Category — Confessions

Came across a little piece I had written a few years ago in college, while I was taking a particular short story seminar. It’s pretty eccentric, but if you had read what we were reading in class, you’d understand why.

NO ROOTS

“C’mon, tell me! What new life languages have you learned since you came to the university?” asked my English professor.

The language of God.
The language of Jesus.
The language of agape.

My classmates and I resist nervously. They are afraid to answer. I do not understand why. I look out the window and rivet my eyes on a silent seagull. I am afraid to answer. I understand perfectly why.

One Korean foreign exchange student finally breaks the awkwardness.

“I’ve had to learn how to relate to other people in English.”

Relating to God.
Relating to Jesus.

The Spirit squeezes my heart, trying to put active life into it, trying to connect it to my tongue.

The seagull perches on the windowsill, peering into the room. He is quiet and pensive instead of the making the usual raucous and annoying cries.

Only I can see it. Only I know the reason for its silence.

The moment passes and my heart loosens into its squishy place. Fear is my momentary god. All I can think of is Psalm 40:9.

“I have proclaimed the good news of righteousness
In the great assembly;
Indeed, I do not restrain my lips,
O Lord, You Yourself know.
I have not hidden Your righteousness within
My heart; I have declared Your faithfulness
And Your salvation;
I have not concealed Your lovingkindness
And Your Truth from the great assembly.”

The tree outside perches on the window ledge, staring at me intently.

It nods. In agreement. One day, it shall clap out loud. Until then, obedient silence.

I look down at my leaves. They are falling.

The tree turns around, giving me a lingering farewell glance that seemed to say apologetically, “No roots?”

The last of my leaves are falling.

I can no longer be a tree.

I mainly entitled this post “Beserk” because it rhymed with my original title: “A Day at Work.” And it is truly one of those rhymes that rests well with the soul because it is a synonorhyme. Haven’t heard of that word? Go look it up. Can’t find it? Come work a day at my job and you will.

Disclaimer: I am thankful for my job. But in a self-righteous sense. I SHOULD be thankful, considering the heavy rates of unemployment currently in the country. But in the reality of the selfish, lazy individual - me - I wake up every morning hoping I’m sick so I don’t have to go to work. But I have to go to work.

So, I drive to work, and as I park in front of the big dreary building wanting to leadbrake my head into the steering wheel, my oxygen supply gets carbon monoxonized by the six-hours-in-a-cubicle-monster. Short, clipped breathing begins.

I trudge up the stairs to work. There’s probably 25 total, but no matter how in shape I am, it always seems to add additional shortage to my breath. But maybe that’s the monoxonized air and not the stairs. Sometimes, I’m right along there with *Mildred,* the eighty-year-old whose antiquated voice and mundane comments have come to taste like a cool and refreshing ice cream treat amongst the dry tasteless quiet of the office, particulary chocolate ice milk, which, to my detriment, I have not tasted for numerous years due to my lac of lactose digesters. (K omitted intentionally all you Type A’s.) Mildred moves up the stairs as if each one was a sparse surfaced stone pathing a waist-deep river.

As I open the door into the actual office, I greet the stacks. Large stacks of journals whose articles never get read by me, only glanced at, mourn the attentiveness of my eyes as I trek past them toward by cubbie hole. Oh no, wait. Cubbie holes were fun little spaces filled by my imagination as a kid. So let’s call it instead my cube in hell. Much better and much more imaginationless.

I spend my first 15 minutes at work preparing my coffee and breakfast. I count this as work. Perhaps I shouldn’t count my breakfast, but I do since I make it while the coffee grinds steep in the French press. And making my coffee is justified as working time since work does not provide edible coffee. It should be a necessity, like clean water.

I go to the bathroom.

I take my gluten free cereal with berries and almonds and rice milk back to my cube in hell, along with my aromatic, enticing cup of Major Dickason’s, grind #12. At this point I usually suppose that I should actually start working, so I grab a batch of abstracts to proof.

The next thirty minutes I think about my coffee while I proof the abstracts.

When I’m done proofing the abstracts, I realize I should probably reproof all of them. But I don’t. Fortunately, they go to Editor *Dakota*, who lets out a loud groan of misery whenever I pass them onto him for checking queries. He surely won’t mind the dearth of pen marks.

I go to the bathroom.

Next, I try to find some computer task I can do so I can start chatting on G-chat. And looking at food blogs. I capitalize, I delete, I change “essay” to “article,” I put articles in the abstracts from Chinese journals, and I say to myself, “Next time they should pay someone who speaks English to do the English translation. But why would you, when you could pay someone who doesn’t speak English a lot less to do it?”

I ponder how my degree of analyzing Tolstoy, Poe, and Toni Morrison flew me to such ambitious heights of capitalizing letters that should be capitalized and were not.

I go back to proofing abstracts on paper since the fuzz of my old monitor screen has grown mold in my brain. However, this time I have no coffee to think about, so halfway through page 2 of 26, my green proofing manual binder knots a plastic bag over my head, and I start suffocating. He likes to do that to me early in the day so that my day seems longer.

The clock moves like a slug.

I go to the bathroom. Again.

(To be continued…)

Singing. Writing is part of the mind + part of the heart. But singing is HEART. In its entirety. To me, singing is breathtaking. When I watch someone sing, and sing well, and sing from the heart, an aura bursts from the singer’s body, an aura composed of a bass-beating vitality and lightening flashes of pumping blood. Or, otherwise, the aura exudes the aloneness of a person and air, and the singer’s voice seems like my own, the echo of my thoughts in my head.

I am not a singer nor a musician. If it feels like this for me, how does it feel for those who actually express it like this?

To all my friends out there who have the expression of music in them, please continue to live in it. For yourself, and for others.

Thanks to Across the Universe for inspiring this post.

Big discovery yesterday. Even bigger humility. My favorite Golden girl has made her mark. Literally. In her mother Doris’s (aka Sirod’s) old yogurt container. Organic, too, I bet. Golden, at almost two months old, can control her bowel movements better than I can. Yes, ladies and gents, she deserves a trophy. Some kind of gold toilet bowl, or even better, a gold mithril diaper. 

While Golden can poo into a cup, I have literally pooed almost in someone’s front yard, giving any drivers by a premium vista of my scandalous act. That particular day, I could not make it home in time - home, which at the time was a heavenly image of rows and rows of toilets calling my name like sunbathing lawnchairs at a tropical resort. 

At another “incident” I became too immersed in a similar fantasy, dreaming in the land of toilets, and then reality plunged upon me and I realized that I had soiled my “adult diaper,” i.e., my running shorts. 

So perhaps it is time that I receive new potty training methods. Maybe Sirod will train me. Heehee.

I can be quite silly, so watch out!