I'm glad to be sleeping alone for the first night in a while. I Applied at Perry's Steakhouse but they only want a foodrunner and I want to be a waiter. Kelso makes $300 a night sometimes. They made me fill out one of those odious form applications. Under special skills I wrote: "Tough as nails, sweet as honey."

Yesterday Diego and I sat on his inflatable bed and read Giovanni's Room together silently, stopping now and then to look up a word in French, usually a dirty one.

I feel vaguely that I am doing wrong and that I am not good. Something to do with evasion. I will trace and solve my own problems, since I've decided against therapy for now (too expensive).

Proud to have abdicated some of my privileges, but anxious to regain some others.

Looking forward to working at La Tazza Fresca tomorrow.

Hella: "What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had." -Giovanni's Room

Just remembered my dream from last night, as I was looking up courses for next semester.

It was a sad, and long, and difficult dream.
twilit and underground, I was working on a computer in a cavernous marble room with huge columns. Working on homework , with my notebooks in a stack and my laptop lit, I was conscious of the few other studiers at their tables far away from me, all of us facing blank marble.

Footsteps rang somewhere, the hour was late. I gave up on studying and packed up, and then I finally stumbled into an honors seminar.

In the seminar room I found the friends I wanted to have, and yearned to find a way to be appointed to their ranks. A lecturer- an old man- was talking about some painting. I found some people I had once known, I was jealous of them. I left- I had to- and stepped into a long carpeted hall. I ran, and running found a friend- a girl like me. She was thinner though, and beautiful, dark, vaguely troubled in a sexy way. She was running too, but I lost her on a switchback of carpeted stairway.

I snuck into the men’s bathroom, there was hair in the tub- I wandered into the other one, brightly lit and pink. I wandered through more fantastic rooms, dim and miraculous. Tiffany style, oriental, modern, I wandered looking for my notebooks, which I had lost somewhere. In the bathroom? In the hallway?

Then after classes, I saw the throng leave the seminar room and go into little chute-like elevators, deeper underground to tiny windowless cells where they would study and sleep.

I had retraced my steps but I was not welcome there. And when they were gone I was lonely, and though I still wanted to be among them, I knew that it was not a nice place there, underground.

collections.

(first, it's a lute, he responds, stretching out one large puffy headphone to hear the questioner. )

Dad, first
Diane
Hannah
these are in no particular order.

Paul, and maybe Daniel.

My professors: Pagani first, and most challening.
then Bullock, what a sweet lady.
Pelletiers is too easy to please.

. . . I say, is that chris over there? No, it isn't Chris it is a girl. a girl with hair like Chris's. At the next table is that one bearded barista who isn't as nice as he looks, and then Lyndon, looking healthy and happy and hooded, a girl with him, undoubtedly his woman.

Christine, I love her.

Elizabeth

Margaret: I think of often but we do not speak. She must be sad to miss me.

Jennifer. except not in the same way.

myself, please.

Who am i?

Goals, and the homework :
1. the homework from group therapy: the notecard containing the pros and cons
2. homework: from phonetics class, because it is easily dispatched and because I am pretty far behind. I'll do the reading and take the notes and later listen to the audio exercises, over and over and over and over again.
3. I'll begina a list of music to download for the show; I only have until the end of tomrrow to get whatever I will.
4. Emails, correspondence: I must call Barbara and leave a message about the electrical outlets and the blinds.

I wish I were more androgynous. expecially tonight, when I feel so fiercely beautiful, so angrily ... delicate. The lipstick that shines will not withstand a sip from the cup perched ... please pull out a cigarette, handsome man facing me, and I will bum it from you... no, it is only water. damn.
the moon! ah, viper hanging joyful and brighter even than the sodium lights.

(t, s, o, y, c, i, i, are the letters, in that order, on her scrabble tray)

Good evening. I'm at Epoch to study phonetics. and, I'm sharing a table with a handsome guy. But zut alors I forgot my notebook!

Oh well, an excuse to journal Diane's wedding weekend, which lasted an eternity and passed too quickly. Thursday night at the parents’ there was no Diane. I texted Hannah that she really hurt my feelings when she went back on her promise to find an apartment together. Then I cried and crawled into bed with Becca and we held each others hands and fell asleep that way. The next day was the one.

I woke in the morning to motivate Dad to make scrambled eggs for everyone. Everything he tries to do now is more difficult because of his mangled arm, though he hides his injury expertly. Breakfast was delivered to me by T-bot as I was having my hair and makeup done by the stylist, Kelsey, who comes from a three stoplight town in East Texas where she and her twin, daughters of the basketball coach, were famous everywhere they went for being tall.

My hair and makeup took forty five minutes. Then it was the florist to be entertained, the downstairs to be arranged, tea lights and decorations distributed, children to be told not to play with the umbrellas upstairs if you please.
Diane herself was exemplary in her calm. The other bridesmaid, Madison, was getting on her nerves, so she asked me to be a buffer.

The boys showed up- Kevin and his brothers- and I directed them how to move out the chairs. Then Becca and Liza and I collected the pillows and put them out. Noon to three fled quickly, then Everyone was called in to do a quick walk through of the first part up of the ceremony. Guests began to arrive and had to be corrallled outside towards all the mismkatched chairs and pillows and quilts and paper flowers and rose petals on the ground. To get their hot cocoa and settle beneath quilts against the chilly afternoon.

After the walk-through Madison and I went upstairs to dress the bride. what an honor, to place grandma's ermine stole over her shoulders. Diane didn't really seem to like grandma, but anyway. She wanted to do a photo shoot called "fist looks" that I had not heard of before. She had me cleaar out the front hall so she could go down out the front door, then to find Kevin and send him out the side door. I watched from the other side of the street. Kevin had to wait facing the other direction for a long time before Diane came around the corner of the street. Finally he turned around (inscrutable man) and they kissed for the photographer.

The ceremony, the ceremony... I can't describe it now, maybe later. Instead---

back to today. It is Tuesday, and things seem to have calmed down, with yesterday spent in bed rolling back and forth between eating food and petting the cat.

5:06a
Today I’m going to try to do it all, every single thing on that checklist.
Schmo is being a good best friend and chatting me up a lot. the place is still a bit messy after an eventful weekend, and maybe before eight I can take care of some of that. I wonder if my neighbors will be able to hear if I listen to the BBC. Probably, since I can hear their alarms going off in the morning.

If I were braver, or, current impulses:

No computer. I don’t need a computer. No phone. I don’t need a cell phone. Although, most of my “I don’t need a cell phone” arguments are based on “I have a computer.”
Anyway, one of them could go. Then both, later.

All of this stuff. All of this STUFF. Maybe I will stay in this apartment a while longer. I keep bouncing around from gmail to google voice to toothpastefordinner to marriedtothesea to theworstthingsforsale to thisamericanlife and if I didn’t have a computer I would be reading instead.

I could move it, or I could unplug it, turn it off.
SIGH. yeah, that’s while i’ll do. Unplug it, turn it off. Put it on the floor behind the table. Not watch TV for a while. Get the news on my phone. ok ok. ok, ok. Goodnight computer.
(it’s twelve nineteen am on the twenty first of november 2014)

Good. Morning. Third day in a row of waking and having breakfast without any hitch.

I found a new Cocorosie album I haven’t listened to yet, Tales of a Grass Widow. (score)

And I found out (by asking him out) that Alex from French class is gay.
But I asked Dana from the library on a date
so I am too.

I’m esckited because I’ve never been on a date with a girl before.
And she likes me, she even said she’s had a crush on me forever.

I wish Paul would get home from his date and get online so I could freaking tell him about it! But here I go merrily into the kitchen to bed.

I like sleeping in this little kithen. the floor is just big enough for the mattress. I am contained. Feel safe.

What a whirlwind of a day! I think I’m tired enough to fall asleep soon. I still feel torn, in life, in different directions. Dancing with Erica over the weekend, with Erica! writing a paper, editing a skit, socializing with Alex, with Joe, with Heather, with Dana (!). To make music, practice vioin, research graduate programs, look for a job. all these things. Feeding myself, all this reading I want to do, and then…

I remember a day with Michael and Emily Bruner. Emily, studying to be a nurse, is slim and impeccable. Not quite beautiful, but with straight undyed hair and respectable clothing. Not too stylish, casual. She and I walked alone down the railroad tracks near Reunion Station and Tower, next to the field of twisted metal that had been Reunion Arena. Giant pieces jutting from the ground at all angles. Downtown on the horizon. We talked about dependence, and she told me the story…

…of a man, a rich man, who used to take her out to dinner, or shopping, or along with him to parties. Very polite, she said, never “fresh”. He spent lots of money on her, enjoyed her company. One day he called her on the phone and said “Would you be interested in lunch, dinner, sex? All of the above, none of the above?” She didn’t say anything. He never called her again.

At dinner, Emily reaches across the restaurant table to point with an oval nail at a certain menu item, then reads it aloud in an incredible voice. Incredible and natural. and the reach of her finger not purposefully seductive. What is tragic about this memory? why does it stick with me?

Alexander C_______. What a mythology I had built around my desire for him. And now I find myself free to talk to him without nerves, without games, without designs. “So this is good,” says Becca. “It is almost better this way,” she says.

Becca has stories for everything.
The last one she told me yesterday while I was breaking up with Daniel. it was about a boy named Andrew, when she was in college. She called him on the phone to break up with him, while Dane was in the room. Andrew asked why, and Becca told him that he was just so awkward. "Which was true, but I shouldn’t have said so." Becca told me she didn’t think Andrew had ever had a kiss before her.

My heart hurts. I should not have asked Dana out. I am thinking of the other girl from the Architecture Library. The one with the long curly hair. A date with her would have been a more pure, a more exciting thing. With Dana, well, I’m … not sure.

I asked her out because I thought it would make her happy and because I wanted to ask out a girl. It wasn’t because she is who she is. It wasn’t for herself. It wasn’t a heart pounder.

It is becoming easier to feed myself. I love the world. I love humans.
And onward. December. Time for me to get a job. Where will I work? At a bookstore? For Hannah's Mom's vintage business?

Yes, I am tired enough to sleep tonight. But I am not at rest. My soul boils. Today I have been exited, disappointed, angry, proud, confident, embarassed, false, sweet, intimidating, invisible,
But not very kind, I find.

Waiting for Paul at Uchi.

The truth is shelled so thickly it will not be written.

Wider and wider I open my heart, and the gaps grow too. Where can I look for strength? Its very definition eludes. I think it is to be not-clever. Calvino offers the path of passion, which acts, or that of wisdom, which waits.

Today at Tazza Fresca: Marco seems like just a kid, but he's 27.

Rico is a sympathetic mind but we are so isolated from each other somehow… I am brash, and too talkative.

Bill, self proclaimed intellectual dilettante, demands an opinion on every subject.

There’s a tall overweight kid in my invertebrates lab named Jesus. One day he stayed in the classroom with me for over an hour and we attempted to sketch from memory a map of North Africa and the near East.

Surprised by how much he has to say, I asked him, Jesus, why are you so quiet in class? He painted a picture of a field in Mexico where a very young boy sits at his grandfather’s knee. ‘Listen!’ says the grandfather.

Today I have run from one friend to another. Good friends, established ones, tentative ones, longtime acquaintances, receptive strangers. Jessica, Miranda, Marco, Kathleen, Heather, Ron, Forest, Katie, the other Katie, Tobias, Erin, Faye, Ariel, Dustin, Chris, Ed, Carlos, Rico, Brandon, Christine, Alex, the clerk at the Minimax, the desk workers at the used car dealership, Audrey, Roberto, the other Marco, Millie, Adrian, Sofia. Lynn, Jennifer, the CVS pharmacy guy, Kristen. I wanted to make them happy, to make them laugh. Becca. I have more friends than feels tenable. Becca.

Everyone is so happy and friendly today. Or else it is a reflection of my own manic effervescence--either way I feel loved. Spring is come and with it irresistible good humor. Forest is back from sailing in the Grenadines, and it hardly seems two weeks. In the Grenadines, Forest says, ‘They’ll tell you to put a shirt on, while they’re smoking a doobie’.

Faye says she wants to quit drinkings. I well imagine her despair.

Paul and I are listening to the new Sufjan Stevens album for the third time today. Paul hides under his covers, experiencing some emotion that exists in his imagination, but has no counterpart in my mind. I lift the blanket to show him that I am smiling.

There is something I am missing: some discernible value of certain relationships over others, not related to utility. What did I once ask for? Vessel-dom, perceptivity, a finger on the aorta of the world?

Paul puts his head on my shoulder.

Is humanity’s unifying theme the search… the desire or hope for a unifying thing?

I had a nightmare where I got high and had John Miller (The AA Guy) sleeping on my floor even though I didn’t want him there. I cut my contact sheets into strips and squares. Tiny photographs. Many of Diego.

Eliza has asked me to send her some of my writing. Once I gave Hannah some neatly printed narrative to read while I pretended not to watch. Her response was ambiguous, or at least not the praise my heart wanted. I believe her comment was about precision, detail, specificity.

Lache. In French, a word between lazy and cowardly. Describes me so well. Afraid to write. Afraid of I don’t know what. That my solutions are not sufficient. Of whole-hearted momentum in any direction. Sober, I prodigally distribute my most precious self among other people. I inhabit joy like a coat. Like a broad blue and white sky. Like a mirrored sphere.

Through practice I dull the inward facing blades of avarice, of envy. What is satisfaction but that which demands to be desired?

Now I stumble across a fear so great my thoughts flow serpentine around its height. I am suddenly aware of the beauty of the music, the comfort of the bed, of a crushing sense of obligation.

I cry out to my will to save me, and receive only a cheery reply from my heart, the wrong bureaucrat for the job.

Midnight

Diego and I fought and made up and then fought again.
I'm gender nonbinary and I think that's normal. But recognizing it and declaring it is not.

Again the disconcerting feeling: things slipping through the cracks- important thoughts recognized, but not recorded. I am reluctant to entrust anything to my journal. Bought a Brother typewriter online today for 45 dollars.

Last night and this morning, dolefully, my back turned to sleepy Diego, I hit the pipe, saying in my head, “it doesn’t matter” and also, “I should not be doing this.”

Monday, after I hadn’t smoked for a day, I felt directed. I told Frances, “I am thinking a mile a minute.” My confidence grew wildly, maybe because she told me her own troubled thoughts of Philip and his alcoholism. Everyone to their own challenges.

During the brief period of complete sobriety when the world was outlined precisely in its real colors and time passed in forthright hours I came to two realizations.

First, that I have a huge capacity for work of which I have realized only a fraction, especially over the past few months. Second, that I feel much more responsibility towards this capacity when I am sober.

That sober day, I felt energetic, powerful, independent, as though I had no need to accept the opinions of anyone else into my head because it was already bursting. No slow down, no jams, but also a calmness, an orderliness rested over my vision.

Perhaps the compulsive smoking is a mechanism of relief when I have overextended myself. I become incapable of work and therefore feel no responsibility towards it because to perform well is an impossibility. But I have to smoke a lot. I want to quit, I want to quit. The other night I considered using alcohol as a substitute for getting high, but it was no good; I didn’t want to get drunk.

Another thing occurred to me yesterday which I knew in an intellectual way but became a concrete realization- I realized I missed the point of a conversation with Tim a couple days ago: That when I am high I am actually dumber. Yes, that it makes me stupid. This is gross. I have never ever thought of myself as stupid. A little silly, maybe, or naive, or lacking in social sense occasionally, awkward, yes, but never dumb.

Even if smoking weed doesn’t cause permanent brain damage, which I have heard it does not, it makes me stupid, at least temporarily. Stupid people have ideas, of course, and I get my share when I’m toasty. But all that time is lost. When I am not stupid I am learning and getting smarter. And if I am not learning and getting smarter, I am losing time. There is this linear push about my western life, always towards future goals. But adding up all the time that I’ve been high, just over the past few years, it’s got to be months of wasted time.

Diego was upset about something and he refused to tell me. He promised he would and still did not. My imagination gave me no relief, especially while the mysterious circumstance was putting him in a bad mood. Still, I was glad to be with him. I felt all the more the importance of his company while his mood was rotten, and the next day still he was still angry, and today again was short of temper, yelling at cars in traffic. This morning he took a whiskey shot as soon as he woke up. I failed to play it cool and said, “I’ve never seen anyone do that before.” It woke him up, though.

I looked into Diego's eyes until there was nothing there but looking back into my own eyes. We created a sort of vaccuum so that anything that we thought we saw bounced and magnified, then we had to laugh because we were confused or because there was nothing else to do. We were bored- nothing there but wondering.

A few days of relative hunger after my debit card was stolen have slimmed my waist slightly but my legs are still cumbersomely fat. I’ve felt a terrible lack of sexual arousal. The last time I remember being turned on wasn’t with Diego at all, who always tries to take me by force, though he doesn’t have to. It’s annoying- he’ll grab me and not let me go. I struggle awkwardly against his sexual embrace and because he is stronger than me I often end up just going limp and waiting for him to get bored, which he won’t if I continue to struggle. But I don’t want his mouth clamped on me sometimes. I want to go to a park and read books.

I'm typing and it is much faster than longhand. But the feel of my longhand compositions is warmer to me. Lusher, closer to the truth of experience.

I am not complacent, I pull and push. I rework and agitates I express, drawing from the source. I feel I am too old for my body, too old for my life. I feel I will never grow up. I feel a pressure in my stomach.

I must at some point address the troubling issue of suicide, since it rises so often from my subconscious into little spoken directives. “Kill yourself” in such or such a way, whenever I recall some embarrassing moment. I tried for a while to supplant the words “today is a good day” but they lacked the punch and didn’t stick and I was still thinking “kill yourself” somewhere in my head. “...underwater” “...with a stick” “I’m going to kill myself” I say sometimes, out loud often, without even thinking the words before they escape.

Once I decided that the path of a scientist was the staid and prescribed one for me, that I could follow and be normal and maybe settle down with. To be an artist would be to continually be subject to fear and uncertainty and insecurity, to have higher highs and lower lows and- eventually- to die at my own hand.

I don’t know why it seemed to be true.

Diego says quite often, self-fulfilling prophecies are the only ones that come true. So why can’t I prophesy my own old age? Because I do not quite believe in it. I can not picture it. I see only a square studio space with concrete walls and modern furniture and my crumpled frame moving aimlessly about as I do now in my bedroom. I do not mind obscurity. I do mind insecurity.

I find solace in the perceptive and concise eloquence of Tolstoy, the depth of feeling conveyed in a few words, the expansive detail of the stories.

I despise him.

I miss him when he goes away. It feels good to miss him. Alone, I remember what it is like to be with him. Then I hate him for leaving. Why did he leave, and what am I to do now? I am sick to death of Diego, and I want to see him again as soon as possible. So tired of doing the things we do.

Avenue H house

Mom and Dad came to visit. I cried a lot and replaced my voice recorder.

Diego came over in an ebullient mood and was fresh, handsome, smart and funny, and I felt wretched and spiteful for it. We went to Greg’s graduation party and enjoyed it seperately for the most part, then danced together to Brass Monkey at the end. We went back to his place and had ridiculous sex which ended, as is usual these days, with my being in terrible pain.

Forest was sad at the party, I think. He embraced me twice and kept his hands on my waist for too long and leaned his head on my head an then became embarrassed and made an excuse. He knows I have a boyfriend and he met Diego, but forgot his name and called him Cameron. I wanted to talk to Forest but had to avoid him for this awkwardness...

I have been depressed, but two wonderful things occurred at the Fine Arts Library today. The first is I found out that we have the DVD of Jan Svankmajer’s Faust. The second is that I read a book jacket with the words “... pictured in the gallery with her favorite whippet, Flash”.

I will not be doing my show tonight, and I must figure out how to make a cape for Nick's movie without enough material, and my room is terribly messy, but I haven’t smoked weed today and I feel better in my brain space- not happy, but clearer and more decisive.

3 am exactly

å I am whipped. So many notions, external and internal. Excitement and dread and joy and intrigue. With Diego it is impossible to say. Our love has cooled. I think of him intellectually, calmly instead of in a frenzy. I see him and feel confused at the distance between us, he is patronizing when we talk and I hold back, unsure and annoyed. It sounds bad but it isn't bad. It is good. How can I explain?

I took a hit. It was okay at first, I managed not to get too fumbled up.
As I continue to DJ I lose the confidence I had as a beginner. I want to cry or something. I cannot figure why I am alive. I cannot figure how to become better, expect that to be a good person all one has to do its be it. Doing what you want and acting like you can do whatever you want are the same thing, and so not to worry for some reason.

I can't stand it! I can't stand it! The thoughts that come and push me out and push me down. Earlier it was so easy to say one step at a time. it's all right. Now it's too late for that. I feel weak, feel sorry, but not really, because writing it is a pleasure, I had not written all day and it kept pushing up for me to stroke it. Even if none of it makes sense it is still important. Even if I fail, I will not fail. I can not fail. I am terrified. I must not be afraid.

I leapt down the right lane of Guadalupe on my rollerblades, maintained speed in front of a bus, narrowed my legs and stood cruising down the bike lane to let the buss pass me, then jumped forward into the cool rushing wind. Unlatched and unlaced the rollerblades while moving across the downstairs hallway of the Architecture library, kicked them off at the landing, up the stairs in my socks.

I am sweating. Big droplets course down my neck, stomach, chest, back, sides, forehead.

I feel like a failure. I’m resentful, angry, mostly I’m terribly sad.

Can’t think of a single thing I want to do after work. Don’t even want to go to Ellen’s sister’s graduation dinner, composing a note in my head: Hi Ellen, feeling depressed so I think I’ll just stay home tonight.

The thought of organizing my room isnt entirely disagreeable, but I can picture vividly thinking about it, looking at it, and not doing it. Do my fits of despondency coincide with my moments of greatest ambition?

My mood has lightened significantly, but I feel removed from Diego. We do not converse fluently these past few days.

I stayed up all night. Yesterday evening Diego and I went to Mother's, on a formal date.
I felt great today. Got my work done, met with Hannah about the ghost film (could be up to $200 to develop it on super-8, she wants me to pay but I don't have the money) and then hung out with my roommate Tim. now at Frances's digitizing photo negatives on her scanner.
I said no to a loaded bowl today.

I have a beautiful new long black dress with flowers.

Spanish vocabulary words from Bodas De Sangre:
Duende: a figure of anarchic magic, a spirit that may possess a singer or dancer.
Moribundo: moribund
Arroyo: stream
Fuente: fount
Miebla: mist
Campanas: bells
Aneja: antique
Cancion: song
Huesos: bones
Bebe: you drink
Una rana: frog
Lejos: far
Quien: who
Madera: wood
Hojas: leaves
Pedir: to ask for
Llevar: bring
Llegar: come
Seria: serious
La pena: sorrow

Tu-uyen recommended me a Lorca book, said I’ll wake up at 5 am thinking about it. I forgot the title. I am thinking about is the time I spent with her and Anthony at their ancient house, their intense life of thoughts, work, desires, questions. Thinking of Tu-uyen’s Vietnamese grandmother crouching on the ground slicing beef.

“Can’t i simply be devoured without being expected to praise what devours me?” - Ippolit

“An agonizing but unformulated idea… what was this grand, everlasting pageant… to which he had always… been drawn and in which he could never take part?” - Prine Myshkin

“In abstract love for humanity one almost always loves no one but oneself.” -Natasya

from The Idiot

More people at La Tazza Fresca:

John Lawrence, (Hannah calls him ‘the artist guy’) came in today.

John says: "this girl I’ve been seeing in Houston broke up with me, sent a text that said she can’t do it anymore and that she needs to focus more on her dog."
So, he went to a witch he knows, who gave him a dark glass bottle with a black candle inside. He wrote his ex's name on a piece of paper and put it in the bottle with the unburned candle, sealed it, and then buried it in his back yard.

Yesterday Elijah Allred came in and we bitched about the large class sizes and irrelevant curriculum at UT. He mentioned that he was researching the history of Mexican folk medecine for something he’s writing. His grandmother was a curandera, I think he said.

I told him there were some people into that who came in sometimes, thinking of tree-limbed lejandro and his two sisters- wiry, tattooed girls with sharp faces and exciting curly hair who were both reading manuals about herbal healing last time they came in. Elijah winced, fumbled a bit, and said, ‘well, I’m interested in the history.`

Most recently, he told me, he read a history of the occult in the Americas.
Then his hot girlfriend Katie V. came in, with a purple pixie cut and a large tattoo on her left bicep of a boy’s face beaten, bruised, red, swollen, bloody. A reference to something, but beyond me.

This morning Steve, the incoherent roller-blade flyer-runner of north campus, and the french-portuguese double-shot-with sugar guy got into a discussion about racial identity in America. Double shot with sugar asked me if I identify as a White American. I don't. His point was that minority groups or racial groups self-define as African- or Asian- American etc. which, he says, isn’t true in Portugal, and he thinks it’s wack.

Madrid Airport

Madrid Airport

Waiting. On this two week tour, my challenges are: first, to always maintain a pleasant expression on my face. For Mom. Even when she’s speaking about me within my earshot (as now) or making general pedantic address, or using a misquotation of myself as a humorous anecdote in my presence, or, most difficult, being just plain racist. So, pleasant face, no complaints, quibbling, or sullenness.

Second, to be pleasant and even somewhat ingratiating to the grad students, who elicit in me a mysterious instinctive abhorrence without ever getting into real conversation with them.
I love my Mom. Gonna go show it.

later

She's telling the story of the dog Carmen’s death again, this time to a few musuem ladies piled on their luggage. It is a horrible grisly story. Earlier she was talking nonstop as if ill, as if insane, and I realized that I also suffer from this sometimes.

But there is so much else to write about! Spain! Dad lent me his camera, Score!!!

later

Madrid Airport

It's day 2, and I'm already beginning to think that if mom never invites me on another trip that’s fine with me. She brought me to tears in the Prado with her endless prattle. Her special move is following up the phrase, “…and that’s all I'm going to say" with several more sentences.

Another one is switching the name of the person she’s describing mid-sentence. Her history lessons sound like retrospective (half-invented) social gossip. You correct her and she agrees with you without acknowledging the error.

After the prado we went into an extra stupid souvenir shop to wait for the guide Ali so he could show us how to ride the bus. Ali was late and I couldn't take it so I went and waited outside and watched a blind busker girl roll her blank eyes around and jingle a can. A sign hung around her neck. She rubbed a sack of coins against her crotch.

Then to tea at the Ritz, which was perfect, delicious. As Mom and Dad get older, they see me less and look through me more. Even when they’re paying attention, it’s like they’re not. But I’m still afraid of how much they pick up. Mom wouldn’t get off her phone for a long time and I started crying again but she apparently didn’t notice.

After that we went back to our hotel and rested for a bit, then Mom consented to go our shopping. We walked those same slanting, bustling streets I remember best from my last visit to Madrid, to the Puerto Del Sol, where there was a protest, young people with posters. I would have paid more attention to this if solo.

At Plaza Mayor a funny street performer all painted silver and stood on a pedestal holding a suitcase, a coat, a map, and a hat. His act was to keep dropping things as if accidentally and to fall all over himself picking them up. He couldn’t reach the ground from his pedestal so little kids would run up and hand him his coat or map and he would drop something else while retrieving it from them. Then he'd straighten up, take a big pretend swig from a flask, and put it right into a pocket with a hole.

We went to a packed indoor fishmarket called San Miguel where people bellied up to high bars and yelled over their fresh tapas. I noticed that in the restaurants in Madrid the tables are very close together and everybody seems crammed. No room to backup your chair. Except at the Ritz of course, which was as spacious as it was empty.

Toledo

We arrived in Pedraza at three in the afternoon. Middle of siesta. It was like a ghost town, completely closed to the sun. At the top of the city, Zuloaga’s castle was beautiful, a beautiful place to live. His granddaughter leaned over the balcony to talk to us, which was cool. There was an oubliette in the yard, and we were allowed to descend a wooden ladder into the wet cool dark.

This afternoon I spent getting lost in the deserted and closed streets of Toledo, which twist up and down unpredictably. everything so old, mysteries all over. Scary, skinny cats who don’t want to play. The spirit of El Greco.

I’m still periodically terrified that mother takes my journal out at night and reads it all the way through.

I found a sleek cafe bar and talked to a barista. The coffee is cheap. Two euro for a cortado, for a dirty chai.

Bilbao (undated)

We’re in the Nervion river valley.

Burgos was lovely, with its fresh cheeses on the terrace over a green valley. Bilbao is stunning. The architecture is fearless. Formica arches on the bridge. Blonde German families, fashionable young ladies. We’re at the Guggenheim, which is completely covered in .38mm Titanium panels.

Our guide’s accent sounds like London Spanish. The museum atrium advertises techno DJ’s, Jazz Festivals, Concerts, Art after dark.

There’s a special exhibit of Basquiat - so many ideas on his canvases. Redefinition. They seem to speak aloud. If Basquiat had lived, he would be younger than my parents.

What I felt in the Richard Serra installation
The utter goodness of isolation. The variety of experience.

When someone in another car is looking at you, yelling at you, making faces and gestures and obviously talking, but they're muted? Hilarious.
I have ceased at some point to grow the world through discovery of new art, lost enthusiasm for that. Not at home in the Austin scene. I want to move to a smaller pond, or to the desert. Not literally though. There are too many people here who look like me, talk like me, like what I like, want to do what I want to do. It's confusing.
Carmen visited the house tonight. She's living in a coop in Brooklyn, a brownstone with eight bedrooms.

A couple of days ago I realized that I'm never going to cease being myself. Which means a radical transformation into a type A person, isn't possible (having the same routine every day, lack of impulsiveness). I'm not going to suddenly lose my perfetionism. Last night I dropped Diego off at a theater kid party in west campus. The house had no furniture it all, it was lit with worklights, and the word CRACK was written in white smudgy letters on the dark wall of the back stairwell. Then I came home and walking from the car heard a roar of more and more parties down the block from my house, so I went ahead and crashed two of them. At the second one I ran into Valeria from the fine arts library. It was a Plan II party (The UT honors program). I don't want to make friends. I'm not ready.
I had my first interview at Perry's, and the second comes next week. Guy says I can be a server in three to six months. That food running is hard work. Just... whatever. Diego is coming over in a few hours to watch a movie.

My roommate Sarah is some kind of writer, which incites mad curiosity, but no jealousy because I like her. (need to work on that, obvi)

It's so cool to be sober and not on antidepressants.

Talked to Becca, Paul told me about his double promotion, very ideal. I went to Tops and got a desk chair in which I now sit. I work in an hour and a half, I'm going to lie down and relax a bit. Then maybe I'll study some latin. It's good to have a desk.

I never would have guessed, as a child or adolescent, what an absolute pain in the ass it is to be an adult. Payments, registrations, keeping-ups, just so much to do that isn't pleasant. I wish I could live a child-like lifestyle.

Today is my last official training day at Perry's. I worked at Tazza this morning, getting an early start on my shift. Diego is here doing Marco's homework, which Marco paid me to do and I'm paying Diego to do. "We can't let Marco get into the habit of doing his own homework," we joke. Hannah said about it last night, on our group shopping trip, "you shouldn't enable that." But I have no qualms.

At Tazza last night I talked to Katie "He had the weirdest shaped dick I've ever seen" and to Roberto "I really wanted to try out this drug nicotine, but in a safe way..."

Worked for sixteen hours, slept for fifteen. Waking in the afternoon, at four, with Schmo, I have the aimlessness of much to do but nothing pressing. I dreamed. My dreams are melancholy, adventuresome and, like everyone's, garbled.

Schmo fell off the roof yesterday. I came home with Diego and she was gone. AFter walking around calling her name we found her, bloodnosed and limping, at the side of the house. The first place I had searched was the periphery of the roof, looking grimly for a body.

2:13 am

Sunday

After working for sixteen hours, I slept for fifteen. Waking in the afternoon, at four, with Schmo, I have the aimlessness of much to do but nothing pressing. I dreamed. My dreams are melancholy, adventuresome and, like everyone's, garbled.

Schmo fell off the roof yesterday. I came home with Diego and she was gone. AFter walking around calling her name we found her, bloodnosed and limping, at the side of the house. The first place I had searched was the periphery of the roof, looking grimly for a body.

2:13 am

Tradeoffs, travel, the 'scene', music, books, history.

It would include the publication dates of books, and also when the events described in the books took place. Russian history is especially interesting because I am so enamored of their literature. But it's embarassing also to have such a vague knowledge of world wars, shifting empires. Especially South America. I have a good history book for Latin America but no repository for the information therein. Books upon books upon books, and I read less and less lately. Diego began to read to me last night from Angels. He tells me all sorts of things, tidbits. That the author had published a book of poems at nineteen, then began to publish novels in their early thirties, claiming to have wasted 20s with drugs and alcohol.

Diego is grinning at me and it's very distracting. I stare back and type without looking at the keys. He wiggles his toes. I'll be working doubles for the next four days in a row, this is my last bit of sane free time. He wants to watch a movie but I don't. It's okay. We went to Half Price Books this afternoon and I bought two guidebooks: One about national parks and one about places to get vegetarian food while road tripping, by a woman who traveled around the country with the grateful dead (as a cook, I think). There were many more travel memoirs than guides at HPB. Diego did find a good one though, by a hobo who laid out pretty clearly the ways of hobo life. His biography on the back cover said that he was a 'hobo jug band and vaudeville act' based in California.

Last night Diego and I drove out of town to film the blood moon. None of our cameras (we had 4) could pick up the blood moon at all, but we had the excellent practice of driving nightways with KOOP playing Commercial Suicide and the moon disappearing into black. We hopped a barbed wire fence by a lake, I got bitten up by fire ants, a cop pulled over just to see if we were okay, and Diego took a video from behind of me walking all lit up red and blue in the policy lights that I like a lot

Trying not to ash on the keyboard.
Roommates Anna and Adrian cleaned the whole house, the dears.

Learning. Every time I see Blythe she says to me, mom-like, "What did you learn today?" My answer last time was better than the usual "oh lots". There's a native people in the high countries of Europe called the Sami.

At Perry's in the kitchen, I learned that the busboy Victor was married five years ago, that he and his wife moved here from LA where he did video post production, also that he has a side career as a model. he started to show me some nudes of himself and I giggled so violently that he became alarmed and stopped. We had a good talk. I learned that Chef Ricky's biggest dream is to find a mexican girl to marry. I told him it's so easy! People do it accidentally all the time. I learned that Franciso is my age and has a daughter, melisa. I learned some more closing duties, but I'm still a fairly useless closer. This will change this week. Chef Ricky, with the deep vertical furrow in his forehead, asked me how much Spanish I understand. I said that I only understand good things. "Tu eres bonita", he said, and I said "Oh Gracias, si entiendo".

Somewhat Sad. Cried while listening to Yo La Tengo. It's good to be able to shed a couple tears, but the intense nostalgia makes me ask, is my life now so unhappy? I haven't been doing the things that make me happy: exploring, creating, writing. Way focused on money. Feeling impersonal around Diego. Stopped reading Cheryshevsky (What is to be done) forty pages from the end because I don't want to finish reading it. This book reminds me why I love reading in the first place. Ideas! Curious about alternatives to capitalism and about political theory. I feel strongly about democracy, but capitalism? I've always been taught that communism is theoretically good but in practice untenable. I wonder where the distrant future of government lies.

I increasingly regard luxury as vice. No, is that right? I still don't know who I am, and I want to so desperately. I don't know the things I want to know. Frustrated. Is this all just a mood? I want to move away from Texas so badly. Patience, preparation, focus.

Focus. Prospective move date: far in the future. Prospective date of flight: October 2016. A winter journey.

I need a system. Some thought out, logical, praceable set of rules. Not to do with bed times or daily tasks, but grander. I finally have some idea of a medium term plan to help this process along. Will continue to think about it.

After deciding a need a personal code of conduct, Two simple and challenging principles suggest themselves within a day:
1. To look directly at things, not sidelong, demure, wincing, or unwilling
2. Not to try to undo what has been done, to move forward.

Polyphonic Spree show last night at Emo's. Small show, small band, minimal stagecraft, old Tim DeLaughter seeming sad. No new album, just new young pretty girls in the band and choir.
Emotional, so emotional. They played the whole of the album The Beginning Stages of the Polyphonic Spree, in order. Tim came out into the crowd and liquefied himself against us, until we were all in a sort of mosh-hug. I cried, and bought a t shirt.

Working at Perry's feels like failure, feels like selling out. Must find outlets, ways.

Halloween
I'm getting mad phone numbers with this driving gig. Last ride was bartenders, who told me about 'Waldo,' their slang for a certain type of jerk. This ride was a Waldo. Founder and owner of a boat company, named Nick. He kept calling me Dude.
I'be been driving since 10 and I've probably made 200 tonight. Really glad I quit working at Perry's. Also, since I disappeared in disgrace I still haven't picked up my last check. I feel shameful about going in to get it. Yesterday's drive from Dallas back to Austin after a lovely visit with mom and dad was not great. Heavy rains caused flooding, and heavy winds caused many accidents. With traffic, the ride drive took seven hours instead of three. I spoke to Liza and Becca on the phone and listened to the Economist.

Another economist article I heard this morning about the value of colleges was helpful to my thinking about choosing a graduate school. Some schools have very high acceptance rates but still turn out graduates in the highest earning percentiles, especially in engineering.

--Words were: what we love others will love and we will show them how.
Sharing so much information with strangers is a sort of profligacy of feelings. You tell them things and then they're gone and you never see them again.

Finished reading Grapes of Wrath. Read most of it today.

Goals:
Get health insurance (short term)
Set up web store (short term)
Write more stories (medium term)
Have 3000 in savings (medium term)
Visit Liza, Christine, Elaine

10 pm
I do have nerve. I've got some fucking nerve. Sometimes it takes nerve. Sometimes the nerve of me.

11.20.15

november twentieth. woke up very late.

Because I slept in until noon, I didn't eat breakfast or lunch. When I finally did get out of bed I felt foggy and jumbly. I didn't finish my homework. I didn't study for phonetics. I feel depressed this afternoon. Somehow I still couldn't stop yawning in phonetics class. Shit shit shit. I have no money.

Okay, things are okay.

On the bus on the way home from class I resolved to develop a more intimate realtionship with journaling, with future self, with posterity, if you will. It's an investment to contrast squandering my energy on frilly relationships I don't expect to last and dont care if they last.

it was quiet on the bus today, dunno why. super packed, but nobody talking.I had a nice talk with the bus driver, clearly audible to everybody.

Daniel invited me to his house but I do not want to go for any reason.

Later

ten fifty seven

been sleeping for a long time. my bookshelf is too far from my bed. didn't wear deodorant today.

Delirious, sleep deprived. I removed the bed from my room and now everything is upsdie down. Sleeping on the living room couch with a view of the sunrise from the front window. I reconneted all at once to lots of social media. Manic couple of days. Trying to write instead of mindless entertainment. End of entry, into stuttering cluttered dreamland.

The sound of pants being pulled inside out... A single resonating gunshot creak of a springloaded hinge on Hannah's outer door. Esmer, the beautiful one, is here. Mike, and Gary from California with the handlebar mustache, to whom I gave a yogurt mouse.

My aversion to showers.

Sailor Poon show at the Black Heart pub. Everybody's look a more or less successful attempt at the same look.

Just got back from Winter Wonderslam. everybody's look their own, excellent look ( it seems to me, but i'm sensistive ). It's disappointing when someone comes into my room, which has bookshelves and photographs, and the first thing they remark is my computer.
Good ol' Joe, he is good. So nice, and normal. But we really can find nothing to say to each other.

I saw Rory, that fascinating man, and as usual he failed to mark my identity. I also saw Joseph, Katlyn's old beau. We run into each other all over town actually, three or four times per year. We never say much. Even when he's in conversation, I noticed, joe doesn't seem to talk. I respect his reticence. I hold Katlyn in such reverence that I assume he must be very intelligent.

If the feeling of hapiness, of euphoria, of mania, can come from a pill, then why not the feeling of determination I feel so deliciously after a good movie?

One thing I know: If I go back to school it has to be with my whole soul. With a new and different determination. What else is there for me? There's the book...