to sleep, perchance to scream

I'm starting a secret blog (that will purge away secret stains and pains and drains on this finicky life,) you'll never find it, maybe you will. I'm staying up and not working, not working, because home sometimes just wants to mean a glass of wine and a sigh of release.

Can you hear it? I can't. I haven't had a released moment in ages, this heart is always beating too attentively, every instant is pitter patteringly hyperactive, manic, maniac, maaaaaaaaama?

This is when the child cries for help, "save me from the unmanageable world, Mother, who hath brought me into this unfortunate struggle where I pee on myself and my stomach hurts and then..."(and yes with a Stewie-like British accent)...but forget receding into infantile helplessness, how about, how about, slowing down this over-stimulated nervous system. Less coffee more REM? Less stress more sex? Less late nights more massages and long walks on Greek or Italian or French or Brazilian or Caribbean beaches, peaches, soft yellowish relaxation zones.

That's what this life requires perchance. A chance to dance, to dance, to dance.

lets talk about sex, american style

Hypothesis: White (straight) american men are more insecure (on average) when it comes to the bedroom, the bra, and the boob. Than whom? Probably than almost everyone else. I wonder if educational achievement correlates with sexual dysfunction? Maybe for some men.... The "smarter" and better in one achievement area, the dumber in the other. The more seemingly secure in intellect, the less secure in lack there of. What if intellect is just totally over-rated when it comes to pure physicality, what if we just disconnect with our bodies and become scared of them? How absolutely awful. Although it depends on the kind of intellectual practices one is socialized into, as well. This could go the other way too, education could open sexually, the right kind of education. So I'm talking Puritan-descended American mentality. If this generalization holds any truth, it all comes down to specifics. The body should be hidden, the body reeks of sin and skin.

This goes for women too. This is a societal problem. More specifically though, it could just be a WASP problem too, the common occurrence of identity diffusion in Wasps is something I'm pretty certain of. So we're talking Christian and mainly European descended, super-mixed descent to the point of almost impossibility to identify with one original cultural group, 1/124th this, 1/18 that...a fraction problem.

(I'm thinking anomie, and the wonderful Greenfeld again.) Anomie, namelessness, the inability to know who and what you are, the inability to locate yourself culturally, spatially, physically, mentally, socially. You have 37.8 careers every minute, you flip your brain like a tv set with 100+ channels, you flip your thoughts at the speed of google - which is why you need to be constantly hooked up to google, your fingers are always picking at your I-phone, you can't make constant eye contact, you can't focus on one lover, one job, one thought, one thought, one thought. You have given yourself ADD when it comes to knowing what you want and when you look in the mirror which face do you see? I am talking about a typical WASP problem.

On a grander world scale, I think Europeans, Aussies & Kiwis, South Americans, etc. are better off than Americans...I think the less regulated dating interactions and the more comfortable the society at large is with bodies and physicality (enter dreaded puritanical history) the better. I think the more socially-regulated and metricalized and fearful of offense and morally and legally inhibited people are in sexually-related interactions, the worse the likely outcomes. If you throw all this grammar between us, between every touch, and interpret in a myriad ways the most seemingly animalistic of connections, you're well...screwed. I mean the more we overthink the more bodily warmth and flow gets sectioned off into over-regulated little boxes. Soon, we could draw a flow chart of the date, and that would seem more sexy than the date itself. Or here's a better idea for regulation: write me sonnets, dream your Petrarch dreams, the metricality of romance is artistic-encouraging of creativity, and with that we have passion and a striving instead of constriction and fear.

Favorite defense mechanism in this life: Intellectualization

Super weapon of choice: charm, intelligence, and fairy tales

And then, the smart little lady lived happily ever after, pursuing thoughts,

those balloons that flow ever upward and offer their stringy little hands

up, up.

it all comes down to escapism

I realized that today...I didn't want my hot little date to be over because a date, and another person, particularly one that has nothing to do with my academic/professional world of warfare, can be such an amazing escape. Another world that has nothing to do with this one. This one which is overwhelming (mentally fulfilling yes,) but draining, and Protestant Ethic crazy...except alas ironically the man himself is a monk of sorts too and ran off to pay his ever-churning dues to the Faustian machine.

Another world I say:

Vacation = another world, but this concept has been sitting officiously in my thoughts ever since Liah Greenfeld's amazing Modernity seminar years ago...one of the students did her paper on the modern concept of vacation, the bourgeois routinization of reality avoidance.... You change location and activities for a specified period of time, so this is the most obvious as escape yes? You vacate your yearly routine, and this is the acceptable way to "stop the clock" and open the wallet or whatever. Time and space are altered, the wristwatch removed, the tummy filled, the skin tanned, the brain emptied like some kind of overfull receptacle of shit. Clean your hard drives ladies and gentlemen.

My point? You probably guessed it, everything except the dreaded (whatever your most constant existence happens to be,) is escape. Everything. This blog, almost everything about the oh-so-efficient but reality-consuming internet, movies, novels, coffee time, tea time, lunch time, booze time, drug-of-choice time, conversation of almost any kind unrelated to "it"...it just depends on how badly you wish to escape from "it" and how much of "it" you do every day. In the neuron-killing dead end jobs of my past, I remember bathroom breaks being escape too. I remember going to the bathroom and hearing my boyfriend's mocking voice in my head "at least they pay us to take a shit, hahaha." - and this was the sad solace of office work for me. The smugness of being paid to take a shit. Any wonder I'm in a monastic, bombastic, soultastic, starvation-causing, existential crisis-inducing, nerve-wracking, brain blowing, PhD program now?

Now too, with the overwhelm that comes with this year, everything that isn't my work is escape...people and places and movies that conjure other worlds all provide pleasures guilty and wonderful. At least the work is delicious if totally terrifying because as you can see I'm a rambler. My ideas coagulate and clot. I have to make sense of them and stick them into academicese. Easier to just be a poet? Probably. Not that poetry is easy, not the kind that gets chopped up on market blocks to fit parameters of editors who are looking for the latest fetishistically styled lines. Little meat parcels, little sushi lines that used to make sense as perfectly good verbalized soul

food.

The Queen of Cups

Apparently my potential and goal for the year should be the queen of cups. (I had a tarot reading done the other night, and this was the card that was to represent moi.) It fit. That's exactly who I want to be, and as I peer into my glass it is hard to separate cynicism from intuition. Maybe I've seen enough to know what to avoid? Or maybe the void will fill with more worthwhile things now that I know a bit more about the flow.

Or maybe, maybe each minute of life seems so precious now that it's hard to know how to be the perfect queen of cups. Drink, see, offer, be.

My latest therapy is kittens and living in a beautiful house with lovely people.

My last two nights went to partial waste. Wash your hands, water's gone, weekend's gone.

Boa noite. Drink to worthwhile time, and time not regretted but savored.

and now

Morning. I'm behind and I can never catch up: that's how it feels sometimes. Life's too quick, short and brutal. And I have to stop for sleep and food. This marathon is almost over.

Some boxes to pack and last words to record. As if I'm covering something sacred?

I'm a really imperfect detective and I'm not the chipper Angela Lansbury type. I'm more like the lonely man version, (Hercule Poirot maybe?) sipping his whisky cynically in a random bar as he examines the other beings around him and takes a break. But he can never really take a break because people tire him out. They zap the life force from him because he's not relaxed enough, he's always talking to people but never fully connected. Aw, that's so sad, right.

Well, it's ok. I'm past the deep brooding whiskey point hopefully. And the mystery is less mysterious certainly.

bonne nuit quand meme

I wonder how many of us there are - there must be hundreds, thousands? People who self-induce insomnia because the internet is so distracting and attractive and seductive and the day never seems long enough. (Tiring as it is!)

The day just stretches on and on and it's hard to turn off a day sometimes. To cut off wakefulness can feel like giving up when there's too much to do. Or maybe it's because you want to do just one more thing, and just one more, and one more before finally your fatigue takes over so ov

er

whelmingl

y

In wonderland

I used to think that location mattered ever so much. I switch mine repeatedly, almost compulsively. I am dreaming about the psychology of movement. Like a rat in a maze, why not try to find that ever-elusive piece of cheese, memorize the walls, find it faster, faster. If we keep changing up the path, go to the fromagerie at the corner, switch it up to the Monoprix, or the grocery store in Hyde Park or Auckland or Brighton or Brighton Beach or the 5th arrondissement of Paris what difference does it make?
The truth is objects are just that. What matters is how you feel, who you love, do you see yourself reflected in the eyes of others - do you exist?

Streets, rues, avenues, and the prize at the end. I seem to keep wanting to confuse myself, to remind myself that geography is pointless.