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| QuantifyingIt has been a most worthy weekend. I'd forgotten how corny Han Solo gets in "Return of the Jedi", but other than that, it was just candy. I drank 32 ounces of Irish Breakfast tea per day, spent $12.58 on junk food (and ate about 80% of it), watched 5 episodes of "Firefly", read 14 pages of _Mansfield Park_ (I blame the "Star Wars" and the "Firefly"), wrote one single-spaced page of my novel (which for me, lately, is pretty damn skippy), and tried on 3 vintage dresses (only 1 of which fit).
These are the things we talk about. At work tomorrow I will decide what to tell them. Sometimes I make up things to tell to the co-worker I don't like. I laugh inwardly when she believes me. And then sometimes I begin to believe them myself.
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| Back now.I'm currently in that weird non-time non-space in which one is mired after a jaunt of too much travel in too little time. 1,400 miles in two days of travel and everything hurts --my knees, my eyes, the bridge of my nose. I'm tired in that floaty, hyperactive sort of way, too, and I know that some good hard sleep would cure it if I could just get there.
But I can't stop thinking -- I can never stop thinking -- and the sky is such a pretty fade-to-black blue, and I forgot that way out here you can actually see the stars. My window is open and there are small animals and insects still awake to keep me company.
I saw a dead deer on the way home with her head bashed in. I saw a tiny fuzzy bumblebee up close and ducks hanging by their feet in Thai delis and the sky turn into one huge rainbow when the sun set.
I'm okay with the fact that this blog post isn't going anywhere. Because neither, in an okay sort of way, are we.
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| Just some old-fashioned pointless ranting.I feel so meaningless. It seems like there is really nothing to live for but self-indulgence, which is depressing. I can't really contribute anything to society -- I thought writing a book would be a cool thing to do, but there are so many books already, so many GOOD books with points to them, and morals and lessons. "Well, don't stop now -- maybe you'll write the next American classic!" isn't really inspiration enough anymore because honestly, that's not going to happen. I'm writing a horror/fantasy novel, and those genres are pretty much a joke criticism-wise.
I would write a "realistic" novel like _Atonement_ or something, but that makes me feel so very unimaginative.
I try to be a happy person, but the world is really, really mean and it's so hard to be optimistic. I can't even read the news without getting a migraine. It's too much. Anyway, it's impossible to be happy when I'm not being *myself*. At work I have to pretend like I care about everyone else, those stupid, vapid, materialistic people, and makes me feel terrible. I hate being such a phony. I'm elitist and a snob and I can't relate to anyone, but I really have to pretend like I care who got kicked off of last night's "American Idol". And yes, I would be happy to file that for you.
Actually, now I am no longer feeling depressed but angry. Maybe that will be good for my pointless, meaningless writing. And despite the fact that I know it is pointless and meaningless, something in my brain keeps making me do it. I just paused to scribble something down in my moleskine scribbledybook.
Heh. I just remembered what Kurt Vonnegut said about us just being here on earth to fart around. But he made it sound like a good thing.
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| Amazing Indeed."It's amazing how those people live."
This was said to me this afternoon by one of the bankers at work, a mom-aged Norwegian woman who likes to think of herself as "trendy". She had borrowed the bank's camera (of which I am guardian) for some civic-minded project or other and was returning it to me, asking if I could download the pictures onto the Mac for her. I agreed, and one by one they popped up on the screen.
"Those people" turned out to refer to poor people, and I think her "amazing" actually meant revolting. She was clearly shocked and horrified by the pictures (15 total), which showed various rooms in "those people"s' homes. One-level homes, the walls painted in shiny, garishly bright colors, each room furnished with one piece of furniture -- a bed, say, or a couch. The closets contained unfinished particle-board shelving units. The floors were cheaply carpeted in brown shag and littered with cast-off clothes and broken toys. And every once in a while, peeping from behind a doorway or captured in the reflection of an uncurtained window, was one of the little house's curious residents.
The picture that shocked the banker the most was of the bathroom. There was a little mildew on the tiled walls, and the showerhead was rusty. Atop the toilet sat a radio from the early 1980s, and above the stand-alone sink hung an unframed mirror. I sighed a little, reminded of Homer Court (the place I lived in at college) and my forlorn little apartment in Chicago, where the bathroom hosted that very same species of mildew, as well as spiders the size of my hand.
"It's amazing how those people live."
I've never been rich, but I've never been what I considered to be poor, either. And while I put my dirty clothes into a hamper and not on the floor, I can't say the paint jobs in my residences have been any better, my shelves less crappy, or my showerheads less rusty. After a moment's mental digestion of her words, I realized they had stung. I realized that I felt insulted -- not only because she looked down on "those people" who, like me, could not afford to have Ethan Allan decorators fill their home with yuppie mahogany shit, but that she thought I was like her, looking down upon the unfortunate from our great height, callous in our great pity.
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| Righteous Indignation.So. Over the past few months, my life has settled down into a substance resembling vanilla soft-serve. I have a steady cubicle job, a daily routine, a devoted boyfriend, and plenty of free time to waste. Some might call this contentment. But it's driving me a little crazy.
I feel like I need some sort of struggle or adversity in my life. A cause to feel passionate about, a gross injustice at which to take an indignant stance. Because living my life like I am now threatens to bring down the brainsmothering blanket of apathy. My writing has suffered for it, I'm certain.
Hmm, I just got a call that my credit card has been compromised and they're shutting down my account, but that still just doesn't do it for me.
Anyone else ever feel like this?
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