At work, I get so bored sometimes that I imagine weird groups of people who don't know each other but know me showing up for dinner reservations. Friends from different places, professors, ex-boyfriends, store clerks, musicians. They'd be meeting each other there for the first time maybe, most of them anyway. and then eating dinner together. What would they order? What would they talk about? Who would get the most shitfaced and who would sit there in uncomfortable silence, unsure what to do? What hilarious hijinks would ensue? Etc. That reminds me: I wanna have a potluck dinner with a bunch of unlikely people. The last time I tried that, with a group of likely people, three out of six people brought some sort of bread.

Notes to self.

“For Kierkegaard, resolution and transformation come ultimately when despair in all stages is overcome through a leap of faith. In this leap one accepts at the same time one’s weakness and one’s strength, the intermixture of the finite and infinite realms in being human, and the realization that human beings must move between the opposites rather than identifying with an absolute.”

“What is really required to relate to one’s mystery is to discriminate objectively what one’s own potentialities and limitations really are and to actualize their synthesis. “

I am kind of embarrassed to say what book this is from because the title is just so...but whatever, it's called The Wounded Woman by Linda Schierse Leonard and it's all about female issues from a Jungian perspective. I don't really know all that much about Jung, having been indoctrinated in Freud and all. While I'm still pretty much a Freudian, Jungians use some good metaphors and have super fun online personality tests (I'm an INFP, the Architect). Anyway, that passage is pretty good, eh? Not only does it offer a snappy review of some stuff I forgot from Intro to Philosophy six years ago -- shit, how'd that happen? all that time just going by like that -- but I believe it. I've been trying to figure out a whole mess of things for a long time and have sought a variety of outside sources for help/advice/direction/etc. You could say it's more of a crisis of philosophy rather than a defect of anxiety. And sure, a lot of things out there are horrible, but there's a way to make it better and not live in thrall to the things you hate. While nothing will ever all fit neatly in a little philosophical handbasket, I think ol' Soren was right.


"You're getting old like you've lived."

That's a probably inaccurate quote from Jan Wolkers, poorly translated from the original Dutch and thus likely skewering the original meaning, so I suppose you could attribute it to me. Jan Wolkers was a really cool guy and I found out about him by chance after seeing one of his book covers and wondering what it said and what it was all about. The title in English is Spun Sugar. I can't find a copy of the book but someday I will (maybe even this week) and I'll struggle through reading it and tell you what it's all about.

Anyway, something to think about, "you're getting old like you've lived". It has a nice, bizarre sort of feel to it with the odd syntax of someone whose first language isn't English. I think there's truth to it. How do you live? We've gotta think about that from time to time, as sentient beings, with vastly more options than eating bugs and evading predators, though we do that as well sometimes. There's more to it than eat-fight-fuck-die (though reality television viewing may lead one to believe otherwise). But we've still got lizard brains, instinct. What's your instinct? What drives you, from the murky depths of your subconscious? What conflicts do you struggle with? What sucks about your life and how much of that is you not knowing any better and you knowing better but letting it suck? What do you want? It's hard to get what you want when you don't know what that is. It's hard to know what you want when you're too scared. But if you live scared and worried about things you can't control and allow yourself to be willfully blinded to the options, you'll get old that way pretty fast. Of course, it's hardly easy to come to that conclusion, and much more difficult to believe it.

Aside from Manhattan's ominous, glowing towers of boxes which give me major creeps on some visceral level, like 'how could one live this way', New York's alright. I held it in contempt for awhile, though not out of some misplaced love for Boston nor that delusional, rabid fanaticism that comes with affiliation for organized sports teams. I walked up to Herald Square in a sort of daze, exhausted as I can hardly sleep before I go traveling somewhere. It was just so funny to me, this oddly placid island of relative calm amidst the rush. I sat at this little table and just sort of spaced out, looking around at all the buildings and the world gliding by and started to understand a little bit of what people might love so fiercely about this place until I was interrupted by one of those palm reader hacks with some wack ass Eastern European accent. I have trouble getting those sort of people shilling bullshit away from me. Fortunately Kim called at that point which afforded me an escape.

I didn't really get anything done but that's the point of a vacation, I suppose. Though most of what I've been doing the past few months has been "not doing" so uh, I don't know, but that's the past now. I saw people who I haven't seen in awhile which was great. Positive vibes and good dreams.

If you want comfort you should give up learning;
If you desire to acquire learning you should abandon comfort.
How can a person who wants comfort acquire learning?
And how can a person who wants to learn enjoy comfort?
- Sanskrit proverb

Another day of hustling out applications. Real cool times.

I interviewed for a generic office position in this labyrinthine office park complex this morning. It went well but I'm not going to get that particular position. And really, nor do I particularly want to mold myself into the sort of person who would be the right fit for that. Can't jam a tetrahydral peg into a pinhole, I suppose.

So the search for a job that doesn't make me want to jump off the Tobin yet also affords me enough money to move out and not starve remains ongoing. All sorts of things are up for consideration. So, I spend hours staring at my laptop screen, my eyes disintegrating from the light as well as the content. Man, I can't even believe how much horrible shit is out there and that people spend their lives doing it. Are they really that boring that they don't mind living and working in the equivalent of an ant maze doing a job that will be outsourced to either the third world or a "friendly" robot within the next few years? Why there is so much completely unfulfilling and ultimately pointless bullshit out there is something too frustrating to ponder further. The vast majority of what society has constructed to maintain an artificial consumer class is fucking horrible. I'm making myself sick here. Well, I suppose once saddled with dependents and a mortgage and things of that ilk, one's concerns tend to shift away from "intellectual stimulation" and "personal growth" and "fulfilling life experience" and "doing something awesome that is actually enjoyable rather than a suicidal gesture" towards the more banal but still important "being responsible and shit", etc. Rather than continue to contemplate that vicious infinite regress of that particular hell and ponder ways to join its discontents, I'm also considering more bohemian ventures that would allow me to be less tied down to any particular position such as nude modeling. I reckon that perhaps it will help me overcome my various and sundry vagina monologues-quality body image issues. Contradicting myself, I also just applied to a finance job. Which, for females, may as well be nude modeling. I feel as though I should have some sort of ideological opposition to that industry as a whole, but at least some of those guys don't even pretend that they're just shuffling around made up things. Trading "futures" up in the shiny glass box tower somewhere in the financial district is merely few steps in prestige and degree attainment above rolling dice in the alley below. I have a feeling that whatever I just applied for is not actually a job but the equivalent of a fishing lure -- one of those too weird and too good to be true jobs made up by staffing agencies in the financial district to actually attract folks like me in for soul pulverizing temp positions doing the most inane tasks in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire for barely above minimum wage. Fuuuuuck that. I bet they won't even call back!

How's that for a positive mental attitude? Eh, I've been trying to work on it.



This is from 2005 I'm fairly sure. I was looking at it last night and thinking "Man, how could you have ever thought you sucked?"

I retrieved my Richard Brautigan books from storage in the garage and got another one, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings. Three in a row from when he was 21:

nothing new

There
is
nothing new
under the sun
except
you and me.



the eternal she

I gave
a girl my soul.

She looked at it.

Smiled faintly.

And dropped
it into the gutter.

Casually.

God! she had class.



a young man

Surely goodness
and mercy
shall follow me
all the days
of my life,
and I will dwell
in the house
of the Lord
forever, if the
rent isn't too high.

Mattieu Laurette

Sometimes I wonder (when contemplating life post-my shitty current job and post-student loans, that is):
Do I want to just earn a ton of money to be respectable? For power? "Money corrupts" -- why is that? Because you need to stoop to skeezy means in order to accumulate vast sums of it? And what's it all for anyway? What would I even do if I suddenly had a lot of it?

(Oh come on, that's easy, everyone knows I'd just buy a town in New Zealand and build some weird stuff in it)

Sure, you could play these all at once in order to compact the amount of time it takes to feel the posi vibes, but I wouldn't recommend it. Take your time, take your time, take your time. I'm taking mine and biding time.

There's something about New England that's just totally crushing. It's not so much the Puritanical mores, rabid love of boring sports (except hockey), or its generally aggressively unfriendly denizens that's got me down -- it's the fucking horrible weather. I've got this condition and I've got it bad. Of course there's a German word for it. Fernweh, literally "an ache for the distance". How great is that?

Even though a vast area of Australia is kind of totally fucked right now, Sydney looks like this!! I wish it were at least warm enough outside to wear that and jump around taking self-portraits. But nah, not in New England. All narrow, unplowed one-way streets and black ice and frozen slush filled sidewalks (if there are sidewalks at all) lined with Shaq-high snow banks around these parts. It's gonna be gross for at least the next two months. It's got me entertaining batshit-crazy thoughts like moving to Texas. Which uh, also has snow, but Jared tells me it was warm enough last week to wear shorts. See, I don't want for all that much. Just to walk around skimpily dressed and not die of hypothermia and to sit outside eating hemp milk ice cream. (Ew how precious does that sound, but for real it is so good).

But nah, unless I spontaneously come across a cash windfall, for now:

current interests:
Talking to Kim, pouting
I've certainly been better, though not recently.






this photo by Troy Stains


reading yr book












What is this bullshit? Am I in art school now or something?

"Somebody once said to me that cartoonists are people with a good creative gift that are scared of failure as painters, so they make it comedic." - John Lennon

lewd, crude, & rude dudes







Lauren (miss you to the max)