Monthly Archives: December 2004

Front

No, I did­n’t learn this mean­ing of the word from grade school, or even from the ebon­ics primer at Dolemite Dot Com.

(Actually, I learned it from 2Pac’s Life Goes On)

Yeah.

I only recent­ly had a mod­ern day poseur point­ed out to me. This isn’t the same as an intel­lec­tu­al poseur, this is the poseur of per­son­al­i­ty. The one’s who want to be quirky, eccen­tric, dif­fer­ent.

At first, I did­n’t notice; I was just annoyed. Then Loo’s per­spi­cac­i­ty put a name to it. I can’t stop catch­ing oth­ers now. I find that the one dis­tin­guish­ing behav­ior is the over-state­ment of char­ac­ter traits they wish to have, such as, “I did this fun­ny thing because I want you to see me in a cer­tain way, and by telling you this, I will make you believe that I am who I want you to believe”. Or “I like this song too₀ I lis­ten to any­thing because I have wide­ly vary­ing tastes!”. Over-state­ment such as this may or may not be based on some kind of inse­cu­ri­ty; some do it to hide because they’re uncom­fort­able with them­selves, oth­ers just want to be mem­o­rable and only end up being remem­bered for the wrong rea­sons.

Sometimes it’s even worse on blogs, where peo­ple write one line posts that don’t say any­thing because they think they’re cool and cryp­tic and that peo­ple are inter­est­ed in what they have to say. Or oth­ers who post con­ver­sa­tions, and expect every­one else to under­stand or appre­ci­ate the humour behind them. Or even peo­ple who actu­al­ly write about how they’re fuck­ing INTELLIGENT, or GRAMMAR FREAKS, or ATTRACTIVE. Why the fuck do you need to state it? LET THE WORDS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES. The key to writ­ing is to SAY not TELL. Telling an audi­ence how some­one is feel­ing is nowhere near as effec­tive as describ­ing direct actions/thoughts/reactions relat­ed to those emo­tions with­out actu­al­ly stat­ing the emo­tions them­selves.

In the end, it all makes me even more zeal­ous about being hum­ble, unassertive. I’ve always been one to “speak soft­ly and car­ry a big stick”, as Teddy once put it. There are tons of great sur­pris­es when one does­n’t present all of one­self from the start. And after all, when one is revealed as a true self that does­n’t match the false image that’s pro­ject­ed on oth­ers, one ends up being a pho­ny.

And I fuck­ing hate phoneys.

Have I Slept?

I think my alarm woke me up this morn­ing.

In uni­ver­si­ty I would dream of dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions, log­ic gates, algo­rith­mic proofs, any­thing that I crammed in my head the night before. If I did­n’t dream it, I was­n’t ready. Everything was ster­ile, unemo­tion­al. I would­n’t be watch­ing myself write an exam, I’d be writ­ing it. My con­scious thoughts would take over my sub­con­scious mind.

This is dif­fer­ent. All day I think. At night, I try to sleep but can’t, and all I do is start to think again. Then, some­how, my alarm wakes me up. Have I slept? Was I actu­al­ly think­ing, or just dream­ing about it? My jaw is sore. I’m clench­ing my teeth. When did I start? Was it before or after I got in bed? My eyes are sealed shut again. Have I been cry­ing? Did I cry in my uncon­scious, or did I do it con­scious­ly and for­get?

Ride

A lit­tle while ago, I shared a cor­re­spon­dence with a woman who once found this site by search­ing for “cool futon cov­ers” on the web. She was a sin­gle moth­er (the search was for her daugh­ters’ new futon), and she told me that she gained a new con­scious­ness after read­ing my entries. She led me to believe that this some­how changed her life, a woman who was begin­ning to real­ize that she had come to the end of the direc­tion of her life in her ear­ly thir­ties, and that she grew up too quick­ly, and could­n’t relate to her teenage daugh­ter.

She had always been ner­vous, and what I believe was a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ed, with our cor­re­spon­dence; I could tell that she was putting up a wall, a sort of sep­a­ra­tion to keep her dis­tance. When I brought this up to her, she acknowl­edged it. Later, she sent me this let­ter.

This is me. Without spellcheck or the com­fort of a cut + paste option. Ink is hon­est. Even more I hes­i­tate before com­plet­ing the thought/sentence. But I want­ed to give some­thing more and this seems like an accept­able amount for now.

What if I am just “trite”? I estab­lished that opin­ions are irrel­e­vant, so what the hell.

I had a mas­sage tonight + I feel bet­ter, phys­i­cal­ly. I can move my neck and look over my shoul­ders. I was begin­ning to look like a lit­tle old lady when I drove, turn­ing my entire body at the waist to look left or right. It cost me $80 to not be in pain. Funny, that’s about the amount that my com­pa­ny paid me to get in this shape. Ironic.

I just climbed into Jessi’s top bunk of her bed + hugged her. She did­n’t hug me back, but she did­n’t push me away either. That’s progress. We argue over the most insane­ly stu­pid things. It is usu­al­ly by acci­dent that we find our­selves get­ting along these days. Putting forth an effort does­n’t seem to work at the moment. I sup­pose that will change over time….but I sure do miss her.

It is late. I’ve had my bath, I ate din­ner (egg sal­ad + chee­toes). I won’t read tonight. I have enough in my head right now. Besides, I’m afraid I will be tempt­ed to stay up too late. I can’t func­tion on a few hours of sleep like some peo­ple. I need a sol­id sev­en hours minimum…and that’s been rare late­ly. I have a big clos­ing at 8am with a very impor­tant client. She is there because of me. I’d love to tell the pri­madon­na bitch to kiss my ass, but she pays my bills…so instead — I will kiss hers. Being a grown up sucks.

I won­der what it would be like to “check out” of this world? To give in to the notion of insan­i­ty and be for­giv­en any­thing + every­thing for lack of a func­tion­ing mind? Perhaps that sounds a bit dra­mat­ic — but for me it sounds like peace. If only I could some­how be sure that I could find my way back — maybe then it would be a viable option. I’d nev­er have the guts. I could­n’t let go of the con­trols. Voluntary insan­i­ty — — now there’s a fan­ta­sy I could play with. But alas, I would nev­er make it in a world with­out log­ic + order. Wow. I have writ­ten non stop. No more hes­i­tat­ing. I real­ize I’m no longer break­ing up the para­graphs cor­rect­ly: and I’m sure I’m start­ing sen­tences with the word “and”. Ha! I haven’t reread one thought, haven’t ripped out a page + start­ed over — see — it’s just me.

I could tell that just from talk­ing with me, learn­ing how I under­stand my life, she was begin­ning to under­stand many parts of hers that she was­n’t com­fort­able think­ing about. Raymond Lindquist once said, “Courage is the pow­er to let go of the famil­iar”, and I admired her for what seemed to be a great effort to share her­self with a stranger.

For a while now, our cor­re­spon­dence has stopped. It was her deci­sion, and some­thing I assume to have end­ed only because she has giv­en no response and no rea­son. She always told to me of her dreams, to one day buy a motor­cy­cle and take the high­way to the woods, instead of her exit home. From there she would save the world, one tree at a time. I’ve always hoped that that’s what hap­pened. That the rea­son why she stopped reply­ing was because she took Jessi with her, and left every­thing else behind.

And I wish her all the best.