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levityI don't anymore have a watch I can trust that I am willing to risk giving formalin baths to, so when I want to check the time during lab I go to Siberia. A dissection lab without living people is completely different from a dissection lab with living people- yes, I know that the difference is the living people- or maybe it just depends on your state of mind. The point is, Siberia. I walk in every ten, fifteen minutes and get annoyed at how slowly time seems to be moving, and there are our cadavers- not our cadavers, you know what I mean- laid out in varying degrees of decay and fungus infiltration. There's one that looks like it has corals growing on it. It is very easy to talk about how we're all going to end up like that, food for worms if not for medical students, and there is only so much you can do with what you have and so you may as well go out on your own terms, there's so much universe and so little time and so much to do and equally little time and the way life goes, you have to choose between the lesser of two evils, and then it won't be a problem any more. Vibrant, furious nihilism is easy. Standing in the middle of a hall of cadavers looking at the clock over the door and knowing in your bones that there is very little point to being alive is so easy it's ridiculous. Anyone can do it, which is why I don't get why people who don't see the point tend to think they're better than everyone else. It should be equally easy to acknowledge that life is worth it, and that the point always ends up being people anyway and so grand ideals meaning nothing and morals, ethics, and principles just being relative should really not be an issue, and that everything counts, even you and your stupid failure of a human being life, because people, remember. Well. We try, I guess.
---
One day when I was eight or seven I accompanied my mother to the grocery store. I trailed after her through the aisles, pushing the shopping cart while reading a book and not looking up- upon hindsight I realise just how annoying I must have been as a kid- and when we got to the cashier I tucked the book under my arm to help her unload the groceries and asked, "What's suicide?"
Mother managed to give the impression of freezing while putting a bag of meat on the counter, and said, "What are you reading?"
I honestly do not remember what I had been reading. It could have been the Guinness Book of World Records.
She explained the whole thing on the drive home. Well, probably not the whole thing, which, understandable. That day's new vocabulary word wouldn't get its due mileage till I was a few years older, but gods, the mileage it got.
---
He said, "The speech?" and I agreed and he said, "You'd better get it right," and I will always, always love Terry Pratchett more than Neil Gaiman but that moment I realised the logic in Death being the most beautiful woman in the world.
---
What people do not seem to realise, though, is that Gaiman got the twins all wrong. There are two sorts of beauty, if you want the oversimplified generalization. Despair is the one with kind eyes and a smile like sunlight. You want to put your arm in hers and wear out the soles of your shoes walking around Manila and just talk, and it's like no one knows you better.
Desire's like knifeblades, bright and dangerous, the sort you look at but don't want to get close to, laregly because you wouldn't know what to do if you did.
---
And see, I am trying. I don't know exactly what it is I'm trying to get done, but I'm trying. I type up notes in class and bug Allison about drawing footballers as cats and abuse blue highlighters and laugh at all the embryology and sing to everyone's music and read Iron Man fanfic and generally make an effort to be a functional human being, and most of the time I get to ignore the very loud voice in my head- this is yet another oversimplification, I think it is just my head- that is saying that I should have offed myself derby day but better late than never.
---
I am Tony Stark. We have established this. Allison is Captain America, Billy is Nick Fury, and I am Tony Stark. This is an apology, of sorts. I'm Tony Stark, only I'm Tony Stark without the brilliance and the wealth, which is just a nice way of saying that I am blisteringly arrogant, prone to self-destruction, too flippant for my own good, and absurdly inept at dealing with emotions, both mine and other people's. Saying This is me, deal with it is the lazy idiot's way out and also ineffective, so I won't say it, and mean it. And I feel like everything I've been writing up to this point is just verbal shots in the dark, words without emotional honesty behind them, because I have no idea what I want to say, because I have no idea how to say sorry and have it not mean sorry I'm not dead. So I guess I'm not Tony Stark after all, because at least he can make the requisite effort.
---
I think I have made it depressingly clear that I want nothing more than to go to sleep. I'm supposed to be too old to be writing like this.
---
One day when I was eight or seven I accompanied my mother to the grocery store. I trailed after her through the aisles, pushing the shopping cart while reading a book and not looking up- upon hindsight I realise just how annoying I must have been as a kid- and when we got to the cashier I tucked the book under my arm to help her unload the groceries and asked, "What's suicide?"
Mother managed to give the impression of freezing while putting a bag of meat on the counter, and said, "What are you reading?"
I honestly do not remember what I had been reading. It could have been the Guinness Book of World Records.
She explained the whole thing on the drive home. Well, probably not the whole thing, which, understandable. That day's new vocabulary word wouldn't get its due mileage till I was a few years older, but gods, the mileage it got.
---
He said, "The speech?" and I agreed and he said, "You'd better get it right," and I will always, always love Terry Pratchett more than Neil Gaiman but that moment I realised the logic in Death being the most beautiful woman in the world.
---
What people do not seem to realise, though, is that Gaiman got the twins all wrong. There are two sorts of beauty, if you want the oversimplified generalization. Despair is the one with kind eyes and a smile like sunlight. You want to put your arm in hers and wear out the soles of your shoes walking around Manila and just talk, and it's like no one knows you better.
Desire's like knifeblades, bright and dangerous, the sort you look at but don't want to get close to, laregly because you wouldn't know what to do if you did.
---
And see, I am trying. I don't know exactly what it is I'm trying to get done, but I'm trying. I type up notes in class and bug Allison about drawing footballers as cats and abuse blue highlighters and laugh at all the embryology and sing to everyone's music and read Iron Man fanfic and generally make an effort to be a functional human being, and most of the time I get to ignore the very loud voice in my head- this is yet another oversimplification, I think it is just my head- that is saying that I should have offed myself derby day but better late than never.
---
I am Tony Stark. We have established this. Allison is Captain America, Billy is Nick Fury, and I am Tony Stark. This is an apology, of sorts. I'm Tony Stark, only I'm Tony Stark without the brilliance and the wealth, which is just a nice way of saying that I am blisteringly arrogant, prone to self-destruction, too flippant for my own good, and absurdly inept at dealing with emotions, both mine and other people's. Saying This is me, deal with it is the lazy idiot's way out and also ineffective, so I won't say it, and mean it. And I feel like everything I've been writing up to this point is just verbal shots in the dark, words without emotional honesty behind them, because I have no idea what I want to say, because I have no idea how to say sorry and have it not mean sorry I'm not dead. So I guess I'm not Tony Stark after all, because at least he can make the requisite effort.
---
I think I have made it depressingly clear that I want nothing more than to go to sleep. I'm supposed to be too old to be writing like this.
