I'm trying to find a passage, from either a journal or short story--can't remember which--about my junior year dorm room. I can't seem to find it, but to convince myself this isn't a huge waste of time, I'll use my readings to update my weblog.
So, excerpts from my journals:
4.11.01:
hysterical with self consciousness
that we understand our partners through past partners. idenitities melt into a pool of adults. I am no one special. My breasts, understood through other breasts, my sighs, other sighs, my hair, other hair.
I don’t hide life’s production. I put my lipstick on in front of the boys I date. They call that domesticity.
5.4.01
Sixteen in Paris, with a fan to sing me asleep
or nineteen in Berkeley, what I learned in Paris to keep me company at night.
What I expect from others is just more of myself.
Learning to bathe in myself, eat myself, smoke myself, and sleep under my own arm.
Learning to read myself, and breathe myself, and drink saliva on long walks.
Replacing television with hot feet or the pulse in my neck, and phone conversations with dirty socks and my compact mirror.
This is a new way of breathing, where my breath never escapes.
Slowly, I realize summer is a race of sitting still. How much endurance can concentration mimic?
7.9.01
And then my work: reading and writing. I’m full of ambitious plans. Drafting titles for a short story collection. Brainstorming thesis proposals. Matching short stories to appropriate literary journals. I sit down everyday and try to work on my short story, but the physical gets in the way: what is that headache? Why still exhausted? I can’t concentrate; I can’t get into this. I can fight myself, but I’m not producing good work in this state.
11.3.01
what it is to be somebody else. of course I’m not an I. I’m an accumulation of things. I feel no I, except in the worst moments of dissasociation, when all there is is the awareness of being dissassociated from the self: then, the mind’s activity is so limited, only one thing really, that an “I’ can come into existence; my “I’ is that one thing, that one awareness. But normally, too many things are happening for the simplicity of an “I.” But I sometimes long for it, the worst nostalgia. And I think I can find “I’ in breathing; my breaths start deep and then turn painfully shallow. That is me. My mother, I imagine her breaths move horizantally, out, slow, in, fast; and that is the essence of her drama, her critical sense of others, her life’s disquiet.
12.17.01
Sadness is the idea of eternal loneliness.
I’m thinking of the movie--with the tsunami and tea leoni. not armageddon, the other one. (deep impact.) tea and her father are on the beach, waiting to die, together, finally, after the parents’ divorce, drifting apart, etc., etc. Dying together: nice. But what if, when the wave hits, it snaps their hands apart, and crunches Tea Leoni’s spine, but, for two or three long seconds, she remains conscious, thinking: “Shit, this fucking hurts. This isn’t a good way to go.” And she thinks her thought is funny, but she has no one to share it with, and so, right as she dies, she comprehends true sadness.
1.11.02
The fight is between the present tense, activity, and the future tense, stasis.
Belonging to the future: crushes, shopping (books, clothes), bookmarking websites, making lists, applications, most daydreams, ambitions, goals. An image of myself that I don’t have to work to achieve.
Belonging to the present: I don’t know. I’d say cleaning, but cleaning is for the future self to live in, and when I clean, I think of others. I’ll stop there. I’m too tired to think right.