poor memory

I recently read a collection of short stories in a book I borrowed from a friend, called The Color Master by Aimee Bender, which was by the way very good and beautifully written and strange and interesting and really enjoyable to read. It's also great for reading in installments, as many anthologies are. But anyway, this post is not about that book. Actually I went from writing a short review of the book (which is why I won't be writing much about it here) to writing a blog post about something else, to writing about things that writing my blog post reminded me of, and somehow I kind of came back to writing about something that came up while I was reading the book. So on we go:

Something that Aimee Bender’s story, Wordless, reminded me of. That we are losing our words. Sounds very dramatic, but more specifically, I definitely know that I am either losing my words or have always had trouble grasping for the right one. My mind is a total jumble, and I am 57% convinced that it is because I got so caught up in trying to master the art of multitasking. Now I’m just terrible at everything. Just kidding, but I became a lot more inefficient with doing simple things like just remembering what I was talking about, or where I was going, or what it was that I meant to google just now. Where did I last see my glasses? Did I leave them at the store? And once in middle school, the biggest temporary memory dump I’ve experienced so far: once I was walking down the hall right after class, with my backpack on and all my books in arm, surrounded by the streaming traffic of hurrying teenagers, when suddenly I stopped and noticed this gaping blankness in my brain. And I thought, “Where am I supposed to go? Where am I supposed to go?” and just stood frozen in the middle of this hallway-intersection, feeling this growing panic as I stared at the floor, trying to recall where I was going, and then where I just came from, what class? And I couldn’t even remember what class I had just left. It was like I didn't even have any recent memories that morning, and all my memories of other school mornings came flooding in as a little tick tick slideshow, and I could only preview them one at a time and tick them off, no, no. I remembered one morning in math class, the teacher at the front of the class, and the light that came in through the windows. But it felt a little too distant just then, that math morning, so I accurately identified it as “not-this-morning”. Then I thought ok logically it had to have been first period, my first class. So that would be Spanish. It was Spanish last year too so I can’t be wrong. 

And that makes sense since I’m in this hall, so what’s my next class?

… 

… 

... 

… 

… 

ok I can figure it out, it’s either A-day or B-day classes. No idea which. Ok, narrow them down. What classes do you have? 

… Spanish. 

… 

...

...

... English.

...

uh ok… what are common broad subjects that people teach? Math, science. Do you have science. Who is the science teacher. All I can think of is the teacher I didn’t have in 6^th grade that everyone else had. Oh my god. How am I not remembering? Is there anyone here I know? Who’s in my classes? I recognize her!!  She doesn’t know my schedule. People are leaving, the bell’s going to ring soon, everyone's leaving, there’s no one here I know--that’s a 6^th grader. I'm the last person here. I better head to some class and just hope it’s the right one, or by now it’s just--I need to check them off one by one by visiting them. But where are my classes? I have no idea where ANY of my classes are, or who the teachers are. Then someone on the brutal and scary member of school staff comes hurrying over in a huff, whistle dangling around her neck, “What are you doing? What are you doing here? GO TO CLASS.” And I’m like, ok ok! sorry I! I can’t remember what class! Mumble- swivel, start walking. I. oh my god.
Math class. 

It was math. I think that was the class I forgot, and I finally found it and walked in and was super relieved. Maybe the memory was frightened back into place by the staff person. This was, by the way, definitely well into the school year, and I had long ago stopped looking at my printout schedule by then (and didn't have it at school when I happened to blank out). I still don’t know what happened then that made me forget everything so fully and ridiculously. 

Anyway, there was a lot more to this post, and if you remember, this post was part of another post that I’d meant to write on a different subject, but I kept hopping to concurrent topics that later were maybe less concurrent, and now we’re here. And I didn't even really talk about what I'd set out to talk about in that first sentence up there of the second paragraph. Or third sentence, maybe. Also there’s a new poll! Hooray! The old ones got so dusty they lost their vote count, ha. Oh wait, no they didn't. They usually do by now. Hmm.

Also, do you title posts or things that you write before or after you write them? When it comes to blog posts, I usually title them after, and it's fun because I find that after all that rambling, I actually sometimes still have a somewhat cohesive topic by the end anyway. Or if they have nothing to do with each other, they suddenly do in the title and then it's cohesive.

October 10th, let's flash back to the 8th

So this picture is actually from Wednesday. Here we are in the nature lab, studying our objects!

Dear October,

Let me begin with what happened on Tuesday.
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Basically I had my first work shift on Tuesday and it was very nerve wracking and exciting. I got there in the morning and the mailroom manager(?) guy led me downstairs to their package place, which I didn’t even know existed. He told me about the packets on the table, which were ordered by date of arrival of packages. So every package that arrived that day was in one thick packet, which had a long list of people’s names and and package numbers and such. I was supposed to get people to sign their name by their package on the list when they received them and beforehand had to check some stuff.

There were the shelves of packages, which were all numbered. Then there was the giant stack of boxes in the middle of the room, which was where the too-large packages went if they were too big for the shelves. Really though, Peter only told me about the packets and what I needed to ask people for, and then he left. I figured out most of the other stuff by myself, which was weird because then I wondered whether you were just thrown in for every job like this. There was another guy there named Shaun, who was friendly and somewhat upbeat and positive (all the walls were posted with very positive messages as well), and who seemed like a long-term worker, so he said hello and asked some cordial questions and such but then I went back to reading and he continued doing his thing at the computer. So I just sat on a stool by the door, which is one of those doors that split in half so that people can look in but they can’t walk through the doorway because the bottom half of the door is closed. I thought it was so cool that I was on the other side of that half door.

About 7 minutes into my shift, a boy comes up to the half-door and just stands there. Meanwhile, I’m still answering Shaun’s how-are-you-liking-it-here questions and I glance at the boy at the door and I think, I wonder why he’s there? So I finish answering pretty quickly and just wait for Shaun to ask him what he wants, because I don’t know what he wants. So I just stare at the boy and he kind of glances at me and the boxes and Shaun like he’s unsure what to do, and then Shaun says, “Now you get his package” and I’m like OH (my god) ok stand up uhhhh what’s your package number? Boy says three-three twenty-three and I think wow that’s a weird number and I go down the aisles and I see the labels on the shelves and I’m like ok so they go by 500’s ok uhh does it go up or down here oh ok it goes up in this direction ok I’m in the wrong aisle, switching aisles, nope this one only goes up to 2000, next aisle… wait there is no next aisle. Where are the other ones? Search the back shelves?? But those are labeled with departmental stuff! Wait maybe the big boxes. Search search search look at boxes there (big box pile is not organized in any way. You just read all the numbers) there is no 3000-anything oh god SHAUN HELP ME SHAUN NO DON’T LOOK I’M CAPABLE uhhhhhhhhhhh don’t look confused. No stop that spin. Go back to the shelves! Look around that second aisle again! That boy totally knows it’s your first day! Oh god he’s like oh no I got an incapable one to handle my package noooo keep looking. Boy says “Um, I think it’s right there” I turn around. “Uh, where?” Boy points kind of at me. Ok. Look at long boxes that are leaning against the sides of the shelves. Did I see those before? But no, these are all only in the hundreds. I need a three thousand! Boy says, ”That orange one?” ORANGE ONE?? THEY’RE ALL BROWN “It’s right behind you” Turn around. Wait which behind me. Like behind me from my perspective or behind me from your perspective, which is really my front (why was I even wondering this). And I look at this package that has a little orange stripe on the side made out of tape, and the box has 323 written on it in red (like they all are) and I take it and boy is like “Yeah” and shuffles around his pockets for his ID. I laugh and say haha I thought you said three-thousand twenty three! (he thinks, um that sounds nothing like three-twenty three. I really should have said three three twenty three but at the time I couldn’t remember how I got so confused) and bring this very long package over to the half door, and I’m trying to figure out how to pick it up (like a log? Over the shoulder? Just grab it? Tilt and roll a bit? Just lift? Am I breaking some kind of package-holding rule?? The guy over there, Shaun, is probably looking at me like oh god you aren’t supposed to carry long packages like THAT wow common sense) and I just end up scrabbling a bit at it and then lifting vertically and tilting slightly because making it horizontal wasn’t necessary until I got to the door and I didn’t want accidentally swing too hastily and knock some other packages, and the first thing that happens is I smile like wow I was so clueless thank god I (you) found it and I lift it a bit more and the package hits the ceiling tile with a little clonk and I’m still smiling and I say oops like oh it’s no big deal but inside I just slap my forehead. Then I do the whole check-sign-date ritual with the packet after I figure out which packet to get and familiarize myself with how many pages of same-first-letter-of-last-name people there generally are per letter so I can figure out where this boy’s name is without just flipping one page at a time, or forward and back several times like I don’t know the order of the alphabet. Yay! Then I scoot the package over the door and he picks it up also rather awkwardly and leaves. It’s all fine. I sit back on the stool. I laugh at my terrible first package and then read The Tempest. 

The next person comes about half an hour later, a girl with a friend. I think for this person I don’t even find their package. I even ask Shaun if there’s somewhere else they put packages and tell him the package number and he doesn’t see it so he tells the girl to come back later. The third person comes when the mailroom manager and Shaun are there, and for her I bypass her package because it’s on the floor and not on the shelf and I had tunnel vision apparently but luckily I checked again and found it. The fourth person is the first one that probably thought I was normal, and then for the fifth one the girl gave me two package numbers but I found three packages on the shelves with those numbers, so I brought them all over and she said oh yeah it’s possible I have three because I got a bunch of emails and wanted to get them all at the same time. So I find the several packets with her name on it (since each package arrived on a different day) and then on the last packet I say, wait. Why… are there two packages listed under your name here. I ask her and she says there might be a fourth one, so she asks me to check again and I go back to the shelves and find a fourth one and bring it back. So that was kind of a strange one too. But I learned so much! Package numbers aren’t restricted to just one package! Sometimes the same number is on two packages! You can be a person and ask them if they know when it arrived, if that helps, and they actually know sometimes! And various other things. After the first hour, Shaun left, and I wondered whether the only reason he was down there the first hour was just to make sure I knew what I was doing. Which was nice because that was comforting though scary also. Anyway in total, about 10 people came that day to get their packages, and I even met the guy who took the next shift because I stayed over my shift (is there another word for a shift) a bit since neither the mailroom manager nor shaun came by like I thought they would and I couldn’t go up to find them cause then the mailroom would be personless. But hooray the next guy came early! And in the end the mailroom manager guy saw me as I was looking around the upstairs area and it was fine and I left for my lecture.

Then I went to one of the city's public libraries and it was cute and old looking and I flipped through an encyclopedia that was out on one of the display desks like I've always wanted to do, and the first word of the page it was turned to was cool. The word was banausic. Isn't that great? Look it up and use it. Then I looked up my name and that was fun. It wasn't very interesting or useful though. I suppose we can't all have interesting names...

----back to the present
So I went to the mailroom today to apply for working Thursday morning too, and today there was another girl who was working there for the first time! She is a sophomore and her name is Cheyenne (not sure about the spelling). Our shift was two hours long, so at first we said hello and chatted a little, and then I took out The Tempest and she went back to her laptop. About an hour later, no one had come to pick up packages. No new packages were being rolled in either. It was a slow hour. Then I asked her about sophomore classes and we began talking again and this time it was less introductory, which was great! We talked about snow and New York and how peopleslip and slide a bit on your first step and then have to get down the hill somehow. We talked about classes from Texas really do live in cities, with highways and skyscrapers and such, and about how in the winter people shovel the snow out in New York, but here NO one shovels the snow, so you walk out and  a bit, and found out that my TA for drawing is this girl’s best friend, and my drawing teacher is one of her favorite teachers, even though he always picked on her (which I thought was great, really. That she liked him so much partly because of that). So it was a good day. What else happened. They had oreo/caramel/marshmallow pizza today, so I tried my first weird-dessert pizza and it was actually good! I sent in my answers to questions for everyone else’s sound project today, which was fun to do but frightening as all due-by-midnight online assignments are. 

Today was pants weather too. Are you going to just keep getting colder from now on? No more dips into cold and then “haha I was just joking, I’m actually going to be warm next week”’s? I suppose I am fine with either way but I just realized that long sleeve shirts are actually really necessary! I need more! Also my pants are even proving inadequate to your temperatures! Already! HOW DO YOU LAYER JEANS? The only other kind of pants I have are sweatpants, but they’re very thin and I wear them to sleep.

Problem to be solved later,
Indigo

song of the day: Skinny Love by Bon Iver, Birdy's cover then covered by this girl, Bella Ferraro (phew) This is her audition for the X Factor.
I know it's not really just a song, but I really encourage you to watch this (I think you should watch the whole thing just to get the context and all, and don't just listen to her sing, look!). Try not to have high expectations from what I'm saying, because I didn't have high expectations when I watched it. It's beautiful and kind of amazing how the crowd and Bella interact with each other without meaning to. 

5, 6, 7: Labels, Drive-ins, Lampposts

I think this is going to be a pattern.
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5:

I have really ridiculous blog labels. I was looking at the "labels" tab on the side of my screen, which shows me all the labels I've used in case I want to label my current blog post with one of those labels, and the first few are

#, $100, $300, %, *poke*, 1,  100, 1000, 11:30, 13, 1st, 2

Then it goes on with a bunch of random numbers till if gets to actual words. Anyway, I don't know why I'd label anything with 11:30 or 100 or 1000, but I know exactly which post the $100 and $300 labels go to. I made a post about getting my tablet a long time ago, and the one I was going to get was $100 while the one I ended up getting was $300. It's kind of weird labeling a post with something like that. I guess I thought, you know, I think maybe one day, I’m going to want to look up my Wacom tablet post, so I’m just going to google “$100” instead of “Wacom tablet. Or maybe I thought I was going to buy a lot of $100 things in the future and blog about them. Lol. It's just weird. I guess I thought labels were like search tags, which they kind of are maybe, but there is an actual search bar that looks up all the words of posts, not just their labels but I was probably thinking I'd label everything a bunch of labels just in case. Yesterday I labeled my post with “3” and “words” but akjehdfd

Today: 758 words
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6:

At drive-ins, every drive-in, every living building at night that chatters busily despite being alone, the warm glow of fumes floats heavily, every huff and puff of yesterday freeing itself into the cool air. The trees feel it first, that dim vibration of everything secret that the world buttons up in its coat pockets, next to the jigsaw puzzles and bricks of mysterious cheese. It hugs every trunk, and seeps into the asphalt, into the dirt, into the shells of the tiny glittering bugs that sleep snug between the roots. And the stars, as small and sad and distant as they are, feel it too, and swing into stuttered motion, clicking their way to the sea, where they drop and fizzle lovely craters in the sand.

- from the writing meeting I went to, to the prompt "summer"

Today: 0 words
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7:

 Allow me to gather my thoughts. This is kind of turning into an every-three-days thing rather than a daily thing. I’m leaving for a week long trip soon! So that week is going to be almost completely sparse of updates. Which is funny, because it means I will have a lot of words to make up, along with the words that I already need to make up! 

I just had some chicken pot pie. It was delicious, as chicken pot pie always is until the need to have chicken pot pie dies out. Let me recall my surroundings. I am in a room, lit by a ceiling fan. Faint desert air blows in through the bejeweled curtains, as I sip from my coconut tea. 

One night, while in the car with a friend, on the way back from a drive-in movie theater, I was watching the tall lampposts(?) outside pass by on the highway, and I was thinking of how the lights from those tall sticks were kind of like stars, except they are held up by poles and follow the highway, so we pass each star really quickly. So wouldn’t it be cool if the lampposts down here were actually the stars of the society in the sky, and their lampposts were the stars in ours? In that case, we’d be living in an inverted world, sort of, and if their lampposts lined their streets, then their streets are really weird and jumbly or scattered. But I guess the stars in their sky are always aligned since their stars are our lampposts and those follow our highways and small roads. Their constellations would be really obvious. Maybe they have a problem where there are so many stars in line with one another that it’s difficult to section them off into constellations. Also, in their world, their sky would be smaller than their ground/land/whatever, which is weird. Maybe they have more underground things than we do as a result, and it would be funny if they kept digging through our sky until finally they popped out through the other side and fell out into someone else’s. 

Today: 626 words

2, 3, 4: AHHHH, :(, Beep

I know I haven't posted for the past 3 days! Ahh! Ok here we go, succession of posts, both short and medium and nonexistent! 
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2: 

Everything burns. I went to the beach with some of my friends. We made a sandcastle with strange jut-outs and a cat head and another head, and tried to boogie board but didn’t really since the waves were somewhat low. 

Clothes: burn 
Fabric: burns 
Shower: burns (apparently there is no cold water in my shower) 
Lotion, 10 seconds later: burns 
Another kind of lotion: burns 
Typing: burns

Just kidding about the last one! But
Sitting with my back touching anything: burns

Today: 153 words
(comment from the future 7/5: what a fun and sad day)
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3:

Today: 0 words
(comment from the future 7/5: .___________.)
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4:

My printer is going kzzk… kzzk… kzzk… kzzk kzzk kzzk kzzkhzkhzkhzkhzkhz 

So I’ve been reading a lot of webcomics lately, and but I only recently noticed all the different sound effects that the artists come up with for things. It’s not just ZAP! or POW! or CREAK.. click beep POOF! slurp, swish, bzzt, slam, whack, kaboom, crash, THWACK, etc. (Actually, it’s funny to note the sound effects that are verbs, like slam, crash, stomp, and slurp. Maybe one day sound effects will evolve into really ridiculous verb sounds, like WALK, drink, CLOSE DOOR!, open, UNPEEL!) Anyway, instead they’re a little more unusual. Like 

Krrrnch - breaking a metal floor 
Zrrrrrt – laser beam through tent 
Woooom - explosion
Shooooop – opening a chest
Crrrr – wagon piece dragging 
Fweeeee – light fleeting away 
Fwshhhhhhh – power zapping out 
Zzzzhooooom – laser beam 
Ffssssss – electricity doing its thing 
Krsh! – power zap, electric 
Shhf –leather boot sliding into saddle, gun into pocket 
Fzz, crik, crak – campfire 

I'll tell you about the webcomics another time. So I was thinking of how you would come up with sound effects for just things you do/things that happen every day. I guess the steps would be something like this: 

1. Listen 
2. Imitate by voice 
3. Try to spell it out 
4. Figure out the pattern (long and extended like shhhhhhhhhhhhhhk, short blips like beep beep beepbeepbeep, dramatic like SLAM!, soft and lowercase, etc.) 
5. Figure out what it looks like (slinky and oozing around in waves, etc.) 

So... I did some stuff and listened to the sounds that happened (appeared, resulted?) and tried to translate them as accurately as possible. Here they are: 

drinking water – glgflkgdlgfglg
fireworks (happy 4th of July, belated!) – poooosh! Buh buh bububububububu crkkk… pook 
flicking light switch up – blun
ceiling fan - whuwuuwWWWwhwhwhwhwhWwwWWWWWWww 
laptop having trouble breathing- vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrn vrrn vrn vrrn vrrrrrrRRRrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRN 
crinkling receipt slowly – blllk mllk blLLK… Kr k MLk blKrr.. 
peeling a post-it - fffzzzzzzzzzzzzzsssssuh 

Wait. Is it peeling or unpeeling? I am peeling an apple. I am unpeeling an apple. Unpeeling a banana. Is there a difference? Ok. Peeling is to remove the skin. So unpeeling would be like putting the skin back on, except it’s not. Also it doesn’t seem to show up in dictionaries as a verb. What a mystery. 

It’s really difficult, when you’re listening to a sound, to figure out whether it is an “n” sound or a “d” sound or something else. I was poking my laptop with my nail just now and couldn’t decide whether it was more like a “d d d d d d d d” or “dn dn dn dn” sound. The only reason the “n” is being tacked on to the “d” is because the tapping sound is slightly muted, probably largely by my finger and then by everything else, so there needs to be something that stops the d sound from being too duh duh duh when you read it. 

Anyway that was fun. You should try it. It was surprisingly difficult. I guess there’s a difference between the sound effects used in comics and how you would actually spell out a sound effect if you wanted it to be as accurate as possible. I’m pretty sure if someone drew a character scrunching up some paper, they wouldn’t write “blllk mllk blLLK” next to it. They’d probably just go with “crinkle crinkle”. 

Aah this is so complicated, typing and continuing the same blog post on different days. Let me tell you how I am organizing my NaNoWriMo writing right now. I’ve got MS Word open, and I just type type for the day. At the end of the day, I write the word count for the day, type a looooooooong line of dashes under that and write the date, in bold, at the end of the dash train. I highlight the dash train a hideous cyan because it’s either that or another terribly blinding color, or yellow, which is boring (only highlighter yellow though. Normal yellow is awesome! And only highlighter yellow on the computer. Real-life highlighter yellow is so practical it’s ok if it’s a bit boring. At least I can see the words underneath). Then I type type for the next day and repeat. 

 Ooh I want to try something. 

“At my end of my day, I write my word count for my day and I type my looooooooong line of dashes and I write my date, in my bold, at my end of my dash train.” 

 I always feel bad about using “I” too much in sentences. Are you ever worried people will try to psychoanalyze you? Anyway, I thought I'd see what it would look like if I replaced all articles with “my”. It’d be funny to have a day where everyone does that when they speak. It might become a habit though. o_o 

So that’s how I’m organizing everything, I can’t keep blog posts in one piece on MS Word. They must be separated by dashes. It’s just weird, especially when I decide, the next day, that I want to type something BEFORE the stuff I typed yesterday for my blog post. Actually, I’m not supposed to really run into this problem since the goal was to post every day, and the assumption was that I would only write blog posts on the day I post them. Gah confusing. Alright see you tomorrow!

Today: 1133 words
(actually I'm kind of warming up to that horrible highlighter cyan. It may look cute here, by the way, but it doesn't so much on MS Word)

Week 337

Week 337

Sister :: Mister
Talks :: Phone
Electric! :: Phone
Corner :: Stile
Turnstile :: Corner
Swap :: Mop
Young :: Old
Horrific :: Wendy
Block :: Sand
Wind :: Goose

From lunanina