Superpower Showdown

*~*~ procrastinator v. workaholic ~*~*

• Composed on

I read an excerpt of this book about just how strange eels are. The excerpt made a big impression on me. For hundreds of years, nobody had any clue where eels came from. They just thought they were kind of magic? Eels live in rivers and streams as adults but swim into the open ocean and all the way to the Sargasso Sea (the current-free middle bit of the North Atlantic) to lay their eggs and die. So that's where they're born, too, and live their young lives. Strange, toothy-grinned beasts. I want to read the whole book.

I swim like an eel through another day and another and another, the days accumulating like so much open ocean.

I love how the grocery store sells these tomatoes as "TOMATO GRAPE CHERRY".

Why not tack a few more on?

TOMATO GRAPE CHERRY PEAR LEMON CANTALOUPE STRAWBERRY

Part of me wants to work 14 hours a day, to always be going. Then there's this other part that says, No. You can't do anything else today. You are a slug. A happy slug.

Sometimes I just go lay in bed and look up at the ceiling fan, spinning around, pushing the air down, spinning too fast for me to see the blades as more than a blur, unless I blink my eyes open for just a split second. I lay there and stare up at the fan in lieu of thinking or acting or sometimes even breathing. It's very predictable.

Lately I've been writing 1,000 words in my journal every night. Which seems to me like an odd perversion or at best a compulsion. Maybe it's the weird number-counting. But then I was explaining it to my therapist, and she was like, "Wow. It's hard to get people to write, like, a paragraph." Which just reminded me how much our society codes certain things as "good" and "virtuous" and somehow my favorite things of like, reading books and writing down bullshit are now placed in the same category as other supposedly unpleasant but socially virtuous activities like exercising or eating organic or volunteering. Which I basically like all those things, too! But when they have the veneer of a certain social class, and a certain desire to be seen a certain way—it gets hard to tease out where the pleasure lies. For me, I try to approach the journal as a total indulgence, like eating ice cream from the carton or doing your eye makeup just so.