Introspection

 

There's a mirror in my bedroom directly across from my bed and it's a good mirror.  Real pretty.  It used to belong to my aunt or my grandmother or somebody along those lines and my parents painted it white to match the rest of my furniture, which all came in the same set as the mirror except in an ugly beige color that I'd quickly gotten bored with and tried to paint over with sparkly Barbie nail-polish when I was six or so.  They hadn't been too happy about that and had decided to just paint it all white.  The paint on the headboard is peeling off and falls onto my pillow sometimes and I spruced up the nightstand beside my bed with gold nail-polish almost immediately after it got moved back into my room, and all of a sudden, as I'm thinking about that it all seems kind of childish and stupid because now I wish I hadn't done that to all my nice furniture, because it really was nice stuff.

 

But I was talking about the mirror, wasn't I?

 

Right.  It's right across from my bed so that if I woke up every morning like all the people in movies do I'd end up looking at myself first thing, but I'm not like the pretty people in the movies and I wouldn't want to wake up to that anyway.  I don't know why I decided I wanted to put it there, anyway.  It reflects the red light from my digital clock so that a person can look in from the hallway and always know what time it is, even though my clock is set three minutes and fourteen seconds ahead and they would have to be able to read numbers backwards, which I have trouble doing.  I can never remember which way the five is supposed to be and which way the two is supposed to be which is the trouble with digital clocks, really, and I never use that clock to tell time with anyway unless I just woke up in the middle of the night or I don't feel like peering at the little numbers on the right bottom-hand corner of my computer screen.  Those numbers are usually about fifty-two seconds off anyway and that only works if I remembered to turn my computer on beforehand.  I like clocks because I like knowing what time it is; I don't like them when they're in my room or reflecting off my mirror, which is how I got into this whole spiel in the first place.

 

That's the problem with free-associative writing.  You start typing and you just write about whatever's going through your mind and hope it makes some kind of sense when you read it later.  It usually doesn't, but hey, sometimes it does.  And once you do something that makes sense, you've got to figure out what you're supposed to do with it.  It's not like you can stick the pages in a frame and point at it when company comes by and go "yeah, that one made sense.  I was proud of it back then.  What do you think?"  Most people would just give you a weird look because they only think you should frame stuff with writing on it if it has picture on it or it's meant to be important, like a certificate or something and you'd probably spend a lot of time wondering why you ever bothered to write something so stupid in the first place.  Another thing I really detest about free-associative writing is that it always reminds me of that movie with the kid and the dead people--Sixth Sense--and that creepy scene where the kid turns around and half his head is blown away.  Or that scene where the sick girl sticks her face in the boy's tent while he's playing with his soldiers.  Or that one where the girl grabs his leg from under the bed.  Or the one with the woman who he thinks is his mother at first and she turns around and starts screaming at him because she cut her wrists and stuff.  Or that scene where--

 

Yeah, you get the picture.  I love the movie but I'm not too fond of the dead people and since Bruce Willis and the kid whose name no one can ever remember spent about two seconds talking about free-associative writing in the movie, I automatically think of it whenever I do this.  Which is a lot because I can't sleep lately.  And that's another reason I wonder why I put my mirror where it is.  It's twelve thirty-nine at night according to my computer clock and almost twelve forty-three on my digital clock and I'm supposed to be asleep because I've got school tomorrow and if my mom walks by she won't see the red numbers reflected in my mirror, which will clue her in to the fact that my door is shut and because I don't usually shut my door at night because my cat always used to sleep in my room when he died and it was pretty awful to wake up in the middle of the night because he had to be let out, she'll assume that I'm doing something I’m not supposed to be doing.  And she'd be right, or course.  She usually is.

 

It's a school night.  Tuesday, really, which means that I'm supposed to shower after I get home around ten-fifteen and be in bed by ten-thirty because I've got to wake up at five something the next morning and I hate waking up as it is without staying up all night writing.  But I've been tossing and turning in bed for over an hour and a half and my hair is almost completely dry by now, which is weird considering how long it usually takes, and I had nothing better to do than to try something like this.  I've been doing a lot of strange things late at night lately, mostly because I can never get to sleep.  This is the second night this week that I've tried the free writing, and since the week isn't even half over that kind of worries me a little.  Last night I started reading through some of my old middle-school English papers, which I kept although my mother yelled at me about it and I never really liked any of the assignments back then anyway.  That amused me a little bit until about two o'clock, when I decided to try and get some sleep again.  It didn't work, so I eventually gave up around three and got a head start on some of the homework due the next day which I'd planned on getting done in first period, since I never do anything there anyway.  That worked pretty well; I was asleep by four and got at least an hour and a half worth of sleep, which is more than I usually get.  Maybe I should stop doing this and go do some homework.  Then I might be able to sleep.  Nah.  I'll save that until I get desperate.

 

I'm listening to the radio right now because when I can't sleep I like to listen to whatever crap the radio is playing since my own stereo is one of those ones that will either wake up the entire house or will be too quiet for me to hear three feet away.  My mother is really strict about which radio stations I listen to anyway, not that she really cares about which CD's I buy or which cassette tapes I pop in the stereo at three-fifteen when I'm trying to figure out my math homework, which usually takes me four or five hours to figure out and another hour to actually do, although that's changed a little from last year since I'm in an easier math class now with stuff that I did last year in Trigonometry or two years ago in that boring Algebra class that I never could figure out and suddenly understand so it usually takes me an hour tops to do it all.  Now I usually just listen to the stereo while I'm reading or doing English stuff, which seems to take longer these days than it used to.  Probably because none of my other English teachers ever gave me homework at all.  But, like I said, my mother doesn't care what I buy, but if I'm listening to the radio it has to be a station that she approves of or that she would listen to herself.  If I actually decided to follow that rule I'd be listening to country western, which I can't stand, or oldies, which aren’t too bad but I've heard most of them anyway.  Besides, I'd rather be listening to Incubus or Ritalin, which is both a drug and a band, but groups like that involve a lot of guitars and drums and profanity and she doesn't like that.  Go figure.

 

My dad doesn't care about stuff like that too much because he sometimes likes that kind of music, which, now that I'm thinking about it, makes me wonder why he only listens to the Beatles and Eric Clapton and easy listening groups like that, whose rhythm sections usually only consist of a basic duh-duh-dum drum beat and a budda-budda-bing bass line.

 

Anyway, I'm listening to the radio--it's set on 99.1, which is a station I love but my mother can't stand and I've got it set on my radio because I hate being told what to do--and it's playing one of those songs about suicide and misery that it plays a lot of the time because that all of a sudden seems like the only thing on those singer's minds besides getting in bed with their best friends significant other or whatever and I've decided that I don't particularly like that kind of music right now either.  So I walk over to the digital clock radio with the red numbers and spin the dial around for a long time hoping that I'm changing the channel when all I might really be doing is setting my alarm for an even earlier hour since the clock is ancient and annoying and it eventually settles through the static and starts playing a song by someone who knows what drums are really supposed to do even though all she's singing about is a bunch of stars falling on her head or something but it's still better than listening to all that suicidal mania so early in the morning when I'm really not feeling very perky in the first place.  My mother would like this song, I think, because when I listen to the lyrics a little bit closer and put some thought in them I realize that it's really just another person wishing that they could make someone else's life just a little bit better and a lot of the time I think that's exactly all my mother's trying to do with my brothers and I, really.

 

All of a sudden I'm not in the mood to listen to the radio, but I've already gone back to my computer and started typing and don't feel like getting up again to turn it off.  Besides, I'm kind of lazy and not exactly awake.  And I've suddenly realized that a page and a half ago I was trying to talk about my mirror and that now I can't remember what I was going to say about it anyway so it seems kind of pointless to go on about it.  So instead I'm thinking about something that happened at lunch the other day that made me laugh then but really isn't very funny right now.  My friend Stephanie, who I really don't know very well since I only met her a few weeks ago and I guess can't really be called a friend but who is anyway, was telling us about a dream she had where someone told her she gave bad hugs.  I didn't even think about it and I mentioned that Freud, who I'd been reading about for some reason or another all on my own time, not for school or anything, might have told her that she was feeling sexually frustrated or sexually incompetent because the guy was obsessed with sex and his libido, which he said was psychic energy derived from basic urges and the dictionary on my desk said was just someone's sex drive.  We all laughed about it and spent the rest of the day pointing our fingers at things and going "well, y'know what Freud would say about that?" but now it really doesn't seem that funny because I kind of think that he really would have said something about that and that I really didn't want to have to think about Stephanie's sexual frustration in the first place.  I hate being a loudmouth.

 

It's because I was such a loudmouth last Thanksgiving that my cousin is trying to hook me up with one of his best friend's friends, but since I don't know this cousin very well and don't like him too much in the first place I keep on telling him that I'm not interested.  He keeps on accusing me of being anti-social and now I'm starting to wonder if I really am.  I don't like meeting people, that's for sure, and I HATE--with a capital H, A, T, and E--having to talk to people who I don't know very much about, but once I find something that I've got in common with another person I don't have any problem.  I also go up to people randomly and start spouting my views of philosophy at them, so I don't think he's entirely right about my social patterns, which doesn't really surprise me.  Most people aren't either introverts or extroverts in any case, they're the other one, the ambiovert or however you spell that, and they like people or don't like people according to their mood, and that really makes more sense to me than his anti-social rants.

 

Oh hell, who knows?  Maybe I am anti-social and just haven't figured it out yet because I'm too busy trying not to fall asleep in school since I can't get any sleep at night anymore.

 

I haven't told many people about how much trouble I've been having falling asleep these days.  One of the people I told promised to get me medication or something--I think that was probably my father--and someone else told me that I really should stop thinking about stupid stuff like how we know that we exist and why the idiots who always go "one time, at band camp" whenever they see someone with a flute in their hands never figure out that sooner or later that flute player is going to cause them bodily harm.  She was probably right--I'm thinking about stupid things and my brain is too busy to worry about trivial things like sleeping and homework.

 

I skipped dinner tonight in order to make it to my latest private lesson on time after that last club meeting and having to drive my brother and his friend home from band practice this afternoon, which I agreed to do even though his little friend lived a good hour and a half out of my way.  I'll never figure out why my stomach is always repulsed by the thought of eating when it's hungry and attracted to food when it's not.  That must be one of life's little mysteries, like that sock that I can never find while I'm folding laundry at two a.m. because I'm up right then and the sock has gone on a midnight booze cruise or something.

 

Right, so my friend was telling me to stop thinking about stupid things like why I'm always running from place to place and why I can't split myself in two or three parts so one part could go one way and the others could go everywhere else and try and see if I can get some sleep.  I figure that if the subatomic or quantum level particles which make up my being and physical form can do it, which, according to my mother's old science book, The Tao of Physics, they can actually do, I should be able to do it too.  If little microscopic parts of me can be two or three places at once, why can't I?  They can travel back and forth in time too, but no matter how hard I try, I just can't seem to do it, although I've managed to get some interesting scars and bruises by trying.  See, if my friend is right and I can't sleep because I'm thinking too much, then I'd be able to sleep if I could figure that stuff out.

 

Anyone got any ideas how I can manage that?  Anyone at all?  No?  I didn't think so…  And I'm really too stubborn to actually take her advice anyway.  Whoever it was who said "I think, therefore I am" really managed to traumatize me--my thought on that is that if I don't think, I am not.  And if I'm not, then who's the one asking all these dumb questions and suffering from the insomnia?  As if I don't have other things to do that are hard enough while I am being…  And then there's always that other insufferable question--what if I think and therefore am, but really, technically, at the same time I'm not?  What happens then?  Would the world explode?  Would my brains start to leak out of my tear glands?  Would I ever figure out how to be in two places at once and go back and forth in time without turning into a science-fiction geek and watching Back to the Future until I had every aspect of that old car memorized?

 

My radio just turned itself off.  I think that's kind of neat because I've never see it do that before, although I guess it does because those times when I do manage to fall asleep I always wake up to the alarm, which is just music blasting in my ear.  If the radio played all night then the alarm wouldn't wake me up, would it?  Now that it's off I’m kind of worried that my mom's going to hear the typing--or worse, my dad will, because he sometimes can't sleep either and he just walks around the house, which used to make me think the place was haunted and he won't get me in trouble with mom or anything, he'll just come in and delete the entire hard drive on my computer, which would mean that I'd lose a lot of neat stuff that I've been saving for who knows how long and haven't gotten around to backing up on floppy disks yet.

 

I have a ton of floppy disks in my desk drawer.  The whole 9 ½ by 8 inches of my desk drawer is filled with floppy disks and pens which ran out of ink a long time ago but I haven't gotten around to throwing away yet.  I don't know which of those disks are actually blank and which ones have stuff on them, but I figure that someday I'll go through each and every one of them and sort out which things I need and which things I don't.  Then I'll go through my closets and get rid of all my old shoes because I've kept every single pair of shoes that I've worn since I was seven except for one pair, which literally fell apart, and I keep them all in three boxes in my closet.  I don't know why I keep those things; some of them are ugly and a few of them have been written on by friends back when we thought it was so cool that we could write notes on our shoes in markers and pens that blurred and smeared as soon as it rained and most of the shoes are worthless and I can't fit my foot into any of them anymore.  I guess I just like to hang on to the little things like that which connect me to how I used to be or something.  I also hate it when people ask me my shoe size.  I've got no problem telling people my weight--127, if you're curious--but I absolutely despise telling people my shoe size.  Don't know why and don't particularly care.  It's just one of those weird things that make up me.

 

Anyway, my radio is off and that's making me paranoid because someone might hear me typing.  It's one forty-four in the morning now and I guess the sensible thing would be to stop this dumb free-association writing and try to get some sleep, but it's a rare occasion that I actually do something sensible, but I'm wishing the radio would come back on all by itself so I wouldn't have to move--which is probably one reason why I don't want to go back to bed--and so my cover won't be blown by anything more than the reflecting numbers of my red digital clock in the mirror and the light of my computer screen filtering out from under the door--and the scary thing is that it does.  So, being me, I decide not to wonder why but instead that I'm hallucinating and that it's time to go to bed after all before I start playing baseball with little boys coming out of the walls like my brother did when he ran that 104° fever awhile back.

 

That means I'm going to stop writing now and try to sleep.  And tomorrow I'll wake up--if I can ever get to sleep--and avoid looking in the pretty mirror across from my bed just because that's what I do.  And maybe some other night in the near future when I can't sleep--maybe tomorrow--I'll tell the story about that mirror, which I started to do this time but never actually got around to doing.  Maybe I'll have that dream again--the one where I'm walking through the woods and then go inside my neighbor's house and see a decapitated head on the table with a pot of cooked carrots and then go home and meet some lady outside who I invite inside so she can start cooking carrots and murder me while I scream and try to dial 9-1-1 with fingers that are too slippery from blood to do anything like make a phone call.  I love that dream--it's better than the one that my brother told me about once, the one where he was at a nudist colony and he was the only idiot there with a pair of pants on.  I don't think I'll ever understand that.  Most people dream about being naked during high school assemblies or something, but my twelve year-old brother does exactly the opposite.

 

Hey, how come you always get cool toys and thing when you believe in Santa and clothes ever after?

 

No wonder I can't get any sleep.  Obviously the universe is inside my head and I didn't even know it.  I really hope that this doesn’t mean that a bunch of little people--who look like Smurfs in my mind's eye--are also suffering from insomniac because the light's too bright out here.  Then I'd just feel guilty.

 

… Maybe I should just go to bed now before the little people try to sue me…