What makes you think I enjoy being led to the flood?

(Apologies in advance for length and lack of structure. In other words, this is a self-indulgent, three-a.m. ramble.)

Wow. Became incoherent for a while, so must backtrack. Think again. I reached the clarity of having found conclusions during my run today, so I think I’ve made at least some sense of all of this.

First of all, the title of this post is a lyric from a song by The National. It doesn’t exactly sum up what I mean, but in a way it captures the resignation I feel about much of this topic. And I just find myself playing it over and over again, the way I do with new song obsessions.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t spend the majority of this weekend with my soul curled up in a fetal position, bawling my eyes out. I’ve needed it for a while, but the imperative to stay strong has always kept my guard up. But around certain people . . .

This is complicated. I had an ex-boyfriend visit this weekend. I guess this can be viewed as unwise, but we’d talked about it for weeks, and we’re both in between relationships, so under the rules of modern social conduct, it was as allowable as anything else.

I know that I should probably choose my company more wisely – inviting exes back into one’s life is generally frowned upon. But he’s never really left my life, and I don’t want him to. Terrible, terrible things have happened between us, and at times I thought I’d never speak to him again.

But. I’ve honestly never been as vulnerable around anyone else, and I doubt I will ever be. It’s a byproduct of having spent so much time growing together. So much of us is relatable, instantly understandable. And I wanted more than anything else not to have to explain.

In any case. In any case, what I needed was to spend a weekend with someone familiar, to remember at least a little of my previous confidence. What I needed was to drink and to cry, and then to drink some more, and then to feel sick in the middle of the night, and then to wake up completely disoriented and unable to remember what was so sad the night before – call it a twenty-first-century catharsis?

When people drink, their worst fears end up manifesting themselves in garbled clichés. I’m convinced everyone at their core has one of many generic insecurities. Which makes mine boring as hell, but also completely true for the time being – I was told that while whimpering pathetically on Friday night, I asked questions to the tune of “Am I actually a good person?” and “How do I know my life is worth living?”

Such age-old anxieties, I know, but I confess that they’re painfully accurate. Other people worry about being alone, about failure, about talent. Right now, my problem with my existence is so fundamental that I can say only this: I can’t understand how I became this person that I am. I can’t comprehend or support my own decisions. I feel conflicted about every choice I make.

This weekend, while we watched countless episodes of How I Met Your Mother, I tried so hard to adopt the emotional physics of the sitcom. And when we watched Rushmore, I fell in love (as I always do) with Wes Anderson’s understanding of life: so shitty, yet so uplifting by the end of every one of his movies.

I want to see existence the way Anderson does. I want to believe what he believes.

It’s such a struggle right now for me to make my mind up about even small aspects of my day. I’ve been grappling with this since last winter and I just don’t. know. what’s. wrong. I refuse to believe it’s just another bout of teenage-like angst. I want to think that it’s my real coming-of-age, when I learn to appreciate everything about my existence after all.

Was it a mistake to have him over? At first I felt a sort of bombastic shame about the whole ordeal, but I don’t anymore. Instead, I seriously think that nostalgia can be revitalizing, that maybe Lawrence was right about sex after all, that the transition between serious and casual isn’t quite so difficult to navigate.

Plus (and maybe this is what is the most important realization to me), I’m just sick of wondering what is expected of me in these situations. I’m so good at obligation, at should and ought – such a Thinking type that I try to squash what I’m Feeling. I’ve gotten in so much trouble for that, jumping into any romantic opportunity I think should work out despite my hesitations. And then staying in because I think the sort of person I want to be would be capable of dealing with it.

God, I should just listen to my instincts. Isn’t that the entire problem in the first place!?

In high school, one of my close friends decided to write me a series of puppy love letters, even though I was already in a relationship. And instead of doing what I felt – which would have involved being creeped out, getting the fuck out, and letting this inconvenience go – I was so overwhelmed by how nice and kind and earnest this boy was that I thought I owed him something. And I couldn’t extricate myself.

Yesterday I got a late-night phone call from a close friend that was so similar in sentiment that the phrase “eternal recurrence” flashed through my mind as I sat in the parking lot of my apartment complex, flabbergasted. Same nice, earnest, completely deserving guy. Same nothingness from me.

Later, I realized the situation wasn’t as dire as I thought. But it’s still not the best. What in me invites declarations of love from my closest friends? (Especially when I'm in the middle of considering myself so irredeemably foolish?) For a few minutes I actually thought it was my duty to love him. As though anything like this could be forced.

I’ve obviously not fully learned my lesson. I can’t feel bad about this. But even now the guilt is creeping up on me. And I think I should want what I don’t.

Ugh. This weekend I learned about myself that I can handle casual encounters relatively well (minus the crying jags, which are probably not permanent). Except what I think I should do is throw myself into a relationship the way I have for the past five years. Great.

Not now. Not now. Not when I actually literally have no idea what I’m doing with myself. Not when I really feel like using this period of my life to get myself together. I'm not scared of being unsure. I'm scared of not making my own choices.

I’m going to borrow a line from Jake & Amir, which I’ve also overindulged in this weekend. Instead of stressing about what I ought to do in situations like these, I’m going to go to bed and wake up tomorrow and make myself a big, nice helping of NOT GIVIN’ A SHIT.

Sexuality.

Here we go. I've spent outrageous amounts of time talking about sexuality these past few days. People come home from college with stories about random hook-ups, or random friends with random hook-ups.

It bothers me to no end that I'm bothered by these tales, that I get squeamish when close friends give me detailed accounts of their sexual exploits, even though (or especially because?) I ask them for all the grimy specifics. It feels illicit somehow, to sit in a park where I've attended high school English class--to sit there and discuss such obviously "grown-up" things. I push myself to reveal information that I know I would have taken to my grave a year ago. The words seem strange coming out of my mouth, I feign nonchalance, I grit my teeth and tell myself it's important to shed such moral pretensions.

This is related, I guess, to D.H. Lawrence's conception of pornography and obscenity as "the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it" (quoted from his 1929 essay on the topic--always a good read, and very telling of Lawrence's general outlook). Anything "dirty" is only so because of the way we approach it, because we want to hate it and hide it behind closed doors. It's shameful only because we're ashamed, because we force an element of impropriety onto it, not because it's inherently disgraceful.

Definitely, of course, in high school, sexuality was a horrible, horrible desire that we avoided in discussion. Or rather, we avoided discussing it until the lights were out and we were in someone's bedroom telling secrets. In the dark, we could say things we wouldn't have said during the day -- but isn't that what Lawrence was talking about? Hiding, secrecy, not admitting to certain parts of ourselves. . . . Now it all seems so sadly tragic, the fact that we were too repressed to recognize our own dishonesty.

Anyway, we're all older now, more "liberated," staunch about our acceptance of physical desires. And yet I still find myself cringing when I realize how incredibly fast these "mature" relationships move. I can't help but have a very visceral reaction to promiscuity. Why, why, why? How could my socially-imposed morality have become such an instinct? --How do I make it go away? Ideally, I would actually be casual about all of it; realistically, part of me still wonders if maybe I wasn't better off innocent and prepubescent. It's cognitive dissonance at its best, I guess. I just wish I didn't feel so awkward about both perspectives.

Closer.

I'm massively fatigued due to an international flight, but I will forget everything if I don't remember it now.

The 2004 film Closer boasts an all-star cast and a plot so psychologically twisted as to be inscrutable. I've seen it twice now but have come to differing conclusions both times.

Clive Owen's character is at once animalistically sexual and brutally honest--I think that if we are to sympathize with any of the movie's characters, we would have to root for him. He's tough, he's real. He doesn't skirt around issues of infidelity. He doesn't hide behind false modesty. There's something admirable in that, right?--even in the crude way he approaches human intimacy, in his fits of violent rage?

Maybe. Meanwhile, I kind of wish we could all be Natalie Portman, and we could all giggle and make bold assumptions of permanence and innocence. Why is she a stripper? What is there in her commodification of sexuality that allows her to idealize romance so? (Some random critic says that her vitality brings out both the best and worst in her costars, but I'm not sure if this is true. It seems more to me that her simplicity is easy for others to essentialize.)

--And Julia Roberts and her martyr complex, Jude Law the obscure and sometimes all-too-witting romantic-hero freak with moral pretenses shoved up his ass. These people are so complex that I can't make any sweeping generalizations of anything, but I would like so badly to dissect their characteristics and make sense of the "subtext." All I know is that it's a movie about deception vs. honesty, love, sexual politics. Things are cruel, but life is cruel, and splayed out on the screen, human nature is not much better than animal nature (perhaps even worse in its potential for duplicity?).

"Have you seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood!" -- what Clive Owen says to Jude Law, pityingly. We are all flesh and blood, flesh and blood and passion and pain. Writers like Law might try to make things better, smooth over the edges, but art (so we are told by both Portman and Owen) is a lie. It makes ugly things beautiful. Closer isn't a beautiful movie, but its atavism and its cruelty are both much more intriguing than beauty could ever be.