guys, too soon.

Yes, I do understand that I’m fairly screwed up for devoting more attention to a critique of tornado naming than I do to worrying about real people being hurt. I’ll work on getting worked up about that.

I’ve been having my typical spring-induced burst of eloquence/need for attention, but I haven’t been able to channel this into blog form. Every time I log in and get ready to type I get overcome with a guilt complex about not doing my math homework. Due to this overreaction of mine, I am now three sections ahead of where I need to be, and I think I’m going to keep up that pace until I just obliterate the whole course, because nothing brings on the crazy like math.

I’m not going to elaborate how much of my mental powers I daily devote to the argument that my ability to divide polynomials is going to have literally no impact on my career/life/endeavor to become an interesting person, but trust me, it’s a subject I dwell on with some passion.

But much more troubling than my futile sophist arguments against systems of equations is how quickly math slickens my grasp on reality until is slips out of my minute yet tenacious grip. I don’t know why my mind wanders from the task at hand so quickly—probably the lack of adjectives—but usually about forty seven seconds into my first math problem I get bogged down in the philosophical inquiries that the presence of math naturally hazards. For instance: is the assertion that the rules of math have been proven in nature just another example of man imposing a law of order onto an uncompromisingly anarchistic universe? Do we find the proofs for geometric laws because they’re there, or because we crave to see them? In other words, is 4 really divisible by 2 independent of man’s consciousness or influence, or is 4 divisible by 2 because we need it to be?

See, there’s a reason why I stopped taking math after Pre-Calc sophomore year of high school. I argue that my judgment to stop the madness there should have been respected.

I was totally gearing up to dive into the various difficulties that come with making new acquaintances and friends. I’m fascinated with how much I can completely misrepresent myself while making only truthful statements. But every attempted sentence related to this topic kept on coming off either self-congratulatory, self-loathing, or creepily detached. Which I suppose means we best shelve that discussion for another time.

It should be noted that tonight I am finally gaining some closure on a nine-year-stale grievance. Tonight, I shall see u2. Bono shall serenade me. More importantly, The Edge will rock my soul. My parents better cross their fingers that those irascible Irishmen still have their groove, because if this concert doesn’t blow my concept of what is legendary, they’re never getting off the hook for denying me the chance to see their Elevation tour back in 2002.

I know, how leftover teenage angst of me. I should just bust out the Slim Fast and Daria and call it a Nostalgia Tuesday. Maybe if I feel super rebellious I can watch the copy of Moulin Rouge I used to hide in the shoebox under my bed, cleverly concealed beneath my ballroom shoes between the layers of tissue paper.