The fever pitch of my consciousness reaches its apex around 2:30 AM on an average weeknight. I become more than aware of my inability to complete anything on time and, rather than reverting to my textbooks or Microsoft Word to find a definitive solution in what the modern social theorist has termed "labour," I decide to update my iCal.
I have three closed tabs, each with the five available colors, designated to specific activities I have since abandoned: community service, the gym, read: studt, read: leisure, correspondence, and formal composition. Perhaps I also have colors for calling home, taking showers, eating breakfast, intentionally forgetting to eat lunch, and oftentimes forgetting to eat dinner. On off days, I add tabs for seeing bad movies, grocery shopping for food I will forget to eat, and buying drugs. If I am lucky, I will schedule sex in for 6 AM, somewhere between when I fall alseep to my boyfriend's heaving chest and wake up to the rhythms of Jackson 5's "I Want You Back." [On a sidenote, I should add a color for every time I play this song. My paranoia has convinced me that my iTunes doesn't record each play.]
The elevated sense of pleasure I experience from my iCal recalls the feverish temerity the Aikin siblings:
"Here, though we know before-hand what to expect, we enter into them with eagerness, in quest of a pleasure already experienced. This is the pleasure constantly attached to the excitement of surprise from new and wonderful objects. A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced, of 'forms unseen and mightier far than we,' our imaginaton, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy cooperating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement."
Indeed, the power that overcomes when considering the fantasy that is my ability to follow any schedule or to do list places me at the top of a hierarchy of consciousness that begins with transcendence and concludes in the Empyrean itself.
Next week I will actually follow my plans. I will wake up every morning at 8 AM, run three miles while watching co-authors of economic textbooks tell instruct me about the decline of modern civilization, read for eight hours, write for four, eat three meals a day, have sex at least twice, and remind myself to tell my mother that I love her. For now, I am going to stare into space and consider St. George's relation to the dragon.
Indeed, the power that overcomes when considering the fantasy that is my ability to follow any schedule or to do list places me at the top of a hierarchy of consciousness that begins with transcendence and concludes in the Empyrean itself.
Next week I will actually follow my plans. I will wake up every morning at 8 AM, run three miles while watching co-authors of economic textbooks tell instruct me about the decline of modern civilization, read for eight hours, write for four, eat three meals a day, have sex at least twice, and remind myself to tell my mother that I love her. For now, I am going to stare into space and consider St. George's relation to the dragon.
