This is Your Brain on Thesis

I am starting to wonder. It is 4 a.m. I just finished my thesis. No relief yet, just daydreams about sleeping and cinnamon muffins. I feel bumbled and daft, in a non-punkish sense. Maybe I will just throw words and sentences together, dangle participles, and mangle quotations to support cloning. Let the passive voice be abused. Lift paragraphs verbatim from the Yale Daily News. Tell people to rip out the column, sprinkle tobacco on the paper, roll it, and, as in those "heartless Columbia" posters, force a monkey to smoke it. ­Sometimes the monkey smokes you. I drifted down the Mekong with a salty, simian, 65-year-old Canadian geologist and his 45-year-old Vietnamese girlfriend. The motor lulled me to sleep. Actually, it was something a bit greener than the motor. "How'd you get that here?" I asked. "Whitehorse, Yukon, land of the free. I am old and bald. No one pays any attention to me in airport security. I have blazed a path throughout Southeast Asia." Later that night, in an open-air market in Luang Prabang, Laos, I had a leg of chicken, sauteed in golden oil. It kicked me with flavor and freshness, a heroic bird, down to the last bite...­The last worthy meal I had was at a Japanese restaurant in Shanghai. A live lobster clicked his claws as we removed the meat from his back. It was too cold. The sashimi taught me how fish could give flavor to the world. Since then, my stomach has been a mess. Not from pinchy, but from an earlier meal in Harbin, China: fried pork. Stirred vegetables with rice. Crunchy, sugary cake. Mongrel. Never eat dog in a North Korean restaurant.I despise dogs. Especially the one who cursed me to this gustatory purgatory of boiled tofu and no liquor. I also hate the wild ones. One morning, having hiked since 3 a.m., I reached a village. A dog started barking. I smiled, arms outstretched. But instead of welcoming me, the cur neared with some of his bitch friends. I pretended to swoop up a rock to throw at them, like I was taught, but they kept advancing. A villager finally called them off. I eat dogs as revenge. Stewed, they taste like brisket...If I had not been saved? I would be paddling with my hands up this same dark creek. Honestly, I could not think of anything to write this week. I wish I had a backup column I could use instead of this mess. Gary Larson drew a Far Side cartoon of a fat kid crouching inside a bee's nest. One bee detective says to the other that the rocks seem to be thrown from the inside. The caption reads, "It was late and I was tired." Sometimes you just have to write.I have told people that after graduation, I will sit down someplace quiet and write a novel. I told them it does not matter how it turns out. As long as I can hold 300 pages of myself in my hand at the end of that year, I will be satisfied. I lied. It would pain me to turn it in. It will crush me if after next year, all I have produced is a sad jumble of words. Yet sometimes I have to stamp my name next to a bungled attempt. Why not enjoy it?Two muffins are sitting in an oven. The first one says, fanning himself with his hand, "Oh my god, it's really hot in here!" Second one says, "Oh my god, a talking muffin!"