ex nihilo nihil fit

Continually challenged to determine how many days a girl can go without significant sleep. Sometimes getting only forty minutes. Sometimes getting none at all. I had work to do. And people had birthdays. And I had to fly away for a few days. And I had to fly back. And I had to drive out of town. And I had to visit people. And I had to spend entire days in important meetings. And I had to decide what to wear.

Strange. Wherever I have been was the locus of some string of memory. That place I used to work. Waves of coincidence. Reminders reminding.

I got my hair cut, and I hated it. When I went to Tim's bowling alley birthday party, my friends did not hate my hair, but they were not scrutinizing it as I was. I went back the next day to get the color fixed, and I hated it even more. No one seems to hate it now, either. But you can't trust anyone when your hair is bad. No one will speak the truth, and hearing it will not make it less so. Maybe it's not so bad. But it's not what I wanted. And it was far from free.

I am tired of being away from home.

I offered many wishes of happy valentines today. It felt like a pleasant formality.

I don't usually watch much of the Olympics. I think the last time I sat in front of a television and watched them, it was the year 2000, and it was someone else's television, and swimming events were on, and the evening ended in an ideological impasse. But I have seen a great deal of the Olympics this time around. Also on other people's televisions. My mother always watched the figure skating in the winter and the gymnastics in the summer. I don't remember much else.

This Japanese figure skater has the same first name as a stuffed thumb-sucking monkey I had when I lived in Guam. I will find a picture of it and post it. It wore a sailor's cap, and I loved sleeping with it. Daisuke. This guy was skating to that Tango Di Roxanne number from Moulin Rouge. And from far away, he looked like an iteration of Michael Jackson's fashion sense from a few years back. Men who skate don't seem to mind those outfits they wear.

And what a caricature these snowboarding victors are of the version of Southern California one might think only exists in movies about Southern California.

I wish I had made a better show of it all. I must keep myself from reassessing lest I feel perpetually disappointed in everything I have ever done and every moment I have ever endured.

I'm reading a book I bought a few years ago and never finished. And I finally got to a few passages I felt triumphant to have read. I dog-eared the pages. But I realize that everything I savored in the words was what is sad and forlorn in me. Words that justify my yearning or echo what I say when an ache is present. What a terrible habit I have of indulging that.

It's a shame this Canadian fellow fell in his program. He's a good dancer.