I wasn’t going to write a post while I was on the plane…but it’s a red-eye, and I can never fall asleep before 2 a.m.
It’s not even 10:30 p.m. yet.
How disappointing…I always hope to someday fly on a plane that has wi-fi (American has it, but I’ve never flown on American). I think it’s expensive. I think Continental is doing it too, eventually. Now that I think about it, in my extremely-wired life, being on a plane is my only time away from connectivity.
Traveling is a wonderful way to get some reading done. I made a ton of progress on GEB (Godel, Escher, Bach) on the Amtrak and BART ride here. I have to say that this is the most interesting book I’ve read all year. I’ve always been fascinated by particle physics, paradoxes, et al. When I was thirteen, I read this book called About Time that served as an introduction to the relativistic universe we live in. It whet my appetite for such things forever. I want to read Parallel Worlds (or maybe I did, I read one of his novels, but I don’t think it was that one).
But next on my list is Future Shock, which I couldn’t find at that cute-as-hell bookstore near Old Ironsides.
I don’t know why, but I’m super excited about this trip. The whole ride on the train seemed abstract…I had Internet on my MacBook through my phone, so I was just doing my normal after-school IMing routine, until we went through a tunnel and I lost service.
Which brings me to the subject I’ve been kind of dancing around writing: Taggart.
I made a fool of myself a few days ago when I (at long last) joined him for $3 pitchers of beer at the Depot. This must have been Thursday night. I have a bunch of pictures of him that I took, and videos of me being a drunken douche. I don’t know what it is, but I always turn into a flirty faggot when I drink. I guess that’s what straight guys do, turn into more bro-ey bro douches hitting on girls, but it still sucks.
I’ve got no idea what he wants. I gather that he does want or did at one time want to have sex, but for me I just can’t see him that way. There’s just too much history there. He knows all the games I play and all the tricks up my sleeve, so I feel utterly outgunned. Being intimate with him bring back all these neuroses and insecurities.
These days, I feel like every relationship is this odd formal system with small successes and failures, not worth mentioning, and a concrete rubrick for success and failure that I will never reach by virtue of how I play the game. I can’t break out of this formal system of interaction.
It seems I connect with many new people I date in a way I haven’t with anyone else, which makes the possibility of meeting someone that fulfills this ever-more-complex equation.
On the one hand, I see people I deem unattainable even if they were single (i.e. Eggis, NY Sean). I have a concrete system for calculating the worth of people, and I feel like I need to triple-major in linguistics, semiotics, and renaissance literature to be someone I want to hang out with.
Yet with the more existential novels I read and French pop I listen to, I feel so isolated from the mainstream that it would be a miracle to find someone like me. And as soon as that thought happens, it is reduced to the fact that really, I’m not unique. My morals lifted verbatim from Marshall McLuhan, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Kurt Vonnegut, musical taste created by Modular and Ed Banger, my regurgitation of other people’s ideas Creative Commons-licensed.
Yet at the core of it, I am verifiably intelligent. I scored in the 95th percentile in language on my SAT, I consistently scored in the 98th percentile in language all through elementary school. I’ve worked as an assistant editor for years, but skills in writing (I’m not sure even that is accurate…what is the definition of what standardized tests actually measure?) don’t seem to have many tangible benefits.
My mother always says when I mention events that concern my blog that I lose more friends than I make because of it.
I used to have an argument against that, that I wanted to live an authentic life by having no secrets. That was a wonderfully quixotic notion that held fast until about a year ago, when I had to admit to myself that secrets are sometimes necessary. However, I remain intransigent. I can’t stop writing. It is this unstoppable drive that springs from the most authentic part of myself.
These last few weeks, we’ve been studying statistics. I am loath to calculate some kind of approximation of the people I be compatible with. The number is infintesmally small. When I look at people who are in successful relationships, it always seems to be this kind of give-and-take of attributes that neither of the participants could have on their own, which makes it seem like the secret of staying together is to be incredibly codependent.
Christen and I talk about how we need a certain amount of “craziness” in our interactions, or we just get bored. People like Hector are a suffocating cloud of boredom because they have no rubrick of what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Excusing people’s boring lives with phrases like “He is just so nice” or “Oh, he’s a good person” are alwas the kiss of death. Some of the people that I love and admire the most could never be called nice, yet they are incredible people.
I think I’m hitting my head against the idea of growing middle-aged, settling into a routine, and becoming either an endlessly eletist “I’ve seen it all yet take pleasure in nothing” douche like Davis Chris, or a criminally small-minded corporate ladder-climber “Oh, I’m not from Sacramento, I’m from Roseville and I work at Intel” (Hector’s roomate).
I’m terrified of routines. But they are a necessary part of life, and in this economy, I don’t think I’ll get much time to do the things I really love (writing, reading, painting)
(oh god, the cabin is filling with a putrid stench…someone just let out the biggest fart ever)
I think the best thing to do would be to get a small student loan and go to a small college near my mom’s place. I would live on campus, but I would be able to visit her all the time. She’s not going to live forever, and she’s the person that matters most in my life, so I should move there. I’m also at the point in my life where I can insulate myself from her controlling tendencies.
Well, it’s 11:10 p.m. and my wrists are starting to tell me to quit writing, so I’m going to try and watch a movie, or maybe go to sleep.
Categories: Ennui
