Things end

As is traditional, I reread my journal upon finishing the blank pages today.

For the first time ever, there were parts that I didn't actually manage to read again. I went through a couple of awful summers with that book, and there were some things that hurt too much to go through again. There were also some parts where I can now see how immature and melodramatic I was, and those hurt to reread as well, in a different way.

This book was last completely blank on February 2, 2005, and was no longer blank at all on July 26, 2007. (There's a 6-month hiatus in there between February 3, 2007, and now. *shrugs*) It therefore covers half of my third year of undergrad, the preparation for my trip to Brazil, the summer before fourth year in which I started teaching for Princeton Review and Answerboy went off to India, all of my last year of undergrad, med school applications and interviews, and my first year of med school.

As always, here is a selection of things that I wrote -- that I like, or that I'd forgotten about, or that took me by surprise in a good way on rereading. I apologize that it's not behind a cut, or whatever, but the instructions for doing that are too complicated.

~isolde

God, I feel like a clichée. Writing in the dark felt too forced-angsty and writing with the lights on felt too earnest and businesslike, so I turned the lights back off and lit four candles and now I feel like a clichée. Good.

I'm just circling myself, like water going down a drain. Pulling myself round and round in ever smaller circles and ignoring what should be obvious ways out. I apparently take some kind of pleasure in being in this much pain, like I can win some kind of grotesque award for "Deepest Funk Incurred During The Normal Course Of Life".

The fucking Brazilian consulate and the fucking Brazil trip. Fuck everything, fuck the whole country. Fuck notaries, visas, police checks, and fuck my own general incompetence. What am I, fucking illiterate? (Sudden vision: white-sleeved arm handing me a prescription for "therapeutic F-words, to be taken as often as necessary".)

I daydream about finding a way to short-circuit my life. I imagine finding a way to move sideways quickly enough that the world can't adjust to the change, quickly enough to get suspended in some changeless alternate dimension where all I have to do is read and sleep and not actually try to be anything.

I feel that at
any moment my
life will spontaneously
degrade
into

freeform
nonlinear
poetry
that only looks good
because it's written like this
and actually sucks a lot.

[this is most of an entry I wrote while Answerboy was in India. Seeing as he's now in Taiwan, I find it especially relevant.]
Missing you. What is the nature of that, its shape and colour? It seems to be a simple pulse -- a naked circle of DNA, a plasmid of pain. If it were a sound I imagine a single frequency, the purest and singlest of notes. As a painting it would be one of those works of contemporary art no one knows whether or not to take seriously -- a massive canvas painted in a single raw colour -- maybe an orange, or a violet, or Yves Klein's International Klein Blue. If it were a flavour it would have to be a chemical red, or a chemical grape, or a chemical green apple. Some taste made up of one molecule only, repeating itself over and over again. As a fabric -- pure rayon -- the closest I can imagine to a sheet of glass I can slip into. As feelings go this one seems shiny and uncompromising and modern to me. Invariable, constant, and repetitive. Polymerized.

So it's irrational me driving the car tonight. Oh, irrational me. What can I do to placate you? *sigh* rant useless, weak, stomach-turningly whiny rants, of course, just what I always do.

[capture of a random image, scrawled diagonally across the lines of the page]
I put up the blind, and in the sky there was a brilliant white streak -- the vapor trail of a jet illuminated by the setting sun -- that I mistook for a comet. For one second the beauty of it seized me utterly. I thought I was suddenly on a faraway planet somewhere, like I had transcended Earth without noticing.

I seem to have completely and utterly abdicated myself. And you know, there's only so long that an abdicated corpse can keep attending classes and turning in papers. I'd hate myself it it didn't take so much energy to hate things.

I want to be more like Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy, and less like -- oh I don't know -- Gimpy from Undergrads. I want graciousness. I want to connect with people. All kinds of people, because that's real grace. I want to act out every day the belief that everyone -- movie stars and vagabonds and princes and addicts and Jesus freaks and strippers -- is a real person.

I want to arrive in [boyfriend's city] relatively sane and settled -- not prone to dump all of this on Boyfriend, who obviously wasn't there and anyway doesn't have a responsibility to be my ultimate sounding board. He's my partner, not a surface for dry-erase marker brainstorming sessions.

I'm feeling very existentialist right now. Is Samuel Beckett a mood?

The only time it's quiet here is when Mom and Dad go out, and I can walk around and turn off all the radios. Silencing the chattering voices, one by one. I hate them. It makes me want to scream, because I prefer my own garbage utterances to theirs.

I hate these teary conversations with my mother. They make me feel like I'm in a snow globe that has just been shaken. Life will eventually return to normal, but for the moment it's like pieces of the ground are whilrling around my head.

I'm 23. For a 23-year-old, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how everyone I know will eventually die. I also spend an inordinate amount of time in a sate too drained to be kind. I wonder if the two are connected.

There are bits of me that are rotten, hidden in the foundations of bits that work good. They've just quietly rotted away. And you'd never know it -- never know it till you call on them for use and they're not there. Like a corrupt computer file, maybe, instead -- you use the program fine until you try to perform this function, and then the whole fucking system crashes.

My desk is covered in receipts, notes, calendar pages, scrap paper (the discussion of phase II and III clinical trials less relevant than the grocery list on the back), cans of Coke, masking tape. I feel like there's some thing I need to know before cleaning it up seems anything more than futility.

[on cleaning house with my mother and turning up all kinds of old things]
One day I will trawl through all these and see the adults in my life not as adults, or elders, or gods, or stateswomen or archetypes, but as people. And I'll learn things that will help me to be better to others, and better to myself, and that will be a good thing. I'm glad to have rescued certain things from the trash heap today -- things that make my life, and my family's life, seem a little more like a story. Worth writing.

Labels: introspection, personality

Cute and layer-y, sort of...

I was bored today, so I cut off a bunch of my hair.

Annnnd that's the kind of day it's been, folks.

~isolde

Labels: minor fits of insanity