A Calendar of Days - 2014

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. Proud to have abdicated some of my privileges, but anxious to regain some others. Looking forward to working at La Tazza Fresca tomorrow and getting to see all the regulars.

I Applied at Perry's Steakhouse but they only want a foodrunner and I want to be a waiter. Kelso makes $300 a night there sometimes. They made me fill out one of those odious form applications, and 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. Where did James Baldwin learn to write like this? How? The style is marvellous, it reads like silk.

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

I was just looking up courses for next semester, and I remembered my dream from last night:

In a cavernous underground hall with colossal marble columns, I was working on homework. My notebooks in a stack next to my glowing laptop. A few other silent studiers were scattered far away.

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

In the crowded seminar room I found the friends I wanted, and yearned for a way to be appointed to their ranks. A lecturer- an old man- was saying something I already knew about some painting. I encountered people I had once known (Poppy, Fallon). I was jealous of them. I couldn't stay anymore and ducked into a dark, carpeted hallway. Running, I found a sort of friend- thinner than me and more beautiful, dark, vaguely troubled in a sexy way, running up just ahead. I lost her on a switchback of carpeted stairway.

I snuck into the men’s bathroom - hair in the tub. I went into the other one - brightly lit and pink. I wandered through a series of miraculous uninhabited rooms. Tiffany style, oriental, modern... looking for my notebooks that I had lost somewhere.

Retracing my steps to the marble cavern, I felt deeply unwelcome and I was lonely. I saw the honors students throng from the seminar into small chute-like elevators, deeper underground to the tiny cells where they would study and sleep.

I still wanted to be among them, but knew that it was not a nice place there, underground.

Dad first,
Diane,
Hannah,
Paul.

My professors

My sisters Christine,
Liza,
and Maggie: I think of her often but we do not speak. She must be sad to miss me.

-

I wish I were more androgynous. especially tonight, when I feel so fiercely beautiful, so angrily ... delicate.
the moon! a viper hanging joyful and brighter even than the sodium lights.

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.

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

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. I woke early 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. Kelsey comes from a three-stoplight town in East Texas where she and her twin, daughters of the basketball coach, are famous everywhere 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 very calm. The other bridesmaid, Madison, was getting on her nerves, so she asked me to be a buffer.

Kevin and his brothers showed up and I directed everyone to move out the chairs. Becca, Liza and I collected the pillows and quilts and put them out. At 3 everyone was called in to do a quick walk through of the ceremony. Arriving guests were coralled outside towards all the mismkatched chairs and pillows and quilts, 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.

The ceremony, the ceremony... I can't describe it now, maybe later. Afterwards I gave a toast from the Princess Bride, standing on a chair in the dining room.

It is Tuesday, and things seem to have calmed down. Spent yesterday recovering in bed, rolling back and forth between eating and petting the cat.

If I were braver, or, current impulse:

No computer. I don’t need a computer. No phone. I don’t need a cell phone.
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 site to site, and if I didn’t have a computer I might be reading.

Third day in a row of waking and having breakfast without any hitch. It is becoming easier to feed myself.

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

I’m excited because I’ve never been on a date with a girl before.
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 tell him about it!

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

I remember a day with Michael and Emily Bruner. Emily, studying to be a nurse, was slim and impeccable. Not beautiful, but with straight undyed hair and tasteful clothing. She and I walked alone down the railroad tracks near Reunion Station and Tower, next to the giant juts of twisted metal that had been Reunion Arena. 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 hung up, and never called her again.

Later at dinner with Michael, Emily reached across the table to point a pale oval fingernail at a certain dish, then read it aloud in an incredible voice. Not purposefully seductive, just naturally so. What is tragic about this memory? why does it stick with me?

Alexander C_______. What a mythology I had built around my desire, and now I can talk to him without nerves. “So this is good,” says Becca. “It's better this way,” she says.

Becca told me a story yesterday while I was breaking up with Daniel. In college, she had been dating a boy named Andrew. She called him on the phone to break up with him. Andrew asked why, and Becca told him that he was just too awkward. "Which was true, but I shouldn’t have said so." Becca says she was his first kiss.

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, with whom a date would be a more pure, a more exciting thing. With Dana, well, I asked her out because I thought it would make her happy.

I like sleeping in this little kitchen. the floor is just big enough for the mattress. I am contained. Feel safe. Yes, I am tired enough to sleep tonight. But I am not at rest, I feel boiling. Today I have been excited, disappointed, angry, proud, confident, embarassed, false, sweet, intimidating, invisible,
But not very kind, I find.