palmerpink

My fixations are powerful, but they can also be maddeningly ephemeral and fleeting. And I hate that; about them and, honestly, about myself. But I’ve never really  asked why I feel that way... I'll commit immense amounts of time and energy and even money to a fixation for a few weeks, maybe even a month or two, sometimes rebranding my whole personality around it, then just...move on. I'm not sure when I first noticed this pattern—if it was always there or if it emerged and intensified over time—but it's been part of me for a long while. And every time I do, I feel such guilt and shame. Who even am I if I can't be consistent, dedicated, substantive? How disingenuous is it that nothing I care about lasts? I’ve always just accepted those feelings; I’ve never poked at them in earnest. If you can’t tell from the recent flurry of activity on this blog, I have been fixated on blogging; I mentioned in a recent post about this blog that I had a compulsion to revamp the whole bl...

I was driving home in some traffic last night when I drifted, in my mind, a long way back (about 20 years) to high school. I was caught in one of those periodic traffic slowdowns as I floated back; you know, those waves of congestion that seem to pass backward through the columns of cars in each lane. (I've heard they start because someone switches lanes, and in response, a rippling emergent slowness travels backward and outward as the cars behind it accommodate the change, one by one.) What drew me back to those younger days was that, back in high school, similar phenomena of congestion took place in the halls between classes, when eddies of young humans would get caught in and around those clumps of those chatting by lockers or retrieving books. Occasionally, backups would occur when groups of people got caught in these eddies, or collided with other groups by the lockers, and slowdowns would ripple back from there. Maybe it's not exactly the same, but as I drove it seemed si...

You may have noticed my using these hashtags on twitter, usually related to my little "road trips" recently. You may also have found those updates amusing, or annoying. For me, these have not been entirely trivial, though they've almost always a bit tongue-in-cheek. Here's what they've been about. Roughly almost exactly a year ago, my mom came to pick me up at the train station for my Thanksgiving visit. Proud of having finally gotten my license a scant few months before (though still all but entirely unpracticed at driving), I offered to drive us home. The next 20 minutes of my life were among the most terrifying of my life. As mentioned, I'd only just gotten my license; I'd only driven for short jaunts using Zipcar to run errands. I'd hardly ever driven more than 45 mph and certainly never driven at night. Navigating those winding country roads and hurtling on at 55 mph with cars coming at me out of the darkness--coming, it seemed, so near, wit...