The Inner Condition

It was late and I was hungry, so I went to the fridge. I rationalized that this was my third meal of the day, despite my day being an increasingly long stretch into the next day, and keeping any sense of a normal eating schedule is as difficult as keeping any normal kind of sleeping schedule. Regardless of that, I opened up the freezer, mostly out of habit because we used to keep snacks in there, or frozen tv dinners. Now it’s all frozen leftovers, and occasionally alcohol. That’s the deal when you’re trying to eat better, you cut out the shitty processed food and try your damned hardest to eat right despite this stupid world making it infinitely easier to eat like a big disgusting fat piece of shit. Well when I opened the freezer two things caught my eye. The first was a bunch of very old toaster strudels, back from who god knows when, and the second was a box of Eggo waffles.

Eggo waffles left over, from my dad’s brief time living here at the house. I bought them originally so I would have something easy to make him for breakfast, since his cancer pretty much made it impossible for him to cook his own meals. He liked the Eggo waffles, and they were about as simple a thing to make as quick as possible, so he we could both enjoy an easy breakfast together. But eventually he died, as the cancer he was so resiliently fighting finally took him, a mere few days after we had him taken back to the Hospital. For a month or so him being here worked, because I got to spend the day with him, he’d be a little forgetful, and sometimes it was hard to get him to take his pills, but more or less he was himself. Eventually he started sleeping more and more, and his condition got worse and worse, until he kept trying to get out of bed to do things, convinced he could still have enough strength to get to the bathroom himself. Worse, sometimes he’d forget he couldn’t make it, and end up falling, and the process to talk him into understanding why he was on the ground, why we had to forcibly move him, and why we were trying to help him was arduous, to put it very fucking lightly.

For the last 2 weeks or so my family and I spent with him here, we spent in nearly absolute silence, waiting to hear the slightest creak or rustle from his bed. It was a 24 hour job, because at any moment he could try to get up and get to the bathroom, rather than use his commode, and potentially fall. It was fucking frustrating, and nerve wracking, and by far the most stressfull, horrible thing in my life. Imagine never being able to sleep because at any moment you’d have to drag your half naked, screaming father by force to his room, all the while he’s confused and thinks you’re hurting him, and is begging for you to stop hurting him. The moments where I did get a few hours sleep were constantly interrupted, and not very restful in any way, shape or form, and the stress was so intense it started to make me very physically ill.

Imagine sitting next to your dad, trying to give him pain medication that he refuses to take because he thinks you’re poisoning him. Imagine trying to give him some of the special morphine gel they’ve given you, because he refuses to take pills, oral liquids, and rips off medication patches and asks why you’re doping him. Imagine him being so confused and scared he’d end up literally trying to fight the night nurse we paid to watch him for one night, just so we could get a nights sleep. Imagine sitting next to him for hours just so your sister, who’s worked so hard in every possible conceivable way, could get just a few hours sleep. Imagine having to see him try to communicate he wants a drink of water, and try to take a drink from a trash can, because the neurons firing in his brain are just that fucking crossed. Imagine sitting there, wishing your dad would just die already.

Imagine the guilt from thinking that.

Imagine the regret from having that thought.

Imagine sharing that thought with your sister, and she agreeing in kind.

Imagine feeling like the worst fucking children in the world.

Imagine looking at a box of fucking Eggo waffles, and having all this flood to your mind in one instant, after spending months trying to push away all of those thoughts, through attempts to rationalize and process “the grieving process”, and thinking you’ve sufficiently gone through it. Well, I can imagine it. I imagine it every fucking day. I lived it. Fucking duh. Obviously.

So I took the damn waffles out of the box, and saw there were five of them left. I put two in the toaster, ate them, then ate two more. They weren’t even good, not like regular Eggo waffles. They were some weird extra fluffy kind, so one go through on the toaster left the middle still frozen, resulting in a weirdly crunchy, mildly warm/frozen waffle. I double toasted the second set of two, and ate them, all the while thinking about how these were dad’s waffles. I shouldn’t just fucking eat them all in the middle of the night to satiate some hunger pangs I know would go away if I just tried to sleep.

Then I put the last waffle back in the wrapper, back into its box, and back into the freezer. It’s a fucking waffle, and probably something stupid to be so beholden to, or even revere, but dammit those were my dad’s, and I’ll be damned if I finish them. Some people hold onto something like a picture, or a shirt, or if you live in some shitty cliched movie existence, a locket. I have a fucking frozen waffle.

How perfectly cruel.

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Someday in the not too distant future, I think there’s a distinct possibility that I’ll be a real adult, no matter how much I kick, scream, and drag my feet. Being a real adult means, to me, at this moment, nothing more than using a real, never-been-used-by-another-human-being chest of drawers.

When I moved into university housing four short years ago, packing more belongings than I actually needed into the tiny space of my dormitory, all of our furniture was standard issue and bolted into the walls. Of course, calling it furniture is a kindness: our “wardrobes” were file cabinets stripped of their shelves and given a curtain rod, and our drawers were awful metal units that rattled and jumped off their tracks at a moment’s notice, like the old steam trains in spaghetti westerns.

I spent the majority of my first year with a large portion of my toiletries trapped in a drawer that had wrenched so badly within its first use that I wasn’t able to open it again for months. When maintenance got around to prying it open just before Christmas, I found an unopened bottle of shampoo, a loofah, and some rather nice body wash. It was like receiving a Christmas present from my past self. We all made do, of course, these are the things that bond you to other people in your first year. Down the hall, my friend Elizabeth’s drawers were busily functioning as a place to hold all of her magnetized calendars and reminder notes. (They didn’t do much else.) Toward the westerly end of the hall, a semi-collapsed part of a desk made a perfect hiding place for Allison’s handle of vodka. Necessity is, of course, the mother of invention.

The next year, my expectations for furniture were higher. I reclaimed a heavy chest of drawers from my grandmother and took a can of black spray paint to it, sitting in my parents’ driveway with newsprint sticking to my bare legs as I covered the faux-oak paneling. The drawers sat on tracks that fit into channels on their undersides, like long puzzle pieces. It sat in the corner of my bedroom in my very first apartment, slightly lopsided, while the drawers, like the drawers in my dorm room, jumped away from their paths and made morning routines something of an adventure. The process of moving the chest from my hometown to my college town left its shiny new paint job chipped and damaged, in some places so badly that it wasn’t the oak veneer that showed through, but the porous compound underneath. It followed me to my next apartment, which was less decayed than the first, where I promptly shoved it in a closet and forgot about it, preferring instead, apparently, to strew my recently laundered clothes in varying piles on my floor. (It’s a system of organization. Not a great one, or one that makes getting to the bathroom in the dark a safe practice, but it’s a system.)

By the end of the year, I realized that I used the chest so little that I absolutely didn’t need it, even though, of course, I still had the same amount of clothing as I had before. The solution was to pass it off to someone else - the fiancee of an acquaintance, because the magic of social media means that everyone I know was offered a clunky black chest of drawers - and have help heaving it out of my apartment just in time for move out. This time I found myself with more clothes hangers than I had ever encountered before, and a rickety plastic set of drawers that I once again shoved into my closet to bury in mostly-folded laundry. It’s got caster wheels and the drawers are relatively reliable, but let’s face it: it’s plastic.

I’m staring down the barrel of my graduation date and shoving my thrift store clothes into plastic drawers, pretending it’s not getting closer. But as real, grown-up concerns like bills and graduate school and employment creep up on me, I put more than my fair share of hope for the future in the potential of a single piece of furniture.

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There is something so bland about being ordinary. The thought of being like everyone else, following society’s footsteps, making the safe and rational choice have become intensely unappealing to me. I meant to write about this topic a while ago due to my hate relationship with ordinary, but I kept pushing it back for some reason or the other.  However, recently I have been battling a tough fight against ordinary and I fear I have been miserably losing, which has been particularly difficult to digest.

In my opinion being ordinary is living half a life.  It’s following others; it’s taking the easier route because it’s a route that is already paved for you; it’s the path of least resistance.  Being ordinary means that you fail to think out of the box and you struggle to challenge society’s trends.  You become a follower.  Risk becomes seldom, surprise becomes rare and fulfillment of life becomes empty.  On the other hand, I also understand, although criticize, that many prefer this path as it provides routine, comfort, and ease and sets a context where fear of unexpected change is not tampered with.  Let’s face it; life can be hard as it is.

I on the other hand, try to live my life breaking boundaries.  I take risks; I choose fun and unique hobbies.  I try to experience all of what life has to offer.  I remain particularly independent and defy the notion of conventionalism.  My lifestyle may shock some who claim I am an eternal delinquent adolescent, while it continues to surprise and worry my family who is already quite unorthodox.  I am drawn to people who are like-minded and find myself enamored by their avant-garde ways.  These are the people who inspire me; these are the people who teach me, and what better way to live life than to learn indefinitely.

I have always lived life based on my beliefs, but during the last two years, I have definitely realized my instinct to be different. I have taken tremendous risk and lived every day as if it were my last (sounds cheesy, but it’s true).  The last two years have been my richest years; the years in which I have learned the most and that have been the most gratifying.

I cannot deny the difficulty I faced to sustain such a lifestyle. I cannot deny the constant instability and the fear of not knowing what’s next.  I cannot avoid the frustration and constant burden of being criticized by others for being myself, and the constant need to justify myself to those who care and worry about me.   All this to say, the last two years have brought me so much and defined me as me, while the focal need to prove myself has severely drained me. (pause) Alas, I am tired.

And so this last month, I have been contemplating a fine balance between ordinary and extraordinary, stability and instability or better yet, colourless and colourful.

Gloomily, my weariness drove me to choose the easy route, a route that I criticize, a route that I am not proud of, but a route that will provide me with stability, which will give me the time to rest, and the space to refill my energy.

The battle may be lost for now, but I am only building my ammunition and will come back remarkable as ever to reanimate my world of blissful chaos; my life.

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I like to think of myself as a music journalist. At least that’s what I try to tell people when I go out. Je suis un journaliste musical. The native Parisians tend to give me reproachful glares until I tell them I’m from New York City. I’ve come to the conclusion that my city is less of a tangible place and more of an idiosyncratic fantasy. Idolized. Consumed. Regurgitated. NYC becomes an illusion for all those lost souls with ambitions as bright as their eyes. Living in Paris, transplanting myself to a new and foreign metropolitan, has really put The City into perspective for me. When I return maybe I’ll be better equipped to devour the lucid pleasures and dangerous provocations it has to offer. But before my flight I was anxious to uproot myself from all the turbid, gray madness.

The skies of Berlin sustain an off-white hue of melancholy most days. On average, the country gets far less days of sunshine than the city of Seattle, if that puts things into perspective. But this morning I woke up, congested, dehydrated, still buzzed from a late night bump of ketamine, and saw faint blotches of blue against the pungent grayness. This is all the more significant considering my acute colorblindness, where shades of color merge to make them indecipherable. The friends I’m staying with left for class and I wrote an album review for Kavinksy’s OutRun. Shortly after I go outside with Josh from the first floor who I met the night before and smoke a spliff on the side of an old building. Dazed and confused, I could feel the warmth against my cheek before I fully understood what had happened. From out of the clouds, the sun emerged like a tidal wave of ecstasy from the heavens. The wind picked up as the sky fractured and gave way to an ocean of blue. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen such angry sunlight and such elated blue skies. Josh tells me there hasn’t been weather this nice in four or five weeks.

My friend Josh is a deadhead and has very niche taste in music. On one hand he’s a cult follower of the Berlin techno scene, most passionately with the minimalism genre, and he also loves Grateful Dead. I let him explain minimalism to me in our stoned excitement, but I don’t think I fully understood it. He was persistent on the fact that this kind of music should be experienced in a live setting, preferably on the use of hard drugs, and surrendered to. This I understood. It’s the same appeal I find in all live music. Sound becomes a living, breathing, amorphous entity that surrounds, envelopes and ravages you. Tonight should be a lot like that. With the skies open and clear, the city won’t feel so frigid and people will swarm the streets looking to drink and dance and feel something true. Tonight I will be one of those people.      

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The room was cold.  I tried very well to cover myself in a thin useless blanket.  The droplets of hail softly hit the window as I tried my hardest to comfort myself to the idea of sleep, but I knew there wasn’t going to be much sleep at all that night.  In my head there was something missing.  I couldn’t tell what exactly, but it felt like there was something unfinished.

The next day, however, I made an unexpected encounter.  I walked lightly through the library of my old school as I made my way quietly to an open desk.  It wasn’t a matter of disturbing others; it was more of a matter of others disturbing me.  Across the library, I saw a familiar physique.  A girl with a light skin tone but not light enough to be pale.  She had a natural state of dark brown hair that covered half of her face as if she was hiding behind a self-made wall.  Focusing on what she was doing, I notice a familiar device; a MacBook.

Yes, this was the girl I once fell for long ago.  As I remember correctly, it didn’t end all that well.  In fact, I don’t recall it ending at all.  I was left feeling as if I was leaving something incomplete; I was leaving it unfinished.

My next action was made as a split decision.  I got up from my chair and headed directly toward her.  I wasn’t sure what I was going to say or what I was going to do but I knew I had to do something.  I sat in an empty chair beside her.  I didn’t say anything or make any gestures, I simply waited.  It took some time before she noticed me as I decided to sit behind her wall of hair.  But once she did notice, it was as if all words had left both my mouth and hers.

Her facial expression lacked shock and produced a calm, relaxed, and warm look of relief.  I could’ve sworn that I was staring into her eyes for the first time.  I couldn’t help but produce an expression of my own; a smile.  Her tense shoulders had relaxed as she surrendered nothing other than the words, “I’m sorry…for everything.”  I felt an incredible warmth cover me as if some useless thin blanket had suddenly turned into a cloud of cotton that was ready to float me away.  I took her hand, leaned in, and simply whispered, “I know.  But I’m okay.”  I was able to read the reprieve in her eyes, and just like that my maintenance was done.  I was cured.  I silently got up and headed out the door.  There was a heavy amount of closure for me and for her.

At that moment, I knew I had gotten a good night’s sleep the night before.  I knew this because as I walked away from the faint light in the library and closed the door behind me, I woke up. 

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It would appear that due to the many reality television shows & talent competition shows that fame is easily attainable. However, is it sustainable? Popular singing contests such as the X Factor provide a platform for aspiring musicians to attain a record deal and singing career; yet can these be sustained?

Again I find myself quoting the great anthropologist Edmund Carpenter; “Artists do not address audiences, they create them”. It is a quote that rings true concerning my own performances as a magician. I indeed write about subjects that interest me, if other people enjoy my narrative on which ever subject I choose to write about then it is indeed a very humbling feeling, however I do not go out of my way to write about a specific subject if I feel it has no relevance to myself nor if it holds no interest. 

Edmund Carpenter goes on to say, and I quote; “If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audiences. You put on the audience, repeating cliche’s familiar to it. But artist’s don’t address audiences; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear and are affected”.     

James Arthur was this years UK X Factor winner, a very talented singer with a lovely voice however I personally fear for his future career. Why? Because I fear that the talent James Arthur possess has already become part of a wider message as opposed to message he originally wanted to make. If I may further quote the works of Mr Carpenter;

“Photographers once thought that by getting their photographs published in Life magazine, they would thereby reach large audiences. Gradually they discovered that the only message that came through was Life magazine itself and that their pictures had become but bits & pieces of that message. Unwittingly they contributed to a message far removed from the one they originally intended.”

I fear that this might be the case with James Arthur, again whom I must stress is indeed talented, however may be part of a larger message than himself. Many people are already voicing their opinions about Mr Arthur’s potential career, stating that he will only have a shelf life of 1-2 months.

Personally, I do not wish to see that happen however if that is the game you wish to play then you must be prepared for the consequences as it would appear that fame & success attained via the X Factor is not sustainable; you are part of a larger message and business ethic. 
Again, I do not wish to slate the X factor, can fame be achieved via these types of shows? Of course! Can they be sustained?

I fear not.

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The following text was written when a friend of mine left his facebook account left open. I felt I had no other choice but to write this as his status.  Enjoy!

“There was once a time when everyone used to call me Katherine. They were darker times, and I usually don’t speak of them, but I will just this once.

It was a long time ago, so I don’t entirely remember it all, but I’ll try my best.

It all started when I met this man by the name of Steve Shackleford. He wasn’t the tallest man I’ve met, but he wasn’t the shortest either. I met him on a Sunday morning during my long walk on the beach at North Point. He approached me in the most suspicious manner. He muttered words from a distance, but I could not make them out. Once he got close enough for me to hear what he was saying, all I heard were the words, “The red face is never unseen.”

I did not know what to make of this. He was dressed in a brown leather cloak with the stitches undone. He had a light beard just shy of five o’ clock. His eyes screamed of shock. He approached me even closer. Close enough to the point where I was able to see his pores glistening in the sun. There was a loud sound in the distance and we both turned our heads to the West. I turned my head back and the man was gone. My eyes dazed across the scenery of the coast but I could find no man in leather.

Later that night, I had the greatest realization. “Red face” is a reference to the “red handed.” The man was talking of a murder! But why would he approach someone random as opposed to the authorities? Why would he approach me? Could it be? Could the man have committed the murder himself?

Long story short, some lady mistook me for her lesbian friend who used to work at K-Mart a few years back.”

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I am staring blankly at my computer. 

I am challengingly writing my to do list for the day, the week, and contemplating what to do with my life. 

“What to do with my life?”; a sizable question that has become a reoccurring theme I fumble with regularly. 

The last couple of years have been the most humbling and most uncontrollable years I have ever lived. The last couple of years have nourished me with travels, discoveries, different perspectives, but have been the focal cause of my existential state and my existential question that I fear not know the answer of: What to do with my life?

In the last couple of years, I have decided to act boldly, break from my routine, my well paying job, my comfortable life, my pretty and perfect condo and do what many evade doing; I reevaluated my life. I was happy, don’t get me wrong. I almost had everything, health, my family, money and a balanced life, but I knew that it wasn’t enough and I could tell that my sense of contentment was becoming hollower.

I left for a humanitarian mission in the Middle East to only discover four months in that my work permit wasn’t granted. I got reposted to another country to once again face, four months in, another issue that forced me to rush back home. I tried to keep my head high and waste no time.  I wasn’t too sure what to do next, so I did what many unemployed people would do, I went back to school to complete a Master degree. 

Three months in, my university department went on strike.

“Jamais deux sans trois” as they say in French. 

It seemed life was out of reach, out of control and was tumbling down on me.  What I planned for was being answered with a negative.

And so I had to reevaluate life, but this time around, without my well paying job, my comfortable life, and without my pretty and perfect condo.

I decided to adopt a new attitude that was far from who I was and what I believed in. I became passive towards life. Instead of going for what I desired, I waited for it to come to me.  Unfortunately this strategy didn’t prove to be fruitful either.

So here I am at another crossroad, reigniting my active and conquering drive that is off to a slow start as it is stumbling on the first and most important question: What to do with my life?

ENDNOTES: Amal is a lost soul permanently trying to find her way.  She treasures humour in life’s daily dramas and loves to share her anecdotes at amalsreverie.tumblr.com.

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What would you do if somebody that you knew was effectively given a death sentence?  What would you do if someone that you knew was given an expiration date, and you knew that at a predetermined time they would cease to exist?  They would no longer have a shelf life, they would spoil, ferment, no longer breathing and no longer functioning in this world as we deem normal.  Would you be able to look them in the eye? Or even in the face?  In gatherings, would you be able to enjoy the time you have with them fully, or would that constant knowledge in the back of your mind creep forward as you continually try to suppress it with just one more drink? Try and push it back, compacting the garbage to make room for more but still the juice leaks past the compactor and it all oozes back into memory.  It’s all a loosing battle and will always be until their ordeal is over.

When it is over, what will you finally say? Were you close and did you share memories? Did you care about this person as if they were your own? What if they were your own, did you even know them at all? Did you even care about them like your other kin? Were they just a nuisance and something that you put up with when everyone was together.  An obligation that you had to deal with and token cheek to kiss during which the expectation grew greater that at some point a wad of twenties would be shoved into your hand.  Did you even care at all about this person?  Did you wish for their death for the ease of a burden or did you wish for their death for the ease of their pain or someone else’s pain or the ease of someone else’s burden?

I know almost nothing about you.  The only thing I know or remember about you is that your are a footnote to larger experiences that I share with someone else.  It was always them AND you. Not just you. I don’t remember you.  I don’t think about you.  I don’t worry about you.  All I know is that your time is coming to an end I don’t know how I fell about it.  I try to cry and yet I can’t bring forth the tears.  I go through the motions and yet nothing comes.   It’s like dry heaving, all action and no vomiting.  I will not pretend and I will not bullshit you, myself, or God.  I am not a good Christain, and often times do not try to be.  I do what I feel is right for me and my fellow man.  I used to truly believe and would have given anything for the knowledge of the existence of Him and His works and what comes after the great divide.

I don’t expect that God would exclusively listen to me in my time of need since I haven’t been such a good Christian and and I am definitely a sinner but I still only ask that he hear me out that he gives my request some consideration because of not just me but the others around me and how your predicament affects us all.  I pray that the rest of your time on earth is not painful.  I pray that your final days are peaceful and that they are everything you want them to be.  I pray that your beautiful smile radiates your room and that your last breath fills your lungs like the waters from a thousand flowing rivers and a million rolling oceans and that your heart drums its last beats in cadence with those in the room around you and it slowly fades away in a cacophony of reflection of life.  I pray that your eyes look upon the ones you love and see what you have given the world. You created good men, who have in turn created good families who in more turn have shaped the world around them as they see fit.  You have propped up a man who has never put his head down, and he can never put it down for the rest of his own days. You’ve led a good life and have done good things.

I regret I never made the effort to know you. I regret I never took the time to love you as I have loved others. And in the end the last thing I wish for is that you see your vision of paradise, and that you see yourself as you best remember and you see and touch and visit with all of those who have gone before you and wait in your truest form for all of those who will come after you.  We will all meet again on the other side of those dark waters.

ENDNOTES: R.A. Curcio, President and CEO of Beta Enterprises Un-Ltd.  Specialties include: Government Overthrows, Rebellion Quashing, Bar Clearing, Tiger Taming, Land Procurement, Rum Running, Wood Refinishing and Orgy Organizing. You can follow and contact Mr. Curcio at layoffthepabst.tumblr.com

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My twenty-year-old brother moved out with his partner earlier this year and I have since adopted his old room for myself. However, when he left, he didn’t take everything he owned, leaving random bits and bobs to sit in his old wardrobe, taking up space and gathering dust. My clean and efficient mum recently asked me to take the time to clear out all the old junk and today I decided to do so. However, once I cleared out all the useless slips of paper, empty shoe boxes and the broken television, I stumbled upon a box or two of things that weren’t exactly junk. Old figurines of his favorite superheroes, retro handheld video games of things like Tetris, our old Pokedex toys from our Pokemon days. Even one half of the set of Undercover Girl walkie-talkies I had chosen to share with him back when we were thick as thieves. I couldn’t help but grin as I sorted through the miscellaneous fragments of my childhood, which, as a recent high school graduate and hopeful university student, I have been mourning. When you’re a child, you look forward to the future, you dream of what it would be like. And here I stand, on the precipice of change, and I’m scared. Perhaps this is why I am taking so much comfort in these long lost friends, that had been so quickly cast aside once puberty set in.

Isn’t it strange how we simply box up old things and store them away? We lock away the memories and only reconnect with them as we either move or attempt to clear out the excess. I find myself wondering what I ought to do with these plastic memoirs. What do I salvage and what do I discard? Should I keep any of it? I’ll admit I’m probably being needlessly philosophical, but I’m at a crossroads. The past thirteen years have been a steady routine of wearing the same thing as everyone else, learning the same things as everyone else and doing as I’m told. I’ve had my graduation ceremony, bid a bleary-eyed farewell to my peers and teachers. Now what? My future is my own and, with exams rapidly approaching, I can’t help but fear for my future. My brother and mother never finished high school, they struggle financially and they aren’t passionate about their work. I’ve never struggled to do well, in my trial exams I was top ten in the majority of my subjects. It isn’t that that worries me. It’s what comes after. What if I get my degree and am still as flaky and directionless? I want to teach primary school, but am terrified I won’t find work. It is human nature to fear change, the unknown, to worry about the future. Perhaps this is why we so often struggle to throw things away, to cast off what we were and accept who we are yet to become. It’s like a break-up, where you want to move on, but you have so many things that remind you of that person. You debate whether you should throw it all away, the good memories as well as the bad.

But this is not so easy. This is not a break-up. This is my childhood. There are horrible memories in this box, too, behind the grinning smile of Action Man. These pleasant and these horrific memories have shaped me, these toys represent the years that turned my brother and I into the people that we are. The close relationship we have since lost. They have done so much for me. They have served their purpose. They helped me grow up. Now I put them in a big, cardboard box, tape it up, and put it in the garage to gather more dust. Until, a few months or even a few years from now, whenever I move out into this big, wide world, I’ll stumble across my childhood in this little box and I’ll thank them all over again.

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It’s 1999, and the television in my living room displays a scene of dark, oblong shapes descending from the sky.  These mysterious flying objects were spotted a few miles from my house.  I head to bed, but my feet are heavy with fear.  I climb onto my mattress, slip under my duvet, and lie down.  Something is watching me.  In the shadows of my bedroom, a man in a tweed coat looms over me.  Only, he doesn’t stay like that for very long. Within seconds, he is a clawing, sharp-toothed, drooling mass of spindly arms and snapping jaws.  He pounces. 

I woke up in absolute terror, crying more fervently than I ever had before.  I ran downstairs to my parents.  I don’t remember much after that, but the memory of this nightmare is still as fresh now as the moment it happened.

When I was a child, aliens were my ‘monsters in the dark’.  I wasn’t fussed about ghosts or zombies or vampires or witches.  I was just absolutely terrified of aliens.  However, I had a somewhat masochistic curiosity, so I would wander through Llangollen’s Doctor Who museum (which unfortunately closed down – how much money would they have made if they’d kept it open for a little while longer?) with my face pressed to the glass case in which a Dalek sat.  The pre-recorded noises and dim lighting made it a truly horrifying experience, but I couldn’t look away from the green suits and polystyrene props in front of me.  I fed my own fear until it was strong enough to produce a nightmare that completely traumatized me.

For about a year after the dream, I was so scared of sleeping that I had to stay in my sister’s room.  This is something I still feel guilty about, but she was extremely patient. However, even then, I was still afraid of having a repeat of the nightmare.  I would lie awake for hours, not able to keep my eyes shut for too long in case a laser beam brought an alien floating down from the ceiling. 

It was then that I started a bizarre ritual to mentally prepare myself for night time, and it is something that, thirteen years later, has found a life of its own.  I don’t remember when I first started doing it, but as soon as I got under the covers, I would picture myself as a super-strong heroine kicking aliens in the teeth until I fell asleep.  My imagination was one thing I could control very well, and so I would send myself into a dream with the idea that aliens couldn’t hurt me.  It really worked; I didn’t have nightmares again, because some of that drowsy fearlessness translated itself into my unconscious.  Soon I moved back into my own room, and was able to doze off almost immediately without any petrified glances at dark shadows.  I felt I didn’t need to continue with my pre-sleep confidence boosts, so I stopped relying on my imaginary superhero. 

My sleeping mind certainly became a less frightening place, but instead of nightmares I gradually began to experience another bizarre phenomenon. The unpredictability of dreams that I had feared so intensely decided to produce something that I was aware of but couldn’t quite grasp, and something that I could only truly recognize when I watched the film ‘Paprika’.  Among other things, the film explores the separation between the ‘self’ and the ‘dream self’.  The female protagonist is an austere, sensible character in reality, but in her dreams she is a quirky, adventurous young woman.  As soon as I saw this, I knew that there was a clear difference between myself and who I am when I dream.  I won’t deny that I was a little horrified when I realized that this separate self was the same as the one I’d imagined when I was little.  I suppose I’m lying, then, when I say ‘I don’t have bad dreams’ because I have them frequently; it’s just that I’m experiencing frightening images through the eyes of someone who was created to be stronger than the stuff of nightmares.  I’ve vanished through walls to escape burning buildings, I’ve laughed in the face of a hungry zombie, and single-handedly defeated dystopian organizations.  ‘Paprika’ made this all very real and somewhat unnerving for me, especially since I’ve recently had a few experiences of lucidity.  There’s something a little worrying about being aware that you’re inside a dream, but not of whom you are within it.  Am I lucid dreaming as myself, or am I briefly living inside the body of my childhood hero?  Super-powers aside, has the separation between our personalities substantially blurred from when I was a frightened six year-old?  I find it quite creepy to think about, so I should swiftly end this column entry by saying never, ever underestimate the power of your own imagination.

ENDNOTES: When I am not sleeping, I can found on Twitter and Tumblr.

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So it’s been a little over a month since I’ve moved out of my parents house and I can honestly say that I’m pretty satisfied.  But, of course, as the moment has come for all of us, my parents are visiting this weekend.  That means I need to get rid of this thing called a mess that I have going on here.  That includes anything from dirty laundry to empty beer cans that are laying around.  That also includes any full beer cans that are in the fridge as well.  

I know my parents well enough to know that they are definitely going to raid my apartment to see what my lifestyle has transformed into.  They are going to inspect every inch of my room and see if they can find anything to catch me “red-handed”.  So tonight is about finishing any beer that I can’t hide and writing about it.  

Tomorrow, I’ve decided to skip my morning class (we never do anything in statics anyway) in order to clean the entire apartment.  I’m starting with the kitchen and working my way to the bathroom.  I’m going to go through everything that I know my parents will check and then I’m going to go through more.  I need to make sure there is absolutely nothing left that my parents, specifically my mother, can criticize.  I’ve even gone as far as shaving my beard completely in hopes that it would act as a distraction for a good amount of time.  

Now, I don’t know if I’m completely overreacting about this or if this is completely normal for at least most.  I am, however, starting to think that this is how my mother must feel whenever my grandmother comes to visit the house and my mother makes us all take part in cleaning every leaf on all of the fake plastic plants that no one ever notices.  

On the plus side, I was promised a new mini-fridge for my room to keep my “milk” nice and cold.  Like I need calcium.

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