in the eye
Today is Nick's birthday. Happy Birthday, Nick.
I am under the impression that I no longer have any important thoughts - or if I do, that they are locked away somewhere within me and that, by some mechanism, I have impeded myself, as a protective measure, from bringing them to the surface. So I have become a numb being of immediate and superficial pleasures.
Today I had the thought - it is not hte first time I hae this thought - that in every moment of every day, there is this underlying anxiety in my being. The only thing that varies between my moments is - not lack or presence of anxiety, because it is always present - but the degree to which I feel it and the degree to which I am aware of its presence.
There are lots of things I worry about or feel anxious about. I write these in no partiuclar order: I worry about never finding love - either because Love does not really exist, not the kind I have always idealized/fantasized about, or because of certain of my personal character traits that make me particularly and singularly inept at Love. I worry about my place and purpose in Life and in the world - I am afraid that I have none; I worry about finding success and having some sort of a career; and the feelings I find myself constantly confronted with are those of inadequacy and incompetence - in everything I do or try to be.
Since Giancarlo's death, whatever trace of existential anxiety I may have already had to begin with, has been exacerbated. I feel "scared". I put that in quotation marks ecause it isn't exactly fear, it isn't exactly an emotion. It is more dispassionate than that. It is a more mental, philosophical fear - not an emotional one. Giancarlo and I weren't particularly close. But I think part of the reason I am so affected is that I feel cut short by his death, in more ways than one. It is a scary thing when you lose someone - anyone, I might dare say - on your radar of people-who-matter. He was one of those people you admired from afar, one of those people with a certain aura around them, one of those people you made yourself a mental note to go have a coffee with on a rainy day, one of those people you felt could enrich your life. He seemed so rich in character. He was cool. One of those people I had always wanted to get to know better. One of those people I had a feeling I wanted to be more like. Admiration of someone also implies that when you watch them, you feel a desire to be better - you nurture a hope that you yourself can one day be better than what you currently are. Maybe it is that with his death, a part of that hope was cut off. I need to ask Jeff if he knows if Giancarlo had ever been in love. It seems wrong to die without ever having been in love. Doesn't it? Or is that just another myth they've fed us about being in love is one of the greatest experiences in life?
I jotted down these sentences from a book I'm reading called "Chinese Thought." Nonfiction, for a change. I decided I do not read enough. Not reading makes you selfish and egotistic, not to mention, solipsistic.
"Seek them and you will fnd them, neglect and you will lose them." - Mencius
"For extreme poverty leaves scars on men's minds and hearts as surely as it emaciates their bodies." - Mencius
And these are thoughts that came to me while reading this work.
1. I am afraid my intellect is inferior to my heart. And already, my heart is not spectacularly great.
2. I am only capable of mental love - and am very generous in that - but I am unable ot handle emotional love (as I have learned this summer).
3. I am afraid I have lost the ability to reason.
I sometimes think my mind is going, that my brain cells are dying, that I am losing a part of my mind and with it, some of the glue that holds me together. I sometimes have the feeling of coming undone. Did I ever tell you I had a hallucinatory experience at Stanford? It was during the summer, after I had eaten one of those instant noodles - there must have been something init that had gone bad. I was in Roble. I remember I ran a fever or started to sweat and that the walls of my room started to contract, everything started swimming around me and the speed of everything slowed down, includingmy own movememtns. At one point, I got up because I was starving and wanted to go to Jamba Juice. I remember walking at what felt like the speed of a snail but unable to move any faster despite my attempts to move faster - as if something got disconnected so that my mind could not make my body cooperate. Crossing the street was such a huge enterprise. It's true that drugs can really alter your perceptions -- I really felt it then.
Recently, I've also been having a lot of guilt feelings towards Robyn. The first betrayal wasn't his but mine. Mine because I clung on to him without being honest -- because I needed him more than I loved him, I needed him in order to stay alive. I clung to him for survival. Because I was so bruised and scarred and barely alive but he looked at me, at least for a time, as if I were a miracle, something special. I hung on to him in order to hang on to what bit of life I had in my left. But I couldn't kiss him. Because I couldn't reach back. I couldn't give. I needed so much to receive.
Maybe I've clung on to singing for much the same reason - to stay alive. That was how it started. I fell in love and started to sing - the two things happened contemporaneously at a time in which I was dying inside and those two things saved me and gave me life again, so that after that,I began to worship those two things, like you would worship a God who saves you.
A thought while I was playing guitar and Everwood came to mind: is it possible to still love your boyfriend if he makes another girl pregnant and you are a virgin? Interesting question to ponder.
Maybe it is that the answers to all the great questions I have pondered are in there, untranslatable into words, in music.
I am under the impression that I no longer have any important thoughts - or if I do, that they are locked away somewhere within me and that, by some mechanism, I have impeded myself, as a protective measure, from bringing them to the surface. So I have become a numb being of immediate and superficial pleasures.
Today I had the thought - it is not hte first time I hae this thought - that in every moment of every day, there is this underlying anxiety in my being. The only thing that varies between my moments is - not lack or presence of anxiety, because it is always present - but the degree to which I feel it and the degree to which I am aware of its presence.
There are lots of things I worry about or feel anxious about. I write these in no partiuclar order: I worry about never finding love - either because Love does not really exist, not the kind I have always idealized/fantasized about, or because of certain of my personal character traits that make me particularly and singularly inept at Love. I worry about my place and purpose in Life and in the world - I am afraid that I have none; I worry about finding success and having some sort of a career; and the feelings I find myself constantly confronted with are those of inadequacy and incompetence - in everything I do or try to be.
Since Giancarlo's death, whatever trace of existential anxiety I may have already had to begin with, has been exacerbated. I feel "scared". I put that in quotation marks ecause it isn't exactly fear, it isn't exactly an emotion. It is more dispassionate than that. It is a more mental, philosophical fear - not an emotional one. Giancarlo and I weren't particularly close. But I think part of the reason I am so affected is that I feel cut short by his death, in more ways than one. It is a scary thing when you lose someone - anyone, I might dare say - on your radar of people-who-matter. He was one of those people you admired from afar, one of those people with a certain aura around them, one of those people you made yourself a mental note to go have a coffee with on a rainy day, one of those people you felt could enrich your life. He seemed so rich in character. He was cool. One of those people I had always wanted to get to know better. One of those people I had a feeling I wanted to be more like. Admiration of someone also implies that when you watch them, you feel a desire to be better - you nurture a hope that you yourself can one day be better than what you currently are. Maybe it is that with his death, a part of that hope was cut off. I need to ask Jeff if he knows if Giancarlo had ever been in love. It seems wrong to die without ever having been in love. Doesn't it? Or is that just another myth they've fed us about being in love is one of the greatest experiences in life?
I jotted down these sentences from a book I'm reading called "Chinese Thought." Nonfiction, for a change. I decided I do not read enough. Not reading makes you selfish and egotistic, not to mention, solipsistic.
"Seek them and you will fnd them, neglect and you will lose them." - Mencius
"For extreme poverty leaves scars on men's minds and hearts as surely as it emaciates their bodies." - Mencius
And these are thoughts that came to me while reading this work.
1. I am afraid my intellect is inferior to my heart. And already, my heart is not spectacularly great.
2. I am only capable of mental love - and am very generous in that - but I am unable ot handle emotional love (as I have learned this summer).
3. I am afraid I have lost the ability to reason.
I sometimes think my mind is going, that my brain cells are dying, that I am losing a part of my mind and with it, some of the glue that holds me together. I sometimes have the feeling of coming undone. Did I ever tell you I had a hallucinatory experience at Stanford? It was during the summer, after I had eaten one of those instant noodles - there must have been something init that had gone bad. I was in Roble. I remember I ran a fever or started to sweat and that the walls of my room started to contract, everything started swimming around me and the speed of everything slowed down, includingmy own movememtns. At one point, I got up because I was starving and wanted to go to Jamba Juice. I remember walking at what felt like the speed of a snail but unable to move any faster despite my attempts to move faster - as if something got disconnected so that my mind could not make my body cooperate. Crossing the street was such a huge enterprise. It's true that drugs can really alter your perceptions -- I really felt it then.
Recently, I've also been having a lot of guilt feelings towards Robyn. The first betrayal wasn't his but mine. Mine because I clung on to him without being honest -- because I needed him more than I loved him, I needed him in order to stay alive. I clung to him for survival. Because I was so bruised and scarred and barely alive but he looked at me, at least for a time, as if I were a miracle, something special. I hung on to him in order to hang on to what bit of life I had in my left. But I couldn't kiss him. Because I couldn't reach back. I couldn't give. I needed so much to receive.
Maybe I've clung on to singing for much the same reason - to stay alive. That was how it started. I fell in love and started to sing - the two things happened contemporaneously at a time in which I was dying inside and those two things saved me and gave me life again, so that after that,I began to worship those two things, like you would worship a God who saves you.
A thought while I was playing guitar and Everwood came to mind: is it possible to still love your boyfriend if he makes another girl pregnant and you are a virgin? Interesting question to ponder.
Maybe it is that the answers to all the great questions I have pondered are in there, untranslatable into words, in music.