Day 303-- The "mad ones", dirt, and licorice sticks

On the maple wood dresser there's a tissue box next to a Costco-size bin of licorice sticks, and a soup bowl emptied of its morning cereal, and a battery temporarily taken out of a fire alarm detector, and bank statements hiding off in the back near the book spines.

So many books.  Bonk, Let's Go Europe, Better, Brave New World, The Red Queen, Protect Our Privacy, a few math text books, Sperm Wars, The Catcher in the Rye, The Origins of Species, Reffer Madness, Doubt, The Blank Slate, One Nation Under Debt, my Tennessee Williams plays, and I Am a Strange Loop among about 300 others.

As I type on the laptop on the matching maple wood computer desk there lies neon green headphones, my open tin of black olives, video game strategies, sunglasses, an ipod, and crumbs from a breakfast bar.  It's a cozy place to stay the night with worn fleece blankets and incense ash.

He insists on keeping the bathroom window open despite the cold and I can hear the loud drunk laughter from the neighbor's house and how I was just there with her dirty floor, her painted walls of orange and asparagus green, the funky street-punk-art framed above grummy couches, the weed in jars, the beer bottles, and one white cat.  

I'm thinking about the On the Road trailer and that quote, "people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn..."

I think back on the movies I adore like Into the Wild and Girl, Interrupted, and I wonder if in fact I'm living a type of life.

Not many people can say they spent their first year after college in a beach town, where the ocean was down the street and the people all had tan skin with long hair, and drunk loud laughs.  And dating one of those broke shaggy blond stoner types with good looks and charming ways.  Working that crappy job and eating poptarts as meals, and sometimes running for no reason, and laughing for no reason, and being so poetic about the state of the world in its nakedness, and the underrated passion of simply being happy.

I'm not someone who graduated college and started a 9-5 life.  And maybe I'm drifting towards that with each fight about wanting less flaky friends, wanting him to get a good job, and me perusing career website every few weeks.  It's like an itch in the spine I can ignore as long as I'm flying kites and spending lazy mornings in messy rooms and a shared cup of too-sweet coffee.

I guess I'm wondering what all of this writing will read back as.  What will I, as a blog character read as?  Annoying, self-indulgent, lost, philosophical?  What will my relationship read as?  Annoying, unhealthy, realistic, happy, romantic?  Because things get lost in writing.

Writing tends to focus only on the extremes of a mood.  I write about the funny part of the day, or the shitty thing that happened and in my writing I'm usually the victim or the hero or the bemused observer.  But what about when I'm utterly boring and watching CSI reruns on Hulu, or taking forever in the grocery store trying to balance the price of cereal vs the prize inside (if any prize these days).  I write about my relationship's fights or passions or conversations, but what about the little things I can't quite write about accurately, like the feel of a day's stubble on his face or when he mocks dances in the car to a chick song to make me laugh or how I fit into the nook of him as we watch a Bill Maher Real Time episode.  

And in my own room I have three glass candle holders all smudged with vanilla wax.  And a red hairdryer that folds on its handle. And a black peace sign end table with a lamp with no lamp shade on top, and a surrendering plastic Christmas tree in pieces near my laundry basket in the closet.  I have a bottle of iron vitamins next to some sea shells and a few quarters next to a deodorant stick.  And my diploma is crooked in its frame but I like it that way because I feel like it 'says something.'

I know with precise accuracy that I will miss all of this one day.  And I know, with full confidence, that one day I will question if leaving this lifestyle was worth the price of ambition and wealth.  The thing is, I suppose, that I'm not one of the mad ones.  In many ways I'm an average girl with average wants, and this was my chance to do something a little different, to be mad for just a little while.  To get tan and broke and loud and happy. Until whatever comes.

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world!
That has such people in't!

~Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I