friendly reminder
that self-described romantics
are lying to you
a walk on campus
smell his brand of cigarettes
six years is so long
failwhale white on blue
I refresh, refresh, refresh
twitter still is down
it’s ten fifty-eight
my paper is still not done
must stop writing these
Categories: Ennui
I just finished Ballard’s Cocaine Nights. Hands down one of the best books I’ve read in years.
I should have been doing a thousand other things, mainly studying for the Spanish test tonight that I surely will not pass. Just not enough hours in the day.
Was feeling lazy, so I walked down to the football field and jogged a half-mile on the track. I felt like going farther, but my iPod died. Due to my family (who thinks it’s a wonderful idea to move other people’s stuff without telling them), somebody hung my coat up in the hall closet when I was at my aunt’s house. My iPod Nano is still in the pocket of that jacket. So I have to use my hella old iPod that barely works (the battery lasts maybe three hours, and it will barely sync, I think there’s a bunch of bad sectors on the hard drive). I miss my Nano, it can be almost dead and still last through an entire workout.
I don’t know what I’m doing today. I feel this wall of apathy that I can’t break through. I still only have written two pages of the four that I’m supposed to write about that poem. Also, I’m supposed to have a zero draft. I plan to write some dada masterpiece to pass off as my zero draft, but I doubt I’ll have time.
Ah, my roomate just got home. It’s beginning to get dark.
Walking to class this morning was like taking a 20-minute cold shower each way. It’s the worst feeling getting out of the elevator and realizing that you don’t have enough time to go back up to your room and get an umbrella. Class was so-so, I mostly wrote haikus about how much I disliked the class. 2-3 people actually did their homework. We’re not even pretending any more. Whereas before I felt alienated because I liked the short stories, now we’re doing all this medieval poetry and it is boring as shit. Let me compare thee to a summer’s day? Let me compare thee to a Summer’s Eve. I just don’t know how to write pages and pages about a poem that’s 14 lines. How much is there to say about a poem like We Real Cool? That poem has become a running joke in the class.
I should go down to the language lab and study. I should do a lot of things. Pay off my credit cards. Unsubscribe from the UO email list. Donate to the ACLU and the EFF again. Write a calm e-mail explaining that I was incredibly insulted by what he did although I still have feelings for him. Stop waiting for torches to burn out. Stop reading TechCrunch and Gizmodo, stop spending hours on Reddit.
I feel trapped by the impending shitty weather. Summer feels free, a bountiful harvest of possibilities. Winter feels like a wet, dark tomb.
Categories: Ennui
I’m supposed to write some haikus for my English class. Since I’m only two pages into my four-page poetry opus, I thought I would take a break and write some. They are supposed to focus on sensory imagery, but I’m not in the sunniest of moods this weekend.
glazed ceramic cat
she sent to me in winter
stares with painted eyes
feel the warm dark breath
grinding, metal on metal
“Next stop, Bedford Ave.”
Amy Hempel writes
short stories with such brevity
they could be haikus
[the rest of these written while flipping through d.o.c. (nsfw)]
crossed the creek undressed
clutching a handful of hair
furious ramming
two boys adrift on
an ocean of anonymous sex
possibilities
wet perineum
straining to get to the best
hour of happiness
man in the next booth
prettiest guy of the day
the wall between us
Categories: Ennui
I decided on a poem to write my paper on. It’s The City by Cavafy.
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.
Reminds you of a few people, doesn’t it?
Categories: Ennui
Alexis kind of takes control of the camera a quarter of the way through. She loves to make videos.
We had fun today playing World of Goo and Crayon Physics with my Magic Mouse. Yesterday, Nick, Alexis and I played cops and robbers out in the yard for dayz.
In Marshall’s today, Alexis and I were playing in the giant displays of rugs. It’s like my second childhood, lol.
My fun is short-lived though. I have a ton of work that’s piled up and waiting for me back at the house. A four-page paper for English and a ton of stuff for the magazine. Trying not to think about it until the morning though.
Also, this is the funniest thing I’ve seen in weeks. Remember Cuil?
Categories: Ennui
I spent all morning at the New York Public Library. I found some amazing resources for my paper (I decided to do it on Cyborg Feminism), but the problem is that the library closes at 6pm. I was there for four hours and only managed to crank out three pages. I’m in a Starbucks near Union Square waiting for the doors to open for Röyksopp. I should probably head down there in another 20 minutes, there might be a line. It’s raining though, so I doubt it. I found some other resources on Google Book Search, I hope that’ll get me to the seventh page.
Categories: Ennui
Guess what I just got in the mail from Christen?
You know of my love of ceramic cats. <3
Categories: Ennui
Now it’s time to go out and see Untitled. I don’t know if Yevgeny is showing up or not, he’s not answering my texts, but I’m going anyway. I want to be entertained tonight. My paper is slow going, I need to get back home after the movie and work.
[I had to run out of the house to catch the movie, I just got back]
The movie was pretty hilarious, it sort of trailed off at the end though. I guess Yevgeny he was having some kind of problem with this phone, because as I walked up to the theater there he was. He’d texted me but I didn’t get them.
After the movie, we went to the Lower East Side Whole Foods for salads (the same guy was there as when I went there with Jove like four months ago…weird), and I spent $8 on one of those adorable canvas grocery bags. My excuse was that my current one broke, and it’s not really that much of an excuse, since I do have to carry my groceries all the way across the sprawling campus to my dorm room (and, possibly when it starts snowing, all the way from the train station in Hawthorne).
I need to get back to my papers. I’ve written maybe a half-page of my 10-pager so far.
Categories: Ennui
I got an envelope full of insane letters from Grammie, my grandma in California that has dementia. She’s been in the facility about as long as I’ve been in New York, about seven months. These letters are so off-base, in them she writes she’s been there for five years. God knows how she managed to send this letter, it was sealed with masking tape and used a hodgepodge of stamps.
Transcription follows:
“Please excuse my shaky writing but I am too hopeful now leaving this place — I do not believe I am registered but I never get a chance to leave — closely watched — all these people are the same — no other church — I have to stay in room — do have private bedroom — constantly watched by them. Please help me — I am a Christian Scientist but get little time to study — books were taken.
My name is Barbara Susan Abbott — my home which I have not been in for 5 years — I was in their place — I do have family in that home [the address]. One son next door — he is not a Christian Scientist but put in the church where he put me. The sons live there — home occasionally — but they are not allowed to see me although they are both graduated into college thanks to me.”
The sad thing is that this was sent to her old house, which has already been sold. The only reason I got this letter is the postal service forwarded it to me at my new address.
I sure wish I had graduated from college “thanks to her,” but my dad sold her house for $300,000 and told me on the phone today he isn’t going to pay for anything after next semester. Thanks, assholes. If that’s true, I’m changing my last name to my mother’s sooner rather than later.
There are six notes altogether written on different scraps of paper. Feel free to peruse them on flickr.
This one was the coup de grâce, written on the back of a photo of me and Grammie at my high school graduation:
“Remember so happy
[the existing text on the back of the photo, Barbara + Arthur '03]
We were happy once — I tried my best — now my best is prison because of you! But remember. You will pay the price and it is very awful — especially alone like you are always.”
In the conversation with my dad, he said that she was the sanest person in the lockdown ward, which must feed her delusions that she is still sane. Still, Grammie’s former boyfriend will take her out to lunch but she doesn’t know what she wants to order, can’t read the menu—and the next day she doesn’t remember going. Dementia is a disease I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. You become nothing—an empty host of memories of a life you can never return to.
Some were short and sweet, this one addressed to my dad’s name:
[Dad's name]
Trying to take care of you it was and is very difficult.I do love you — but I would guess you do not have a happy life.
She’s probably right. I can’t imagine anything that gives my dad joy.
Some of the notes are long rambling affairs with tons of details jotted down everywhere, like this one:
Sunday – I am there with breakfast with ill people.
Only place I am allowed— I still am not ill not for all these years — please let me go home — I could be ill from all these god says no But says no
Please get me out —all I want Please is my home and family — please
I want to go to my home — please — I will be good
Building I am in the room for south — of Bldg — I am
I am retired employee about 6 yrs and I was only ill one time —years ago — short time.
I have not been in this Church since last June — I have had no illnesses — for all this time, I am put in room of all ill such handicapped men and women — we breakfast lunch and dinner all in the same room — I still have had no illness but I do have to stay in this room most of the time.
It looks like I will have to stay there for life please help.
After I read this one, I started to cry. Especially at “I will be good.” She knows, even now, that there really is something wrong with her, but she doesn’t have the cognition to know exactly what. Sometimes I wish the cancer had taken her, then we could have grieved and moved on. This is worse than death. So much worse than death could ever be. I’m supposed to be going to dinner, and yet I’m crying—I never thought I’d be wishing for someone to die just to put an end to their misery. No one deserves this. After all the horrible things she did to me and Kelly as children, she doesn’t deserve this life—dead but alive, alive but dead.
I don’t know what to do.
We’ve just got to keep going. Wash off the tears in the downstairs bathroom, go up for dinner. Don’t think.
Categories: Ennui
