My body constantly wants to eat the universe.

Somehow this week I am finishing up grad school (again), starting to fast for Ramadan, and moving out of my place to escape to the country. I'm oddly calm about all of the Major Life Transitions that are Happening Right Now, but that could just be the denial talking. There is no furniture in my house except for a mattress on the floor and a decrepit book shelf full of old bank statements and art supplies (mostly red). The majority of my belongings are in piles on the floor, usually right next to empty boxes, but not actually in the boxes. Packing everything I own and cleaning the place in two days while I am not eating for 12 hours a day should be easy, right?

This Ramadan got off to a weird start. Actually it got off to a perfect start, since it began last night. I was having dinner with H. at Mother's when the sun set, which was lovely and in some ways a great encapsulation of how this transition is going. Because who else, several weeks before she is about to move across the country, more or less falls in love with a man with muscular dystrophy 18 years her senior? NO ONE. (Well, H. might know a few...) Ah well. I love longing and mystery and the universe kindly showers me with an abundance of both. It is very interesting to know him right now, as we are both going through Major Life Transitions. He is buying some land outside of Austin to start a holistic health center for folks with MD. It feels like there is something else at play in us (re)entering each others' lives at this particular moment.

Anyway, the weirdness of Ramadan was this morning. I couldn't sleep last night so I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning reading about the holographic nature of the universe. Then I started investigating how I could spend some time at Esalen before I settle down in whatever my next hometown will be. I finally went to bed at about 4 am, only to wake up two hours later to try and beat the sun. So I went to McDonald's. MCDONALD'S. I started off my first day of fasting with MCDONALD's. After which I promptly fell asleep on the couch. Fail. Damn you, enchanting holographic nature of reality.

The rest of the day was a blur of almost-but-not-quite packing and finishing up things at my internship. I had my last meeting with my fabulous supervisor Inga Larson, during which I started to feel the effects of not eating for 8 hours. Since there was not much food in my house for dinner, I went to Central Market. I'm pretty disorganized when I shop anyway, so you can imagine what it was like on a very empty stomach with little sleep. There were no straight lines, no lists, just the chaotic tracing of nutrient-deprived neural networks back and forth across the shiny floors. There was actually something strangely interesting about the experience, watching the impulse to snack on the cheese samples, being utterly distracted by the smell of fresh coffee. My body constantly wants to eat the universe.

Fasting started to get quite amazodelirinteresting around 6:30 pm, when my brain really started to shut down. I was increasingly delirious in my house without furniture, stumbling around piles of clothes and empty boxes, trying to talk to strangers from Craigslist who really really really want the last of my belongings. At some point I became fascinated with the pile of half-filled journals I have accumulated since high school. I thumbed through them in a reverie, feeling like I needed to DO something with them, but unable to figure out what. One of them was empty except for the sentence "Everyone needs a pet monkey" and a list of peoples' addresses from 1995.

At some point I did a little latihan and started cooking dinner. Cooking actually helped me feel more focused and wasn't as difficult as I expected. And then I felt normal again. Simple as that. So normal that I am now drinking tea and smoking cigarettes at Spiderhouse (fail). So normal that I am concerned I will stay up again all night reading about holograms.

Lather, rinse, repeat.