October 4–17, 2004 — Body parts

At work we never heard about that project, whether we got it or whether someone else did. All I can do is try not to think about the twenty hours I put into our proposal that I’ll never get back.

My body continues to rebel: I know now that the pain in my shoulder comes from beneath my clavicle, the word my sister used when I pointed and asked her what that bone is called because she’s in school to become a nurse. I still haven’t been to a doctor.

I’ll be 23 soon, in six weeks or so. I’ve wasted a lot of time these last four years. I’m still setting goals, but meeting them doesn’t change very much. When accomplishing a goal means getting a box in the mail full of booklets, I shouldn’t expect much.

My new goals involve people. Perhaps I have been too passive; Mimi thinks so. There is an author whose writing I like a lot, but I won’t tell you her name. I see her sometimes, and we’ll say hello and ask each other how we’re doing without necessarily answering the other’s question. Once I gave her a high-five. I’d like to give her something I wrote. I wrote it partially because of something she wrote, but I don’t know that I’ll ever find the nerve to show it to her. I feel I would be ruining everything if I was open about how much I value her opinion and how much it means for her to so much as say hello, even if it’s probably only because she’s a very nice person and because we’ve been introduced more than once.

Mimi also invited me to use one of her day passes at her school’s gym to go swimming with her. She says she’d teach me how to swim properly so that if I join the gym near our house — it’s only $90 for six months, after all — I can go swimming properly and without embarrassing myself. But no one has seen me except fully clothed in about six months, and I’m hesitant to change this.

And maybe nothing will change. Not much has since I moved. I still haven’t settled in, really. I still haven’t unpacked anything that I don’t use every day. I’ve stopped bothering with the dehumidifier because it’s so loud and because I don’t know that I’ll be much better off living in dryer air. Oh, what difference does any of it make, to dry the air out when it will only become wet again?

The schedule for garbage pickup changes very soon, though. I was going to print it out and put it on my fridge, but I don’t have magnets, and I haven’t unpacked either of my printers.

I’ve found some live-release mousetraps and set them up. It’s already so cold outside that I will likely walk any mice I catch far enough away that they won’t come back and then release them in the vicinity of a building in case a mouse doesn’t feel capable of surviving outside in the cold. Then someone else will kill the mouse while I cling to moral superiority.

I was thinking of getting one of those ultrasonic frequency generator things that repels mice because they can hear it and we can’t. It pulsates between 32 kHz and 64 kHz, acting like a really loud siren outside the range of human hearing but within a mouse’s. I worry, though, that some part of me might still hear it.

I wouldn’t want an ultrasonic frequency generator to change me at all. I’m happy the way I am.