Month: September 2024

There’s a drawing of a fingerprint on a dialog box, prompting me to take action during a sign-in process. I envy those clear ridges regaling my screen—surely the work of a good designer. However, they can also be found in real life: I recently came across one, during a demonstration of what a legible fingerprint should look like. Nothing like the smudges I sport.

Still reeling from my failed identity check, I learned that there are times when forensics teams find themselves working with a dry cadaver with desiccated fingerprints, which makes it impossible to identify. How do go about this hurdle? Turns out, there is a product for exactly that case scenario. There’s a special lotion with capsaicin that moisturizes fingertips and plumps them up. For more severe cases, the investigator will use another type of fluid and inject it into the fingertips to achieve the same effect. And then, voilà! Fingerprints clear as day.

As I am still a living thing, but with slightly cadaver-like fingers, I wondered how I could avail myself of the magical potion I first described; however, one of the purveyors only sells to government clients and the other one charges special hazmat shipping costs. The only alternative solution provided by an official source: moisturizing often for a certain period ahead of the fingerprinting session.

So here I am, frantically slathering different kinds of cream on my hands in hopes that I will pass the test when I retake it.

Day one of a new endeavor is one of elation. There is so much faith in yourself, a sense of invincibility brought about by the achievement of a single step. Look at you—a person of action!—moving a whole inch forward. You’re unstoppable.

On day two, however, the euphoria wears off and reality sets in: You made a promise to yourself. Now it’s time to deliver.

Suddenly, that single step, that easy inch, stretches like taffy into infinity. A strike of true terror shakes your bones: This is what the rest of your life is meant to look like. And it’s up to no one but you to make it so.

Resign yourself to the fate you chose one fine day when you were feeling particularly optimistic. Carry that optimism with you as you cross the chasm of bad days. Don’t ever look ahead again—you already know how painful and useless that is. Remember, though, to stop for a second every once in a while, look back, and marvel at how far you’ve come.

My mind has been feeling a little bit eroded lately, language-wise. A smooth, sandblasted brain. I’ve been unconsciously sneaking Japanese grammar structures into my English sentences, and don’t get me started on the way my mind seems to drift off mid-sentence, because there are holes where entire phrases used to be. Sometimes I’m looking for a word in either Spanish or English, and my mind serves me a smorgasbord of possibilities in Japanese, French, German… everything save the language I actually need. So this is day 1 of me writing every day to try to save my mind from utter obliteration.

I wonder how I survived in Japan with absolutely no one to talk to. Well, social media was not as pervasive back then, and I still had to go to school and participate in class, which counts as talking. Oh my god, is this what they call brain rot? I definitely feel an unusual sluggishness when trying to respond during conversation. Have I brought this upon myself due to overconsumption of social media? Is there such a thing as a healthy dose of social media, anyway? I’ve already written about this, and the answer is no. Not for me, at least. There must be a way to make it more educational, though, like following accounts in my weaker languages only. Ha! That’s where I’m one step ahead of you, says social media. I’ll make it impossible for you to see only the things you follow. I’ll make you crave more novelty, and forget about your original noble (albeit very naïve) intent.

My weakened language production skills have brought about an unhealthy habit of second-guessing every word I say. Is this idiom correct? Is this sentence structure correct? My mind is negating decades of written and oral communication in my two main languages. Meanwhile, my third language is neither regressing nor thriving. Ha, what a fancy way to say I’m stuck.

So, to make the jump from whining to action, in addition to these writing exercises, I’m ramping up my water intake because hydration is also vital for optimal brain function. Nothing can come out of a shriveled up brain.

(I also need to talk to actual people on a regular basis, but life in this century is making that particular endeavor especially hard.)

Why oh why, why on Earth am I still playing the charade of doing basically all my web surfing on incognito/private mode? It made sense maybe ten years ago, when I realized I was using my browsing history to trace my every move online just to remember what I was doing on a certain day—probably an anxiety-induced frenzy. I decided to go full incognito in an effort to kill that urge, or at least the possibility to fulfill it. So now I go on opening tab after tab after tab because it will help me remember that I will need this later, as if an open tab were an item in a to-do list, until months later something insignificant happens and boom, in an instant all the tabs are gone forever. And then I feel like half my brain and life history have blown up in smithereens, because I absolutely cannot remember what any of those tabs contained, but surely they were really important, otherwise why would I leave them up like that, and their presence there must have conveyed something about who I was and what I was doing and thinking about back then (when?), and earlier than that, like a slice of earth and its rock layers.

This particular batch of tabs, the one I’m mourning right now, feels like I’ve just lost some souvenirs from a wonderful trip. Lord knows the real loss was exponentially worse. Still, the real memories of recent marvelous travels remain intact, as does the joy of them happening.

I told Cavorite while we brushed our teeth that I had a bunch of old tabs close on me.
“Good!” he said.
“Cold water is healthy,” I replied, “but it’s still a bucket of cold water.”