looking back a bit
and realizing that I was at my best last spring, when I was teaching fellow Dartmouthites about education, the "other", and life in general, when I was updating my journal many times daily, even if only to write about playing basketball, enjoying pain, tr ying to score with four different girls (but i would have stopped at one--i'm not a monster). When my mind was active, trying to understand the people around me, then understand why that was futile, then move on to enjoying what I could reach. When I wo uld listen to Miles and Trane regularly, meditating over it or just letting it take me somewhere. Before my life became merely a series of nights spent drinking and smok ing, skipping class to sleep til 5.00pm. Before I became content once again to smile and nod during banal conversations in which only the speaker is laughing, instead of finding something better. Before I decided that small, precious acts like playing c ards are not worth the effort of moving, that the sun is not enough motivation to wake me up before it sets, that the moon is enough light in my life. Before I started to feel sorry for myself because I don't like the job I'm committed to in DC for the n ext five years, or before I let that self-pity spend more than a flashing instant in my mind at one time. Before I, in short, burned out.
And then I remember that I was burnt out in the months before I started journaling, and that the journal provided a stable force in my life--indeed, it forced me to stabalize half the thoughts in my head. And I have hope for the future. I just put Miles in the player, to follow Stevie.
I wrote one hundred autobiographical pages last fall, and doing that drained me of whatev er energy I had left. I've already lost friends that I made just last year, because not only did I lack the energy to give them what they had come to know, but I lacked the energy to explain why I couldn't.
But then I write an entry on Mariah, verbalize some of the shit that clogs my brain and makes me tired, and I'm ready for more. And I go back to my friend Emily's journal, all the way back to November, and her brilliance precludes me from making comments on the entries, because all my comments would be the same. I would praise her ability to isolate an idea, find the strength to say it, say it in a way that speaks to me, and do all these things better than I could have imagined.
And then I realize that, after reading innumerable entries by Emily, perhaps I tried to do too much with the beginning of this here entry. Fuck it, I'm getting myself back together.
And then I remember that I was burnt out in the months before I started journaling, and that the journal provided a stable force in my life--indeed, it forced me to stabalize half the thoughts in my head. And I have hope for the future. I just put Miles in the player, to follow Stevie.
I wrote one hundred autobiographical pages last fall, and doing that drained me of whatev er energy I had left. I've already lost friends that I made just last year, because not only did I lack the energy to give them what they had come to know, but I lacked the energy to explain why I couldn't.
But then I write an entry on Mariah, verbalize some of the shit that clogs my brain and makes me tired, and I'm ready for more. And I go back to my friend Emily's journal, all the way back to November, and her brilliance precludes me from making comments on the entries, because all my comments would be the same. I would praise her ability to isolate an idea, find the strength to say it, say it in a way that speaks to me, and do all these things better than I could have imagined.
And then I realize that, after reading innumerable entries by Emily, perhaps I tried to do too much with the beginning of this here entry. Fuck it, I'm getting myself back together.