Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Something that came into my mind (don't give it too much weight):
whenever I'm around my brother William, I feel stupid. Whenever I'm around my brother Robert, I feel broken. I always idolized both of them -- they're two of the coolest hu-mans I've ever met -- but since I was so much younger, I had an excuse whenever I didn't understand something or was slower or sloppier than they were. But, like, William, to start with, always looked out for me. He sent me wonderful mind puzzles and talked with me about grown-up stuff and then he turned into a kid like me and we shot holes in paper drawings of cafeteria food and ate Cap'n Crunch in my bunk bed. I always knew that he thought I was someone who'd really grow up to be... I dunno. Worthy. But I was a kid, so I could just be who I was. Now I'm supposed to be a grownup. I'm supposed to have caught up and gotten smart. I get all his jokes now, sure, but I can't talk the right way in front of him -- we were having this conversation last month about philosophy and math and my brain seized up. I was just mouthing these banal, stuttering, inarticulate empty-headed phrases, trying to say something that meant something, and nothing came out. I had been talking some of the same stuff over with my dad the night before, and that was wonderful, like one of the best SJC seminars; we both said what occurred to us, and then we prized the truth out of it together, but when I'm with William... I don't know why. I feel like he's trusted me to grow up like him, quick and sharp and logical, and I'm still like the fuzzy-headed snotnose I've been since I was six.
Robert, on the other hand, knows people. When I was really young, and he'd just done a marvelous trick on my nephew Michael, getting him to do something or other without realizing he'd been coerced into it, I said to Robert, "When I'm older, I want to take Develelopmental Psychology like you did, so I can understand how kids think, too." And he said, "Are you kidding? I've always known this stuff. I didn't need a class to teach me." I felt abashed. If I couldn't learn it, I guess that means I'll never know it. Robert always knows whats in all of our heads and what the solution is, even if it's tricky and complicated and bound up in so much other nonsense. He gives me these marvelous speeches about how we work, and all I can do is sit there with it spreading over my brain and assent to the truth of it. I've never been able to say anything to him that made him go, "Oh! You're right. I didn't see it before." I'm still the kid in the dunce cap, except it's the subtler stuff and not the analytical that I'm missing.
I guess it's just ego, or partly just ego, any way. But part of it is that I want to be like them, as good as them. Both of them, or either of them -- I'd be satisfied. Instead, I just sit and listen like a codfish, and know that I'm the kid brat that'll never catch up. They both love me and hang out with me and talk to me. I don't want to disappoint them by being less than they've always thought I would be.
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(4)
12:26:33 PM,Wednesday 11 September 2002
I feel pretty good today. I had one of those foul energy-drink things ('cause I couldn't fall asleep before six in the morning), so now I'm all zinga-zing. My physics professor cried this morning. We sat and looked at a picture of smoke rising from the towers with the Statue of Liberty's torch in the foreground. I felt what Anne felt -- the uselessness of all this death, in the past and future. I didn't feal afraid or angry or even sad, except on an abstract level. I know it's obnoxious to keep bringing up Proust, but another detail came up in my head which reminded me: the narrator's great-aunt's maid had such a soft heart that she would cry whenever she heard of suffering... so long as it was far away and she'd never met the people she was crying over. Stories of earthquakes and wars and starving children would drive her into long, loud sobs. It's an odd way to be, isn't it? It doesn't seem like the way people are set up, naturally. When I saw my physics teacher crying, then I felt something. Before that... I just shook my head. It's so stupid and wrong. I don't want any more of it. Ugh. One more thing... whatever emotional power Barber's famous Adagio might ever have been able hold over me was neatly short-circuited by Hollywood the first (and second and nth) time I heard it. I don't know if I would have been able to listen to it or feel it if it hadn't always been accompanying movie melodrama, but I sure don't get any truth from it at this point. A while ago I was afraid that even melodies like the Ode to Joy had been twisted the same way, but then I heard the whole 9th symphony on the radio and in its proper place it was perfect. So maybe the really mighty stuff is incorruptible. Dunno.
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(4)
12:14:34 PM,Wednesday 11 September 2002
There was a big sign outside the computer lab that said, "Plato is coming to Towson!" I got all excited. But it's just some kind of electronic standardized testing tutor. Fooey.
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(2)
10:42:59 AM,Wednesday 11 September 2002
Angst night in the boonies, tooralee, tooralay.
There's this part in Swann's Way where this chick is getting it on with her girlfriend and she spits on her father's photograph. Her father loved her to distraction and wound up dying partly because of the grief she caused him by being so shameless and pleasure-driven. And the narrator says she's a sadist, because she's mixing maliciousness (spitting on the image of the man who would have done anything for her) with pleasure (making out on a sofa with her hot music teacher). He says that this kind of sadism comes about when people desire pleasure over virtue -- and have enough guilt in them to duly temper it with pain and "evil", so that the pleasure's never pure. That way they never succumb to it entirely, and they can still see themselves in a relationship with Good -- deliberately opposed to it -- instead of feeling completely forsaken and lost.
I've got nothing so dramatic or sexy to report, but the same forces are at play in my own life, and have been for as long as I can remember. Whenever I feel like I'm wasting time, I go onto the internet, because at least time there is wasted in tiny little packets, one after another after another, and when I'm online, I haven't started any sort of activity that demands a conscious sacrifice of time; I could logoff at any moment, and so that gives me the right to stay on just a moment longer and one more and one more. Anything else -- studying, exercising, practicing, talking to friends -- has a beginning and a conclusion, and a concrete result at the end, depending on how well or how long I did it. The internet doesn't demand anything from me, and so I can pour myself into it until there's nothing left of myself.
I was planning on studying all day after my classes ended at one and then going to bed around eight or nine. Instead, I came home, cooked and ate lunch, cleaned my room, practiced a little, played on the internet, went to the D.S.O.C. meeting for... god, three and a half hours, I think... and I've been on the internet ever since. As soon as my plan started getting skewed, I got hungry. I eat when I'm guilty because my mind thinks, "I've got to do my duty. Something necessary, something virtuous -- ah, food! Food is necessary to life. You can't fault me for eating. It's not one of those luxuries you can abjure, you wannabe ascetic!" But then that "sadistic" part of me says, "Slacker, slacker, slacker! Sure, eat all you want. But make it the foulest, most worthless filth money can buy." So I ran to the vending machine and bought three bags of grease and salt. Then I got on the internet until my battery ran out. Then I went into my room and got the power supply and hooked it up and... I have class at 9:00 tomorrow. I haven't done any homework, and I'm slowly falling dangerously behind in Organic Chemistry. Nothing's irreparable yet, but it will be unless something changes.
This isn't right. I'm very well aware of that. I feel like my will's not my own, or like I have no will. I feel like... if someone would just march around and give me orders every waking moment, I'd get some habits pounded into me, ounce by ounce, and it wouldn't matter if I really felt like being upright and virtuous. I don't want it to be a matter of choice because, even if my spirit is willing on an abstract level, when it comes down to the little choices-by-the-minute, I firmly, resolutely, wilfully choose the wrong ones.
"Moral sickness" sounds so dramatic. Just like I stumbled on a bunch of websites today for people who mess with the skin on their faces all the time, like I do. It's a disease with a long Latin name, and they cover their mirrors with inspirational tinfoil and take 12-step oaths and unburden themselves on anonymous messageboards... honestly. It's not pathological for me, because it doesn't matter one way or the other whether or not I look like an ugly-ass motherfucker. My life won't really be altered in any important way. So I don't need to correct that particular compulsion, and therefore I don't need to call it a "disease" or anything else. It's a foible. There's a cute and harmless word for you.
But this laziness, though it's endearing in Askeladdens and goldbrickers and other people who make a clever game out of avoiding work, is fatal to me. I don't want to use the million tricks I figured out to keep any teacher, no matter how well-meaning or dedicated, from forcing me to study. I don't want to shoot myself in the foot. I want to have a will. Goddamnit. So what'll it take? Psychotherapy? Hypnosis? A live-in drill sergeant/dominatrix? Actually (god forbid) forcing myself to assent to the whole thing, on every level of my mind? I don't want to give up, and I don't want to flunk out. I don't know.
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(11)
02:29:00 AM,Wednesday 11 September 2002
Adieu, adieu.
Remember MEEeeeeeee...
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01:40:32 AM,Wednesday 11 September 2002
I think I suck enough to need professional help.
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(12)
01:24:32 AM,Wednesday 11 September 2002
Happy Birthday, dear Neil
Happy Birthday, dear Neil
Happy Birthday, dear sweet beast I miss you and wish we weren't divided by so many uncooperative states damn them all,
Happy Birthday, dear Neil!
And many more. (`8
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12:37:01 AM,Wednesday 11 September 2002
I'm going. I swear. Just one more thing. There's a lecture on Cheese this Thursday at 11:00am in Smith 554. Don't let me forget. It's mandatory for Chemistry majors. Cheese! {does excited double-handed bent-knuckled wavy thing}
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(6)
10:36:21 PM,Tuesday 10 September 2002
Yeah, I know I was leaving, but then I went looking for... pictures... and my computer spontaneously stopped working, and then I got a little random voice in my head which told me T.B.I.L.W.: The Shadout Mapes. And you just don't argue with that sort of thing. So. There it is.
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(1)
10:26:44 PM,Tuesday 10 September 2002
"Quit your whining. A little raw potato never killed anyone."
"No... a big raw potato did, though..."
"Aw, shaddup! I slave all day over a hot stove to put this food on the table --"
"Bedroom floor..."
"Yeah, whatever. Ya ungrateful bastid."
I wonder if there are any health nuts who eat a completely raw diet, on the principle that cooking makes food carcinogenic. They couldn't eat anything but beef tartar, prairie oysters, nontoxic vegetables... can it even be done?
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(7)
04:21:12 PM,Tuesday 10 September 2002
"Girls, you stay away from this man. He's an unrepentant fornicator!" -- bible thumper guy who appeared on the little open stage outside the cafe and has been going at it since at least noon. There's this guy, with the usual frothing schtick about how we're condemned to the pit and what we need to do about it (three guesses), and then this orthodox Jewish student guy gets up and says "Just remember, there is good in this world, and there is evil. Jews have (371? something like that) commandments, and non-Jews only have 7. You don't have to be a Jew. It's easier if you're not. But there is good in this world and there is evil." Hell if I know what that means. And then this earnest secular humanist kid (the unrepentant fornicator) gets up and he's dancing around talking about how religion's a swindle and we have to look inside ourselves for the source of morality and he's pointing at the sky and the other kid's clutching the Tanakh and the thumper guy is just pulling faces at us and the crowd is heckling all of 'em, with smart-ass applause and hoots or boos and jeers as their fancy takes 'em. Very silly.
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(2)
03:40:47 PM,Monday 9 September 2002
Tritoner, drop your hurdy-gurdy!
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(1)
01:19:24 PM,Monday 9 September 2002
Floaty floaty in the Den
Cherished by the wisest men
Chewing gum with goey core
Stay awake a little more
Read your book and do your chore
Blessed comfort is in store
Do your duties one to ten
Drag your boots back home again
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07:28:17 AM,Monday 9 September 2002
God, I feel like such a lameass for not making the supreme (ha) effort to get out to Bethesda and hang with Remi and rock with Martin and Anne. I was going to be studious instead, but of course I only sat on my arse the whole time. From now on, I'm going to go on adventures. I work better when life is full of daring slickness, anyhow. Grrr.
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(3)
09:47:07 PM,Sunday 8 September 2002
"Philosophier er nicht, Herr Schatz!"
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08:17:41 PM,Sunday 8 September 2002
If I was in charge of a teen abstinence program, I'd just teach 'em all to sing "My Thing Is My Own" and call it good. Best song to make you feel better about not getting any ever.
Speaking of such things, my roommate and a couple of her friends have been going to a charismatic church. Now part of me just says I'm being prejudiced without any real evidence, but the other part of me is kind of unnerved. Apparently this church swoops down on all the International students (much cheaper than being an actual missionary, I guess), and is all nice to them and invites them to baptisms and stuff. Today this old lady named "Miss Ruth" ("Miss Annie" called earlier) came by to see if Baya was feeling better (she has a cold), and she was, well, a nice old lady, of course, but... I don't know. I have an instinctive suspicion of people who barter friendship for membership in any sort of society.
I mean, it makes sense; International students don't have any friends here, initially, and they're curious about American customs, and so they go to the church to see what it's all about even if they're not religious, and they get the idea that all Americans are like that, fervent and god-fearing and close-knit, and they fall in with them, and... god, I know I'm making it sound all sinister, and I'm sure it's not. But it just doesn't feel wholesome.
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(4)
08:12:01 PM,Sunday 8 September 2002
Perfido mostro!
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07:44:44 PM,Sunday 8 September 2002
How many words with a silent "g" can you think of?
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(9)
05:26:30 PM,Sunday 8 September 2002
I am caught in a perplexity. In theory, it would be very sensible to stay awake as long as I possibly can today -- preferably 'til at least 8:00pm -- so I can jolt my system back into a sensible pattern and not go shambling around to all my classes with glassy eyes and morning breath. But I'm tired now. I've been up all night. I want to go to sleep. I haven't had much pain in my life; I've always been healthy, I've never broken anything, I'm not afflicted with any chronic troubles, for which I am very grateful. I like to pride myself on being able to ignore discomfort, sometimes to the point of brutishness. I can sleep very well on a bare floor, eat EZ-cheez from the can, listen to substandard audio files, etc. But I won't wear wool socks, I'm scared of vacuum cleaners, and I don't like being awake and tired in the cold cold morning. Should I crawl under my dyne and spend a few blissful hours in the world but not of the world? Or should I suck it up and stare churlishly at the wall until evening?
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(5)
07:06:36 AM,Sunday 8 September 2002
