the diary of antoine roquentin

oh. my. god.

new goldfrapp album.

omg. omg. omg.

Download it ASAP.

“Dreaming” is the song I was born to listen to.

In other news, not much is going on. I saw Marina and the Diamonds tonight with Matt. It was a really fun show, although the opener was absolutely awful.

Yesterday I went and took the GRE. I think I did terribly, although maybe I’m wrong. I’ll get the results back in 15 days.

In response to your question, Molly, I have been so bored with my undergraduate work that I’ve been focusing very much on which grad school I want to go to. I’m hoping to get into a very good school (preferably in Manhattan) so I will have an excuse to be there every day.

In reality, I probably won’t end up going to grad school unless I get into a PhD program, which is very unlikely. If my dad holds true to what he said a few months ago, I’m going to have to pay for the rest of my undergraduate work out of pocket, which means I’m going to graduate with a cool 20 grand of debt. Well, we’ll see. I just need to focus on getting straight A’s this semester.

I’m not really as thrilled about spring break as I would normally be, mostly because I have these papers hanging over my head. I guess I’m more excited about working full-time for a week. I have been spending more money than I’ve been making for a while—it would be nice to reverse that.

On Saturday this giant rainstorm hit that completely disrupted everything. I could barely get to Matt’s place due to the subway craziness. Apparently all of this debris had fallen on the tracks… everything was crazy: the MTA website, twitter, and announcements were all different. We did get to the city though, and went to that cocktail party for the opening of the new exhibition, Skin Fruit.

The New Yorker had an interesting writeup on it, but nothing prepared me for the actual art itself. Normally shows at the New Museum are anemic (a friend of Matt’s was speculating it’s because each space in the museum is gigantic, almost warehouse-sized), but this exhibition had a very unsettling emotional power. We were there an hour and it felt like maybe 10 minutes. We barely had time to see everything before the museum closed. After that we went to see some bands at Pianos, which was an oddly fun night: just the right mix of people, good food, good drinks. I had a blast.

Tonight I wish I felt motivated to finish any projects or to write anything. Journaling comes so easily to me after all these years, but any other type of writing is just out of my grasp. Well, I do academic writing. And technical writing for the magazine. But there’s something missing—the sense of the imaginary, the sense of fantasy.

I had such vivid dreams last night. I kept looking out the windows of wherever I was in the dreamworld and seeing these crisp, billowing, sunlit clouds almost as if I were on the same level as them. I remember opening Google Maps on my phone in the dreamworld and seeing this completely alien configuration of streets that was supposed to be Sacramento. In the dream, Matt was driving me to Grammie’s house. I only realized when we were a few blocks away that she didn’t live there any more and that strangers would be in the house.

Later in the dream I was in some far-off city that looked like what would happen if Venice and Delhi had a baby. I want to travel. I’ve never been to even DC or Boston. I want to rent a car for a week and just go drive around the east coast. But then again I’m still in debt. My addiction to the latest and greatest gadgets is hell for my bank account.

I just want to write something. Maybe I’m afraid of revealing something. I think writing about the most salient times in my life, even heavily fictionalized, would say too much about me. It’s the ultimate paradox: to be writing with fervent desire about wanting to write something. It’s not that I don’t like journaling, I just find its endless solipsism empty and rather boring. It’s like having a long phone conversation with nobody on the other end. I can imagine that those of you who leave comments are there on your computer screens in your respective cities, but that doesn’t console me. Reading all these books on the theory of literature as text is almost making it harder for me to approach writing in a meaningful way. I need to be post-post-modern, post-post-structuralist. I need to go back from meta-writing to the signal level of actual writing.

The problem is: what do I want to tell? The possibility of just telling “stories” seems almost vulgar. You get someone with this amazing tapestry of life like Whitman with all the stories about growing up and being a boy in the forest and all this crap… how do you compete with that? I feel like if I started writing stories about relationships I would just get drawn into this genre identity of gay-ness, which I feel is the least important thing about me, but our society seems to think otherwise.

I tried to write a few stories: one about Aaron, one that was a fictional travelogue (since I’ve edited countless travelogues). The story has been more than a narrative: it has to be this magic trick that deceives the reader until they come to this grand realization, and I don’t have that knack. I don’t even know what I want to convey—talking about being me too much would come through as identity politics. We have no struggles as peasants, other than to pay the bills. That type of Harriet Beecher Stowe-ish call to arms will never be written again (because if it were to be written, it would be about consumerism). Would I try to imitate the canon? I find most of the canon of fiction inapplicable to modernity.

I guess the central problem is that I have no story to tell.

That’s not really true though. I have tons of stories. I’m just not sure that anyone wants to hear them. I think most of them are terribly vulgar in some way. You can’t write without giving away yourself.

I don’t have that luxury any more.