Against Insanity, in Addition to Existence, for Life

Anne comforted herself sometimes by repeating that she was in the depths of despair, and her dreams were a perfect graveyard of buried hopes. In such a way am I writing today, to comfort myself by making the insanity of my life sound poetic.

First I must say that I am on the verge of insanity, but fear not – I have every intention of backing away from that brink. All it will take is a box full of cookies, much time with friends, and all the extra hours of sleep I will not be getting in exchange for said time with friends.

My office is much too busy, yet I am sitting, writing this at my office. Just prior to this, between imagining these sentences and answering the phone, I was reading a book, another partial cause of my near insanity. GK Chesterton has been writing to me of the ridiculous that makes life alive. Funny thing, imagining life to be alive. I think that is Christ. He seems to be around every corner of this world, which is a very good reason for sanity.

In fact I love patterns, even the poetic pattern of nuanced changes, the fact that my hair is brown and my corduroys are brown, I wear a brown necklace and in a startling change, a camel-colored bracelet. As all this is highlighted with gold, I find the effect most wonderful. It is a glittering accent to the pattern. A woman came to my office earlier with turquoise and brown beads on her shirt, and similar embroidery on the camisole beneath the shrug. Her purse I did not get a chance to study, but I have the distinct impression that it followed the theme in brown leather. My all white office upholstered and carpeted has recently been significantly altered by the introduction of a black chair in the doctor’s half. There is already a black chair in my half, but I sit in it, and thus have no comment on its effect on the décor as I have about this new one. Suddenly I am noticing that my clock is black, my appointment book, the mousepad, and one of the phones. All in all this does not have the art of consistency, but it does have the statement of contrast.

My voice is occasionally interrupted, when I frequently answer the phone, by a cough. It is insignificant enough to most commonly be silent and suppressed, but it has the annoying habit of altering my consonant pronunciation and taking away the warmth from my tone of voice. As a result Adam came out A-ar, and minute sounded more like the kind of cookie I’m about to eat: mint. This brings a vague recollection about consonant shift referred to but not explained (in the way of an insider that assumes you would know) in articles I have read about etymology and the devolution of language.

This I’m doing here, it isn’t life. It may be existence, this tedious survivatl – ok, so that was a typo, but it is so romantically Aztec that I’m leaving it as a tribute. Anyway, existence is “I think therefore I am,” the soulless I am. It’s ok when God says it, because He is Trinity, and I am is plural. For a human I am is not enough. I am satisfied only by saying we are. In fact this day has so far been broken by two instances of we are: when two young friends came to visit me while their mother picked up glasses – one can have the sincerest conversations with children; and the other was when the very friend about whom I was writing in my other post, the one about literature, came by with her two little girls. One is a genius who shared her flower by allowing me to smell it and by proclaiming it most accurately to be both pink and green; the other was asleep, but quite beautiful, just as was her mother, happily dressed in a maternity jumper with her hair all pulled up just like the joyful smile she is in my life. How can hairstyles be smiles? They just are.

Mine, by the way, is the result of getting up late this morning and loosing the braid I remember deciding to put in my hair last night, though I am unaware whence I stole the minutes in which to plait it. There is a large clip for emergencies fastened at present to my purse strap. At the end of my day, if I am tired of brushing the strands aside, I fiercely affix the jaw that is remarkably able to contain the entire girth of my ponytail.

Have you ever figured out under which circumstances you are supposed to use “that,” and which “which”? Microsoft Word is always objecting, and I’ve learned that if I have a comma, which is acceptable, but I can’t fathom why that would be. I do know that which is much more necessary when prepositions are used properly, and kept from ends of sentences.

Existence is a victory; "I am" is worth saying. Thinking is worth doing if the philosopher is correct in that it proves our am-ness. There is no meaning, no life abundant, alone. This is what I tell graduates as the primary lesson I wish people had told me before the first five years after high school. Don’t abandon your friendships; they’re more important than grades, money, or degrees.

To God be all glory.