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We are about sick of this, aren't we. Tonight I continue my self-absorbed streak. I'm sorry, world, I will concern myself with you, um, tomorrow. Right now I am making soup, reading a crotch novel (jesus christ these things are terrible and predictable, and I haven't read one in oh so long I'm so looking forward to it), and listening to Iron & Wine/Calexico (the show on Saturday is sold out! but I'm going anyway damnit and I'm getting in). So, here's some crap I typed out at work. Don't read it, it's long and boring. I'll try to delete some stuff, but it will still probably be long and boring. : Change of course is good, it is what keeps our epic sprawling lives in motion, and we must move, we must go forward, our journey can't end until we die, or maybe not even then, who knows. Change of course is uncomfortable and scary and hard. We get what we want, we do what we want. Me, I had a crush on a cute boy and I got him, I got a little fling out of it. As it turns out we are both nice caring intelligent people who started liking each other more than either of us was prepared for or wanted. We had a lot of fun, it was a beautiful time. That became the focus of my life for a couple months, remember? The cute boy and how we were ignoring each other, one day he asked me to help him with boxes in the elevator tee hee, one day I made him and his eyes laugh, how exciting it was when we started acknowledging each other's existences, then we slowly became friends. It was a dance and that was what I thought about and wanted and lived. Then I got it. So, there was the rest of my life, stagnant. Now, everything's changing. And it has been so uncomfortably hard, but I realize that it is good, very good, these are the things that need to happen. This is my journey.
Me. You will never meet anyone like me. I'm not saying that's good or bad, it just is. Me, one day I got on a plane and went to a different hemisphere by myself without knowing what I was going to do when I got off the plane. Did I have enough money? Where was I going to sleep that night? What was I going to do for two and a half months? I didn't know. I was shaking when I went to the ticket counter, but I did it. (Oh but let me downplay it a bit by pointing out that they speak English there and I'd been there six months earlier, so it's not quite as daring as that, but, I really was shaking.) And what happened when I got off the plane was: I went through customs, went out the doors of the airport, sat on a bench, cried for a few minutes, and then got on a train headed for the city. I took more trains, went to more cities, got off the trains, stuff like that. I got hit on by a girl for the first time there, I went to a bar by myself for the first time, I saw sheep brains on toast. I saw the southern sky at night - there are no brighter stars than the ones I saw. I ran around Melbourne at 3 a.m. with strange people, I learned how to drive a tractor, I saw a large roachy thing crawl down the wall right by my pillow and didn't even care. Me, I didn't start talking until I could say sentences. I asked my mom recently if this was true. She said, "You didn't do ANYthing until you could do it perfectly." I didn't take first steps, I walked across the room. And I remember when they found out I could read, when I was like 4: someone was reading Hop On Pop to me, maybe they were taking too long, so I finished it for them, and there, I could read. (Yes this says a lot about my issues with perfection and exposing my weaknesses.) My parents went to New York when I was a licenseless sophomore in high school and one day it was raining so I drove myself and my sisters to school in my dad's 20-year-old three-quarter-ton Ford pickup, no power steering, a three-foot-long stick, a clutch two feet off the floor. Did I know how to drive this large stiff truck, or even any automobile with a clutch? In theory I did, because I'd watched my dad and figured out how the clutch worked and stuff like that. So yeah I knew, so I did it. One afternoon I decided to drop out of graduate school and I went home and watched movies and read books. Oh I know how it looks, believe me, I know, and I know how it feels too (which you don't): After three years of grad school, three years! so close! and I quit, what a waste. And not only that, I broke up with someone I'd spent a third of my life with, moved back in with my parents, and got a job working as a maid. How easy it would have been to continue being lame and miserable and comfortable. I was so old until I was almost 27 years old. I didn't do what I wanted to do, I did what I was "supposed" to do, although, supposed by whom, I do not know. But I always did the right thing. I was so old. And I've loathed myself so much and it's been absolutely debilitating and it's probably the cause of most of the problems I have in my life. And a stupid waste of time. Conversely and contrastingly and conundrumingly I'm also my biggest fan. I will never have a rational temperate self-esteem. However I am a person. You cannot treat me like shit. Only at my lowest moments do I think I don't deserve better than that shit. You wouldn't believe me if I told you but I can write like the wind blows, I can play Fur Elise with my eyes closed, I know the words to the Ninth Symphony, my watch is on military time because I wanted to learn it, I've been to countless concerts by myself and walked home from most of them, and yes I've peed all over the world. I worked one summer doing manual labor at the stupidest most unprofessional landscaping company that ever existed for the dirtiest weaseliest lecher that ever lived. I exaggerate a bit. But I stayed there all summer when most people left after a day or two and finding out how retardedly fucked up the place was. I stayed for the experience, and the stories. Joey had to dig a hole in the prairie, 12 feet down to the water main. There were rocks - the prairie's on the path of an old glacial lake and its ancient floods - the digging sucks. Joey complained unintelligibly a few times and then around 10:30 got his lunchbox and left. Joey fucking quit his job 45 miles away from home, that's how fucked up that job was. I've seen the sun go down and I've seen the sun come back up. I've flown through long nights and come back through short nights. I've met a lot of people and learned a lot of things. And rarely, only rarely, do I ever let anyone know me. On the insecure side it's because I'm afraid of people thinking poorly of me, which they undoubtedly will. On the arrogant side it's because I think there's something in me that's worth a little effort. Put forth the effort and you will be amazed. In some big book of birthdays I found out that I was born on the day of the viable candidate. I am the solution to everything, I can make things better. This is my arrogance and know-it-all-ity. I can't stand know-it-alls. And I am one. One day after kindergarten I got hit behind the ear with a brick, or maybe it was just a stick, I really don't remember. So I went home and hid in the little room until I stopped crying, and I never told anyone. I hide my wounds. If you hurt me you will never know. (Oh but there's so little time for that, and these days I hope sometimes my pride steps aside every once in a while and I can admit I'm human.) I am stubborn and closed and uncommunicative. I'm fiercely protective of myself. I am hypersensitive and you can kill me with the blink of an eye. I have a huge overactive imagination. I live in my head. I realize I need to live more in the world but that's not something I can do on my own. I am solitary, I've been on this amazing journey by myself, and suddenly all of a sudden I am admitting that I am lonely. Yes I'd like a friend, I'm sick of myself. One day I was walking across a bridge in Melbourne, maybe I already told you this, it was near the end of my trip, and I suddenly got so fucking sick of myself, I just wanted myself to go away. I'd been with myself by myself for too long. Luckily it was the end of the trip. I would like to share the things I have with someone. You read that thing I wrote a few months ago: I'm in a temporary life right now, this phase will soon end. I am on a bridge connecting two big things. I would like to be able to look back at this phase and smile. Oh I will anyway, regardless, because it's getting me where I'm going, but there's so many things I'd like to do and learn and discuss and experience right now. What I hate the most is fakery, bullshit, image without substance, form without function. And people say things and do the opposite. You can say whatever you want, that doesn't make it true. Words don't mean much to me, and it's ironic that I think that, given my relationship with them. Lies. And also, words can cut, and maybe you don't really mean them, but once they're out you can't take them back. Life is long and there's no use filling it up with stupid shit. I want nothing to do with that. Bullshit and posturing and passive-agressiveness and manipulation and intentional hurt. I have no right to try to hurt anyone or make them feel bad, and no one has the right to do that to me. Unintentional, that comes with the territory, but no one has the right to do that to anyone else on purpose. ----------- [I deleted the end of it. This was written at the cute boy, and then suddenly it changed and was written at someone else, and that's no one's business but my own so I deleted it at the corner. FYI, I'm going to buy a Subaru.]
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