Odds & Ends

1) There Is No Me Without You

I was lying down in bed with Joey, just now -- I'd been gathering laundry to throw in the washer, and he'd been going to bed, and he pushed me over onto the bed (laughing) and threw his arm over me. "You're in bed, now," he said, "now you have to go to sleep with me!"

So, I threw my legs over his for a few minutes and we talked. I'd rather not mention how we got to this lame topic of conversation, but we were talking about Pokemon and how he and my brother used to collect the cards. "Jim called me one day," he said smiling, "to try to sell me a card, because your mother was doing a Pokemon card purge."

I remember that time in my life. He remembers it too, from the other side.

It's funny to me that he knew my brother long before he knew me, that they were friends before I knew he existed, before he knew I existed. I look back over the long long trail that took us from that point, not knowing each other in our teens, to meeting each other in high school, going to college together, moving in together. It's hard to imagine him, a boy, sitting talking on the phone to my brother. It's hard to remember that there was a point where he didn't exist for me, where I didn't exist for him. That we were so close to each other -- and yet, it seems, so far. That I would one day be sleeping in the same bed as that boy my brother was talking to on the phone -- in the scheme of everything, it would have seemed at that point an impossibility. Time has a way of shaking things out.

Sometimes the things that we thought were impossible were just waiting in the wings, sitting patiently around the corning waiting for us to come along.

2) Sisyphus, revisited

By the time I had read yesterday's Sweet Juniper post (today, at around 6), a picture had already been taken of the horrible state of affairs of my desk. Two weeks ago, on a day when I was home sick from work, Janet took the opportunity to clean my desk:

She did a great job, as you can see. Unfortunately for both of us, it didn't take me very long to restore it to its previous condition:


My desk stays like this for a reason...it's because I can find everything more easily this way. I never pretended that my life is anything other than barely controlled chaos. Still, the pictures tickled me, incontrovertible proof that I am (as two people who barely know me have recently commented) a mess, most definitely a mess.

Also, check out that sweet computer monitor! I take very intricate pictures of cells, and you can't imagine how awesome it is to see a giant image like this one:

Rabbit kidney cells I imaged on a confocal microscope -- the red structures are filamentous mitochondria. Aren't they beautiful!

3) Baby, I Got A Plan, Run Away Fast As You Can

One of the feelings I used to get with the mania was a restlessness, an itching in my nerves that made my feet twitch and my fingernails press into my palms. At night, I would lie in bed and imagine myself just taking off, running as fast as I could through the streets. I thought that this idea was just a fantasy, that I would never be able to just take off like that and run for hours. I would want it so bad.

Now, I'm not manic, but I can run for hours. I lace up my running shoes, step out into the darkness of the evening, and just take off. I run down near the river, where the moon reflects out and water sometimes splashes up the sidewalk. I run through tourists, college students. I run, and I keep doing it until I'm done. Until I stop, exhausted, after 3 miles, or 5, or 8.

Tonight, I couldn't go running because it was about to rain, so I walked to my car. The air was so comfortable, warm with a breeze that made me wrap my cardigan a little more tightly around me. Almost reflexively, I thought, "I want to go running in this. This would be so perfect."

And the knowledge that I can -- if I so choose -- take off into the night and run for hours, that feeling was so different, so much more pleasant that anything I ever would have imagined.