Riceaamy
There’s a feeling you get sometimes that’s redolent of what the rice must feel like in a tightly-wrapped Chipotle burrito. It’s neither nesecarily a positive or negative sensation, but more a pressure of substance, of things pressing down on you, making you flat, confining you under their weight.
Think of how the rice must feel all squished in the tortilla wrapping of a burrito: all these little particles flattened together into a nondescript layer that’s constantly being bombarded by fierce tomato or meat or spice bits. That’s rough. And heavy. All the other burrito ingredients try to permeate into the rice, try to wiggle in, penetrate into the solid layer by being stealthy and bland. That’s what happens when the burrito wrapper wraps up your burrito so tightly; gravity pulls everything into the rice layer. And then. BAM. Your burrito explodes because the layering gets lopsided.
That’s what it feels like right now.
I am the rice. My roommate’s untamed messiness; looming tests; the stress of losing a driver’s license and not knowing how I’m going to fly to DC on Friday without ID; the soreness of having to carry a blacked-out friend home from Lee Circle tonight; not knowing anything about ANOVA tests; having my room appear like it has become bulimic and keen on vomitting its own beads, cups, other Mardi Gras loot into itself; not knowing how or when I’m going to live in Chicago this summer, but knowing that I’m going to make it happen; a phone service that fails to be reliable during Carnival; feet that hurt; academics that need attending to—these things are the other burrito ingredients, innocuous as single things, but impossibly exhausting to deal with collectively.
The things that press down on us don’t have to be monumental in themselves. Just as a tomato slice, a dollop of guac, or whatever else you put in burrito are not enough alone to tickle your taste buds. But it’s the collective force of them all that sometimes is hard to deal with. The confluence of everything, that’s when life gets intimidating. So what does it take to mitigate the frustration caused by the compounding of all this stuff? Let your burrito explode.
Don’t pretend it’s nothing. Just let it all out, let all your present annoyances penetrate into your layer of sensibility, internalize them, deal with them respectively and then move on. The thing is, I think, that the only way to keep yourself sane when insanity seems imminent is to localize the trouble, deal with it, and then repeat the process until everything in your life is back in working order. You can’t fix everything without first fixing every thing. Address everything that’s been troubling you and get back ownership of the things you’ve lost control of (academics, friends, relationships, body, etc). The whole burrito metaphor thing, that’s gotten kind of tangled up in this blog post (I don’t remember whether it makes more sense to be the burrito or the rice), but regardless: catharsis is important. And urgently so when we’ve been consumed and distracted by tons of stuff in our lives.
Tomorrow is a purging day.
