this is where we look for things

Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries

2.25.01 - 7:51:20

ok, so i read someone's newest entry today and it was all like, dude, the profile thing is so cool. and i notice neat things. like the way their examples for fave movie, author, and band are blahblahblah, which are like, totally what i have listed as MY favorites!!! ok, chiquita estupida, they use the entries from the fields you've filled out in your profile. no, you are NOT 'just that cool.'

la gente estupida me molesta mucho.

so we have a spanish test tomorrow. it's so weird having to do work for this class. like, we never had to work for rafael. and yet somehow, i think i learned some spanish anyway. we're learning tons of tenses all at once now. it gets confusing. sometimes i wonder if it's possible to get by communicating entirely in the present tense. ooh, and gerunds. i do like those gerund constructions.

do you know what we are thinking about today? we are thinking about sureties in life. and how really, there aren't any. we are thinking about the way you just don't believe things sometimes, even though you may hear it over and over and over again from a hundred different people, because even though you often want to believe it, you just can't. can't.

did you know i just recently discovered that shift-tab takes you back to the last field you were in? man, i wish i'd known this years ago. i can't believe i didn't.

anyway. but there's this moment sometimes, and it's like, the thing, the thing that you've been hearing, the thing that can't/won't penetrate your consciousness, the thing that you so want to believe, it blinks. or you blink. and suddenly you know you have to believe it because if you don't, you'll go crazy.

"if i were president, i would put more money into education."

"because?"

"because i think it's like, a good thing"

no, that's actually an excerpt from the conversation the loud talkers beside me are having.

back to me. why is it so much easier to believe in other people than it is so believe in yourself? i wake up every morning and i have to tell myself that one day it will all be ok, because really, how do you go on living without some sense of that in you? but it's so hard to convince myself because i can see the way i move through time and i'm looking at the walls and they're the same walls that they were yesterday and the same walls that they will be tomorrow and it's true, i'm creative enough. but maybe it takes more imagination to create a future that's always the same as the now than it does to create one that grows and changes like it's supposed to. so yes. it scares me and i turn that picture off and i start repeating it to myself, 'it has to get better, it will get better, it can't NOT get better...everything will be ok.' because you can't get out of bed without saying it, even if you don't know really believe it the way you want to. but when i think about other people i care about and i see them hurting, i know that there are certainties in the world, but they're the kind you can't hold on to because when i take them out of my head i realize that they don't have skeletons and the shape now is not a shape and then it is not exactly nothing, but not anything that is something. because it didn't have bones. i'm staring at my hand now and examining all the bones and tendons and ligaments and joints and thinking about the bones falling out, the ligaments tearing, the tendons lonely for their bones, the joints, gone with the bones. they've done two hand transplants now. it's amazing, but listen. i don't want robots in my brain, ok. i really don't. not now, not ever.

the certainty. the absolute knowledge that i love you and somehow that means that "it will be ok." i've felt it a hundred times. bad things happen to good people. often. and every time i know. i will never say that it has to get better because it can't get any worse. because we don't even have any conception of what "the worst" is. i read a book when i was 12 where "the worst" was hiding in the shadows behind a log cabin and watching a group of american indians scalp your entire family. i would get very close to saying that might be the worst. but really. you never know. sometimes when i'm most upset i feel this sudden blast of euphoria because i think, it HAS to get better, it can't POSSIBLY get worse. but it does. inevitably. i think it's like it hears me and interprets it like a dare. so i've quit. i've given up. and i don't ever tell it to other people because i know how it feels to be wrong, again and again and again. you can't keep thinking it because it'll drive you into the ground.

that's why you switch to "everything will be ok...in the end." the funny thing is that i really have no idea what ok means. alan shapiro told us in class tuesday that the only pleasure a writer will ever get from writing is in the writing itself. that the bar is always being raised. that being published only raises your standards. that publishing a book only whets your appetite for more. that winning an award or two or five or a hundred will never make you happy. that the pleasure you get from other people's approval is empty and unfulfilling. unless you write for other people and then it's just not right and you shouldn't be a writer. or you're not. but the writing. the process. at the desk or on the balcony or at the museum or on the swing or in bed or on the floor or wherever you are when you're creating, making this living thing, this art, that's the feeling, the joy of it, and that has to be enough. but how could it not be enough, especially when you know exactly what to do to bring it back, again and again and again?

previous - next

about me - read my profile! read other Diar
yLand diaries! recommend my diary to a friend! Get
 your own fun + free diary at DiaryLand.com!