I want to go home

I really want to go back to my bed and my space heater, and I want to go to the ceramics studio and build things and I want to go to the library to study for my tests and I want to see my best friend instead of being back home where every streetcorner threatens an existential crisis. I want my firefans. I want my gross fridge and moldy microwave. I want to be alone there.

online shopping

I've recently thrown a whole lotta money into the interweb-void. Sure, in a week or so I'll have some stuff, but until then I'll just feel a little weird about the whole thing.
I bought $250 shoes. For 70 bucks, but still. I just need some powershoes, you know? And I finally bought a cracker, a sleek black half liter $30 darling  so that I can take whippits whenever I want. So that was a week and a half's grading down the drain, and by down the drain I mean turned into material things instead of stashed in my bank account.

I obviously have no real conception of what money is worth.
That's what you get being raised by yuppies who grew up poor. And for living in a city where being cheap is chic. And maybe I just have class issues that I should work out but I don't know how to deal with them.

How I got a concussion the day before my final exams started

You should see the other guy...

I swung too hard and broke the swing. I fell on the ground. I fell vigorously.

Now I'm redefining "cognitive rest" as 3hr tests + studying. Also day drunk now. Weeeeeeeeeee

s'change

if you write me something i'll write you something.

Last Day of Class(ical)

I woke up at 6:30 this morning and pressed snooze twice. Pressing snooze means walking across my room and pressing the button and laying back down. That's how little I wanted to do my work.

I could have done my work last night. Well, by anyone else's definition of "could." Instead, I drank Spumante and watched the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.

So at 7:00 this morning I was wearing a sequin dress with my mesh "I sing the body ELECTRIC" shirt over it. I looked fly, but my homework refused to do itself. I absentmindedly "studied" for my chem exam, sent despairing snapchats, and fiddled with my physics.

I thought about wearing my funderwear, but the day seemed so unsalvageable that I didn't even bother.

Then I went down the hill.

The chem test wilted at my touch. It became flaccid and weak under my pen. I emerged victorious, with 20% of the time still left over.
I know some people believe in "checking your answers" but Kanye sums up my test-taking philosophy pretty well:

When it's over it's over. Bitch I'm back out my coma.

Well, with 10 extra minutes, the Electro problem set was no problem. Credit where credit is due, without my lovely study buddy it would have taken way longer. I even had time to do most of the classical problem set. Stressless, with just a little bit left to do, I walked out of the library and to Physics 123: my most frequent haunt.

Then I watched everything fall into place. I wanted to cry, I laughed, I twitched and felt shivers flicker across my arms. My belly felt warm and my thighs clenched. My cheeks tensed and I sighed and cooed because the physics was beautiful.

It's kind of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariant_formulation_of_classical_electromagnetism

I don't know how to talk about it yet. I don't even understand it yet. But I will, and I know how beautiful it is.

I didn't want to relax my face, and I didn't want to sit down. But I wanted to finish the last classical problem set and I did.

In classical I learned a way to derive the equation of motion for light rays from the lagrangian for light waves. Then, we talked about throwing an object with rotation around different principle axes, and which ones were stable vs. which are almost impossible to maintain rotation around. That was amazing too.

My classes are perfect. My field is perfect. Physics is amazing. I've made good choices.

I will miss classical mechanics. That was an amazing course.

unnatural

I can feel the water in blood forming a lattice structure.
There is no excuse for this temperature.

Today is Spring/Fall

I woke up to snow blustering against my window. 3 hours later I had all but 1/2 of a problem done, done correctly, on the classical set. Chem problemset: done. Electro: well, I finished in time and Neal ran down the hill to turn both of them in.

And now I'm skipping the class and waiting for it to be Spring/Fall and waiting to kiss people and celebrate in the freezing dry air and to realize what an incredible accomplishment getting through this semester was.

You're not a classmate, I can stress-count at you:
Lecture classes that take 3 hrs per week:
-chem
-electro
-classical
Labs, 3hrs each:
-chem
-j-lab
j-lab lecture=1hr week
Relay:1.5 hr per week
Strategic Planni
j-lab lecture=1
ng: 1.5 hr every other week: 45min per week
Paideia= 1hr per week

=20.25 hrs per week gone

approx:
Grading: 6.5-8.5 hrs per week.
Classical: 5-7+ who knows with classical
Electro:6-9
Chem: 3-4+ lab write up 1-5


=21-33.5 hrs per week gone

So more than a full time job. And when you add it up by hours it's not even as scary as it feels. I've worked a full time job. This is more.

And I made it through. 

I feel tired. But I'm ready to drink some champagne.

Csi Miami season 9 episode 6

OR No One Says Off Point Because No One Watches CSI Miami

Don't google me. Social media point charge.

Because every charge distribution looks like a point charge from far away so your social media sphere looks the same as mine if you're god or aliens. 

Time-Travel Dysmorphia

Puberty is put forward as this crazy time when your body undergoes unbelievable change and wow it's hard to deal with oh man don't panic guys.
But really, the rapid change in my body was easy to keep track of. These days, when my body changes it goes so slowly that I hardly notice. Then one day I'll scratch my shoulder and think "holy shit that's a different shape than before!"

Back story though. When I was younger, I felt a strange breed of dysmorphia. I didn't really recognize my face as my own. In my imagination, my face looked very different. The face I saw in my mind was my own, but what it would look like 3-5 years later. When I came to college, I had the last face that I had imagined. I thought: "This is what I will look like forever."

If only it were so simple. Since then my face has become longer and thinner. My body has changed too. Some of it has to do with the change in lifestyle (read: Life of the Mind) so my legs are less muscled. But that doesn't explain away these hips. That doesn't explain this waist. I can't see the future anymore.

They gradually feel more and more like they belong to me, but there's been a wee setback in the last week or so. I don't think I've been eating enough. I can feel many more bones in my shoulders and hips than I could before. I don't feel particularly skinnier, but that could be related to my cycle. Bones. I feel exposed. I feel pokey. It doesn't feel like me.

All of this is part of why getting dressed/facepaint is so important to me. It's how I own my body, either by making it the shape I recognize or making it so unrecognizable that the disconnect doesn't scare me.

If only I could dress my name. I'm feeling more and more like "Julia" though.

Blamo

This weekend has me smiling all the time. I feel like everything will be alright. No, I feel like everything is great, and everything will continue to be great as long as everything is like this.

So, this weekend I went to a party. We all got very very drunk and called all of our siblings and I did a little bit of a "popper" before deciding it was the grossest thing ever and then I flopped onto the air mattress that was in the living room. My housemate did the same thing and then suddenly we were holding hands. And that's all, we just held hands loosely for a few minutes I don't know how or why but his arm was behind my head and and my arm was across his lap and somehow we were holding each other's hands and just touching them and his hands are very dry and you can feel his knuckles through his vegan fingers and it was heaven.

We're acting silly now. I smile at him all the time. He smiles back. He laughs at my jokes. I make him a mug with a Seven of Nine quote on it:

"I have noticed your attempts to engage me in idle conversation. And I see the way your pupils dilate when you look at my body."

I think it's a hilarious thing to put on a mug, because someone will say "ooh, what does your mug say, it's so nice and handmade?!?" and then read it and be like, OH SHIT HE'S ON TO ME!

Or he'll be like, damn this girl is crazy why she like me so much. But he's acting silly too so I think he likes this flirty business. Or he likes me. We didn't say anything about the hand-holding. I like him so much.

He's so great. He's good and great. I used to think that people at Reed were either good or great and no one had the emotional fortitude to be both but he's both and I feel amazing right now.

Yesterday I spent two hours of the day shedding uncontrollable tears

I think I may have left the end of my rope somewhere back there. I dunno, I don't really have time to look for it.
Maybe this weekend's strange moods were stress-induced, because honestly it seems like my whole life is stress-induced, even the stress-less parts. I have to seek out activities that have no stress in response to the stress-drenched life I lead.
I'm not managing it.
The physics grading took me 8.5 hours this weekend. And by this weekend I mean 4 of them were Monday so the grading was super late. I had a committee meeting and relay and I realized that I just didn't have time to get them done even during business hours. At 1 am, I left the library. definitely not business hours.
Uncontrollable crying? Well, I missed most of electro because I had to leave and be bummed that the one thing I hadn't fucked up yet (physics grading) was now fucked. By 'be bummed' I mean sob under a tree. Then I went to the bathroom in the Bio building to clean up but a professor who is on the committee with me happened to be there and he waited outside to tell me that if I needed the 1.5 hrs we'd spend in the meeting  I should take them. I tried to explain that the committee is awesome for me because I love discussions and I don't have any conference classes but it didn't really work.
Then, at 1 am, walking home from the library, I started crying again. I hope no one heard in the house. There was just nothing left in me except that. I literally flailed my arms before I even realized that was what I was doing.
One nice part was talking to Allie for an hour and a half before going to the library. She understood my plight a little bit, which was cool. Also it was good to decompress.
Okay, so I'll try to do better from now on but I added up the hours and I'm actually OVERLOADING, like doing at least an extra credit worth of work between committees and relay and grading.
So let's just say that won't be the case next semester.

strange moods

On Friday night I spent 100 dollars on quality food and cleaned the house until 1:30 in the morning.

On Saturday I made breakfast for everyone. I threw 2 bowls and 3 mugs in the ceramics studio, and then went to my housemate's show. It was done by about 9, but I just hung out at home afterwards.

On Sunday I went for a bike ride, and then made pasta for everyone, and then finally started on work. Later tonight I'll go to the ceramics studio with Jeanie, and throw some more. I've been dreaming up this crazy chandelier. All I want is art.

This weekend was strange in that I made nothing but healthy choices, with regards to my life. My school work is still unbalanced to the point of doom and despair, but I try not to think about it.

The chandelier is going to be amazing. We have a bunch of half rusted steel, and my lovely housemate will help make the base. Then a mobile of porcelain vases will hang down center of the rectangular-spiral staircase and the whole thing will be a death trap but it will be so beautiful.

Ahhh.

Difficult Truth

So I read this article this morning.
http://nplusonemag.com/what-do-you-desire#.UoGXw054FCg.facebook
It's long, but I couldn't stop halfway through. I feel like I'm in the same place that this woman is, in a way. Yes, younger different whatever whoever. But in terms of sex, it's spot on.
The last time I had sex was at the end of July. It was good, but at that point I felt like I was trading sex for emotional support. The idea of sex had stopped being attractive.
What fucked me up? Frenchmen. The constant sexual harassment I experienced this summer has lead to more shame and discomfort around the idea of sex than I've had since middle school. I feel objectified by compliments and angry at admiration. Is this valid? Sure. Is it productive? No.
How will I heal? I don't know. I hope I want to kiss people casually again. Maybe Spring-Fall will help. In the mean time... Well, I have to go meet with my advisor, so I can't flush this out, but I think I'll just take more data. Mindfully.

There's this cool program that randomly generates facebook statuses that sound like you based on your past statuses

Haha no sleep

Prove to god NO rain yet?

Like druid blood.

burning man without missing THE ONE WHO IS there

 other highlight I am I the only agriculture in the eye!

is that is THE city and the girls are easy ways and pie with sleep

good thing and doesn't list homework as an example.

They were all men in a lyricless song.

being back DOWN AT 1100 degrees Celsius is so lonely now.

The difference between Hogwarts, Hogwarts, and they

it got a dynamical system may have found demons.

Physics midterm as stairs.

no, shitshow means impressive, in the SKY

Alright, this country may have our relationship with tits, and it's a dangerous thingamajig... Get out of its inhabitants.

A working list of my heart

In the tree I just watch him do

Lemme know if I can dare to dream where a wisdom tooth used to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pacify

I went because I wanted to ride in the back of the truck. I also like watching my housemate play music. When we got to Recess I served as drum technician number 4, which is to say that I carried a drum up the stairs. Then we went to a friend's apartment until it was showtime.

Or, since our friend was playing first, 20 minutes late to the advertised show time. The music didn't start until 9, 40 minutes later. During those 40 minutes, I watched the room (the small, smelly room) fill with Reedies. None of them except the ~radicals~ even acknowledged me. Even a dude who I thought I'd had a Real Conversation with one time. It was so awful.

But then the band played, which was really fun. Afterwards, most of my crew left for a smokebreak. I met some new folks who live in a different house with a bunch of my friends, and then the second band played. I must have been in a weird spot in the room because I could not differentiate the instruments. So I left, very annoyed. As I was leaving out the door I was told the fire marshal had come and no one was being let back in. Ridiculous.

I hung out behind the building with my house etcetera and that was alright but I was still so angry about how rude and hip everyone was trying to be. I mean, yeah, sometimes people don't see you but it was actually EVERYONE and they were doing it to everyone and I think that scene is just really fucked up.
Fast forward: we leave, and I get to ride alone in the back of the truck with the drum sets. I sing some favorite songs to the night. I feel good.

At home, my housemates prepare to go to Daft Ball.  Due to the mountains of hate I was feeling for Reedies, I thought about just skipping it.

But you know what washes away mountains of hate? Oceans of seratonin.

So with glow sticks and black light paint we headed down the hill.
I found some friends but it was striking, as it always is, how few people I knew in the room. That only mattered until I came up, at about midnight+15.

And then I danced. I didn't care who with, except that I didn't want to dance "with" anyone because this roll was more about how the inside of my body felt, the joints and muscles instead of the skin. Oh I danced.

The best part of the dance was that this freshman who I think is really cute and I just get excellent vibes from was dancing near me, rolling so hard.  I thought maybe I'd creeped him out by too obviously being attracted to him, but it's probably just paranoia left over from the French Experience of being perma-creeped myself. Anyways, I had my light up valve covers (motion activated) that Connor had given me at Burning Man. The circumstances were too parallel, and I wasn't really using them. I handed them to him and he went apeshit. It was awesome. That was healing.

The only thing I worried about was that the music would end too early. But it didn't. When it finally did, I was tired. I went outside with the sweetest sophomore and talked and talked at her. She likes to listen. I basically just said everything that was on my mind. I also walked around her in circles while she spun to face me.

I had a lot of catching up to do in the water-consumption department. I endeavored to drink the entire water fountain but was unsuccessful. Eventually we collapsed in the pool hall due to its proximity to water and its music. After laying down for a while, I danced again.

One of my favorite people at Reed came in, and the music was Portishead-y and soft with heavy beats and I just moved my body. Oh my god.
I played this song after a while. I'm a little obsessed.
http://papipacify.me/

Then that favorite person gave me a wonderful massage. She laid on top of me and we talked. A little bit more dancing, and then... it was time or something.
I made it home at 5 am. My phone was stolen at the dance, but not my wallet which is awesome. Neither the button that came off the coat that I would feel awful if I lost. They did steal my purple lipstick though so they will burn.
Oh, and I don't hate everyone anymore. Funny how that works.

Practice love letter for my Paideia class

The first time that I saw you, I thought maybe there was something wrong with me. A part of me has thought that every time since.
You were too far away to even see clearly. Suddenly I couldn't breath or I didn't want to breath, or there was something else in my mouth that kept me from breathing. Maybe I'd inhaled something too strong for air and too soft to feel.
I walked east to be closer to you, or "to see your face" as I convinced myself. I don't think I did see your face that day. I pretended that you were in my way, just to say something to you. I remember your clothes were the color of a forest. I passed you and took my smile with me.
I asked my friends who I'd seen in your vicinity if they knew your name. None of them did. In addition, none of them saw what I saw in you, so I pretended to be surprised that I was attracted to you. How can you be surprised by something that feels like a part of you? Maybe it happens.
Maybe this happens? Maybe you were just the first time. Maybe it'll happen again and again! Maybe this isn't some sacred magic that I should stay away from. Maybe if you aren't the love of my life it won't matter. Then again, maybe I could touch you and kiss you and this feeling would persist and I'd be drawn to you no matter what. I don't want to take the risk either way. But I guess I miss deep breaths and I think that I could breathe through you.
-Julia

A story everyone should read: World Memory by Italo Calvino

http://www.scribd.com/doc/4930515/memory-of-the-world-calvino

my favorite passage from Zhuangzi

 We sleep and our spirits converge; we awake  and our bodies open outward. We give, we receive, we act, we construct; all day long we apply our minds to struggles against one thing or another--struggles unadorned or struggles concealed, but in either case tightly packed one after another without gap.

The small fears leave us nervous and depleted; the large fears leave us stunned and blank. Shooting forth like an arrow from a bowstring; such is our presumption when we arbitrate right and wrong. Holding fast as if to sworn oaths: such is our defense of our victories.

 Worn away as if by autumn  and winter: such is our daily dwindling, drowning us in our own activities, unable to turn back.

Book life

I read a book yesterday. It felt like clicking back into the summer setting. Turning pages, hopping from perch to perch as I followed the sun's arc over my house. I spent a few hours with people, but there was always the slow murmur behind my brain that asked 'what happens next, how does it end, what will it say,' encouraging me to leave my friends.

Neuromancer, by William Gibson. Today I rode my bike to Powell's to pick up the sequel. Lolita has become too creepy. I can no longer have any feeling toward Humbert Humbert but revulsion. No feelings towards Lolita but pity. Not because of the situation, but because of how they are acting. The situation has been the same for a while, but the people are becoming more pathetic. I'm sure I'll get through it eventually. But for now, Count Zero.

Self-Like

I really think I sorted something out tonight.
Last year was hard in ways I still don't understand. Emotionally and intellectually, I was at the end of the rope. The entire candle was on fire. The metaphors lay gasping at the last stretch of the marathon.
Right?
But I didn't really see it at the time. Even with the full mental breakdown, and the week in bed, I didn't realize how far gone I was. But cut to France, where I have nothing but perspective. That's when I realized I don't even recognize the girl living my life. Why did she make those choices, and who was she appeasing or pleasing or disappointing?
Now I'm back in the same situation. Funny thing is, I still don't recognize myself. It's not a lack of motivation, its a lack of motivation behind the motivation. Why am I motivated to do anything, to speak to anyone, to paint my room or to eat food? Who am I.

In short, I've been having a year-long existential crisis. It's just been masquerading as existence.

So how is this a breakthrough.

Well, the breakthrough was 2 hours ago so in part I don't really remember. But the gist is that the questions I've been asking myself aren't fair. I am not some isolated thing that exists regardless of my circumstances. I don't recognize myself because I need to stop assuming that I know myself. I need to keep knowing myself.

I have self-love. But self-like is something that needs to morph with me. I need to prepare to be a friend to myself, not just a sister. I can do it.

Recognition

These days I don't recognize myself. I don't see my face I don't see my handwriting I don't see my art I don't hear my words I don't feel my desires I don't make my choices I
I feel lost. I want to know if I am who I want to be. I mean, obviously not, but I want to be able to work towards who I want to be. I just don't know where I am or where I'm going.
All I know is where I've been, and that looks more and more appealing.
So I don't value myself. I want to go back to someone I was satisfied with.
That is a) impossible b) wrong and I have some explaining to do.

My family is supportive

Night

Edith came over and we gave eachother massages while listening to Broken Social Scene and I pretty much forgot about all other thoughts.

Also my ear is being stretch to accommodate a beautiful silver swirl and I think this body mod will do me good.

The methox only cured my sadness for a week, but caffeinating cures my sadness for a day. It also makes me sweat and talk and yell and be easily annoyed and bored, but it works. Caffeine gives me ADHD?
Seems logical.

Didn't do any homework tonight. Fuck the police.

Self-love>Beer's law.
Oh chemistry I love you sometimes. I love me always. And the rest it's like, eh...
Hot freshman though. Need to make moves.

Google Translate gets fucked by Proust

He there awake, but do not know, and can only repeat indefinitely, with less force, this same testimony that I do not know what I want and interpret at least to ask him again and return intact, available to me, just now, to final enlightenment.

(I never get sick of this one)

How I asked my friend for his time/love

The Current Future (10:02 pm 10-02-13) is unacceptable. I have decided to change it in for a new one.

In the Improved Future, or the Current Future (10:04 pm 10-02-13), we will do something awesome together this weekend (I have a plan. I mean, I have a Current Plan, stay tuned for Improved Current Plan (approx. 10:03 am 10-12-13)).

If you take issue with the Current Future please change it. Alerting me of these changes would be cool but then again, soon the Future will become the Present and then we'll know for sure.

Love,
Julia

Is this obviously a date? I guess it can just be time together and if it turns into a date then that works and if it doesn't then we'll have built an awesome art project on the front lawn so really nothing can go wrong I hope he thinks it's funny.

(he is clearly number 8)

classic love life

I've just made a list of 10 dudes I could potentially fuck in the next few weeks. I also listed the reasons why I shouldn't fuck them. They are:

-eh
-eh
-australian
-don't know anything about
-isn't interested anymore
-has lots of feelings
-communication strugz
-can we date plz
-2 yr old sexual tension is probably too old
-something is off but something sure is on

Need to find a new dating pool asap cuz this dating puddle is not doin' it for me.

This is my life now

Learning to solder circuits today more pumped than this photo would suggest

notes from methox in the rain

we talk about time like it's not happening right now.
juggling is an extension of the body like computers are an extension of the mind.
lover and creator of beauty
math
i miss you
purple hair green feather trine swingset who am i
why is that what I remember
i think of chains as the things that hold swingsets up
which is ?wrong"
I know why i do this?
i should be studying physics
i am that way
am i my mental state or my physical state
i appreciate things that are not combinations of each-other.
everything is a feedback circuit.
or is becoming and
or i wish i could use it that way because things seem more manageable when you pretend they happen one at a time.
I am tired or hungry or thirsty or wet or sleepy or happy or sad.
well, i'm not sad so I guess I still know how to use or.
Also, I was looking for a drug to make me stop caring and this was it. nice... you realize

back to school blues

When I was younger I never got cramps. 400 mg of ibuprofen and 1.5 hours later, I don't have them any more.
Tired, because drunk people came home at 4am (ish?) and disturbed my slumber. Housemate was having sex before I went to sleep, so that kept me up a bit too. The walls are thin. This room is fucking cold, I think I need blankets over the windows. I'll put them up when I leave for the potluck tonight.
I met Edith's mom. She is worried about Edith, and not in a really nice way. In a panicking way. It's not productive and I hope E comes to talk about it soon because I think it's really fucking with her.
I still feel like my life is boring. School is not as interesting as it was last year at this time. Last year problem sets felt like adventures. This year I'm just tired and overworked. It's so mundane. I need to do things.
I need more punk music in my life.

d'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent.

I read Lolita while I wait for bypassed emitter circuits to make sense. Lab report due in 2.5 hours, with a pile of other work that follows it. I'm ready.
But I'll drink my tea regardless. Maybe read a chapter.
I have to keep my priorities in line.

I'm home

This house makes my life. Fresh off the vine, dem beans. Pizza breakfast in bed for the housemates. Painted my walls. 

Morning

It's too early to do dishes, too early to do work. Cold cinnamon toast that Neal forgot in the toaster keeps me company, washed down with emergen-c. Saturday morning, friends.
Yesterday I bought a new journal. It's enormous. It makes the statement: I have a home. We'll see what it turns into. What any of this turns into.
Last night I stayed home and slept instead of going to a party. It could almost have been described as a mature decision.
-Nick stops by and picks up S. for a meeting.-
Quiet house apart from the dishwasher.
Sometimes I can't tell if my skin is clear and my stomach flat or if I'm just having a good self esteem day.  I check by looking at my facebook pictures and seeing which ones of them make me cringe. None. Good self-esteem day. Worth so much more.
Under all the back to school panic is a deep and abiding satisfaction. Almost joy. It's the opposite of the summer.

no dreams

I fell asleep at 2:45 am on a cocktail of caffeine and melatonin. Woke up at 6:50 to keep working.
Don't do drugs kids, or physics.
The have antagonistic interactions.
On the plus side this physics is awesome though.
The drugs are fine too, really, who am I kidding?
It's just that I keep getting sicker and sicker because there's never time to sleep it off.

The housemate who is mostly very depressed it seems was having a good time last night on the porch so I went and talked to them for at least half an hour just to watch him smile and laugh. My heart rejoiced.
Still don't know what to do about him being depressed, apart from having entertaining conversations.
Which may be the only thing to do at all.
Okay more math now.

jk this is a dream journal

I dreamt that I was walking down the highway, a part that looked a lot like the road to Burning Man, with a huge snake draped around my body. Then it slipped off and fled and I chased it but when I finally caught it it was being devoured by worms.

A Week In(d)

Sunday morning, halfway done grading problem sets and curled up in a couch on my front porch. Is this where I want to be?
Not an easy question, but I feel good. After Burning Man I just wanted to build and travel and experience (why couldn't I have gone to Burning Man before France?!?!?), all the while knowing that I'd come back to be trapped in school again.
But I live in a house that feels like home, with people who are kind and interesting and brilliant but also push me to learn and grow. And the work? We're circling each other like lions for a fight, asking "ni jiao szeu ma?" I think when we finally clash the adrenaline from the battle will hold me through.
In the mean time, the rest of my life is almost in place. My room still needs a little more paint, but I got piles of christmas lights from a garage sale yesterday, so the half-functioning fluorescence problem is solved. Edith moved everything out yesterday, so now it's really my space.
The big parties have not been appealing to me lately. The last two nights had one rager and one lovely get together each and the lovely get togethers were heavenly and the ragers made me want to rage-quit. Last night I just smoked hookah with olde chittick until 1:30 in the morning. The tobacco fucked my brain but the conversation was good and I love them.
The giant Australian likes me. I like him too. He's so good. I don't even believe in the word good but he is it. How else could I have taken 2ce for the 3rd time in the desert with dust storms and bicycles and neon lights and felt totally safe the entire time. With almost a stranger. Incredible.
But I also need people here and now. And I don't want to feel bad, even just relatively bad. But these are simple problems which are part of a complex solution.

nightmare

I dreamed that I was being chased through an art museum by inept teenagers who I stabbed with my very dull knife (which in real life was only a few inches from my head.) and then by ruthless killers.Then the chase continued to a fancy restaurant, where more ruthless killers found me. My mother didn't care, wouldn't even help me turn off my phone so that they wouldn't be able to find me as easily, and the proprietor of the restaurant was scandalized to have gunshots in his establishment. I ran and ran and ran though Colorado ranches until I got to an industrial cite, but there was a black SUV waiting for me. When I finally woke up I had dived into a patch of shrubs to await execution.

back at school gonna paint my room i don't have a bed or a working vacuum

but in other news I made it through Burning Man still alive.

whatnow

Life is entirely mad at the moment. I'm at a family reunion where two professors, a doctor, an entrepreneur and a lawyer comprise the original siblings and they still manage to leave their families food insecure for two days because no one can communicate or think of others. Apart from that they are great though.
My housing situation has been totally reversed. I decided literally at the last minute (well, literally in the last two days) that the housing senario was not actually how I had imagined it and realistically it was not what I needed. So now I'm living in a shithole party house instead of a 100 year old salmon colored sweet little thing, but that's what I needed. I needed friends, and proximity to campus, and a known quantity.
And then I'm off to burning man.
So I don't know what is happening but since changing my housing plans I don't really care because it all feels pretty alright.
Also I ate food and got a good night's sleep.
It's weird how much food and sleep matter oh wait no those are pretty much the only things that matter how are they neglected at this fucking reunion.
The only thing about family that is not overrated is my little brother who is a fucking angel and got me food when I had litterally just broken down after being told to stop cooking myself two eggs because there were only 7 to go around after we had just gone on a huge hike (during which I'd been pretty much tripping off of oxygen deprivation because of the altitude) and my total food consumption for the day had been porridge, half a banana, and a rice cake with avocado and cheese on it.
Right, so I promise I feel better now.

Graffiti near my room

200th Post, and it's a good one.

I feel so free.

1. will not be able to explain this. I think maybe my blood has changed color. I look out the window and I see magenta glowing from purple clouds, I see thunder and hear lightning and I know that these are the substance that flows in my veins.

It is too dark to read the book that has set me free, but not too dark to edit the poems on my box of light.

Black Swan Green thank you. This was so precisely what I needed. I guess I am a 13 year old stammering, British, teenage boy. I guess that is the level of emotional maturity and determinism my life has achieved.

BUT THAT IS FINE. Oh I am so relieved to find this book (again, I read it a long time ago) and I am crying at it's perfection. Not crying like I was before, but crying like a bird because unformed noises are the only way to fully commune with it.

I am free.

It's strange: the lamp that I turned on to read this book is bringing back the HPPD from MDA. It's the same as the lamp in E's room, in terms of color. Why I didn't use it all the time is one of the things that ought to cause the stabbing guilt about this summer, but doesn't. The things that do are almost forgotten. The knife is dull.

Even though the fan makes it stutter, it's still better than the fluorescent light.

At the beginning of the summer, looking at the sky broke my heart. It would immediately be grainy and distill its one perfect hue into a bunch of oscillating dots that would fade in and out of approximations. I knew that if my mind could just average the points, I would see the sky. And as I looked up, each time, there would be a blink before the dots came out. In that microsecond I would see the blue. The perfect blue, and then it would leave me.

And I thought I was punished for my rashness. I thought what I should tell my brother, or anyone, who wants to try drugs. How much do you value the sky? It scared me more than the idea of schizophrenia ever did, to think that I'd never see a clear sky. The dots were less aggressive when it was thoroughly cloudy. It was the blank slate that let them in.

But that faded. Thank... Thank life that faded. I can see the sky again. If I'm tired, overcaffinated, crying too much, or what-have-you, the sky is taken from my but when I'm in good form, it's mine.

And tonight in the dark, the trails are back. No messy dots, just graceful trails following my hand. Nothing compared to the dots. Indeed, just an added charm to the incandescent light.

Incandescent means more now, with these two experiences building its power.

David Mitchell, I love you.

Back in the states in a matter of hours. I mean, a matter of a hundred or so hours but they are hours and they are small compared to me.

\MY CENTER OF POWER/

is there. Is here. I felt it in Paris too. It tastes like invention and smells like choice. It invades my saliva and through it twists my tongue and shapes my lips.

Sometimes it says I OWN YOU and I'm afraid of it

Sometimes it says I AM WEAK and I forget myself

Sometimes it hits my heart like adrenaline and drives the beat by itself and I feel like I'm flying. Sometimes everything else is ripped off, in the moments when I know that I am dying, and I am alone with it and the Harmony we create is electrifying, and real, and PERFECT. That word that is so empty to me, but here it finds its substance.

The truth is that I am made for myself.

Maybe this light brings back more than visuals and I am back in that heaven of MDA. Not quite the same. I knew amphetemines would be heaven. I knew that to have my brain be working more intensely and creatively was all I ever wanted. And that's why I put off trying them.

Well, I didn't get addicted but this feeling is familiar because I felt it then. I know I can get this feeling, any feeling, without drugs but to be able to call it up is... good. It leaves me free to send that energy elsewhere. Drugs are a shortcut.

LI<3RE is my favorite form of the pun so far. I think it's too ironic to get tattooed but it's amazing and I love it.

I fixed some poems. They're still a work in progress. Here is my favorite so far. Still a work in progress.

SOMNCALCULIST

Outside already understood

Flood of truth and loops of cool

But jaggedmixedandfickle dreams

                  Separate furtherthanspace                apartfromtime

Every side of this is mine

How can I sleep nestedinart

And allnight take the world apart

blarg art makes art is what I learned at the Pompidou and however mundane that is it is so true. I think it's because religion and earth have both lost their art to us. How sad. How known.

My world is small but I know that it is only one of many and so it grows. What-There-Is is big.

So. That works out.

I am made for myself.

But I think I can play with others too.

I'm so happy that I don't want to stop writing.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN. Hello Internet journal, I guess I'm back. It probably didn't feel long to you, but we had been so close so the week or two I was away felt like a long time.

Bitches. ← too much Yeezus in my ears but how can I stop because it's amazing.

I was freakin' and I wrote this to help.

I'm leaving for Paris soon. I haven't been typing at all lately, but I've written in a similar state of mind at least twice in No History in the past few days, so I've resorted to this as an effort to spare my re-reading self too much redundancy. This doesn't mean that I believe in blogging again, though who knows where that belief went or what took it, it just means that I don't know how else to manage. Writing by hand isn't enough when one is this stressed.

I want so much to understand why I am stressed. I think it's that I'm sad, and I'm misinterpreting the pain and exhaustion of sadness as the more familiar pain and exhaustion of stress. Yes, I have concerns, but I have pretty much decided how to deal with them and part of that decision involved dealing with them when I get back from Paris. I have also decided on the actual dealings. Don't worry. Of course there are still unknowns, but the unknowns are out of my control and I know what the knowns are. I know the knowns better than anyone else. If they think that their knowns are more important than mine, well, they'll see that they have another thing coming. Yesindeedio.

I think “No, my plane leaves in 30 hours,” will be enough to convince them that they are stuck with my solution. And anyways, I have already paid a big security deposit on this room that I don't think I can gracefully get back. I suppose I can give them my French bank coordinates but how I'll ever get money out of BNP Paribas will remain a question for a long time. My final duty, hauling all of my cooking supplies and my fan across town, will be a matter of brute force or the subway, or both. Brute force I can handle, and the exercise will do me good.

I've read 22 books this summer. I've also ready most of a 23rd, which I'm trying to slog my way through the last 30 pages of. Nikola Tesla's “My Inventions” essays were really good, but his ideas for how to increase human energy through a grand metaphor of Newton's Second Law are pretty much unreadable. I hate metaphysics, but he's creating life as a sort of sub-physics. That is even worse. Also, he is very naïve about how awesome it would be to live in a world where patriotism and religion are one and the same and there is only one government. Under normal circumstances I would stop but because I've started this list I don't want to put half-finished books on it. The list... is to make me feel like I've accomplished something this summer.

It works, but it's also pretty pathetic.

Finally 9 pm. My train leaves at 10:30. I'm nervous, but once I'm on the train I'll feel good, I know. Once I'm free. I can't wait to be home. Denver and the family reunion will give me a chance too look over last year's physics. I'm not set on relearning it yet, just re-familiarizing myself with it. Just so I hopefully won't be a total asshole when I'm back at school. “Back at school” is like heaven to my mind. Friends, purpose, fun, stimulus. The freedom of commitment. I had that here too, but it became an excuse not to deal with my emotions. I'm stuck in France doing work that kills my soul, so of course I'm sad and there's nothing I can do about it.

My boyfriend. I hate the word, but I'm glad I can use it. His friend asked me if I was his “significant other” which is a nicer term but also kind of lame. I'm so glad that happened. That was the best part of this summer. Even though we had that rough patch, even though we weren't that good of a match, we still... had some togetherness and I wasn't alone when I needed someone and that means so much to me. I think he has an inkling of what it was but he doesn't completely understand. That's fine. I think that's right. We struggled with the language barrier to the end, and the communication barrier that it masked as well. I think we might keep in touch, at least a little bit. God, his smell was what did it. His smell broke me down the last few days. I'd bury my head in his blanket and try to hide the tears. The last time we had sex was definitely the best. I felt his body shudder and his deep lips settle into mine and I felt so close to him.

It's silly that I didn't try to find a girlfriend, since the whole summer I'd been disgusted by men. Toulouse men are assholes. French girls are hot. But my boyfriend was also hot and rarely an asshole and he knew so many things about politics and science and sports and sometimes I wondered if he read the newspaper cover to cover ever day. Oh, and he liked Calvin and Hobbes. He had them framed on his wall, he had books on his shelves he had links that despaired at the intricacies of arithmetic. Calvin and Hobbes are perfect for him. Innocent and wise, just like him.

Maybe when I see all of the Reedies I miss so much he'll seem strange and alien, like he did at the beginning. I was so surprised by his hangups, and his mores. I think they'll seem a little messy after him. His gray sweater with the zipper on the shoulder.

I'm afraid of thinking I have summer depression because then maybe I'll realize I'm depressed more often than just summer.

I don't know how to be sad, it is crippling.

who reads this.

Ca me pête les couilles.

I want to take up this phrase. It means “that farts on my balls.” Well, it technically means "that breaks my balls," but break and fart are homonyms so I'll stick with my interpretation.
It's ungraceful, but French, and so all crudeness is smoothed by soft double el's and forgotten es's. My boss calls us “choupinette” and “choupinours” depending either on our gender or on his mood, in which case we are occasionally all choupinettes. Though it makes it difficult to tell exactly who he is talking about (“go tell choupinours to come here”) it's the most endearing term of endearment that I've ever heard.

“Charlot” means fool or incapable person, which is pretty good as well. In the Matrix, when the Marovingien fairly sings an aria of French profanities, he overemphasizes the grace and misses the hilarity. Yes, they sound silly, but when they're used most effectively they're highly entertaining. The film I saw today (the one set in Washington) had French subtitles, and their filling-in of the profanity was truly inventive. They don't really have the same ones as us. Their versions of the word jackass are inumerable, but also more specific in their meaning. It makes me nervous to use them without fully understanding...

I was going to pick up “cabron” from Madrid too, but that never happened. We'll see if I can work in some colorful French. Maybe just with my French-talkin' friends and my annoying problem sets...

C'etait bien, les vacances

The alps are more than I remember. I, who can never be bothered to take out a camera, took so many pictures. The problem is that my head cannot hold an accurate memory of the alps. Every time I looked up from a path I was struck again by the enormity of the mountains. Every time I felt the need to remember it better. Why are they so far beyond my ability to store beauty?

I am home again. The rent is late and the air is hot, but I have nothing to manage and so life is manageable. My nose is still pealing from alpine sunburn. I was closer to the sun, so it was more mordant. I was very close to the sun.

I don't know what mood is coming, but a feel a change. This heat, these books, this stage in my journey... I am at a threshold. Two days ago I cried, yesterday I Slept, today stagger like a lock following the blade of a knife, wearing down to give way to something great.

I saw a movie of little consequence today, but it was set in Washington. In the winter in Washington. The green and the trees and the sea and the voices came back to me. At a party which was the cause of the Great Sleep, someone asked me if I was impatient to go home. I answered no, but that is only half true. I am not unhappy here, but I do want to go home. I don't get to go home right away, but when I finally get there the wave will have crested an I will run out and get everyone's feet wet before they see what's coming. There will be cool breezes.

Here there are cool breezes, but they are artificially procured by means of a fan which I bought today, and sing into now to hear the choppy little reflections. Then I spent almost as much money on a 170 page book, but I think more J.M. Coetzee is what I need. I think Disgrace was the most important book I read this summer. We will see what comes of Waiting for the Barbarians.

I think that they will write an article from my research on biofilms. It feels less hopeless, at least, though it is still far from invigorating.

So for now, I will wait-to-see-what-comes. That's not really waiting. I hate waiting. This is just fine.

The Answers Marching One by One

Getting inspired by Kate Zambreno. Sunburns and silence. Alone while my family rides bikes. Ants crawl between the keys of the keyboard. What is sweet here? Oh right, everything.

Also, rereading this  and thinking about how carefree my dreams have been lately.

And reading this and smiling.

La Côte d'Azur

Pretty bug. Two amazing meals. By the beach. With my broski and Popsicle. Vacances.

Holistic Attraction

When a stranger asks me to have a drink, there is nothing there to want. I know only one thing: the stranger is attracted to me.

When I am in bed, and we've just had sex, and my lovers eyes trace my collarbone and a hand follows the curve of my hip back and forth because the shape is pleasing, I see a similar attraction. This time, however, it is meaningful. I relish the desire; it leads to so many experiences. It also brings my attraction out of my mind and into the world, because until I see it in a mirror it is only a part of my imagination.

But the stranger's desire is not reflected. It is not real. Or rather, it is caught in uncertainty and is flailing blindly until it finds an image of itself. In its helpless state, sometimes it catches a single shard of mirror, or mistakes an irrelevant sunbeam for its reflection.

But one shard is not enough. One shard is not a broken piece, but rather something that is not anything. Two shards, however, are parts of a greater creature. The more shards there are, the more interesting it is to assemble them. The assembly is the crux of the adventure. And then to look into it for a moment and relish the creation before the cracks appear again.

The mirror I make is concave. It has corners. It's a box, and inside it goes as deep as I look, images of itself stacked within each other until I blink. One shard alone is flat, and self evident.

The truth of the matter is that attraction is not enough for me. Especially not a monopole, but even a monopole with some extra aspects is worth it. The hardest part of seducing someone is deciding that you want to seduce them. And one shard is never enough.

Yeup, rehashing old ideas but lets just call these drafts and one day I'll actually know what I'm writing about.

The world is holding its breath and I am begging for a breeze

The air is stagnant after ten pm, 4 stories above the ground. An artificial wind device would be most appreciated at this juncture, and I will seek one as soon as possible. With the arrival of an unexpired debit card and a father, all of my needs will doubtless be met immediately.

I have had a period of gentle certainty in my place here. More social opportunities arise than I am interested in participating in these days, which leaves a security blanket of potential escape on the shivering body of my hermitage. Anna is done, and so I began Le Trone de Fer, which, to my infinite disappointment, is not literature. It is a book, it is a story, but if it wasn't poorly written it was poorly translated and my patience for it is strained. On the other hand, I have read 300 pages of it and will certainly read the next 200. There is something to be said for stories. But I doubt I will look for its sequel.

Pierrot le Fou. That was literature. No, it was film, but it felt like literature. Maybe I will write a story of Pierrot le Fou, maybe it is inspiring. Maybe it's just conversational, and the conversation should be kept private. How would I write the colors? I saw it outside, in the night, and the bells of churches rang during the movie.

I am still uncomfortable at work. This is because I don't really have any. I'm not taught, either. You know I study physics because I don't think I could learn it on my own. Well, these summer adventures are all about learning physics on my own and it's all very contrary to my central beliefs about physics. Do I learn? What can I relay from my readings? Vague things, and only with specific questions. If I reread my summaries I do a bit better.

So there. There we are.

Oh, and I am eating luxuriously. Rillettes de Canard is meat that melts like summer on your tongue. However, I am starting to believe that my appreciation of food is somehow linked to my menstrual cycle. I find I have phases of everything-is-delicious and other times nothing-tastes-right and still other what-does-hunger-feel-like periods. Maybe there is some other cycle, but that is the cyclest cycle I know.

Next weekend, to the mountains! I didn't speak directly about the subject of this weekend, but it was pleasant though too hot. Apero at la Daurade, with normal conversations. I did the laundry! It was very pleasurable to do, I wish I had done it more often. The movie, and today the natural history museum which has an impressive collection of skeletons.

C'est ca la vie. La vie, c'est là.

Fishiness

My room smells of fish. I splash of mackerel juice found its way out of the can and is making my life a living hell. The mackerels have been been thrown out on the charge of being excessively fishy. They were not thrown out quickly enough, however, and I eagerly await the day that my room regains its neutral odor.

I may need to do some laundry to achieve that goal. But I need to do laundry for other reasons, like going to work. So, as the situation grows more desperate the amount of good that will come of it increases. By the time I actually get around to it, I'll be in a state of ecstasy at its completion. Why hurry?

I have a similar theory with regards to opening a bank account in France so that I can be paid for my minimal contributions to the water-place.

In any case, the window of my room opens out into a dramatic sunset and lets in the last of the daylight for this typing to take place. My writing has taken a backburner to my reading lately, as Anna Karenina is a jealous mistress (spoilers lol). I do have a small mountain of letters to send, but my journals lay around in their lonesomeness and my diarying has less flavor for me. Maybe I'm just overwhelmed by the fishiness at the moment.

I did write the first 500 words of a story the other day, but I'm not sure that it will materialize into anything. I did feel madly eloquent for those 500 words. That's part of the problem. Now that I had such a comfortable start I have no desire to drag myself through any of it. Also, dialogue is so difficult. I need to either hunt down that play I started or begin another one and practice practice practice. I'm too comfortable describing. I need things to happen. I need to share the moment with the characters.

What if I wrote an entire novel without any dialogue. Self-serving.

Look, at this point I'm just writing to stay in the habit of writing. Same with the 15 minutes I just spent with Radiohead and my fans. Gotta buy a ticket to Pacific Fire Gathering. I think I'll also buy Mathematica tomorrow. I can't live without it. Spending dollahs. Worth it.

Somehow many of my coworkers have heard of Burning Man through TV shows. Apparently in a Simpsons episode they go to Burning Man, and some other show too. I am curious as to what these portrayals are like. Anyways, Burning Man Burning Man Burning Man I cannot wait.

I also can't wait to start Le Trone de Fer which I bought yesterday. 300 more pages of Tolstoy and then it begins.

I still feel good. And none of it was real.

Last night I dreamed luxurious feelings. I dreamed food, and sex, and freedom.

I have some habits to fix.

http://archive.org/details/HabitPat1954

Especially since I just took a morning after pill from a judgmental pharmacist. This is incredible.

Who//What//Where//When//Why//How//ABANDON STRUCTURE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE

I've just reread my Hum paper on Niobe. If only I had taken Hum 110 with Robert Knapp for my entire Reed career, I think my writing would be better. Maybe I'll put it up on the blog so I won't ever lose it. That's how this works, right?

I think my favorite reason for blogging is that if I found this blog, as a random stranger, I would enjoy it. There are other reasons, of course: exhibitionism and nostalgia chiefly among them. This feeling of youth and invulnerability sure doesn't help either. I should probably look up the dangers of admitting to lawlessness on the internet. This Ubuntu word processor want to either capitalize the I of internet, or write the whole word in capital letters. How strange.

My last few posts have been a little gloomy, I know. I just post whatever I wrote in the order I wrote it in. Sometimes it seems a little silly to say “I am sad” on Monday, when in fact I was sad on Friday night and Monday is cheerful and bright. But I am a sucker for completeness and I think that's more important than temporal accuracy.

This Friday night was not a sad one. A work-buddy invited me to the Siestes Electroniques, which should be starting up again in an hour or two. It turns out that he didn't know what time they were at, because at 10:30 the park was locked and the show was over. We sat in an asphalt park for a while, drinking his cheap beer, and it was there that I found out that he had absolutely no social anxiety. I have never met such a person before. He's a little wacky, but pretty fun.

In a fit of boundless extroversion, he called a guy he'd met in his building and invited himself to hang out with Pierrot's group. We walked over to La Daurade, where they were sitting on a large map of the city. The conversations were not particularly memorable, but at one point we all got up and learned Indian dance moves from work-buddy and his friend. That was pretty great.

After a disagreement with a large Algerian man over whether or not he was entitled to a puff of a cigarette, we left the park to avoid a fight. We ended up at another, rather sinister park, where we stayed until 3 in the morning, discussing cinema and the allegory of the cave. They were nice semi-crusty semi-punky people, and we got on pretty well.

The boything was home to check on his grandmother and visit his family.

Too Real

How can I write a portrait of someone I don't know? How can I write a portrait of someone I know so well?

I've been wanting to write “portraits” of people since reading The Diary of Anais Nin. She prepared characters for books by writing from experience and observations. I no longer feel comfortable inventing people. I am also nervous about chronicling them, especially after Edith asked for the name change. I should really change everyone's name, especially mine.

But that's a different story. I think I want to invent again. Diarist suits me either too well or not at all, and I'm worried about becoming too entrenched in this project that has no boundaries. I think that I will forget how to play by rules, and forget that some people have a distinction between good and bad. By forgetting these things my life will become more difficult, in a tiresome way.

What is it that keeps me from excelling? I used to feel so pleased with myself. I was so positively reinforced. Why? What was I doing then that I have lost now? I don't think I have shrunk, I don't even feel that I've changed my shape. Why is all so dis-satisfactory? Am I disillusioned? I don't feel any wiser, that's for sure.

I keep dreaming of huge projects. I keep dreaming of giving my life to something. It's really quite meta, when I'm daydreaming about how I could be at work and be totally inefficient because my mind is caught up in something. Does that situation translate into words? I dream that I'm dreaming something.

Am I capable? One of the things I dream is the Artists Collective. Another is a Book. Things I haven't started. I wonder if I could start them. I wonder if I want to start them.

Who are you? Come closer.

Mysterious Angst

I don't understand how depression makes some people creative.

I'm not even very depressed and I feel trapped by it. It invalidates my ideas and makes everything difficult. It makes things that can wait (or must wait) feel frighteningly pressing and everything that needs to happen right now is somehow delayed because I can't bear to be done with it.

It's not that I'm not doing anything. It's that everything I'm doing loses its value. I would be proud of the reading I've done, the writing I've done, the people I've met. But I just feel vaguely disappointed in how much I've learned and in The Beautiful and Damned (which may be a source of some of this ennui).

I must be happy. But seeking happiness to be happy feels like googling “how do I laugh?” I need something bigger to be happy.

I also need the sadness to stop manifesting itself physically. If I could just ignore it, if I didn't feel the pain in my stomach, or the heaviness in the bridge of my nose, the ringing in my ear. It's speaking to me, maybe it's yelling at me, telling me that it's there. I can only stand here helplessly. What is sadness? What do you want?

I haven't earned sadness, no more than my internship of interminable reading. That's why it doesn't sit well with me. I am so nearly cosmically obliged to be happy that I have no arsenal to battle sadness. The reasons for it are so small that I can't imagine how it bloomed in such arid soil.

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre

If this was a song and not something Albert Camus said, it would be my theme song. It is too general to be my motto, and I'm not the kind to have a motto, but I think it can be my theme song anyways.

After three weeks alone, I spent more than thirty hours with another person. This abrupt change was very strange to me, and I have regained my seclusion for a few hours to shower, eat, read and write. I feel comfortable in these activities. At 7:30 we will see Hannah Arendt. Every date feels like my first date. Honestly, I don't put much stock in dates. Too premeditated. The only one that stuck was the 8th grade outing to see Borat, which is really a story that I should tell at parties. Have I been on other dates? I don't know. I remember thinking “Is this my first date?” many times, and yet have no recollection of the incidents themselves. I guess I need to go on better dates. Hannah Arendt will probably not be a spectacular date, but I want to see it in order to better understand my friends who think that she is a spiffy lady.

I'm reading The Beautiful and Damned, but the doomed romance is too much. In the face of this new thing I really shouldn't be adding fuel to the pilot light of cynicism that asks me why? Why? Why? Is there really a connection here? Am I capable of connection. I think that people see the best in me for 8 cumulative hours of their life.

No. I want someone who likes me deliriously and unconsciously. I think I could like them that way too, if they started it. No, I would be bored.

The language barrier is kind of a drag. French accents are cute, but French is cuter. Just not with my mouth, which insists on deforming words every so slightly and just enough that I wish they'd never been spoken. I wish I felt like I belonged here. No more of this bullshit, never again. No more things I didn't earn. Every time I have something I didn't merit, I forget my merits and that is terribly dangerous.

I feel safe by myself, naked, on my bed. Books, computers, spicy mustard and gooey cheese are all I need. Pens are nice too.

Boys are also good. It's just hard to feel comfortable. I keep waiting for him to smile as much for me as he does for... the time I saw his biggest smile. And it's the same every time I don't understand why they don't because I do. I'm not pretending, either. Not then.

Another Self Portrait

I am a walking sacrilege. My breath falls on God's brow like hurricane and His eyes fill with tears against the screaming wind. My eyes never weep. They are dry like cool lava, they are an amorphous solid, they have not welcome in any physical state. My lips part like the jaws of egoism and devour the unsuspecting fool who does not look beyond himself. I drink my own blood. My tongue whips like irony on a raw heart. The world is my Medusa and if I look too close I turn to stone, and it turns to snakes. Good thing we live in a land of mirrors. A cage without windows; there is nothing but bars. Calvin and Hobbes play ball with my brain and it gets lost near 23rd base, with the time-space continuum vortex. I'm flying faster than light, because I have no mass and my wave function is one everywhere but is still normalized.

Wait that's not me; it's Chuck Norris!

I know this isn't funny but I had fun and that's what counts #freebitch oh my god I need to stop with the hashtags.

BOOKS ARE LIKE CIGARETTES!

I used to think that people smoked cigarettes as a social affect. You're smoking, I'm smoking, can I bum one, got a light, etc. Then a group of people convinced me that the reason was more personal. They said that when you're smoking, it's just you and the cigarette. Life is calm, and you are alone and agentive.

Well, in that case, books are my anti-drug. When your mind is in a book, no matter how many people are around you, no one can touch you. That's why it bothers me when people interrupt me when I'm reading without acknowledging that I was preoccupied. Do they not realize what a sacred place I am in when I read? I am no longer human with my book; I enter another realm. I feel safe when I have one with me.

So yeah, just say no, kids. And read a book, read a book, read a motherfucking book.

Elements of goddamn motherfucking style

I've started The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne is the front-man of King Comma, my second favorite progressive rock band. Sometimes my commas get out of control too, as I'm sure you've noticed. I have composite thoughts! There's nothing I can do! Except, of course, to adopt staccato exclamation marks as a coping mechanism. What I mean to say is I hope it doesn't rub off on me.

Madame Nin, on the other hand, was a master of balanced sentence structure. She very naturally wrote sentences of a reasonable length without any extra clauses. They read smoothly, too. I will have to read House of Incest and Winter of Artifice, but until I get my hands on them I have her erotica to guide me. Wink.

Hawthorne is also adept at the sarcastic ad hominid. I just read 15 pages of the most intricate character assassination ever attempted. His arrow struck true, as well. He may as well have described his coworkers as the most adept bike thieves, baby-pinchers, and skilled opera-house-exhibitionists he had could ever have imagined. I thought this book was supposed to be dramatic and historical, but so far it's uproariously funny. It is not entirely out of character for High School English classes to be highly misleading, and I guess this was no exception. I have good memories of Junior year English, however, for without it I would never have read The Things They Carried and my introduction to The Great Gatsby would have been at the very least delayed.

I am glad to pay a bit more attention to style. I felt that journaling was degrading it over the school year. My writing had little reflection, as a turbulent river of emotion leaves few eddies still enough to look into. Holla atcha flooid mekanix. #tolerancebreak2k13.

Well that escalated quickly...

Self Portrait

She was eating books. With total abandon, she consumed the pages. Like a greedy toddler, bits and pieces of them splattered on her face and clothes. They dripped onto her thighs and smeared up her hands. Unattainable fragments streaked down her chin. She stuffed phrases into her pockets for later. Chapters fell lightly into her stomach, leaving her hunger unabated. Sometimes she swallowed them whole, sharp teeth barely grazing the sentences. More more more, but she didn't care for nutritional value. It was the thrill of the act. Turning pages as if they were spoonfuls, marveling at the broth which gave way to meat, and then an empty bowl which smelled of all of the spices she'd ever tasted. When the dish was done she paused for a moment and took a breath. “I tasted,” she thought, and then inhaled and opened to another first page.

At work, she was an amateur painter who had never seen a nude body. Bits and pieces of the figure in front of her were familiar. Cheekily concealed by a shawl on the cover of a magazine, she'd seen a hint of the divergence of a vector field. A movie could still be rated PG-13 if it only had one instance of tensor calculus. When she had pirated Game of Thrones, a popup ad had offered her the chance to watch a couple engage in a closure problem, but she had closed the window. The show itself gave a few glimpses of the Laplacian, enough to make her blush. But in this room it is all laid out. A greyish-yellow voice says the unthinkable. A Dijon accent orders “describe to me this body.” She shivers and dips a clumsy brush.

A tulip bloomed in a desert. As she walks along the river people watch her and think “she will die soon.” They have an irresistible desire to pick her, to bring about that end, but why grasp at what is probably a mirage? They drool for her, with greedy eyes, and she wilts under the glare. Nothing is more obvious than the fact that she does not belong. Dew on petals falls into cracks in parched earth. While the sage grows sturdily and aloe gives the weary some relief, it's hard to remember why she was ever there.

Writing while my room cools down. Egoism 101

The enforced stone age keeps me prolific. I can't sleep until the sun sets, I can't cook creatively, I can't send words across continents in seconds; I'm in a different world. In this world, I read until I'm chased from my bed by the threat of a premature nap that will leave me thrashing in the heat of this room until midnight. I go outside and throw metal webs in the air until a wick comes loose and I undo my hair to fix it. In my bed again, the wind is soft on my back and cools the bruise on my elbow. One diary closes, and another opens.

All day I feel like prey. Only in moments of happiness, usually occurring halfway through a certain special incendiary tune, do I feel powerful. I feel agentive. But it fades because I'm following a path and everyone is watching where my feet land. What are they watching? Are they watching something they fear, something they admire, or something they have a vague distaste for? I feel like an international savage, like my very presence is an affront to as-it-should-be.

They want. They speak to me and I see desire and it angers me. If I don't see desire, I can't imagine what they mean and I invent desire to justify my disinterest.

I don't see faces that I want to see again or even stop and examine for an instant. Only one person (outside of the workplace), in a short interaction, did I want to learn from. He sat in a pile of books, and told me to come back at the beginning of the next month if I wanted to sell some of my library. I didn't feel like a savage. I felt like a spirit.

Today a man began slowly. He said my fans looked like a birds foot. Then he wanted to see me on Saturday, whenever I 'played.' I don't understand what they are grasping at. I love to let people I only barely touch back into the randomness of the world. I love to watch our understandings step away from each other and infect outwards. I imagine them later, at moments that don't announce themselves, and it is a rich feeling.

My desire doesn't come when it's called. She hates to hear her name before she introduces herself. When anyone demands her, she ceases to exist.

Toulouse Pride

Though a smaller affair than Madrid Pride, Toulouse Pride was excellent. It had a similar structure, though in addition to the rolling stages full of DJs and dancers there were a series of speeches to kick it off. One was by a sister of perpetual indulgence! The sound system was such that the deaf could understand better than the hearing unimpaired. I think that says something about their efforts for equality.

The parade started and the crowd was very confused. I tried to follow one float, but couldn’t keep up. Then I realized that a drum corps was coming up behind me, so I hung back. That ended up being the best possible decision and I stuck with them for the remainder of the 2 or 3 hour parade. I just danced and danced and danced and danced. A pair of girls who were hitting on a drummer, and a gaggle of very enthusiastic women who all knew each other followed the drummers with me. With the gaggle there too I didn’t feel like I was alone in the crowd. It really didn’t matter though, because nothing really does when a dozen drums are beating.

My shoulders are burnt, my head hurts from dehydration, and Stop Making Sense just ended on my music-device. But those are the worst things of today, so hey! This is great.

On the way back a dude in a tutu was asking for kisses so I kissed him. First kiss of Toulouse, weeee. Well, this time around at least.

This evening I tried to find a punk concert, but I got sketched out in the neighborhood as I approached the approximate location. There are actually a million things going on in Toulouse tonight, but I’m too tired from dancing in the heat without enough water. Also I just walked for an hour and a half trying to get to this show. Bleh.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I anticipate a slow day, but whatever. Maybe I’ll get to reflect on what my two decades mean to me.

Birthday present from the group: Ubuntu

I'm such a fucking nerd.
My parents got me a set of David Griffith's textbooks and two cordless screw drivers.
I'll have to buy some drugs to balance all of this ~useful~ stuff.

What is fun?

I read somewhere that fun is the American alternative to pleasure. In a facebook message yesterday, my mom asked if I was “having fun yet?” and I took offense. But I have two stories to tell today, because I had fun on Thursday and I had pleasure on Friday.

On Thursday a work-dude was kind enough to invite me to go to a movie with him and some of his friends. We saw “The Bling Ring” because it was in some way connected to Sophia Coppolla, but that did nothing to excuse it. The best part of it was “can I have a 5 mg Adderall mommy?” “of course honey.” I tried to explain how that was the most honest representation of America in the film, but I’m not sure that it got through. I’m actually pretty sure that the didn’t even translate the other Adderall joke, when the girls got up in the morning and all took a pill with breakfast.

After the movie el work-dude and el office-mate were hungry, so we went to MacDonalds. I was floored. They have electronic ordering systems on the wall, so you pay for everything and then just hand a ticket to the person at the front and they get you the food. It would not be that hard to replace everyone in MDs with a robot. It has begun.

They ate, then we went to a friend of their’s (ex-stagiare as well) apartment, and had some wine before going to a bar. It was my first subway ride in Toulouse, which was exciting.

The bar was awesome. It was somehow Spanish themed, and the point is to dance on the tables. We drank sangria (weird sangria…) and then yeah, we danced on the tables. The best songs were “I’m gonna getcha” and “Thrift Shop.” At one point I thought they were gonna play 212 but it ended up just being a remix. I got real excited though.

I met someone else who is involved with the IMFT somehow, and he asked me if I liked office-mate. I said yes, because what the hell. He said he though office-mate liked me too and I should talk to him because office-mate is really shy. I told him to calm down, which he thought was funny. He also immediately told the 2 other guys dancing on the tables, so I flipped him off which is apparently not the done thing in these parts but at least it changed the subject.

I did talk to office-mate a little, but I don’t think it’s a great idea to hook up with someone who shares an office with you. But he’s so adorable, so…

He left early though, and I danced a bit more and then left. Work-dude walked me home, kinda awkward.

Their end of classes party was on Friday, but I decided not to follow that up because it’s basically their Renn Fayre and that is sacred. Even if they obviously don’t have the same kinda blow-out as we do, it’s still sacred to me.

Instead, I had a pretty good day at work (we argued about wine, which was really fun) and then brought some books to the riverside. I lay in the evening sun and finished Disgrace, and continued with Mythologies, and only got asked out twice. Mythologies is gonna be a long term project, but Disgrace blew my mind. I think it has the most perfect ending of any book I’ve ever read. I can see why this guy won the Nobel prize for lit, maybe even more so than after I finished The Bluest Eye just two weeks ago.

After the sun was getting to be really setting, the grassy area by the side of the river was getting really packed. So I started walking home, but I got distracted by the sunset on the Garonne and the fact that “Take Me to the River” was about to come on. Talking Heads and Sunset is a combination I highly recommend. I guess Talking Heads and Sunrise is the more popular combo.

Home, journal and a cup of whole milk, a little bit of Bienvenue Chez les Chtis, and then sleep. I may have just slept for 12 hours. I don’t care, I love it.