One year forward, two steps back.

The first few months after I turned 25, I kept forgetting that I had grown a year older. Whenever I was asked my age, I would answer 24 and never correct myself. Twenty-five seemed like a bad age, a scary age. I had just come home from Japan then, supposedly after a specialization in Environmental Chemistry, but instead I came home lost, more unsure of what I really wanted to do, and farther from where I had pictured myself at 24, more so at 25. After a few months I switched from forgetting to avoidance. I was no longer 24, I had decided not to like being 25, and so I skipped a year ahead. I promoted myself to 26 without the benefit of another birthday. Ten years from now, I will probably think the opposite the better idea, then maybe I can take a year off that age and that, too, will seem true.

This year, I am really 26 and not much better off. Although I have a new job that I like, getting into another Master's program that I am in love with, and meeting new people, I feel that 26 was last-year-me. And maybe I'm afraid I'll get stuck again, not move forward. When asked my age now, I am confused, torn between staying 26 and moving on to 27. Besides, I like 27--it is three times nine, three cubed, it is the cube of nine divided by three. (Twenty-six, on the other hand, is simply twice thirteen, which can only mean bad luck twice over.) And I like the idea of threes, it hints at generosity, forgiveness, patience. But at the same time, it is organization, and thoroughness: Ready, set, go. Problem, experimentation, conclusion. Hook, line, sinker. Beginning, middle, end.

*****
I have been obsessed with painting my nails lately--both toes and fingers. It seems like a disguise that I assume, a pretence at an older me, a distraction, a defense, a mimicry: like bird's eyes on butterfly wings. And as much as I relish spending hours cleaning and buffing and painting, I am impatient for the two to three coats of polish to dry. As soon as I think they're set, I like to get on to other things--I arrange my stuff, read a book, set the time on a watch, or smoke a cigarette. And so always, always, I end up ruining at least two fingers. Which means I have to do them all over again and ruin the others, or apply extra coats to cover them up. Even my disguises need disguises.

But maybe there is no need to over-analyze this new hobby. The reason for it could be as simple as liking how they look, or a left-over rebellion from my years and years in the chemistry lab.

*****
Now, a progress report:

Remember my reading list over my two-month-now-over vacation? Here they are, and the crossed out ones are what I've read so far:

1. The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne
2. The Longings of Women, Marge Piercy
3. Lord Jim, Conrad
4. Kinkakuji, Mishima
5. Our Father, Bernice Rubins
6. The Shipping News, Proulx
7. Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party, Greene
8. Pere Goriot, Balzac
9. The Art of the Novel, Kundera
10. Love in the Time of Cholera, Garcia Marquez
11. In the Name of The Rose, Umberto Eco
12. In Cold Blood, Capote
13. The Silmarillion, Tolkien
14. The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood
15. The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
16. King Lear, Shakespeare
17. In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje
18. Accordion Crimes, Proulx
19. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers
20. Leaves of Grass, Whitman
21. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields

Plus other stuff I read that are not on the list:

1. Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata
2. The Izu Dancer, Kawabata
3. The Counterfeiter and Other Stories, Yasushi Inoue
4. Running for Women: A Complete Guide, Janet Heinonen

Haha. I feel good. 12 out of 25, not bad. Not bad at all.

*****

A slag is the remains of a rock after metal or other precious minerals have been removed from it. My dictionary actually qualifies these remains as "waste" material, but my environmental science training forces me to put the quotation marks, or to rephrase the definition entirely, as I have done here. Slag actually looks like broken pieces of a cinder block, so maybe waste is an appropriate term. Still, I remember a crumbling, hollowed-out mountain face in Marinduque on a tour of an abandoned copper mine. They considered that waste, too. But I thought at the time it was the closest I could come to the reality of the Grand Canyon. There was a river, too: Or two rivers that joined up. Both were contaminated with metal wastes where iron made one river orange and copper made the other a mint-greenish color, hot and cool. And when they joined the new river was half orange and half mint for miles. There were potholes,too, full of steaming acid of a deep golden green and enormous backhoes left near hills of unwanted slag. They were all beautiful. Sad and lonely and beautiful. Like magnificent sunsets caused by abandoned, unwanted particles in the atmosphere.