I’m sure I’ve done a post with that title before on my old blog, the one I had before I got all embarrassed about my thoughts, or believed I had a private, inner life. I deleted that blog in 2008 when I began dating someone who I knew would judge me for feeling things.
It isn’t as if I often feel things. I wouldn’t call it “feeling” things. I would call it “ruminating,” “drifting,” “vague….”
*****
4:50AM, I was waiting at the 59th Street Bridge on the Queens side.
What if this had been me? Would I be who I am now, or a Nobel Prize Laureate? It’s hard to say!
****Question of the day: Am I really 30?****
…23, 24…some people cautiously say 26…
…You don’t look thirtyyyy…
…Dear therapist, why do I still dress as if I’m a Teenager From Mars…shouldn’t it be Banana Republic? (She looks as if she shops at Banana Republic. Which is fine. In many ways I want to be her)
…Peer pressure…
…But I don’t read magazines anymore because of an Intro to Media and Communications class…
…finally have my own cat, who is currently sitting on my butt…
…I have streaks in my hair…asymmetrical hair…
…Retail therapy…
…I am insecure…
Love is Gone
I just figured out that music is part of this interface. I don’t know why I like incredibly cheesy music. Maybe because I was raised in an airtight chamber with Tchaikovsky and Kmom swearing as my sole aural caress until 12 yrs old. Plus I am a Korean girl (Wonder Girls just cancelled their first U.S. tour, dammit!) and they Korean girls are 80% cartoon.
Pop is, in fact, they way in which they be.
If this is indeed a “personal blog, it is incumbent that I heretofore fearlessly expose the blistering gaudiness that is my bad taste.
…is what what my therapist said, reenactment to gain mastery. How I find it intoxicating to contemplate reenacting what had caused an upsurge in this otherwise tepid interior of mine. Upsurge; torment; torpor; vertigo. It is all rather distracting. It is too familiar, it calls me.
I am abstract here, but how else to express ennui? I could compose sonnets, but I seem to be in drifter girl mode ala first year of freshman year 1998 when I had anorexia, literally fainting my way through school, except now I don’t have anorexia, I just have dizziness, nausea, waffle-ment. I seem to be continually grasping at the spectre of a once beating heart, that offered something thick and ready always because it was other and desiring.
Such empty pithy words for 7:30AM. I must summon up the courage to peel myself off the bed, to feel the cold as I de-robe for my nightly shower, and die my mini-death/beauty-rest. My goal is to be so tired that my mind will shut off; knocked on the head with a shovel, synapses clipped short by an annihilating epiphany. I don’t want ease into anything. There’s anxiety in the awareness of time. Just one more moment awake! Please! I must work out that little bubble of thought! Otherwise it will cause an aneurysm! I must contemplate the vice in this or that…I must, I think…all these wringings and frothings that leave me with nothing good to say for myself, exactly the kind of enervated yet wired lout that my parents would have smacked me not to be.
Cat lies in wait to attack hovering hand. It is an exciting game we play. Soon I will turn thirty.
I am working on my birthday. I’ve lost, this week, at least a portion of my brain and soul combining work, school, strange family nebulae, sleep patterns that conform to no known logic and weird new personas I’ve been growing that that may be connected to age, disembodiment, hormones, i.e. this glittering sort of laughter that emits from me as despicably uncensored as an old chrone might complain about the rising cost of stamps; but it superficially mimics a girlish tone, which creates ease amongst listeners, I blend in, whatnot, though upon second listen I frown upon hearing a more maniacal element that could be a result of a definite deflated debauchedness. Is the latter a word?
Just emerged from the dregs of night; dawn has deposited me so colorful and woebegone. This face is fear of thirty; Lynchian, I presume. Blast!
Or…the vitriolic anti-young-people-having-sex memo!
Or…Why can’t we stop freaking out about sex in this passive aggressive ad-hoc American way so we can freak out about it elegantly like the Orientals used to, write subtle, pretty poems delineating all sorts of raindrops and angles and institute geishas to craft the indefinable into a sublime woman-made art for the elemental males to integrate respectfully?
Or…I hope my biological clock will never tick because it definitely hasn’t yet! Although worryingly, I find babies’ less hideous recently. But I still don’t look at them. Sometimes I think to myself, gee, I haven’t seen babies in months, but then I look around me, and they’re all around us, I just haven’t noticed ‘cus I don’t SEE them! Y’know?!
Or…just ‘cus I can booty dance doesn’t mean I have sex! And definitely not with you! Don’t touch me!
Or…I am a crazy cat lady!
*****
I grew up (surreptitiously) reading Archie comics (when my mum would abandon me at the local mall’s Waldenbooks) till my butt fell asleep. I would have to pretend to be in the middle of The Utne Reader or Raygun (which I actually did read sometimes) when she came back at an unpredictable hour, doing god knows what, maybe going on a crazy shopping spree at Jo-Ann Fabrics.
Is it possible that I’ve absorbed the Archie comic value systems, their ethos, their worldview? Do I frame things in terms of Betty’s insecurity, Veronica’s entitled ditziness, Archie’s idiotic binary ogling, Jughead’s creed of hunger? Am I just a simple bitch?
Mail, scolding teachers, distant mothers, TV shows, servant-ing, mate-ing it up.
I:
I left a chunk of the money on the table; I took just enough so I wouldn’t bounce a check. It was an extraordinarily dull feeling I had as I contemplated having to work every night of the next week and my future being all tenuous….plus it’s cold and I have a hacking cough and a defective knee. All this old people shit. Must.Party.To.Prevent.Aging.
It’s 9:48AM. Time to go to sleep.
This is what a 29 year old looks like. I will be 30 in 11 days.
I thought I’d be mature and post a photo of myself that doesn’t primarily feature my cat.
****
My worry lines tend to congregate on my chin; I also have an underbite. I had to explain what this was to several lucky girls this past weekend, who had had braces growing up: lovely Chiclet teeth.
Yet, some people think underbites are cool. It remains to be seen whether their opinions are legitimate.
I have been keeping my mouth open for several years now so I don’t wrinkle my chin, a look that is “not attractive,” I was told by an exboyfriend in 2006 during an unpleasant viewing of The Ring. To say the least, I really regret watching that movie.
So me being me is allowing myself to close my mouth as I lay around the house.
****
My vision is off the charts blind, like 20/400, according to my optician. So they have to order my contacts from some other place. The assistant is this funky chick who suggested I try, in the interim, the colored contacts they have on file that somewhat matched my prescription but weren’t Toric lenses, i.e. astigmatic lenses. She said, “I had to have em in every cullah.” Her life seemed fun and carefree.
I thought I’d try them, as they are about $150 less per eye. Plus, I needed a new personality. The color was suitably jarring—a sort of gritty mustard yellow, incidentally called “Honey.”
But I liked the honey factor: two sludgy sugar dots that shape the normally jumpy, tweaking brown-blackness. As I become that sort of New York unconscious that allows one to abandon dignity for raw survivalism, I find myself no longer willing or able to hide the consuming states that increasingly occupy what previously had been a present pair of eyes. I reckon subway passengers no longer can read my mind. I remembered my 9th grade best friend told me I should never commit a crime because everyone would be able to see on my face immediately that I had done it.
As I wore them, I began to dream that what people looked into was not my soul, but a color field that would transport them to other places besides myself. It would be a risky lie that nobody would believe, but people will accept anything if it is done with balls, and if it is colorful.
I decided eventually to opt for a less alarming Hazel to replace the Honey. Hazel is a real eye color and therefore I am now more real, gliding towards a better sort of lie.
