I had a talk with one of the techs at the clinic yesterday while I was lying in the scanner. A short talk. I asked for some water and she said something in Dutch. It had a lot of "krch" sounds and I never got any water.
When I was in 7th grade, I was like the class psychologist. There was a brief break in my generally outcast-flavored life when boys and girls would seek me out on the playground or in the lunch hall to ask my advice on love and life. Does he like me? Should I tell my parents? You could just play the odds and say "No" to all these questions. "No" is actually the correct answer 99% of the time. But my thing was, I knew that if I could get them to do something, act a certain way to that other person, maybe even pass a note to some third person at the right moment, then maybe the answer would become yes. I didn't just want to inform. I wanted them to get what they wanted.
I could work that kind of 14-dimensional emotional chess behind my back. I had a granular, transformable mental map of 7th grade social attraction forces running picture-in-picture on my occipital lobe at all times. A sparkly magenta line drew taut between two nodes with a little snap to show attraction. I'd know before they did themselves, if they ever did. Does an antenna know what song it's transmitting or receiving? They were antennae and I was a radio. And now I'm blindsided by krchng. The airwaves are clean and nobody's singing to me. It's all gone quiet. I can rest.
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