I have these ideas about things.

Like, there's nothing gayer than a straight woman dating an extremely manly, virile, man. I think it has something to do with gender performance, and straight relationships looking a hell of a lot like butch-femme relationships. That's postmodernism, right there. Or maybe it's subversive. I've forgotten the meaning of a lot of these words I learned in college. I spent a lot of time in college learning a whole vocabulary to describe things and then piecing those new words together in strings that I thought made sense. It was an exploration of language and meaning and how to talk about things.

I had a professor who would ask, "Can you know something without having the words describe it?" He was talking about feelings and such. Later, I found out that some cultures have words that are missing in English for emotions that I don't fully understand. I'm not sure if this makes him wrong or right, but I do know that I'll be learning new words my whole life. That I'll be paying attention to words.

I miss reading The Road so much that I imagine my surroundings transformed into The Road's landscape. Today I drove to St. Helena over the mountains, watching my gas mileage rise and fall while my car's computer generated an average. You can only really have an average when you have a beginning and an end. What's the point of averaging a pool? Like say, the average age that a pool of children start to walk? The answer is 2 and a half, but does that help us in any way? Does it fill our lives with meaning? We only start to pay attention when something is outside the average, but if there never were an average in the first place, everything would be significant.

There were signs from the 70s pointing to landmarks for geysers and petrified forests and it was raining, supposed to start snowing. I imagined the father and son from The Road, pushing their little cart up these hills. Searching the petrified forest museum for food but only discovering relics of burned wood. They didn't keep track of averages. Their whole life was a giant pool of unrelated events. My dad says that this is the absence of God in Cormac McCarthy's books - the unrelated, the meaningless. Seems to me that needing God in order to have meaning is something we invented - along with the mathematics we use to assign averages. What's actually god-like is senseless and meaningless and full of mystery. Which is how the book ends - with this soulful description of ugly fish, continuing life in the face of wreckage.

I've read a couple of post-apocalyptic books since becoming pregnant. I also had a dream that the world was ending, and in the dream I knew it was because earth had fallen into the ocean. All of the children stuck to the ceilings of their houses and died. People were abandoning the cities and I was following them, but I kept thinking, "Where do we think we're going? The world fell into the ocean."

Every night, Rafael bursts through the door in the evening, demands everyone's attention, exaggerates his stories and then passes out while watching boxing on television.

When I was 16 or so, one of my crushes said, "I came home and passed out." To which his snarky brother said, "You didn't pass out. You fell asleep." I was thinking about these people today because I saw photos of them at a picnic. It's eleven years later and I've tried to stay friends with this crush, to keep that wonderful feeling alive inside of myself. It's blatant selfishness, really.

I have imaginary conversations with him and today I thought to say, "You'll always be my number two."