Don't talk to me about being alone

have you ever had a feeling in a group setting of happiness like the people you're with are interesting and funny and you want to hear what they're saying and you want to entertain them too, you aren't thinking how much longer till you can take off, you are just paying attention to them, not feeling critical of all the things they say and you say, not wishing you had something to say, fidgeting and wondering what to do with your hands and arms and legs, glad when you have to go to the bathroom because it's a chance to get away from them and relax? i haven't had this feeling too much with people, but i try.

On a lighter note, bowling

live

public message

Well MK, now you have more evidence that my neighors use drugs. These are pictures of a public letter written TO my neighbors (across the hall) in blue marker on the walls in the apartment entranceway, where you found the empty bag. I'm sorry that it has to be this way at my apartment, but at least the graffitti has an honest message. I'm not sure who "Boy's Girl's" are but it's probably another name the "Pink Eye's" came up with for themselves. I wonder if "Boy" is the Irish father who used to live there and walk around in the hallway without his shirt, and if he is the "husband" referred to in part of the letter. He doesn't live there anymore, but I don't think the mother lives there either most of the time they just run wild. I wonder who is having the baby, the mother or the oldest daughter or a third party, a rival to the mother, and I'm sure you wonder who is doing crack and if it's the same as the junkie but then we have to think or talk about something else. It's not worth being jealous of, obviously.

I Hate You! don't leave me

It's so annoying how sprint changed the format of the pictures! hate that fucking frame! (not the movie frame, but the white surrounding one). why would they do that? they ruined it.

Anyway, I'm reading about therapy and thinking about my therapist. I'm reading about transference and thinking that I don't think I ever did this with her. I have no feelings to transfer. I can't count the number of times I have cried in front of her on one hand. Why? IT doesn't seem right. It seems like I should go crazy in there. I should be discovering memories. I have hardly any memories that are easily accessible. Sometimes I remember the yard or neighborhood at sunset or smell of summer attic or other random sensory things, but I couldn't write a collection of stories, and isn't that weird? Most of what I say about my family in therapy is second hand from what my sister told me who is a psychologist now (or, starting in May when she graduates) or what my mom told me who is a psychologist and both have wanted to help me and I hang onto facts or ideas that resonate but when I think about it, it seems like another life and another person. Well I would really like to remember for myself, I like the feeling when falling asleep of almost seeing or hearing things. Another thing is how my therapist talks about herself all the time. It's true that I ask her things. Maybe she figures she might as well just answer all my questions. But I wish she would say, "nothing about me, all about you, where were we?" But I can't tell her I wish that. I should though. I should practice being assertive because I'm supposed to be able to do it there in a messy way. Instead I just chat her up every week. I wonder if she's waiting for me (for four years) to get down to business, or if we are slowly and surely handling the business and my expectations are too high, or if she has no clue and is just entertained by me and hearing about the nonsensical gay life I lead. Well she is gay too. Of course I couldn't talk to one I didn't trust in some way and it's true I had a lot of first meetings with other therapists and didn't go back or even up to three or four visits, but only with Val have I kept coming back, so I must like it. I wonder if she is really happy being single and living alone with all her dogs. She swears that she is, but I don't believe her. But I used to always picture myself a lone wolf until the very end, and imagine this peaceful center I would find living out in a cabin or desert somewhere like she does, but now that fantasy solution for my problems has been interrupted by the introduction of love into my life and being alone all the time was getting boring anyway especially after I admitted that weed is no good. And then the fact that Val doesn't have a license, haha. It actually doesn't bother me really, except I think she is avoiding the license test out of fear and if she's not confronting fears, how can she teach me about it? I wonder how anyone can take my mom seriously as a psychologist after getting the stomach stapled. Maybe obesity is just beyond my comprehension, but shouldn't it be like any kind of addiction, and if you can't work your shit out how can you help anyone else? Well, maybe you can. Now she's a whole new person also, with frail shoulders and an angular face, and she doesn't eat compulsively anymore, she can't. So where did the pain go? Well, she's on all these painkillers now, for that and for the knee surgeries. I wish I had access to her medicine cabinet. But then again no, for Mishy's sake. God sometimes my therapist goes on and on about the most practical, boring things, like this week it was ulcers. So I guess I have an ulcer now, it started hurting last week and got worse and worse since I didn't know what it was and kept eating pizza, drinking coffee and alcohol, smoking, eating chips and chocolate, all very bad for the ulcer. On Friday, when the pain was making me feverish, I started taking gas-x and pepto and drinking alka-seltzer but it just kept getting worse and waking me up in the night time. I finally went to a doctor on Monday and had a blood test, so I will find out soon (will they call me?) if it is a bacterial ulcer. Anyways I'm still drinking tons of pepto bismal even though it says on the bottle "do not take if you have an ulcer." It makes it feel better though. So my therapist started taking about her ulcers, and I felt very impatient. why should I care about yours? I can't look her in the eye for extended periods either. She told me once that she is a witch or used to be one, hahaha. I think that's funny.

She writes in her journal too

Is this how you like it?

Look below, that's my real journal. That is an entry from the end of December. One correction necessary I think, it says MK is half boy and half girl, and she's totally a girl, she just has a few boyish features, like me.

Last night I helped work on the electronic versions of two dead muse songs, and Mark bought an amazing microphone that we used at his house, and some of my confidence about singing "returned." Well, I get the feeling back every time I'm doing something new rather than something I'm trying to perfect or get ready to present. In fact listening to this particular song, I heard much more feeling and freshness in the version we have on myspace, which was recorded the 2nd or 3rd time we ever played the song. The last time we tried to play it when trying to decide what to record, it stank. So we never play it anymore now so last night it was hard to decide whether to use the older lines I have on myspace or the new ones; in the end I recorded them all, and some new ones, and will let Mark decide what to use and where to put it. It's fun singing on a good microphone, I've always enjoyed that. Playing piano in the jazz band in h.s and would have so much anxiety over doing a "solo" haha. I would refuse. They would all go into the part where I should do a solo and play quietly to hear me and I would just keep playing the main chords. Also then the panic in gym class during volleyball when the ball would come to me and I would see it coming and freeze and it would just fall at my feet and everyone on my team would be mad and disappointed, doh! I felt so gross during that time. But why do they say teenagers have raging hormones, are idealistic, etc when you can be that way your whole life? If those feelings go way, I think you're done, your shit is just over, that's not living really is it? So last night my new parts say mercy, mercy, mercy, mercy. So after all these years after freezing up and even my dad who is a piano player who loved jazz and blues working with me and then I sang in gospel choirs and also was afraid to make up parts which of course is what the gospel singers are supposed to do especially during the emotional vamping parts, but now here I am I totally get it and love it and it seems to be my specialty. If I just breathe and listen I hear the theme, where the melody is supposed to go and how to communicate with the other peoples parts, and then I just come up with some words or themes that have been on my mind that day or week and elaborate a little but not a lot. It doesn't have to be a whole story and the latest song isn't finished that sings about a bus to Munsey, it's about me seeing the jews getting on the buses to Munsey and how I think they are hot. Mish thinks they're gross because of the hair and I know they often have dandruff and smell funky but I like the smell of funk and I like how they're always reading the giant book and wearing the little outfit and the curls and I didn't grow up with Jews plus I like the separation of men and women and the hats and the accents and I like kosher food too. But the song is also about sadomasochism hehe. Even though I am not confused anymore thinking that I'm sadistic or masochistic because I'm not I just like the ideas, I don't like them in real life, it's gross, especially with diapers or anal fisting and all that crazy shit, I just like it in the abstract, to discuss it and think about control. (Yes that is cat food puke next to my head on the couch because they do that when I buy the cheap food.)

Object and subject

They were necessary

Potent

This picture bothers me because it doesn't really make sense. Apparently the word "potent" can used as a noun, which it wouuld have to be in that sentence (here's an excerpt from dictionary.com), but was the writer really referring to a T-shaped form? It's strange.

1. a fur having a pattern of T-shaped forms, placed in alternate directions and having alternating tinctures, one metal and one color, so that all forms of one tincture face the same way and are between, above, and below forms of the other tincture facing the other way.
2. a T-shaped form used in potent or counterpotent.
–adjective 3. (of a cross) having a crosspiece at the extremity of each arm: a cross potent.

So, hmmm, what?? Whatever. Somebody wrote it on a table at the Nublu bar. And I like to imagine a stranger recognizing it or ... this is better, sitting down at that table and remembering this photo, seen here. It's just a fantasy with mildly grandiose aspects. Which reminds me of two things - one on grandiosity, another on the book Nadja.

Obviously grandiosity is just one side of a coin which, when flipped, lands frequently on the shame side. A few months back I noted to Mischa the difficulty I was having with incorporating her positive feelings about me into my perception of my relative worth or worthlessness. I could feel, within the space of several minutes even, a reaction which swung from a sense of being not good enough for her at all (or for anyone I might be attracted to) toward the other end (but stopping midpoint) in thinking, but wait I'm pretty awesome too, perhaps I do deserve to be liked and even loved. If the pendulum kept going, which it could only do if I was alone and smoking marijuana or sufficiently distressed, I might decide that I was too good for everyone, although I really haven't had this feeling since meeting Misch. That feeling only comes if I haven't talked to anyone in several days or however long. What I want to say about this range of perception is that not only are both extremes false but that this tendency is exacerbating my career crisis. We won't go too much into the crises today since I have decided in my real journal that there is no crisis, and I can accept exactly where I am and that it is where I'm supposed to be, and that idea is final. But, I feel like I am frozen between being nothing and being the greatest artist that ever lived. hehe. Don't judge me either I know some of you people are also delusional! But am I really delusional? We won't ever know. Perhaps I am so talented that I will never produce anything! Perhaps I have already written and destroyed my greatest poems and no one will ever read them! I realize these types of statements belong to a mildly disordered personality. But I really, really really always wanted to be anthologized and remembered forever and ever and like the Greeks in battle achieve immortality through greatness and my photos the best black and whites ever like Marilyn Monroe on the beach. I want(ed) to be a combination of all the greatest of the greats!

But then of course the problem arises that EVEN if I were great, most people don't go to college or even know what an anthology is, but they probably wouldn't understand the first thing about me EVEN if they "learned" about me, if I were dead, even if they saw the DOCUMENTARY made by the best director ever and an extremely hot, skinny actress playing me, but even if they did understand me, it wouldn't matter because I would be dead and wouldn't care anymore! There are so many problems with the need to be great. As it stands, I haven't really done anything worth documenting (by admitting this it shows my personality is not disordered very much at all). And anyways all the documentaries are full of lies and misunderstandings and not everyone sees them plus everyone who might see them will die too, just think of all the libraries and archives filled with information; only a few librarians care and it's just impossible to everyone to know everything worth knowing. But if you are canonized, at least college professors with have to teach people about you. But you have to kill yourself.

Oh fuck it who cares, I need a career! Here I am and I've been a receptionist for five years or something! Meanwhile, it took me all this time to get enough confidence to start writing songs with other people and sing them on a stage, one song after another, not just one solo but the whole fourty five minutes or however long the show lasts. God I hate singing on stage. It's just not fun, all I can think about is how gross awkward horrible boring I am and I want to run off that thing. I feel that I am torturing people to beg them to come and make them listen to it. I used to get nervous enough for even one karaoke song or solo in the a cappella group, now, like I said, it's all me, ew! But on the other hand, I feel I am a genius and sometimes when I'm going to or from practice it's like I'm sleep walking because I'm going over the words and melodies in my head and see or hear nothing else. And I think every person who wants to be any sort of artist also wants to be a genius or secretly thinks they are one. OR maybe that's just the feeling of excitement of creating something and it is such a big feeling that I interpret it in a strange way and other people don't, they just think "oh I'm a small time painter, maybe I'll show my work in five to ten galleries before I die but it's pretty average and I don't mind if it makes a small splash." Anyways Misch came to my shows and she said to me, there must be some part of you that feels good about my success and achievement, and I didn't want to admit that some part of me was proud because the second I admitted feeling good that would open me up to further criticism, yes from inside, but it felt too vulnerable, to admit that. Better to say I'm shit and know it has to be a little better than that. But so much of the time I wish to god I could stop wanting to write and sing so that I could settle down and be a teacher.

I want to be a teacher. I do. I don't want to plan those stupid lessons though, or develop a classroom management plan, or grade homework, or stay late, or teach an extracurricular activity, or arrive early, or take anymore classes myself besides educational psychology which I took twice. But I really like the idea of helping kids become literate so they can go to college and read the canon. Also, teaching them to write, I could help them get their little minds organized and let some of the feeling out - this idea is special to me. I don't want happy kids, I want the messed up ones. I have no use for healthy, happy people, period. In the office where I work there are these three girls who go everywhere together, mid-twenties, white, shoulder length brown hair, heterosexual, super happy, friendly, one guy hangs out with them who I fucking hate, actually I hate them all. I mutter to myself when they come up all the things I can't say because I'm the receptionist. Anyways, I'm a heh heh psycho, next topic.

The only thing I really want to say about the book Nadja, is that I finished it and believe that I basically understand it, and the main point of that book is that the speaker want to know who he is, and he settles on surrealism as the best method to discovering himself and feeling understood also by an audience, namely the reader. Nadja more or less represents surrealism, her personality and lifestyle embody it's most important aspects and values, including automatic response and writing versus calculation, freedom versus logic, mystery, symbols, signs and revelation versus science, etc. Large paragraphs in the book are essentially poetry, meant to be read several times and understood like a painting full of related images, not strictly interpreted; Nadja is supposed to be confusing but intuitive. How did this relate too my opening paragraph? Oh yes, feeling that certain images - taken from billboards, advertising, graffiti - were potent and significant even if unable to say why - and faith in the feeling rather than deciding, "but it doesn't make sense, so it's means nothing."

Well, Karamasha is on her way to me, this instant. She is probably walking in the cold rather than taking cabs and trains because she thinks she has to burn a certain amount of calories each based on whatever she eats, and when I spoke with her earlier she was consumed (no pun intended) with anxiety over several issues: the calories and exercise to prevent imminent fatness (height 5'7, weight 119), what we might eat for the rest of the day, and also serious concern over getting a good seat on the bus we will ride to Philadelphia this evening. If we sit near the back, she might smell the bathroom in which case she will have to wear a surgical face mask. She insists though, that it's not the smell but the germs. If there is no smell, she will still know about the germs, but reminding her that there are always germs all around us is not reassuring. Then she is irritated and reminds me in a high pitched voice that it's not rational. In fact, all questions about the subject get this response, so all I can do is hope she brings a surgical mask for me, also.