SO THIS IS THE NEW YEAR

and already it is so much better than the old! already i feel different, more secure. it feels as though i learned a lot in the past year, but what and pertaining to what i couldn't really say. mostly pertaining to myself, i imagine. ahh the self-centeredness of youth.

this year is already unlike any other because i am starting it off in love and i am loved in return. (sidebar: love is pretty great and a lot less painful than i'd always felt it to be). this year is already unlike the past couple because already i am taking steps to do what i mean to do instead of sitting around waiting for things to magically just sort of happen to me. this year, 2010, i will do things that are going to scare the shit out of me. and i will be anxious, and i will chew my nails off, and i will find several more snow white hairs in my bangs. and i'll lose sleep, and i'll be wracked with uncertainty, and i'll have bigger things at stake than ever before. and it will be GREAT. it's going to be fantastic and marvelous and a year like no other, and i look forward to all of it. i look forward to working hard and letting off a lot of steam and making plans and making plans come through and really especially i look forward to sharing it all with him. i can't wait to share a life with him. the mundane realities of dirty dishes and bills to be paid and building a home out of scratch all seem fairy-tale-like and beautiful from over here, because they'll be done in cahoots with him. we are going to wash dishes and become real people together and it will be lovely. i am and was going to be a real person with or without him, but for whatever reason, everything is a gladder prospect now that he's in the picture.

i'm not making resolutions this year, because they are cliched and destined for failure, but naturally and inevitably, i have a list of things i mean to work on in order to become more like who i'd like to be. also i love making lists! so here goes:

2010

• move out/up north/in with chris
• read more nonfiction, especially history, and less crap
• sleep more at night and less during the day
• learn a whole new skill, like archery or some type of dance
• improve my cooking skills beyond eggs and pancakes. successfully cook beef.
• pay off some debts (2 can be reasonably paid off this year) and improve my credit score
• learn to tell a couple of really good jokes and not fuck them up
• volunteer with real dedication for something i care about a lot
• stop leaving banana peels to rot in my car
• put real effort into writing something and trying to get it published
• learn to take a really fast shower
• get a real job
• take more pictures!!!
• go somewhere i've never gone before
• write more on a daily basis. even if it's just lists.

and so, ok, the new year started a week ago, but like, i was on vacation! haha

rage, rage against the dying of the light

i will be first to admit, and with little remorse, that i am a savage and i speak like one too. last week, on a rant about useless pseudo-celebrities, i referred to kim kardashian and her sisters as walking, well-shaped holes who need to shut up and get fucked, and stay out of the public eye. because, well, let's face it, it's the truth. these past couple of weeks, i've been referring to our class as "those retards"- not the autistic kids i work with closely, but the other kids, the "normal" kids in our mainstream class who act like a.d.d.-addled monkeys. i'm on this fairly intense "hating children" kick, truth be told. they're all stupid and i can't believe i ever wanted one at any point. proof that i too am stupid.

well, so anyway, i am oviri and i fucking well like it like that.

judith warner's blog in the new york times today, titled "i feel it coming together" is about watching her kids come into their own and the passing of the flame. the flame of life, know what i mean? because she's forty-something, because her kids are hitting the teenage years, because she's... well, because she is a fucking idiot she sits around sniffling about how beautiful it is that she's done with longing and intensity and how sweetly nostalgic it is to see her daughter so full of potential, blah blah blah. seriously? is this what we aspire to as human beings? to have kids and drop out of the flow of things? to have kids and be done with longing? to have kids and "hit a plateau- not so bad after all that"- except it is bad! a plateau?? to stop growing and changing and wanting and fighting and raving and screaming and thinking and being conflicted and being exhilarated etc etc? never. never ever ever. i never ever ever want to be THAT person. sitting around, fat and content, waiting for the grave. not in way that denies aging- i will be old someday, someday not too far away, really, because our lives are short and our bodies deteriorate, whatever modern attitudes and science say about the matter- but i will never be old and decrepit and without longing in my head, where it matters. may i drop dead before that happens.

since i have known myself, i have been a conflicted, questioning, seeking, writhing mass of doubts and pieces that don't quite fit and passions that don't make sense, and yeah, sometimes i am unhappy. sometimes i have the luxury of being the unhappiest person IN THE WORLD. sometimes i am full of rage and i want to hit things and curse the universe at the top of my lungs and bleed. sometimes i am sadder beyond the depth of the ocean, hurt unto feeling it like physical pain. sometimes i am deathly afraid of the future and all the things i don't know and all the paths i might take that are wrong and stupid or right and stupid. sometimes, i feel like the stupidest, most worthless person in the world, and even when i am feeling at the top of the world, i know that i will feel that other way again and not too far off. since i have known myself, i have been the type of passionate person whose hackles are up in an instant at a whiff of injustice- a starving, beaten dog, a homeless person, war and famine in some distant part of the world- however cushy and sweet my own life may be at the moment, there's enough going on in this marvelously shitty world of ours to feel angry, discontent, driven about SOMETHING at any given point in time. does having kids mean not feeling this way, being this person anymore? i don't see why it has to, and yet it so often DOES.

having kids makes you conventional. having kids makes you boring, it makes you stupid, it makes you unhappy. having kids makes you OLD. like, in a bad way. because, ok, children are magical and fantastical and watching them grow is like, a miracle of nature and divinity, right? only like, not. maybe if they're your own. working with kids has made me feel that our species would be better off petering slowly into the void, but then i am a terrible over-reactor, so who knows. i mean, a lot of it is probably just that only stupid people are breeding, and no one seems to be big on actually parenting their offspring anymore, and half of the kids in the world are autistic because of vaccines or milk or the way we kill chickens, or whatever, but still. what if those people are only stupid because they had kids and not the other way around? nnnngh. i don't know. sometimes, like when i'm driving, i am convinced that 99% of the human race is retarded, while at other less harrowing times i think that i am just a conceited, self-centered shit and that by sheer strength of probability, most people are smarter than anyone gives them credit for being.

i guess what it comes down to is this, which may be naive, and it may be cliche, and it may also be the only true thing that i know: i don't want THAT. i don't want a normal life, i don't want to be a normal person, i don't want to grow up and get married and have kids and let that be that because whatever emerson may have said well, contributing a healthy child to the world is not the same pinnacle of achievement as a redeemed social condition or even a healthy garden patch. having a healthy child, especially nowadays, is a miracle unto itself, but it's also the most normal and mundane thing in the world, something that idiots do all the time BY ACCIDENT. while i am not one to deny my animal status and slavery to genetics and the machinations of nature and design, i also refuse to bow down and deny that everything about us that doesn't matter is precisely what is best about us and what i want to glorify with my entire life and not just my heated, chocolate-scented words. my children, should i ever have them, will not define me, will not be the end of what i contribute to the world, they won't be the best i contribute to the world, even, though maybe they'll tie with whatever else i do, because if i have kids, i will want them to be amazing and good people too.

i guess this is working up so much because i'm like, frustrated with life and myself, and also with what feels like pressure to do what i "should" do, even just a simple, "don't say that, who knows where you'll be in ten years, you may want kids before then" is like an icepick in my skull lately. having kids done right takes time, people, time i'd rather be using to figure out my own life first. have kids too young, you'll just fuck 'em all up is what i always say, and i know this from experience because my own mother was practically a child when i was born. because while i happen to like myself, mostly, i'm also aware that yeah, i'm kind of fucked up. that's alright though, i like having stuff to work on.

in any case, now that my heart rate has slowed a bit, i will admit too that the prospect of having kids is terrifying in a thousand different ways besides just making you a zombie. pregnancy? miraculous and GROSS and terrifying. childbirth? gag me, please, i love my vagina just the way it is now. will the kid have a tail? will he be... you know, healthy and sane and normal? will he look like my inbred-looking cousin (who talks and thinks like someone whose mom and dad were related, in addition to being hideous- though my parents assure me that i'm just an asshole and his parents were not, in fact, brother and sister)?? what if the little fucker gets all of my bad stuff and none of my good stuff and then i can't stand him despite the fact that i'll be compelled to love him because he came out of me? god, what if he's ANYTHING like those little fucking beasts i teach! perish the thought. it's unfortunate that i love babies so much, because babies grow into, you know, children and people and stuff. i think, though, that IF i ever decide to give in and do the damn thing, WHEN i have lived a lot more and feel prepared to balance everything and not be a boring zombie creature, BECAUSE i am a wild thing, i will make a damn fine mother, and be nothing at all like poopy judith warner and her pathetic, infuriating resignation in the face of life. life, i roar my terrible roar and gnash my terrible teeth in your fucking face.

so long, my luckless romance

schopenhauer and i, we are definitely onto something with this whole "worst of all possible worlds" thing- developed independently from each other, via convergent evolution, just to be clear. and should anyone require proof, all i would have to do is brandish the letter i wrote last night, that i will never mail, but will post here for my own records:

dear chris,

i don't know what to say or how to say it, so i will write instead. it's always easier this way. how do i feel? i feel like, "wow, this is really really shitty. so this is how it feels to be cheated on. hmmm.' except you didn't cheat on me, because you aren't actually my boyfriend. i should have known what that meant, your unwillingness to say anything more concrete than ' i love you'. and that mainly over text.

i feel like the stupidest person in the world. for believing you when you said you loved me, that you wanted me around, that i'm the most amazing girl you've ever met. i have a feeling that when a man thinks he's met the greatest girl in the world, he doesn't go out and fool around with some older woman friend he rejected the month before. i have a feeling that even if he did fool around with mrs. robinson, he wouldn't then tell the most amazing girl in the world about it with a nonchalance bordering on sociopathy. i could be wrong though, clearly i suck at the whole having feelings thing.

it really sucks that i'm only psychic for bad things. i spent the whole day telling my sister that the reason you never called was that you slept with your coworker and were avoiding me. ok, so, not the coworker this time, but still- someone who is distinctly Not Me. it occurred to me this morning, in a flash of insight, and instantly made me uneasy. my sisters called me paranoid and said you would never do a thing like that, not that they know you at all, except apocryphally, through me. i pushed it aside, mostly, though i worried about it enough that i brought it up a thousand times, half-jokingly.

to think that you not only slept with someone else, you lay in bed with her all morning, into the afternoon, while i fought off the urge to call you or message you, not because i had anything of importance to say but because just being in contact with you makes me happy. ow. you spent the night kissing her, holding her, not thinking about me at all, while i text you to see what was up, missing you, waiting for your reply. did you laugh when you saw my pathetic little message? did she look over your shoulder in her bed and roll her eyes at it? i thought i wouldn't care about cheating, when it happened. i still suspect it would have been better if you drunkenly fucked your assistant. this, this is something else entirely. you feel "caught between the two of us", she is unsure of how to proceed because you are not religious. the fact that you have to think about it- and that she gets a say- says it all.

i should have listened to you when you said you were a bad person. i should have listened when you worried that you would hurt my feelings. i should have known better, period. love. three hundred miles away. ' i just want you around all the time.' hey i know! let's move in together! what a great idea! to think i thrilled at the sweet things you said, that i read them over and over again like a lovestruck schoolgirl and showed them to friends and strangers alike. how could i be so incredibly fucking stupid, again? and again and again. a man who is constantly breaking up with you, even though you're not together, even though he follows it up with an i love you, is not a man who cares about you or wants to be with you.

and i know... you're so sorry. so sorry that you can't say it, you have to message it. so sorry that you go into detail about how you 'didn't sleep AT ALL last night' and you're 'so exhausted from not sleeping last night and getting home at four p.m. today' because you were so busy hooking up all night and morning. and how you thought i should know, 'for whatever reason.' not because we're involved in some vague way. not because you love me and i love you and when two people love each other and one of them sleeps with someone else and then doesn't know how he feels, it's kind of a big fucking deal. you're not sorry and you don't care about me and i know that because you did what you did. and hey, i see the appeal, you know. totally. she's there, i'm not. what's love when you can get some action instead, right? i'd thought you incapable of doing something like that, you who blush and stall when i say something sexual, you who don't see the point of sex without feelings. unless you love her too and just didn't know it. wouldn't that be wacky and amazing!

i can only imagine how it would have gone if the situation were reversed. the shouting, the crying, the crushing disappointment and guilt and misery. i can only imagine because i never would have done anything like that because i love you and because i love you i don't do things to cause you pain. though i might be overestimating myself here, you did say you weren't afraid i'd hurt you. someone you don't love can't hurt you, which is how i understood it, but brushed it aside as you being stupid and saying the wrong thing unintentionally. hah.

i can't even bring myself to shout or curse, in part because i don't have the right to, and in part because i'm more full of pain than of anger. 'it's so weird.' damn right it's fucking weird. i woke up this morning aching to see you, to talk to you, and i'm going to sleep now wondering if i'll ever be able to talk to you again, if i'll ever want to. you woke up this morning naked, holding Not-Me, feeling so little guilt or remorse that you kept on doing that for the larger part of the day. but don't worry. you won't have to deal with any of that shit from me. however long it takes me to stop being a jellyfish, you won't have to know about it. i'm a grown up and i take full responsibility for my own feelings. it was my own fault i got so caught up and carried away, whatever you said. i should have known better than to believe. i hope you and brenda are very, very happy together, i know i will be when i finally learn from my mistakes.

sincerely,
trina

p.s. that you did this to me, of all the wonderful people you've been involved with, is the most major burn in the history of the world.

how can i get better once i've had the best?

just got through uploading some pictures of jake to facebook. i think people "in the know" will think that all i do is sit around and cry and think about him, but actually i've been past that stage for a while now. i'm in this space where it's really hard to wrap my mind around the fact of the matter, sometimes, but also really easy to think back on the good times with a lot of love and feel happy about them without immediately collapsing into tears the next moment.

i haven't actually cried about it since earlier this summer, just before i left for big sur, when i was telling chris the short long version of our story. and hello, talk about weird! i felt like a traitor for a while, for thinking about someone else with a warmth that is so much more than friendly when jake died just a year ago. but now i think, if i love someone else does that mean i stop loving him? and the answer is of course, never. ever. even if i tried. so there's that.

these are pointless ruminations, of course. i just hate that i can't bring him up without getting a pitying sad face in return. as if a few pictures or mentions on the internet could begin to convey the depth of feeling behind that issue. i miss that kid every day, but also i am ok, and when i wasn't, you weren't there for me, you sad-face-pulling little finky bastard.

playing hooky? yes, please

i did the thing i should not do when making/saving money is the goal (which it is, naturally, and especially since i have a very special someone to visit as much as i can as soon as i can): i have skipped work today. ricardo's little warrior mother is going to have my scalp tomorrow. alas i care not. i have actually used my time wisely today and done many, many job applications because you know what, faceless internet? i am awesome. and i deserve a better job.

i mean, i hate to be my own cheerleader, but really! i am too awesome to sit around being an over-frustrated glorified babysitter. i have too much to offer the world to spend my days catering to the whims of a child who is more spoiled than autistic and for whom large doses of ritalin would help far more than i, in my infinite power, ever could.

so yeah. i've sent out about ten thousand resumes, at least a few of which should result in calls-back, and they are all or most for positions offering more hours and more relevant experience than what i am doing now. zut alors! i have high hopes.

i mean, maybe it is stupid to give in to discontent and search for or accept a new job when i'm just getting settled at the one i've got (which took forever to find, and feels like i've been there all my bloody life), especially when one considers that in the space of six months or so i plan to move my entire life three hundred miles to the north, in order to be nearer to not only my best friend and the larger quantity of my actual friends, but also nearer to the sweetest man i've ever met, whom i want to cover in kisses pretty much constantly, which desire is thwarted by the entire length of the state of california that lies between us currently. maybe it's stupid, but it's also so necessary if i am to avoid becoming the living dead.

speaking of friends, ahaha, wow, do i have a knack for befriending selfish and stupid people who like my ears and like validation but don't actually like being good friends or even interesting people! ah life. this is a recurring theme with me, starting up or staying in friendships that do not actual provide me any pleasure or benefit or actual... friendship. what would my therapist say about this? hahah yeah right. therapists are for idiots, and only occasionally for people with real problems.

see my heart, i decorate it like a grave

i have hit, officially, definitively, with a skull-crunching thud, the wall. The Wall, that is. the wall against which all is sound and fury, every motion a study in the futility of existence, every sigh and convulsively clenching fist a tragedy on a grand and minor scale simultaneously.

my life, my twenty four year old life, is like a hobo in tatters on the street corner, begging with tears in his eyes for change. while i have never been one to deny a hobo change, in fact being the sort of person who, if ever a hobo directed his tear-filled eyes at me, would give him every penny i had on me and maybe some jewelry too, despite the fact that costume jewelry and sterling silver probably wouldn't be too much help to a hobo, it is much, much harder to provide change for my own sad annoying little life.

in many ways, it has been like this ever since graduation. life after college is like hitting pause during a movie just as it was getting good- if you're anything like me, anyway. i studied history, i wrote a lot of papers, i enjoyed the hell out of learning stuff, and only occasionally, in moments of existential panic, worried about finding a career, much less a job, when the inevitable end came. history! no wonder my parents glower accusingly at me whenever talk of my college days come up. if it were up to them, i'd be in law school, having done pre-law, or med school, having done pre-med, or engineering, or computer science, or something ANYTHING useful and applicable to the real world. bastards. instead, here i am, 24, a smart kid, no doubt about it, lacking any useful knowledge or experience, incapable of imagining a day when going to work doesn't feel like a march towards the gallows, living at home again, suffocating.

i'm pretty sure that i'm actually chock-full of useful skills that have just never really had cause to see the light of day. i'm a good writer, this whiny, depressive blog aside, i am a terribly quick learner. being a virgo, i am in possession of an attention to detail that is almost a medical illness, it's so intense. being a hideously impatient person (except for when it counts, natch), i am efficient in whatever task i am assigned. i have customer service skills oozing out of every orifice, practically, i worked so long in retail (customer service skills being the ability to grin and bear it, and to say "have a nice day" in such a way that the recipient of this cheerful phrase understands it only subconsciously as "die in a thousand flaming fires"). i can talk to almost anyone, and be jovial, and make friends, to which my unlikely friendship with the jehova's witness girl at work can attest. i like to be busy, do well in high-stress situations, can speak three different languages, type reasonably fast, am ridiculously well-read for my age group, anyway, have opinions about almost everything, and a brain like a rusty steel trap, that gleans and synthesizes information from every angle. so what exactly is the problem here??

shitty economy aside, that is. useless degree aside also, that is. i should be working at something that involves brainpower and creativity. i should spend my days if not improving the human condition then at least feeling useful, like i contribute something good to the world, something amusing or informative or inspiring in some way. i should be surrounded by people with whom i have things in common! god, the idea of a job where i get to talk to adults all day long seems so far-off and unreachable. where would i like to work? i don't even know. yes, that is a lie. for started anyway, to get experience and contribute to something i enjoy fiercely, i would like to write. like for an independent newspaper, something like the l.a. weekly or something. i'd kill- KILL- to work at pixar. because, ok, they make children's movies. but they are children's movies that i LOVE love love love with a love that is more than love. pixar studios makes art, beautiful, accessible, art that makes me- and lots of other people- happy. if it meant i spent the day sharpening pencils for john lasseter, i would work at pixar and be happy as a clam in delicious delicious chowder. i would love to work in a library, the whole no library-science degree having aspect of myself aside, because i love libraries, love books, love people who read, and can spend a day happily wandering around organizing books, ordering books, recommending books, pointing a shotgun at conservatives who want to burn books, etc. etc. hmmm. that's starters, anyway.

i could spend the day running around some shitty paper's offices, the daily breeze, say, writing copy for local cake bakers, and still feel more fulfilled than i do now. i am too young for this shit. and too old, really. it's like julie powell wrote in 'julie/julia', about how for someone like her, and me, the options were either to spend her twenties working ridiculous hours at some soulless bigshot corporation, snorting coke and explosively fucking a variety of rich men, or living in a loft somewhere, making self-centered bullshit, calling it art, making lots of money, getting high, and explosively fucking a variety of slightly smellier rich men, but somehow she ended up married at 24, working as a temp til she was thirty, waiting for her ship to come the fuck in. jesus. i get no big-shot or artistic job and no explosive fucking. i may not be a temp, yet, but by golly do i relate to that girl.

why, life, do we only get answers once we no longer have need of them? what good is it going to do me to look back at my life in ten years and go, duhhhh, clearly that's what i needed to do (and hopefully i'll have done the right thing)? le sigh. it's back to craigslist for me, looking for a new job when what i need is a goddamned clue.

little expressionless animals

we were not meant to be. you and i, man and woman. i'm beginning to think that we don't even qualify as the same species, boys, except for the fact that we can reproduce with each other and in fact, must reproduce with each other if we are to reproduce at all- a cruel joke, that kind of dependency. it's truly a tragedy that men will never know what it feels like to be women, but i am certain that the reverse is not true: for a woman to step into a man's shoes is like a whale reverting back to its land form, a devolution of sorts. it would be like having gone from having human vision, in full color with cones and rods, to seeing the world in only sepia or gray tones, like some lesser creature than a dog or a pig. a millipede, maybe, some ugly, earth-tunneling, poisonous thing driven entirely by instinct and without capacity for higher things.

does it sound like i hate men? i only wish i did. mostly i am boggled by them, these hairy beasts that consume so much of my time and energy and sanity. i am boggled that i am expected by nature to associate with them, to spend time with them, have babies with them, depend on them, when i can't for the life of me begin to understand them or connect with them on any meaningful level. we are nothing alike, men and women. the basic facts of us can be the same, biologically and otherwise, meaning that on paper we might be a lot alike, but when you get down into it and can see this thing eye to eye, it is a totally fucked situation. i feel things. my actions are driven as much by my feelings as by my rational mind. men, sweet and lovely though they may pretend to be, do not feel things, and if they do feel things at all, it is negligible compared to the depth and breadth of my feelings, the feelings that all of my sex are more than capable of.

how is it that men have written the vastly larger part of our human cannon of love poetry and love stories and love songs? men, i am convinced, do not know what it is to love. when i love, when i care, like all the women i know, i do it wholeheartedly. lover, i think about you all the time, i think about how to make you happy, how you've made me happy, all those things which are specific to you that i enjoy and delight in. it's not obsession, this, it's just what it is for a woman to be in love: her lover is present to her even when he is not physically present. man, on the other hand, does not remember that woman exists unless she is in front of him, preferably naked, preferably prostrate- and if a thought of her flickers in his mind while she is not present, it is this tableau that it features, and is caused only because he is physically desirous of her physical presence and the opportunities it would present.

by virtue of our being carbon-based dna-replication machines, sex is important, i get it. sex is great, sex is fun and fantastic, etc. etc. sex is why we exist, as in: we wouldn't exist without it, and we exist so that we might do it, frequently, and make babies, etc. etc. sex boggles, because why should the two halves of the species interpret the goddamned thing so differently? physical intimacy is nothing like the real thing- a thing i am beginning to doubt actually exists at all- but god doesn't it feel like it? in these sexually liberated times of ours, the womanly tendency to develop feelings out of what is ostensbily purely sexual interaction is a highly ridiculed institution, but why should it be? because i woman, feel close to you, man, because i have opened myself up for our mutual pleasure, because i have committed with you an act of supreme closeness- allowing part of you to enter me, risking pregnancy by you, risking disease from you, whatever precautions we might take- because my feelings (chemically mandated, affected also in part by society, which you, my pigman, have controlled and shaped) elevate this act of biology to something higher, consciously or not, and because to you it is a mere scratching of an itch, an urge on par with passing gas, why should my attitude be ridiculed and your baseness go unnoticed?

you, man, are not evolved highly enough to deserve a crumb of attention from even the stupidest, basest, emotional void of a woman, because even she is capable of a tenderness that you could never recognize or appreciate, much less replicate.

the crux of the matter is our lack of control. why should we think about you, why should we pine for you, why should we waste one breath cursing your name, knowing what we do- that you aren't thinking about us, that we don't exist to you the way nothing exists to a cow in the field besides the grass and the dirt, certainly not the sky or the birds or the god of love or anything that isn't grass and dirt and shit? we shouldn't, but we certainly can't help that we do. beyond you we may be, but not beyond these damnable laws of nature that wired our chemistry to respond to yours, to desire yours, to transmute basic chemical signals into ridiculously overwrought symphonic orchestras of feelings and thoughts. ridiculously out of proportion, that is, ridiculously wasted. a shame, really.