The sound of the toilet trying to clear its throat is incessant, and the stink bugs keep kamikazing towards my window screen. Do stink bugs get concussed? Rain is a thin blanket between me and the scratching rodents of the void. They are mating or fighting right now. This is not what people mean when they say to be present, surely. But being present in the way people mean feels impossible; presence is a fleeting and ever elusive concept, especially now. Sometimes time spent waiting is the only real time I have. I think I am the most aware of the weight of my brain in the one minute and thirty seconds it takes to make my oatmeal. I find myself somewhere inside the black box of uncertainty, looking out through the glowing orange window—each revolution of thought spitting out an emotion: hot, but not quite ready.
Being done right now feels like walking up to someone I have never talked to and saying: “I will never see you again, isn’t that crazy?” It feels like swimming in shallow, turquoise water, but heading towards deep oatmeal brain mush. Unwritten articles and unmade edits bubble between Thursdays and Sundays as far as the eye can see.
One thing I have learned is that it is good to be kind to yourself as you wait on the naturecultural machine to do its work on you. Sophomore year, I remember going to my classes and waiting, wondering what amount of suntanned grass would poke at me between now and then, then and now. And how many hairs would wind themselves towards me like bifurcating streams through the stalks, and who would they belong to. That was the year I started journaling, spending stolen seminar minutes and the minutes before a Tinder date deciding if I was trying to therapize myself or be an artist about it. When I needed kindness, therapizing won out.
Sophomore year, things also came into focus for me and a lot of people I know. We could no longer subsist on the thrill of meeting five new people every night, and we no longer felt invincible. In my case, the Play-Doh I was always eating ended up giving me indigestion. It felt like time to get serious, so I took off my computer stickers and started writing articles for The Misc, jam packed with facts and quotes from the same people who told me the facts. When I wrote about how the college is working towards carbon neutrality, my brain-filter was working overtime to purify the writing that my creative writing “voice” had contaminated. Finally, someone told me I could write whatever I wanted, just not in the News section, and I applied to be an Opinions columnist, never once looking back.
What many of us have developed is such a robust filter that when we talk we create an escape chute so we do not have to filter everything fully. For me, thorough (although no longer News section level) filtration looks something like writing a Misc article. The information comes in, I filter it through my catalogue of experiences and let my ADHD chew on it a bit, but not too much. Then forget about it for a week because I really have a paper due, and my friend is going through a breakup and I have to do my laundry. Then I raise my hand in Wednesday Ed Board when Opinions desperately needs writers for the third week in a row and get about 15 seconds of feeling like a hero between grateful smiles before it hits me that my writer brain, the one that consists of a primitive Lifestraw through which oatmeal moves, is clogged all the way to my hunt and peck fingers. Actually, although the filter is chronically clogged, it has been moving slowly for the past week, so when I sit down to finally write the thing, I go and go and go.
In conclusion, here is my oatmeal recipe: Steal your substitution milk of choice from the milk alternatives fridge in the Deece. I like unsweetened almond milk (30 percent more calcium than cows’ milk). Purchase a container of instant oats from My Market. The ratio of oats to milk is on the package so read the package every single time. If your housemate went abroad and left a tub of matcha powder in the cupboard, use a scoop of that and some cinnamon, and send a thank you text to her at the end of the year. Then, one minute and thirty-three seconds of meditating or dishwashing or peeing. Imagine microwaving your brain and waking up to smell oatmeal. Graduate with your belly full, an appreciation for your mutualistic relationship with The Miscellany News, and a thirst to continue writing op-eds.