You know how sometimes you’ll hop into your car after work and an hour later you’ll find yourself in your tiny, pathetic apartment preparing corndogs and EasyMacTM while ironically/appropriately learning how to live your Best LifeTM on OprahTM and all of a sudden you have to stop and think, huh, how in Voldemort’s name did I get home? Because somehow, completely unbeknownst to your brain, your hand stealthily turned the key and your foot quietly hit the gas pedal and your hands skillfully avoided hitting a suicidal Portland cyclist? Well, except for that one time. And that could have happened to anyone…let’s just put it behind us and move forward.
It’s a strange moment when you realize you’ve been going through all the correct motions of life without really being present, when your brain is busy reminiscing about that school play in the third grade where you played a snowflake and sang a solo apparently written with Mariah’s vocal range in mind and out of nowhere you realize you’re reading a Mennonite cookbook or teaching a computer class or popping your third multivitamin for the day. The multivitamin habit would be especially worrisome if not for teatime at my workplace, where the sole ongoing conversation/debate seems to revolve around which Ugandan bachelor I should devote my life to. I strongly suspect the matchmaking isn’t based on complementary personalities and life goals but on the size of my birthing hips, which- thanks to an array of billowy skirts- misleadingly appear to meet the requirements for the ambitious eight children per superwoman regional average. In any case, I figure if one of these days I space out for an especially prolonged period of time and find myself married off and subsequently knocked-up, all the extra doses of folic acid and iron won’t be for nil.
I don’t really have a logical explanation for why the previously occasional disconnect between my brain and body is increasing. Perhaps it’s because the interruptions that would potentially snap me back into reality in America- Oprah’s booming voice, the familiar taste of corndogs and artificial cheese, the familiar bang of a cyclist’s body against my car- have been replaced by the continuous and monotonous soundtrack of cricket chirps and my own breathing? All I know is I need to get rid of this Mennonite cookbook. I mean, seriously, snow ice-cream? Those Mennonites are a notoriously cruel bunch.
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