The Diary of Antoine Roquentin

Been listening to this album all day, Fujiya & Miyagi

It’s 3:30 a.m.

Tomorrow is going to suck.

I had a really fun Sunday, I hung out with Christen. We watched Voyager for a bit, and then went out for sushi.

I’ve been having more trouble than usual sleeping these days. It’s the last two weeks of school… I finished up the last assignment listed on the online math homework. I finished my geography book two days ago. It’s all coming to a close and I feel like I have no plan for the future.

As soon as I graduate, I’m going to be applying to a bunch of schools… but it just doesn’t seem real.

My grandma is completely and utterly insane. I was doing some housecleaning and decided to get rid of this old monitor I had sitting around (even though it had sentimental value). By mistake, I left it out on the couch because the guy was supposed to pick up that day and I didn’t want to lug it down the hall twice in a day. The guy didn’t show, but when I got home today, the 20 to 30 pound monitor is gone. She must’ve done something with it.

Two days ago I could barely sleep, hearing her locking and unlocking every door in the hallway for three hours starting at midnight, carrying things around and rearranging them so that when she woke up the next morning she could say that the robbers had been inside the house.

I absolutely must get out of this house. I don’t care if it’s that shady rooming house on P Street.

After work, I spent most of the day writing out Christmas cards. I only do it because of my mother, she’s obsessed with cards. I used to find it a tedious and wasteful affair, but I do love stationery, so I have been co-opted by the card industry. I like writing in hyperlinks in the cards, I think it adds an interesting sneakernet dimension to the tradition.

Every time I close my eyes I think about what I will be missing when I leave Sacramento. Mostly, it’s thinking about Christen and what it will be like to grow and change in a vacuum without her. And then I think of my mother who isn’t going to be around forever, and my choice is clear. I have to move to New York.

The thing is, however, I can’t live at the house there. My mother has assured me a thousand times that I can, but there’s a difference between having somewhere to sleep and forfeiting all of the comparative luxuries I have here (my own room to decorate as I please, and a house that is well insulated). My mom’s house on the East Coast you could hear a pin dropped in the third floor when you’re in the basement.

Also, I come and go as I please here. If it’s 3 a.m. and I feel like driving downtown, I can. If I lived with my mother, I would never be able to take a night drive into Manhattan if I felt like it.

And (as I am writing this at 4:30 a.m.) I will feel like it.

I only have two parallel visions of places in my mind. For France, there’s 1) the cutesy adorable France from Amelie, and 2) the paranoid, incredibly rude and psychotic France in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant.

For New Jersey, I have the pristine beaches of Wildwood contrasting with the monochromatic lines of nondescript factories stretching from my mom’s house all the way to Secaucus.

For New York, I have all my visits to museum after wonderful museum from childhood to now contrasted with every episode of Law & Order I’ve ever seen.

I feel like it’s time in my life to hedge my bets. Either the world economy is going to expand for the rest of my life, or America will cease to be a world economic power. I guess I’m thinking too long-term, but I don’t want to be in New York City when the big thing that defines the 21st century happens. Be it a famine, rising sea levels, or a second depression.

Even though my East Coast grandma owns the house they live in, if it was just my mother living there she would barely be able to make the utilities and the taxes… it’s thousands upon thousands of dollars a year.

It’s time to decide whether to leap or not, and when I think about it, the decision has always been to leave. I mean, where would I go? Sacramento State? Hell no.

I’m paranoid that I’m not going to be working at my current job in a long-term sense if I were to stay here. They fired another person because they are closing one of the three magazines that we publish.

I’m distressed because I know that I’m leaving and I don’t know where I’m going to end up. But really, if it is a terrible decision and I hate my life, I can always move back. Sacramento is so mediocre, it will always be here.

Now it’s five o’clock in the morning. I tried to sleep at 2:30, but it didn’t work. I wonder what it will be like to go to a real university. I wonder what it will be like to become bored of Manhattan’s music and arts scene. Since that’s pretty much my life goal at this point, I think it will feel awesome.

I made the mistake of listening to that song that plays at the end of The Doom Generation, Slowdive’s “Blue Sky An’ Clear.” It’s my ultimate nostalgic song and I end up having one of those cliché flashbacks about everyone that I had been friends with in Sacramento. I can’t really slice and dice it, I had a wonderful time in Sacramento. I met a lot of really great and really not so great people, and have incredible life experiences like seeing My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Yelle, Crystal Castles, Honeycut, the Dresden Dolls (they finally broke up, so I’m glad I went when I did), Interpol, Bjork, Cut Copy, the Presets (three times), Walter Meego, Massive Attack and Ladytron.

I also saw a bunch of amazing shows like when we went to see Repo Man at the Trash Film Orgy, the whole Coachella thing… I don’t have a lot of regrets. I maxed out my credit cards when necessary to enable fun, and had experiences I could never have again.

Sacramento was a good medium-sized city to get my city smarts in. I couldn’t just do Crescent City (population 3,000) to NYC (population 8 million, 20 million in the metro area). Sacramento is not quite in the middle, but it has a population of 500,000 with 2 million in the metro area. It’s a good first step.

I guess it just feels like the end of an era, and it’s not a good thing. When I left Crescent City, I had no friends. The whole milieu that I had been in for around two years had collapsed. All of the girls in that group had gotten pregnant, all the guys had moved away or had gotten the girls pregnant. I swear to God, straight people in small towns are like machines. For my last six months in Crescent city I knew I was leaving so there was no point in cultivating new friends. I corresponded with all of my friends that had moved away and with the people that I would soon be living with.

This time it’s different… I’ve made friends that I have a deeper connection with, people I’ve known for years upon years, and I have a sense of “belonging.” My satisfaction with living in Sacramento is definitely cyclical though. For a while, I had my routine. I would go to work, then I would hang out and read at True Love or I would go down to Capitol Park and walk around. I would go to Zodiac (it’s now a Quickly) and chat with the lady that ran the place. I felt I had established a beneficial routine. Jogging before my math class on Mondays and Wednesdays, do my math homework in the library, go to my geology class, get home, cook dinner.

I remember those days as being cool without being chilly, and everything had a certain poetry to it. I’m not sure if my posts from the time would agree, but I was very happy with the flow of my life. Right now, I despise winter and the time change, which makes me unable to stay late at work. True Love closed months ago and is probably not reopening… I heard through the grapevine that Kevin Seconds, the guy who runs the place, is going through a divorce. The irony there is that they named the place True Love because of their marriage.

Everything changes, I suppose.

I have felt really guilty at myself for not writing more. I log on to my web statistics and traffic is less and less, and I know it’s because I’ve only been posting maybe once every two weeks. I don’t want to force myself though, because then it just becomes too anecdotal. The slogan “prosaic rambling with the side of ennui” is supposed to be ironic, although it isn’t half the time.

I hung out with Drew yesterday. Since I am not willing to risk the ignominy of having my grandma yell at people, I can’t have anyone in the house. We went driving in his car all around the periphery of Carmichael. I think we went through Gold River, some planned community out on Sunrise. My geography book was talking about these master planned communities in the outskirts of Shanghai that are made to look like a bunch of different regions in the world. The real estate developers are even getting together and marketing it as a “live wherever you want” package, with everything from fake London townhouses to fake Orange County McMansions.

Everyone will eventually live in Disneyland, gated off from the poor. Yesterday I read the chapter in my geography book about the future. Pretty much, however the world-system plays out, the poor are fuuuuuucked and will continue to be marginalized. It’s a really depressing ending. This whole class is really depressing… we spent trillions to bail out banks, but it would only cost $11 billion to provide food and medical care to all of the world’s needy children. And our so-called Christian nation can’t even do that.

Human geography is nothing if not pragmatic, however, and we may yet find solutions to many of these problems and in finding them create hundreds more problems.

I feel like this is kind of a symbolic post in that my very first post was musing about whether I would graduate from high school. You guys are unable to actually view the first year or so of posts due to the fact that they don’t have titles and the permalinks use titles (an annoying problem I hoped fix with some automated solution, but no, I would have to go back and title the first post “1″ and the second “2″ for about 200 posts). I do however have them in a handy hardcover volume (remember when I was printing out my archives into books?)

My wonderful and eloquent first post ever (slightly edited):

I think I’m going to graduate today. I haven’t posted to this thing ever, I haven’t had anything to say except that I’m going to do a happy dance when I graduate.

Six years later, I sure am going to do a fucking happy dance when I get my college diploma, and add it in the box with my high school one. I may be on the six year plan, but it’s better than the 20-year plan.