Nothing really makes sense.

I decided to ride my emotions to their ends instead of trying to moderate them. I have so many. I understand (so much more than I did before) what Foer meant when he wrote one of his characters' childhoods in these terms:

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.

I spent my life learning to feel less.

Every day I felt less.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

I don't remember the page number, but the book is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and I think that I could be that girl, crying about everything tiny, acutely feeling the small tragedy of existing at all.

I think I wrote a paper to this effect once, but I don't remember any of it, and I don't think I meant then the extent of what I mean now.

It's difficult. I want to cry about so much--even the rustling of paper, even the silence between and question and its response, even the green of my copy of Mrs. Dalloway because it is such a vibrant lime-chartreuse, because the front of the cover is rough and the inside is smooth and---

Doesn't really make sense. I know, I know, I know, I know. But still I believe myself, the way I believe Woolf when she wrote these thoughts for Mrs. Dalloway:

Big Ben struck the half-hour.

How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching to see the old lady (they had been neighbours ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell, making the moment solemn. She was forced, so Clarissa imagined, by that sound, to move, to go--but where? Clarissa tried to follow her as she turned and disappeared, and could still just see her white cap moving at the back of the bedroom. She was still there, moving about at the other end of the room. Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that's the miracle, that's the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of draws to dressing-table. She could still see her. And the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn't believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

The page number for that is 140-141, but maybe only in the Penguin Popular Classics edition--in any case, "here was one room; there another." What could Woolf possibly have meant by that, and yet I think I get it (if only in my own personal way), and yet it seems so plausible--Mrs. Dalloway's thought.

I'm just overwhelmed, I think, not that I can really justify it. Just: Colors. Eating. Gravity. Expectations. Glances. Age. A room next to another. How can it all be possible? And my emotions--the melancholy of a lazy afternoon, the delight of a brother singing off-key.

I am so influenced by the literature I read.

Embodiment.

Realizing more and more that I have intensely physical reactions to my emotions, becoming more aware of the whole mind-body phenomenon. After emotional trauma, I can't fully fall asleep for days -- a bizarre insomnia that somehow keeps me more awake and alert instead of tiring me out. Nowadays whenever I think of a memory that still bothers me or the imminence of the future, I feel queasy. When something exciting happens I find it more and more difficult to restrain myself -- the enthusiasm just kind of tumbles out of me.

Today I was at lab running my fifteenth PCR of the day and in a sudden bout of existential stress, I ran to the bathroom and stood gagging over one of the sterile white toilet bowls. I could control neither my thoughts nor my nausea, and in some way they were the same. I'm always perplexed, even in the moment, by how the world warps around me -- how stark, how unfriendly it seems all at once.

As a perversity, I tell myself to believe that my physical and emotional identities are collapsing in on each other, until I become nothing more than a passing ambience in the air. This is gimmickry, I know, but I'm good at entertaining such bombast. I like to think that I'm falling apart, peeling and crumbling like an aging Venetian building. It reminds me of Professor Moten's scholarly aestheticism, to which he is monkishly devoted. Or maybe of Professor Ruderman engrossed in D.H. Lawrence scholarship in her carrel somewhere in the corner of Perkins Library.

Sucks.

A problem that the Romantics noticed and a problem that I am just now becoming extremely familiar with: emotions are awesome but capricious. They don't answer to anybody. They're inconvenient, sulky messes, and they have no obligation to you.

If I could always maintain a specific mood for as long as I wanted, I would be satisfied. But as it stands I am buffeted by my own moods like nobody's business. Sometimes I don't even feel fully human anymore, because there's just so much I'm conscious of lacking. And then I'm given to writing trite and rambling pieces, and I can tell my work is not good enough, and I can tell I've been completely paralyzed by my own volatility gone wrong.

Logic, to me, has always seemed like a distraction from the underlying emotionality of the universe. It's a very useful distraction, for sure, but somehow not natural, not quite organic. It's a fundamentally unreasonable creature trying to reign in what it fears most about itself. But hiding never helps anything.

Emotional fluidity.

Last night I spent a good amount of time considering the validity of sociopathy.

Others would perhaps hesitate to couch it in such terms, but here's what I mean: a layer of defense from even the closest of friends, a portion of yourself to be squirreled away for no one else to see, autonomy in any social situation, a reversibility of commitment to everyone.

Now I regret my words, because such a disregard toward humanity isn't defensive so much as it is necessary and instinctive. It means a certain impervious attitude that prevents defense from even being up for debate. It's subtle, difficult to detect--not sinister, really, but hard, in the way that gemstones are chiseled yet transparent.

I imagine myself to be a pretty emotional person at times, because I cry more than I should, because I make close friends easily, because I idealize vulnerability and deep human connection.

But.

Is it Nietzschean of me to think that at a certain level of emotional intelligence, people become flat? They become repetitive, predictable, manageable. Granted, they also become infinitely more interesting, but only after the recognition of their characteristics as just that: characteristics. Varied, intricate, captivating . . . but not affecting, in the end.

I make human interaction an intellectual exercise.

I admit this because though I know it to be socially unacceptable (or at the very least a little too telling, a little too eerie to be flippant), though I know my own ideals of spiritual openness and unconditional love, I feel an even deeper apathy toward my own apathy. Or maybe I'm even being pompous about it, because I have the horrible urge, sometimes, to laugh at tragedy, to ridicule the emotional climax of a story, to approach cruelty with curiosity instead of with fear--

It makes humanity easier to study. And it makes it easier for me to feign (feign?) something which I know I am not. Ultimately I am most interested in fluidity, in the ability to get in, get out, and move on.

I don't mean to villanize myself, only to question motives. I'm not a mercenary; I'm just a dilettante.