Things are changing. It feels really, really good. I can't even describe it because it's not like those overhaul lists I make at the beginning of every year. It's bottom-up, inside-out, genuine voluntary change.

Oh, ho, ho
YES.

Part 4

Today I have enjoyed being quiet and nothing. Yesterday ended badly despite having been wonderful for the first half, so I went downstairs around midnight to watch A Room With a View and doze on the couch before coming back upstairs to sleep.
Today I was very tired and got up late, sat at the computer for a long time, and wrote Zoe an email. Then I showered and began to feel very sweet and clean, but still not happy. Cleaned bathroom. Cleaned kitchen. Came back to computer.

Listened to Smetana's Ma Vlast while I cleaned the kitchen. Nobody was home so I had everything queit and peaceful and didn't have to make a noise or say a word for hours. I felt exquisite, but still not happy. My clothes were all freshly laundered and the cotton shirt stood away from my skin lightly and smelled (smells) like detergent in a faint, nice way. Completely clean, and cleaning things, and listening to that beautiful music. Several times today I have felt like I will cry over something, anything. The music was the main thing. The music is beautiful.

I really love watching Shuler Hensley as Jud in the London stage revival of Oklahoma!
I always forget how much Jud creeps me out until I get into the movie (either one). I am just as frightened by him as I am by any other cruel or terrible movie villain I can think of. There's something disgusting about him but still awfully sad, like you want to understand what he's thinking - when Curly goes and visits him ("Poor Jud is Dead"), you wonder why he was so angry, and if maybe things could have been different if the visit had never happened.

This reminds me of something I've been thinking about again.

Right there on the list between "bake a pie" and "speak more Spanish", it says "marry Evan."
I can get to that after I... knit a sweater? Graduate from high school?
He wouldn't have me.
Seriously though. I'd be his beard, right? A beautiful sex-less marriage of convenience. So awful and important to me. He'd just be sitting there wallowing in how fuuuuuucked up it is and enjoying it - just like he'd imagined (seriously glamorously twisted). No rings, no kids, nothing tangible. Jut us, living in a house together, and he'd play his guitar and get high while I get terse and ugly and make dinners. And eventually we split up and I can cut my hair and meet somebody else and think to myself while I fall asleep in their apartment, I was married to him for a while, and isn't that what I wanted all along?

thingks to thingk about

"Tomorrow or another day something will happen that can and will upset what I thought I had learned before. What is to be learned anyway, except love and respect for others and yourself? And, of course, Nutella"
- Pierre Carrilero


On a scale of one to deep, the personality of my mind gets about as treacherous as the pond on my grandparents' old property in Parkland. Charming enough to look for polliwogs in, dirty enough to keep your feet out of, safe enough to linger by.

I guess I finally deadened all those nerve endings that Evan used to brush up against. Not a damn feeling either way. Four nights in a row he was supposed to call. I care only because I can count them. I wonder if there's something "up" with him, but not enough to call him, or ask him, or talk to him when I see him at school. I just don't know.
I feel a bit isolated right now, but not in a bad way. I initiated a thing with Andy and now I don't care about it and would sort of rather take it back. I am as immensely fond of Paul as ever, but I'm more intent upon reveling in the fact that we're still wonderfully good friends despite weeks of never seeing each other. I don't really have any other interests as far as males go. Evan was the main one for so long; a part of me misses that sensation, but most of me doesn't. Most of me knows this isn't for good, so I should enjoy being immune while I can. But honestly, I wonder sometimes if he's playing games, or if he's expecting me to. Now I'll be honest - it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable for him to think I might be doing something, because before that would have been true. But this time it's not. This time I'm curious. I'm thinking to myself, I wonder what he'll do? And the answer is: nothing. So that shouldn't be a surprise. In fact, it confirms everything in my mind.
Nothing there.
So gone.

faves

As far as grown-up books go, I read Lolita and loved it, took a good whack at Sophie's World and appreciated it, whizzed through Portnoy's Complaint and felt oddly educated, and savored Maurice about a million times over before pronouncing it one of the best books of all time, next to A Room With a View and The Life of Pi (of course).

Ch-Ch-Ch...

...anges.


This rocks.
Today I ran for a mile and half. I haven't done any sort of running on my own initiative since well before high school. It felt really amazing. If I do it regularly for a while, I can be a fox for junior prom.

I watched Amelie tonight. I almost cried at the end. I've only seen it once before all the way through, and that was probably a year ago. I remembered vaguely how it ended, and that it ended happily, but I was so affected by it this time. It's beautiful and simple and perfect and totally unrealistic, which is exactly how I wish my life could be.

I really love reading books that get to me, or watching movies that affect me, or listening to music that stirs up emotions. It makes me feel alive, you know? It's so strange that something that impersonal can affect me so strongly. I love it, but it also makes me vulnerable. I cried really hard at Othello. That movie was insane. Amelie makes me want to cry, but for different reasons. (I'm not even PMSing, seriously.) The Pianist is something else all over again... my God! It feels like a punch in the stomach. And reading Maurice made me feel totally - - incandescent. A weird feeling requires a weird word. I felt like I was growing as I read it. I felt that way when I fell asleep to Chopin nocturnes every night for a month or so. They just conditioned me completely, and the music was so incredible. When I'm in the right mood, hearing a particular piece of Chopin's can put me out of my head.
It's really remarkable. It's not the sort of thing you really get to talk about with people, because it only sounds dumb or affected or whatever, but it's not like it's some grand intellectual experience in the first place - it's just something that happens to humans when they hear exactly the right notes at exactly the right time, and then all of a sudden they can feel the depression of the keys like weights going down against their chest and maybe they forget to breathe a little bit, and their eyes get achey and tight, and little body-shivers run up and down. Same thing happens when you hear the right words at the right time. Like good poems.

Hmm.
Oh, ha, hum.