Monthly Archives: September 2002

Jealousy

I would­n’t con­sid­er myself a jeal­ous per­son. After all, how can one be jeal­ous when one is sure of one­self? It’s a con­tra­dic­tion to me. Almost always, in my rela­tion­ships, this is true. However, a spe­cial case has come up, and I am jeal­ous, an emo­tion I haven’t expe­ri­enced in a long while. Yet there is noth­ing I can do about it. I can only sit here and take it. This isn’t some­thing that I can change about myself. I am very inse­cure about this, and I have rea­son to be.

This jeal­ousy nib­bles inside me, cre­at­ing an odd world of dys­thymia. As long as I am jeal­ous, I will be able to write and learn. God, I sound like some­thing out of a Graham Greene nov­el. I was once afraid that I was becom­ing bor­ing, hav­ing been giv­en much in life, with noth­ing to write about.

Ah, well, let’s lay this issue to rest for today until I learn some more, and I can see the sit­u­a­tion more clear­ly.

I do need to clear my head.

Put on some Chopin Nocturne

This one hurts.

God, I’m tired. I spent the entire day run­ning errands. I took my kit­ten to the vet, which was a fair­ly painful expe­ri­ence. A bitchy, though red-head­ed, sec­re­tary “served” me. The appoint­ments were an hour behind sched­ule. I decid­ed to hold off on a con­fir­ma­tion of the name until I felt com­fort­able with it, which I cur­rent­ly do not. I’m fuck­ing tired.

There’s some­thing about a girl with long, slen­der, del­i­cate fin­gers. They seem to speak of an intel­li­gence not expressed in any oth­er way. They way they move, the way they touch, the way they look. Sometimes dex­ter­i­ty is so sim­ply an attrac­tive fea­ture that one miss­es it, while being drawn to oth­er, more opu­lent fea­tures.

k

This kit­ten is so impor­tant to me right now. I think that this will be the clos­est thing to hav­ing kids for me. But as a human infant is dynam­ic and ever chang­ing, cre­at­ing a volatile envi­ron­ment of order, a cat is more sta­t­ic, leav­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of bore­dom. This would be my worst night­mare. I hope I nev­er grow tired of her. I hope “the nov­el­ty” nev­er wears off. This life is my respon­si­bil­i­ty, and it will be the great­est test of my tol­er­ance yet. Of course, there may be noth­ing in it; she may sim­ply be a won­der­ful pet, which she is so far, cre­at­ing a mutu­al­is­tic sym­bio­sis which I would glad­ly be a part of.

And, as one can tell, I’m get­ting ahead of myself. I’m see­ing some­things a lit­tle too far into the future, while I look at oth­er things too unfo­cused to be viewed prop­er­ly. If the jaguar is tru­ly my totem, then I should be able to find pat­terns with­in this chaos, find some mean­ing in my present sit­u­a­tion.

“a sol­id in the rip­pling water”

Living With A Cat

I’m extreme­ly tired. My kit­ten kept me up all night. She took the mid­dle of the bed, so I kin­da had to sleep around her. I kept wak­ing up, every time I need­ed to shift posi­tions, scared that I would crush her. I’ve been play­ing with her dur­ing the evening so she los­es a bit of the noc­tur­nal instinct to go crazy at night. I named her Dolly, after Nobokov’s char­ac­ter Dolores Haze. I need­ed to keep the name under two syl­la­bles, and I think that it’s a good sym­bol of the way one can nev­er tell whether a cat or human is the mas­ter, just as you could­n’t tell whether Dolores or Humber was in con­trol.

I feel so unor­ga­nized. I have so many things to do it seems. Take care of this, take care of that. I think that I’ve brought a lot of respon­si­bil­i­ty on myself, adopt­ing a kit­ten, apply­ing for a Big Brother posi­tion, doing this and doing that. I think that I feel much more mature and impor­tant when I do all this. Perhaps it’s a cry for atten­tion, but I doubt it. It feels like I’m sud­den­ly being over­loaded with things to do. I did­n’t fin­ish a sin­gle one of the three assign­ments that I had due this week. I’ve actu­al­ly been los­ing sleep, which is an extreme­ly rare thing for me.

I felt so guilty about those assign­ments. I’m pret­ty sure that I failed one of them. I just need to keep every­thing in per­spec­tive, some­thing that Sam taught me so long ago it seems. Everything feels so chaot­ic, spi­ral­ing out­wards like Yeats’ fal­con from the fal­con­er. Not that I think the Second Coming as at hand, of course, but things just seem so com­pli­cat­ed right now. They’re noth­ing com­pared to oth­er peo­ples’ prob­lems, I know, but I’m not use to being so respon­si­ble.