Status Updates From Clima

gosh i feel like i'm not reading this fast enough- 😵‍💫🏃🏻‍♀️🏃🏻‍♀️

"Anytime I think I am a semidecent person, I remember this story someone told me once about her ex-husband. [...] He never came home when he said he would, [...] he had a rule that if anyone asked him for help he would pause to see what that person needed. [...] Sometimes it was money, sometimes food; once a man needed a belt and he gave him his. [...] They broke up because he was a mean drunk, but still.

"Sometimes now with students there are these moments when it feels like a sudden cold wind blew through. So lately I've been checking that my sweater is buttoned right, that my T-shirt isn't too weird. I'm like a woman carrying a full cup into a room of strangers, trying not to spill it."

"One morning a student tells me failure is not an option and is angered when I laugh. I assume a cheerful manner. I tell her, Hey, me too, I used to have plans! Biggish ones, medium at least. She stares at me. Sorry? she says. After she goes, I slip into the bathroom, make sure I don't have lipstick on my teeth."

"When we worked together years ago, she always told me I had no game. She said this because allegedly you are not supposed to cut to the chase and ask your fellow dater to tell you about the time he was most soul-crushingly lonely. Allegedly this is not a best practice. But it makes a date so much less boring. Do you, did you, will you? I just want to know."

*i didn't mean my phone being stolen

"She tells me that her phone was stolen and she's been using a really old one instead. She won't get the newest model, she's decided. "So I just go at a slower pace. I know I'm missing things because I can't respond quickly enough to what people say or show me, but that's okay. It gives me more time to think," she says."

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MY DREAM

"My mother told me once that each thing, each being, has two names. One is the name by which it is known in this world and the other is a secret name that it keeps hidden. But if you call it by this name it cannot help but respond. This is the name by which the creature was known in the Garden of Eden."

"We order grilled cheese sandwiches and eavesdrop on the people at the next table. "Is he your soul mate?" the woman asks her friend.
"Hard to tell," she says."

""Some things are in the air, they float around," she says, and I think of leaves, of something falling and accumulating without notice."

"I need to pack for this trip, but there's something buzzing around the room. I can't see it, but I can hear it hurling itself against the glass. A bee maybe, or a wasp. Over there, on the blinds, I think. I capture it with the aid of a cup and an index card.

Quiet in the cup. Hard to believe that isn't joy, the way it flies away when I fling it out the window."

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way to be cynical

"A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you're my mother? Sometimes you don't seem like a good enough person.

He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don't know, once or twice a day."

"What it means to be a good person, a moral person, is calculated differently in times of crisis than in ordinary circumstances, [...] Suppose you go with some friends to the park to have a picnic. This act is, of course, morally neutral, but if you witness a group of children drowning in the lake and you continue to eat and chat, you have become monstrous."

"One good thing about being addicted to sleeping pills is that they don't call it "addicted"; they call it "habituated.""

"It's slow today so I help her set up for class.
Cushions for the strong, chairs for the weak. "You should stay," she always tells me, but I never do.
Not sure where to sit."

"You seem to identify down, not up. Why do you think that is?"

You tell me, lady.

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🙄

"In the first class I ever took with Sylvia, she told us about assortative mating. Meaning like with like-depressive with depressive. The problem with assortative mating, she said, is that it feels perfectly correct when you do it. Like a key fitting into a lock and opening a door. The question being: Is this really the room you want to spend your life in?"