Yeah, yeah, I shouldn’t be here doing this, but it’s "night crawler" time and I’m feeling a little too crazy to be writing about Beethoven and stuff.
A little less than two and a half written. A little more than two and a half to go. Less than six hours to do it.
Yeah, shit. But it could be worse. I shot myself in the foot and I’m going to bleed for it, by gum. I’ve always thought of myself as a little self-mutilating. I don’t think I’m fishing for sympathy, but it’s hard to tell when you’re on the inside.
I want to know how I come off to other people. I don’t want to be like my roommate, sitting in ho-bum land, ignorant as a pig. I want to be better.
(Oh, wait, isn’t that ignorant of me to say pigs are ignorant? They’re quite intelligent from what I hear. Oh, dear. I hope you know what I mean.)
Two days later (sort of):
Another paper to do. And I haven’t even started! My God, I keep abusing my body. At this point, I’m probably worse than the kids with their drugs.
I just want to sleep and dream of beautiful things and not have to remember what my life is actually like.
Yet if you ask me if I’m depressed, I will say I don’t think I am. I know I hate admitting weakness and all that, but I still feel the same way that I always have, and assuming that I haven’t been down and out from the get-go, I would say that I’m okay. Can’t a person be a little unhappy without everybody coming at them with this and that?
I’m not in such a hot place mentally and academically and spiritually and romantically, but that’s just right now. Tomorrow is a place of infinite hope. This is just the waiting room for the real show, and I’ve got to make the best of it. Now whether or not giving myself over to fantasy is the most effective way of spending my time is something I’ve yet to work out, but it’s a bit late in the year to go in for any big new changes.
Two days later again:
After taking some crap from one of my roommates and picking out a sort of model for myself, I’m feeling better. An upswing, finally.
Looking back on the past a little, I think I can say certain bands defined certain years (more conforming to the school year schedule than the actual calendar) for me; that’s when I started to really listen to them. Like I know in eighth grade, it was a few bands I don’t want to mention (I’m embarrassed), but even now when I hear their music, there’s that little electric twinge of remembrance. It gets a little more complicated in high school once my music tastes were widened up a bit and so a band, or really, just a particular song, becomes more evocative of "moments" like it’s a soundtrack, but I think basically freshman year of high school was about Weezer. And sophomore year was The Beatles. Junior year’s kind of a nasty blur that I don’t want to revisit. Talking Heads, maybe, but not as major as bands of other years were. And the pillows, too, I guess. I don’t know, that year was hectic, perhaps not enough time to immerse myself in something. Senior year was also a big old blah. Pixies and The New Pornographers I got to be nice and familiar with, though their songs I can’t seem to especially attach to memories of the year. I’m sure I’m missing something. This year, though it’s still early to call it, would probably be Belle and Sebastian and The Cure. Actually, the particular time I visited this college last April was definitely marked by Belle and Sebastian. Dear Catastrophe Waitress, to be specific. I’d checked it out from the library. I remember standing alone in my host’s room thinking about "Lord Anthony" and kind of dancing around in the hotel bathroom singing it after a very longed-for hot shower (weird song to dance around to, now that I think of it). But I guess this is a little note to myself that the end of winter quarter and the start of spring I couldn’t get songs like "Funny Little Frog," "White Collar Boy," or "The Blues Are Still Blue" out of my head. And as for the last week, it’s been very heavy on the other stuff. Whether it lasts, I don’t know. I mean, this one’s a bit of a funny case because I haven’t really been listening to what’s been sung; I just take the music and pretend it means what I want it to. I think it’s helped with my mood a little, for what it’s worth. I’ve only been listening to the singles, though, since that’s what the library had, so I don’t know about the regular material. I have a hunch it’s good, too, though. My music hunches are pretty good, for the most part.
And in my short exploration of the band, I discovered that young Robert Smith was good-looking. My prior idea about his looks came from the Mecha Streisand South Park episode and the Greatest Hits album cover. It wasn’t an especially good impression, the old one (no duh). Some board I was reading compared young Robert to young John Cusack. The resemblance is there. I like Cusack’s features, so there you go, huh? All that bushy hair and lipstick covers Smith up. Sometimes I think when people still dress/coif/make-up themselves as they did years ago when they were young things that it’s very sad. I’m old-fashioned; I think they’re too old to be doing that anymore. It’s not proper.
That’s very predictable of me, isn’t it? I was once again marked for being predictable (one step away from boring) by someone. At first I was hurt and angered, because to be that one-track, to always be rolling out the same reasons makes it seem like I don’t think hard about things. I mean, that could very well be true. I’ve been avoiding making something happen with my internal messiness for a good long while so I’m just this one static recording. I am worthless, more or less. I want to be a person of some merit and integrity who is respected. I don’t want to be this chattering know-nothing drain.
But I think there’s a caveat in that I am just a fucking college student right now at this point in time. I’m still wading around in the paddling pool, trying to figure my way around. I am still trying to figure out myself. Like, my roommate was saying she never saw me looking at neuroscience stuff…and I got awful defensive. I mean, I don’t look at it that much; she was right (God, I hate to admit that, because she’s so psychotically obsessed with one area of existence…her world view pisses me off because it seems so misguided; she’s gotten me more and more polarized to my own way of thinking to the point that I’m afraid I’m just going to have to accept that I am an intolerant son of a bitch who needs to take herself out of society). I said a bit to her about how learning more about it would only piss me off because I’m not studying it in my classes yet, but that’s a really lame argument and that’s not the reason at all. Now that I’ve had some time to collect my thoughts (rationalize the shit out of it so I don’t feel guilty?), I think part of it is that I’m hesitant about really devoting my life to that. I might suck at it, I might want to do other things, I might not want to deal with the inevitable bullshit that comes with the field (though that’s true of any job, so I can go ahead and bite the bullet on that one). And then there’s the day-to-day kind of thing. Everything here just kind of tires me out. I’m not really up to digging into really challenging material when I get back from classes and such. I’d much rather screw around. If I were to make the neuroscience thing my job, it couldn’t be something I’d be forcing myself to do just to do it. It’d have to be a lot more natural, but other things grab my attention before I can get around to it. That part, I admit, is a big fat-ass problem that I’m going to have to work out. I used to be a real good concentrator, but that’s all gone to hell. I’m supposed to be studying for a midterm right now, you know. I stopped right in the middle and came over here to blab.
Best be getting back, I suppose.
