Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

How does one measure the space a person inhabits? How can one be sure of how much or how little one takes? And what is the best way to maneuver given one’s perceived size and status?

but this other option, I think, reads better. There are many different ways to say the same thing.

Yes, I could live this part forever, enjoying life on the company dime.

“It’s not a lack of confidence in oneself preventing people from going after jobs where they don’t meet all of the qualifications, but a lack of confidence in other people’s abilities to view them as capable of doing the job, and therefore hiring them,”

“The main barrier is not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception of what is a real requirement or rule, of how processes like these truly work, and this is especially a problem for women.”

The certainty is more manageable for me than the cycle of hoping/not knowing and losing and hoping/not knowing and losing.

A rush job, but I agree, because I have asked for it, plus I thrive on deadlines. It’s one of my favorite feelings—the pressure of time creeping up on me, and pushing myself to meet it.

How augmented is his reality from mine is the question I would like answered.

I remember something a friend who grew up in the countryside once told me: If you want to fit in with rural people, wear camo.

We fell in love like young people do for the first time—fast, reckless, absolutely, and hard.

If you make people believe you’re strong and comfortable enough to laugh in the face of danger, maybe then they won’t eat you alive.

Anything is possible, but not all is probable, a fortune cookie once told me.

In kindergarten. The boy who sits across from you, in a fury over your taking a crayon he wanted from the shared crayon bin, says, Your nose is flat and ugly. You’re stunned into silence. How have you never noticed this about your nose? It is the first time you see yourself in the eyes of this person, and from then on you are constantly aware of how you might appear in those eyes. Your mom advised: You tell him his nose is big and pointy and ugly. But you didn’t. His nose was not, and you were too scared and wounded to retaliate.

You are protecting a piece of yourself from people like him.

How many improbable moves did it take for us to reach each other? How many miles? How many decisions made by those before us, to carry themselves from one place to another, from the familiar to the new?

I had the idea, for example, from my father that a crisis is not only a danger but also an opportunity and that there is a positive and negative in everything.

It was the German Nietzsche who originally wrote, “Out of life’s school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.”

“Well, that is the basis of modern science. That mice are model humans.”

“That’s not you, though, taking things easy.”

I do not want to be the suitcase that he must drag behind him.

This doesn’t mean anything, if you don’t look at it that way. What does this mean, then? This means nothing. What do they mean, then? What they mean is that you mean nothing.

Children of the East Coast must understand mortality better than those on the West.

You don’t need love, you are love.

But not all of us are lucky enough to get to choose how the world defines us.

One of those fights where you look at the other person, a person you’ve known so well for so long (or so you thought), and go, aloud and inside, Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? So much so that the contours of their face begin to shift, like there are shapes and lines you’ve never seen before, and the face becomes a landscape of the unfamiliar. One of those fights. It takes a while to restore us back to one another.

“There’s a Chinese saying about this. What do you think is the most important quality to having a good connection with another person?” “That you get along with them?” “Well, of course. You have to have something in common. You can talk to them. You get along, that’s just a basic thing. An obvious thing. What is the next step? Even more important than that?” “I don’t know.” “You have to be able to reflect each other’s hearts.”

It is the nature of relationships that they are impossible to fully understand from the outside, their inner workings built both from memories and habits and histories made up from the exterior world, and from those known only between the two involved, that exist only through them and are lost when they are lost to each other. A relationship is particular in the way people are particular. Whatever lessons one can glean from other people’s relationships can only be taken in pieces, assembled into bare, minimal instructions.