19 III 2002 - 22:13 - prex3

answers to a couple of questions and more musings but first i must get something out of my system (and borogoves put it there:)

canis me mordet.
canis mordet me.
me canis mordet.
me mordet canis.
mordet canis me.
mordet me canis.

all right, i'm done with that now. a couple of people have signed my guestbook expressing concern for my well-being. which is probably justified considering the mood i'm in. however. i'll be fine eventually. it's just that it's sort of bad for the now. (the vaguely self-destructive tendencies? those are always there. i just hide them better, most days.)

if perhaps you remember the following passage from the great gatsby:

     It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning -

     So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

sometimes i feel as if my conception of myself - what i should be - is my green light, the unattainable. silly for someone who is 15.5 and a little bit to be worrying about, no? i have a future ahead of me. much as i don't like to think about it too much. (and yet i know what i want to do next summer - the greek program at uc-berkeley - better than i know what i want to do this summer. also, i should be writing my gatsby essay and my research paper thesis for history right now. but that's an aside.)

i am playing hindemith while recording a tape of lang lang's playing for a friend. since the two sounds are mixing i am beginning to feel a very little bit ill. i suppose i could make a very ives-like piece out of the crossing of the two. sudden topic switch: wolfi, the sfcm's library server, is down, which means that i cannot search the site for oboe quartets. sigh. i need to get moving on my independent projects, though.

once an endearment, an epithet, has been given by me i do not revoke it willingly. max will remain liebchen, tiff carissima, and al the brainless slug (just kidding, al) until it becomes absolutely necessary to change. i tell myself that will never occur until i find the person i am certain of spending the rest of my life with. so i say.

words and emotions are sometimes fickle things and not to be trusted.

but this is the truth as i see it, now. i don't know why i added that qualifier. this entire site is the truth as i see it now. "now" is a malleable thing, ranging anywhere from a section of five minutes to an entire year. i read entries that i wrote only half a year ago and i recognize myself and my sometimes overly pompous, self-important tone, but i read what i have written without any real recognition.

the new and improved orchestra seating begins this saturday, and i begin the first movement of brahms c major trio.

i now have a thesis for my history paper. everyone, please stand up and applaud, for this has been like pulling teeth.

what i wish is that i could forget what my mother says as easily as she seems to. i'm not going to, though, not as long as what she says merely reinforces what i already sometimes say about myself. this morning on the way to school she began a rant that took me everywhere and left me, wrung out, on a platter to be served at school. the hydrochloric acid-magnesium metal lab we did today cheered me up a bit. bubbles of hydrogen gas rising through water are sort of theraputic and hypnotic.

but. i am selfish and spiteful and i will have nothing to write on my college application and i an bitter and i have no life, social or otherwise, and oh by the way something is fundamentally wrong with me because i am gay and don't particularly care to hide it and i am not socially promiscuous and do not have four hundred friends and do not care to make them for the sake of the appearance of it. and right: what the hell is wrong with me that i slouch all the time and shift my eyes and mumble and play with my hands as i talk? because that betrays a lack of confidence and she can't possibly understand why i might have no confidence.

indeed.

in summary this was perhaps not the best of days for me. a pounding headache started to make itself felt to me during math class, which was all about the sums and differences of cosines and sines. it lasted through lunch until the advil which tiff gave me finally kicked in.

at least latin went reasonably well. and gym wasn't too unbearable. i basically hung upside down for forty-five minutes, and that counts towards fulfilling my weekly requirement. i love finding loopholes like this. (because it's not excercise if it happens on the weekend, no no it's not!)

other people tell me i suffer and i want to believe them. other people tell me that there is no such thing as a little trauma, that if i hurt, that does not make my pain less than the greater pain of the one across the way.

i don't believe it. i dismiss what might be pain.

what i perceive as pain, though, drifts from above as lotus petals on the current of a slow river, gentle and draping thickly over me until i cannot breathe for its weight. what i want is that it should be over, that i might feel as if i matter to someone.

i do, but perhaps not in the way i want, in the way where i can do something for them. i am at heart a jealous and insecure man. i want to feel needed, to be reassured. i understand intellectually that my friends have other problems and other people to tend. they cannot spend their life nursing one of the sick.

but on days when i am told there is something fundamentally wrong with me, i want to scream and rage, and do not. because they don't have the time or the ear for it.

Fundamentally wrong. Because I am "anti-social," have no desire to make purely pragmatic connections yet, no ability to identify purely pragmatic connections, and because I came out.

I tell myself everyone's parents are like this. I tell myself it will be only two more years. Every day I fear I have gone just a bit more to the mad end of the scale.

I don't want to repress my emotions, to be a robot. I do feel. But in order to keep the peace it seems that's what I must do.

bite your tongue for two more years

I'm not patient enough for that. My hope is that some force might transmute me from a sinner to a saint, that I might find within myself some patience, that I might find within myself some scrap of dignity to which I can cling and thus reserve my sanity.

These days I don't think it too likely, and hope only that I may not come out the less for it.

at least they don't hit me

I take my comforts where I can.

they say they love me and i'm sure they do

I'm sure they mean well. So sure of it that I cannot tell them when they ask me what's wrong. That I can't do anything about it but vent to what is essentially a way in which I can talk to myself.

and they wonder why you talk to yourself all the time it's because that's the only time you get to play by your rules, in your logic-world, and because although school is an escape it too is at times intolerable

and perhaps the best word of all for what all of this feels is interminable.

for lighter reading, go to any. one. of the diaries to which i'm linked in my profile.

prex, precis f. request, entreaty; prayer to a god; curse