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wordcount She feels tired, she sits at the keyboard, all night long, these are her days, typing away, while time stands still, it is july fourth, something important in the US, not here though, here in her small Vancouver apartment, where it is so very quiet, no one breathes here, only her, the music is playing, but it is viscerally quiet, stillness within her own little world, outside the garden, no motion, her glasses are too big, everything is utterly annoying, so very much. she only whines and whales into the computer, this is not literature, poetry, maybe, words that string all over the horizon, like cables between telephone poles, crows dotting them, sitting there like knobs against the sky, the wire being the whole sentence, the birds being the words, something like that. Birds on a wire, hmm, sounds familiar, ever so slightly. Poetry in motion, the music stopped, she can hear her laptop hum, she never noticed the humming before. Vancouver is overcasted, white, fluffy clouds, wind is blowing, in summer. The weather in this city is always temperamental, what is beautiful about that? Well, the license plates shape our world, our collective conscience. They hiccup our own feelings, put the individual perception in line with the others, the perceived others on the street, strangers passing her by, fast and slow. She should make her way to bean bros and debate whether to frequent starbucks or bean bros, US or Canada, as if it matters, as if it really matters. None of these establishments is affiliated with East-Azerbaijan, except for the East-Azerbaijany at the counter: her. She ponders, whether she should dive headfirst into exploring identity issues, but gives up, before she even starts, there are people who feel so much stronger about identity or non-identity, about religion, about politics, about bigger issues about smaller issues, she only feels hungry, slightly annoyed by her laptop that shuts down whenever it feels like it, does its own thing, that seems to be a pretty functional machine nonetheless, that might not chew up her files, that might do just like its master wants it to. Machines annoy her, life annoys her. The wordcount says 357, 1

she wonders if that is enough for this day here in her greenish decorated place, where the fridge makes funny noises, and she starts humming to herself, at herself. When did she become a writer, when did she leave the world of animation? “I am a recovering animator”, she says at cocktailparties. “Oh, how much does that pay?” - “Ah, nothing.” - “ Oh!” Her life, her life. She indents kind of randomly, spells at random, punctuates at random, makes up words, sits here and writes. Each and every day. Her fingers are getting numb, especially the right middlefinger that does all the typing, is the prima ballerina. The main man. 487 words now, did tolstoi count the words. No, he was busy talking about war and peace. Who knows, who knows.?It is so very quiet here, only typing noise, she is getting insane. Actually she might have arrived already, in insanityness. She hates to be alone, some very annoyed robinson crusoe. She misspells everything here, her prose is splashed with red and green squiggly lines, 537 words. She has to find the page thingie, she has to print this out, to spellcheck, not necessarily in that order. Animation is so much more calming whereas writing makes her nervous and her eyes twitch. 571 words, 576. Maybe she should spellcheck. Maybe she should open the curtain, let the light in . maybe she should use big words, engage in some kind of discourse. Any discourse will do. And 606 words are in the file, by now. Her indenting used to be by typing, but then she found out that all the university presses asked for using the tab-key. Yale did, so did Harvard. the u-presses have really detailed manuscript guidelines, great teachers of conventions in the world of formatting. This is kind of fun, spending her days googling this and googling that. Learning some stuff. These are her days here on this green, velvety couch. She should take up yoga, she’ll be the perfect soccermom. Without soccer, though. Soccer is absent from her life. Spellcheck, spellcheck and save and type. Exhale, inhale. Her life sucks, she is going crazy. But she said that before. She will stop writing 2

once she has arrived at 999 words. Or maybe 997. Words, math, writing is so much like animation, math, math. Her animation prof used to say “animation equals pure math”, he calibrated the scenes, the frames, he would pick a narrative into exact parts, frame by frame. He gave her an F. How could she get an F? It does not make any difference in the scheme of things. Of course it does. She is at word 819. She types in the wordcount, and the wordcount changes, because the word demarking the wordcount adds up to the wordcount. Weird phenomenon. She should not curse in an essay, people get F’s, but she does not really understand why she gets an F. Others get F’s. Dumb people. Not her. She feels much too smart. She feels entitled to an A plus. At the very least. Magna cum laude, not suma cum lade. The wordcount is kind of erratic, this laptop does weird things. Well, as long as it does not explode. 913 words, she should sum this up with something breathtakingly insightful, intellect poured down in words, like chocolate sauce over strawberry ice cream. It is lunchtime, she is slightly hungry. Types away, bitter, frustrated, philosophically. Words pile up, mixed letters on the monitor, number 953, not 999 yet. She should stab poetry, throw her creative ball into the court of poets, follow into countries of songs and words that motion like melodies, like dances in the wilderness. Hey, that sounds, good, word 991, 995, 997, …999. Arrived. Finally. And another five words to the end. Now.

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