Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in roofsleeper's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
12:04 am	Lobotomy I give up. I have no idea what good logic is doing me other than digging me further into introspection and planning. From now on, at least here, I act as if I've had a lobotomy and have given away half my brain. And then have had a clock inserted in place. Sincere, meaningful, but no philosophical heady thoughts. For today, it felt really nice to hear the voices of two sophomores singing to the high holiday prayers. Of course, the services that I attended were for my college alma matter so there were lots of undergrads, but it felt like they were singing because they felt some passion behind words they might not have understood. It was saddening to actually read the english translations for the prayers. This is the third year that I've actually understood what's been sung, and this has only brought me to further question the event. I cannot feel the emotions expressed in the text. I am speaking empty words in ways. I'm just becoming more and more of an insomniac as I realize how superficial and nearsighted my life has been. (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 21st, 2008
10:09 pm	Narcissus My resolution is to start posting more about things other than myself to rapelle me from my funk of introspection. At the moment, I think I am confronted by my need to take and make direction of my near future. Right now, it seems that the only interests that sustain me are writing mis-wired pieces of writing, literature and anthropology. Or, rather would sustain me if I were to concentrate on these pursuits. Instead, I've committed to public health and am currently ambivalently pursuing my master's. Every week I am riddled with doubt. I've decided that if I can foresee myself not balancing life in a month, continuing to remain as blased, then I will take time off and get a position as a research assistant. Ah more to come. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
10:49 pm	The Most Important Thing in the World To combat a constant dull sense of dullness, I always try and learn more about the world. I figure this is what the zen try and do when they open their awareness to the present and widen their attention to the overwhelmingness of the world. This shouldn't just be an intellectual exercise, but for me who tries to think everything into possibility, it becomes a series of mental machinations. But for now, save a nonexistent brain black market, there's nothing better than pulling me away from this constructed mirror of self reflections. And so, I'll try and keep to this theme of trying to be omniscient though vague. Briefly. I think a lot about the worth and meaning of culture. I've concluded the most important thing is the ability to be part of something larger than yourself, to have that sustained social harmony and connection. What this means, I'm not sure of. But what I question deeply are examples stirred by the collision and fading of cultures, and the rise of the west. The recent, last uncontacted tribe found in Brazil, for example, raises the question of whether the culture should be preserved or whether a lack of contact is a sort of deprivatory exclusion. If the natives could speak in a manner that we could truly understand, would they give the same motives pre and post contact? Would they advocate change and absorption? Is this simply a prototypical universal situation with a universal answer--faced by natives in america, latin america and australia alike? Who do you listen to? (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
10:01 pm	Connected I love referencing the movie Adaptation. The point which seems like the pinnacle of absurd highness in which Susan Orleans falls for John the orchid gatherer whom she deemed as depraved or insane. As she's conducting a phone interview with him, after having met him in person and being appalled at his deshevilled, hallucinogenic lifestyle, In high school, we were given the assignment to name our role models. I named orchid hunters. I am just of the ranks of the impressionable. That is where half of me alway is. Trying to think of a prefabricated meaning to insert into the successive voids of my usual despair. How do I convince others that aren't here that my words are more than me talking to myself? How do I convince myself that I'm ? How do I put myself together? (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 6th, 2008
11:06 pm	First, last night's dream. I dreamt I was applying to grad. school and was in the process of this overnight stay that perhaps was part admissions, part only functional thing left in the world to do. My brother and I kept waiting for the grad student in a room of what was perhaps a restaurant or maybe the room of a hunting lodge. The grad student was with his girlfriend and we had to wait for him to interview us. Place seems to be important in my dreams as it's the most vivid thing I can recall, if only in ambiguity. All that I can recall. ______ For now, until I get a good journaling system, I'm tracking the mundanities of my day so I can ensure I am clearer. Today I Ate: 12 am: 6 servings sunflower butter, 1 apple 9 am probiotic, chicken, tamale 12 pm sweet potato, chicken 12:30 pm=midol 6pm broccoli, probiotic, turkey 7:30 pm=midol Ran at 1 pm. 30 minutes for 3 miles. Tried to unsuccessfully focus--poor selective attention and short term memory. but I did regain my focus around 10:25 pm. Things I need to recall for tomorrow. Task focus. Larger goals. Activity bursts of focus if I can't seem to hook in. Self-monitoring. Continuity. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
10:18 am	The dream was precarious. As if every several months I color in what was just blank sheets of moments in some long-gone memories. I use shades of what it’s like to be able to communicate in more than polite protocol. There’s a bus that runs through this city as rundown as every others, the city that recharges and becomes real every 15 seconds, like waves existing and erasing on a beach. The kids are about to mutiny any moment and yet through my ignorance I convince myself that I can hold off the collapse of their discontent. I know I won’t be coming back much longer. I slip to the back of the room. I don’t remember if the girl who’s name I don’t know showed me her drawing or I snuck an unpermitted glance. On the corner of a small notebook, a heel had formed somewhat asymmetrically next to either a skeleton or one of Gaudi’s house. Her explanation was that the asymmetry helped show the instability of her drawing, that though it was beautiful and formed enough to be art, it really was only a post-modern conceit. I’m like Rosa’s character who tried to figure out what his existence was made of with visualizations and a mirror. There’s something to taking apart the architecture of this dream, some sort of suspended reality that I know only is fragility, but that if I dissect it right, I’ll find out my lies. (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008
12:18 pm	Tornadoes and Rotting Corpse Flowers... The sadly most happening thing in my life right now are my bizarre dreams that I remember scatters of. Sometimes I remember a dream right after I wake up and am still convincing myself that none of that was prophesy or foreboding of sorts. Sometimes in that space between sleeping and waking, I can consciously feel my struggle to embed my dreams as memory, to solidy them into some sort of solid narrative that I will remember later. The scatters of dreams can be anything from cubist-like jagged narratives to stray bits of words in foreign or playful languages. My only recollection from Thursday's dream is the word "entourtrash", as in a combination of entourage and trash. Today, I dreamt that an unexpected tornado was approaching one of my university's buildings. This tornado was actually part of some weird weather-epidemic where those students who were addicted to nerds or other forms of condensed sugar and shoplifting menaced the city in swirling collusion of air pressures. They were suspended by the levitation of their own disease and converged into a tornado because of the reaction of their combined forces of illness. As part of a subplot, my brother and I had left some of our belongings out in a park by the athletic center. We had forgotten about them for days, until decay had set in, and detritovores were devouring both our organic and inorganic possessions. Somehow, the rot was a frightening tragedy. My dreams prove that dreams serve no wider purpose than personal befuddlement and slight bemusement. (Comment on this)
Monday, January 14th, 2008
1:06 pm	Technicolor Boots I've mostly slept away my winter vacation. There are a lot of woes that I can insert here that I don't. It's somewhat comforting to think that offhours my mind is creative. I dreamt that I had to take place in some flagpole standing competition and then that I needed to buy warm enough boots in a city clogged with crowds for a festival, warm enough boots before the blizzard hit. My dreams are the calibre of tangential children's books. (Comment on this)
Monday, December 31st, 2007
12:35 am	The Clock and I Well, the day before this revered new year's eve day, I have planned most of my winter break and tried to appreciate Joseph Heller's Catch-22 as something more witty than campy. As part of a project of appreciating the many wonderful, quirky, and mundane things that I encounter daily, I am forcing myself to write at least a paragraph--unspecified topic as of now--so that I can see in words what slips by my radar of cynicism. This means, I will have to come up with default topics on the rough, dry days. I'm going to try to get a good balance between participant and observation. Maybe on drought days I should write as if I were Mary Rowlandson or some other mover-shaker of the journal world. Maybe unexpectedly full lonely moments as tomorrow night's celebration is bound to be. (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 29th, 2007
1:58 pm	Holy Grail First, it's amazing how this journal can be a dumpsite for my thoughts. I mean, amazing in that my thoughts become totally disembodied from the paper, something which perhaps is an inevitable process of writing, but which only becomes really apparent in my own personal writing, when writing is perhaps such an essential process to my being. Speaking of journals, I've noted how a lot of those on lj subsist on sensationalizing, indirectly, pain. Pain, in ways, can become a way to literary immortality, to hypothetical communication. I could talk a lot about this, but am mentioning this only in passing. What I mean to mention is this holy grail of self-improvement I'm attempting. I'm switching my search inwards, rather than for this external artifice and have a few ideas of the process of achieving this. At the moment, I need to aim to have a stellar winter break and have at least 1/3 of my day (5 hours) be spent productively. The rest I can zone out, relax, or volunteer, but 1/3 is going to be spent intensely crafting my writing, shaping my summer/post-college goals and thinking up ways to keep to the goals I am so good at declaring, but so bad at merely remembering. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
7:53 am	The Road Not Taken It's too late to not be melodramatic. I've somewhat dug into a hole of isolation and mundanity for the past three years of college (the entire experience practically) and it's hard to actually figure out how to make use of a semester when I should be planning for the future to actually build friendships and some kind of life. I have no idea where to start working towards these kinds of goals. I feel aimless. Goaless. Lacking skills because I can't seem to think like the rest of the college population, in organized, timely, effective manners. There doesn't seem to be any strategy to clarifying goals or relationships that a bumbling, vast, disorganized mind refuses to compartmentalize/specify. In so many ways, each day just brings greater frustrations and realizations of pointlessness. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
6:20 pm	On the road To be Henry Iggens.. This is what I think of whenever I think of my poorly chosen college concentration that devours my life. I say devours because planning and strategizing hasn't reduced the amount of time that I spend getting through how exactly my reading topics fit together. This doesn't really vary, at least, I hope, yet, from week to week. So, I've learned some valuable lessons and am in the midst of a figuring out a good future road. My lessons: 1. I choose a lot of dead roads based on transient, superficial interests 2. I really don't enjoy my lay-up of courses. 3. The usual realizations of shoddy focus. When I extend this thinking to implications for my future career path, I still sort of wish that I could write, and sort of get this unrealistic swell of something that might be confidence--that maybe fiction writing of some sort is something I could do well at. Since I am doing something that doesn't come naturally to me, being within the world of ideas, I can only look for ways to ease the confusion about where the larger connections and implications of the discipline's ideas lie. So. I've avoided the usual woe is me post. I'm actually more gearing towards finding a similar bunch of students that are still discerning between different career paths, and particularly writing or phonology. Of course, then that ultimately will bring up the matter that comparatively I truly lack the focus of such a sorting-out crowd. At the moment, confusion about my direction and passions hasn't yet turned me into Henry Iggens. Not yet...I'd need to actually move away from the texts and apply this theoretical, bloated academic jargon of linguistics that I'm learning to a human being. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
12:12 am	Gorrilas Take Two Really More fittingly, I should conjure a murky title to express the bleak days in an unexaggerated and unbland fashion. But I am slowly beginning to try and think more clearly, more productively, realistically, what have you. I'm not sure what dignity I even have, but in the class that is supposed to count for the concentration that hasn't fully dissolved, I lost several ounces. As part of an elaboration (I'm not sure exactly how this fit in a less than tangential fashion), we brought in (not taking into account ape language, disregarding different symbolic features of their language to satisfy the same interpretive structure analytical framework of this really expansive theatre course) a gorrila chest thumping. Instead of the usual professor flipping through the slides mostly done by himself, the entire class has the luxury of keeping the professor company as he both proceeds to demonstrate another instance, creature-like this time, of performative play and fool himself. I am probably making much more of this, having to beat my chest and then escalate into shrieks and other series of movements. What is perhaps more upsetting than the gorrila chest-thumping is this constant sense of stuckness, discouragement, the hurdle of getting to a reasonable level-ground that I can build some constancy with my studies and current other points of my life. From here on, I am trying to position myself in a wider fashion and to emerge from self-absorption, and to become at least passionate about a few smaller, and hopefully one larger interest. I want to be able to come up with chains of thoughts for longer than a half hour about important and large subjects, I'd like to be able to contribute more to friendships, I'd like to figure out the whole other gaping part of my life. I'd like to begin working on these things immediately, but also be able to gradually work towards improving who I've become and exploring what I can be. There is so much to this, and the first step is beginning to think less in generalizations and the unvague fashion and find some way to ground myself. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007
1:29 am	empty picture frames Sometimes I focus more on writing and talking eloquently and gracefully than actually the significance of what I want to say. I wonder if this is related to worrying about performance, always having to jumpstart an activity at prodigy level of genius to derive any content and satisfaction. This habit of writing begins as something even when talking to friends, strangers, relatives, regardless of the import or strike of the situation, I already am trying to turn interactions into a story, to judge the value of an interaction based on my ability to transform it into some writing. But if I were meant to really write short stories, to write sustainably as everyone says, this wouldn't be about wanting to write without having things that need to be written. At this point I have empty picture frames that I am trying to fill, picture frames that I post on figurative walls of zeal and say because of the act of putting up picture frames that I am a painter. Here I somehow become a writer because I can try and contort conversations into narrative, try and introduce lush anecdotes and think of how to redirect conversations, so that the conversation as a whole, and not just the various little tangents, can be character-fodder. That is, more than being directed by feelings for friends well-being,happiness, interests, and my own other interests, how I've gotten to spend my time. When I wrote about my brother preivously, I partly wrote knowing that my (or his) conflict mattered, that somehow I could feel something, that I wasn't so consumed by myself or destined for the unfeeling state of my father's so called depression that I wouldn't be able to recognize feelings. These moments are small, and writing them becomes my proof that I am something, that all the other moments of the day that I try and disprove myself, that I think that reading heady material is impossible, or being anything but a mediocre lawyer, are too much exaggeration, are products of fear. The moments that go into writing are small--things like that I would like to be the type of person that can sense other people's moods without their having to tell me, and to act accordingly, I want a wider sphere of caring than that of thinking about my impressions (first second third) on people, and also being able to devote myself to interests other than finding and writing about things that other people find important. Writing may very well have been an interest, but the way I've gone about it, it's been something to serve other people, it's lacked the full force of being more directed by my own will and interest, by my own sense of importance. I am not an immensely great writer and may never be, may never be good enough to have writing be something that during my working career, when I need to pull in money, can take up more than 3% of my time. What I need to figure out is what it means to think about and follow important interests, passions, beliefs. I used to worship authors, still have a rather smitten adoration phase, but I need to gain a wider sense of possibility other than reading and hearing about the world and writing things down. I need to begin parcipating more, in the broadest fashion. But I become vague, general, so caught by all these specifics that are frightening, that make life miserable--I have difficulty reading ethnographies and theory that is presumably part of the major I want to study, I have difficulty when structure of courses and paper assignments evaporates, I have difficulty thinking large and at length during conversations, Usually, maybe in my cowardice fashion, this is when I take to the bike path and ride twenty miles every sunday, or hole up and try to spend the mornings writing. But I've never dealt with this core bit of my habit of attaching to other people's interests and passions, having difficulty finding my own. I care about friends, family, am concerned when friends are in trouble, can relate to that experience all too well. But I am more the sort to commiserate with or be concerned than to be strong, supportive, encouraging, sensitive. I can't really imagine being able to initiate having better times with friends, and my view of spending time with friends is still rather unfleshed, simple, confused. One area of issues. If I were to pick up tomorrow and start living a good fulfilling life, skipping the bottom-dweller phase, I would have no idea of city, job or interests to keep up with. When I write I feel like I am halfway heard by something or someone that I can't describe, but I can't be touched, my words can't be judged, I can let up sometimes and convince myself to speak less uptight, worry less about being off-track. Time's less definitive. Do I write because I am helpless to contemplate other options of getting direction, purpose, or things to do more than pass the time? Why can't I find something important enough? (Comment on this)
Monday, November 6th, 2006
4:31 pm	...What's wrong is apparently a roundabout question, the following is completely unordered and just been poured onto the page, as I don't know what "all this means, all of this." I am just now coming from a conversation with my brother who seems to have gotten caught in this confusing and trying crevice of wanting to not feel the pain of not being able to concentrate on work or have meaningful relationships and also wanting to piece together some sort of happiness. It is the same problem with concentration that I deal with, sitting down and being able to complete neither schoolwork nor even peruse a book at length for independent, non-coursework sake. I'm not sure if the happiness he derives by getting together with friends is a means to avoid that pain that stems from somewhere else and that is why it has no meaning, why he cracks endless jokes, which he tells me when we are alone, disgust him. Excuse the lack of clarity--sometimes sense can be so evading when trying to deal with possible weakness and vulnerability of not being able to resist whatever it is that is causing attention difficulty or inability to create or keep to meaning. What he complains of initially is a volatility of moods. This is the first time I've known my brother to have anything resembling unhappiness regarding his current situation, and always thought he had some incredible reserve of strength that made him selfless and quite even-tempered and only wanting to help the hungry, or be with his girlfriend, making sure she's okay. So foolish and imperceptive on my part. To a certain extent, I don't write about my brother because I am trying to understand his situation now, but also because I am trying to see how I've eclipsed myself from a similar void that he feels that I myself feel as well. Albeit my brother can find a sort of artificial solace in friends, that he reluctantly admits isn't true, but that's sort of automatic, the sort of going out to spend the night with people and only being truly upset when they don't return his phone calls. Or only being unhappy when work doesn't go as planned. To me, maybe too much based on my own situation, I see a veered center, a sort of orientation of emotions around validifying moments, that of having produced a work or of having acquired an acceptance by a friend but not being able to live for the smaller, before, intermediary moments. Always having the sense that emotions are contingent on when judgements can occur either through the submission of thermodynamics lab reports or the returned phone call after several hours with a friend. Are the moods not volatile, or are they weirdly conditioned around trials of self-worth? (to put it perhaps extremely, but the only way my tired mind can at the moment) I unfortunately, and my brother and I both know the ways we cannot help but fail each other, cannot offer an understanding of his problem because I myself am going through something parallel. I am trying to learn how to feel, to experience to live--to be sentient. First I am struggling to understand why this even matters, why I must change whatever it is that I am. Quite frankly I have no idea. Sometimes I like to deny that I feel outcasted and isolated and dull, and fear this is the only motivation for whatever change or awareness I am undertaking. Whether it be truthful or not, I can spend the entire night with friends and be talking simply with the trepidation I am worthless, and would be more than . This odd, what I've come to call a lack of strength to stick by my own will and sense of importance, makes life a series of petty consumings of whether my taste of literature might go off well, or my response to someone calling will be deemed pathetic. I don't mean to generalize, I just am trying to organize and make sense of this horrible habit of living (usually I only go through a memory a day, but my brother's own disheartened consciousness is gnawing away at me). After reading about the silent candy, I think, in steinbeck's of mice and men, I remember coming to a way out of my grief back then by beginning to plan conversations. The silence of school lunches, I thought, wouldn't be as painful if I were prepared to be vibrant and witty. And this somehow developed to the point where in my own most devastated moments the only way I can pull a bit out is by envisioning saying what's on my mind. The envisioned person doesn't respond. I just talk. In the past, moments with people were painful whether I was judged to be someone I didn't want to be and failed to fight that judgement. During lunches at school I was generally thought silent. When my best friend accidentally hit me in the eye with a snowball I was overreacting. I could never figure out or even begin to think about what I wanted to be. Now I think of what such a moment would look like, a moment of starting to let my being be important, and I come back to writing. I need a sense of a passion and a devotion to self, more than anything, and writing, despite the tragic self-absorption with creating characters from your own head, the ultimate self-society (?) could provide a chance at that attempt. I could write one word an hour, or more truly, write about faith-torn characters, emotion by emotion, until some semblance of complexity emerges. But I can't ever forget about the audience. As I write I think about my lacking perceptions into say the rawness of my style, and how I want to be able to describe my tone or characters, but unfortunately write quite without knowing. This is more complicated, truly, and more of a sidepoint, but segways, I feel: Here's what I am ultimately afraid of, when I set aside being afraid of being judged: I don't know how in depth we've talked about our religious backgrounds, but I went to a quite Jewish orthodox dayschool for the first 6 years of my schooling. They taught us Jewish values and morals and laws from early ages, and never withheld from calling things what they thought they were. To give you a sampled sense of what went on at times, when teaching the torah, the teachers would refer to the woman as adultresses and whores (but I don't recall them explaining the definitions) and we stood up when elders entered the room and we didn't ever speak badly of other people cause that would be loshon horah. My memory is spotty. I remember being quite disheartened about learning by rote, not understanding any of the hebrew, but I could memorize the passages quite well. Once I had done just that memorizing so well that the second grade hebrew teacher called one of the esteemed rabbis to the classroom to hear me recite. Before he had arrived, I tried to tell her, and maybe I wasn't good at telling, that I really didn't understand the passage about Mordechai being led around and humiliated by a non-jew, but refusing to sacrifice his pride, (I can explain these references, but probably not necessary). She could've responded in several ways that my memory cannot capture. But whatever she said, I was moments later reciting the passage, albeit barely understood, in apparently well-pronounced hebrew, to a rabbi j. I had for some reason an inadequacy to think with an understanding and to feel something other than sorrow at not understanding. When I applied to another lower school that I didn't go to they had a questionaire for us who's parents wanted us to get a good education to fill out. One of the questions asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Guess what I wanted to be? Because all kids can dream even if their present is lacking? (Dreams can't rot?) A puppet. And I think I was one too, but there were times when I could feel this pain of disappointment that I couldn't feel anything deeper, have any understanding. I don't know how I could still manage to feel something that wasn't happiness, but certainly wasn't sadness. But looking back, there were moments that are so sad that these are what I live not for: Lunch was my favorite time of day. Not because they would unroll these mobile foldable tables and we'd all get to talk about polyvinyl alchohol or water or fish or bad jokes we thought were good but because I would get to eat whatever amt of junk food my mom thought not too unhealthy. And so it made sense that I got a bit thrilled when the school purchased a vending machine to sit in the auditorium. If I had 1.50 I could eat some honey mustard pretzels. Surely, though, I could've imagined some other sustenance, I didn't have to rely on food? We did have art classes at this lower school. Perhaps because we were in lower school they had planned these very precise procedures for us, like making necklaces for our mothers, or writing our names in hebrew on passover plates. They had though, I think, a fair amt, or at least, a sufficient amt of materials to be imaginative with. Albeit, sometimes the projects were disappointing, like drawing inside the hollow printings of our names with washable markers. But there was this one russian girl, not exactly what they would call "religious," that one day of this project created the most beautiful waterfall. Perhaps my memory has exaggerated the waterfall a bit, but I could call it something that was like an impressionistic style, dabbled blues and whites so perfectly arranged to form a cascade of water. The teachers, I thought, would surely praise her, and I got depressed at why I couldn't follow through with my dissatisfaction and boredom to forge something similar. What was even more depressing when the teachers only scolded this girl for not following directions. I don't know which is sadder. But I fear becoming both--dry of imagination and food-running creature. I can't shake living from sort of fear. It's guided my decision to be religious and not religious to return home when my mind can't work to go to sleep instead of reading Denis Johnson to miss saying goodbye to friends. Perhaps those are different decisions and shouldn't be grouped, but they're all connected by something resembling fear. Most recently, I can't make sense of my life, and thus return to the past. High school was quite impossible. I had no other life but work and school and would sit in class quite worried and not taking in any of the lessons. What became my reason to keep going, the highlights, was when I would get a test or a paper back. Ironically, these were tests or papers I didn't put much thought into because I didn't/couldn't concentrate enough to study. I memorized, last minute, perhaps not out of the ordinary for a teenager? Perhaps home life was tough too, perhaps the home that provided and prided itself on providing the only sense and love I could know at such depths often itself didn't know what that meant. This was when I gave up violin because I joined the academic decathlon team to be with people asides from my parents on Saturdays. (my only motivation was to get away). But I think I could never keep to violin because I remember trying to play back then, I was too stiff, and always what was in my head was how I could get myself to sound good to a potential audience that wasn't present. Sometimes that would be teachers I never was confident enough to talk to sometimes complete strangers who could be beautiful with words. My parents were always quite critical of how I played, and yet, and yet, I could never simply be not good for awhile, automatically after about two lessons, I would be expected to sound quite magnificent. Sometimes, couldn't a schradeik (poor spelling) exercise, if done right, produce something just as beautiful? But how much of what I write here could I think about in an organized form, which didn't even emerge here, before I wrote to you? I can't even untangle my own problems on my own to begin trying to construct meaning and a self. Where am I now if I can't live the slightest for myself or even know what that means? I think I've a puppet in some ways or am so afraid that I might be one that I can't think of being anything else. I guess I keep wondering if I have some deep-seated turmoil causing some concentration difficulties. Sometimes I wonder if some of my behavior indicates some predisposed biological inability and deficieny to concentrate in depth and at will. When I was younger for example, before I went to religious school, and was in nursery at a quaker school, I would bring in about ten books when the teachers said to bring something in to read. Could my parents making decisions for me have begun my drift along these problems? To be as concise as possible with that unbearable issue, my parents have always had their disagreements and strong-headed sense of what should happen. In order to make art, they took us to the MFA, not because I think it was inherently a certain style or teaching method adapted for kids, but I think because they believe that certain things are prestigious and should be done in certain ways. So they had, whether they own up to it or not, a heavy-hand in my brother and I's learning or not learning. (when I somewhat understood the extent of what I felt a suffocation, the results, my own actions, and where I ended up for 3 months of my life are quite difficult to tell and explain and understand) Interspersed with that are their own tedious relationship difficulties which they would always ask my brother and my opinions on, or my brother and I would get caught in the crossfire. Their fights were all decibel to me in my younger years--sometimes my father would knock some of the ceiling out of place, or honestly just get so loud you'd think the fragile dishes we kept in the apartment would break. I would hide in a closet, I don't know why I wasn't capable of anything else and can't remember what my brother was doing. I was afterall a fearful child, and I guess this is what fearful children do. I wanted calm, quiet, to have a moment when there wasn't anything to be afraid of. In order to study in high school, I would get up whatever energy and go to the scili (good ol' scili) and do a three hour concerted push, because I never felt safe enough around the atmosphere at home to concentrate. Whenever I tried to deal with sadness or relationship problems or hurtness, they would always remark that the world couldn't be trusted, or perhaps don't have that kind of understanding that I needed back then, which I am trying to form now. But perhaps I just can't naturally attend to matters deeply and was just vulnerable to succumbing to my parents' issues. This could be more understood, I am hoping, but at the moment, I am quite asunder, and hoping for some more clarity, and until then at times chaotic and fragmented when dealing with who I am or have been made to be. I don't know what explains why I cannot develop relationships or read something for an hour at a time. I don't know how to change that. I don't know why I haven't been able to or why I can't now. All I know right now is I can either ploy more into fiction and sleep the occasional night at the lab where I work with hopes that waking up in a different place than the home where relationships are turned into one-way interactions could help in my process of coping and understanding a sense of purpose to keep figuring out this mess, a sense of purpose that answers why I don't sleep days away. Why do I try and write fiction or read or study or earn money or eventually maybe reconvene with friends who are dear and who I could cherish if I could get my mess(es) aside? At this point, such an answer, of why and hopefluly how, if I could come to one, would be approaching enough. Any of your good-headed sense of life about what I show you here of my life, about particularly how to figure out this mess or move on without going apart, would be greatly appreciated. There you have a bit of everything that scatters through my mind these days. What can I say--I am spilling selectively, though regrettably not clearly. If I believed my heart stored my emotions, about a fourth of it would be disjointedly here. (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 14th, 2006
12:05 pm	Stairways and mirrors and other weirdly connected issues I have survived what I can inefficiently call my own self-contrary tendencies of harmful harmlessness, of sadistic thoughts not carried out against the one hope that I can learn how to love--to write and not fill pages with sights of letters, to not be disconnected, and only capable of thinking of phone disconnection, and not what disconnection means and what it doesn't mean. To not transcend vagueness, and think what if my condition of I don't know is relentless? So I am trying to depart from vagueness, which maybe somewhere near I'll figure out what this is. Maybe this vagueness comes from not deciding what I'd like to pursue for the next two years, for beyond, for the rest of my life, to always be confronted with some such vague inclinations, huge, broad, unmanageable, and of course intimidating. Yesterday and the day and day before I've been increasingly contemplating 10 days of solitude. Of course this may be a self-indulgent endeavour, and once again I have no idea why I am lured to these sort of activities. As a tribute to James Joyce and my love for writing, because before I have that experience of almost total isolation, which he feels is complete liberation in some senses, I will never be able to say I'm a writer, and even then I maybe won't. Because only then will I be completely independent? But in thinking about myself don't I asides from taking devoted sorts of risks to follow a passion, to maybe develop a passion, or create a passion, don't I run the risk of becoming the self-imploding sun? The sun that forgot how its rays only existed for the comraderie of the other planets--a sort of baby you light my fire minus the romantic, perhaps seductive and sensual connotations--and imploded against all scientific plausibility? In Rosa's (I hope I remember correctly) story, the intrepid, and then depraved? protagonist tries to see his soul within a mirror, and to his shock is confronted with a reflection of his face--a hideous, frightening sight (not just a shock due to ugliness). Gradually, the protagonist learns to mentally deconstruct his mirror-image, to erase the features that he sees within himself, the replicas of his ancestors, and find out his true, original, authentic being. After learning how to substract eyes, hair, cheeks, and what I think are most if not all facial features, the protagonist (is he nameless?) discovers a shimmering outline of nothing. He realizes and confesses that he does not exist yet. But these thoughts all lack a certain connection, they all splay and sinew irrelevant of what the other said, only maybe held together by the outer appearance of a word. For this reason, if not solitude, I climb the library stairs--all 14 flights--15x a day. To learn what other reasons exist, to unveil the connections, which I'm sure though they fade and shrivel, and perhaps atrophy in meaningless times, can also grow from some sort of epiphany of purpose. I believe, if in nothing more particular, and concrete, mind over matter in these psychological trivialities, even if I am not taking into account all the contrary cases which might prove me wrong. I've got the faith of a lottery fool at times. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006
11:17 pm	I write on myself to remember. This will have to be a secondhand writing, words which may be by virtue of not being on my skin may be forgotten. For whatever reason. Reason. Reason. I am a very impractical person. And not talking about my impracticality extends even to my not willing to discuss how impractical i am, for practical purposes, for hopes of avoiding reinforcing what i may become. perhaps i need to work on anchoring to situations and hopes of saying what i might mean. this i think is what puts me in such sour moods that verge on being more than i can return from. I walked out of a review session today, and wasn't even going to go but somehow pushed myself. I still can't figure out my reluctance and then my affirmed reluctance, which took the form of unseating myself and departing. It doesn't make sense all my misery could be explained with "processing difficulties" (Comment on this)
Monday, May 1st, 2006
9:57 am	I don't even have enough concentration to go and pray, yes implore God in times of desperation, before you need Him more--that's devotion over neediness. Relatives, forefathers: "I started a crisis." "I would go for another walk but I dont have time" This is the man who I descend from and who said he'd take care of me, or who had to for the first few years until I could cut my own toenails. I can't flesh out the context of this misery and sadism. Because. of. the pain. He's taught me how to be afraid, and somehow had some part in deterring me from departure, from escaping the miserable life he's created. "But I'm depressed." among other despicable statements of narcissism. the world is not egocentric around this monsieur and his pathology. When the people whose names i forget left Sodom, they didn't look back. They could've but didnt. Except the wife who turned into the pillar of salt. I am the unmarried wife of no one. (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 27th, 2006
10:43 pm	what is this "same day"? I saw the title to an article--"is change possible"--and didn't read it due to a time crunch and the fact that though I do procrastinate and allow longer than intended drifts into ambling thoughts, I have some sense of not discarding my experience, or at least designated, or crucial pre-deadline time. What kind of change? personal? social? world? and then there are further distinctions. but my vague mind refuses too often to draw more than cursory boundaries. So I am going to try in the future, whatever that is, to draw myself into attending to what I resist by noticing the wandering thoughts and what substantiates them, if nothing more than familiarity and just that kind of thing, and work toward I lost a thought. And maybe not indulge in these spout bits, and really urge myself to be more specfic and such. Ha. Disgraceful, there need to be some standards held to my fingers and mind. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 30th, 2006
9:48 pm	It's quite easy on livejournal to erase who you once were, or at the least to switch your identity. But maybe remembering is necessary so you don't in your newly-born-amnesia re-become who you didn't want to be. But sometimes the "pain of the memory" is greater "than the sorrow it brings" (counting crows). Sometimes it conjures all sorts of fear when you realize change's absenece, and your faulty impressions. Such vagueness. I wish I could finish a thought--all this nervousness and self-critcism comes from not being able to put together and take apart a moment or such before the next moment arrives. In the process, all reason is lost. Learning to focus...isn't going to be easy. And thus far I've thought too much about what not-focusing means, now I've got to attempt the disheartening latter. Somehow. Schedules, reminders, self-made focus-maps, avoiding extravagance, because whatever means I use is merely functional. What I didn't do today: run, read the lots of material for my course What I did do: waste gas by driving to places I would focus, and then arrive and not be able to...gaze at swans and water I am going to sleep; but tomorrow won't be better unless I make it better. (Comment on this)