We’re all just fumbling in the dark — for a heart of hearts
December 2008
The Archives
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12.26.08please tell me this is the last Christmas at my grandma’s househttp://www.vimeo.com/2634754
Woke up to the sound of Grammie screaming about who-knows-what for hours upon hours. At about four, the real part of my family finally showed up.
Kathleen, Kelly, and I had to make an alcohol run to get through the holiday. Kelly got wine, I got champagne. We sat at the dinner table, both of our bottles of wine conspicuously in front of us. We drank our way through the holiday…it’s really the only way to get out of there with a shred of your dignity intact.
We had an in joke about wanting there to be a bell that would ding to tell us when we’d ruined Christmas (like my grandma always says weeks later, no matter how well it goes). In the video you can hear Kelly make the ding and then we all laugh.
While Kelly and I were driving to Kathleen’s we talked about what a coup it was. To just be able to turn off our feelings like my grandma and my dad have done all their lives. We realized we’d been wanting something like this the whole time…eating until we felt sick had been but a primitive attempt to have the kind of Christmas we had.
I haven’t bought anyone presents. I didn’t even get my mom anything. I did get something for Christen, but that’s it.
I brought my computer over to Kathy’s house and we watched my converted VHS home movies for hours, the child versions of Kelly and I playing in the pool, roller skating, playing our adorably stupid little games. Watching Christmas after Christmas go by on the screen. House after house, a few of the people in the videos dead already, was a little too prophetic.
Needless to say, I’ve been listening to a lot of Slowdive and Nails. I want to crawl inside Souvlaki and disappear.
If there ever was a song to play at my funeral, it would be Blue Skied N Clear
Tonight, an unexpectedly candid text from someone I have a lot of buried feelings for turns everything upside-down and breaks down my defense mechanisms.
I’ve wasted so much time.
the world is gone
but we can hold on. -
12.23.08got my scores back today
96th percentile. Not bad.
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12.19.08strangely isolated place
Jean Seberg is only famous because of Godard.
A Strangely Isolated Place is an okay work of shoegaze.
Couldn’t motivate myself to download porn, I ended up searching the forums for people who live in Sacramento, this one guy wrote a pretty depressing summation of the “scene” here.
Watched the first few episodes of Enterprise…I’d put off watching it for ages but the new Star Trek movie will probably reference it in some way, and I need some escapism in my life now more than ever.
When all of your wishes are granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed.
I feel like I don’t know what I want out of life, but that feeling springs from my chaotic living situation. Perhaps I should move in with Megan and Steve. I can’t scrounge a deposit right now.
Called Taylor on my lunch break, but in the hubbub at the clinic forgot to call him back. I probably do have scabies, they’re probably burrowing under my skin and laying eggs right now. This must be kind of what it feels like to have HIV. To know that there’s something running through your veins that isn’t you.
Our washing machine is broken (due to my grandma), so I haven’t been able to wash clothes. Good thing I have drawer after drawer of clothes I never wear any more.
One thing that really surprised me (I learned this a few months ago) is that Mario never got into Nine Inch Nails. From the onset I suspected the reason: he’s never had anything but rich white girl problems. He gets mad after breakups because they thwart his social climbing. He likes Hector better than me because Hector is a mindless, pretty shell that he can project his insecurities on.
I’m reevaluating my decision to talk to Michael (Zero) at this time. I’ve never known someone (other than Adrian) so completely unable to grow up.
As my great-grandmother always said, Meglio sola che male accompagnata: it’s better to be alone than in bad company.
Ah, 2:00 a.m. again. I had missed you.
I’m listening to The Fragile to get a handle on things. You can tell you’re in a bad stretch when it makes more sense to you the more you listen. This used to be my mantra.
so impressed with all you do
tried so hard to be like you
flew too high and burnt the wing
lost my faith in everythingI guess, back in the day, that line was about Taggart. I’ve been talking to him off and on, still. I guess it boils down to:
I don’t know why he wants to sleep with me.
I don’t know if I want to sleep with him.
I wanted to get to this nonchalant state where we could just fuck, but I just can’t…there’s too much baggage. I’m not hung up on him, but I can’t look at that face and not remember pining away for him for years. I literally had to give everything that reminded me of him to Josh when he was living in Crescent City.
Still, right now, I just can’t suborn his life. In my mind, I write him off as a wannabe hipster. Which, despite his protests (this is the first sign of wanting to be a hipster, denying one is one), he is consciously or unconsciously desperately trying to be. The moped gang, the “bike polo,” the lack of bathing, the tight pants, the skating…need I go on? He protests that he’s “only been to four clubs.” What does that have to do with anything? So I’m left with:
a) he’s too permastoned to understand what a hipster actually is
b) he’s playing games
They aren’t mutually exclusive, however. I feel simultaneously like I’ve been fucking him over (wanting to hang out and then realizing I have homework), and that he’s been fucking me over by playing games. I just can’t sustain a conversation with him…just like I can’t talk to Drew for more than five minutes unless it’s about films. Terry and I would just argue incessantly, but at least we’d be talking. I can’t talk to Taggart, so I brand him a douche in my mind. I can’t decide whether to let down my guard and let old feelings take over, or what. I really don’t want to have sex with him, I want to cuddle and watch movies and relive everything I felt when I was 17.
But I’m not seventeen any more. I flew too high, I guess.
Okay, this may sound kind of insane, but I’ve long considered becoming a eunuch, to attempt to discover the essential nature of existence without the complicated distractions sex brings to the table. The conclusion I’ve always come to, however, is that life wouldn’t be worth living without sex. Which is kind of depressing. I mean, I do want to have kids someday, but beside that, it seems like there should be more to life than just working some job for the rest of your life.
Sometimes I want to be a monk, but I couldn’t give up my luxuries. I have this fantasy of becoming an organic farmer in New York State with my mom and telecommuting to a web design job.
I was having such a shitty day today (with the exception of my time spent at work), I tried to brainstorm on my way home what brings me joy. I used to know. I had this specific set of things I used to have fun doing that I can’t do any more since True Love has closed. It was my favorite time to pop over there, have a hot chocolate, surf the web a bit, and unwind from work. I liked driving around with Christen singing the Dresden Dolls, I miss a lot of things. Having all my friends be 21 was supposed to be this endless land of excitement, but what it ends up being is me feeling like a lonely drunk.
Which is what keeps bars open, I guess. I’m sick of embarrassing myself when I get fucked up. But the alternative is worse. Last week, when I went out drinking with Mario, I didn’t get buzzed for a moment. It made the night where I puked out of his car window seem fun. I can see why people develop drug addictions and fall out of society.
I survive by turning off my emotions. And I don’t think Andrew cares enough about me as a person to endure my baggage. I don’t think he should be required to, since I’m not a straight girl, but I don’t get why he talks to me at all. I felt so giddy when we went on dates…ecstatic as a 12-year-old when we snuggled when we saw Iron Man. But the magic is gone, and I killed it. We kissed, I freaked out, and didn’t talk to him for a few months.
I don’t know why I’m on this old record, but I thought I’d set it straight. I used to be so obsessed with guys when I was a teenager. I meet guys now that I would have obsessed over endlessly as a 17-year-old, but I don’t understand how to date people without that kind of quixotic attraction that nobody my age feels any more.
I used to feel like I was missing this chunk of myself and I was lonely and needed someone, now I feel like I need a running mate for a political campaign.
The world is gone, but we can hold on.
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12.17.08daytime so absent-minded
I took my last final today. But before that, I had to discover that our washing machine is broken again. Yet another visible manifestation of my grandma’s mental deterioration. I heard that she wandered away from the house while I was at work Monday, and some stranger dropped her off at the house.
After class, I talked to my aunt Gail on the phone, I burned them a DVD of the videos I took during my vacation with her and the family, she liked it.
Watched this 1962 Roman Polanski movie Knife in the Water. I really liked it, it explores rivalry and one-upmanship, something I experience all too often. It was really powerful in developing the characters.
According the the encyclopedia article, this was Roman Polanski’s first film…it’s shot very well. “It is sometimes referred to as one of the best debut feature films in history (alongside Citizen Kane by Orson Welles and Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard).” I didn’t care for Citizen Kane, but I adored Breathless.
I’ve been trying to work up to watching Nights of Cabiria, but it’s two hours long, and I would need to watch it with someone.
I watched Romance again with Zero (his first time seeing it), and it was great to fall in love with that movie again. After flipping through the mind-numbingly pretentious and utterly unbelievable Anatomy of Hell that time with Drew, it’s great to find a more accessible (and almost funny, in a strange way) side of Catherine Breillat.
I love not being in school, I can catch up on all the novels and films I’ve been neglecting.
Kathleen is apparently missing, I was on the phone with her and it cut out. 30 minutes later, her boyfriend calls and says her car is gone and she’s gone. Apparently they have some enemies…bad people he lent a trailer to and then they slashed the tires. You can’t make this shit up.
Well, it’s 2:30, I should clean up my popcorn mess, I’ve been cooking it on the stove like Kathy taught me to.
I love Kathy, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 23 years, it’s that you can’t save people from themselves.
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12.16.08when you sleep
Today feels like reality is slipping apart and I can see into the seams. Having spontaneous conversations with the checkout people at the Co-Op and Emigh makes the world seem unbalanced.
Put in a full eight hours at work, did some cool stuff, but didn’t work on the thing that I was supposed to work on that I dread. My boss wasn’t there, it’s hard to motivate myself when he’s not.
Drove home and Grammie’s boyfriend had bought real ant traps (my grandma had been sprinkling this unnamed bug killer all over the kitchen, coating the whole counter with poison). I can’t even explain to her why that’s bad.
It turns out that Orrin is the one who’s going to decide if she lives or dies. My dad doesn’t care enough to come down here, my dad thinks my aunt stole $3,000 from Grammie, so it’s all him.
I have to move out of this place.
Watched a bunch of Voyager to keep from falling asleep at 7 p.m. (I got up really early), but then by 11 p.m. my second wind had hit and now it’s 3:40 a.m. and I can’t sleep.
I watched the last few episodes of Spaced, and then the show was over…it was the last episode. So depressing. So I thought I’d watch Firefly for a while, then (since I’d never seen it), I watched Serenity, the Firefly movie. The end was so sad I ended up crying…I wish I had my computer.
I installed the Mac OS 10.5.6 update this afternoon, and it bricked my computer. It wouldn’t boot up, it would get to the firmware then when it tried to load the OS it would turn off. So I’m booted from my external drive using an image of my computer a year ago. It’s weird, there was a saved Firefox session on here from a year ago. I can’t seem to find my Mac OS disk, so I’m downloading a new one. It’s 8GB, so it’ll take a day or so.
Oddly enough, since I bought my new external drive when I did, everything is fully backed up (I have access to my files, the computer just won’t boot from the internal drive.) I had heard about people having issues with the little OSX updates (10.5.2 to 10.5.3, for instance) and such, but since I’d never had them I didn’t really take them too seriously. I certainly will now.
I feel so alone and I want to call Kathleen, Taylor, somebody…but it’s selfish. I want to feel real again.
One good thing is that I’m going to see Sam this weekend. December is going to be my world tour month. I want to visit Molly and Taylor too…I haven’t seen Molly in ages. I miss her a lot. I hate the end of a TV series, it’s like a breakup…I was depressed for months after the end of watching DS9 from beginning to end.
I’m listening to Honeycut and trying not to remember how douchey and gimmicky they were live. There’s so much emotion in the songs, but seeing them live I wanted to get up on stage and say “THEY’RE FAKING IT.” The singer was just going through the motions.
I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place: a stable job in Sacramento and no future, or living in my mom’s basement a five minute bus ride from Manhattan.
Tomorrow is my math final. And on the 23rd I’ll get the results of my SAT. Then it’s applying-to-colleges time. I’m halfway done paying my credit card back after I cut it up a month or two ago. Fuck credit cards, they waste your money.
The last day of my geography class was so sad. I’m going to miss those people, and especially my teacher. But I’ll make it up by reading all the books he told us about whose titles I scribbled in my notebook.
Future Shock is good, but I’ve been too stressed out to read this week. I went and saw Amanda Palmer and Zoe Keating on Saturday with Christen, that was great. Here’s a video:
Amanda doing what she does best:
The ants continue to besiege the house. They are everywhere. You can’t put anything down for a moment without them finding it. They are coming in through the trim in my closet, from inside the cabinets in the kitchen, from under the molding in the bathroom.
You can’t have an itch without the thought that it’s an ant crawling on you..and you’re right half the time. I can’t have anyone over any more, Grammie has no idea who anyone is.
I’ve been looking and looking at rooms for rent on Craigslist. There’s some good ones, the rooming house I wanted was rented, but I didn’t have the money. I’ve found some really cool places though, even though I don’t quite have the money yet to move in somewhere. I’m making great progress paying off my credit card, after that I will do nothing but save for my apartment.
I think that will greatly lower my stress levels and allow me to focus on work and school without the downward spiral of living with someone with dementia.
In 20 years this place will be just like L.A. today.