Return and Departure
(2-11 April 2000)

11 April 2000
-From Fish, my quote of the day:  "Tell me why, why won't you love me for who I am, where I am?  He said 'cause that's not the way the world is babe.  This is how I love you babe.'"  Stina appreciates that one I'm sure too... some good ol' New Mexican "Hearts & Bones".  Now all I want to do is to go home.  Well, Debate Nats & then home.  Maybe I'll just go home directly from Swarthmore.
-I am so good at screwing myself up.  I should put that on my summer resumes.  "Excellent skills at self-destruction in all facets.  Works well with others in effort to undermine self at all possible levels."  I think that's neat.
-THAT is a lot of packaging.  At least it's not a bomb.
-I need to figure out if I want to do my Census thingy or not.  I really have objections to about, well, all of the questions for one reason or another.  I'm tempted to send it back with a long list of my objections, but I don't know if anyone would read it or if I'd be held in contempt of state or what.  Dubious.
-I never get tired of the "Watership Down" movie.  It may be animated, but I could watch it all day long.  Maybe I will...
-"Confidential"??!?  I'm sorry, but you just gotta admit that's funny.  I think I should start saying "confidential" things behind HER back - really mean, nasty, untrue things & when she asks say "Oh, I'm sorry, I had a CONFIDENTIAL conversation with someone!"  What a load of crap.  & besides, confronting me in front of Driscoll is a REALLY confidential way of handling one's life.  Je-sus.
-Excerpt time.  Actually, whole e-mail time.  This is just WAY too relevant on about 80 levels to leave out.  An e-mail, from Mesco, exactly 2 & a half years ago, to the day, dated 11 October 1997:  "It's not necessarily true or good, just something to think about..... 'Time ticks by; we grow older.  Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have other people hurt us.  To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.' --Douglas Coupland   Maybe when you get right down to it, all stories are war stories and all stories are love stories....but you need to let yourself live either way...."  Chew on THAT.

10 April 2000
-Glory Junction??  I don't know if I WANT to spend much time there.
-From my Dad:  Life is not an inalienable right.  Think about it.  We take it for granted that death (an alienation from life, to be sure) is inescapable.  With that in mind, how can life, something guaranteed to be imminently alienable, be INalienable?  The Constitution codifies & protects absurdity.
-What a disaster of a day.  I hear one thing from one person who isn't even sure & it sends me into total tailspin.  Not that I appear to be missing anything.  But being back on unsure footing with the truth is something I tire of desperately easily.  I think that the thought-speak I wrote about in a short story "Earth to Earth" years ago should be instituted as planet-wide policy.  One should only be able to make an effort to cloud one's thoughts & otherwise, thoughts are the base-form of communication.  & it'll be clear if their thoughts are being "blocked" or not.  Imagine how differently we'd live, how much more intelligent behavior would be & seem.  For now, I'm stuck on Earth & not on Ulanghi.  But I suppose I can dream.

9 April 2000
[from Long Island]
-"Sanctuary" is the perfect word for it.  Thank you, Zirkins!!
-Snow in April.  I woke up, looked out the window, & was convinced that I was dreaming.  The whole day was coated with swirling surreality.  Snow softens everything, even in unfamiliar worlds.  This has been what Dylan must have been talking about, Time Out of Mind.
-People's kindness makes me want to cry.
-I'm tired of thinking about what I deserve.  It's never what I get.  Or I never seem to think it is.  Except when things are working out & then I think it's more than I deserve.  But I'm giving up on that whole "things working out" idea, so...  I give up.

8 April 2000
[from New York City]
-Most of the tournament on Friday, it seemed people couldn't determine if my eyes were watering from my cold or if I'd been crying.  I was among those people.
-Waiting in the Broome St. lobby for 2 hours, I realized how much of my planning was based on friends always being there.  No knock on Gris (Hell, I'd done more or less the same thing to him coming back from Dartmouth.  Though he'd had Schneider & even Zack to fall back on.), but what a bitter pill to swallow in light of this week's losses.  Every song wafting through from the deli was extra salt in the wounds.  As if "Wish You Were Here" on the car ride in hadn't been enough.  At least I finally figured out who was lying - making that particular song extra difficult.
-Theme for the trip?  Waiting.  As Dugan observed last morning, it's a bad sign when you see the same people coming back after you saw them leave.

7 April 2000
-Well, I won $5.25 in poker & then watched the M's win 5-2.  These are the only good things to happen to me in the last 72 hours.  Why does it feel like it's been longer than that?
-What kills me about all this is that, much like Lisha's somewhat surprising analysis of the bag-scene in "American Beauty" (see her 6 April [she calls it "FOUR - SIX"] - click link above), everything was beyond my control.  The actions of about five other people, in addition to the actions of a few germs finding their way to me, created the whole running fiasco.  There's nothing I could've done differently to change any of it.  Which is why I find it so strange that right now, my feelings can entirely be captured by listening to the extralong 15-minute live version of "A Murder of One" that I have an MP3 of.  I think you can find it at annabegins.com too (now click the OTHER link above!).  In the midst of this song, Adam Duritz yells out "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry now" about a bazillion times.  & the plaintive urgency of this message seems to embody my soul today.  Surprise:  confusion, instability, paradox.  Not new themes, but I didn't know they'd feel so distant from the realm of my free will.  I need to figure out what the message is here or I'm gonna go bonkers.  Maybe I'll find it on the subway in Harlem.
-After giving my Dad a brief synopsis (very abbreviated, in fact) of the events of the past 3 days, he said, completely matter-of-factly, without any hesitation, "So, you're not going to New York this weekend."  I think that just about sums it up.  But here I go.

6 April 2000
-Confidence?  Never heard of it.  That must be that mythical beast that whenever it shows signs of coming around, suddenly disappears without a trace.  Save a possible claw in the back for good measure.
-Blocking people on IM strikes me as rather immature.  Who am I supposed to believe?
-From an e-mail to Shannon dated 6 April 1998 (2 full years ago):  "On the college news, I've gotten in to 5 of 6 schools I've heard from... Brandeis still has the best offer (though Berkeley still hasn't reported on the Regents Scholarship... one way or the other).  So, we'll see.  It's looking more & more like Boston is my future home, however.  I could do much worse!  I wish I could visit, though... I've never been to Boston & I'm not sure I want to commit to it for 4 years without ever seeing it.  Though I've heard nothing but good stuff from others, so I probably shouldn't be concerned. Anyway..."  The more things change...  Freez, you can fill in the remainder of THAT blank, I'm sure.
-Welcome back to being Everybody's Best Friend & Nobody's Lover.  Familiar territory, to be sure.  Maybe in another 14 months, I'll have another chance.  This cynicism won't last too long, I hope, but tonight it just feels fervent.

5 April 2000
-A fine, fine line between defensive & deceptive.  & perhaps not mutually exclusive.  But certainly more than linguistic similarity.  Sometimes it'd be nice to shut off my brain...
-"Uncomfy as heck" is really sound analysis for how this feels.  Maybe I should emulate Niver & stop going to that class.  I wonder if he knows.
-Wow, I couldn't've been much more wrong.  Ever feel like the world just ended & you wonder why you still exist?  Any second, I swear I'm going to disappear.  A Mack Truck would've been far kinder, I fear.  "All is darkness, anger, pain, & fear," as S&G say in "The Sun is Burning".

4 April 2000
-Good ol' Sherman breakfast.  & with the fog rolling in & everything.  The scenery never changes, but the scene is so rarely stable.
-Where the hell is Zack?  I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm getting well too used to having a single & all, but I haven't seen the kid in almost a week.  & while Tina Turner could, on some strange netherworld, be seen as captivating, I doubt she'd be THIS captivating.  Makes one wonder.
-Oh well.  It's just Opening Night.  The M's are on their way to a 161-1 season!

3 April 2000
-Electric.
-Brandzy's book comment was perhaps the least funny thing I've ever heard in my life.  I mean that quite literally.  & it actually caught me off-guard.  For a few seconds, at least.  Good thing that today, I will not be fazed.

2 April 2000
[from Chicago]
-Those were almost normal dreams.  Hm.  Well, normal's an exaggeration - I guess I mean "not extremely disturbing".  I've been thinking too much again... maybe it should be disturbing, but I don't see it yet.
-Janna is a Yupette.  Like a Muppet, but wealthier & more spoiled.  Like, a Yuppie, but younger.  That term needs to catch on.
-Joe Edlow & your-mom jokes don't mix.  I've created a monster.
-I've got to learn to start trusting my instincts.  I might hate my intuition, but it's always right.  Guess it's as good a source of advice as anything.
-Sitting in Midway waiting for that late plane, I noticed this cute kid sitting on her bag by the window.  She seemed to have that spark of life, of intelligent thought, of vibrance.  Then I noticed she was reading one of those mass-media magazines - it occurred to me her spirit was dying, or perhaps slowly decaying.  In five years, I can see her vacuous & sad without realizing what hit her.  Airports are living embodiments of the great American tragedy.
-You can feel close to anyone if you go through enough with them.  In that sense, Katie's right.


Introspection, My Worst Friend* (Current)
Ye Olde Archive (Past)

Tell me this is not the end...*


*-lyrics from an as-yet unreleased song, "The Same Old Frontiers", by SWClayton.