"nobody knows what the world is for"

someone said this tonight. we were lying on our backs in the snow next to the huron river. our feet were propped up on the fence in front of us and i could not feel my toes. the sky was that weird peach-grey glowing color, the snow was blue, and the trees looked like roots. if you tilted your head back, you could see the whole line of trees behind you, waxy through the snow that was still falling, their tops jagged like so many scratch marks. and when he said that, that nobody knows what the world is for, i almost believed him, except for that my favorite memories of anyone are usually not of them at all but of the way the world looked curling around them. it is probably very selfish and silly to say that the world is for curling around a person, but truthfully i can't imagine lying like that in any other place than where we were, with the snow lighting the sky up the color of skin and the river not listening and the cold on us so that we could not even move, and the trees so still we could not even leave.

listen to "old times," by the elected

I think this is a wonderful time, the first long period when everyone has come back from school. After months of summer spent preparing for and imagining the ways we would and wouldn't change, now we finally get to see how right we actually were. It gives a rather stark perspective on who you are not and probably will not ever be friends with, but the friendships you do have now have to answer to all kinds of questioning- is this really sustainable afterall, or does it just not fit now that everything's been rearranged? When does a new room mean there is no room?
It's funny, the lengths we go for what's comfortable. When old routines and relationships are falling back into their places all around you, you think, well why not? Whether or not you want it falls by the wayside- easy plus familiar might as well equal something close to desirable, at least if you squint. Then you find yourself shoving everything around to make your life like a time capsule of itself. In a recreation of when you wanted what you insist you still want, it is important to arrange it so no one will notice how tightly the seams are stretched.
This week has seen the return of two people I thought I was probably done knowing, and there is no question that even though I can find no reason to, with both I am trying. Boredom is of course part of things, but how much really? I think a lot of it is a sort of opportunity-induced nostalgia, for what you didn't think you wanted until suddenly you could have it, and if you can have it then why bother not wanting it anymore?

But how long can someone go thinking that anyone or anything can fit anywhere anytime. Everyone's screaming about change, but when it comes half the time it's ignored. Of course, there's the counter argument, of how much going back to something is all about proving change. I think this might be the worst kind of nostalgia, because it thinks it isn't that at all, when really it is, but full of bitterness too. There is maybe no really easy way to leave and come back. If you come back, there must be something you're coming back to, and then there's all sorts of trouble to trick yourself into wanting. And it all looks so comfortable! You might even forget that once your hands were so full of why you were leaving it would have taken you a week to write all the reasons down.

christmas eve

is history fated to repeat itself, or are we fated to repeat our own history?

up too early, i'm eating frozen fruit for breakfast, last night it snowed but it isn't quite pretty. i'm starting to think that we're all ineradicably tied to narrative. the other night i had dinner with an old friend, and it was not long at all before the conversation broke into a back-and-forth between retelling the story of everything that had happened between us and a weirdly proud recounting of everything that's happened since our relationship ended (as if this is something it merely decided to do one day, end, and we just had to listen to it and walk away). i was thinking at dinner about who i understand him as and who he understands me as, and i don't see how we could be anything but stories to each other at this point. when we knew each other better i think we still knew each other as stories, nice things we'd made up. then we got tired of making our bodies try to fit into all of those nice things, and realizing that we were tired made it clear how irrelevant that initial narrative of how and why we were bending together was to the actual bending. perhaps we never even knew each other better at all.
and the things we say to each other now, the breaking down of what's happened since july, all of that is just stories too. it all turns so minimal, being warped in the arc of a beginning and a middle and an end. telling stories and turning to stories the way we always do because they seem so easy, you invariably come to some kind of end. stories really are easy. i think i love stories because even if they're messy and full of holes they still end. and when they end, because they end, somehow or other they've turned sickly and wonderfully easy.

It is either an awful kind of good dream or a perfect kind of bad dream when it could and perhaps already has all happened or in any way might, though not in the way it did in the dream, though you don't want to imagine it any differently than the dream which was of course only a dream and so upon waking the scene slides out like a projection dropped off the screen so that first it is on the wall and blurry and colorless and then warping on the floor until you can't make out anything from the original picture, and know only and firmly that it was just a picture, and what can you do with that anyway but look at it and think of it later and know it was always in that picture that it could blur and warp and slide off the screen, and so no matter how wholly you try to keep it in your memory inevitably some is left out, and knowing this you know you could never remake the picture or even really look at it again, because once it slid off the screen it was gone, and now that you think back you don't know what you'd want to recreate: the clear picture projected or the weird lit-up blur on the floor.

bread and better

Today is not the seventeenth, which I learned promptly after arriving at work for the bogus Sell Food! Have Fun! class needed to earn a raise. Gutting, given I woke at ten for it and now have far too much time to kill on a frigid afternoon. There is really only one thing to do when you're walking down Detroit St. with a stuffy nose on the day December relented and bloodily surrendered to winter, and that is seek shelter immediately in the drafty nostalgia of the People's Food Co-op. There's hot squeezed ginger root juice to drink, Community High students to annoy you, and the most attractively pierced people in town. If you get hungry, you can eat a block of tofu, or a muffin made out of vegetables. I love it here.

I was kept up til two last night by the sourdough I insisted upon starting at seven pm. My parents were frustrated and said it was only bread and should not control my sleeping schedule (??) but they never experienced the delight of watching starter bubble in anticipation of feeding. It turned into a wonderful dough- the starter is fermented and active, and when you knead it all you can feel the internal energy. That sounds kinda kitschy, but it's true.

I talked to a friend during the last rising before the actual proofing (the dough's been relaxing in the fridge all night- this evening I'll wake it up and bake it. If it's been proofed properly the crumb will be airy and moist with a bright and not overpoweringly sour flavor, and a crust that's hard but not too chewy. Bread is so fucking cool.) It was not a very light conversation, and felt kinda like an intervention of sorts, trying to get her to finally leave a damaging person behind. There are many levels of knowing that something is wrong or hurtful. You can repeat what everyone's telling you so that you know the words, or you can know with your body, without any real need for words. The whole conversation she kept repeating I know I know I know but it was hard to tell exactly how much she knew, whether she knew what he was doing to her only because I and everyone else keep telling her, or because she- alone and for herself- was demanding something better.

A guy I know told me the best thing anyone has told me this year, which is that self harm (of any sort- I think what my friend was talking about qualifies as self harm at this point too) is like any other addiction. It's not like you just decide one day to be better and that's that. You make a choice not to do something, and then every day you keep on making that choice again and again. This whole semester has been filled with addict rhetoric- the whole grant me the serenity to expect the things I cannot change thing, and admitting you were powerless against something, and getting to some point where you respect yourself enough to see that there's something wrong about making a cutting board of yourself. I left Oberlin with someone's voice in my ear saying be better- I think about that all the time, as if his saying it was my motivation to do it. It wasn't, and then it kind of was. Hurt and comfort too often come wrapped together, and so it is uncomfortable to walk away. Better is what you walk away towards. But you have to want it more than all the shit and all the ease of what you kinda knew was shitty but ultimately stayed in because it was easy. There's a reason you miss what you miss.

january oh january what do you have in store?

As if antidepressants might make me a different person, I am both relieved and disappointed by sporadic sightings of this continued vague sadness. I think I spent so long trying to thrill everyone with the wild happiness they were all expecting I would, through genetics, of course have, that I never noticed how much of a performance it all was. By the time I did, I was already firmly settled in so many double lives that it didn't seem to matter, and the space without happiness was like a refuge. I didn't really want to be happy- what I was and was doing was reliable and constant, whether or not it was abusive or destructive didn't matter. Clearly, the cold is making me go into a major sadness-stalking obsession. In winter you have two choices: curl up inside of yourself, or relentlessly try to curl up in others. If you really don't know what you're doing, you can try for both, just to see what happens.

Once Thanksgiving happened the year went into turbo-mode. Suddenly it is time to apply for "re-entry" to Oberlin, which sounds exciting and kind of science-fictiony, like it is a solar system or a spaceship. It's fun imagining the Medical Leave Re-Entry Review Board dressed in metallic suits and bubble helmets discussing the results of students' screenings and whether or not they are fit to return. More fun than wondering what might happen if once I hit the atmosphere of Ohio, all stability quickly evaporates. Really though, that all still feels far away. Between now and then stands the month of January, which is to say I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen.

this saturday is on fire

Well I've neglected this writing thing for a little while, partly because it was starting to seem like a diary and I couldn't figure out why I was writing a diary if random people could read it, but mostly because I had nothing to say. I still have not much to say, but have less to do, so there you go.

On Friday at work after I caught one Napoleon Complex-ed co-worker shamelessly under- and overcharging each U of M hottie and her Botoxed mom while he stared at their chests rather than the register, I teased him and he retorted by asking about my weekend plans. He, of course, would be pre-gaming, gaming, and post-gaming. I, of course, would be living the dreams of solitude. It would mean nights of heavy drinking for both of us, except he was probably not the one aspiring to make it through a whole box of Twinings by Sunday night. Tea consumption in this house is ridiculous. I am habitually 3-5 minutes late for everything due to last minute brewings, and my belly is an aquarium.
So while this co-worker is probably now catching the reflection of his toned biceps in the glint of his hair gel, I'm gulping chamomile and getting ready to watch sad naked people in Lust, Caution, my favorite movie I'm embarrassed to talk about. This plan doesn't go well with the current mood of the living room, dominated by some soprano mumbling hymns on Prairie Home Companion and my dad already asleep in last week's New Yorker. It's decidedly anti-lust. But that's how Saturday goes.

well

nothing is actually more complicated. or for that matter different.