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Well, there went July. Didn't feel like doing much of nothing today - woke up, ran the usual errands (PO box, pool), spent a little time at the office doing some work on projects (the third P) and then home. Was thinking about hitting a party I was tag-along invited to but as the evening rolled around I really didn't have the energy to face a room full of people I didn't know, and, fearing the worst, just tucked in to a night's drawing instead. |
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Payday, hooray - going straight into paying rent, not so hooray. Hopefully the PO box will reveal a bounty of checks this weekend, 'cause if it don't I'm in for two weeks of ramen, riding my bicycle to work and something else that begins with R and costs no money. But, whatever - I've been through this before and I have no doubts I'll go through it again - just gotta buckle down, start re-budgeting to accomodate for new and unexpected costs, find new ways to bring money in (a few of which are just about to come to fruition), and just generally clean up the acts a little bit. It's Friday, I'm going to take it light this weekend, and who knows what next week will bring? Not me, not you, not God. All we can do is cross our fingers and walk in the right direction. |
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Feeling really lonely lately - no tangible reason why, spending plenty of time with my friends, talking to my family, et cetera - just a weird hollowness. I keep telling myself "OK, get over it, get over it, get over it," but of course it's never that easy. And it's not really just AK that I'm not over - it's E, and R, and A, and all of these other abbreviations - it's all of these relationships that I've collapsed under the gravity of my own neuroses. I hate this feeling - the feeling of missing intimacy, of losing connection - of drifting. Watching the DNC, I thought about how much people changed me over the last five years or so - A brought me out of my hermitage, woke me up to the world I'm in, E helped me rebuild after everything fell apart and shared a totally different world with me, R gave me the impetus to theorize, to think abstractly, and AK politicized me, made me aware of the world around me and my place in it. And, of course, I don't think any of these were conscious gifts - but they were all gifts nonetheless. And who knows what I gave any of them - let's hope it was even a fraction as helpful. So - missing that, missing that learning and changing that comes from having somebody close to you (or not having somebody at all). That's what I'm doing today. And drawing comics, 'cause my boss ain't here. |
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Haiku: Sky open, open Rain soaks through and cleanses you heart open, open |
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This month's Oneaday is the largest file I've done so far - I've been a real blabby Barry lately. As a Microsoft Word document, it's 25 pages long. I can't even open it in SimpleText. And, looking back, what does it consist of? Three weeks after a breakup and a bunch of attempts to figure shit out. And, as the month comes to an end, what have I actually managed to figure out? Not a lot. I mean, I've been doing a lot of thinking, and reading, and talking and listening, and I've got a lot of ground-level solutions that I am putting into action (mindfulness, breathing, taking time to asses situations, keeping my mouth shut more), but the actual progress on the root of this stuff has been achingly slow. I don't feel a whole hell of a lot closer to the core of why I'm so anxious and scared and withdrawn so much of the time, and why when I'm in a relationship with someone, the more I care about them the worse it gets. And, of course, I shouldn't feel so impatient about these things - it's a life's work to find yourself and find your place in the world, but it's in my nature to want to rush, to hammer away at something non-stop until it's fixed. I feel that this whole process is moving at a glacial pace. But even glaciers moved and melted, and left behind calm, cool lakes. That's kind of a fucked up goofy metaphor, but visualizing it is helping out. |
| Back to work - it's a tauntingly nice day outside and I don't get my customary tomorrow off 'cause I have a meeting to attend (and also need the money with a pretty serious seriousness), so I'm just gazing longingly out the window and hashing things off of my to-do list with vigor and zeal. Its going to be a long week - lots to do in birthday-preparation, finances are teetering on the brink of collapse, trying to find time to deal with still-simmering emotional and personality issues (doing some recommended reading by some of y'all out there, thanks so much), and still fit in going out and having goodtimes too. Hopefully I'll be able to balance - and if I can't, hopefully I won't be afraid to let some things fall to the side for a bit. Know yr. limits - know yr. own. |
| I bought some pants, went swimming. Slept in this morning, spent the day running a few errands and trying to get as much sun as possible after the last disastrous week of rain and clog. Really enjoying just wandering the streets lately - recapturing the sense of overwhelming wonder that I had on first coming here. So - did that, drew the poster that Tom and I are collaborating on for the Williamsburg community activist coalition against 35-story condo towers on the waterfront there, then over to Matchless where Alison and Max are starting a regular Sunday horror night - I brought Pin over to help 'em out and the sparse audience was sufficiently creeped. If yr. In town, head down there some Sunday - it's a nice little bar with a good beer selection. And then, stumbling drunk, full of fried chicken (why?), home to bed and hangover preparation. |
| E. and I had dinner last night - first time either of us had seen the other in some four, five months. Because I had done it again - started dating somebody new, closed off the rest of my life, compartmentalized, wrote off. And there was no way I could apologize to her that would make up for it. God, the list of people I've done this to is just hideously long. We talked a bit - both going through similar re-appraisals of how we are - about the social leveling and being spread too thin feeling. It's tough when you want to be liked by everybody, all the time (substitute I for YOU in that sentence, bad habit). I find myself spinning out of control, trying like a dog to please everybody at once, working on a level of direct reactive feedback - laughs good, other reactions bad. Classic class clown mentality. But honestly - how many people can you actually be close to at once? What's the upper limit for true friendship? I feel so fucking stupid a lot of the time nowadays - like this is all stuff most normal people learn before they're old enough to vote. But then I talk to other people going through the same or similar and realize - we're charting new paths, every day. Nobody has ever lived in a world like ours before - there are no precedents. So what I think I have to do is find a way to balance that wide-open net of friendships, the Internet people across the world, and the closeness of people next door. I have to realize that there's room in my life for everybody, one way or another, and that I'm not going to run out of the ability to care about people or be kind to them. And I have to be willing to give up control - to let them make their own choices. But I feel that one thing that I'm good at is giving people a supportive, encouraging environment to do that in. So: more of that. More helping, more opening doors, inside and out. I don't have to try to please people - just help them please themselves. I need to buy some pants and go swimming, I'll talk to you later. |
| Talking with Jesse last night after the Pere Ubu show in Prospect Park about him quitting smoking pot, he came up with a really interesting metaphor - when you're sober, your mind works (or should work) as a President for your actions - one unified leader, advised by your sensory and emotional feedback, but acting with singular purpose. But when you're stoned, your mental state becomes more like a parlaiment - dozens of competing opinions and directions, none with priority over the other. Which makes sense - pot linked to schizophrenic states, etc. But I always feel like that, sort of - like a cloud of things are always swarming around my head. And, interestingly, it takes a lot of pot to get me high. So what does this mean? Do I have a naturally schizotypal brain mechanism? When I was in therapy, the attending brain doctor (my therapist was only a CSW) said that I didn't need meds, which was a relief (seen too many people go down bad roads) but is there something legit wrong with my skull-filler? This has been a concern for my whole life - because honestly, if there is, what can I do about it? There don't seem to be many treatment options that don't involve disastrous rewiring. And I need my brain to work in certain ways - I just need it to work in some ways that it's not working in right now as well. |
| Interestingly enough, I've been coming more and more into contact or re-contact with other people who are undergoing similar things as I am - trying to reconcile inner-life with outer-world. I suppose it's just a like-mindset clumping, but it's nice nonetheless. It's a lot less lonely when you can empathize and relate to other people in similar situations. Been doing a lot of thinking about levels of friendship - reading this James Glieck book and coming to terms with the fact that socializing is occurring on many different levels, far more than it ever did in the past. Humans are being forced to maintain dozens or even hundreds of facile, surface-level "friendships" without ever being expected to delve any deeper into each other. Actual truthful relationships in this atmosphere are difficult if not impossible, it seems - you "get to know" somebody so fast that you acclimate to their social fronts, and you interact on that mask-kissing level, and most of us (myself included) are too scared to let that slip ere we be rejected. So we blindly fake and muddle through our days, occasionally letting real-self out, and then feeling shitty about it because this environment is completely inconducive to any kind of "real" behavior. It's kind of depressing to me at this point, sad to say. But there's two choices - bow your head, shut up and let the machine grind you down, or stand up, be willing to get hurt over and over and over again, and go out fighting. I'd like to say that I'm firmly committed to the second path, and in my gut I am, but it may take the rest of me a little while longer to follow along. Baby steps. Thanks for helping, and sharing. |
| Back to work - had some thinking yesterday about social accountablity and awareness of atmosphere - I, of course, see my own faults best in others - and when observing another personality exhibiting self-absorption and displaying similar behavioral traits to me at my worst (overtalking, not listening, etc), it irked me. A lot - possibly more than it should. I may be becoming oversensitive to this behavior in others as I start to codify and understand it in myself, which is backwards - the only behavior I need to be sensitive about is my own. But still, a cautionary example, and something that it may be wise to try to avoid in other people - behaviors are often osmosed, and by spending time around people with more healthy social awareness, I should assume and develop that awareness. Anyways - something to be aware of. It's Wednesday, I have practice tonight, very much looking forward to it, still need a drummer, if you know any in the area let me know, etc etc etc. |
| So last night I pose as a flower delivery man to kill my first target - Andy Shaw (he's a promotions dude, hire him, it looks like he's pretty good). I see him pulling up to his house on his motorcycle so I run down the block, as he's opening his driveway gate I catch up to him, ask "Are you Andy Shaw," shoot him in the gut. One down. This morning, I wake up late (since I don't work), take care of some house stuff and start walking down the block to the subway. I'd done quick recon out the window and hadn't seen anybody, but then heard footsteps to see this guy chasing me down the block with a backpack Super Soaker! I took off, pulled my squirtgun and started returning fire while running but then felt a splash on the back of my leg, defeated. Now I'm dead. Then I had the rest of my day off. |
| Back to work - taking tomorrow off as per tradition so today ain't that serious by any means, but still feeling a little drained and listless. Going to commit a murder tonight - maybe that'll pep me up a little. All I seem to want to do is work - not job-work, but draw, make music, write. Create. Trying to balance this (which I do obviously love, and what has always brought me pleasure) against these social experiences which I need to keep up (and want to keep up). I think, in a lot of ways, this may end up being the essential struggle of my life. But then again, it could end up being something completely different. |
| Had an hour-long phone conversation with my Dad today - probably the longest one we've had in our adult lives. Really, really amazing and strange and both comforting and depressing. A lot of talk about similarities between the two of us that have gone unacknowledged - our mutual fear of rejection, leading to emotional distancing, our constant desire to fit in and be liked - it was really strange for me to bond with my father over something that has so long seemed like a private, individual issue. So - incredibly heartening. Just being able to contextualize all this stuff - to put it in a bigger picture - is so different from anything I've done before. I am very good at compartmentalizing, but there's always this pull against that as well - to try to fix, to bring everything together. So, the best news out of this is that Dad is finally coming to New York to visit after seven years of me here, sometime this Fall. I am pulling together what hopefully belongs together. Wish me luck. |
| Woke up a little frazzled over - Eric came down from Maine for the weekend, and after a couple Optimators at Zum Schneider I was a woozy gentleman. After rousing and taking in the beautiful day, I went to the shelter to walk Buster (sad, hurt beta-dog, ears permanently folded back, hiding behind my legs if any other dog draws near). Kept him out for a good hour, constantly showering him with praise and friendly pats, laying in the grass at McCarren Park and trying to let him feel safe. Then off to return him to shelter, to Union Square to pick up my Killer packet. Props to the organizers - setting 80 people up in a death-tourney ain't easy - and I got my first target (secret until he dies). Then off to the Gary Panter / Joshua White light show which was really amazing and overwhelming. Out to the sun still out, home, draw, collapse. It's funny how having guests kind of empties your mind. |
| The week's over - it's been tough on a lot of people. A generalized feeling of not-rightness has been creepin' through my familiars lately. I hate that feeling - one of the few times I truly feel at the mercy, no matter how slightly, of forces beyond my control. Some conversations and events of yesterday reminded me how truly far I am from where I want to be, mentally and emotionally, and how much I still need to work on. It's frustrating to me when progress isn't as fast as I think it should be - even though I know that I don't know it all, that I can't just 180 into Wellville, there's still this incredible nagging push to try to do just that. And a lot of these problems are caused by me moving too fast, not taking time to consider circumstances and consequences. I'm so used to my brain ratcheting away at a million miles a minute that I sometimes forget that the turtle won that particular race a long time ago. I have so many internal processes that are patently ridiculous - when I'm alone, I obsessively run conversations in my head with people I want to talk to, always ending up with them understanding what I'm trying to say - slipping into these dialogue fantasies and catching myself in them. I have always been a dreamer, a fantasist, carving inside-life out of clouds. In being alone, I built a manque of how I thought people acted and treated each other, in easily calculable, obvious, simple ways that meshed perfectly with the way I expressed myself. In isolation, where I first found shame and misery, I found comfort. But I can't hold this fake world up anymore. The real one wants in. I hate this. I hate this, I hate this, I hate this. I feel like I'm made of glass. |
| Emailed AK yesterday - just something dumb (advice letter written to somebody on my LJ friendslist from Andrew WK), but it was really just an excuse to email her. Totally selfish act - the loneliness has been really shitty over the last few days, and adjusting to not having her little voice as this constant presence in my life has been pretty unfathomably difficult. That was something that I always loved about her - her idioms, her ways of seeing and speaking - and to be bereft of that, even though that's just the way it is because we broke up is pretty unhappyfeeling. So really, I emailed her just to say "pay attention to me," got back a non-commital response (more than I deserved) and, upon realizing what I was doing, went into a tailspin for the rest of the night. Why do I do this bullshit? And now, what do I do - email her back, apologize, explain how I was feeling? She specifically stated that she couldn't be there for this mess I'm going through, although she wished me luck with it, so to pull her back into the mess would be even wronger. So - just let it lie? And if so, how much of this reaching out to my friends, trying to be more open socially that I'm doing is for the purely selfish reason of feeling less lonely without her? This really sucks. Really, really sucks. For the last week, I've been so overtaken by the grand gestures of change (and no mistake, I still think that this process is vital, and I am still committed to every step of it) that I've been kind of burying the actual feelings that I'm having right now. I am sad and lonely and guilty and I can't sleep very well and it fucking sucks a whole lot and no matter what I do it's not getting any easier. It's getting harder. And it's one thing to tell yourself "OK, this is going to be hard, but I can get through it" and a whole 'nother thing to actually do so. But I have to. And I have to do it fairly, and honsetly, without ridiculous lapses like this. I'm glad she doesn't read this shit, for both our sakes. |
| Wow, do I ever have a whole epic lot of stuff to do today. My to-do list is twenty-three items long... and growing (cue Flinstones Vitamins commercial jingle (cue memory of eating a whole bottle of Flinstones vitamins as a kid and having to have my stomach pumped)). I think I have a tendency to load up on work when I'm depressed - having something to occupy my mind can help distract it from what I'm actually feeling, which is good in the short term but not so good in the long term. My work has always been the thing that I built my value as a person on - I have always been a proponent of "deeds, not words" (despite my calamitous production of words) - but I'm realizing more that the deeds come from myself, and that if I'm doing them just to prove to somebody how good a person I am, they're not necessarily all that worthwhile. So when I look at these twenty-three items, I'm asking myself the reasons behind them, and the ones that I don't have a good reason for doing can wait another day. I think I'm getting closer. Oh, also - I'm doing a week's worth of interviews at Gothamist - I started Monday, today's my third. I have had a really great time doing them. I hope you enjoy reading them. |
| Today seems quiet. I'm at the office before anybody else, not listening to any music, just the whirring of the air conditioner and the occasional swish-by of a car on the street below. I feel peaceful. This last week has been one of the hardest and most rewarding I can remember in my life, but I'm not anywhere near done yet. Still so much to read, so much to think about, so much to learn. Everything I've written here is just questioning, not answering - I don't think there's ever really an answer to life, a solution that puts it all in place. There's just the constant growth, exploration and change. Vanagiem: "Creativity, love and play are to life what the needs for nourishment and shelter are to survival. The project of self-realization is grounded in the passion to create, the project of communication is grounded in the passion of love, the project of participation is grounded in the passion for play." I have an amazing life to live, with so many incredible people in it, so many ideas and projects and worlds to explore. And I feel closer to it, to the actual experience of it, on the whole, than I have in some time. I feel like I've been on a pendulum, yawing back and forth between authenticity and self-imposed exile. But every clock can be broken, even the watch I drew on my wrist. I am under no man's onus but my own. My life is mine to live, and mine to share, and I'm never going to run out of it. Welcome to week two of the rest of forever. |
| Thinking a lot about a discussion - or half a discussion - AK and I had, midway through our relationship, when she told me that she viewed these things as a kind of linear progression, mapped on a graph, of increasing intimacy, commitment and love, and when we had this talk, our position on this line was inconsistent - some things higher, and some lower. And I didn't, and don't see things that way - my metaphor for a relationship is like an amorphous multicellular organism - starting with two units, particles of caring, of compassion, or romance, are accreted gradually, but not in any particular "order," through shared experience. And it takes a constant effort by this organism to continually grow, and evolve, and change. And it's hypocritical of me to say this, because I committed nature's most basic flaw: I accepted stasis, and stopped reaching. But anyways, the reason this was half a discussion when we talked about it the first time was I was so scared of rejection, so afraid to disagree with her (or with anybody) on this topic, that I just thought "OK, I have to change, I have to see it her way and do it her way." But I don't, and she doesn't, because we're both right. Real, honest love can only come from two people who accept each others subjectivity and realize that, in the end, they value the same things, no matter what their metaphor is. And I understand what she was saying when she told me this, and I understand (I think) what I was feeling, but I never said it. And now, too late (of course), it's said. Also, at the grocery store today buying breakfast, I saw the most beautiful lemon I have ever seen. Also also: tonight, in Manhattan, the sun will set perfectly aligned with the streets of the city, causing the entire place to be flooded with light at sunset. Read more about it here. I'll be out for it. I hope you will be too. |
| Up at 7:30, hopped on my trusty bicycle with my chain thrown over my shoulder, rode across the Queensboro, up and across Manhattan to 180th, across the GWB to Fort Lee, and then rocketing down the North Jersey coast to Weehawken for the 200th anniversarry Burr/Hamilton Duel Renactment. After a bit of history and a bit of sunstroke, Cheese and I went out for brunch in Hoboken before I cycled home (cheating a little by taking the PATH train). Then home, nap, practice - just me and Leela as Jon was upstate, but still nice - worked on harmonies. Went out to sushi afterwards, talked about stuff, including the stuff I've been talking about here a lot. Have been thinking about Vanagiem's descriptions of roles - we crate these parts to play, these personas, to engender in us this sense of false comfort when dealing with other people - it's so much easier to comprehend somebody as a stereotype of a concept that you already understand than it is to wrap your brain around them as a complex, multi-faceted, sometimes contradictory human being. Leela and I were talking about a recent NY Times magazine article on graphic novels, wherein many of the cartoonists interviewed do their best to feed into this stereotype of the misanthropic, bitter loner, and I realized that I, unwittingly or not, was completely seduced by that sterotype at an extremely young age, despite having actual personality traits that pretty significantly differentiate me from it. But, because the machine of belonging made me feel like that was what I had to be, I became it. And I poisoned myself, willingly. And I have never felt better, in recent years, then when I have felt like I was purging myself of that poison, shedding that role, by acting honestly and humanly. And I think that a lot of my friends and the people I care about still have this role in them, and I understand and relate to them because I play it too, still - but my closer friends, the people I have this deeper connection to, seem to be the ones who have moved past it, and into this new realm of personal honesty. The place I'm trying to go. And seeing them there, reaching a hand out to me, is an amazing and perfect gift. |
| Back from the shelter, dog-reeking and sweaty, thousands of things running through my head, taking a little time at the office to clean some of them up. OK, here we go. 1) As AK and I were falling apart (or, more correctly, she was putting herself back together without holding me together) I apologized to her, over and over and over, so truly sorry for every shitty thing I'd done. But an apology is, at its core, meaningless. Yes, they were true, and I was wracked with self-hatred and guilt, but an apology is a cop-out to yourself. It's saying "OK, I close this issue, I'm sorry for it, it's done, let's stop talking about it." But, of course, it wasn't done. It hadn't even really begun. The best apology I could have ever given her would have been, after we met, to sit her down somewhere and tell her that sometimes I feel anxious, and distant, and scared, and the closer I get to people the more I try to push them away, and I don't ever want to hurt you with this because I feel so much for you. Instead, I left her to find out for herself, through a systematic pattern of being hurt. And that's complete and total bullshit, and now it's too late for any apology. 2) I was thinking about my social pattern and one of the reasons I think I stayed with it so long is that it's, emotionally at least, riskless behavior - since I'm in such denial, or I guess was in such denial (it's hard for me to really explain, or understand, where I stand in all of this right now), if somebody is driven away by it it serves my own needs, perevents me from having to invest any part of myself or open myself up to them. I'm caught in this loop of desperately needing approval and recognition but not wanting anything but that from the people I interact with. But this poisons itself - because what are the people who reward me with this behavior actually reacting to? All I'm giving them is bullshit - so do they like bullshit? No, that's not true. They like the pieces of goodness that are underneath that that I'm letting slip. 3) When I first started dating AK, she would tell me that she admired me. No, no, no, I'd say - don't say that, that's really strange, don't don't - because that's like holding hands with a shadow cast on a wall. But it's not that way at all. I couldn't even fathom that she didn't admire my bluster and persona at all - quite the contrary, she hated it. What she admired was the core. She was so perceptive that she could laser in past all of these defenses and masks, and that scared the living shit out of me, even as it made me incredibly happy, because she was coming in. And there's a very big difference between letting somebody into your life and inviting somebody into your life. Nao said, when we had lunch, that she had just always thought that the only girl I'd ever find would be somebody with a nearly endless tolerance for my behaviors. Fuck that shit. That changes, today and for every day of the rest of my life. Come in. I invite you, to whatever level you are comfortable with, to be with me. My life is nothing if I can't share it with the people I love. |
| The last two nights have been interesting - two situations where this change in me is being put to the test. Wednesday was the monthly comics jam - an atmosphere where I have tended to let the most boisterous, obnoxious parts of myself blurt out in full effect, much to the insult and dismay of some people I really like. This night wasn't a 100% success - I found myself slipping a few times, over-talking, but on the whole I felt calmer and tried to take things slower than I have in a while. Sitting next to Neil helped a lot - he has a calm and a quiet which, for whatever reasons he has, I can appreciate. The only thing that really stands out as weird or wrong is that when I left, my goodbye seemed fake - not what I said, but the tone in which I said it, which is strange. Something to think about. And then last night was this Gothamist thing - my past kerfluffles with Gothamist founder Jake Dobkin are a matter of record, but age has mellowed us like sweet premium wine. Still - this was going to be the first time I'd interacted with him in person, so the on-the-way was a lot of nervousness and stalling. Once there, though, everything went well - did a lot of listening and what-do-you-doing and waited my turn - and then, when I did talk, people seemed to appreciate what I was saying. Funny how that seems to work. Met some interesting people, realized I gotta print up some cards, enjoyed some free beers. Again, not 100% successful - a few slips, a few weird moments. One of the things that I am interested in right now is my body language - I do some things in the course of a conversation that are very exaggerated, but some of them are in (what I see as) a positive context. I'm not sure if being gestural or "big" conversationally is a bad thing per se, but it's worth thinking about the extent to which I do it. But that's symptom, not source. And, at least over the last few days, the source has been pretty quiet. I have felt anxious, and nervous, and awkward, but it passes. And it passes easier without me drawing attention to it. I'm sad about a bunch of things, especially one big thing - fuck this dance, I'm sad about losing AK, that's the one big thing - but I am learning, and working, and hopefully changing and growing. Tonight I think I'll stay home. |
| This helped, thank you my secretive friend. A long talk with Nao yesterday also helped put things into historical and global perspective. The Vanagiem book is helping, writing the letter to my Dad is helping, the mail I got from you is helping, everything AK gave me is helping, everything you all have tried to tell me is helping. Here's the deal, straight as I can make it, so far: I have several problems interacting socially with people. In certain situations where I feel anxious or nervous, I slip into a sort of role where I become louder, more facile, more petty, more cruel. My body language apparently changes (something I'm extremely not conscious of). I can slip in and out of this in the course of an experience. Nao had a good point - when I was younger, I did this all the time, but it was more exaggerated, more cartoonish - as I have aged, I sublimated it, adapted to more subtle ways of coming out, so it's more dangerous by accretion. To be my friend, to this point, you have been required to accept this behavior, because there was no way I was recognizing it for what it was, and way too defensive to discuss it with any kind of honesty. I had made attempts to deal with it symptomatically, to deal with individual behaviors, but never at the root: my anxiety, my loneliness, my fear of being abandoned and ignored. And there's two parts to dealing with this - be mindful of my surroundings and my interaction with them, and explore, talk out, and be understanding and learning about those feelings. So that's one thing. This is shaping up to be kind of an epic and part of me wants to say OK MORE TOMORROW but I think it's smarter to just get out what I've learned so far and tomorrow say the things I learned after writing this, and living through another day. Another thing: When I begin a new relationship with a girl, I exclude my friends from it. I have been doing this for as long as I can remember dating as an adult. I am all too happy to enjoy her friends, her social circles, but I always feel awkward and weird bringing her into mine, and usually I just don't. Again, Nao: saying that she's just used to it from me by this point, "oh, Thor met somebody, not going to see him for a couple months." Why do I do that? I really love and value my friends, and love spending time with them, but I never reach out to them, I almost never am the motive force behind socializing with them. What am I so afraid of? This one is hard to work out, because the symptoms confuse me. If I'm so lonely and afraid of being abandoned, why don't I gather people around me tighter? Why do I seem so content to just drift off from people? I don't know. I am trying to know, and I am trying to fight it. Another another thing: I did not talk about it if I didn't feel right. I will not admit to being flawed in any serious way. I am so scared of somebody visualizing me as incomplete, as lonely, as insecure. This self-image that I've made for myself is so fragile, and deservedly so - because it's not me. I believe, or am trying to believe, in my real self - my strong self, the self where the acts of true kindness and joy and pleasure and play have come from. I have to express how I really feel about the people I love and care about, without this mask of ridiculousness or uncaringness. I have to be willing to really talk about my problems, my concerns, my fears, without hiding them behind artifice and metaphor. I have to be unclouded, mindful, aware. I've had my head in a dumb sack too long, thinking that it was the world. I think at this point, hopefully, I've managed to poke an eyehole. Thanks to all of you helping me from the other end. I love you. |
| Well, in ref 7/3/04 - I lost. AK broke up with me yesterday, for all the good reasons in the world. And now I'm here, alone, trying to understand what happened between us. When things were right, there was this huge, enveloping feeling of belonging, of mutuality - but things weren't always right, because part of me had to make them go wrong, because I'm not comfortable with mutuality, and I'm always living in fear of being rejected. Among other things. Just as a warning: it's probably going to get pretty serious and navel-gazey around here as I try to make sense of myself as a person and the way I treat other people. I am going to write in here to try to put down, in words, things that are pretty hard for me to express any other way. I don't know how great that's going to be for you, the reader, but if I can ask you this: if there's anything I say over the next however long this takes that resonates with you, that sounds familiar, that you want to talk about, that you've gone through or somebody you've known has gone through, talk to me. You (the collective "you" as well as some very specific "you"s) have been an enormous help to me throughout the life of this thing, in a lot of different ways. Thanks for everything, past and future. |
| Stopping in quick to settle some hashes before out on the street again - giving AK a leg up at the DMV as she has to work so can't wait in the epic line of madness for her number to be called - so we're Wonder Twinning it up - Shape of! somebody at work! Form of! Somebody who has the time to wait in line! - and, like the best things in life, two can do what one can't. And then I think I'm going to hit the pool and swim laps until my arms don't work anymore. |
| Day off, I'm getting some errands done (and updating this minor chronicle) before going home and - whooo! - changing my Goddamned socks! There's actual legit work that I didn't get done here so I'm taking a silent office to do it - considering that tomorrow is my unpaid day, I suppose that something (reponsibility?!??!) is making me do it. But it's not a bad feeling, actually. In fact, it feels pretty OK. |
| Up on a Brooklyn rooftop, four sets of synchronized fireworks hanging and shimmering over beautiful, illuminated Manhattan, beer in hand, arm around AK, drunken Russians stumbling over each other, if this is going to be the first day of the rest of my life I couldn't have picked a better way to be born. |
| How do you make yourself a better person? What is it that pushes you to the point when you recognize that if change doesn't come from inside you, it's not going to come at all? In my life, so far, these changes have usually came after I lost something important to me - it took such a serious shock to my system to wake me up out of things that I could recognize what I was doing. I almost had one of those shocks today - I still might have lost something important - but this time, I have a foothold on it, I can see it happening and it might not be too late. |
| Back to work on a holiday Friday, not many others present in the orifice but me. Tooth still nagging me - I don't see it getting better until it's yanked, so I'm not worrying about it. The weekend looks good - warm and inviting, lots of things that can be done but nothing where I'm required - leaving me open to chart my own course. Hope to spend it with the people I love and the people I don't see as much as I should. And hope to look up and see the sky lit up with man-made stars. |
| Took the first day of July off to go to the doctor's in the morning - diagnosis: murder! Of one of my wisdom teeth, that is. Just given a clean bill of mouth by the dentist two months ago, now my bottom right back-molar seems to have dandered up and got to swellin' - leading me to have a grotesque inflammation of all of the gumline, jaw-harp and nex parts. Prescribed some antibiotics and a dentist's visit, I'm not looking forward to the extraction at all but I suppose it's a rite of passage. Wish me luck on this one, dear hearts. |
JUNE
all content (c) 2004 k. thor jensen