I am an observer and a recorder, perhaps, a subtle commentator, on experience. I am not a rigorous analyst. I not one for shoe-horning the mystery of reality into categories, into an all embracing schema for the world, even if that schema is one that claims to deny that is what it is doing. What is, IS and I question whether our efforts to master it, to lay down what and how it is, and what it isn’t are not doomed from the start. I am an impressionist- into senses, not exact structures. Feelings over rigorous explanations and attempts at exact description. I know the world as what I sense it to be. My sense of how it SHOULD be. That sense carries more weight to me than any detailed, intricately worked out analysis.

This is my approach to art. I paint on instinct, a feeling for what looks and feels right, what “works” and what doesn’t. Some intelligence underlies that, to be sure. Knowledge I have absorbed intellectually about design, composition, contrast, and colour. But if I think too much about those things while painting, my art suffers. Such information works best in the background, feeding itself unconsciously into my aesthetic sense.

This is also, naturally, how I prefer to approach others' art. I want to experience it, let it wash over me, and draw my impressions from that, not from rigorous examination of technique or of the ideas supposedly represented. I am interested in what art, literature, architecture, or film, even religion, makes me feel.

This is why the approach school makes me take to, say, Shakespeare, feels like violence.

Forcing one’s will upon it, invading it and plundering it in search of “what it means” or “what I can get out of it”. Literature, art, as yet another commodity, another resource to exploited and “developed” by man until whatever beauty it once possessed is obscured by viewing platforms, casinos and tourist hotels, mining operations and oil rigs.

Is such a reservation just an idealistic excuse for intellectual laziness?

I don’t know. But the activity of school as I am experiencing it feels increasingly invasive and unnatural. I have increasing difficulty imagining making a life of it.

Hmm. I'm getting exceedingly bored of this....

So things are settling into a sort of normalcy, if normal means always having a huge paper or something you really should be reading hanging over your head 24-7.
Nothing to rant about, I'm afraid. My angst is taking a break until school lets up enough for me to bother with it.

I got to present my Augustine paper at the conference this morning, which was definitely a slightly intimidating first. Went reasonably well, for all that. They went easy on me.

I got to spend a few hours with two of my most, and one of my very least, favorite people.

But hey, I got free pizza out of the deal.

Hope

Nope. not so much.

This is getting old. Another night of lying on my back in the dark , listening to my hamster run.
I haven't touched coffee since yesterday afternoon, but now, even in the morning, my heart is racing. I slept for only two hours, but I am wide awake. Good for getting to class on time. Bad for writing three papers this weekend. Its possible this could be the aspirin i took last night as a desperate bid the clear the nagging ache that presides over all attempts at rational thought, or more likely, just the stress. If the drugs are keeping me up, its all they're doing. The headache remains untouched.

My two hours of actual sleep this morning were cut short by my alarm, which was telling to me to get up for prayer, something we've been trying to do in again in the mornings, and something that frequently puts me in a better state of mind. I hop out of bed, figuring I can join the others, pray for ten minutes, and hop back in bed for another hour and a half before i have to go to class. But...nobody else shows. Which is fair, because I missed the last one, as we moved the time up and i forgot to change my alarm. Not like i need them to pray, anyway. But i am now wide awake again. I try to go back to sleep, but it isn't long before I realize that just isn't happening.

Sigh. Sometimes I don't know about this.

well, i am still up, rather unwisely, having just begun to recover from the last few days illness. But i have just finished reading a novel for class. Not bad, for Can lit, but bloody depressing. I have no immediate desire to sleep with that on my Brain.

In other news, honesty is, i have decided, the greatest thing ever. Well, at the very least, it is rare and refreshing. To be able to discuss a delicate matter openly, like a mature adult, is an incredible relief. I hate dancing around real issues with hints and implications. I hate decoding polite-speak, and the even more nefarious I-don't-want-to-hurt-your-feelings-speak. I hate games. And I hate waiting. Even when the result of such open discussion is a mild dissapointment, a weight is lifted just having the cards face up on the table. Even when I see I have a losing hand. I feel relieved, relaxed, freer.

I think this may signal a policy shift for Jeremythepolite.

Hello?

Where is Everybody?

So I began today crawling out of bed to rush to Church, and ended it shivering and coughing in the back of a police van.

I'll leave you to ponder the intervening events while i get to sleep. I am extremely sick, and missing class tomorrow isn't an option. Submissions for the explanation of the above will be accepted. Preferably ones more exciting than the truth.

Ok, so you're not all bastards. A couple of you brought me spicy noodles and donuts. i can't hate anyone who brings me donuts. And spicy noodles? Oh yeah. The way to my heart is unquestionably paved with noodles. And you did it without reading my blatant, self pitying hint! Bonus points. You just might be Ok in my books.

Another extremely slow and lonely night at he cafe. With the surreal exception of Tammy pulling up in a tow truck, complete with rusted pickup suspended from the back, and stopping traffic so she could say hi, and introduce me to her new bf(... and his son!) I haven't really talked to anyone all day. Got tons of work done, but... But here i am, with the lights low, candles lit and a sad song playing, reading philosophy. Sigh. Gosh, sure would be nice if some of my friends came to visit, to cheer me up!

But they won't. Too busy having fun. Bastards.

Man, is this cafe dead tonight. Frustrating. Because peace and solitude are not exactly what i'm looking for at the moment. well, peace, maybe....Something's up with the sound system, so i can't even drown it in good music. I'm playing radiohead, but i can barely hear it.

In happier news, its been snowing all day. I like my winter to look like winter. The cafe is warm, and the snow is building up on the sidewalk faster than occaisonal feet can muddy it. A walk may be in order, later. Sometimes white-carpeted branches, the night sky and stillness can do more to lift what hurts than talking it out a million times.

So i had a long and angst-ridden conversation with Chuck this afternoon. ( I'll let you guess who had all the angst.) yes, i want to be moving in a more positive direction, but i'm not buying that the way to do that is simply pasting on a happy face and pretending its all ok. And it's so relieving to just spew, to say exactly what you really think and feel, the good, bad and ugly, knowing that you're not going to be looked down on for displaying your lack of perfection, for not having it all together, for not always feeling what i should feel, or what makes sense to. And, hopefully, that it isn't going to cause that person to treat you differently, like some kind of walking disease or open, bloody wound, to tip-toe around you , trying to be polite and not mention it, but secretly revulsed by the raw, exposed mass of emotional flesh... er, sorry. That's the ugly part.

Its not that easy to have to face that the last few years of your life have been, to a great extent, a train wreck, and that its entirely your own fault.
Watching things go swimmingly for others doesn't really make that realization easier to deal with. Not that that's their fault.

All things considered, i think i'm handling things reasonably well.

You think this stuff is easy? Try it some time.

Can't sleep. Again. I was doing better for a couple days, but now i'm lying here and my mind just won't stop. Can't. Stop. Thinking. Its really annoying. I'm exhausted, have an early class tomorrow, and here i lie, completely unable to sleep. Jaques runs incessently, much like my mind. Going over everything. Too much. Where i've been. How i ended up here. Where things might be going. The past seems distant. Ancient. Irretreivable. Misty and irrelevant. Strangely, the future is a big, white nothing. Blank. Odd that i should just be noticing this. I'm used to thinking in terms of where i am going. what will happen when. Used to thinking in terms of tomorrow. I may have, in the past, indulged in a great deal of agony about which path of a particular set of options to choose, but i always saw something ahead. I could always follow those paths, see how they might end up. It was the detail and plausibility of those fully imagined alternate lives that made choices so difficult. To aim for one was to abandon hope of the other. Some lives had to die if one was to have a chance to live.

I honestly don't know what's going to happen. Tomorrow. Next week. Next year. The next ten years. I can't see it. I have no idea. Strange that this should seem a new feeling. I have nothing but now, nothing but today, this hour, these thoughts. No other certainties, no comforting thing or situation that i can count on to always be there, to remain the same. No "once-i-get-there" to look forward to. This is, suddenly, incredibly, unbeleivably scary.

At the same time, having no tomorrow might be just what i need to enable meaningful action today. Always did feel i had difficulty living in the moment. Now, maybe, i suddenly find myself with no choice but to do so.

All those possible lives, all those fully constructed, self-contained worlds i could plug myself into, if i only knew how to start, seem to have fallen apart, or dissapeared, or merged into each other beyond recognition, or something, leaving me with a big, messy unknown.

I really, profoundly, at this moment, don't know what to do with myself.

I'd say i don't know who i am, but the phrase is too steeped in cliched associations to have any meaning. I'd say rather that the identity i've been working with for the last little while is invalid. It doesn't hold up. It isn't healthy. It isn't me. It needs to be discarded, put off, like my old plaid shirts, ball caps, and super baggy jeans.

So where does that leave me? I don't know who i am or what to do with myself. The past is out of reach and the future is blank.
Sound depressing?
Hell, sounds like a fresh start to me.

All the cool kids are doing it

I 'm sorry. So very sorry. I know Weakerthans quotes have enjoyed a high circulation on the blog circle lately. I can't help it. These out of sequence lines have been stuck in my head for days.

Rely a bit too heavily on alcohol and irony...
Drowning in the pools of other lives.

In my defence i can only say that all our accidents are purposefully planned.

Today is a good day. At least, it is going to be. Last night i returned from class, feeling just a little bit sad and sorry for myself. But i dealt. I resisted the lure of the poker game upstairs (sorry guys!) did the stuff i needed to get done, read my readings for today, and, amazingly, spent more than two hours just writing. Something i hadn't done in quite a while. It just poured out of me, i wasn't agonizing over every word, i wasn't laborously self-editing. I wasn't sitting, wasting my time, letting myself freak out about things beyond my control. I just sat and wrote, almost in a single minded frenzy, and got out what i wanted to say. Followed that thought, that creative impulse and got it down. it felt very, VERY good. Its a small thing, ( and possibly, in the sober light of morning, not that great a bit of writing) but part of the ass-kicking of yesterday's post was to stop making excuses and start making it a priority to do the things that really matter to me. My writing will get better with use.
And then i slept. Like i haven't in weeks. Deep and silent and free. i woke, at the first buzz of the alarm, without fear. You don't realize it when you've been doing it for a long time, but you notice its absense. For the past while, a seeming eternity, i realize i've woken up already scared. Already dreading the day. Dragging myself ouy of bed, wanting nothing more than to keep hiding in sleep, filled with the trepidation carried over from the night before. Today i woke without fear. What comes, comes. I'm not going to stay where i was. I'm going to take whatever steps are needed. I'm going to be ok.
It helps to actually have gone to bed at a reasonably sensible time, and to be up more than 5 min before class. To have time to reflect, to find peace before throwing onself, always behind, always trying to catch up, into the day. Again, a small thing, but getting up and getting to work when i resolve to do it is also part of what i want the new me to be, and it feels good, for once, to plan it and actually have it happen. Hey, i'm seizing the small victories here. Even doing that, it suddenly seems like i have so much more time. ( Though i know part of the reason i'm suddenly finding more free time on my hands, and I admit that, while one part of me is quietly happy about it, still stings a bit) But hey. i have time to write. I have time to blog. (yay!) I have time to sort myself out. I might actually survive school, and come out of it with something to show. These are good things.

Hey, its nice that everyone's concerned. No, that's not a sarcastic, leave-me-the-@#$&!-alone comment, i really mean it. Yes, i am having a hard time. Yes, i do notice that you notice, and it means something. In the spirit of what we're supposed to be about here, i'm not ashamed to say that right now, i'm ok with a little help, a little encouragement, a little prayer. Heck, if you're exceptionally lucky, i might even take advice. I'm a little overwhelmed, a little more than usually daunted by the frightening gap between this-is-where-i want-to-be and this-is-where-i-am. Again, i appreciate people being there, even peripherally, while i sort this out. But i'm not looking to make it all go away. I don't need a quick fix. I need to be here. i need to feel this. I need to feel this hurt, to let the full weight of it rest on me - so i can finally face where it comes from, deal with things i've run from my whole life, get healthy and start moving in a better direction. It may involve opening old wounds, and may get a bit ugly before it gets better. It may have to involve professional help. Probably will. But i'm tired of this shit and i know i don't have to be like this.

I appreciate my few ass-kicking friends. We're such a "mind your own business" culture; it isn't always good for us. I appreciate people who have the guts to tell things to me straight. Tell me i'm full of shit. Tell me i'm being an idiot. Who can tell me, in respect and genuine concern, that i need to get help. Which is scary- but not as scary as the thought of spending another thirty years like this. Thirty years is already WAYYY too long to spend waiting to live. Enough is enough. i'm putting it in print so i can't weasle out of it. A little sadness is part of life, sure, but morbid paralysis sure as hell doesn't have to be.

State of the Union

Sorry. I am still alive, for better or worse. Just having trouble finding words lately. And to speak of my largest concerns of the moment would either require extreme delicacy or a torrent of words i would almost certainly come to regret. Suffice to to say that while i can be genuinely thrilled at the unexpected good fortune of others, and i am, truly, my feelings regarding my own present situation are, um....not good. And I am facing the highly uncomfortable notion that unless I succeed in changing certain entrenched tendencies in myself, this situation could well be permanent.

On a more cheerful note, however, it does encourage me greatly to see dear friends finding richly deserved happiness. Its nice, every so often, to be reminded that life has nice surprises for us, to go with all the ones of the other kind. In a world that too often seems fractured, cold, disappointing and malisciously random, it has to give you hope to see things working out in a way that just seems, well, right. If one believes that our lives are steered, which, at the bottom of me, i still do, you have to shake your head at the strange ways things work, beyond all possibilty of prediction. That part makes me sit back and smile.

And being able to smile for others, at this point, may save me. For the moment.


I still so owe this blog an explanation of that China comment, though i suspect that by now anyone who actually bothers to read this has heard more than enough about China from me in person. I also promised Chuck my life story to go with it. Give me a bit on that one, mate.

. . . . . .