121118 wake from a fitful sleep. i’ve been obsessing about the presentation. you would think it would be over, now that it’s over. but i keep going over and over it in my mind, thinking about how bad it was. especially the first time through. i was this fuzzy, rambly, unfocused, mumbling, unprepared wretch staring down at his ipad every few moments, saying things that were either obvious or pointless or just totally *non sequitur.* Jason said “I think mat knocked it out of the park,” and then did you notice Amanda didn’t say anything. Cuz that’s nice, Jas, but oh my god I so did not! He’s so kind to me, but I don’t want to be the special ed kid that everyone is extra nice to! Well, not even everyone! Just Jason! Why? Why is he so kind and supportive of me when I so clearly don’t know what I’m doing? He’s kind of boring to listen to, but at least his stuff made sense and had a plot. I don’t know. I truly don’t know. I really don’t want to sit here and “write” “about” myself. You know that, fish. You know this is boring. Even you know this is boring. But I don’t know what else to “write” “about.” It seems so dumb to wake up at this ungodly hour, when I’m sick and have so much work to do, and sit here spewing out dear diary crap like a teenager. But I don’t know what else to do, because, though dimmed with more urgent and recent concerns, the refrain of “succeed or quit” kind of keeps ringing around my head like a loose jingle bell. Millie’s up. There goes the creaking. Next comes the squall of the shower, then the spongey clump of the stairs, then BAM! the lights come on, then CLANG CLANG CLANG the ice cubes into her metal cup, then the whole place smells like scrambled eggs and there’s me, knowing I should get up and start grading, but feeling the weight of six million butterflies pushing my eyelids down. Dreams were interesting, almost as interesting as the 3D fractal shapes of the city and town lights on the ground on the last hour or so of the flight the other day. The coolest was how I would be looking at a shape made of points of light, white, amber, everything in between, and I would think I was looking at, say, a building with substructures on the roof, and then I would realize we were still at thirty thousand feet or whatever and that “building” was actually a whole chunk of the city, and there would be this sudden mental zooming out; scale kept shifting madly; I got where I could do it on purpose, like those magic eye 3D books that I finally learned how to do way back at the bookstore. The cities were fractal. Also weirdly fragile and beautiful, like skating hovering sheafs of delicate tortoise-shell and feather. But so last night I was a fugitive again. In some kind of primitive and high tech society. Deciding to flee, impulsively really, instead of follow the rules. I had the queen’s baby daughter. The queen’s mother was my mother, but I don’t know who the queen was. We ran and escaped detection for a little while, and when they caught up with us the fighting was surprisingly low-stakes. But all the while, others were watching. We were having a conversation, a relaxed guard-down moment in some courtyard or backyard (everything was a little shabby like a trailer park, even though surveillance was everywhere, and large banks of inscrutable cables and electronics on a macro scale were everywhere you looked, like trash cans in a city on trash day) when I saw a glint in a window up and over the side, above a sloping roof. It was *him.* The first guy I had fled from, way back then. THe one whose sinister authoritarian air had triggered my flight response in the first place. He was holding up some kind of sign in the window, and he was fully aware that I was the only one who had seen him. He was gesticulating a semaphore of despair. The implication was that I should give up. But instead, I climbed up (what? the drain pipe? A ladder? uneven window ledges?) and talked to him. He opened the window. I pointed out how odd it was that we were mortal enemies, antitheses of each other’s whole value systems, and yet here we were, just two men, and I could even reach out and touch his hand. I did. It was rough and large and strong but showing signs of middle age. He didn’t seem completely unmoved by this poignant observation, but he didn’t exactly embrace me, either. It was essentially a stalemate, a standoff, concord in a state of arms. Then the alarm went off and I was like, there is no fucking way it is already 5:00. But it was, of course, it was and it still is, just like it always is. There is no time. I’m sick and there’s no one to take care of me--although I have to say, Cel sure as hell stepped up and helped in the kitchen and stuff yesterday. She’s so self-assured now, it’s very cool. She has a cosmopolitan hair flip and way of holding her bag as she leaves the car outside the Y and says, “I’ll be at the track.” I gotta lie down for a bit before I start grading. That’s OK, right? I’m not a complete fraud and slacker and dullard and failure, right? Right, Amanda? Why do I suddenly care so much what Amanda thinks? I wrote “I used to be a narcissist #bushmill” but maybe “used to be” isn’t a hundred percent accurate. At any rate, I gotta try to sleep off some more of this cold, even though millie’s self-sufficient machinations make sleep more of a toss-up than anything. I’ll definitely start before 10 today, though. I just gotta!