October 2007
4 posts
61. Sorry Cupid.
I’ve been using an online dating service. Well, I’ve used loads of them actually, but I finally found one that made sense to me, and it all seemed to be working. But I deleted my account today. My ego just can’t bear it anymore.
60. Freeze-out.
I seem to have an invisible threshold between myself and men, one that’s scary or repulsive to cross, and so avoided. So despite my warm tendencies, here I stay, locked in ice. I can’t make the metaphor work, because I don’t understand the situation itself. Why be so positive about me and then summarily, almost violently drop me? What is it about me?
September 2007
10 posts
59. "I'm so bored of cowards..."
“…who say they want, then they can’t handle.”
I always turn to Bjork in times of heartache or sad bewilderment— the latter, in this case. I love almost everything she’s done, but Homogenic is probably the best of her records for this purpose. She never fails to make me feel happily in the right, stronger, and more hopeful. She also never fails to make me...
58. Fear of heat.
Why should the warmth of a low flame be so threatening? Or is it just when that flame is me? Am I so dangerous?
57. Things appear as if from nowhere.
Almost overnight, there was something new, someone new. I wanted to think it was a miracle of sorts, but of course it wasn’t. Some people are like that: there all of a sudden, and gone just as quickly. They say “easy come, easy go” but I’m not so sure.
56. Self-determinacy
Today I’m wondering about limits of abilities, my own limits. Recently I had sudden and unexpected reason to hope I might get a new start in life. Sadly, as quickly as it had appeared that hope evaporated. On the same evening as the equally sudden and unexpected rejection described below, too. Never a dull moment.
I could write at length about why all of this is external, why none of it...
55. We choose our own focus.
And I suppose we see different things altogether as a result.
August 2007
4 posts
54. Got the message now?
This week I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not wanted and not needed. I suppose my persistent self-delusion ruled out subtlety as an option— after all, I questioned the meaning of even the most emphatic and clear message. I fool myself so thoroughly about being special (what an odd twist of ego) that rejection always seems to come out of the blue. Sometimes hope is my worst...
53. Hoarse From Silence, Deafened By My Own Voice
I haven’t posted here in two months, for a number of reasons, but tonight I suddenly feel the need to break my silence and shut myself up at the same time.
If you discount a few brief hellos while out walking the dog, I’ve gone more than 48 hours without speaking. I don’t know what it would be like to speak right now, whether my voice would crack from disuse, or whether...
June 2007
12 posts
52. Good Will
Absurd as it might seem, this piece of graffiti makes me feel better every time I see it. Some of us hear these words so seldom as to make them inherently suspect, but the sincere innocence of this bunny-thing (a recurring character in graffiti in my neighborhood) helps me suspend my disbelief, at least for a minute or two. It feels nice. I wish I knew who drew these.
51. Does This Mean We're Getting Smaller?
The world will go on changing and accelerating and intensifying without you, if you let it. I am trying not to get left behind.
50. Madeleine Effect
Yesterday I was lying on the bed with the window open. The temperature, the dry air, the breeze, the shade-lashed sunlight.. it was one of those moments when you just disappear into a perfection of physical feeling that takes you over, saying, “This. This this this.” And as sometimes happens (ask Proust) the this connected instantaneously and viscerally to an older ‘this,’...
49. Blue And Blue
The happiest color is also the saddest. Among other things, blue can be contentment, or it can be palpable emptiness. I felt both those kinds of blue today, and a few more as well. Luckily, blue is also both cure and symptom, and so looking at blue glass, blue water, and blue ink has calmed the ache of blue longing and blue aloneness I felt tonight.
48. What's Left Here?
One of many reasons I love fossils is because each one is a long shot, a small miracle of probability (or, to look at it another way, a measure of just how vast time is, that the world is filled with rarities, but that’s a consideration for another day). The fossil represents something ephemeral: animal or plant matter that would otherwise decay over the course of decades but which, for...
47. Obstacles
Why is asking for help so hard? I don’t mean the emotional obstacle of admitting you need help, I mean the obstacles of logistics. So much presence of mind is needed to get the right help, but when presence of mind is precisely your problem, what’s to be done?
May 2007
50 posts
46. Longing
I wrote a few weeks ago about yearning but perhaps I wasn’t specific enough about terms. The difference between longing and yearning, to my mind anyway, is that yearning has no known object, whereas longing does. The pain of yearning is in part that very lack of specificity, the open-ended and thus overwhelming want. The pain of longing, on the other hand, is knowing exactly what you are...
45. Sorting Cause From Effect
I’m trying to learn what the real source of well-being is, because for the past few years I seem to have had it all wrong. I sort of knew I did, but as long as I felt something close to happiness every few days, well, that was good enough. And I fooled myself some, because I so loved the source of that happiness, wanted it so badly. I loved the affection, no matter how anemic, conditional...
44. Beholders' Eyes
I’ve more or less always hated how I look: as a child I was told almost daily, by one particular person, how hideous I was, and although I know now that that person was troubled, who was I, back then, to doubt the truth of it? So aside from brief periods of being in reciprocal love, or thinking I was, I’ve felt a self-repulsion that is nearly physically painful. That sounds pretty...
43. Driven To Abstraction
As I add to this list of thoughts, knowing that no one may ever read them, it becomes harder to resist the lure of abstractions that will mean very little to anyone other than myself. Abstraction also beckons from the sharp slide I’m trying to avoid, the one that keeps me dulled by sleep for eighteen hours a day if I let it, and leaves me incapacitated by a deeper depression. Abstraction...
42. Chaos Works
I’ve mentioned my love for contained chaos. But there are times when I hate chaos for the very reason that it works as well as order— as well, but not better. Order or chaos: I hate that it might not matter. When life overwhelms, function is the route to sanity, but if chaos and order are functionally interchangeable, how can I make a priority of order, which I know I ultimately need?...
41. Pessimistic About the Past
How can the past be so changeable? How is it that an experience— a weekend, in this case— that brought me joy can later be made wrong, and by someone else? Or was the wrongness there all along, just ignored for the sake of ease and wishful thinking? Probably, I guess. It’s easier to see, in retrospect, that the affections it brought me were only ever lukewarm, and always held...
40. Inertia
Another Monday and I’m stuck again. Past experience has shown that I can overcome the forces that often seem to pin me to my bed, but between the fear and the confusion sometimes I’m still baffled by how to start. In fact, when I do start, it’s not usually for any particular reason that I can discern— it’s more as if some frisson of energy moves through me and throws...
39. "Why'd You Sing With Me At All?"
I haven’t had the strength, these past few days, to be expansive. I just wish this sad business would be over. I can be nice to myself ‘til the cows come home, but at times like this, the fact that he has tired of me still overruns any warmth or hope I can muster. Time to let go, I know. I know it’s the right thing.
38. Habits
I once read that the general shape of any particular species of tree is called its habit. I love that concept (even if I also recall reading something later that made me question whether I’d got the info wrong) as it suggests the metaphorical possibility that our habits, which we think of as mere behaviors, may be not only somewhat pre-destined but also shared across relatives. And I like,...
37. Parade Of Shoes
Alright, time to lighten up a bit. Let me tell you a story. A million years ago (well, about twenty, anyway) when I lived in New York City and had one of those ‘promising’ jobs with a smart-looking office and my name on the door, I was witness to a groundbreaking change in the world of commuting: women began wearing sneakers and white socks over their staid, beige pantyhose, and...