the diary of antoine roquentin

It was like a miracle on Monday: my roommate went to class and I started writing my story and when it was done he came back.

I feel like it’s jumbled and I don’t even really know what I’m trying to say. I absolutely hate censorship—I second-guess my work enough without having to pass it through another filter.

Maybe this subject that I’m trying to elucidate on just isn’t possible in a short story form. Maybe it’s not possible at all. I’m still not sure whether I should make peace with Kelly, but I refuse to swallow my pride to someone who’s betrayed me. It’s petty and selfish on both of our parts, but trust once betrayed is loath to grow back.

I’m really liking my roommates, they’re totally awesome. They had a few people over when I was leaving to go catch the bus tonight and I was tempted to stay, but I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of carrying my suitcase around all day tomorrow. When you wake up and have to go somewhere it’s so self-defeating and exhausting. If I leave at night, I can wake up and do some work and then go have some fun at night.

I still am having a lot of problems balancing all of my responsibilities. I’ve been able to carve out an appropriate amount of time to do my homework and assignments, but I can only devote a few days a week to working on the magazine. I’m in a lot of debt, and would like to reverse that, so I need to be much more disciplined when I’m at home for the weekends. That also raises the question of when I’m ever going to have time to work out. I don’t think I’ve been to the gym since school started.

Since I can’t really seem to find time at home to work out, I was thinking of maybe joining a gym in New York so that when I’m waiting for a bus or something I could just go and work out for a few hours, no matter whether it’s 2 a.m. or not.

My life would be so much easier if the gym across the street was 24-hour, but alas, I’m not master of the universe.

I thought I did terribly on my Spanish test, but it turned out I scraped by with a C. in order to study, I checked out a bunch of Jorge Luis Borges’s books in Spanish. His poetry is really difficult to decipher, but his fiction has a lot of contextual clues that allow me to follow the stories. I’ve also been spending a lot of time reading my Spanish Fahrenheit 451. I’ll sit in the language lab and decipher page after page. The feeling is the meaning washes over me of a particularly difficult paragraph is a curious sensation, I have to say.

Tomorrow I’m going to see Tosca, the Puccini opera, not the band. I’m seeing it on Jonathan’s recommendation.I feel very much like a member of the hoi polloi having never seen an opera, but then again I’ve never been big on theater, especially musical theater. I’m keeping an open mind though.

Next week I’m going to try to stay until Friday night, since I don’t really have anything to do in the city. However, I’m pretty sure I will leave early. There’s just nowhere I can sit down in an ergonomic position and use my computer. They have these incredibly uncomfortable and non-ergonomic desks in the rooms, and the setup in the library isn’t much better. I’m all about comfort, especially since I have my tendinitis.

When I’m walking around campus I feel like I have all of these things that I want to write about, but now that I’m sitting here none of them are coming to me. I guess I feel like I’m searching for some kind of sense of stability, but anytime you have that it’s just an illusion. I’m lucky to have the luxury to live on campus, my weekly city-hopping is inevitable.

“So that’s where you are going, New York,” my roommate said as I was leaving. I gave him a look like “where else is there to go?”

Every day I dream about grad school, much as when I was going to community college I dreamed of life at University. It’s great, I like it. Anybody that doesn’t have shit for brains can pass their classes. If you actually put in effort, you can get straight A’s. It may be that this semester I’m doing all the classes that didn’t transfer (hence entry-level stuff), but I thought that everything would be, well, harder.

I need to schedule a meeting with the English department so they can tell me which classes to take next semester and in what sequence, but I’m procrastinating. It’s not even October yet and I’m not counting my chickens until December.

I’m trying very hard to be frugal and pay off my credit card before December, so I can go visit my friends in California. Terry just bought my Vespa, so that’s a shot in the arm money-wise. I need to sell my MacBook this weekend. Still, it’s a lot of money. I think my major goal is just to turn my cash flow positive. I’m ending up with $100 less every month, which is a really bad habit to get into.

I can’t believe this is the fourth week of school already. I know it’s going to be December like tomorrow. That reminds me, I finally had a conversation with this cute guy in my English class. Afterwards, it seemed pretty pathetic that was the highlight of my day, but I really have no friends at William Paterson. I had a few opportunities to bond with people, but when I’m there I’m busy from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, and on the weekends I’m gone.

A part of me doesn’t want to know anybody at the school because it’s just my value-priced stepping stone to NYU/Columbia/wherever. On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to bullshit with somebody every once in a while. I don’t know whether my roomie was being serious, but he was talking about how he had no friends at the college. He said that people don’t invite him to parties, which was strange because he’s a pretty gregarious guy, although he doesn’t really have anyone come over to the apartment.

That’s another sore spot…I sort of want to come out of the closet, but I don’t know whether that’s going to start some big to-do. Despite my philosophical views on the subject, it’s really nobody’s business. Though I feel like putting up a barrier of being in the closet makes it very difficult for me to explain my life to people.

I had a lot of good ideas about how to redesign this site the last few weeks. There is a difference between sketching new designs (a step I haven’t even gotten to in the redesign process) and actually sitting down and writing standards-compliant CSS and XHTML. That will have to wait until school’s out, at least.

I’m not even really sure how I relate to Antoine Roquentin any more. I definitely related to him when I was living in Crescent City, and to a lesser extent Sacramento, but basically at the end of the book he leaves the provincial town that he’s in and moves back to Paris. Which is essentially what I did three months ago.

Oh, I should run upstairs and get my mail. I may have a brand-new copy of High-Rise up there. I was halfway up the stairs before I realized I didn’t want to wake anybody up. The floors creak extremely loudly at night. You don’t even notice it in the day but at night it sounds like Wagner is conducting your steps.

It’s probably a new New Yorker and a new Economist to read as well. speaking of reading, I’m about 40 pages into Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Dunes ( alternately translated as Woman of the Dunes). I just can’t explain how amazing his writing is. You know, it’s funny… one of my coworkers mentioned the movie that was made out of this novel when I said that I only like boring black-and-white films. The movie is on my computer somewhere, I haven’t watched it, but the book is superb.

I’ve been texting Keith (I think his nom de blog while we were dating was Josef K.) I don’t know why I called him that. In hindsight, it’s almost an insult to be named after a character in a Kafka novel. However, there is the shade of meaning of being the only sane person in an insane world which he was for me when I lived in Sacramento.

I don’t know what I would’ve done where it not for him. We fell in love at just the right moment. The first date that we drank, we confessed our love for each other prefaced with the fact that that was totally not okay to do on a second date. I’m smiling as I remember it now, meeting him at lipstick with his brother, sneaking behind the waffle square to make out. It was cuteness incarnate.

That Kelley Polar album reminds me so much of that time: I Need to Hold on to You While the Stars are Falling. I remember being in his bed and feeling like the universe was crashing down on me: Grammie was in and out of the hospital with the cancer and the dementia, I was out drinking most nights of the week just to cope, and still had to work and turn over two crash-course classes. It’s terrible to remember so vividly how strongly you felt for someone and then mentally deconstruct it. That apartment, that bed, isn’t there any more. My room is gone. Everything is gone.

Because it was not to last.

The sad thing was, even if I would have stayed, I would’ve been delaying the inevitable. Due to financial difficulties, he moved away a month after I left. I would have felt terrible alone in that house had I stayed. My dad sold it. Escrow closed a few weeks ago, so I can never again relive all of those amazing times I had in that house. Keith is back in the town he came from in Illinois.

I’m not sure what it is, but these days sometimes I just get completely overcome with nostalgia. I just pick up the phone and pray that I can call Christen and have her meet me in the Village in 15 minutes. Last week I called Patrick while walking down 8th Ave. out of loneliness and then he couldn’t hear anything I was saying over the cacophony of the city.

I meet people who’ve known friends their whole lives and the whole concept seems incredibly alien to me. I think it’s because most of my old friends failed. When I go back through my mental catalog, most of my female friends had kids, got married. The male friends all moved to crazy places like Brazil or Arcata. that’s The bad thing about growing up in a small town, everyone is just flung to the wind because they have to escape mediocrity.

I have a hard time letting go of my old lifestyles. Especially Sacramento. San Francisco can burn to the ground (again), but Sacramento was really where I grew up, where I came in to my own as a person. With the exception of paying rent, I was living on my own for 2 1/2 years. I went through everything—abusive relationships, fantastic love affairs that changed my life, abject poverty, relative prosperity, losing my cousin’s friendship, watching my family implode, fantastic concerts, amazing stay-up-all-night stories that I will treasure forever. But you can’t get them back once they’re gone.

I don’t know why I’m so prolific on the blog all of a sudden—probably has something to do with the fact that I barely talk to anybody Monday through Wednesday. I go through fertile and infertile creative periods. I’m not sure if these posts are tremendously creative other than just working through my issues and chronicling my daily minutia.

Often times I feel like I’m living in the future. However’ I’ve been living in the future for so long I own a house there. In some ways I dread actually graduating and having to do a 9 to 5. The rat race and all that. I feel like it would kill me. During the summer I worked full-time at my job in Sacramento (I was part-time while I was in school) and I absolutely hated my job after a month. Part-time was fine because I would get off work, ride my Vespa down to the coffee shop, read for a few hours and go home. But eight. Uninterrupted. Hours. of. Work.

Soul-crushing.

I started gaining weight, feeling lethargic and morose. I just couldn’t deal with it. Before I moved to New York, I ran into this woman at the natural foods co-op who saw my New York City subway shirt and we struck up a conversation about how she lived in Chelsea for a few years. The unspoken question in my mind was “why the hell are you here?” But really, not a whole lot is different. Yes, there are celebrity sightings and tall buildings and whatever kind of ethnic food you could ever imagine, but it is ri-fucking-diculously expensive to live around here.

I guess I’m thinking about these things more now that people don’t card me when I buy alcoholic beverages EVER. I always thought it was really strange when Adrian would fawn over anybody that carded him. I totally know the feeling now. I went to get my ID just out of habit to this woman at the Columbus Circle Whole Foods and she just kind of gave me this pitying look. Yeah.

I think I will echo Molly’s view on the subject of aging: if I can still read a good book, I’m fine with life. And I’ve been reading such fantastic books lately I feel like it’s awesome to be me right now.

I <3 literature.

Also, A Place to Bury Strangers (my favorite neo-shoegaze band evar!) is playing the Bowery Ballroom next month. I’m terribly excited. Totally bummed that I can’t go see Fever Ray because it’s on a Monday, but life will go on. Srsly, who fucking has concerts Monday?

In other news, HEALTH plays the Bowery Ballroom tomorrow. I didn’t really get into their album, but Crystal Castles likes them and Crystal Castles are the ultimate arbiter of taste in my book. Alice Glass will come to your house and cut you if you disagree.

Anyway, it seems like Keith isn’t logging on and it is terribly late, so I’m hitting the hay.

Categories: Ennui

It’s 1:35 a.m.

I’ve been studying my Spanish and painting for hours. The painting is being dried by the fan in the other room, I’m not sure if I want to look at it. I was ambivalent with how it came out, but hopefully by morning it’ll be dry enough to work on the areas that I feel need to be touched up.

I have my novel by my side, but I can’t seem to want to pick it up.

I got a tremendous amount of bureaucratic crap done today. Filled out some paperwork for the college, did some work on the magazine’s website. I have this folder full of articles they sent me to edit, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day. I’m going to tackle that Sunday.

I went to the B&H on 34th St. today, hoping to get some awesome headphones, but it was Revenge of Rosh Hashanah…they were closed for the holiday. The universe is set to deprive me of headphones.

I did manage to score a (used? I forget) copy of High-Rise on Amazon. I can’t believe that it’s out of print. I felt like it was one of his strongest works. Terry is so sending me that copy I lent him before I moved. I adore that edition with the 1960s style cine-camera. Is “cine-camera” a British-ism or a Ballard-ism? Not sure.

Oh, last night was so incredibly fun. Went to Mondo the first time last night with Jonathan.

I walk in to the venue and they’re playing “Playgirl.” I was on cloud nine. The rest of the night they played Elastica, Electrelane, Iggy Pop, The Smiths, Phoenix, The Breeders and even Le Tigre! Needless to say, Jon and I danced for hours.

Tomorrow I feel like I have a thousand things to do.

1. Get an estimate on data recovery on my mom’s dead hard drive (it’s going to be a fuckton of money, I can tell)
2. Get groceries at either the natural foods co-op in Chelsea or Whole Foods if the co-op sucks. Isn’t there a Farmer’s Market on Sunday? I forget
3. Get BEER. I need to drink at least one night with my roomies, but I’m always so damn busy.

I was listening to Elastica and feeling rather morose at the fact that they broke up. I just can’t imagine the soulful, earnest face of Justine Frischmann smoking heroin. Damon Albarn even wrote a song about how addicted she was. And then she married some college professor in Colorado. How shitty is that.

Flew too high and burned the wings.

I guess I should write about why I didn’t write for over a month. I think that after Sacramento I learned that I had to keep everything bottled up or I would get stabbed in the back. While that’s certainly still true, I don’t have any of my old enemies here. Well, I wouldn’t go as far as enemies—one hates most the qualities they see in themselves but amplified to grotesquerie in another.

It’s bad when you can’t even remember the screen names of old friends you’ve blocked. I guess I’m being a bit melodramatic, I do still talk to those that I love in California, it just seems like there is an insurmountable void that will only grow with every passing month. If I would have considered that six months ago, I would have probably said that for the most part, that’s a good thing.

I’ve been toying with the idea of coming back to visit during winter break, but I really really doubt I’ll have the money. I’m spiraling into debt headfirst.

Will I make the same mistakes I made in San Francisco and Sacramento here? I think that’s the question I’ve been too afraid to ask myself. I feel like everyone I know and everyone I’ve loved is far away, a half-dozen would-be boyfriends in far-away cities. It’s the tyranny of distance.

I want to write my short story about something closer to my heart, whatever that means. As terrible as that day with Grammie was, I still hated her. It will just come off flat and stilted, like 500 Days of Summer. Maybe a better idea would be to write about the last Christmas, with Kelly and I.

I wonder if I wrote a blog post about that? That would be…December ’08. Hm, I did write about it: “please tell me this is the last christmas at my grandma’s house.”

Hm, I had a Nails reference in that post too. Must have been in a similar mood. I think I want to convey abject despair at one’s situation in my story. Must do some pre-writing next week.

My amazing Last.fm friend Suzanne invited me to see Black Devil Disco Club at Webster Hall next week. I’m terribly excited, because I’ve never met her IRL (although I think we were both at the Junior Boys show last month).

Wow, Jonathan just sent me this fantastic podcast by Joyce Carol Oates about Shirley Jackson and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Damn it, now I must subscribe to the New York Review of Books. :P

It’s so late, and I have much to do in the morning (let’s be honest, afternoon) so I should get to sleep. But, before I do, I should post a picture of my work on the Firefox painting.

I’m not sure what level of realism I’m going for…but I need to get more into the habit of painting and then painting over what’s there before. My major stumbling block is being unhappy with something and giving up instead of just waiting for it to dry and then repainting it to my satisfaction. Now that I think about it, I should have used a square canvas for this.

Also, my mom holding the pepper we grew in our organic garden (we picked it last week):

Categories: Ennui

I thought this was an amusing and apropos passage from the Italo Calvino novel I’m reading right now (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler).

The businessmen to whom, before meetings, I show the collection [of antique kaleidoscopes] glance with superficial curiosity at these bizarre apparatuses. They don’t know that I have built my financial empire on the very principle of Kaleidoscopes and catoptric instruments, multiplying, as if in a play of mirrors, companies without capital, enlarging credit, making disastrous deficits vanish in the dead corners of illusory perspectives. My secret, the secret of my uninterrupted financial victories in a period that has witnessed so many crises and market crashes and bankruptcies, has always been this: that I never thought directly of money, business, profits, but only of the angles of refraction established among shining surfaces variously inclined.

I’ve decided to do a bit of a redesign, making my Twitter stream and my Shelfari account (books I’m reading, etc.) more prominent. I have to say, Twitter has killed a lot of that feeling that I absolutely need to write about something when I get home. Whether that’s for good or bad, I’m not sure.

I’ve been tumbling around a few ideas for the short story I’ve been assigned in English class. I’m trying to recall all those times I thought “that would make a great idea for a story.” I wanted to write something lascivious regarding Folsom Street, but my teacher insists on her “grandma rule,” where if her grandma would be offended at it, we can’t talk about it in class.

She was analyzing this short story “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor, and inferring that the main character wasn’t really an atheist. I wanted to call bullshit on that, because I get the feeling that she’s a Christian. You can always tell a Christian in that they never frame discussions of theology, they discuss them as if they were a matter of fact. Like today in class, she was defining the word “omniscience.”

“God is omniscient,” she said. No digression, no “Christians believe that God is omniscient.” I despise English professors that ignore avant-garde literature. That makes them little more than a glorified priest, gushing their happy homilies on stories which describe irrelevant and out-of-date social issues.

I’m off to class.

Categories: Ennui

Since last we spoke:

had a few good beach days

Went and saw Chairlift with Jove and Audra (my love)

There’s Audra! She wasn’t in the group shot for some reason (the reason is…alcohol)

Chairlift @ the Bowery Ballroom! Woo!

(no, that’s not a Photoshop disaster, she is srsly wearing her pants backwards)

This guy looked SO much like my ex Keith, it was creepy!

Such a fun show. Also, I discovered that the Bowery Whole Foods has this upstairs area with these fantastic salads.

Saw Telefon Tel Aviv on Saturday, but I didn’t get any good pics (I was way in the back row) but I got some HD videos with some pretty good sound.

It’s so weird, because the Telefon Tel Aviv guy sat RIGHT NEXT TO ME AT THE BAR the whole night before the show. It was so awesome.

I haven’t been writing much since I have no privacy at the dorms (my roomate is in my room as we speak). I don’t mind it (I actually rather like it, it’s hard to feel lonely with people around me all the time), but I can’t do voice-rec.

Checked out the pool yesterday, it was pretty awesome, but I couldn’t find the men’s locker room for the life of me. They are remodeling the gym here for some reason, so I haven’t been able to work out for a week or two. I think it might be done by now, since they started last week.

Anyway, I should walk down to the campus and have something to eat before my class marathon today (4:15-9:30 pm, with a 5 minute break between classes). I’m going to fill my backpack with vitaminwater and powerbars.

So excited for this weekend! I’m going to Bootie, the mashup party (for my first time) with Johnathan. I’ve been listening to the Front 242 vs. Gwen Stefani “Hollaback Headhunter” and the Gossip vs. Elastica “Standing in the way of Connection”

I’m off to class.

Categories: Ennui