Lack of sleep invariably leads to odd thoughts and
actions.
I'd like to blame me not sleeping on the thin-paned, drafty windows in my bedroom.
These days I live in a
renovated palace near
Santo Spirito in Florence; it would be elementary to blame it on the noisy, dog-fighting, beer-bottle-breaking, guitar-playing drunks in the piazza, or the restaurant burglar alarm that went off all Sunday night and Monday morning. Really, these are just excuses to talk to friends living six time zones away during
the wee hours of my morning. Friends that I'll likely never see again, ties to an undergraduate misadventure I'd rather otherwise forget, this is why I stay awake.
I had to make a presentation in class today on a chapter from a text. It was on the development of
Interest Groups in the European Union and a comparison with
their American cousins. Usually I am extremely displeased by presentations that consist of classmates reading the entire spiel word-for-word from their notes-cum-teleprompter. Therefore, this morning I took my brief outline that I prepared previously and rewrote my entire presentation out, longhand, on one of the public computers. I wouldn't have been able to get through it otherwise, coffee mug full of
espresso or not. I set the copy in
Futura, because I felt that a favorite
typeface would keep me interested in reading it. (Really, though, it was
Twentieth Century, since, outside of Times New Roman, Microsoft is categorically too cheap to license anything but
knockoffs of
standard typefaces).
I did this since I've found myself incapable of pronouncing a cogent sentence, from a combination of this self-induced insomnia and learning Italian the hard way. I get about halfway though, pause, struggle to form a predicate, fail, and blurt out something else that generally conveys the same meaning five seconds later. It's like Porky Pig without the stutter,
the mouth in gentle mockery of itself. It's good then that E2,
at least for now, is a written medium.
Another thing besides typing I'm still fairly capable of doing is cooking, so I made myself some lunch. As I was de-seeding and chopping vegetables, I lost myself skirting the edge of thoughts in that way that always seems to be part and parcel of
sleep deprivation. I felt as if I nearly understood why I was really here in Florence, what it really is about those friends that keeps me up at night talking to them, and how I really ought to live my life – a hemiëpiphany, if you will. And then, right when I felt I'd almost grasped the thought, like a brass ring on a
precognative carousel, it was snatched away as I felt the knife pierce through the other side of the bell pepper I was holding, its tip slamming into my wrist.
Shocked, I looked down. The end of the knife was fortunately blunt, thus it was merely deflected by the arm in its path. As close as I'd come to personal enlightenment, I'd come even closer to accidentally making myself one of those wrist-slashing teen-agnst
emo kids.
In that spirit, I thought I'd write a
daylog about it. Oh, and also, I'm going to start a
Indie Indy Cripplecore band called "On the Verge of Tears Again." Or maybe
Indy Indie Cripplecore. I never understood how those underground music adjectives work.