This Is Not A Meme

Twelve Points Of Interest (about myself):

1. There are only 129 thoughts in my head, which I rearrange into different configurations to create the impression of great depth and complexity. I do not know if this number is higher or lower than average, or if perhaps there is a different system I am not familiar with.

2. I love poetry precisely because I am utterly unenchanted with it. I have no intrinsic love for what it is, what it looks like, what it represents. Every individual poem has to earn my love from scratch. Especially those I write myself.

3. Sometimes I regret my good sense of direction, because I am enraptured by the feeling of being lost.

4. I love my body very much the way it is. I do not find it gross or offensive. I want to lose weight because of the relentless prejudice, but I will miss the weight when it is gone. At least I will still have the beautiful, unfashionable hair.

5. When I perform among poets I feel like an imposter. In a good way. I like getting away with it. I think poetry is the opposite of what I am. Poetry is all about honing down to the most distilled idea. Everything good thing I have ever uttered is the result of an unnecessary tangent.

6. I hate jokes. I love it when people are funny, but when they start to “tell a joke” my heart sinks. Listening to a joke feels exactly like being stuck in traffic.

7. I am lost in love for someone who will never have any idea how deeply I want them. Even though I tell them regularly. I think my love for them will haunt me for as long as I am alive.

8. I have a Little Mermaid valentine’s day card, in pink with glitter, up on the wall at my workplace desk. I placed it behind the computer tower where I can see it but no one else can. This accurately sums up my relationship to the everyday world.

9. My mother told me that when I grew more mature, I would stop identifying personally with inanimate objects. I’m older now. My car is named Stella and I think of her as a lover.

10. The way things get divided into tens makes me sleepy. Especially lives. Thinking of myself as “in my thirties” just confuses me and others. I want to start describing my life in eras, like they do with dinosaurs.

11. I can think of two women and one man who I met only once, and have had a relentless crush on ever since. I do not know if this is normal, but it somehow makes me feel very wicked.

12. I am starting, for the first time, to really understand how useless it is to evaluate my life in terms of what I don’t have. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. The fifth surprise is that there is no fifth surprise.



(12.5. Sometimes at work, as I walk by the mannequins, I give them a gentle caress. It is embarassing. But it is necessary. We're in this thing together, after all.)

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