Tibet.

My last computer access for quite some time.
I'm leaving for a six-week service project in rural Sichuan in five hours.
I find myself at the cusp of something thrilling and daunting. I don't know if I can handle it. I have such crises of faith.

I took a walk with a good friend today and we talked about the momentum of life. I find my life to be like a book to which I constantly forget the opening chapters. But once I spend time remembering the beginning, I've already lost track of what's actually happening. So much to wrap a mind around.

The point is that we learn something from everything, so I need to think about everything.

Reflection, reflection, reflection. Then, when I get back here, I will right some wrongs, make a few important decisions, be a better person. Good, solid plan.

How to fix a depressed person.

You can't.
You can try all you want, but you can't.

Damn it.

Writing: thoughts.

I had lunch with one of my favorite professors today, at a pretty popular Latin American café about five minutes walking distance from campus. She always asks me about my future in English, and I never know what to say to her: graduate school is so difficult (and not lucrative), but fiction writing isn't anything to hang your hat on--but maybe if I went to law school first and learned how to fend for myself in this big bad world and then went for my MFA?

Future's wide open. What I want most of all is to be published: She told me about her first published story, then about her slow journey upward--publication in The Kenyon Review, then being contacted by some random publisher to do a collection of short stories, then being reviewed in The New York Times, etc. etc. If only talent were so guaranteed, but more and more I really do think it's all just a matter of taste and whether or not someone important has the same aesthetic sense as you.

So maybe what I really need to do is develop my aesthetic, which is to say: develop myself. (It always comes back to this.) Do some experimenting. I admire my professor for her fearlessness--she told me about sending a snarky letter to an editor that hadn't gotten back to her about her work (only to find an acceptance letter in her mailbox that same day), but I'm far too timid for my own good.

I know right now exactly what sort of story I want to write (think: the emotional restraint of "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead," with the same undertone of disgust/calculated insouciance--taking my cues from Stars), but I don't know if I could pull it off. It'd be a perverse little thing, but that's how I like them.

God that was strange to see you again:
Introduced by a friend of a friend,
Smiled and said "Yes I think we've met before."
In that instant it started to pour.
Captured a taxi despite all the rain,
We drove in silence across Pont Champlain.
And all of the time you thought I was sad,
I was trying to remember your name.

♫ "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" (Stars, Set Yourself On Fire)

Autonomy.

Actively changing my lifestyle has been so good for me. Not that I've changed much, but I think I've changed the most important parts. And -- I just realized this -- maybe it hasn't even been perceptible to anyone else but myself?

But I think most of the time what I need most is to know that I have control of the situation, regardless of observable circumstances.

There are many vague sentiments that I often believe life can be boiled down to, if we could ever reduce existence:

• Control
• Power
• Love
• Empathy
• Beauty
• Truth
• Self-knowledge
• Security
• Fear

These theories are, of course, all mutually exclusive, but I think I believe one of them at all times. How to avoid reductive thought? Can't.

Melancholia.

A phrase from my heresy class this semester that won't leave me alone/needs to be turned into something:

"a creeping empty glory."

Reminds me of:

Are the beating drums,
celebration guns,
the thunder and the laughter--
the last thing they remember?

(x many many repetitions)

♫ "Celebration Guns" (Stars, Set Yourself On Fire)

Utensils.

Today's Poem-A-Day:

Utensils
Richard O. Moore

An available palette thickened by air
words I hold and so fast lose.

A thunder so low       an inaudible present       its slow
cycles place me shaking in its throat.

Stare       and beauty opens like a work of fire
a made thing       a connection must be made.

This is to say necessity is a place made all of stares
come beauty       come the final ruin of the world. Stop   :

for what it may be       or was       a burned-in-after-flash of fire
over distance measured light years. The glamour of it all.

Friendship fatigue.

I grow tired of the people I know here -- so much that I find myself in the same building as they are but strategically avoiding them. Or even in the same room with headphones staunchly secured in my ears. I like not knowing what to expect from people, and I know exactly what to expect from these people.

I'm listening to an installment of This American Life about getting over the people in your life: relationships, mostly, but also just the idea of dynamics changing, the re-navigation of an emotional map. Recalibrating distance.

It's not just people here, though -- it's everyone I think I know well. I had a fight with my closest friend from high school yesterday, about something trivial, and after the fact I realized that I'd actually picked the fight so I could tell myself he no longer knew me anymore the way he used to in twelfth grade.

The perversity of this strikes me as surprising, especially given my otherwise incorrigible romanticism. After reading thirteen Shakespeare plays this semester, I now realize that I will never like comedy as long as it mocks true love or anyone who believes in true love. But the emotional involvement necessary for romantic love far exceeds that which is expected in friendship, and I can't even muster the patience for friendship.

Paradox, paradox -- I'm sure some consistency underlies this inner conflict, but I'm not sure I need to figure it out. Instead, I'll look forward to the summer: new cultures, then something like peace and quiet in Durham.

Shakespeare.

Note never to take a huge English lecture again.
Have definitely learned lesson: class structure so much more important than class content. More important than professor as well.

Will sleep when dead.

Infinite finite infinite finite infinite.

Must resist Tumblr-esque urges in the future.

Leontes.

I have too much believed mine own suspicion:
. . . Apollo, pardon
My great profaneness 'gainst thine oracle!
I'll reconcile me to Polixenes;
New woo my queen; recall the good Camillo,
For, being transported by my jealousies
To bloody thoughts of revenge, I chose
Camillo for the minister to poison
My friend Polixenes: which had been done,
But that good mind of Camillo tardied
My swift command, though I with death and with
Reward did threaten and encourage him,
Not doing it and being done . . . how he glisters
Thorough my rust! and how his piety
Does my deeds make the blacker!

In Act III, Scene II, you will always make the same, stupid, useless speech.
No matter how many times I read the play: this ever-recurring realization of an irreparable mistake.
Leontes, you son of a bitch, you.

Criticism.

A comprehensive list of all my current flaws:

1. Academics: I still don't know how to handle these well. In high school, the stress defined my existence. I never feel as tethered to anything as I do to my grades. This is unhealthy, but how do I undo years of conditioning?
2. Fear: goes along with academics, but may be an even more deep-seated issue. I worry, doubt, existentialize -- have been this way since the age of seven (rough estimate). I overreact and very easily succumb to myopia. I become irritable and petulant, lose intellectual curiosity, constantly feel unworthy, hate the future, have the constant urge to read Nietzsche. A philosophical weakness?
3. Toxicity: starts unnoticed, grows. Must keep a look-out for these cancerous tendencies, avoid resentment. Too many friendships have soured as a result of negligence to underlying annoyances.
   
4. Caprice: I might actually have no real opinions about anything. 'Nuff said.
5. Emotionality: cripples me from time to time, to my chagrin.
6. Independence: obnoxious. I balk at expectations, idealize apathy. I'm not yet brave enough to risk anything substantial on anyone.
   
7. Morality: Mine is very fluid, hardly consistent, and might even be so flimsy as to be nonexistent.
8. Love: a habit developed during young impressionability and never broken, a maladaptive instinct fed by romantic ideals but which actually contradicts the rest of my impulses. In combination with my volatility, this is what I distrust the most about myself. May be aesthetically appealing, but only in the most perverse sense and at the expense of my autonomy.
9. Stubbornness: momentary conviction about everything, despite long-term fickleness. In conversation, I never give ground. Unpleasant and unproductive.
10. Honesty: layers that I will never figure out.
11. Self-interest: thinly veiled.
    
12. Family: I pay lip service to family, but I ran away as soon as I had the chance, and I never call. How stupidly typical.

Others pending. Could add so many more. But I guess it can't be helped.

New: experiences.

Spoke too soon.

Always make me question my fundamental nature.

Instead, though: Shouldn't I just realize that I have no fundamental nature?
(Or no tangibly fundamental nature, that is.)

Something chameleonic about the state of things that excites/unnerves me. Lately have noticed how much I hate obligation, expectation, repetition. Wrestling with the idea that maybe I'm not so good at people -- at the real activity of people, that is: following through, patience, similar arguments couched in similar terms, "working" through issues.

Beginnings better than ends.

Ought I devote energy to fixing this about myself? Again: fundamental nature, or lack of maturation? Which, which?