Sure, okay, whatever.

Lately I've been feeling less conscious than usual;just perpetually sort of dazed and out-of-it. Somewhat paradoxically though, I'm often aware of feeling that way, and it's consuming and frightening from a strange third person perspective of my own state of mind. The same thoughts circle through my head constantly, about how I’m boring and I sleep too much and I work too much and I don’t eat right and I don’t have money. It’s all so dull and redundant. Where did all the interesting thoughts go? I think I used to have them. I think I used to be passionate about things. I need to take a vacation. Yes. That’s what I need. People live for vacations. I need to clear my head of its repetitive thoughts. I need to do yoga again. That always made me feel good. No actually it made feel kinda stressed out. Forced relaxation is weird. And it’s like fifteen bucks a class, I can’t afford that. 

I replay the same sorts of thoughts over and over again in my head especially at work. Then a customer will walk up or a co-worker will approach me about something and I snap out of the thought-chain like an alarm clock has gone off in the middle of a good REM cycle. Then moments later, after the interaction ceases, I’ll be right back in the spiral, except it resets to start all over again in almost a verbatim chain. Which is really kinda sad. I just have to have something to occupy my head space, something to fixate on. I can’t deal with having no thoughts. I have to have thoughts. But God my thoughts are so fucking boring and repetitive. I need to read more, yes maybe that will help. More thoughts, I just need more thoughts. Other people’s thoughts will do, that’s fine, just some other goddamn thoughts besides the ones I have over and over and over again. 
“I ate too much sugar today. I’m going to gain weight.” 
“Oh wow, I hardly ate anything today, I feel skinny.” 
“I need to call my grandmother.” 
“I need to get back in touch with old friends. I’m going to die alone.” 
“Gas is so expensive.” 
“Rent is so expensive” 
“I should go buy a new dress. That will make me happy.” 
“I need to check my bank account. Do I have enough money to make it until pay day?” 
“I need to make a payment on my credit card. Mom says I can’t leave a balance on there because then I pay interest. I wonder what my interest rate is. It can’t be that high with a $600 credit limit, right? God I don’t understand anything about money and finance and shit. I should learn about it. Learn how to make money turn into more money. God I am so jealous of rich people. I bet if I was just born rich, I’d have a lot easier of a time getting my stuff out there to the world. I wish I was Jewish too. That would help out I bet. I need to promote my shit. But I don’t want to have to spend time on the computer. I hate computers. Maybe I just like the idea of hating computers. I’m so stubborn. If I just got a smart phone and tweeted shit constantly, I’d probably be more successful. But I’m afraid of indulging my narcissism. And I’m also afraid of being rejected. I’m afraid of everything. I thought this anxiety medication would help with that. I think it just makes me sleep more. I already slept too much. I guess I should tell the doctor that. But I want to be medicated. I like the idea of being medicated. It validates my "issues".  

The Latest Doodle

Boobs and Bowels

I moved into this new house that I feel super duper comfortable in and all the sudden I'm pooping every day as opposed to once a week. Go figure.

A friend recently told me that he thinks I'm deeply afraid of being boring and that my biggest fear in life is of not being afraid. He was super drunk, but I definitely took that shit to heart. I'm also totally getting boring lately and that scares the shit out of me. Fuck maybe that's actually why I'm pooping more frequently. Because I'm boring and comfortable and stable. Oh no. Well the anxiety attack I'm having thinking about that will probably make me constipated.

I finally bought new normal bras the other day after wearing two sports bras on top of each other every where I went for months. But now, in my new bras, every time I move slightly, like take a step or yawn, I can feel my tits slipping out of the cups so that I have the 4 boob dilemma. And once again, like dozens of times before, I remember why so many annoying fuckers tell me I have to drop 60 bucks at Victoria's secret and not just go to Target. That's also the poor man's dilemma. Spend small amounts of money often on bullshit that you can afford versus spending larger sums of money on better quality shit a lot less often. So I'm perpetually broke and have 4 boobs. Oh fucking well.

Totally unrelated (though people might use this line about me behind my back):
I've noticed that when confronted with a very eccentric person who's kinda really fucking annoying, certain obsessively politically correct folks will say something like "I think Jane is some where on the autism spectrum" like as a way of expressing their discomfort when interacting with that person. That shit is kinda fucked up really.

This video made me horny:
Nudi Eat Nudi World
I'm not sure how to feel about that.

Hedgehog-juggling Chameleon

Not sure why I drew this...I think I came up with this as I was passing out one night, as is usually the case with my drawing ideas.

She Ratchet.

I work with mostly young African American women at one of my jobs. Sometimes I feel like the token white girl. For example, my co-workers think it's hilarious when I use the expression "girl, bye." Apparently I pronounce the "e" in bye, like "bi-eee" when it's just supposed to be a sharp, curt dismissal of a person when she is being ridiculous, aka "girl, bi." not "gurrl, byyeee" as I supposedly say it. Based on the way my co-workers mimic me, my speech pattern is straight out of the movie Clueless...which makes sense considering how many times I've watched that flick.

The girls at work teach me the latest lingo too. Which is cool, because I'm always trying to stay with the times and not become a complete curmudgeonly hater of this era. They taught me the adjective "ratchet", which I naturally looked up on urban dictionary with my shitty duct-taped laptop the second I got home....since I still have a flip-phone and couldn't figure out what they were saying immediately...which would've been ideal so that I could have pretended like I knew the meaning all along. My co-workers love my old-school phone, especially the youngest chick, I'm pretty sure she thinks it's a fossil.

Well lately I have had next to zero ideas for drawings/ posts, and as I was laying in bed trying to take a nap one afternoon, I thought about how the word ratchet kind of sounds like rat shit, and how "she ratchet" kind of sounds like "see rat shit" and below is what I consequently produced. I sent it to my co-worker Essence, who then showed it to some of her friends. They didn't get it, and one girl said "white people over-analyze everything." I think the problem with my drawings might be that there is actually really never anything "to get" about them, but I like to think that's the best part.

No Time for Godot

Life moves forwards in what seems like such predictable, unchanging, repetitive patterns. Yet every day I feel a little smaller and a little older. Like the world is growing around me and I'm shrinking. And I've gotta stay current.
Gotta stay with it.
Can't just lay in bed under a rock.
I want to be immersed in it all with complete detachment. I want to understand things in society without having to go through them...I guess that's why there's television.
I want to seem rebellious without misbehaving.
I just want my little spot in the world to stay quiet but to never feel completely underwhelmed by the absurdity of everything.
I want to know the world at it's face value and a little more, but without having a committed relationship to it.
I don't want to pretend like death doesn't happen. I want it to just be a part of why everything is hilarious to me, but I forget about that part sometimes.
The part about how everyone seems in a hurry to some sort of finish line.
And  at the coffee shop people are always straining their necks morosely downward into some little flat box they have in their hand that they're grasped in a protective sort of way close to their bodies and I wonder if the world is nicer inside that little box...if the future chiropractor bills are worth it for the sake of escaping into the void of relentless information. Maybe people dance there in public and don't care like little children who don't have crippling self-consciousness yet...maybe the people standing in lines in reality escape into those boxes so that they can forget that life has become mechanical.
Or maybe they have business to intend to, important matters involving suits and numbers and things beyond my understanding of the world and the way it works now.

Kloof

We celebrated my bestie Joshua's 35th birthday the other night. I asked him what animal he wanted me to draw as his gift (because I'm broke, ya'll) and he said a ferret. About a week before this, we got together with the third musketeer of our crew, Bridget, to discuss Joshua's wild recent visit to South Africa for a wedding. He said he spent some time in a town called Kloof.  Bridget pointed out that it sounded like a weird bodily function, and I followed that up with the declaration of "kloof" as the term for a penis fart. We are super mature. 

Naturally this was the drawing that was produced for his birthday (unfortunately by the end of the night it was soaked in beer and whiskey and various other fluids and got all tore up...that's the first time I've seen 2 am in ages, holy hell.): 

Why, you might ask, is he French? Why would he not be? 

Another Quirky Illustration...

Good Shit

RDF

I was looking around at all of the suited up dudes that come into my place of employment regularly, and realized that a lot of them consistently look super pissed. Then I thought to myself "maybe some of them just suffer from Resting Dick Face". 

I know resting bitch face is a thing, so for purposes of gender equality, I think RDF should become just as popular of a description. A lot of folks have it, just look around. 

Southern Snow, Zombies and the unavoidable Apocalypse

My attempt at a post-apocalyptic/ end of civilization piece.

As is the case every few years in the South, we experience slightly more than a dusting of snow and everyone freaks the fuck out. The most recent storm reached apocalyptic levels of accumulation: 6 whole inches...not exactly the Ron Jeremy's Richard of snowfall, but it was enough to turn a 20 minute commute into 5 hours for some, and to make tragically empty Starbucks cups suddenly appear suitable as toilets. Funny what the human mind will do when desperation and panic assume control. Maybe subconsciously us southerners don't actually feel endangered by snowfall, but just enjoy the drama and intensity of mass panic. As individuals we may say it's no big deal and laugh at ourselves as a region that can't handle some snowflakes, yet as a group we love to make it a huge fucking deal. The thrill, the rush, the pandemonium...that shit's addictive, y'all.

It was interesting timing for this event, because in recent months I've found myself preoccupied by the cultural obsession with apocalyptic themed media and zombie flicks. I've only seen one movie involving zombies, it took place in a shopping mall and I don't recall seeing it through til the end. That's not to say that I feel above the Zombie craze, they honestly just make me feel really weird and uncomfortable in a way that I don't like...maybe that's the part others enjoy...similar to the absolutely dreadful feeling I experienced on the handful of times I rode a roller coaster. The rush people experience while watching thrillers, or in some cases, the Weather Channel, makes me think that others enjoy panic, enjoy a virtual brush with death, a manufactured embrace with the end of life. I personally hate it. Am I more afraid of dying than others? I don't get a thrill at all. I just get fucking scared shitless. And it's a terrible feeling.

I'm scared of everything in life.

Which reminds me, I was walking in an airport with a friend recently and I pointed to one of those prostrate escalator treadmill sidewalk things and told her that they freak me out. She responded, "Everything freaks you out, Emily." It was in that moment that I realized I had lied, that those treadmill things don't really bother me, I actually kind of like them (I'm an anxiously fast walker by nature and I get insane sidewalk rage when trapped behind a bunch of slow walkers), but that I was just trying to make conversation, and it certainly made sense that I would be scared of them, because a lot of things give me irrational anxiety and she knows that (she is a very leisurely walker).

Anyway, back to Zombies. I've always found it funny that mainstream society loves the shit out of those movies, because it seems to me that the zombie is a symbol of the "mass man" and a critique/satire of capitalism, mass consumption and contemporary anti-intellectualism...though I recognize there's some snobbery/generalization/classism involved in that analysis. Still, I was interested to see if "the zombie as reflection of culture" was a topic of interest for others, and it is. There are a lot of articles out there about it.

People are generally drawn to heroic characters in film, so maybe the viewer experiences an unconscious desire to defeat the ever dulling of the modern mind, which is sort of an interesting irony (though I tend to use that word incorrectly a lot, thanks Alanis Morrisette, you bitch. Jk. I love you.) Or maybe people just like those movies, and there's nothing more to it, and that's fine. I am a pro at over analyzing/ making-something-out-of-nothing.

I also teared-up when I watched Kanye propose to Kim on television...so it's not like I'm immune to zombiedom, it's just easier to recognize it in others than oneself, and more fun, because false feelings of superiority are a survival tactic, right?

The obsession with the end of the world/ civilization and/or the apocalypse is fascinating to me for other reasons, and this writer articulates that far beyond my capacities: Top 10 Reasons Humans Are Obsessed With the Apocalypse

RBF

An Odd Couple.

It was 'Family Day' at the art museum I visited on Sunday.

Just to the left of this sign was a giant phallus sculpture. We must protect our children. 

I hear coloring is meditative...

So I sketched out my own mandala type thing...like the hippy chick that I'm not....and colored it in while watching "Sex and the City" re-runs followed by "There Will be Blood" and it was, in fact, quite relaxing.

Recreation of some wall jottings I saw in a coffee shop bathroom

I thought it was an interesting little era-defining tid-bit...a whole new digital age spin on "God is dead."

Thoughts on my jaded cowardice and the American Dream.

So I've been thinking a lot about the American identity lately. How we don't really have one, so we've sort of invented one, or I guess unconsciously assumed one. What I've observed that Americans seem to have in common, or at least what seems to be a theme in the mass conceptualization of "the American", is a strive for success whatever the cost, and an extreme anxiety/ paranoia about pretty much everything. I realize I'm not exactly saying anything new here, everyone knows Americans are obsessed with the green and scared shitless of germs, terrorists and the basic uncertainty inherent in everything. We feel that our roots are in quicksand and we either obsessively move forward and far away or get stuck mentally, physically and emotionally in whatever our situations are/have been.

I've felt pretty damn stuck for a while and have blamed it on an array of things such as the economy, my antiquated skill-set and my apathy/ distaste for the way the world is. I've always rebelled against conformity to the bullshit by essentially doing not much of anything, but lately I've just felt like I need to suck it up and make some freakin' money and be able to pay rent AND go out to dinner sometimes. That's what we call maturity here in America. Taking the plunge. I'm selling out, ya'll.

A friend of mine who is in her fifties recently said to me "You're too young to be so cynical." She's probably right.

Gorillas

Daddy issues.

Hipster Giraffes

#

I haven't read significant chunks of any of those books. I just want people to think I read a lot. 

This is gonna be my year, goddamnit!

I don't pay much attention to calendars, half the time I don't even know what month we're in, but I'm pretty sure 2013 was a shit show. I'm not implying heavy drug use with the "pretty sure", I wish that had been the issue. The sentiment I attach to the recent past is pretty terrible, though the details are fading quickly.

The causal relations of things in my life aren't as random and meaningless as the backdrop of nature's course, but I stuff significance away in some pocket in a pair of pants I never wear only to find a reminder, like a photograph or artifact from the past, and feel overwhelmed with the rawness I so arrogantly proclaim to constantly embrace. 

But fuck yes 2014, I'm excited about you. This optimism about the future is freaking me out.

I think resolutions are just a set-up for failure, but if I was going to try to work on things, this is what I'd do:
(some of these clearly contradict each other, which is leading me to further ponder a question someone asked me in a very serious tone yesterday: "Be real with me, are you clinically insane or just really strange? I need to know.")

-Figure out how to not be so damn neurotic/ controlled by my out-of-control emotions, I'm getting too old for this shit.

-Start believing in God, because according to some people, he believes in me.
-Have more sex.

-Call my schizophrenic aunt more before she dies so I don't have to feel guilty about not calling later.

-Sleep wayyyy less.
-Delete my Okcupid account permanently. No more of this de/re-activate shit. 
-Stop bragging to people about how I'm one of the only people left in the world without a smart phone. It's a dumb thing to say. I think I'm so cool. And I'm constantly text messaging on my dumb phone.
      -consider getting a smartphone, I've heard they're very useful.
-Start saying 'yes' more when my sister asks me to work out.

-Look for 'real' jobs

-Learn another language to feel better about myself, since every fucker on the planet seems to be at least quad-lingual nowadays

-Stop comparing myself to more successful people. 

       -Stop thinking that "how do you really measure success anyway?" is just a bull-shit cliche and be more okay with the fact that I'm actually not unhappy (double negative intended). 

-Eat more vegetables

-Stop blowing off rich dudes because they're boring. aka, find me a sugar daddy.

-Go out more/ drink more

-Read less philosophy

-Watch more t.v.


-Buy a magnet that says something like "live, love, laugh" or "learn to dance in the rain" and believe that shit. 

I did the broken 'brella move on some guy during a one night stand once. He blew up my phone for months after that. I was all like "leave me the fuck alone, dude." 

...

Just an MS paint masterpiece my friend Joshua and I made.

Earth Stuck.

The Grenadines

~

This is what happens when people leave liquor in the house. And yes, that giant wrinkle is most likely a subconscious vag.

...

"Slave to the Man"

New Drawing.

Seeking an SOB who will make me feel like shit: A classifieds ad.

I'm pretty damn honest a fair amount of the time. I strive for authenticity, but the effort negates it all.

I've been told I'm full of shit. It's mostly unintentional, except when I'm lying.

And though most things in life are uncertain and unpredictable, I am certain that I'm fairly predictable, and definitely not worthy of your time or trust.

....

I have so many infatuations that I can't keep up, and forget about most of them. I don't take anything seriously, and am mostly just looking for a story to tell.

Please tell me what a fool I am. I need to get out of this comfortable self-deprecation. This hall of mirrors where I've trapped myself. A place for nothing but vain self-reflection. No progress is made here.

...

"Your blog is really stupid. You're too narcissistic to be self-aware. The musings about yourself are just bullshit wrapped in horse shit"

"Thank you. That's the best feedback I've ever gotten."

...

I have a lot to say and say nothing at all, with a whole bunch of sentences. I probably should learn what experiencing is all about.

....

They say change is good. I don't know about all that.

Hey there folks.

My blog is staying the same, but I'm changing the URL in a few weeks.

Find me at www.theblurrycurrent.com after 1/15/14ish if cluelesscollegegrad no longer works.

Thanks for reading

[Walton Ford is amazing.]

texts.

-You can't keep invalidating my feelings all the time, it's so patronizing. I know I'm verbally full of shit almost always, but my feelings are real.

-I think that's possibly the dumbest thing you've ever said.

-Lol.

Merry Christmas

"Can I come over later and just sleep?"

"No. We can't keep fucking, Sarah."

"I wasn't trying to fuck. Look, I'm going to a Christmas party for work, and I don't have a date.."

"I'm not going with you to a goddamn Christmas Party."

"I wasn't asking you to....I just want to come sleep there after."

"I'm not in the mood to talk."

"I don't want to talk either."

"We're not having sex."

"I just want to sleep on the far other end of your bed."

"That's ridiculous."

"It's better than being totally alone tonight. This Christmas party is gonna make me feel like shit."

"And sleeping on the edge of my bed isn't?"

"It won't tonight, but probably in the morning."

"You can come over, but I can't promise you that you can sleep here."

"But neither of us want to talk, and we can't screw, so I'm going to fall asleep...you know I'm basically narcoleptic after 8 pm."

"You're crazy."

"You like crazy."

"Fine. Come over."

"K. Thanks."

....

Space Man

This is me reading a piece of my flash fiction in an exaggerated accent which might be offensive to people of my region. 

...

Sometimes I just want to crawl back into the womb,

But I'm so goddamn claustrophobic.

Julia Holter-In The Same Room

Thought this was really lovely. 

Bull's Eye Askance

Went to “Jake’s Billiards” in my hometown the other night.

Not that I got all that far away from home,

It was just an hour drive.

I looked around at all the hootchie cootchie outfits

And the underage faces,

And reminded myself

That I’m not in college anymore.

Haven’t been for a while.

What the hell was I doing there?

Playing pool poorly

Then darts.

Throwing them harder than necessary,

Straight for the wall next to the target.

I was aiming for the bull’s eye though.

People got a kick out of how hard I was throwing those darts.

And how hard I was missing the target

And I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown.

But I laughed too.

I was drunk and a little hysterical.

I’m not too old to be irresponsible

Yet

But I feel like I am.

And every other girl in that room looked like she must have possessed a fake ID

I was there with my best friend and some guys who were chasing her beautiful, round Russian face like everyone else does. They were philosophy students.

I wanted to tell them not to bother.

With chasing her,

Nor with studying philosophy.

I’m jaded.

I don’t feel angry about the way the world is turning like I should be. I just keep chugging along, working bullshit jobs and not taking the energy to hope that things get better.

But that was the first time I ever felt out of place at a grungy dive. I hadn’t been to one in a while. I’d forgotten how long I’d been a hermit, how many months had passed by of me being drink-less and mostly alone. It’s weird how the slowest moving parts of the past look like a blurry nothing. A blurry nothing that’s similar in appearance to the travel of light. I’m not sure what I had been doing since the last time I’d been in a dirty bar. Probably just working, watching T.V., sleeping and maybe reading a little when I wasn’t too tired. Just one great long day of that for so long that it’s like nothing ever happened on any given day, ever.

“I should be doing better than this by now” is what I kept telling myself at Jake’s Billiards.

But every day I see all the bored looking white-collar nine-to-fivers come into the corporate coffee shop (or drug dealership, as I like to call it) where I work, and I don’t want that life either.

I feel like I’m in a permanent purgatory,

But I’d be lying if I denied half enjoying it.

And older, wiser people are always telling me things will turn around,

That I’ll look back after having everything figured out,

And I’ll feel nostalgic for the fun side of instability.

I wonder if I looked like I was having fun throwing those darts and missing the bull’s eye by a few feet.

All I know is I’m bored, and everyone I know is bored too.

I played darts long after losing interest in it, but it passed the time like everything else does.

Making "pathetic" the new awesome, one glass of Rex-Goliath and epsom salt bath at a time.

Recently, after reading several of my blog posts, someone made the comment that they “liked some of it, hated some of it, and didn’t learn a damn thing about me, oddly enough.” I’ve thought about this before; I tend to be really fucking honest yet I paradoxically don’t reveal anything at all about my life or “who I am”. I do this for a very conscious reason. Because my life is boring. Very, very boring. But here it goes, here’s some shit about my life:

I value sleep over having an active social life. 

In those fleeting moments when it’s not entirely non-existent, my love life is a complete joke. I often find myself sending neurotic text messages in chaotic, stream-of-conscious novella form to people I have superficial, semi-requited crushes on when I’m bored and there’s nothing on television, or I’m watching the Kardashians and it’s not keeping my attention long enough not to text. Sometimes these texts are returned, because, let’s face it, the whole rest of the world is pretty fucking bored too. When the messages aren't returned, I assume the other person is a lot cooler than me. That makes me like them more, and text them more garbage, which shockingly changes the “semi” in semi-requited to “un”.

• I sadly spend the vast majority of my time thinking about my disconnection from the world, but in the shallowest way possible: aka my lack of boyfriend. And then I daydream about what it would be like to be in a committed, exclusive relationship, and then I get really grossed out, then my feelings of fierce pseudo-feministic independence are rejuvenated, then I watch a Rom-Com and cry and feel really sorry for my single little self all over again. What a vicious cycle. When I try to be honest with myself and analyze the failure (due almost always in part to my own neuroticism) of all of my past relations (not relationships, because let's face it, a lot of the "hips" in my relations, were just hips), I just don't want to deal with it. I try to convince myself that the diagnosis so many people have given me is true: I'm crazy. I'm totally not crazy though, and as a fairly sane person I am 100% responsible for my actions. Which is the worst. 

Okay, I definitely don't want to write about that crap anymore. Moving on:

I’m generally too tired from work to read, and when I do read it’s about three pages at a time of some high-falutin philosophy that doesn't get along well with my self-diagnosed dyslexia. I tend to be really worried that I’m reading philosophy backwards and not just missing the point, but absorbing the information like it’s opposite day and believing it to be the best shit ever.  

I don’t retain information well. This makes me very insecure about how much I know about anything. If I read an entire book about air-conditioners and even paid attention to what I was reading, I still could probably only tell you that they keep you cool when they’re not broken. Consequently, I avoid intellectual conversations at all costs. I always sound really silly and use the word “like” more than usual out of nervousness. And I also sweat a lot.

That reminds me of something else about myself: I have to bathe after talking on the phone to anyone because it makes me sweat so much.

I am completely obsessed with my weight. Which is stupid because I’m a skinny bitch. And even if I wasn't utterly consumed by what I consume, I’d probably still be a skinny bitch.

Speaking of food: My dinner time occurs right around the rush hour at K&W. Sometimes I’m in bed by 6:30(pm). I almost have a panic attack every time someone asks me to hang out later than 8 pm.

I’m also completely obsessed with my heating pad, even when nothing aches.

I trim my toe nails too short when I’m nervous about something. My toe nails look like shit. I have absolutely nothing going on in my life worth being nervous about.

I can do 5 push-ups. I do this set of 5 once, 2 to 3 days a week along with squats which always remind me of a birthing scene in a book I read in anthropology class about some African tribe. And then I feel racist, and then I feel bad for thinking my racism is funny. And then I feel bad for not really feeling bad. 

Maybe at one point my life was cool. The past always appears way more awesome than whatever is currently happening. But that’s always been the case, so I’m not sure at what point (assuming life has points) I’ve been happy or interesting or cool or fun. I know I’ve been these things before, at times. Anyway, I hope you feel like you know me now! Ask me anything, and I will give you some sort of response, maybe not an answer. Who has any real answers when asked about their own nature anyway?

Essay Titles

Here are some satirical essay titles I've thought of but have not written content for and probably never will. 
*I know some of these titles contradict each other. And also make me sound like I'm one of the people I hate. Which is totally true. 

Poor White Kids with Rich Parents, A Cultural Phenomenon

On Being Broke, Frightfully Vulgar and Well-Read: How the literature of dead aristocrats makes me feel good despite my lack of class

On Hating Everything, Including Your Own Optimism

Two Essays:
I. On Having All the Wrong Intentions yet Doing Good Things
II. On Having Good Intentions and Always Fucking Up Everything

On Being Alone versus Being Lonely: They're not the same thing, damn it! But fine, okay, I totally get lonely sometimes. 

On Serving White Collar Professionals Drive-thru Coffee: A study in human nature and post-post-modern sociology

The Elitism of Young, Unemployed Intellectuals: Examples of why I prefer being around people who don't read books. A collection of photographs primarily taken in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Two Essays:
I. On Thinking Everyone is Dumb except for Yourself and then Realizing You're Really, Really Wrong
II. On Growing the Fuck up and Getting over Yourself: A psycological process often referred to as maturity

Deluded

There's a lot of standing still in this run I'm on.

I have been obsessing a bit over this paragraph from William Gaddis's essay "Old Foes with New Faces":

"Certainly an enhanced capacity for self-delusion is a valuable attribute for the writer in nurturing both his fictional characters and, often enough, his own. Thus it is hardly surprising to find this capacity to be fueled by an equally large appetite for strong drink: the majority of America's native born winners of the Nobel Prize in literature have been confirmed alcoholics. We may even go so far as to find their counterpart in Alfred North Whitehead's remark that 'a relic of religious awe at intoxication is the use of wine in the Communion service.'---at all odds a relic of the drunken license turned loose at pagan saturnalias of a still earlier time where, habit breeding expectation, promiscuous intercourse provided plentiful material for the marvels of virgin birth that followed. 'Speaking for instance of the motive of the virgin birth,' Jung cautions us again that he is "only concerned with the fact that there is such an idea' but not 'whether such an idea is true or false in any other sense.' "

The term self-delusion is enough to get me excited.  Lately I've been fixated on my own self-delusion. Believing myself to be certain things based on such and such aspects of who I consider myself to be. But even these aspects are abstractions of the very abstract "self", which of course is just a term incorporating one's entire being, past, present, future, up, down, left, right, sideways, eternally, mortally, genetically etc. I've many-a-time professed myself to be self-aware. A term I've come to loathe exponentially alongside the loathing I feel towards all conceptions I have about who I am. 

At first when I read this excerpt from Gaddis, I interpreted his commentary on writers' alcoholism as a need to drink to be creative. Or a need to drink to become more raw and sincere in one's thoughts, to delve into one's own delusions and turn them inside out. Then I reconsidered this and thought that maybe writers drink as a means to escape the unavoidable for the "deep thinker"; the ever darkening cloud of one's awareness of one's own self-delusion (I've heard that Hemingway mostly wrote sober). This awareness, this sense of doubt in one's own understanding of the self, is tough. 

On one level a person has to deal with his self-delusion in terms of himself in his situation, and his situation is always changing. When he tries to make himself stand still when evaluating who he is, not only does he automatically lose an authenticity in his analysis, but he can get dizzy too. If he does't get dizzy trying to find himself standing still, then he's probably taking the easy route to this route-less non-destination, the soul, if you will. 

And that's what I always do. I get lost trying to find myself and give up pretty easily. And when people try to explain the way I am to me, I get belligerent. 

I'm scatter-brained, that's an easy way of dealing with myself. I'm "all over the place". And I thrive that way, but in a self-deluded sense, because I've come to define myself by own limitations in being this way. Because when you're going a hundred directions at once, you can't, and you won't, but you sure as hell will get a lot of people to think you're interesting. And maybe I am, but I can't expand on this much, because I only know the bare minimum about all the things I know about. 

All people seem to assume certain habits as a means to keep some sort of grip on their lives in a chaotic world. Habits that have become so second-nature, so compulsive, that they really do become personal identifiers. We delude ourselves with self-conceptions. People are often very good at describing themselves, and, well, talking about themselves in general. I certainly am. I talk a lot when I'm around people. 

But I get this pit in my stomach every time I try to explain something about "the way I am" to someone because no matter how accurate I might be describing an aspect of "me", I always feel like I'm lying. Words are tough. Semantics will be the death of me. It's not even that I feel I can't describe my sentiments in words, it's that I'm not even really sure what I'm trying to describe or if I even know a damn thing about myself. I'd trust someone else's judgement over my own, but I never want to deal with what people have to say about me, so I never seek it out. And consequently, even my closest comrades have assumed this sort of egg shell dance around me. 

Everything feels like circles to me. Always. And then I remember there is no always for me, though there is objectively an always.  And that's hard to deal with. I saw a picture of a very charismatic, cool guy I knew just shortly after he died suddenly last week of some sort of brain thing. It was spooky. Like many people say when someone dies unexpectedly "I'd just seen him, he seemed great. All smiles. Perfectly healthy." People's characters can't just go away. But they do. I'm self-deluded to the point that my ideas of my self feel concrete even though I have no idea what they are when I put myself on the spot and try to think of them. But remembering that nothing is forever, not even my terribly unresolved sense of self, does nothing but make me feel strange. But I kind of like feeling strange. 

So here I am floating in spaces, spaces that aren't home, but aren't not home either. 

~

I have a bad habit of asking the question "is that really a thing?" about new pop cultural phenomena. Jung seems to be fascinated by events (fictional or not) transcending into beliefs and then practices formulating around these beliefs. The original event is different from "the thing". A "thing" in this sense is some sort of seemingly absurd habit or behavior that is no longer perceived as absurd because too many people are doing it. Jung was fascinated by the immaculate conception in probably a much higher, but similar sense that I'm fascinated by the Honey Boo-Boo following. It's an extreme phenomenon in a world that has allowed for it, nurtured it, and kept it on a pedestal while allowing it to melt into the commonplace world through household mentionings. Large and varied demographics interpret "the thing" and make it their own in whatever way they please.

I'm pretty interested in how specific people and events come to be the top of an umbrella full of things and people drawn to, and obsessed with, this canon at the top. There are so many replications, critics, fanatics, etc. that allow certain things to become "things" by popularizing them through the zillions of formats now available. But I will always and forever wonder how certain things gain supremacy and overshadow other things. "Culture" is weird, high-brow, low-brow, indie, pop, whatever it is, it's all bizarre and non-sensical, yet we have academics around to make sense of all of it, and then eventually their ideas trickle down into the mainstream and start a whole new frenzy of new things to counter the awfulness of the old things. And on and on and on forever.

I feel like I am whatever information I've consciously and subconsciously kept around in my brain. And that all I can ever be is a bunch of stored up loosely and strongly connected ideas of the world accumulated from sources outside of myself. But I guess that's okay, and there's probably a lot more to me than that. And I do sort of believe in the soul or the spirit I suppose.

~

And I've always believed that people can't really change. It turns out I'm just lazy. 

Trannylicious

At a bar one night recently, a couple of friends got into a discussion about Jerry Springer's "Final Thoughts" at the end of each episode of his show, "Jerry Springer".  They were laughing at the fact that these little monologues are actually relatively deep, particularly when juxtaposed with the content, characters and actions he reflects on. Later that night my buddy and I decided to Youtube "Jerry Springer's Final Thoughts" and consequently found ourselves watching an episode entitled "Trannylicious" nearly in its entirety. It was about transsexuals and their intimate relations. The first "tranny" was a mid-operation female (aka she was essentially female, had breasts, etc, but still had some operations to go through). She met a man at a bus station and they slept together and this blossomed into a relationship. Unfortunately the woman never told her fella that she was born a man. There was another issue as well: she no longer wanted to be with him, she just wanted to be single. So she had him come onto the show so that she could A.) tell him that she was born a man and B.) dump him. It gets confusing because you can't tell what the dude is thinking when he is loaded down with all of this information. Does he feel weird? Does he love her? Is he sad that she's dumping him? Did he know she was a man? Did he not know and now feels embarrassed?

He talks about it somewhat, but I was too busy counting up the times he said "you know whatum sayin'?" to listen to whatever he was sayin'. Then there's the additional, underlying de-complicating factor that the whole show is staged, which is sort of mind boggling on its own.

The transsexual woman kept defending herself by uttering nothing but "it is what it is" over and over and over again.

Did she mean:
A.) It (her genitalia) is what it is
B.) It (her not wanting to be with him anymore) is what it is
C.) It (she lied and there's nothing to be done about that now) is what it is?
or maybe
D.) all of the above?

I hate the phrase "it is what it is" with a passion. But taken out of the context of "Trannylicious", it is probably the greatest and only truth. Everything is, in fact, whatever it is. Unfortunately, that informs us of absolutely nothing. It reminds me of an irritating Intro to Philosophy course I took. On the first day the Marxist Feminist professor rubbed her palm sensually across the table in front of her as she presented the class with (rhetorical) questions such as:
"What is a table?"
"What does is it mean to be a table?"
"What does it mean to be an object in a room?"
"What does it mean to be an observer of objects in a room?"

These are four very different, equally loaded and irritating questions that nobody should have the time to sit around and ponder. And if you do have the time to sit around and think about shit, these types of inquiries probably shouldn't be the central focus, unless drugs are involved and it simply can't be helped.

The utilitarian (who would never dub himself such a thing because the title is just a useless, recondite term), would say that a table is where you set things. And he'd be correct.

As pragmatic as I wish I could be, I'm not.

Sure throughout my day I unconsciously take habitual advantage of objects and accept them to be whatever their function is for me, and that's fine, but when it comes to people and communication and "the way(s) of the world", I feel perpetually disappointed by another person's utterance of "it is what it is". I tend to think "no it's not" or "yes, you're right, damn it, but that's just not enough."

Your simplification is too wise for me. I haven't yet learned the value behind it, I'm still too young to simplify the complexities I've dealt with into a sort of umbrella of various experiences, packed into a half-victim+half-victor=nihilist equation of "reality" as it is, as it comes, as a static continuum whose paradox I manifested for myself in a pre-made environment. And it's best not to see paradoxes in things because they are what they are and nothing more.

I just can't be that reductive yet or accepting of the aspects of reality that are straight-up bullshit. 

All in good time.

I’m on a mission to feel more and more incomplete

This feels sincere. But it also feels like someone already said it or it’s already been written, a million times, worded a million times better. Then I wonder, “am I just chanelling shit I’ve read by other people, or do I occasionally have totally original thoughts?” All of our ideas have to come from somewhere. Oh how terrible it is to feel perpetually trite and alive at the same time. 

Am I seeking fulfillment or reassurance that I will always be unfulfilled, or that the world is perpetually unfulfilling, or that I can never be satiated because there is so much in the world to be known? Or am I just hiding from the emptiness within myself by reading about the emptiness of everything else to the extent that I don’t feel empty, because I understand what these people are saying and criticizing, and am therefore safe from their finger pointing? Oh haha! The world really is that way, how terrible! How God fucking awful! Oh woe is me!

I am a part of this world though. It’s unavoidable until death comes knocking; my loathsome friend, or my beloved enemy, he’s both, and views me quite neutrally, almost coldly, but with such a profound aloofness that it is only me who feels the chill of his entrance. Its only fear I feel. And then I’ll be taken out of this place I love to hate so much, without ever knowing the depths of my heart. No,no, I will quite possibly live a great, long life. I’ll grow to be so old that I will have filled my heart with so many people and places and things, that the depths of it will be unreachable only because I’ve found so much joy that there’s no need to go digging through my heart to its bottom anymore like I try to do now in my mind. And that’s the scariest thing in the world to me. Filling my heart with joy. Sounds like a magnet my mother would put on the refrigerator or a placard in my grandmother’s bathroom. Above the toilet. Fancy that. There’s even joy in shitting sometimes come to think of it. I run from contentment like the plague. In a fear that it will eat me alive and turn me into just another one of those people in the photos that come in a picture frame when you buy it. Funny thing is, I’ll look around a room and see people and think “god people are boring” and then I remind myself that I’m just one more person. Just one more animal, just one more cell in a non-vital organ of the universe. Earth is a gallbladder. But I still feel like I have something to say before I die. I’m just never quite sure what that is. Maybe it will just be an insightful quote by someone smarter than me that I’ll forget to put quotations around and it will go on my tombstone. I guess it’s healthy narcissism to assume people might read some of my shit when I die.