2002-11-20 - 11:51 p.m.
Monday I tried to brainstorm "things to be happy about" in my new notebook. I wrote, "Recognition of the intrinsic ambiguity of lived experience," circled. Beneath that, "as a means for making future decisions."
I'm not sure what that means, but it rings true.
Now I'm trying to quit smoking, and having a pretty good time at it. This wasn't planned, but rather emerged spontaneously from waking up one morning with my trachea scabbed up; I was chocking and gasping and wheezing for most of the rest of the day. Enough of this. I decided to see how long I could go without a cigarette, and it's been about 48 hours now.
There are few feelings as intense. It feels like there are leeches immersed in my brain, and visual surfaces are cloudy. But it also feels like purification.
Yesterday I decided to see what would happen if I went without coffee for a day. I promptly got into a car accident. Nothing serious, just me ramming the rear corner of a late-model Cadillac rented by a nice woman from Berkeley, California who seriously considered getting the insurance, but in the end decided not to. Although she may have been driving erratically on the unfamiliar North Trail, I blame myself, for not being alert due to my suddenly abandonment of my caffeine crutch, and the state trooper blamed me, too, for "improper change of lane or course."
Tomorrow morning I go into David office and find out if I've unsatted his class and this semester, and he can say "yes" or "not yet." I kind of didn't turn in the research paper due Monday and don't have the prospect of turning it in anytime soon.
This past weekend I devoted less thought into the paper than ever before, and took apathy to new levels. 'Wow, this article sucks,' I thought at one point, 'But I don't care--we're going to print it anyway because I have nothing left to prove except that I can not care."
In one amusing incident, Sparkle and I were going through an article. She would read a sentence, and ask "This is poorly written and I can't tell what this is even saying, much less why it's important." I would translate into the active voice, using nouns and verbs. Sparkle responds, "Then why doesn't it say that?!" Me: "Ours is not to understand the ways of the lame writers, especially not the bitchy ones." Okay, so that's an exaggeration--but there's a genuine interaction in there. I did say that I don't care, and you shouldn't either. That felt weird, because while I don't want to care anymore she does still want to, but you can't if you want to keep your sanity when you have no resources and no staff and existential malaise.
Today I called my new insurance company and got a list of headshrinkers. The woman on the line, whose name was Heather, nicely asked me questions such as "has this problem caused you to miss school or work?" and then "how often?" Although I came up with an answer, I realized the question is misleading: that is the problem. Like suppressing the memory that there were about three big projects/assignments that you thought "I'll take care of this over the weekend" and then watching cable for hour after hour. Or assembling a reasonable enough to-do list, then utterly avoiding looking at it.
Enough of this. It was as I said yesterday, in a disturbing bit of introspection that slipped out in casual conversation, "I can't go on living like this. But I've been saying that for years. I don't know what that means."
