Brainz

“Everyone wants to be readable in a society doomed by the parable of first impressions.” – Me


How was I smart? I wrote that sentence almost five years ago. Aren’t brains supposed to come with age? At least, that is what all our old liar-faced grannies keep saying.


That sentence came to me today as a string of words on my first read. I had to rewind the language for a minute and hit repeat. I knew I missed something the first time around. I found even more on my third read. Rolling those words over and over again in my brain … seriously, how was I smart? That feels so far away from my writing today.


I am surprised by my own eloquence. I love the play on literary language between ‘readable’ and ‘parable’. That a story is read. That appearances are the first story we tell to a new person, in a new environment, facing a new situation. Even before words are said. All we can hope is people correctly interpret our stories. Huh, that’s deep.


That sentence came out of my institutional years. College. Not mental hospital. I plucked it from a paper for a class I took called Politics of the Body. My essay babbles intelligently on the social status, race, sexuality, religion, etc. worn on our bodies and where that puts us in the world.


If you want to read something intelligent - I’ll send you the paper, but that’s not what I do here. I won’t be pulling those kinds of sentences out of my butt. I don’t even know if my butt has any more of those sentences stored inside. All I can do here is admit that I miss thinking that way. Critically, on assignment, persuasively, logically, structuring thought and presentation. I don’t really have much of a reason these days to talk about how if you look a certain way in our society you are automatically fucked. Wow. Way to dumb it down. Where did my brain go?