| nous disons encore "non" à faux-ass nonsense |
[06 May 2017|04:00pm] |
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Nearly everything after Oct08-- and a good deal of the relatively recent stuff before that-- is friends-only now, and probably will be for a long time. I liked the idea of having a public journal when it was possible, though, so if you comment I'll probably add you as long as you're not really creepy.
If you're reading this without having been given the address by me personally, or without having been added, maybe you should consider when it was that we could last have been considered friends. My guess would be: sometime before you felt the need to skim a personal journal for passing mention of your name. If that doesn't feel lonely to you, it ought to.
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| superficial burns |
[13 Sep 2009|01:28am] |
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mood |
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 sad |
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music |
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Built to Spill |
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I've just got to say, first, that all my typos lately are based more on phonetic similarity or confusion between the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets than on U.S. keyboard layout.
Since Thursday morning (I think) I've had something like a depression/hangover: I'm very suddenly missing something I need to function. I'm used to my yearly depression beginning around October, but I don't think I've ever crashed this hard.
At the same time I wonder if it's really new. Thanks to politics and drinking and unemployment and my own failure at being an acceptable (girl)friend, I had a pretty shitty summer to the tune of depressing seasons in general. They aren't just forgettable, they're impossible to remember: alcoholic craters of experience or asinine wormholes of memory and art or pick your own pretentious way to describe something really common but nevertheless really scary. I've alternated between not being able to remember my own experiences and actively believing false things about them.
In addition I've remembered or believed things that were objectively the worst to talk to anyone about. Matt feels too new among other reasons and telling Sean would be all kinds of inappropriate. Kelly believes every negative emotion I've ever had is a good reason for me to seek therapy (even the physically intimidating ex boyfriend ones). Ron I don't talk to enough to feel comfortable starting again when I need something. Allison wants me to pray.
I'm tempted to keep drinking until I'm drunk enough to call whoever and ask for whatever I want unselfconsciously, but I think in the morning I'd feel just the same. And I think this is why psychiatrists and psychologists have libraries of studies that say the American public doesn't even buy the idea that mental illness is a biological problem: because any illness really does impose moral problems upon the sufferer; in addition to the fact that our perceptions are precious to us even when they're painful. No adult should feel OK with being a dependent, and maybe an emotional dependent in particular. I guess I say that as someone who's felt guilty she didn't talk more people off more ledges.
In this I've wanted to break down a set of feelings that I know are irrational: resentments that are mostly quite old and suddenly feel urgent, or needs that I'm sure someone thinks are OK but not the people I know and love most and best. I guess I didn't think a biological malfunction could be so elegantly designed. Or, if I did, I wasn't quite prepared for its experience.
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| in the hips |
[18 Jul 2009|11:33pm] |
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mood |
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 pensive |
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music |
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Neko Case |
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Lately I've found love problematic. Not-- in the sense that I've been rejected or rejected people or been failed in some more elaborate way or otherwise thought of it as an institution that has failed me or something, although I guess I'm aware that I could. Think of it that way.
Rather, I've wondered if, for example, Matt doesn't just permit himself to be loved. It's weird, because I guess that could be characterized as paranoid of me, and anyway I'm not used to newly-discovered attractions to other people that need to be nourished and worked on, or something. The (usually) uncomplicated enjoyment I get out of our time together is (often) mixed up with worrying if it's really like that.
On the other hand, I've wondered what it means to think of Sean as one of my very best friends, the person who still knows the most about me probably ever, and as the person with an enduring value that I know I can't rationalize. I wonder about the way(s) I ruined(?) that, and whether the things I now think of as having been wanting in our relationship would ever have seemed that way, had I not ruined it.
Finally, I've wondered why love seems momentous to people, a word they shouldn't overuse (often, it seems, as if they are afraid to dilute its meaning) or a stage of life into which they decide they've entered based on vague and often (I think) meaningless criteria. Compared to most people I know, I feel I often admit to having loved an awful lot of people-- admit it to others, and admit it to myself. I wonder how many additional loves I'm hiding in the back of my mind, from everyone? And yet the people who, I feel, most tormented me I've largely accepted as having been loved. And the same with the people who made me most happy.
This limited, tortured use seems odd to me because it seems to me that love is experienced in dozens (at least) of different ways even within the same human experience-- even within the same human experience of a single other person. Maybe this only means that the term is an impossibly broad catchall, difficult for even (and maybe especially) the articulate among us to define. On the other hand, I think that my-- and maybe most people's-- experience of love for other people is inevitably tied up with time and its power over us, its demands made of everyone involved. And if appeals to timelessness, or at least adaptability, undermine our appreciation of the sometime brevity of profound human experiences?
But then, maybe I've been biased by my own adolescent moth-love and by having been encouraged to romanticize brevity and loss. Certainly I love-- relationships that have ended, people whom I no longer exactly know. Does this mean that I wish I could move back, or have them back? Not exactly.
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| love, and more. |
[11 Jul 2009|08:25pm] |
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mood |
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 anxious |
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music |
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Modest Mouse |
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I'm too lazy to check if this is already on here somewhere, but evidently I wrote this poem in May of 2007. I think it's more apt right now than it was then.
--
a credulous man
I am a slow worker.
Past midnight I begin to remember, and envy,
the ease with which you extracted yourself
from a web of springtime blandishments:
mine.
And if only labor makes sense to you now?
Once we had too much to drink,
sat under the stairs and named our children
after regional semantic differences.
Bucket and pail, that sort of thing.
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| dirt |
[18 Jun 2009|03:45am] |
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mood |
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 confused |
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music |
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Horse Feathers |
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This morning Matt woke me up early with his thousand alarms. I fell asleep downstairs and he put me to bed in my clothes, even though his new room is upstairs and frightfully hot. I drove him to work and then went back to my own bed. Had the most awful nightmare and woke up in a sweat.
After I woke up, Matt called me and asked if I wanted to go to a late dinner with him and Kelly. Matt is waking up early tomorrow (today, really) to drive Kelly to get her wisdom teeth out, and she was taking him to dinner to thank him. I had to explain about the nightmare on the phone. At dinner, my hands shook.
In between, though, I took a pretty good shower and went for another drive to Farmer City, west of Champaign on US-150. I guess it helped, a little. Not as much as I'm used to.
Last week I went out of boredom, I think, or maybe it was another bad day in politics (last time I cried about Dr. Tiller: Friday). It had been raining all day and was still foggy out. I'd never noticed before how all the buildings out there are white, all of them. All of them seem to have the same pitch to their roofs, too, which are all forest green, gray, or white.
US-136 has a junction with US-150 possessive of both a four-way stop and a flashing red light, which last week winked at me slowly pinkly, a benevolent aureole or a red beacon in a sea of milk. Today, sitting in a white sky with good visibility, it was only an intermittently lit red point on a line.
Lots of other things were the same, though. There isn't actually a lot of corn grown out here-- it's mostly soybeans-- but the summer has grown advanced enough, and recently it's rained enough, that the corn is finally distinguishable from the other crops in color and kind. It's hedged in by grass that's roughly its own height, though not for long.
The soy fields are better. In some places, they taper smoothly into perfect expansive and English lawns tended by riding mowers. In others, they foam suddenly into wildflowers and prairie grasses, a greener analogue to the crest of gravel that follows the shoulder of the road, and making me wonder about the meaning of a "frontier" in these places.
This area is divided, then molded, by bodies of water such as the Sangamon River and Salt Creek. On lots that border these, the soybeans hug the shape of the river and the edges of the stands of trees like a rock garden flooded green, premature to human nourishment.
On days such as these, the landscape of central Illinois reminds me a lot of rooms like Matt's and mine, with their wooden floors and high windows with their molding painted white. With its never-tended ivy obscuring the windows, and blue curtains between me and the leaves, my room is a variation on this type: as much like a leafy tent as a box of light whose character is quiet. Matt's room, barely lived in yet, is a better example, and the white houses along US-136 have the kind of narrow windows that move me to fantasize about the rooms inside.
It's comforting to know that such unabashedly physical realities (if more so than things like food or sex or comfort) can exert a pull on me, exact a toll. I've been spending a lot of time alone lately, in my hot little house, reading After Many A Summer Dies the Swan and wondering when next I'll love more than one person with the decency to stay in one place. This is probably not decent of me since I'll be moving at the end of the summer and leaving Matt behind. But, since I'm the one who's always alone and always trying not to be, not him, I expect he won't mind.
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| exploring |
[28 May 2009|08:19pm] |
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mood |
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music |
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Neko Case |
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Yesterday around noon I drove Matt to work and decided to go for a drive I'd been wanting to take. In the past, I've gone down IL-45 to around Pesotum, or wandered around the farm roads of Savoy and Philo. The best way to do this from my house is to take Lincoln Ave. south until it comes to a T at Windsor Rd., where you should take a right, then a left on Neil St., which is IL-45. Alternatively, you can turn left earlier, at First, and wander around Savoy, itself a rewarding experience. So yesterday I decided to turn left on Windsor instead, taking me east through Urbana and beyond.
Windsor Rd. continues east until somewhere between Tipton and St. Joseph, where it jogs straight north and ends at a T with Homer Lake Rd., which continues southeast for a while until it hits IL-49. It then straightens out before continuing northeast as E 1490 N Rd./Lincoln Trail Rd., where it turns to gravel. You can see what I mean by using this map, although it redirects to Urbana for some reason. Tipton and St. Joseph are tiny, and Homer Lake Rd. is southeast of Urbana. Around the intersection with N Vermilion W Rd., there's a tiny cemetery concealed by trees and accessible by a narrow grass track at its edge. That's what I was going back to today after Matt brought me home. I invited him to come, but he was too tired.
Lincoln Trail Rd. has no shoulder, and the grass on either side is marked by a trench that I thought I wouldn't be able to get out of in my Corolla, so I found an even smaller trail over a creek but ran into the same problem. I did see horses, though, and some truly ancient barns and a lot of roads with no names, one marked by two millstones. I didn't want to drive on the cemetery's grass, so I thought I'd try to find some shoulder on N 30 E Rd., which is basically a north dogleg of N Vermilion W Rd. To use the side that looked more promising, I had to turn around and drive south again. On the way, I saw a brown and white dog that turned around when it heard me, hopefully for home.
When I found a place that seemed good enough to stop, although I still couldn't quite get out of the road, a green truck was just passing, heading west on Lincoln Trail Rd. It slowed down, backed up, and turned onto N E 30 Rd. and pulled up next to me to ask if I needed any help. I thought the story about the cemetery would sound crass, since it's probably someone's family's, so I told him I was lost and asked how to get back to Urbana. Instead of giving me directions, he offered to lead me back to US-150. He told me he was born and raised in Ogden, which is about halfway between Urbana and Indiana on US-150, and almost due north of where we were then. He also told me I was pretty. I turned my car around and followed him north. We turned left on US-150 and he pulled over in a garage in Ogden to tell me that I could follow US-150 all the way back to Lincoln Ave. in Urbana, which is what I did.
I told him that I'd just graduated from the U of I, will be moving back to Chicago, and wanted to see as much of the surrounding area as I could before I left, because I'll miss it, and all those things are true. Kerry told me that he knows all the roads of Illinois and that, if I'm ever lost again, to call him. I wrote his name and phone number down in The Crocodile Bird, a Ruth Rendell novel I'm reading and that I'd brought in case I wanted to stop at a diner. Kerry works at the U of I as a building service worker in ISR, where I used to live, and said I could also call him if I ever want someone to drive around with and need a guide. He talked to me about Taste of Chicago and told me to let him know when I go because he wants to go. I told him I'd studied history and he told me that he's Native American and his cousin is a history professor in Native American studies at Columbia Missouri. He concluded by telling me, "I'm a good, good man," and stopped to wave to me before getting back in his truck.
On my way back on US-150, I passed another cemetery, although this one was big enough to have a name and the trees looked planted. It was called Mt. Olive and contained several tombs which I think may be of interest to Matt.
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[26 Oct 2008|09:47pm] |
"The Way", by Albert Goldbarth
The sky is random. Even calling it "sky"
is an attempt to make a meaning, say,
a shape, from the humanly visible part
of shapelessness in endlessness. It's what
we do, in some ways it's entirely what
we do-- and so the devastating rose
of a galaxy's being born, the fatal lamé
of another's being torn and dying, we frame
in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way
we would those other completely incomprehensible
fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.
Making them "subjects." "Rose." "Lamé." The way
our language scissors the enormity to scales
we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate
in memory, or edit out selectively.
An infant's gentle snoring, even, apportions
the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,
Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk
to Crewkerne-- then the nearest town--
by pushing a device invented especially
for such a project, a "perambulator": seven miles.
Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.
Ten thousand I saw at a glance: by which he meant
too many to count, but could only say it in the counting.
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[16 Oct 2008|05:02am] |
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I am not diminutive!
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| all my old things |
[08 Oct 2008|05:19pm] |
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mood |
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 apathetic |
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music |
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Empire of the Sun |
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More house showings for tomorrowwwww
Why won't someone just want our house?
Now I'm looking forward to two things that will mean October is over [even though I love October]:
the election will be over. house showings will be over.
I hope the people who take our house won't be weird or want to come over again.
Maybe I should try harder to kill the occasional ants around the sink.
Maybe I should have tried harder to clean the bathtub when it was my month to do it.
Maybe I should try harder to make our shit match like we're not transients or degenerates and like the only people who would live here aren't ones who apparently don't notice their surroundings.
Anyway. I don't like people who only vote in national elections.
I will probably vote to call an Illinois constitutional convention.
I also don't like people who think they're fucking brilliant.
I don't think I'm brilliant. That's why I have such good self-esteem.
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| love letters to strangers |
[08 Oct 2008|12:26am] |
I always expected the
boats to take you on a Monday.
Bracing yourself against
the light breeze outside our door, you said
in the old house,
I threw open all the windows
I broke the latches on all the doors
I wanted to throw my little body out there
to watch for the antique planes
that brought me here.
Sundays, I liked to
bask in the warmth of your love
like a cat in the sun.
I told the cats all the stories
about our mothers,
the myriad mannerisms that led
to our conception--
our double bastardization
in miniature.
Our grasping, clutching cousins, and:
the Tuesdays of life that described us.
Long grass crinkled beneath your fingertips like paper and
the pens I wore out,
dried, trying to describe
the local peasantry,
the penny shows that bonded
you and I.
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| have been eating you |
[28 Sep 2008|11:32pm] |
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mood |
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 sympathetic |
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music |
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Chad VanGaalen |
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I've been thinking maybe you would hang around as a ghost
(maybe because I couldn't imagine you being gone or)
I wouldn't imagine that
your hands I was sure would drop that rosary
were really yours.
I couldn't imagine that all these multifarious emotions
were really drawing arrows towards:
nothing.
Maybe all these flickerings,
these ghosts-not-ghosts, are the real things.
Four years ago, my cousin was your pallbearer and
today he has this beautiful son I don't think you've ever met.
But I don't know that time in your second-to-last-ever bedroom and the chair to which my cousin lead my grandmother
meant the exact same goddamn thing:
my family as uncomfortable with one another as with you, trapped together as the immediate family, whose status was supposed to have some significance.
You were increasingly unreasonable. You were increasingly mean.
You had that heart surgery and I probably wasn't 10 and I thought I could break you.
You asked me didn't I recognize you like it was funny.
The tags of your clothes had our last name written on them in permanent marker and you were wearing someone else's glasses.
You had this shitty little apartment with a bulletin board of family photos we mailed to the staff.
Thousands of tiny old women carried around dolls and stared in our windows.
My grandmother was clapping so on film her hands were birds, while you held up your arms in triumph over the birthday candles.
What was supposed to be unique about this? Mass-market whiskey in exchange for, what, no one's face looks like it did when they were alive. What am I trading for?
Our big, expected, Catholic and disillusioned Chicago Irish family?
That rosary in your hands was probably from the closet church my grandmother could walk to and I miss you I miss you.
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| "it's a 'problem'" |
[26 Sep 2008|08:24am] |
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mood |
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nervous |
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music |
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the Hold Steady |
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My variable ability to experience things like walking places or eating or talking to people what could be called normally:
has provided me with the confusing feeling of having
an epiphany a day.
An epiphany a day!
Has there ever been anything so shallow?
Maybe God's advice is
asked and answered, too
and what happens to a person with a non-reader-friendly problem?
There are no unusual problems.
In a way, I expect the occasionally joyous
chattering of my brain
to multiply in quantity and kind
until it swallows me whole.
I told Ron I'm having particular difficulty lately in figuring out what I'm like. I think I'm-- more nebulous to myself than to anybody else-- because everyone at least has the cognitive tools to sum up other people and they don't have to decide.
But lately, one thing is that I feel almost catastrophically young.
I feel like a diminutive fountain of naïveté and relative innocence
(and how good it would feel, if people were just inevitably debauched as they age, and so I wouldn't be responsible for a thing--
and so you see what I mean)
so much so that I imagine it must be a little poignant for older people to talk to me
I might be one of my first graders, theorizing that my name means:
elephants; mermaids; magnolias; ancient Egypt.
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| terrors |
[25 Sep 2008|02:49pm] |
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mood |
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numb |
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music |
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Of Montreal |
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Escaped and in an altered but not renovated Armory bathroom I was surprised to discover that:
I wasn't an insect (not the spectacle I'd imagined, both tinyhelpless and conspicuous)
In fact, I looked-- earnest.
And, pretty, in a small, sad way,
not the moral or social monster I'd imagined.
So I put my hair back up and pledged to look earnest
all the way home,
to arrive safe.
Some man in a UI maintenance truck
spent too long a time staring at me
while I was trying to cross the street,
and I remembered again that I have no real concept of how I look.
If I choose to be concerned about that, it can only ever be in an abstract way which made me wonder
about:
other people's bodies, or, bodies in general:
what do they mean to people that apparently they don't (or mine doesn't) mean to me?
or, after all the strange encounters I've had in the last couple of days: what does my body mean to other people that it doesn't mean to me? Is it something additional, or less?
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[24 Sep 2008|07:32pm] |
I'm feeling a little whiny and neglected even though I know that everything is fine.
I also have bloody heels.
I was thinking, on my way back from class this morning, that if you can hide it-- it's not serious, or it isn't real.
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| the twin |
[24 Sep 2008|08:27am] |
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mood |
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 awake |
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music |
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the Hold Steady |
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Exhausted and I can't remember:
what you were like when I was small, maybe, or
what age I was when my feet (used to)
touch the ground in all those imposing rows of desks.
I'm trying to occupy a real space but that's
scary to do, and anyway
it's not the type of thing I'm good at.
I think I'm scaring people because I keep looking through them.
Or, the best way to get away from
being terrified of a crowd of starers
is to use an eye trick, smirk trick
that unfortunately has the side effect of
making people think that I hate them, or
that I know more than I do.
I'd hate to know more than I do.
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[24 Sep 2008|12:48am] |
I don't know I'm thinking of firesides and
quilt mountains, my
burning ears so cozy warm its consumptive
today I realized the small of your back and
invented your mouth
I never edited my dirty feet, though
(privacy of sheets)
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| and how you would, or would most, or would least, like to be |
[22 Sep 2008|11:46pm] |
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mood |
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melancholy |
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music |
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the Hold Steady |
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I'm feeling a little bowled-over and fragile right now. And since I wouldn't know how to talk about it I have no real way to interpret whether I'd like to.
I'm not at all sure what I'm asking you to do here but I'm positive that whatever it is it's vital.
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| nevernever |
[22 Sep 2008|10:38am] |
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mood |
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 amused |
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music |
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Hold Steady |
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Maybe I should bake or something. What I really want to do is cook a mountain of eggplant in a variety of delicious ways, but I don't know. Our fridge is packed right now, it's dumb. I couldn't save any leftovers of anything. Hopefully people start buying less food, because I've hardly even been eating anything and I know it isn't mine.
Saturday I was just never really hungry, and I'm pretty sure most of my calories for the day were in the form of alcohol consumed between 8.30 p.m. and 7 a.m. the next day. Why did I do this? I cannot remember.
Anyway as a result there's a stain on my honor since apparently I'm prodding and picking fights with Russian Nick [never the unimpeachable Nick Chirico, to whom I owe a mix], a person so unfamiliar with ordinary human contact he believes the customary way for two Westerners to "catch up" after a year and a half involves the exchange of essays. A person who's had so few conversations between the 2006 spring semester and now he can quote me from that time verbatim-- unless, of course, you prefer the hardly more comforting theory that he's saved every email I ever sent him, maybe to refer back to when his inbox is empty.
Never mind that I can count on one hand the friends of mine who have not brought up the term "restraining order" in response to a description of him; that those people are friends in real life and that I can get a date with a person not also being medicated for mental instability; no, it's likely that I'm following around a dime-a-dozen obese nerd and part-time sociopath whose panic attacks in reaction to getting dumped are more like seizures and with all the social grace of a 1940s lobotomy patient. So we can all agree that my behavior has clearly been inappropriate? Good; I thought so; I am properly remorseful.
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| revelations now accessorized with exclamation points, included absolutely FREE |
[20 Sep 2008|03:46pm] |
It would be wrong to say that I-- well. Put it this way. I feel more like cold, scrabbling at the bottoms of the doors of my house, edges of windows: with clumsy, blunted fingers.
Or, to participate in a partial excavation: how does one keep out feeling for a person, like that cold which scrambles, caught, at rags and caulk, heavy curtains? How to keep it from trickling in a thin stream into nose and ears, the delicate mucous membranes once tended by mothers? Fellow-feeling a sickening miasma, surely, or, the other way round: the nauseous clarity of looking down from a great height. Or, maybe only: confidences, secrets-- possibly even absence. In my mind, this word has always involved the hand of a person, alone, groping for a nearly empty glass.
I don't feel like that glass. Rather, I-- find myself persistently in a space where the concept of "air" would be an inaccurate one. If I were going to attempt to admit [and how many more important obstacles to admission than secretiveness] what I believe, that is, what I can picture myself looking down into and accept as I accept things like my handwriting-- in a constant process of creation and yet patently mine-- what my mind and my hands can find without looking, I'd have to admit that I believe outright, casual, demonstrable lies.
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| my reds, my yellows |
[20 Sep 2008|10:52am] |
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mood |
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 sore |
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music |
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the Beatles |
] |
Dinner and a movie with Kelly, Dan, and Kim were both pleasant [and, perversely, pleasantly so, since I suppose a part of me believes underneath they all dislike me]. Eggplant; excess chocolate mint liqueur; Star Trek Monopoly [not too skilfully rewritten]. So that Kelly could drink, I slept on their couch and thought about relationships; dreamed about cubbyhole warehouses where everyone was rattily beautiful with drink in hand and the murder mysteries I'd been solving not so long ago existed only partially-- remembered with the same urgency one might apply to the interpretation of a particularly vivid dream.
My screaming back, the moody guest all night, woke me up this morning to dimly perceive Kelly wandering around and I got her to bring me home [well, she offered]. I didn't really drink much, at the end there. I'm just now feeling-- disheveled, yes, but also: as if a long list is rolled out before [behind?] me to return to normal.
This morning I thought I might-- sit in the shower and clutch my little heart to my chest until all the sweat and red have rinsed away except-- I haven't got anything to cry about. And I don't really want to if it's for no reason at all. I mean: I am cruel, but have I been? And I think I would need some dry space to decide that sort of thing before a melodramatic cleansing, either of sins or their perception. I thought we were-- headed for a reconciliation, briefly-- as if my body and I would slide to the center of the pond in our flimsy spring shoes, heels in the air, awkward delicate like deer. I suppose I believed-- maybe?-- that we'd embrace, our scarves and our hair impossible to untangle in their perfect similarity. I guess I believed we'd button together the buttons of our coats.
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