Nervous System - Intellectual

This lyric, obviously saying her bad habits slip loose, and so she drinks and smokes, and was lying to her doctor about this habit of hers in the office. There’s not much meaning to it that I know of other than what I had said, she lied to her doctor about a habit, drinking and smoking, etc.

A pun on the ‘sympathetic nervous system’ which controls the fight-or-flight response, this is Candi commenting on how it makes her hostile and difficult to deal with, even for herself. She can’t go out and do the things she wants to do, because of her ‘unsympathetic’ nervous system, which won’t cut her a break.

Returning to the obsessive thoughts from the first verse. She can’t stop thinking about car crashes when she touches her car keys any more than she can stop thinking about trepanation in the doctor’s office.

Both a thing to worry about/obsess over and a thing to crave, in a way. Not the “hole drilled in the skull,” part but the “taking the pressure off” part.

How the anxiety disorder is affecting her self-image. She doesn’t want to go out, so she’s becoming a ‘houseplant’ with cat hair on her sweatpants. The hatred is self-hatred. She doesn’t want to be this, but also can’t stop, just like the car wreck and trepanation ideation.

Thematically twinned with the bridge, which gets directly into the neurobiology of it.

This illustrates how Candi’s anxiety disorder creeps into her thoughts. Even sitting in a doctors' office having an innocuous conversation about her job and schooling, she can’t help but turn her mind towards the gruesome – trepanation.

We ‘are’ our brains in a way that’s more true and direct than the way in which we are our bodies, and these fancy words define, but don’t add understanding.