too tired to think of clever title

Does it happen to you that the more utterly exhausted you feel the more elusive sleep becomes? Granted, it is only 9 pm, but I feel absolutley wasted, unable to articulate cogent arguments or even reason at all.

I have been feeling a bit unwell, nothing too exciting, nor even cathartic, just a general malaise that leaves me tenuously hanging, waiting for the other shoe to drop, to actually become so sick as to confront it in some real way. Instead I am just sleeping poorly, and drinking too much caffeine, which leaves me shaky and uncertain if a stomach bug is lingering or I am just feeding my body poorly. I almost wish I were sick, I mean really sick, so sick that I could not be held responsible for my own care. That would be liberating for a few days, but I am sure it would get old...

Back at my last check up I was anemic, and though Miguel bought me vitamins, I am a poor patient, never lasting more than a few days ingesting anything other than actual food. And as I have mentioned but failed to remedy, I often forget even to eat these days (hence a logical explanation of general malaise) I would have been a horrible birth control pill taker, because I can't ever remember even to take antibiotics regularly... although, come to think of it, California has been doing wonders for my chronic allergic rhinitis... Sexy non?

Who needs to feel sexy when you've got so much work that you can never imagine the end of it? Not me, certainly.

Funny story today, as I sat in the sun reading between classes. I was preparing to leave when an attractive woman approached me purposefully: "Can I ask you a question?" Well, I didn't point out that she already had, and I looked up, in my busiest aloofly disinterested tone. "Um... I guess." "Where do you get your hair cut?" Very strange question. As hair is my best feature and I was having a "good hair day" I can only imagine that my sun-bleached mane called her to me, because she had made a bee-line directly to me with several other tables equally occupied by others... "Actually, I reply, both truthfully and surprisingly to her (she had to change her tactic on a dime) my husband cut it in the shower with kitchen scissors"

Quick thinker that she was, "well then maybe you will need this..." she proceeded to try and sell me a package of four visits to the salon... ha... if she only knew how little I care and how unwilling to spend any money *whatsoever* on beauty and primping... I kindly explained my status as poor graduate student, not that she didn't try to make me see the economy of her deal... I just wasn't having it. I definitely believe in natural beauty and nothing more, nourished by the sun and good excercise and devilish thoughts on occasion. Oh, and comfortable clothing, the truest key to beauty if there ever was one.

After my class on women writers I was feeling overwhelmed with work once again and the desire to cry was welling up inside me. The sadness is not really a sadness, that is a misnomer, it is a desolation a loneliness that springs from within, a sort of self-isolation, in the sense of an isolation from oneself... my own happiness will always be a mystery to me.

The doubt that surrounds my daily activity isn't so much destabilizing as it is debilitating. I ride by the mountains and I contemplate the crisp beauty that they paint across the bright blue, I smile almost against myself at the palms that bend, individually craning their long necks towards something better. The birds of paradise in their prickly mystery call to me, obliging a closer examination of their pistils and stamens, the patterns that overlay in their precise formation. And still there is a heaviness, a wish for the embrace that will release instead of bind.

I rode the man-bike to school today because it is connected to the new bike-trailer. I still don't change gears but I have found a comfortable middle-ground. Isabella likes the ride to school and it is so much faster than having to hurry her along or perch her precariously on the seat and let her lean against me as I wheel the bicycle up the path. I rode home in darkness with no helmet or bike light, but the flashing one on the back. It is the second day in a row that there is a strange sort of thermic inversion that trails patches of balmy and frigid air, especially noteable while riding beneath the underpasses. It is a strange phenomenon, much like the spots of unexpectedly warm water in the ocean that leave you wondering if maybe someone didn't just pee in that very spot. It is an enigma as to how air currents or water currents function, swirling in chaotic patterns, much like the human psyche, strange combinations, sometimes churning up a deeply chilling revelation and at others a spreading warmth. And the writing is the only way to call the chaos back into order. There is always the fear, in the ocean, of sharks, that menstrual blood, unexpected or insufficiently blocked might call to the animals from miles away, inviting them to tear at your flesh in the icy turbulence. Perhaps that is just me.

The writing helps, it releases some of the pressure. There are some stories that I want to tell, but I promised myself that I wouldn't tell them until I finish this monstrosity of a paper. Let's see if I can resist. I am also being called back to the ocean at Miramar, the long days spent listening to Joni Mitchell, writing in my diary on the lonely beach, being followed by packs of scruffy yellow mutts that commanded control of the entire shoreline, in their little gangs, sometimes snarling over food or just eliciting caresses. I remember the white dog with bi-colored eyes whose gaze seemed so intelligent and so present.

I have been thinking on this idea of "presence" hinany... (sp?) to show up and make your presence be an act unto itself. At times it seems that is the only thing I can do, be present, meet every requirement set before me as if my life were an eternal obstacle course that had some divine meaning or was some divine joke being played out so slowly that the humor was lost.

Sigh.

I hope to go to a film tomorrow despite the fact that I should be working on aforementioned project. I better not jinx myself. I am going to services with a friend for her father's yarzheit. It seemed a good enough reason to go, not so much for the religion of it (which frankly, you can guess how I feel about that) but precisely to make an act of presence, to be a friend in the memory of her loss. Maybe the numbing qualities of communal incantations will be relaxing for me, and I won't feel so nervous.

On other notes, we are singing some really beautiful music, the loveliest is about a wayfaring stranger, and the melodic "I'm only going over Jordan, I'm only going over home" rolling like the lapping of the ocean against the sides of the boat that is collectively rocking with the swells of the world and the swells of my heart, the growing and the loss, the searching and the emptiness and the confrontation of a reality alternative to the one that I created.