Deterioration

Things crescendo, and then they fall, I feel like. Talent, careers, classes, natural disasters, the economy...

Today I got into a moment when all I could think about was breathing, imagining a rasping, shallow breath in my mind and magnifying my own breath. This was before and after Chem section. I walked, because I shouldn't ride my bike, and when I got out of section the strangest feeling overcame me. At this point I'm used to intense moments of feelings, but this was just...nothing, like a white canvas waiting to be filled with noise. The University was empty, so that added to the wasteland feel, but I have a feeling it's not too far off from what one feels/hears when one's drowning. A little calm in the storm before death takes over.

I don't panic. I rarely freak out over anything, but I do let things build up until I break over - so that's my version of freaking out, a delayed reaction unfolding rather than an immediate explosion. So for this crescendo I decided to take a long, long walk around most of the campus. I do everything I usually do: take off my shoes, lighten my load, and walk where the ground is hottest so that the heat distracts. I didn't have my harmonica this time, but it wasn't nighttime. I play Latin guitar music on my iPod touch's Pandora, and I walk, for a really long time.

At one point I passed by a broken Skye bottle, which is one of my favorite alcohol bottles because it's such a deep blue. And I consider the shards for a moment, a long moment. Just gently. I decided that my red wouldn't mix too well with this solid blue to make purple, and that I'd better not try. But the bottom of the bottle had broken clean off so that it was just a round plate of slightly curved glass, like the round glass pieces in your bio lab back home, with hardly any fencing at all. I took it as a memento, and the guy upstairs currently has it right now, but I'll get it back from him, soon.

Alessandra had a dream about making a kaleidoscopic wind chime out of pieces of colored glass. I want to try it, if only I can figure out how to cut a hole in the glass.

From a peer: Frankenstein's monster is the representation of the neglected human soul, which turns violent. Some part of you mutates, then quietly sleuths around killing your loved ones until until you die. But until you die, it'll always be in your shadow, and you know it, and you can't get rid of it. You just know that it's always there. But my question is, can we prevent the birth of the monster? Once the original monster is created it seems pretty easy to prevent it from pro-creating. But the Frankenstein created his monster just as easily as any student might come up with a mathematical proof. Frankenstein's monster is his master thesis, he created unknowingly yet thinking he was onto to something new, something great (wouldn't the secret of life be great for medicine?). It's a sequential process: you find something bugging you in the back of your mind, you explore it, you'll probably find something disgusting that's true, but that you'd wish later that you didn't stumble across.

Is it unavoidable? Do romanticists always find the darkness in themselves whenever they went soul-searching? And should this serve as a warning to readers about their own self-exploration?

I'm still trying to flesh out answers for my SLE93 final...so much to go through.