OF A GOLDEN AGE

a twenty-year-old woman five feet eleven inches tall is in the ninety-ninth percentile. sometimes i feel like the alaska of human figures, larger than life. friends have sometimes called me the gentle giantess. clothing retailers more often say hard-to-fit. but wingspan and big bones aside, my insides are overrun with motion, sensation; my heart is full to bursting, a balloon made of paper, even larger than the rest of me. i spend my days bent to other people’s feelings, absorbing like a fresh flypaper rose, the chamois skin of the emotional world. without this, i would be almost certainly average.

leave-no-trace is very popular these days, tramp through nature without leaving an impact, make sure we don’t disrupt the natural balance. are we so far removed from the evolutionary jet stream that when we venture into nature we need to be so careful? being a human being is a nonstop bizarro-world adventure. please don’t allow your polluted human excrement to ruin the pure world of nature. personally i am an inside girl, preferring chasing spiders with a rolled-up newspaper to tracking animals in the wilds. i can’t even drink soda from a can or bottle. darwinally, i am no survivor.

the chinese character that means “fire” is drawn with this idea in mind: a man on fire. the character for what you answer when someone asks how you are, “good” or “fine,” is made for this idea: a wife and a son, together, are signs that life is good. the really straightforward nature of the world’s most difficult mainstream language is also perhaps its most intimidating quality; if only, if only, one could learn the tens of thousands of characters by creating these picture-stories. no one’s brain has that kind of free memory, though. instead we flail a little, blindly.

potter was my father’s mother’s maiden name, patty potter, like some beloved children’s book character. a functional name, one that came from its holder’s livelihood, more direct than the ornamental surnames of the present. if hereditary convention still applied, i likely would not have a last name, or perhaps i would be caroline donskin. either way, twenty-first century, don’t worry: i feel okay about my meaningless modern name, made more meaningless by the adoption of my father by a subpar stepfather. if not for him i would be caroline kitsch, destined for romance novels or chanteusery. i lose no sleep.

feels as if i spend money like water whenever it isn’t my money. the need for time off clashes with my inner glutton for overcommitment. we want to work like puritans here, even if we ultimately can’t or don’t. the desire to exhaust oneself to provide for society and family, the desire to fill all free time with some miscellaneous moneymaking hand-occupying thing — it is that under which we are indivisible. we have lost the part that ties our toil to god with a taut golden line. now we are tied into the web of things filling our eyes.

nothing like sitting in a big, dark, icy room full of competing college students, listening to dumbed-down directions and filling out tiny arbitrary bubbles for five hours, to make you really love bureaucracy. also, i talked to a kid who’s only going to be a junior, and he said he was taking the lsat now “just to get it over with.” what! it costs a hundred and twenty dollars! personally i really want to make this one time count and make it good.

actually, what’s funny is the best part of something like the lsat is the people you talk to who are sitting around you in the testing room or hanging outside during the break. the kid in front of me was a strangely neurotic AND laid-back engineering student from the university of illinois. behind me was a guy who graduated from college in 2000 who’s been doing crazily various things since. the strangest part: one of my closest friends from junior high and high school was there.

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird:

“You don’t love to garden?” they’d ask incredulously, and I’d shake my head and not mention that what I love are cut flowers, because this sounds so violent and decadent, like when Salvador Dalí said his favorite animal was fillet of sole.