Sharpened pencil

I sharpened my University of Washington School of Forest Resources, Creating Futures Since 1907, made from recycled newspaper! pencil. I left it all this time, kept the object as untouched and pristine as the day I removed it from the manila envelope that brought my acceptance letter, so crisply formal, now over a year long past. It sat on my desk, right underneath the computer screen, one of three, as a reminder of things to come.

It was there for grant proposal discussions with my advisor during my lunchtime, surreptitiously sneaking salty bites, when I read daily REDD newsletters about injustices in Indonesia, when I wrote my mentor for checkups, when I made ties to likeminded academics with similar research in Mexico, when I found exciting grants, when I invented funding possibilities, when I talked to friends about housing and rain, when I calculated my debt if the money didn't come, when my advisor told me the money might not come, that the economy is not smiling but that the research is desperately needed, when I remembered Atlantan porches and reading Davis' description of Mexico City's slums, not realizing then that I would soon traverse Neza twice-a-day, when I thought I wanted to be an academic, why I thought I wanted to be an academic, when I thought about the academics I knew and how the work keeps coming and how this deadline cannot wait so let's put it off but projects end to be replaced by an equally ephemeral deadline that defines the passing of time better than chess games on a wooden table chronically covered with petals from the week's flowers, mostly white or yellow, bought outside of a cemetery on the way home from work.



And when I realized that I love videos in every capacity. Even bad ones. Especially bad ones. But haven't you been working with videos, Mary? but that was different work, you see. Explaining the science is great and all but in comparison to the farmer using a more sustainable system, to see it working and to watch his blue eyes from underneath a sombrero say that he worries for his grandchildren because conventional agriculture is a scary thing to imagine as the dominant paradigm 50 years from today. No comparison. They are inherently different stories and processes in pre-/post-production & production.

So I thought again about why I wanted to be an academic. It was expected of me. Such promise.

Yet things have come and gone and I am here and not in Seattle and it is not as scary as I thought. As a matter of fact, I do not feel a modicum of anxiety about my decision or about opening a new chapter with Mexico as it is the first time in our 3 years together that I do not have an expiration date.

So I sharpened that pencil and now the pencil is just like all the others, scattered across my desks and in old marmalade jars stuffed with spoons and business cards. Everything about it except the pencil's graphite, which is as sharp as the apex of my sea change, and when moved against the paper in my notebook makes a noise, a naturally forced one, like baby fingernails on a wet chalkboard.

Insomnia

We could go out, he said. Do you know that new bar? My friend is playing there tonight.

Sure, she said twisting in the sheets towards his covered, prostrate figure, facing the other wall so that when he spoke his voice sounded muffled.

You are not sleepy, he said with an inflection at the end of his sentence that indicated his surprise.

No, she said aloud and meant it. Let's go.

I am sleepy. I am so tired but I cannot sleep. What is the word? Insomnia. I have been having problems with it. No, he said. We will not go.

You need a distraction, she told him. Something on which to concentrate. She rose quickly and moved the mix of shoes and pants blocking the door, unable to stay shut without a prop, and disappeared down the hallway. He heard her scuffle, fumbling for the unfamiliar light-switch and then in her bag, full of keys that she had recently decided to group by home and work but no longer together, before she returned with a book, half-read and marked with a folded piece of paper that she did not recognize until she opened it from the edges to expose the printed things she had the best intentions of doing but found herself intentionally avoiding.

I just started this story. I read the first part but no matter, she said as she discarded her paper obligations to the side and crossed the room to the light, controlled by a gauge that she carefully increased to the lowest glow possible for her to see.

You will hurt your eyes with that light, he told her.

How do you think they got the way they are today, she smiled.

He would have to excuse, she warned, her poor Russian accent for the characters' names.

If it is anything like your Spanish, he joked, and she laughed though she did not always find it funny.

She settled on the side of the bed farthest from the light and began.

"There lives in Russia a certain honored professor..." she read and found herself closer to the book with each sentence. It was much darker on page than she had imagined. He was right about the eyes but she continued stubbornly fumbling for the sentences based on logic. "My name is linked to the concept of a man who is famous." She changed positions, first to her belly with the book in her face and then to her normal hunch but with a larger inwards incline in hopes the familiar shape would increase her eyesight. “But I am as austere and ugly as my name is celebrated and beautiful." She stopped to cough deeply a cough that had plagued her for days and at her own hands that continued to find lighters to begin the next cigarette that burned her raw throat. As a consequence she read with guttural monotony to keep the fits at bay but it only worked for a paragraph at most before she found herself choking from the inside out. This cannot go on much longer, she thought but she loved reading and even more to people. She persevered. “With regards to my physical health, I must note insomnia, from which I have been suffering as of late."

In disbelief she looked to him but his eyes were shut; she wondered what he was thinking. How could she have forgotten about the character's insomnia, having just read the pages days before? She continued to read to him the protagonist's struggle with insomnia and she thought what if he will now be haunted by this story rather than comforted? Hearing his current state articulated with what struck her as precision and bitterness, will he be able to dissociate how he had previously viewed his condition from the book's character, whose despondence cut into her being, not because the story was spectacular but because she let herself get lost in the situation as if it were her sleeplessly wincing as mosquitoes buzzed in her ear. This was a mistake and this light is impossible, she thought as she rose to increase it a shade more.

What happened? he asked.

This light. Did you hear what the story was saying? she asked him, a trifle excited.

I was sleeping, he told her as he readjusted in the bed with his eyes still closed. She was at first pleased that her idea had worked, but soon she found herself sorry that he had not shared in the coincidence.

She started again. "You are conscious of every moment and every second you are not normal when you fail to sleep at night." Her throat hurt, the voice slowly weakening with each page, but wanting him to rest, gauging sleep by his breaths, rhythmic and delicate, she persevered in monotony but was unable to escape the world and how strange it had been (is it funny?) for longer than she cared to remember and even when she did remember, it all seemed so many lives away and further assisted her feeling both connected and severed from her past and present and future.

"'Lime . . . cream . . . pistachio . . .' but it is not the same. I am as cold as ice and feel ashamed." She looked at him and set the book down next to the mattress before putting out the light and returning to the bed, careful on the old wooden floors that creaked like ones from her childhood.

She lay next to him, trying not to cough, not to breathe, and pulled the white sheet over her side.

Missive

Though like this city, it is falling apart in places. Just this weekend, I was walking through a neighborhood looking for a Korean massage when part of a building, a big concrete slab, fell just behind me, smashing to pieces on the sidewalk where I had passed not 2 seconds before and would have most surely resulted in my untimely death. I stood stunned as my friend laughed uncontrollably and I thought of time and death and luck and you saying once, though you probably don't recall, more people die in this city from flower pots falling on their heads than because of swine flu. I think you to be right.