22 IV 2002 - 21:28 - ater2

(written at 3:47 today, foiled by an uncooperative computer)

Today has looked like a running stream of Surrealist paintings to me, mostly because I was up until 3 AM last night putting finishing touches on the Civ essay. Well, not finishing touches: it's still pretty bad. But just finishing it. I also had to record the tapes I submitted as examples of Britten's work - which turned out later to be unnecessary.

I woke up late, got into class, and was informed (although I already knew this) that we were going to be watching Fantasia. Perfect! Whirring colors and flashing lights set to music that worms its way into your head. After this, time simulatenously sped up and slowed down, and although each class seemed to take an eternity to be over, here I am with only a little while on my hands after school before I have to walk to my doctor's appointment. It might also be a good idea to retrieve my backpack from the fitness room.

My friends are also rather tired, and thus grumpy. I don't think any one of us got a full night's sleep last night. Al wins the contest with her two hours of sleep, although I wasn't far behind with four. Also: apparently, the baser (butcher) urges make themselves known to me when I stay up late. I felt like beating things up. With gusto. Then again, that might have been frustration and repressed anger, so nix on that. A certain amount of sexual tension is always present, but that, I think, stems from my age rather than the hour I'm up. Note the "always" - that would seem to have taken care of the concept.

I'm not thinking all too clearly as a consequence of having so little sleep and being rather rushed and also having little images of naked A. pop up in my head. It's rather distracting when you're trying to think about vectors and suddenly the person you're trying not to think about because, well, naked body parts are distracting waves hello. So to speak.

Some of my friends will be at school tonight until 9 or 10. I'm sorry for them - they're in the musical, and this is Hell Week for them. It is a relief, however, to know and be smug in the fact that mine, or however close I got to one, was last week. So. Now I really have to run. Take care - and celebrate my diary's return to its usual bitchy irrelevance. Hit something on the head! Or blow a spitball. Either one is fine.

at 9:30:

Three things make themselves heard as I slip into night and the certainty that I should be doing my homework. The first is my father's voice as we go home today, asking me, "You never think about the fact that doing something with me like biking or swimming could make me healthier and keep me alive longer, do you?" Implication: You're a bad son. You think only of yourself.

The second thought to make itself heard has to do with the nature of comfort. Ben and Jerry's had its free ice cream day today, and my father would have taken me; however, this was just after a particularly harrowing session of "therapy" and a long conversation with Al, and I didn't feel like waiting in a long line for ice cream that I told myself might make me feel better - but whenever I do that, it never does. So I talked myself out of that, which I'm feeling incredibly stupid about.

The third is about how each session with the gentle doctor makes me feel only worse about myself that I cannot open my mouth to explain anything, really, to her. I wallowed for a bit in self-pity with Al as an audience - I don't know what I would have done without her - and although it felt good to get some of it off my chest, I felt vaguely unclean afterwards, as if I have no real right to be complaining. (Well - I don't. But I'm not arguing about that now.)

The power which my absurd guilt has over me is baffling not just to you, my friend; I too fail to understand it.

I would take comfort tonight in lines and lines of Latin but for that it isn't my homework, tonight, and in the place of translation, which might make me feel halfway capable, I have an essay. One is tempted to notice only the coincidences which occur around the troughs of his life, or at least, one is if he is also me. (Somehow, the subject sounds wrong in that position, even if it does come after an intransitive verb.)

I want... simply not to feel guilty that I want, and to have perhaps the gift of tongues, and barring that, the illusion that if I flee from language to language and culture to culture, I may yet find the one in which my tongue will not trip over the words surrounding the center of my soul and all I hold dear -

It's not a simple request, no. But the more reasonable ones I make, like some contact, get me called sick and not a real member of the family (for if I were I would find touch abhorrent, and here's the thing: with masses of strangers, it is) - the family who most of all should understand what it is like to be tired of dealing with unreliable eyes and hearing, and is it so wrong to want to be held and told that the demons will go away and there are no monsters in the closet and that things will get better?

Apparently, it is, and so I am denied, and my mind makes its leap: if what I consider reasonable is wrong, then I will be wronger, ever more fanciful, asking what no one has power or obligation to grant -

(and part of me recognizes the too-great pride in expecting any request of mine to be fulfilled, that part which also holds that i must learn humility and grace.

i do not disagree, but:

did the lesson have to come there?)