Despertar

if things end up a bit too heavy, we'll all float on

Our choices don't exist in a vacuum. They come packaged with anti-choices, all the other things they preclude us from doing.

For example, law school isn't just law school, it's also a three-year delay standing between my present self and all the things I want to have (a baby, an income, the desire to read for pleasure ever again, et cetera).

I'm "making something of myself," but what? I'll never be an Olympic gymnast; I'm nine years too old to start rigorous daily training. I won't be a young mother unless I get knocked up before graduation, and if that happens, I won't have a law degree. Time marches on and, as it does, you sacrifice options right and left.

*

Recently, at a bar, a really nice, tall, West Indian man bought me a drink and chatted me up for a bit. We kept the conversation light and relevant, talking mostly about everything we like and dislike about the bar scene, joning on the outfits of various other patrons, and so on.

I reached over the bar to get a napkin, and when I turned back around, I caught the guy staring at my ass. The look on his face had changed from mild, hypothetical interest to full-on, active take-her-home mode. He had not yet asked my first name, my age or anything else about my life. I hadn't volunteered any real info. He commented that I seemed smart. I thanked him and tried to reciprocate without sounding like a liar.

At some point, he started bragging about his job. He handed me a business card. He does graphic design work for some IT firm in Bethesda somewhere. His name wasn't on the card. He confided that he hates the work environment there, but that he gladly sticks around for the paycheck.

He earns something like sixty thousand dollars a year. Based on context clues, and the boastfulness in his tone when he said it, I gleaned that this is something he's proud of. He advertised himself further by saying, "When I date a girl, I really like to spoil her. I like to be the breadwinner." This is, I understand, a typical West Indian male attitude: chivalry with both colors of repercussions.

I said, "What if you're both the breadwinner, isn't that nice, so you can split costs of things, and stuff?"

He cocked an eyebrow and shook his head no. "I'm just more comfortable paying for things myself. If she ever needs something, she just has to ask me. I don't like for a girl to earn more than I do. But you're still in school, right?" Big, creepy smile. "That means you don't have SHIT in the bank besides loans."

That revelation seemed to decide him and he invited me ride home with him , to some apartment off of K Street somewhere. I was too drunk to comply, too drunk to decline, really too drunk to make any sort of decision at all, which tried his patience. He eventually left, and as I sat on the curb trying to coax my brain back into sobriety, I realized I'm going to be making half his annual salary in a single ten week. It's the associate salary at the firm where I'll be working over the summer, and if I wind up with permanent placement, I could start with an year-round salary that's over twice as much as his.

I was glad he was gone before I could make a douchebag out of myself by sharing my mathematical revelation with him, which I definitely would have done had he stuck around.

*

Making something of yourself sucks. All my stupid friends are on Adderall or sleeping pills or worse, and every last one of them still drinks like a sailor.

I took a sleeping pill tonight, the last of my tiny three-part stash. On this night, it has the effect of completely inhibiting my typing, meaning this entry has taken, so far, upwards of half an hour to get grammatically right, to say nothing of style. Every time I change my posture, it takes a noticeable period of time for visual cues to straighten themselves out. Atreyu, on the screen, keeps looking like Sara Gilbert right at first, except for the hair.

It's my last one. It's just because I was dying of exhaustion and I can't sleep, ever, because of the world, of Justin, of being hungry and stressed and trying to plan my next trip to New York and San Francisco, the twins, the Sims, where can I get fresh milk to finish off the end of my mango passion granola, will Valerie kill me when she sees that our kitchen has become a greasy portal to hell? And such.

See that, sleeping pills sucks. Being stressed enough to lose sleep over upcoming exams sucks. Law school sucks. That "making something of yourself" consists of several steps, each one suckier than the last, sucks.

*

Of course, if I had my handsome, hard-to-figure-out husband now, I'd be a terrible wife. And if we had our babies, our boy and our girl on the way, I really wouldn't know what to call them. Dashiell has stuck as a top contender, for a boy, but no one can pronounce it and everyone spells it wrong. For a girl, everything I come up with is hopelessly ghetto, or will be construed that way when used to my inevitably black daughter. I liked Eja, but it comes a little too close to Asia, which, nothing annoys me more than black people naming their kids after places they've never been.