Madison is a barren hell-hole, its
redeeming qualities are few and far between. On a city bus, the woman tells her
daughter to shut up when she starts to make a noise. She’s not even crying very
loud and the bus is fairly empty. The landscape is barren and flat and freezing
cold. Both my hands go numb waiting for the bus. The people are kind but it
takes so much more than kindness as far as I am concerned, kindness a requisite
but not fulfilling trait. They can be forgetful (the bus driver passes by a
stop even when the lever has been pulled, the light turned on). They are homogeneous
and pudgy and don’t seem to think too hard before they talk. Of course I have
to wonder what they think of me the “coastie” I must seem cold and unkind and
brusque.
Being here, where I see no
opportunity, a place I have never even thought of before, a place that seems
apart from the world and unknown I am able to consider myself as a separate unit
as well. I am able to see myself to a certain extent in an objective way when
outside of me environment. My goals, my flaws, they become stark to me outside
of my usual environment. Being at the school, with its ‘history’ and brick
walls and such, its jars of plants and research posters on the basement walls
which may be read by no one, it allows me to assess academia, my potential
place in it. Academia seems almst as empty and narcissistic as writing did a
few years ago, when I began my transition from writing to science. Funny how
that change can occur, how I can switch so fully into science then, right when
I should begin to make a career of it, I can switch back to writing and science
can seem so unattractive. The prospect of writing grants (essentially for a
living) is so terribly unattractive to me that it dissuades me from the ‘discovery’
of science.
I feel so totally out of the world,
so disaffected with society. It sounds so stupid and cliché but I see so few
(read: vanishingly small) avenues for my interests. My shit memory, my
disinterest in interacting with people, my apathy toward achieving goals in groups.
At least one of these three will keeps me from getting and keeping a job in
pretty much any environment and field. If I didn’t like to eat good food and
live in a decent spot I might just live in a squat somewhere and write FTW and
anarchy symbols on everything and not do much else and the world would not miss
me.
Q: What is my place in the world, what does it need me for?
A: The world does not need you, you are nothing to it. On a
frozen plain your body could lay, rotting, and there would be no loss.
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