M

y friend Eli 
Chanoff once 
remarked 
that everyone 

in the world would benefit 
from drinking a tall glass of 
water right now. I think this 
is probably true. It is certainly 
true for me. Out of the set of 
emotional and physical states 
a person can be in — of which 
there are many, maybe infinite 
— dehydrated is the one I most 
commonly exist in.

I notice, most acutely, the 

symptoms of my dehydration 
when I’m in class. The corners 
of my eyes get a little blurry, 
as if someone put tiny drops 
of water in them. Sometimes I 
feel like I’m drifting away from 
my body. I’ll lean back into my 
chair and most of me will be 
caught by the back of the chair 
but part of me will keep tilting 
back, back and out of my body. 
I’m equal parts familiar with 
the sensation and insanely 
freaked out by it. I panic until 
something snaps me back into 
my own body and I resolve to 
hydrate more the next day.

The problem is, I forget to 

remember.

I wake up the next morning 

and forget to drink water, I 
forget that yesterday I spent 
class swirling in my body 
instead of paying attention. I 
choose instead to recycle my 
saliva for 30 minutes until I 
down a $3 coffee. I tell myself 

coffee is made from water so it’s 
hydrating me in some way.

I generally believe that the 

reason anybody is anything is 
extremely complicated.

I like to believe that I am 

dehydrated because of a set 
of small, seemingly unrelated 
factors that subtly pushed 
me toward dehydration and 
continue to push me away 
from hydration. What if I never 
got into the habit of carrying 
around a reusable water bottle 
because my mother liked the 
ease and aesthetic of red Solo 
cups? What if that has made 
me subconsciously undervalue 
backpacks with exterior water 
bottle pockets? What if, before 
all of that, Ralph Nader diluted 
some percentage of Gore’s 
votes in Florida and maybe, 
just maybe, if Gore had won he 
would have enacted some set of 
policies that inspired a young 
Harry Krinsky to stop drinking 
out of red Solo cups and start 
drinking out of Nalgenes, BPA 
or no BPA? Of course, owning 
a reusable water bottle does not 
guarantee perpetual hydration, 
but the point is most mornings 
I wake up with the implicit goal 
of hydrating myself, and almost 
every night, I go to bed with a 
dry mouth and yellow pee.

The alternative, of course, is 

that I am dehydrated because 
I choose not to drink enough 
water — I am to blame. I’m not 
sure where I stand on why I am 

dehydrated. Something worth 
exploring, though, is where 
agency begins and ends in all of 
this, and getting to the bottom 
of how and where I actually 
control any individual habit in 
my life is a thought experiment 
worth doing.

As a middle schooler dealing 

with anxiety, I developed this 
ritual where I would imagine 
all of the bad thoughts swirling 
in my head as urine in my 
bladder, and when I peed, I’d 
imagine pumping the half-
conceptualized anxieties out 
of my brain, into my bladder 
and out of my body. Water 
is 
tangentially 
related 
to 

dehydration, so bear with me.

This was a strange habit, 

and Freud would have had 
something to say about it, 
and my therapist certainly 
had something to say about it. 
He told me it wasn’t a useful 
technique because repelling 
anxieties only make them more 
real. The analogy of choice is 
playing baseball with a ball that 
is attached to a long elastic rope 
that is also attached to your bat. 
If you hit a home run, the ball 
will fly far, far away over the 
fence and into the toilet bowl. 
It will, however — as most 
things attached to long elastic 
strings — eventually come 
back. It won’t just come back, 
it will shoot back, powered by 
whatever really basic physics 
concept explains what I’m 

talking about. The ball won’t 
just come back, it will be 
hurled back at you, smacking 
you in the back or the gut or 
the head. The solution: Bunt. 
When translated to an 11-year-
old with anxiety, this means 
keep your anxiety close to you 
because, after all, a baseball 
is a relatively small burden to 
carry to first base. (The analogy 
breaks down when we consider 
what running to first base with 
the ball in hand would look 
like.)

All 
that 
sounds 
simple 

enough, but bunting, just like 
hydrating, is equal parts easy 

to understand and difficult to 
follow through on.

I try my best to bunt when 

I can, but often I forget to 
bunt or forget to remember 
to bunt or forget to drink 
water or forget to care about 
school or forget to watch 
“An Inconvenient Truth.” 
I think about pee so much 
because I’m dehydrated and 
maybe I don’t think about 
education enough because 
I am educated. I think 
about habits because I had 
a therapist when I was 11 
and I bunt when I can, but I 
sometimes forget to. 

2B

Managaing Editor:

Lara Moehlman

Deputy Editors:

Yoshiko Iwai

Brian Kuang 

Photo Editor:

Alexis Rankin

Editor in Chief:

Emma Kinery 

Managing Editor:

Rebecca Lerner

Copy Editors:

Danielle Jackson

Taylor Grandinetti

Wednesday, February 22, 2017 // The Statement 

Golden State Worrier: Life Dehydrated

ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY HARDIE

BY HARRY KRINSKY, DAILY ARTS WRITER

statement

THE MICHIGAN DAILY | FEBRUARY 22, 2017

