I can’t bring myself to clean my room. After over a week of guests, my floor has become cluttered with the droppings of clothes missing their target and empty containers of things that have fulfilled their use. At my head sits an empty box of Tropical flavor Emergen-C. I hate tropical flavor, and I knew this when I bought it, but as I stood in line at Trader Joe’s I was tempted by the new packaging that they had surrounded the fart-tasting dust in. Now I’ve finished off the little drink creators as I used them every morning to make my employment more bearable. Next to that stands proudly another tool of forcing my awakeness in the morning – an empty bottle of multi-vitamins. It’s label stares at me like an archeological discovery of a tool from another time. On the front is written Alternative Market, the store I grew up in – that my parents’ owned. A store that is now defunct. Though I am always able to go home, I realize now that I will never be able to truly revisit my childhood as the carob covered rice cakes, gelatin free gummi worms, and fruit juice spritzers that I used to spend the majority of my time surrounded by will no longer be there to be surroundings.

At the foot of my bed a spoon peeks out from the lip of a fully eaten Ben and Jerry’s Cinnamon Bun Ice Cream. I had had three bites left when I realized I was full, but I finished off the ice-cream so that I wouldn’t have to return to the freezer, stopping at some point mid-journey to put on pants. The empty carton of a $10 bubble machine stands propped up against the wall near my left. I have a hard time not buying fun things that cost less than a Bento Box. My dad once sent me a new jacket, and as I opened the care package he had so thoughtfully prepared I got a call. He told me that he knew I didn’t need a jacket and that I was going to complain about his oversensitivity to the climate I was in, but “just look at the price tag.” He too had bought what he considered a fun toy that he found for $10. I am my dad’s son, just funner and less useful.

One thing is full, and it is because it is impossible to be empty. Within reaching distance, or what I like to call the realm in which I exist, there lies a book that a friend brought over after finding on the side of the street and left because she cared for it little as she had found it on the side of the street. 20,000 Words Sixth Edition reads the cover. I wonder if it’s 20,000 different words than were in the first five editions. Probably not. I don’t think that these are words 100,001-120,000. As this entry has been an exercise in finding symbolic meaning in the mundane objects within eye-sight, I will open to a random page find a random word and then prescribe meaning in a way that is both thought-proving, and representational of the mental strife this entry has re-ignited.

Knee-deep: It’s too easy to relate the mountains of trash that surround me to the concept of being overwhelmed by material that makes it harder to move forward, so I will go another route. Though I lie here knee-deep in words that could provide interesting but difficult to create parallels to my quarter life crisis of comedic proportions, I am stuck with the word knee-deep. Not kumquat, the fruit that I first tried in my parent’s health food store that made me want to understand how evolution knew to create such a delicious treat. Not Koh-i-noor, a word I had no knowledge of as my love of the shiny capitalist symbols of wealth is outmatched by my love of anything including the death of infants. Not labial which would have been awesome to come up with reason to write about. Instead I’m stuck with knee-deep. All those words are on the same page as where my finger pointed, but I am stuck with the shitty, easy path. I wish I were knee-deep in labial pleasure, juicing that kumquat for every penny that the Koh-i-noor is worth because then I would get to use all these words and someone in this room would be happy.