Buttered popcorn

It's New year's in New York, out with the old and the Amsterdam. The streets are as lit as any other Saturday night, except they smell abnormally like ganja. I'm back in the city to work this holiday. I've never put much effort into this holiday. Maybe I'll join a party, or light some fireworks in the rain, watch them roll down my hill. This isn't my favorite cultural tradition. Dick Clark and Carson Daly are not my favorite Easter Bunnies, but I'll through the holiday gods a bone.

This year has been rough, but definitely not the roughest. I didn't write much, but that means I also didn't write much crap. I didn't emote on paper, I didn't serve in Occupied France. Hell, I didn't occupy. I decided I was part of the working strata that was being represented, rather than representing. Fine. I had to work. Reasonable excuse. I barely worked, though. I mostly sat and ran errands. What a year! Errands galore!

It's been a good year, but certainly not the best. Some death, some disease, some letting go. The last few months have been surreal, if anything. No mandated ways of dealing anything. I live in post-modernity where all advice is relative! So I'm told I'm doing fine. Fine is shutting down a little, playing video games, wishing to stay sleeping most mornings, general doubting of life, not going to Brooklyn, not going to Staten Island (but why would I?)...

It's been a fine year. I'm dating Hania, still. I haven't thrown that away. That's nice. It's a nice feeling not wasting something good. But really, I've put a lot of effort into keeping it floating, as has she, and it's going well. I keep cruelly joking about marriage to everyone. Maybe 2012 is the year I fully loosen my grip on social expectations and decide every big life decision. This year was sure a primer, if that's what I'm up against. I have set on some paths that require certain actions in the future. I will have to work, for instance. I can't ruin my parents' credit with vagrancy, much to my dismay.

Maybe I'll go to grad school. Options are still open. I'm not at a dead-end plywood desk, just yet. Plenty of time. Too much time, actually.

I've been getting debris off some blocked paths, too. I've been thinking about serving in the military (Is that what it's called? Am I pronouncing it right, military? It's so foreign to me). I'm really throwing my arms in the air, Who Knows rising from me like a chant.

Chantix. I quit smoking, by the way.

For 2012, I want to cut nicotine out of my diet, altogether. That's a goal.

I really want to stop judging people, too. That's a goal. That's an every day goal, you know? Writing it now only solidifies it. I need to let people be people and not the categorized and compartmentalized boxes I can push them into. I've been watching a lot of The Wire and I'm pretty okay with drug dealers, now. That's positive change, ya feel me?

I really need to see some more of the world. I started off a good streak with moving to Poland this year (where I'm writing from now), but I'd like to at least double my ambitions. At least.

I really do need to get out more, even if a friend dies, I can't let that stop me. Just keep pushing, falling, rambling. Get a hard time, let it wash over me. I'll be a low island for 2012. I will be pushed skyward by volcanoes. Palm trees will grow from my sides. This metaphor doesn't make any sense.

I really want to learn Arabic, and leave the United States with a salary. That's a goal. That's the goal.

I really need to be okay with the silence.

There are so many testimonies

I have been notorious for not responding well to tragedy. Not crisis, not emergency. I do well there. I create a sense of levity and try to calm people. No, not that, when tragedy strikes though, I go blank and feel nothing and then it slowly hits me for a week, two weeks, months, months.

I've had a lot of people die around me. I've watched old friends and acquaintances die. Flip over, fall down, whatever. Whatever. I don't know why Reynolds High School was a place of so many deaths. I don't know. I'm not processing anything.

Another of my friends died last night. This is the strangest it's been. When Victor passed last summer, I knew how to deal with it: blasting "Only the Good Die Young" and crying. For days. When Nick Vining killed himself my freshman year, I demonized him and then cried under his desk, and then demonized him.

Those aren't the best strategies for dealing with tragedy, but they were how I was going to deal, regardless. Plan set. Those were the two deaths that hit me the hardest. I was reeling from both of those, but this one,

One of my best friends died last night and I'm just not dealing with it. "That's the right way, Joel, because there is no right way." Pat on the back. "Feel better."

I appreciate it, all, but I don't feel bad. I haven't processed it. Nobody knows how to respond to death and nobody, except trained professionals, know how to respond to those who are responding to death.

I just want to go away for a while. I just want to walk for a couple miles and stare at the water. I don't want to be hassled.

One of my other friends, a mutual friend with my dead friend, she told me that we should try to publish his music. Hendrix-style posthumous. Or maybe Van Gogh-style. Beethoven. In death, he will become a legend. Maybe, is my response. Yeah, sure. Is that honoring his legacy? Would he want his legacy honored?

No, I think he would want to get paid to play music while he was alive. Right?

And there's no solace in hell.


I am disappointed I didn't get to hear his last album, the one he recorded this summer. I'm disappointed he only had recently came to terms with who he was and was able to admit it. He lived with this knowledge only a month, two at the most. I'm disappointed that he didn't get to sell his music for a livable wage. He will only live in stories and caricatures and pictures and digital graveyards, he won't be able to give his testimony. That's what's hitting me now. He's silent.

I'll let it rain on me.

Two things: I'm sort of worried about the rest of my life. I'm going to owe a lot of money and I'm going to have to pay it back for years to come. Fretting.

I'm also in Poland, in a hotel listening at the rain and reading about modernity.

I need to let go of one to accept the other.

I am more aware of the former because of my age. Everyone else in this program thinks I'm a baby, even, I think, the 22-year-olds (oh, pardon me, 23). I find it incredibly patronising especially coming from academics who deconstruct everything (except age, it seems). Our professors, some aged 60 and over, see us all as children, or young adults which is a euphemism for children.

"You want to work?" they ask me, incredulously. Yeah, I have a lot of fucking loans, I respond with exasperation. This heightens my panic about money, and makes me forget that I'm in Poland with REAL Polish people.

Like,

I signed off facebook with two of my friends yesterday because I had to listen to my Russian, blind violinist friend play some jazz next door. I was sitting back thinking how ridiculous it would be to explain that when I got back home, but in the moment it seemed normal and acceptable as a thing that happens in life.

But earlier,

I made some offhand comment about my disappointment with people that join cults to postpone accepting adulthood, a comment I was very proud of, and my deconstructionist academic peers said I was being ignorant. What is adulthood? Why accept such norms. Pish posh.

I was talking to the program coordinator for the Wrocław a couple days ago at lunch. I asked about her doctorate, which she was given a month ago, and she told me to stay away from the doctorate. It is NOT worth it, she said. Once you finish your Master's program, you feel unaccomplished and the doctoral program helps you feed your academic addiction, but you're stuck in it for years, head to the paper. Everyone is working around you and now you are a doctor of your subject. Where did your life go?

Another guy, a composer (one of two I've met on the trip), went to the New England Conservatory and then a conservatory in Wrocław for two Master's and told me he regretted his New England experience because of the expense. Really?

I'm going to finish reading and sit back all of tomorrow. I'll let it rain on me, real Polish rain.

Stupid Stupid, stupid (Dobranoc.)

My concentration requires either an internship while enrolled or studying abroad. I didn't know how much time I would have in the next year, so I decided to go abroad. I am a student of the globe, so why not see the globe, rather than just theorize it?

I'm alone in the hotel lobby right now. It's next to a forested park with a big fountain that does water displays that move to music. I thought I was going mad in my room when Also Sprach Zarathustra danced outside our windows. Vitaly thought that the Poles were reenacting the war when the fireworks came.

Turns out it's just a normal Friday night in Southeastern Wrocław.

I'm one of the only students in this program without a Bachelor's. Most of them are working on their dissertation and are including their coursework in their projects. How many Polish intellectuals does it take to upset your vision of stupid Poland?

Just one, just one intellectual. There are none here with toothless, happy grins, old world charm, there are none. These people are wearing better shoes than I am and many speak English. Honestly, whatever stupid image I had of the Slavic countries East of Germany... I will tell you, there are more scags on public transportation in Portland than there are here. I'm not even in the largest city in Poland. I'm in the fourth largest. People aren't rich here.

I managed to upset one of the Polish students who are also part of the program. I said I disliked the mass-mediated discourse surrounding the failure of the socialist experiment that was the USSR. He was aghast. "You actually think that we should have another try at Marxist socialism?"

Well, I guess not, when you say it that way. I believed in the decency of humanity and that the bourgeois were replaced with totalitarians that enacted and reinforced boundaries that already existed, but now I don't believe that. I can't believe that.

I didn't live under socialism. I know nothing. Americans know nothing. Why does The New School discuss Marxism in so many contexts if it is not worth discussing? Maybe because it's great sociological critique, my UN table was able to agree on that, but Joel, the time for socialism is dead.

I had to remind them that my name is Joel. You can't remember both names and polemics.

That's a joke. I've only been here two days.

I got into an argument with one of my closest friends before I left. I presented a radical leftist perspective unabashedly (and unprovoked). I was not received well. To fight complacency, I was reactionary and that did little in the way of conversation.

I find this shit terribly interesting and righteous, but I don't have even reason to bring it up in social situations. I don't want to be a zealot. I don't want to not speak and go on like I have in the past, or like I am here, too embarrassed to mutter in Polish to go anywhere, but I don't need to be so virulent or violent.

And hell, even these international academics are less radical than I think I am. Maybe I should keep reading and absorb more everything. A crisis is like a sponge, and so will I be. I don't want to be wrong anymore.

Prolix

All young whites are juggalos and juggalettes and I'm tired of it. I'm tired of kicking past Faygo bottles at MAX stations and I'm tired of black and white makeup kits catching in gutters. I don't understand this whole fascination with the Detroit Mecca. Detriot.

I don't understand the white people of today. White culture is so loud and obscene. I heard about the bullshit evangelizing of Violent J, but his name underscores a larger obbjective violence done to the faiths of his listeners. He is, they are ignorance and misappropriation. I read about a group of wild and rangy juggalos that attacked a group of journalists and teachers. Evangelism, Violent J? Your evangelism brought this.

I can piece together the puzzle and the politically correct media won't say it, but all of these kids were juggalos. The music is their destruction. Blither and bluster and stupid, stupid stupid. No time for it. Who to blame but ICP for this and similar assaults? I want these men to be punished for inciting these crimes, but I can't expect the parents to make a move. They were as easily incited as their children by the Black Flags and the Nirvanas and whatever. And their grandparents with the riot-induction of Gene Krupa, David Brubeck, Stan Getz.

Every generation faces a moment of clarity where we can see the culprits and it is up to the strength and intelligence (not verbosity and wayward desires) of the society to pare down the overgrown culprit trees.

We must not let this stand.

Summer Mode

I'm in summer mode. I will do nothing unless someone urges or yells at me and No one is urging me to apply to grad school or jobs, eat, read or blog. I'm withering away and I'm not even documenting it.
I think I could make FaceSmash.

About a quarter of my summer so far has been in the two most happening cities in the Northwest: Corvallis and East Wenatchee. I jest (please see the municipal websites for both cities), but I enjoyed my time there more than here. Or maybe the same. I'm with old friends and only a handful have gotten old and stale. The ones that haven't seen my in years and mispronounce my name were someone else's friend to begin with.

I finished On The Road recently. It was killer. I stopped after the ridiculous and benign first ten pages, but then I realized that was the whole book and dug it fully. That was the first for-pleasure book in months, maybe a year.

I leave for Poland in two weeks. I'll have research papers due in Winter after I get back. I'm excited to be in a foreign country that isn't Canada, not that I don't love Canada or Canada isn't foreign (It very much is). I'm thinking of this trip as a test. If I fail, I have to work for the post office for the rest of my life. I won't be cut out for international relations. I'll be cut out for what I've done best so far: apologize for late packages.

"I know you have the tracking number, but the number doesn't necessarily signify anything at all.
"I'm sorry."

Polyamory and whatever

I had a conversation with one of my friends about monogamy a month ago. It's easy to forget that there are other sorts or relationships than the one I'm in. Hell, it's a challenge to be aware of anything that I'm not. Friendship is like the perpetual defeat of my accidental solipsism.

Nonmonogamy is interesting. I think I dig it. I think it's something to be dug, but I've never dabbled. I've never seen anyone that had an interest in other people, as well as me. They wouldn't! I couldn't possibly be with someone that had eyes for another, just couldn't do it, it's wrong and painful ugly, but most people are attracted to everyone around them, right?

What kept me out of long-term relationships for the last four, five years, other than fear, is the feeling that I'd be missing out on all these great trysts that are always satisfactory.

I've heard that these relationships fail in previously heterosexual, monogamous relationships. I think Dr. Drew told me that. I hear that, sure, but there are many people that survive (and succeed) in alternative relationship forms. April Ludgate, of course is an example. My friend in my boat-building class was reading a book about how to better her polyamory. I asked her about it and she told me that the water's fine.

And I have a family friend that's been in a ménage à trois for some five years, longer even, but she doesn't like the company of her husband, the third wheel is a deadbeat skeez, and she's fallen off the deep end in other aspects of her life since then.

It works for some people and other people pretend it works for them. Sounds like every other part of relationships.

Sickness, as in Health

UGH!

In Space(time) and Einstein today, we saw a patronizing National Geographic video in which black holes and quasars were sensationalized with a John Williams soundtrack. There was one section where in a matter of thirty seconds, Andromeda and the Milky Way collided, the black holes at the centers of the galaxies becoming one, or as they said in the video, "gobbled each other."

The short animation presented a process in the making, one that will happen eventually, some 20 billion years from now. Watching the destruction of much of the life in our solar system brings an odd sense of closure and finality, even though it is yet to happen. No matter what we do in our life, there will be a day when, if somehow the human race has managed to live that long, our galaxy collides with another and we're destroyed.

No matter what.

It's pretty far away, though, isn't it? I probably won't be alive for it. My legitimate children probably won't either, but still, there is a finite end to everything we've ever known, we as in the next thousand generations.

I'm not trying to say that our actions are useless when facing a grander destruction. I'm really trying to illustrate the same thing I always am: If you aren't enjoying your life, relishing the minutiae, then you are really only counting the days until not only your own death but the death and decay of everything you know. Nostalgia be damned!

Life is not suffering, it is a brief state of mutual acknowledgment. Enjoy it or die.

Also I don't know how Brittany is doing it, but every time I hear the French language, I can't help but to imagine there is a montage behind me and what's being said is comical narration.

I was a bully

I want to be fair, and honest. For some time during the time I was bullied, I was totally also bullying some kids. I have two clear examples that put me in a bad light, but if I'm trying to play the victim card, I should show my whole hand.

I made fun of one of my friends in 4th and 5th grade. She was overweight and I called her a rhino and she would chase me furiously. It was one of those incidents that could go either way between flirtation and bullying. I hope I apologized.

But my other behavior doesn't tread any lines. There was another guy in one of the joint classes downstairs in Glenfair. He was in Talented and Gifted with Keith and I, but he was a weirdo. He couldn't sit down properly and would make noises throughout class. Keith and I harassed and harangued him, not to the point of suicide or anything, but definitely to the point of crying.

We were confronted about this by not only the two teachers of the joint class downstairs, but both classes of thirty. We hung our heads and had to explain ourselves and apologize. It turned out that he was autistic. It wasn't explained to us what autism what, but what bullies were and that was us.

I didn't learn about autism until years later, it must have been.

Louis C.K. has some line about waking up and feeling great and then remembering all the things you've done and having to live with yourself.

So we didn't understand that he was autistic, fine, can't blame us for that, but making a kid cry weekly is heinous.

And this isn't the worst thing I've done. We all have our dirty laundry.

Hopefully all the great things I'll do with my life will reconcile the terrible things I've done.

A friend asked if I was a writer

and I told her that I was a blogger. I almost spat in frustration. How are those things different? Why would I ever call myself a blogger? What is a blogger? What is a blog but a public diary? "Are you a writer?" "I'm a diarist." Get out. I almost spat.

I planned to graduate next year and I planned to apply for grad school for the year after. I planned to go abroad this summer and then write a thesis. I planned to be 20, but here I am. I must have forgotten to ask myself in February if I was ready for March. I'm not panicking, exactly, but I do not feel prepared for this fast track that I set myself on. I did do this to myself. I absolutely said, "Okay, team, I'm going to sprint through life for as long as I can." And I'm in the last lap of the first mile and I can't believe I've been running this fast. I've barely managed to stay in my own lane.

To curb the metaphor-building and head stress, last night I went for a run. I know it doesn't make sense for late-March weather, but I was running in snow last night. I did not sign up for tundra college. I did not move to Canada, or Siberia or Hoth. Regardless, I was pleased to pass pedestrians sporting winter coats. I was wearing shorts and maybe a shirt. Barely a shirt. I wish somebody asked so I could tell them I was from Oregon.

I did mutter a couple times as I was passing, "It's cold, right?"
I thought that was funny.

Oh, and I got that job that I had been striving to get for a year and a half. I'll be an RA next academic year.

Does anyone want to live with me?

I was bullied

There is a fever on the internet about four things, Japan, Libya, Rebecca Black's "Friday" and Casey Heynes. The above video showcases the story of Casey who, after being bullied for apparently years, lost it. He grabbed the bully and threw him to the ground. There have been varied responses to this violent response. The school suspended both students, youtube keeps banning the video for violence and some respondents argue that it should have never gotten to that point, but mostly the response has been outright support.

I am in the latter group.

Some of my friends have noticed that "faggot" rolls off my tongue with relative ease which seems to go against my generally politically correct nature. They don't know that "faggot" was my name for several years to the bullies in my neighborhood.

I stopped walking home at some point in elementary school because there was an older boy that rode around on his bike and told me "go fuck myself" and "die faggot" with regularity. I successfully stopped walking on my street and avoided him completely, but when I started riding the school bus home, I was met with more bullies. One was younger and one was older than me. The called me gay and pulled my hair hard enough to go home with some in their hands. I had anger issues and I'd turn red in the face when I was provoked or embarrassed. I was red in the face every ride home.

One day, when I was in fourth grade and it was early Spring, the older bus bully tripped me on my way to the back of the bus, where I wouldn't be abused. I briefly fell and dropped my books. I don't know what I said, but it got him standing and I punched him in the face. I used to tell people that I broke his nose (I made myself believe it) but I really just gave him a bloody nose and a complex.

I was ordered off the bus and sat smugly in the Principal's office. I had brought up the issue before and it still happened. It always still happens, doesn't it? I'm sure some policies work, but they didn't work for me. I'm not pro-violence, in general, but I would have killed Hitler and I would still have punched that guy in the face.

I'm not pleased that I broke, and I'm not smug anymore, but context and time has helped me forgive everything.

I was in counseling before and a couple times after this happened for many reasons, but one counselor I had, Terry, a wise older man, told me once that "kids are stupid." He's right and it stuck. It isn't just kids who are stupid, though. It's a lot of people. Kids, especially, but definitely not only. People can be insensitive and worthless. It's a fact. I can say that because I watch from my ivory tower and I have never been either of those things to anyone, I'm sure!

We're all infallible and we have to make sure that we aren't bullying anyone every step in the road because some Casey will righteously throw us to the ground.

I support Casey Heynes for being an incredible survivor and giving only one comeuppance when necessary.

"The Long Rain" by Ray Bradbury, is probably my favorite story

I'm developing a nasty habit of making decisions not on practicality or interest, but on adventurism. In about ten minutes, I'll leave my building and walk to a bus stop to board the six-thirty to Philadelphia. I'll hang out with my girlfriend for 48 hours, 24 of them ostensibly sleeping and then I'll go back to New York and sleep.

That's stupid. That's a stupid decision. It's stupid that I haven't slept. It's stupid that my first St. Patrick's Day that I've been willing and able to drink, not legal, but (described below), I won't be hanging with my friends and vomiting. Stupid.

I missed a train to Montreal yesterday at around this time. Scott, Chris and I (these are just names) were planning on having a French-Canadian adventure and it fell slowly to pieces. It was a slow burn, a roast. Chris couldn't find his passport. I found mine but nearly didn't wake up in time. Scott couldn't print his tickets at the station and when he did, we both stood waiting for the other one at different entrances, not willing to travel to Canada alone for four days.

It was pretty silly, but I only really was going to go to Canada because it was an adventure, I was with my friends and I could get drunk legally.

But I don't really want to get drunk. I only want to experience it because I'd be with my friends and it's an adventure.
Reductionism.

It's so late right now that I walked over to my mirror and watched my face change color. I don't know how people accept insomnia. They probably don't accept it, Joel. Fine.

I found out my Dad didn't have cancer yesterday. It was a looming, harsh fear despite the likely ease of removal and low risk, comedy is a based on a rule of threes. We were all pretty sure that he had cancer again, just the mention of the possibility and my family nodded their heads, resigned.
But he doesn't! He's okay for now!

That's exciting isn't it?

Also, Brother Joel (Thanks for reading) responded to my first email after months of postponing the inevitable. Great humor, this guy. I hope we can be brothers and friends.

Good morning.

Post Blog: Have you checked out my second blog? It's called Critique: By Critics. It's at criticlasm.wordpress.com.

I think it's funny. I hope more people write for it, although it's perfect now.

This year is different

This year, my suit will be my clean face.

I'm trying to be something I'm not again this year: successful.
No, I'm really in one of the middle stages of applying to be an RA for my university. It's tiringly exciting, I know.

Last year, though, this was big. I made this whole plan where I would have no technical debt and I would work for the UN gratis and I would, I'm unsure of this detail exactly, but play bass in U2. It's fuzzy.
All of that hinged on getting the RA job and getting free housing. I don't know how it worked, but it did,

or in my case, it didn't.

I went into the first interview (of six) on my birthday in a full suit and really missed my mark. I was sweating. They, two of them, asked me my name and I stuttered out one of their names. My eyes were bloodshot and I said I'd never been to an interview. It was a bad scene.

I'm a lot less stressed this year. I have more on my plate. Bigger things afoot. I'm confident that I'll do well. I've thought of the answers to common questions and I'm prepared, but that does in no way mean that I won't screw it up.

I was trying to shave off my Grizzly Adams beard for the interview, but my electric razor doesn't have a half-stop mode. It's all or nothing. And it's all, for me. I started shaving and realized I couldn't stop.

I would find it hard to hire me. I look like a child with long hair and a distinct musk. I should probably wear over-sized dress pants and look like I'm playing dress-up. I'll walk in and introduce myself as a prodigy or something.

"I'm sorry, that was a joke."
"Mmmhmm," and they'll scribble an x next to self-deprecation.

Maybe I should tell them that I only had clothes that matched my ambitions.
How many bad jokes can I tell? Too many. I should swear while I walk to the building, to get it out of my system, like Edward R. Murrow did.

Something.

I'm confident, though. I'll get through this. I need to master these professional techniques before I'm harassed by more looming opportunities. Yeah, That's the attitude!

Boston was beautiful. I went last weekend. The sealine was overwhelming. It was a real harbor with real harbor folk. That's all it was. I really like harbor folk, though. They love great indie music and have suits that match their ambitions.

Sometimes I blog when I'm doing other things like leaving messages on the phone or writing journals about immigration for class. Sometimes I blog when I eat. I take note of the food, metareference it and laugh.

Life is draining, isn't it?

I wouldn't like me if I met me

I'm so many things that I've sworn against.

If I saw me I would let myself have it. The long hair, the fitting funny-colored pants, the thick glasses, obscure music, studying obscure languages.

I can't even pretend to be disheveled and pretend I don't care anymore. This simulation is reality.
I might as well apply to work at Stumptown and practice frowning.

I'm in a new place. I have never looked in the mirror and really understood the person on the other end (to be me). I look now and slouch and laugh at what I've become. I'd love to judge the mirror for its faults and ignorance but I am the person on the other side. I can't give up being myself.

A strange amount of people think I'm better off looking like a college student / resident Christ impersonator. I don't know how to deal with that. Mostly, I ignore it. I look how I look right now out of compassion, arrogance and laziness. That concoction has led me thus far.

Speaking of Christ, I've decided that I have no interest in holding the mantle of a prophet. I was told by several reputable sources (those that tapped into the God-divine [read tarot]) that I am a prophet.

Maybe I'll become more of a prophet if I humble myself now and say that I don't want to be. It worked for Paul Atreides, I'm sure.

I think I might just make this a soapbox and complain about the ills of society, the thetanic ills.
Thetan...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_wright?currentPage=1

I love a good romance novel, or I imagine I would if I was in to that sort of thing.

Can we all move past the inane, for one second?

In boot camp with Joker and Gomer Pyle, my nickname was Complainy. I never figured out why, but I sure didn't like boot camp. I could tell you about it...

I have this tremendous bad habit of being indiscriminate with how I pee. It's usually in the bathrooms of people I respect and those people are usually women. When I write indiscriminate, I mean accidentally missing, like maybe hitting a wall, but usually dribbling near the toilet. I did this once recently in Philadelphia. I had no idea how far I was from the toilet.
Fellas? Can you support me on this? I'm not the only one in the world with horrendous aim only sometimes, right?

I can't be. I won't be. I won't have it.

And it's just women I respect.

I hope that wasn't too personal. I'm apparently all about oversharing, of late. I didn't realize I did this. I met a friend of a friend and chewed the fat for hours and I decided that a reference to Taxi Cab Confessions was enough to explain some of my sexual history. No, Joel, that is not how we interact.

"I shouldn't have said that, right?"
"No," my friend accepted. "You probably shouldn't have."
I wrote it off as both of them being ignorant. That's the attitude!

I just finished Dune (can we underline on Blogspot?). It was a heckuva read, but I finished it, with all its 'philosophical vistas' and put it down and immediately stopped caring. I didn't want to read the other books; I didn't have time, I decided. It was a great read, though.

I just started Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger. I'm loving it, so far. It's super ironic that there are only three stories in the book. How silly, right?!

Relatedly, I recommend all of the films that have come out in the last two months as they are all fantastic. I've seen them all.

Classes start tomorrow at noon.

How are you?

This is banal.

I haven't been writing. Creeping doubts fill my mind like...
like... See? I don't even have a handle on basic hyperbolic similes. I don't know how your mind works, but I get flashes of prescient vision all the time. I hear myself in twenty years saying, "I remember when I was a writer," talking, I guess, about those scant years in high school. Who knows? It's embarrassing to stall in a sentence and wonder what the next word was.

"You know, like the opposite of sad, sort of."
"Do you mean 'happy'?"
"Yeah, I guess."

I went back to Oregon this winter and was accosted by a strange set of emotions. My asshole friends are still assholes. My critical, my hypocritical, my ugly, my broken
(I feel like I started writing "New Collosus" right there)
friends are still those people, the same, or something pretty much the same.

And there's comfort there. You don't befriend the people I do hoping they'll drastically change in two years. I do, however, sense a deep, drastic change in myself, like how girls become women and vice versa. Or I pretend I feel something, but I pretend hard enough that it's psychosomatic and when my friends don't notice the deep, dark changes, then they must not be real.
I can't be validated.

I fear, though, that the changes are actually an increase in pomp and condescension. I wanted to post a piece a month ago that sounded like,

"Oh, yeah, Joel, he's annoying now. It's like New York, this, New York, that. He pretends like he doesn't judge me, but if there's any character that he can't play, it's himself. But, like, he's to be pitied, not me, obviously."

It was going to be about 20x longer and profanity-heavy, so it could match ANY of my friends.

Self-doubt is something to be fought constantly, but only if you are worth something. If you're worthless, then you might as well give up the fight.

You know what? Most of the time I'm pained to see inaction it's because I fear it in my own life.

Pitiful.