Moot Thoughts & Musings

No. I can't sleep. I know that for many people 1.00 am doesn't count as insomnia, rather as the norm, but since I started getting up at 5.30 to go to Baton Rouge every day last year, I was dead to the world by 10.00 pm or by the time I got home from Baton Rouge, whichever came second. Now that I'm in setting my own schedule mode for the summer, 11 or 12 is nice. But 1!? Well, I guess it was just a week ago today that I stayed up till 2 finishing the third Lymond book. I'm so obsessive about time. I thinks it speaks to a great obsession with information. I can't go on a trip without holding the atlas in my lap (if I'm not driving) and ticking off towns as if they're a checklist. I get excited as each town approaches, wondering what their exit sign will look like. It's usually green like every else's. But just maybe the next town will be one of those hidden treasures. I like to know exactly where I am all the time. When I'm in a new city, it's the same thing. I map it out in my head as soon as possible. But if I don't know where I am, it doesn't always bother me, esp. if I'm with someone who does know where they are. So it's not like a controlling thing where I have to have control over where I am. I just think it's cool knowing just where I am. It helps me organize my memories about a certain place, too. I.e. So-and-so lived there, and then we went there, and then we did this, and I could find my way to their house by this landmark or this catchy street name. Location is not the only thing I'm obsessive about. I also like to know just what time it is. Chris can get absorbed in something such that time will pass and he will have no idea. What will seem like 10 min to him can actually be 2 hours. I am never like that. Maybe that leads to how I can even tell time by the way the sunlight hits the wall. I like to watch seconds tick by on a clock, waiting breathlessly for the minute to change, and it always does! (unless the clock is broken). I also set my mileage every time I am going to drive some distance. I set it every time I drive to and from Baton Rouge. I also record my gas mileage. What the odometer says, how much the gas is per gallon, how many gallons I got, what the total price is. This has been an interesting exercise. The change in gas prices going up and down and up has been a fascinating survey...something we don't think about in the individual gas-buying experience. But to have all your gas-buying experiences charted out to be taken in as a whole is very interesting. I'm actually supposed to be charting my actual mileage, but I'm not fast enough with math to do that while sitting in the gas station parking lot. Again, these things that I keep a running record aren't indicative of a particularly controlling personality, no more so, at any rate, than a headstrong oldest girl of five would normally be. The aren't obsessions to control as such but rather to collect. I've always loved to collect. My mother would despair at the random collections I used to hide under my bed and every other spare corner and then some. Some of my favorite collections that I can remember were birds nests and old alarm clocks. I used to take apart old alarm clocks while they were plugged in so that I could see them in action. (I never thought of battery operated clocks.) I kind of reconsidered this habit when I got a rather startling electric shock one time. Nothing serious, just startling to a 10-yr-old. I don't collect "junk" any more. Too many times of packing up every semester for stupid conferences at Covenant cured me of that. I now throw, throw, throw. But things like what time it is, where I am, my gas mileage...these are harmless things to collect. They won't accumulate such to hamper my living space. Well, this isn't entirely true. I do collect some things still...blank pieces of paper, random art supplies (that I rarely use), photographs (I can't bear throwing photos away), tea/coffee cups/paraphanelia (this has the benefit of being functional, too), napkin rings...ok who gave this girl a blog!?

This isn't the end of my insomnia. Oh no. I wish my intellectual life were this vivid at this time of night. I'm now completely switching my train of thought. I've become rather nostalgic lately. I think it's because of my upcoming trip to Chattanooga to be reunited with Grace and Joanna for a week. (Maybe I'll see some of my readership there...I'll definitely be on the lookout...so to speak...hahaaa.) I also had a glance at my last Tartan to look up who someone was and actually caught myself flipping through the Tartan nostalgically. Actually, I was going to say something bad about it, but then I remembered the Nick was one of the editors. I don't blame you, Nick. Knowing other members of the editorship as I did, I'm not surprised at the predictable layout. I really liked Em's Tartan, but I was a year too late for that one. (I suppose this speaks to the one strand of avant garde I have clinging tightly to my taste.) But anyway, I digress. So I was looking at the Tartan and remembered, as Grace expressed in email earlier today, what it felt like to walk across campus repeatedly running into people you knew well and loved and could have five quick, but deep, conversations in the time it took you to get from Sanderson to the mail room. Or the ideological melange of verbalized streams of thought that centered around the corner in the library as far away as possible from certain library staff who always told us to be quiet, located in those hideous orange chairs in the corner where the two walls of SIP carrels met by the full windows. I'm ashamed for being so nostalgic. I don't want to be like other people clinging to their golden times of their college days, which seems especially rampant in connection with Cov. BUT days like today, I have to say unequivocally that I miss it! I miss it! I miss it! It's not IT so much as things that were part of it. I was really glad to be graduated and done with it and gone. What I miss is having people to talk to. Just friends around all the time, always someone up for a conversation or a cuppa. It's the social stimulus maybe that I miss. The context for hashing out a thought in a group. But at this same time, I'm glad that the kind of milieu of my Cov life is over. It was good then, but I reflect back honestly I had pretty much checked out by my last year anyway except for a few friends who I keep up even now. And reflecting even more honestly, I realize that my friendship now with Chris is better than any friend I had in college. The ability to toss ideas with him in a big salad bowl is a much more satisfying experience, partly because he knows so much and is so well-read and remembers what he's read and has good thoughts about all this stuff and can make connections. So when I get screwed up with words like "synchronic" he can always untangle me. And this bowl of stuff is usually bigger and more widely varied than I realized at first glance. A never-ending conversation really. And to be honest, right now, I can only give a care for about three hours a day anyway. After that you start seeing Hegel everywhere, and that doesn't get us anywhere.

Ok. I think I'm done now.