| return for store credit |
[08 Apr 2008|12:59pm] |
i'm getting so much of my life back. new york, weekends, i'm even getting the hundred dollars he owed me. if i could get all the bus trips back, the walks through the snow and the rides through new jersey rural neighborhoods... if i could get my 8 months back...
i found one of his shirts in my room. i've been smelling him. zane's "the cigarettes you left in my car are the last harm you'll ever do me" was great and aphoristic but just not true. it still hurts. it's still real to me.
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| reviving |
[28 Mar 2008|03:52pm] |
just to take notes on my life, so i can study for the tests.
themes- rising interest in/belief in the need for feminism, hatred of bureaucracy, and of Pretty Girls, and whiny men.
is bureaucracy the only way that corruption is made legitimate? it seems this way to me, i could be missing an example. they develop the system and also interconnect with themselves enough so that they can ensure their continued existence. a man can make a policy decision that makes his position necessary or of a higher priority than it was before-- but it's on the books, over the table! most social systems we have are so needlessly complicated that the average citizen needs to enlist the aid of a bureaucrat to navigate them.
and Pretty Girls. fuck. i knew them in high school, i know them now, they just walk in and ruin and leave and never bat an eye except to get something free. we talk about changing standards of beauty but how is this supposed to be possible when we will drop everything and run for a Pretty Girl? but i've seen one almost saved, i've seen beautiful girls stay good and decent, and i have a hard time sorting out my own motivations for hostility, because i know i am flawed that way-- which makes for muddled action.
as for men, i'm keeping all my sympathy for myself and the people for whom my happiness is a serious priority.
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| Quandary. |
[10 Jun 2007|03:26pm] |
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mood |
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 cold |
] |
I need an ethical construct more substantial than "What I Want Now = Good." For the one thing, it's not even true. I've been having a hard time finding anything true to believe in, but I happen to know for a fact that mindless self-indulgence is eating away at something inside me. I'm not sure what I'm losing here, but I can feel it rotting away, threatening to collapse.
Okay, I can set goals for myself, make lists, cross things off, become productive and creative. Learn to play classical guitar. Get a scholarship. Save money over the summer. Write and draw and paint. Read. Do something besides watching Tivo and mess around at bars and getting myself tangled into bizarre affairs. Visit New York and actually go out, take advantage of the things only New York has to offer, see film screenings, concerts, art projects, etc. Living and shit. Something besides Survival.
But all of this is just a slightly more sophisticated execution of the rabid individualism of the same moral construct. I'd be doing everything for me. There. Is. Nothing. Else.
I need a cause. I feel like I'm searching for some passion, some idea bigger than myself to throw myself into and be taken into and saved by. Serious, high-grade, uncut and uncensored Validation. I need to believe that there is something more than this.
This cannot simply be the way the world is.
I want something to make me believe that things can be better.
At the same time look at the causes around me, and I can't stop myself from tearing it all apart. I see the punks in the cities smoking cigarettes and talking about the Revolution the same way the hicks in the towns have dinner parties and talk about the Rapture. All of this is so fucking messianic! You can't wait around for the world to magically transform into something good and real and pure, whether it's with riots and broken glass or fire and brimstone.
I want to believe in the fall of the consumer culture. It was the one thing my dad believed in to the point that in his desire to work with the system, climb the corporate ladder out of near poverty (poverty with a lowercase 'p,' then: difficulty with keeping the lights on, not food on the table) and create a Good Life For His Family, he lost it. And I still don't think he concedes that the system of corporate ownership and wage slavery and the way it has confined us, is a major part of what killed my mother. What made us so desperate in the first place. What happened to Albuquerque and everyone who was left behind there.
I think he still believes in the American dream, and that it worked, and that we're out now and not desperate anymore. That Mom was Depressed, and that he is the one responsible, for abandoning her with two kids in a lonely town in Texas to go be a trucker and try to make something of himself, for all of us. That it was the only way. And hey, the guys upstairs (in the Human Resources department) are working on depression, the company has got all the answers.
The problem is in believing that this is the only way.
And yet I can't NOT believe in the consumer culture. I wear contact lenses that have to be replaced every 2 weeks. I take synthetic thyroxin, made by Pfizer, which is responsible for regulating my metabolism and keeping me alive ever since the doctors took my thyroid. I eat meat and I fuck and I smoke. I need hamburgers and condoms and Camels. I am bodily chained to the system. It is a fucking part of me. I live by brand loyalty to my shampoo and my cosmetic products. I drive a car and go to college so that one day I too can be a part of it and be hired by a Good Company that will Take Care of Me. I spend the money from my mother's life insurance policy to make sure I can Get a Better Job.
Who is going to make your cigarettes when the Revolution comes?
And what the fuck am I ever going to hope for?
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[12 Dec 2005|07:03pm] |
I was SO planning to get laid this afternoon.
Instead, I sniffled and did English homework.
Oh, update: I think I may have Bird Flu. Go, me.
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| OH MAN |
[09 Dec 2005|04:30pm] |
COLUMBIA CLASS OF '10
(!)
times a MILLION BILLION TRILLION GAZILLION!
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[20 Nov 2005|01:06am] |
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I must be insane. That is the only explanation. Mood swings, hatred, irrational tears and laughing and emotional bullshit and betrayal and jealousy. I feel hideous and out of control. I'm sorry.
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[07 Nov 2005|07:28pm] |
It's taken me this long to realize that the year and a half that I gave up on love was the happiest of my life.
I also had no real justification for missing H-- because I was trying to preserve the peace and wholeness of my life and not risk ruining things with my dad, and ultimately I was trying to attain for myself the greatest overall happiness, but none of that has happened. In fact I believe I might be down in the deep end of the pool in as far as happiness goes, and I mean motionless at the bottom.
I have no Halloween candy.
I have no one to depend on.
I have no hope of getting into Columbia.
I have no hope of making love stay.
I have no more patience left.
If you're not going to be there for me, then there's no words I can have faith in.
I want
to go
fuck
shit
up
but I won't.
I will perhaps write poems instead.
But I probably will not do that either.
I will do my homework
because that,
along with taking up space,
and turning air into stale air,
and being the butt of the universe's jokes
and spilled cups of coffee,
and struggling not to cry but then falling to it while they laugh at me,
is what I do.
So fuck hope.
fuck redemption.
If no one else is going to care, then I give up on caring.
You've gone and pissed me off, life.
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[30 Oct 2005|12:06am] |
You know what's nice?
Only knowing who's in your house by seeing the shoes by the front door, counting the glasses of wine, and hearing two sets of snoring.
Coming home to a pacified and unconscious check-in. Ahhhh...
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[22 Sep 2005|10:03pm] |
You know what would be nice?
If your boyfriend didn't tell you how much he missed you, then forget all about you the next day and make promises to someone else.
That might be nice.
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| There is a Wendy's chicken sandwich waiting for me after this entry |
[19 Sep 2005|09:40pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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 I don't know!!! |
] |
Oh, boy oh boyoboyo. I need to figure out what this feeling I'm having is. Some fluid chemical ether is flowing around in my body-shell and I need to understand what is happening to my brain so that I can think of the individual chemicals, there names, their beautiful frightening reactive sways and dances and imbalances.
It's a full moon, which swings all my mental faculties into hyperactive chaos. I just got home from the hospital and I'm...
I feel like exhaustion is making ravenous love to the pores in my face. Or maybe it's not exhaustion, because I'm bizarrely awake, but "stress" would be too trite. Anxiety, perhaps, but strongly laced with exhileration.
My brain is somehow heavy and jangling in a very flimsy skull. I walked out of the hospital room to go home and the white linoleum hallway in front of the elevator filled me with mad dread. I wanted to fall down and clasp every inch of my body and skin and feel my living softness, or maybe shake myself apart like a wet dog, watch all the membranes and organs and oozy bits fling off of me like tender meat off of spare ribs- flung apart and floating.
My brain feels pressed between two sheets of plywood. Or like a pile of fishing weights jittering around heavily in a flimsy white plastic skull.
My eyes are wide. Driving home I kept looking into other people's cars. I caught people's eyes and shivered to myself. In parking lots I keep seeing empty dark space and glints under cars. At wendy's there were two mid 30s aged guys eating dinner by the window. They glanced at me as I walked out alone. Walking past the drive-thru a pickup with at least 3 men in their 20s, wearing athletic beaters and way too strong. When I walked out one opened the door and stuck one leg out, turning to talk to his guy friends with a smirking tone. I felt like eyes were icing down my shoulder blades.
The moon to me is sex. Crazed sexual raw energy, vibrating through electromagnetic waves. Or perhaps not sex, but glood-filled electric energy, pulsing madly like the heart of a small animal.
I feel crazy and paranoid and snarling and laughing and shaking, shaking all over. I don't feel like someone about to snap; just like someone bending wildly.
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| Laparoscopic! |
[17 Sep 2005|11:01pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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 pacing and wringing hands |
] |
Thursday night I come home because I am at Kurt's and we'd already had sex for the day and he had to do real work in his life which exists outside of his head on my chest as we lie on the couch, and I walk into my house and daddy is upstairs in bed, moaning in pain.
"I ate two hot dogs today. I think I'm having another episode."
OK, back up. Dad has diverticulitus. What's that? www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diverticulitis
He gets dull pains in his side when he eats seeds, because they puncture his colon. Fun.
So Larisa is coming over to talk to him about her house which she is selling (and getting screwed on) and after about 20 minutes of that we realize he needs to go to the hospital because he is in PAIN!
Have you ever been around someone in hopeless, hissing, seething pain? The kind that doesn't go away and has no easy solution? You want to distract them from it, do something to help. Then you get mad at yourself when you can't, and it seems like they get mad at you, too. Then you're mad at them for getting mad at you, and you're ashamed and feel foolish and still completely helpless.
We wind up in the emergency room waiting room, 2 hours later Dad has a room and a morphine shot. Ahh. I watch Comedy Central while he goes and gets an ultrasound. I think hospitals might get scrambled porn on their cable channels. It's hard to tell.
His gallbladder is fucked up. Gallbladder? Ok, sure. After another 2 hours we have test results and bloodwork, it's not food poisoning, and he needs a surgical consult. Larisa drives me home at 1:00, I fret for a while, feel guilty and hopeless and selfish.
Next day, John Sullivan comes from work to pick up the car I drive from the dealership where it was being serviced. I drive up to the hospital around 4- "Oh, Robert? He's in surgery right now."
Fuck. My daddy's in surgery. What are they doing? How long will it be? What do I do?
I go to Kurt's, he's at the KHS football game to mooch free burgers off the soccer moms, we ditch the game and go to Home Depot to buy an orchid (where I fret for way too long over which flower to buy, which plant dish is the right size, etc.) and then he drops me off at my car, I start back towards hospital, Dad calls to say he's awake and I feel selfish and ashamed for not having waited for him. Thank God I have the flower. Ah shit, I'm being selfish again, trying to validate myself with a stupid flower. This is all about me, no matter how I try to think I feel selfish and ashamed. God dammit.
I crave absolute sincerity. Self-consciousness precludes that. I want to feel like I'm really worried about my dad because that means that I'm a decent and caring person. Knowing that I want that, I don't know what I feel. I know it would be bad to feel like it's nice to live alone in the house for a few days. I don't know how much that feeling actually exists, and how much my mind is trying to make me feel guilty for it.
I get there, I have the flower (my bastion of self-validation) and he has glue or some shit all over his mouth, he's just up from general anesthesia. Larisa shows up shortly thereafter. We watch the marathon of That '70s Show from back in the heyday when it was, um, good. I leave the room when he gets up to try to walk to the bathroom. I don't want to see my dad's ass. I don't know if this is another thing that makes me useless and selfish. Ha. Shit. At this point my neuroses are getting almost comical. Almost.
I leave after a couple hours and go to Kurt's, we eat and cuddle and talk for a bit and I leave again to go home, at which point he comments that this is the first day in awhile that we've been together and my bra's stayed on. Ha. I feel jittery on the ride home, because part of me feels like I should be indignant and moralistic and another part recognizes that our physical bodies together makes me feel good and at ease. But shit, should I feel good, or should I feel respectable and keep my mind focused on my compassionate concern? What part am I playing here, the girlfriend or the daughter? Because all of these things are parts, all of my behaviors come as acting, and all my self-consciousness comes from not knowing which script I'm working with. Don't tell me to be myself, because myself is awkward and uncomfortable and self-conscious and fumbling and just likes to sit in the corner.
I go home, wake up the next day (oh that's today), take some money out of the bank, buy a phone charger for dad, go to the hospital. Larisa's there, we go for a few walks around the hallways so that Dad can recover from the surgery. After awhile I leave again (what is proper hospital-vist-leaving ettiquette? Should you wait to be excused? Do you pretend you have pressing matters elsewhere?) and drive down the highway to go shopping for dad's birthday. Step two in commercial validation of repressed guilt. It doesn't help much because with everything I buy I feel like I'm using his money. Notice how many "I's" and "me"s are in that last bit. Again. I feel bad (especially because I'm getting flaky in my driving, and making every lane change personal- 'You don't deserve to pass me, who do you think you are, you damned Buick?') and drive to the Ford dealership, where Kurt said he'd be doing a fundraiser, but he's not there and I call him and it turns out that's not today, so ok, whatever, I'm going to the hospital, I'll see you afterwards.
So I go to the hospital, chill with Dad some more. He's looking a lot better, Larisa's trying to get him to lie on his sides so that the gas used in his abdominal cavity during the laparoscopic operation can escape. What's a laparoscope? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laparoscope
They poked him full of holes, put some lights and cameras and medical instruments into him and puffed him up with CO2 so they had room to work. Then they sewed him up, but he's still blown up like a balloon and the gas needs to escape soon or else he'll start vomiting or explode or something gruesome and wet. Or at least that's what Larisa says, because she's a nurse in the O.R. in her hospital, and deals with this kind of stuff at work.
I think in this situation Larisa makes me very jealous, because she's so much more practical and more useful and for her, caring is a profession and her almost desperate attachment to my dad makes her drop her entire life and her weekend off in order to help him. I always feel like I'm in the way of whatever she's doing, because she knows what she is doing. She doesn't have to wrestle with feelings of shame or worry about showing ingratitude or a lack of compassion. She has no emotional obligation to sort of hate herself.
So he needs to move around to get the gas to move out, or else he'll get sick.
I stay around for awhile longer, then leave and go to Kurt's house. He rented some movies. We hang around, talk, and then it turns out he has to go babysit for the Heyburns, which means I'm alone again after 7, when I really wanted to go out for a movie or something. We fix food and watch some more and as 6:30 approaches start fooling around and all that, and even this feels obligatory and selfish because I can feel myself trying to make him want me to stay, so I won't have to be alone. Or, barring that, I'm trying to make myself feel physically fulfilled, so that I won't have to feel like I'm insincerely depriving myself of pleasure as some new form of self-validation.
I just don't want to have to tell him to feel guilty about leaving me, which is something I actually desperately want to do. "How dare you make me be alone, I wanted to see a movie, I told you I wanted to see a movie, we talked about this, you're terrible and hurting me by not keeping your word" but really, what's the point? Being alone really isn't that bad. He's just got me to the point where I have to vocalize every time I feel disappointed because he won't figure it out for himself, because he usually forgets what I tell him and what he tells me. And he tells me, often, that he has to have more time for himself, because he has a shortage of solitude. And it's just not worth the extra self-loathing, not worth making myself feel like a self-centered demanding piece of bitch, because I can tell that I'm emotionally incapable of seriously holding it against him. As long as I know I'm not going to form a grudge, it's okay to let it slide. Hell, it's a damn good thing to curb dependency. At this point, I kind of feel good. I even feel good typing this. It's fair. It's sincere.
At this point I still don't want to be alone, so I go back to the hospital. I get there and see Dad and Larisa walking down the hallway on another circuit. This time around Dad says something as he's getting back in bed, "Sara's thinking right now, 'I can't wait 'till I get to college.'" As in, You don't want to be here. And I probably don't. At this point I can't tell what I want. I want to be doing something helpful, not for the sake of being helful but for the sake of feeling helpful. I also know that this variety of do-gooder attitude leads to problems. Ack.
Larisa pulls me outside once while Dad's asleep. He's been refusing to turn on his right side, because there's a lot of stitches there. She needs my help getting him to turn that way. Ah! Perfect! She draws me a diagram showing how essential this is, how the large intestine is attached to most of the digestive tract on the right, and how everything flows from right to left (ie the left side of the L.I. leads into the rectum, escaping the body.) He needs to press his right side so that the gas inflating his bowels can be worked out of his system. "He does not listen to me, because he does not want to be mean to me, but he will feel okay if he blows up at you, he will pay attention and listen." Which is actually a damn good description. He basically takes me more seriously...
So at one point when Larisa leaves, I say, "Hey, how you doing? Can I get you some water? What hurts? Well, it's because you're all puffed up... Dad, you really should try to turn onto your other side." "No, Sara, it *hurts*, okay? I'm all stitched up there, I can't. I can't do it. Believe me, if it were you, I wouldn't ask you to do it." So I give him the grave, somber, Dad-I-know-you're-wrong-but-i'll-let-you-be stare, and then moved on. "Ok... do you want to take another walk in a little bit? Ok?"
And then later that night he did, with trepidation, agree to turn to his side. It lasted about a minute, and it definitely hurt him a lot, and I sure as hell don't know if it did anything, but that was one thing that made me feel like I wanted to stick around. Goals are beautiful things. They take the fretful questions out of a frenzied mind.
I feel so unequipped for the world.
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| le punk-faggot |
[11 Sep 2005|12:59pm] |
OK, so here's an interesting situation which developed awhile ago and about which I have not yet written:
My dad is now dating two women.
Woman One: Larissa. She's a Russian/Latvian immigrant who came here 6 years ago with her then-husband who quickly dumped her. She has a 23-year-old daughter going into medical school. She's a cool lady with chunky short black hair and pretty green eyes who works a lot to keep my dad from getting mad at me when I fuck up in front of the two of them, so +10 pts for her for being a calming agent. -5 points because she's bad with English and freakishly clingy, ie wants to move in with us (maybe). Whenever dad is on the phone with her he has to take on a tone like he's talking to a 7-year-old, despite her being pretty wicked smart.
Woman Two: Jennifer. She's a quirky blonde of indeterminate age (somewhere between 41 and 46) with no children and two previous marriages. She's spent her life travelling and doing crazy quirky stuff. She's into horses and travel. She's extremely health conscious and looks barely 35; she acts about 25. +10 points for having a great sense of humor and witty banter. -2108309238097t89749832749832708219083 pts because she's at a point in her life where she wants kids. For the sake of her children, I pray that my dad doesn't help her out with that (he feels rather the same way). The one time I saw her she started a food fight at one of our favorite restaurants with her neice and nephew. She's a lot of fun.
Normally my dad's girlfriends help him deal with stress. This seems to be adding to it; but it also keeps him away from home more often, letting me stay away from home, and it's cool.
OK, other news: School's back, blah blah blah. Yesterday in celebration of the weekend Kurt came over and something unsettling occurred. Then we went to Long Island and saw Richard Jeni live at the North Fork Theatre. On the drive back I got a little bit manic and couldn't stop laughing for at least 5 minutes straight. Don't know what that's about. I'm feeling a little stressed. Oy vey.
Oh, I'm beginning my application to Columbia. I am a white girl from New Jersey. Yargh.
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[08 Sep 2005|10:30pm] |
Garter belts rock my fucking world.
So does my school schedule right now- I am taking Art 1 with stoner freshmen. Score!
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[04 Sep 2005|10:49pm] |
I don't know what to do because I don't feel like anythign anymore. I'm all nothing.
I guess it doesn't matter, I'm going back day after tomorrow, I guess I don't have anythign to do with freedom. Give me choices I do nothing. I waste it all on waste. I have nothing.
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| yet again |
[25 Aug 2005|07:18pm] |
Now I'm in trouble for answering a cell phone call- from Janis, no less, tee hee, ha ha- while driving.
Absolutely. Nothing. Can. Go. Right.
Everything that should be good somehow goes bad. I should just say fuck it all and take up drinking. At least then things will be funny when they go wrong.
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[24 Aug 2005|01:19pm] |
I'm feeling hopelessly divorced from humanity and from the summer.
Being gone for 6 weeks and seeing no one from around here, I'm an alien in my own town. I have no one here to reach out to; they've all grouped together into their own little particles and gone down to the shore together, or Mountain Creek, or to the City, or ________ without me.
I have yet to speak to Janis since I've gotten back in town. She might even be in college already. I was just holding her back, anyway. When she was close to me, she was antisocial and uninspired and desperately unhappy, and she never smoked pot. Now she's reunited with her pot smoking buddies and had crazy pot smoking adventures and been taken to police stations and generally lived the life that is natural to her, the life that belongs to her.
I have no idea where I belong here. I need to fit into this scene somewhere, be on a level with everyone else, or at least be acknowledged by somebody. Everyone I can relate to lives out of town; they exist, but they form no community for me.
I interact with individuals, not with groups.
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| Oh |
[18 Aug 2005|04:58pm] |
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and does anyone want to go to Scotch Plains tomorrow or the next day? I need a guide to take me through the jungle that is Penn Station.
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| back in action |
[18 Aug 2005|04:42pm] |
whoever made that little lever that makes a seat into a recliner-
hats off to you, sir (or madame).
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| If you think I'm sexy |
[03 Jul 2005|02:27am] |
Sara Steele
New Jersey Scholars Program
P. O. Box 6015, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648-6015
Send breakfast and bedsheets!
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| Fun fact- I promise it's surprising |
[01 Jul 2005|06:00pm] |
There are Evangelical Christians in Texas.
There are Orthodox Jews in Israel.
There are Evangelical Christians in Texas who are trying to breed Perfect Red Heiffers.
There are Orthodox Jews in Israel who want to build the Third Temple.
There are Evangelical Christians in Texas who are trying to breed Perfect Red Heiffers so they can annoint and burn them.
There are Orthodox Jews in Israel who want to build the Third Temple where the Mosque of al-Azka is.
There are Evangelical Christians in Texas who are trying to breed Perfect Red Heiffers so they can annoint and burn them, and build oil wells in Israel.
There are Orthodox Jews in Israel who want to build the Third Temple where the Mosque of al-Azka is, so they need money and explosives so that they can blow up this mosque.
There are Evangelical Christians in Texas who are trying to breed Perfect Red Heiffers so they can annoint and burn them, and build oil wells in Israel to create a source of God-given revenue.
There are Orthodox Jews in Israel who want to build the Third Temple where the Mosque of al-Azka is, so they need money and explosives so that they can blow up this mosque and build the temple in accordance with the book of Ezekiel.
There are Evangelical Christians in Texas who are trying to breed Perfect Red Heiffers so they can annoint and burn them, and build oil wells in Israel to create a source of God-given revenue to give to the Orthodox Jews in Israel, so that they can use the ashes from the bull to annoint themselves and conduct services in the Third Temple, thus fulfilling the prophecy for the second coming of Christ.
And we say Judeo-Christian faiths are pure, while Islam is corrupted and fanatical.
I have more stories! I will post more later when I do not have a stupid Scholars Camp essay to write.
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cabarette's journal