sorry to be so heavy

when i talk about my dreams, i do so in a way that people (who, say, stumble into the conversation) don’t know i’m not just talking about something strange that happened to me. (and i do have a pretty strange life, to be fair. when i said, last friday, “yeah, i had liquid valium chemical burns on my tongue, realized i don’t really like strawberries and i’d been talking to my depressed cartographer friend most of the evening” that was just a fairly accurate description of the events of the night before.)

anyway, i realized that steve has the complete reverse problem i do. too much dream logic talk.  he can tell the most mundane anecdotes, and he’ll give you so much irrelevant back story that it sounds like he’s talking about a dream. the details seem urgently necessary, but it’s hard to follow because there are so many of them. you know we’ve been together too long, because we both know that i can’t follow his long-winded anecdotes, so i just say, “too long” to indicate i can no longer follow what he’s saying, and he’ll, in the parlance of our relationship, give me the executive summary. 

i was thinking this morning, do dreams have themes? i don’t think so. they have common elements (i’ve had four about typewriters made of hamburgers), but to say a dream has a theme is to imply that dreams are somehow crafted entertainment. i tend to think  dreams come from the part in us that is most splintered and least capable of self-consciously creating anything. they are exquisite and involuntary. i think superstition (that our dreams are trying to tell us something, for instance) comes from wanting to deny that part, unreachable by either interpretation or divination, exists. which is understandable. we want to think things are meaningful. we want to think it’s all adding up to something, but then we close our eyes and we’re on a bombed out space ship and our bodies are eating our clothes and someone we haven’t thought of in ages is stroking our hair.

i am friends with a rather depressed cartographer. no, really, literally. he draws animals and evolutionary models, too, but mostly he deals with maps. he has become obsessed with his relationship to time, how he thinks of moving through time in terms of distance, and the different things distance can mean. he doesn’t usually know where he is on the line, or the graph, or whatever, of his life or of history. when he does know where he is, he sort-of hates it and is afraid of what’s next. 

he used to be, i wrote bitterly, so affected about his enlightenment. isn’t that an awful thing to write about your friend? “i hate his affected enlightenment. i don’t need that zen shit right now. it’s easy for him to believe that shit. what does he know?” i convinced myself it was fake. i would ask people if it–his happiness with his weird, spartan life drawing maps–sounded genuine, smirking. i would say it wouldn’t last and believe i had insight into him. a matter of time. he worried about me and gave me books that i never read. he held me in a calm reserve that was a kind of indifference, but it was the way he looked at himself, too. 

now i talk to him and we are, finally, both tender. i don’t believe he was fake. but his equilibrium is over. perhaps it wasn’t always untenable, but it doesn’t work any more. he wants to quit drawing the maps, maybe. i listen without gratification or guilt (it’s rare for me not to be feeling at least one of the two, you know). he’s trying to explain everything to me with fitness cycle modeling, like evolutionary biologists use. i piece together the metaphors and say, in summary “so you think you need to fall from a peak, this time in your life, but you don’t know how high you are, or how low you’ll need to go, or where you’ll end up? hmmm. move to the west coast.”

i remember a poem, “black maps” by mark strand. i root around in the apartment for the book and read it to him, slowly. he exhales. it is sort-of what he needs to hear. i talk about wanting things from life, how horrible i think it is for people to want to attain things, to get things from the world, to think of life as an exchange. wanting enlightenment or insight or truth for yourself in exchange for doing stuff is just as empty and greedy as wanting money in exchange for selling weapons, or whatever. i tell him that wanting to understand things, feeling like i required things to make sense, was the worst thing. the understanding i wanted was something you can’t possess. i tell him the world has nothing to offer us, and we shouldn’t be bargaining, anyway, and say thinking like i do now has made me pretty happy. 

he asks me if i’m just talking, or if i’m reading something else somebody else wrote. i feel like i’ve just been babbling. i’m impressed that he thinks i’ve been reading. then i remember how i used to say that about him; that he sounded rehearsed, scripted. how that was the way i sneered at him. what he is saying to me is a compliment, that i am wise and eloquent when i’m just talking out of my ass. his voice loses its catch. i’ve helped. i’m glad he feels better. i burn with love and shame and change the subject to what i’m planning to do for dinner, because i live in pacific time. i’m two hours in the past, if you’re going by today’s time zone maps. or maybe you’re two hours in the future. probably we’re just 1500 miles apart.

steve’s back. we had hipster biscuits (we consider ourselves better than hipsters, but we so like their food, music and aesthetic. ummmm) and i twisted my ankle. i took this picture and he looks downright poetic.

i realize steve’s the same person when i’m just talking to him on the phone while he’s in alaska as when he’s here, with messy black curls and his arm around me at night,  but he’s always so distracted, the reception is bad and i’m weird about talking on the phone, too. so when i say, “i hate phone-you,” we both understand what i mean is that i wish he were here, not that i really hate him or anything.

for all the terrible things cheri did, i remember pretty vividly how she defended me once. we were talking about race relations and my father was trying to tell me i was too much of a “liberal.” it was all very hypothetical, because there were more cows than people within ten miles. it was at dinner. she’d make it for him every evening, usually just chicken breasts in pancake batter and a plate of egg noodles. she had taken his last name, even though he wouldn’t marry her. 

“i don’t assume anything about someone because of the color of their skin,” i said, boldly. i was twelve. pbs and public school had given me intimations of tolerance. “i don’t treat a black person any differently.”

my father heaped noodles onto his plate and replied, almost absently, “you say that now, because you haven’t been out in the world. when you’re laying bleeding and raped in an alley, you’ll have a different story.”

cheri swooped in and took the noodles, glaring at him. “what an awful way to talk to your young daughter!” 

she put the noodles on the other side of her, more righteous than i’d ever seen her, especially on my behalf. it really wasn’t that bad of a thing to say in the scheme of things we usually said to each other. we all tormented each other so much in that ugly house in a rural suburb and made so much shit up that the intrigue was shakespearean–but for a second there was just right and wrong, and everybody (me, cheri and my dad) knew where they stood and my dad had said an awful thing so he wasn’t allowed to have noodles.

i often wonder why i write to my friend tim. not because it’s a bad thing, but because, well, it’s an odd thing: this prolonged, epistolatory, semi-obsessive correspondence. then i remember all the pathos and unexpected poetry we draw out of each other. me:

taking the new medication has made me less twitchy (which makes sense; its label use is as a parkinson’s drug, but it’s used for fibromyalgia as well), which is odd, because i identify twitchy. when i hold my hands out in front of me and they’re steady, it feels strangely dissociative; like the converse of phantom limb pain. (do you get the last clause? it makes sense to me, but i’m awfully tired.)

tim:

Charcoal flavoured crackers are the best food item in ages. It’s like kissing an ashtray that you’ve had a crush on for years.

you see? you’d keep writing those sorts of letters, too.

i was reading about narcissism, and the character it takes in our hyper-mediated society, and how to spot a narcissist, and the problems narcissism causes, and all i could think was “i’m not like that, am i? and if i am, how can i keep from showing it to anyone else?”

i started this blog to become disclosive. but all i can write about is the impossibility of disclosure, and lately it’s all i think about: what language does, what it means to communicate and why i can’t just be a normal person with a blog where they brag about drinking & complain about their significant other & occasionally sound off on politics & take pictures of what they eat for lunch, or whatever.

i’ll tell you this: i wrote a story about someone irrationally haunted by a watching a dude eat a dog hair & mustard sandwich. the inspiration was this girl who used to tell me that her dad ate such a sandwich whenever they clipped their dog. she would tell me this every school day, because i was shy, bookish and so imaginative that it totally grossed me out. the bus ride was two hours long and she could always work it in before i had a chance to cup my hands over my ears (after awhile it just took a couple words to remind me enough that i’d be gagging and squirming).

it was torture. it was fascinating. i don’t know if writing about it is revenge or repetition (or if revenge is always, inevitably, a kind of repetition in denial of itself).

i think i’m now a little like she was, back then. we used to be facebook friends. i think she’s an avon lady these days.

to indicate exasperation with life, we say (livia soprano voice): I WISH THE LORD WOULD TAKE ME NOW!

to express that some one is too sensitive and delicate for this world, we say (junior soprano voice): oh, him! he’s a hothouse flower!

that these two expressions now comprise 20% of our speech-acts may indicate something or other about what kind of people we are. right now i’m going to go stand in front of the fridge and swear. i’ll report my findings.

steve: (looking righteous and angry) sometimes i just want to punch people in portland.

me: (concerned, wondering if he’d witnessed something awful) why? what happened? sit down.

steve: (after a long, deep breath) this kid at movie madness. he was playing this huey lewis and the news concert footage and pretending like he got this ironic enjoyment out of it, but i could tell–I COULD JUST TELL–he was snickering inside at how we were all suffering. i don’t want to be reminded of that.

me: what’s huey lewis and the news?

steve: they had that hit in 1981–

me: i wasn’t even a year old in most of 1981.

(silence)

me: i’m not weirded out by our age difference, are you?

steve: no, are you?

me: no. anyway. there are bigger civic problems than sadism posing as ironic enjoyment of huey lewis and the news.

steve: i guess.

early in what is now a solid friendship, i couldn’t see it going anywhere. he had a lot of problems with people who quote things (or cite them) in conversations. he thought such tendencies were at best, unoriginal, at worst, arrogant. i would sit across from him, glaring at my soup, angry at having to censor myself. i thought that quoting was a humble admission: i’m not the first person to say this. seriously. i felt like he was uninterested in my history, the particular way i had encountered what we were talking about before. phrasing is an intimate history to me. i couldn’t seem to explain this.

i don’t know how that tension resolved. we were long time pals and decided not to do anything stupid like date each other, i guess. he got over me being pretentious and i got over him needing feel things are always new and original. failing that, we share a love of hot dog consumption. (hi.)

before, i had the opposite problem with a different friend. she always marveled at what i felt were completely ordinary utterances. “where’s the from?” she would say, like i was quoting something. i wondered what her standards were. simultaneously, though, i became defensive of my originality: “um, it’s from me, copyright ten seconds ago.”

which is all to say that i don’t have much to say. my illness has made me have not much to say. i’m sure people have said “i’m tired” and “my legs hurt” before, but those aren’t quotable. i don’t feel the need to claim thoughts as my own or cite other people, because i’m operating without much high-level analysis. i give you Andrew Solomon on illness, in The Proust Project:

Illness of the mind is terrifying because it affects the organs that perceives it, but illness of the body terrifies because what perceives and what is perceived lie so far apart. Descartes did us no favors when he split the human, but for those of his heirs who experience the world more through analysis than through physical experience, alienation from the physical self is the most urgent reality. Without our minds, we may still be bodies, but without our bodies we are no minds.

[...]

In illness one is overwhelmed by pain and fear which are rooted in the bewildering fact of corporeal dysfunction. Surely it should be possible to exercise will on our bodies, to force them to the service of a triumphal mind? We try this, over and over, and sometimes it works briefly. At last, however, we find that our very self, which in health seems inviolable, is only a by-product of the physical. At the whim of the body, the spirit dissolves. We defend ourselves from this unwelcome knowledge by speaking of a soul that lives forever, because to think of the person as fully contingent on the body runs contrary to internal experience, logic and hope.

it’s true. i don’t know which part in particular. i mull this. i mull typing this quotation. i mull where to cut the quotation off: where it becomes insightful, and where it stops, and what back-story i should throw in, whether to continue quoting because it becomes less maudlin… and i don’t know any more. i don’t know, sometimes, even how to complete the simple act of pointing elsewhere.

so i’m going to rest for a few (more) days and watch brainless television.

i’ve had the experience of reading pieces of, well, fanfiction about me by two separate exes. i’ve come to think they’re not people who actually do things: they’re people who see lived experience as little more than material. and it’s probably why, i don’t know, they both want to torch bridges and court disaster: that which doesn’t kill you only gives you a tabloid story. what i’m getting at is that while it’s equal parts flattering and creepy to be a muse, i can’t help but wonder if i do the same thing. not that i write (solely) tawdry autobiographical stuff, but, in general, when a thought occurs to me, i test it on the world. i seek experiences that would prove or disprove it. maybe everyone does that. maybe when people do that with lab-coats on and a certain degree of precision & hubris, it’s called science. but every experiment is over-engineered and you can always find someone to tell you what you want to hear or make something appear however you think it should and it’s hard to resist believing what you needed to be true all along. i’m not always sure what’s true and what i need to be true and where those two overlap and whether i made it that way and if it’s a good thing if i made it that way. when i think about it, it’s this ten car pile up of what was and what is and what ought to be and what ought to have been and how i used to think things ought to be and whether and why/not they became that way.

once, a friend of mine was despairing at his life, and i reminded him that he was not angry at life itself, because life itself doesn’t exist. he was angry at a constellation of circumstances, i insisted. he thought this was true, but insisted that life is, for everyone, a constellation of circumstances. i said, yeah, we only have our experiences, and there is no world other than our own, and the very idea of a world other than our own just stands as this mute limit, to check us against making generalizations. yeah, we only have our perceptions, but perceptions can be pretty nice. i felt very comforted, myself, from the advice i’d given.

then i couldn’t park my car for twenty blocks because they were sweeping the just-fallen leaves in my city-quadrant, and i was unemployed, and it was raining, and it was 2am, and i couldn’t afford a cab, and i was a little scared to walk home, and i was lovesick, and i had been told not to walk that far for two weeks, and i soaked my sneakers & wool coat stopping to sob against telephone poles the whole way through the entryway, at my mailbox, against the door jam. i wrote him email the moment i sat down at my desk. i said i had been a smug asshole when i gave him that advice (months before) and i totally took back all that quasi-intellectual chicken soup for the soul shit. i said i understood what he had felt like, and that his feeling had been more reasonable than the advice i gave. now, i feel like i was right in the first place. i tell myself now that on the soggy sneakers night i didn’t reach an accurate epiphany: i just misunderstood things the very same way he had months before (and who would blame me, poor thing), when i gave him stellar advice to be! more! hopeful! now i am (and have been for awhile) rather! hopeful! about! life!

when i run into people who think differently, i try to find something wrong with them.

which brings me back to pretty much everything.

if we fight most about anything–and we really don’t fight hardly at all most of the time–it’s about intentions. if one of us has done something that hurt the other person, we want to excuse ourselves by saying we did it by accident. we didn’t know it would have that effect. we think our intentions are important because they exonerate us from being malicious. but if we’re the ones who are hurt, we say it doesn’t matter what your intentions were. this happened anyway. you should have known. what else did you think would happen?

and it’s, of course, the (kind of) eternal argument about what certainty is, and whether the self makes decisions or just does the clean-up work after decisions have already been made, and whether feelings are ever justified, and whether anything, for that matter, makes sense. people have been writing papers and haughtily agreeing to disagree for centuries, except suddenly somebody’s standing in the bathroom, possessed of this (beautiful but probably stupid) faith in answers for it all, and it seems like having an answer is a condition of things continuing, or at least the two of us sleeping well tonight, so we make it up:

and it’s almost always right, by the faulty standards that are all we have.

inspiration has been made a weak word by greeting cards and pop songs. but you taught me how to be imaginative again, and you’re right that i couldn’t get into your book because of the quaint medieval mores, and i will never concede that contemporary poetry is just a momentary win against typography but: you’ve shown me dazzling new worlds within this one, and i’ve shown you some, too, and let’s just keep doing that all the time until we can’t any more.

let me start by telling you that writing about writing or, more precisely, writing about “being a writer” is one of my least favorite things. when someone needs to say “writer” every several sentences to describe themselves, it’s like nails on the chalkboard of my brain. the only other people i come into contact with who need a noun self-descriptor so frequently are vegans. and i understand a little more about that one: it’s very hard to be a scrupulous vegan and it’s helpful to name yourself a “vegan” frequently so you can find people who cook with you or to find an audience who will appreciate it if you blow off steam about the imprecision of ingredient lists. “writer,” though: that’s imprecise and composite and, in my experience, usually means something bad. i know that eleventy-seven writing manuals tell you that this is how you start and build up your confidence–claim to be a writer before you’ve, um, written anything. Nouns Ending With -er Are Powerful, ad nasueum.

all that said, i have writer’s block. actually, it’s not as special as that. i have a person’s block and the thing i like to do most with my being a person, which would be writing, is blocked.

everything i write feels disingenuous, like a lie. and i write primarily fiction. my characters don’t feel believable to me. i don’t know. even when the narrator is me, i feel likewise doubtful. i wonder what will look dated in ten years, what will need a little annotation in fifty years, to explain that she was referring to this quaint cultural practice of early millennial west coast america. of course being dated is inevitable. but nobody ever told me i could only have immortality with humility and footnotes.

i wonder if it’s being such a harsh literary critic that makes me feel vulnerable. because i am good at lobbing aphorisms at writing i don’t like and i know there will be people reading my work all “bitch, please.” last week i had pimples on my cheek, and a friend at the coffee shop told me about them, joking that i’m a teenager. i ran into the bathroom right away, and they were there. the ability of people to know things about me that i haven’t told them (and perhaps don’t know about myself) unnerves me. i forget that i exist a lot of the time, in the “pimples on the cheek i don’t know about” kind of way.

so, roland barthes, the author is not dead. she’s eating cheerios and afraid of what she could be accidentally revealing all the time.

i have large tattoos with text on my back, so i never got to see them anyway but backwards until we moved into this apartment, where there are a sink mirror and vanity mirror staring into each other. because i’m borderline autistic out of touch with the world in front of my nose, it took me until a couple days ago to realize that, looking at the reflection of the reflection of my back (really, that clause shouldn’t be that complicated, but it took me an unnecessarily long while to untangle the whole thing and i’m going to pass it on) i can see the text as it actually is. or, i guess, how people see it when they’re not me craning my neck around.

anyway, i was brushing my teeth with a mouthful of suds, and remarked to steve, “you know, i love my tattoos. i’ve never regretted getting them for a minute.”

he chortled and replied, “well, it’s good you like them and don’t regret getting them, because you’re always going to have them.”

i paused and let the toothbrush handle loll in my cheek. see, i felt like the permanence of my tattoos made the question of whether i like them or regret them more relevant and pressing. he felt like it made the whole issue a moot point. i wondered if this was a fundamental difference in worldview or if we just have different definitions of “regret,” in this instance. then i wondered if he had a point: if he’s more practical in worrying about possibilities you can actually do something about, while i tend to alternately celebrate and gnash my teeth over the inevitable (or, anyway, the unchangeable).

i had sufficiently admired my tattoos and i was frothing at the mouth with toothpaste. it tasted gross by then, so i spit it out and followed him to bed.

i completely forgot about high school journal posts! here’s another. i was feeling very nervous about going to college:

I feel completely suffocated strangled frantic ridiculous careening needy bursting withdrawn petulant impatient and my stomach hurts

I want some one (sic) to say, “You have nothing to worry about.” but I know I have a lot to worry about with college and nothing is sure. I went over to [x] and [y]’s house. I don’t really understand what they’re doing, playing house in that stuffy apartment where things are usually burning, pretending they have anything more than weird mutual need. Why do they like each other? I guess I wrote that because wanted him to like me long ago, but I’m glad I’m going to college. I’m 17. I’m going to sleep on a bunk bed probably.

I just can’t help but think they’re just clinging to each other to avoid trying to do things they’re too feeble minded to succeed at anyway.

I hate feeling mean. I do though. So mean. I just work so much and I don’t know what’s going to happen at all.

so, shortly after steve proposed to me, on his knee complete with a ring fashioned from tinfoil, i found myself saying, “well, if you want to blog about it, write in yours. my blog is more of a… literary experiment. it’s not for things like that.”

(yes, really. if that gives you any idea what it’s like to live with me, you may well doubt his taste in women. i will say only that i have pretensions about my blog and the sophistication of my readership. you’re welcome.)

BUT I AM SO GETTING MARRIED YOU GUYS.

my father’s angry girlfriend of a few years was holding my denim dress above my head. it was ninth grade, i think. it was my favorite dress, strappy and figure hugging, and i wanted to wear it to school with a black thermal undershirt, to be all gothified and pretty.

“i know what you think this looks like on you,” she said. “but you don’t know that it never looked that way. it doesn’t look that way. you’re sending a different message than you think. look at this rip.” there was a slight tear on the ankle-length dress’ bottom button. “that’s saying you’re trying to show off your legs. and you are. pretty cheap, heather.”

i know now the dress must have just looked shabby, and the collage of subcultures i wore to school (goth makeup, docs, an army jacket: pre hot-topic-era hot topic couture) was just slightly ridiculous. but no one was around to tell me my thigh high fishnets and black converses aped two different cultural movements. in west michigan, nobody knew, so it didn’t matter. i filed myself under “weird, angry & listening to different music, miscellaneous” and i fit in there.

it unnerves me that i didn’t know how ridiculous i looked, that i felt my (sigh) clown paint, unreflective love of existentialist novels and affection for kmfdm were terribly unique. it’s not that i feel bad about being fifteen (nobody is a particularly dignified fifteen year old), but that this ability to be critical of the whole world i inhabited when i was fifteen reminds me that i will one day be critical of my life and writing now in just such a way. i feel all poised and ready to excavate history, but this writing of history will be history, too.

i spent part of the morning looking at photos from last summer, and i look frightfully thin. i felt like i looked great. i look at what i chose to save among everything i shot, because i was always deleting photos: all that’s left are images taken of the insides of abandoned buildings, of my feet in front of me (one turned in awkwardly), of myself in mirrors, and the many ways i moved things around my studio apartment.

i would use the camera to tell me whether things looked right, because i didn’t trust my perspective. i often take pictures of myself not (just) because i’m vain, but because at some base level i don’t know what i look like.

but i find that the more i capture and record and try to get perspective, the more it slips. which is all to say: i know that all the pictures of me with my mia wallace bangs look bad in retrospect, but i’m going to keep them that way forever because i think they look good. which is to say: it’s not like anyone else knows what i look like, either.

i appreciate permanence, especially when it’s expressed in absurd shit, like painting rented walls gold or spending five hours assembling a beautiful dresser that will hold everything, but is way too big for the room.

so. i took notes for an essay to write (”an alternate reading of twenty-seven,” referring to my present age, IF YOU MUST KNOW), but now the score is today: 1, Ms. Heather S. Reddy: 0. so, i am broadcasting to you (live) from palm tree sheets & no longer having the energy required for such grueling tasks as wearing pants or sitting up. i have $92 in my bank account. i have lots of dreams about displacement & not knowing where to go, and i wake up alarmed & relieved to find i am just in portland, in bed with dog, cat & steve (all of whom usually have at least one limb resting on me), and i am not going anywhere.

i had ideas about how my life was supposed to go, which is probably the surest path to continual and crushing disappointment. today, i checked my bank balance and bumped the garbage cans with the car i’m about to sell, pulling out of the driveway to trade old clothes. it was raining too hard to walk so far. i am going non-camping at a non-wedding at the coast this weekend (but i will attend a ceremony of commitment at a campground, so you do the math).

i guess–maybe, i don’t know–there is a certain disappointment in relief.

3:03 PM

me: i learn more about you every day

Kevin: I heard the call today

unicorns are not cool for guys to wear

so I’m going to make something guys can wear on tshirts

3:04 PM and I’m going to call it “the manlicorn”

me: what will it look like?

3:07 PM Kevin: trying to determine that

instead of a horn it will have a bazooka, though

I know that

i can keep playing when the sheet music stops, on any instrument they give me. actually, i produce the same, celestial sound with each. after the violin, and the trumpet, and then a snare drum, i pick up a soup can, and run my fingers along the label, and the same music comes just from doing that. there are throngs of men in business suits, but the orchestra conductor won’t let them get near me.

“there will be a performance and nothing else!” he screams. “stop trying to make a deal!”

i watch people stand in line to see me on the concert day. the orchestra conductor is yelling, “she can stroke a soup can and make something a thousand times better than the human voice!” the line is long and it looks as if the people are getting smaller and thinner while they stand. their ribs begin to pop out and their eyes bulge from starvation. they stand for so long that they begin to fight, and i watch one person tear a baby limb from limb.

i tell the conductor, tearfully, that it’s not worth it, just to hear me play the soup can. he points to the business-suited men, who have beaks and are sitting in the front row, clacking them together, and says they can have me if i won’t make beautiful noise for the people who already bought tickets. the conductor looks sympathetic and then says, “when you started this, did you think it wouldn’t be a fight? you knew.” i take a breath. my opera gown sags. i hear the people clamoring. i wonder how i know the men with beaks are all that bad. i wonder how the conductor found me. it troubles me that i don’t seem to remember anything.

[x]: “pie chart porn” does not yield any interesting results

just another thing for my coworkers to find in my search history

it occurs to me, as a person who reads, is prone to day-dreaming in sentence diagrams, who sometimes writes privately, sometimes writes in a livejournal to an audience of thirty-eight, sometimes writes to a slightly larger audience with this blog, and will soon release a book length collection of stories: reading, thinking, writing and telling are very different activities which require me to bring different things to them and confer various responsibilities. i distinguish between them in my own way.

good reading requires me to be initially uncritical and presupposes a suspension of disbelief, followed by critical application to my own life. thinking usually requires me to be precise and yet gives me the duty to be ruthlessly honest with myself about just how precise i can be. writing requires more reflection than just thinking, setting out the limits of what i know to achieve greater insight. telling requires some attempt at communication of new, useful information and is accompanied by moral responsibility toward its subjects, whether they are abstract concepts, places, other people, or myself.

it occurs to me that many people i have known (largely, though only mostly incidentally, past-tense), especially those who claim the mantle of “writer,” who seem inexplicably broken (or just infuriating), have blurred at least a couple of these distinctions. they are, maybe, so suggestible that writing and reading are the same thing. they are so addicted to the natalie goldberg school of “vomit your unconscious onto the page and rearrange that puke into beauty!” school that thinking and writing are the same thing. they are so unaware of the distinction between formulating one’s thoughts and sharing them that writing and telling are the same. these peoples, those who don’t know the differences, are always the ones who have the greatest problems with doing things well, with existing unmediated by language. yeah, i’ve known (and have been) many strange people.

looking over my teenage notebooks (thinking was no different than writing) and thinking about the confessional ‘zines i published as a teenager (& even my livejournal entries last summer: writing was no different than telling in both cases), i know that the distinctions have been blurred for me at times. it was always when i was least happy and most lousy to myself and the people around me. i am healthiest when i recognize reading, thinking, writing and telling as completely different things. this does not mean that one cannot lead to the other; naturally, they do. likewise, the precise differences blur; it is only important that each is separate, and there is a always a pause and change between any of them. these activities are urgent (and nearly involuntary) to us, as creatures whose worlds are formed by langage. but we should recognize that language’s power (and the recent power to broadcast language with a domain name and wordpress account) saddles us with delicate, deeply ethical responsibilities, toward ourselves and toward eachother.

not that i’m going to stop with my semisecret livejournal… my boyfriend isn’t even on my friendslist, and he opens my mail.

srsly, wordpress. if you keep asking me if i’m “already hip?” when i just need to put my password in I’M MOVING MY BLOG TO ANOTHER HOST, DAMN YOU.

on to what i intended to post. relationship non-news:

“i want to be with you until your hair turns gray. except it probably never will because you’ll keep dyeing it orange, like a comic book character. it’ll be awesome.”

steve and i had a Prolonged Discussion About Longterm Commitment on friday. i mean, you’d think shacking up with someone would imply a certain amount of Longterm Commitment, but we’re both willfully reticent about such a frightful prospect. yes, we live together and gross out our friends with involuntary gushing about “that fuzzy foo foo bear thing s/he did last night!” at heart, though, we’re both quasi-cynical emotional gunslingers who don’t want to admit how we want to be together forever. but now we did admit that. sort of. we remain horrified of the depth of our mushiness, but have permitted ourselves to voice slightly mushier sentiments nonetheless. highly qualified squee?

moving along, friendlove with my bff, who counsels me about my internet addiction:

me: lulz means i am laughing at how much you suffer from your stupidity. lol is much more inclusive.

Kevin: oh

so it means you’re an asshole

me: lulz has a schadenfreude component.

Kevin: hahaha

an ironic, hipster detachment

1:02 PM me: yeah, a look at the stupid person element

Kevin: yeah

me: but the fact i know this?

makes me want to punch myself in the face.

Kevin: you’re a blogeoisie

me: DO YOU HAVE TO RUB IT IN?

Kevin: yes

that’s what the directions say to do

me: no, i dunno; i am just one of those invisible internet addicts.

1:04 PM no world of warcraft. no second life. just a totally reclusive misanthrope who doesn’t even pretend to be an orc.

sad, sad, sad.

1:05 PM Kevin: maybe that would be theraputic for you

pretending to be an orc

with a nod & wink to close acqaintance john cunningham’s old blog, “shouting the poetic truths of high school journal keepers,” i’m excerpting my diary entry from 5/12/1997. i was sixteen. and trite and gothified. it was awesome, lemme tell ya:

How awful to admit at the basest level I DON’T CARE. Breaking up with him. [continues in a different pen] Done. Wish he was worth losing. Maybe then I wouldn’t feel so NUMB! I ran into A. Words came hideously slowly. I was mumbling, but it was okay because him and this girl were too intent on making out to pay attention. I am jealous of everything and maybe everyone [break] Everything I experience I compare to a prototype of reality I get from movies. When the background music doesn’t turn on, the costumes don’t coordinate. I guess I believe in perfect moments even though THEY DON’T EXIST. Life used to be more intense. I remember it being more intense. But maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know do I just want stuff that no one’s ever had, like events being linked to each other, resulting building to an illumniating climax? I have such a crush on [x, who I never told about the crush]! He’s an actor, he’ll understand my need to play at life. I’ve been here [at coffee house downtown] so long this year, just wasting time writing this stuff, drinking chai. 2 lovers A couple, one in a sweat suit, holding their hands together up in pseudo-prayer at the altar of the coffee table, lips inches apart [break, handwriting is denser] Her finger traces along the sharp lines of his chin, feeling the prickly little hairs. GOD WHY DO I EVEN TRY? ? I can’t write, I have no ideas. Even after I strangle life I don’t have anything to say. I’M SUCH A FAILURE!! I haven’t even opened the SAT scores yet!!

okay, i find this hilarious and humbling. i think i’ll do it every sunday. tune in.

so this post will traverse common blog post territory: namely, writing about one’s lack of writing in his or her blog.

i’ve been ill. more familiar blog territory: i feel uneasy about the content of my blog, my writing about being sick. morality and science have been playing meanspirited volleyball with our anxiety about having bodies for forever and ever. sometimes, as in the case of insanity defenses in criminal justice, we medicalize our experience to excuse ourselves of moral culpability. we are innocent because the illness acted, not us. but then, sometimes, as in the case of wanting to object to something we can’t articulate, we medicalize experience in order to show that it’s terrible: i don’t know; that’s just sick.

i think there’s something to the reduction of things to being just-sick, because whatever specialists i’m seeing, and contested diagnoses i’m accumulating, and whatever someone has noted about the searing pain that i experience when i fold my arm behind my back, my experience remains that there’s really no way to talk about it satisfyingly (or the ways i’ve been given so far don’t really work): i’m just sick.

i don’t know whether this is an excuse or a confession. i guess both.

Kevin: anne lammott’s on colberthuhme: i HATE HER. Kevin: haha you’re so hilarious 1:22 PMgodzilla rampaging around your house until you damage yourself or your boyfriend 1:46 PM me: when i get angry, i just withdraw and make impotent but intricate revenge plans i’m a very lazy godzilla i just think about batting down the helicopters, laying around with my tail up 1:47 PM Kevin: passive aggressivezilla 1:48 PM me: oh, it’s totally passive i don’t even earn passive-aggressiveness i’m a dyspeptic little despot, short and stout 1:51 PM Kevin: here is my handle, here is my problem? I don’t have a problem. Sure, you can keep doing that. I’m fine with it.

for the irrelevant things that have made me myself series:

my dad believed in entrepreneurship. sort of. he had, he reminded us, worked his way through college. when he was our age (his girlfriend’s son and i were both eight, maybe), he had a paper route and was mowing lawns.

her son, my twin in age, was also my twin in laying grand, unworkable plans that butted only distantly against reality. my mother and father had, for some reason, built a house an hour away from the city, on a dirt road, with a quarter mile of coiled driveway. land was cheap out there, or it seemed unspoiled, or maybe both. they had thrown up a cedar box with vaulted ceilings, shag carpet & just one bedroom, and had enclosed a pasture with barb wire. i guess they had horses for awhile. my dad eventually kept the improbable house and his rebound girlfriend drove her ford pinto into the pasture and left it there to be swallowed by weeds, an unintentional gesture of third-rate symbolism. he and she had two children, and my sister and i would visit on the weekends. all five kids slept in the unheated basement, which was vaguely partitioned with dry-wall and kept warm during the michigan winters by a wood stove. my father fed the stove before bed, and seemed to enjoy chopping and then hefting logs into the fire, but there were always icicles by the morning.

even though our neighbors were the quarter mile of driveway away, and had a quarter mile of driveway themselves (and the next neighbors were farther away still), we decided we would start a snow shoveling business. my father had mentioned that, as the kind of thing we could do to make ourselves useful and maybe some money for mc hammer records. we were totally grandiose and terrible at arithmetic, because we believed we’d make at least $500 in an “average weekend.” we set out with a garden shovel and a plastic snow shovel to the nearest neighbor’s door. neither of us had shoveled snow before.

they said no. they looked at us oddly. it wasn’t a neighborhood at all; there were houses here and there, every half mile or so. nobody knew much about anyone else. you had to stay on your own property during hunting season. we said, “what about your steps? just a dollar for the steps.” they shut the door.

i don’t know why we refused to give up, walking at least five miles in the snow, going up to every farmhouse or clumsily thrown up recent dwelling, offering to shovel the winding driveways for less and less. everyone said no. but we knew our plan had to work, and when my dad slid around the corner in the red taurus station wagon necessary to accommodate his new brood, we thought his intervention, in the cold darkness, was all that stopped us.

“what was his problem?” we asked each other several times, in the basement’s brief warmth that night. “he seemed embarrassed or something. whatever.” and then we made a plan to make our fortunes breeding kittens and selling them up and down the very same road.

on having an inappropriate crush:

my unconscious is plotting against me. i mean, more than usual.

on mistrust of happiness:

god damn, how did i end up on the other end of a bildungsroman? i don’t deserve it. ruin will come when i least expect it. even if i expect it all the way, all the time.

portland feels like another planet in the spring time. i grew up in dour, never-mild climates, with nothing to see, punishing humidity, feet of snow. tonight it was slightly chilly, and we wound through the back streets from the coffee shop and grocery store, each with a bag of groceries. the northwest is lush and mountainous, and as much as i don’t want to go hiking and the roses make me erupt in sneezing: damn.

the geographical cure is supposed to be not-so-work-y, but it worked for me. the midwest was an anxious, barren place, where i felt like i wanted the wrong things and was repulsed by the wrong things. i thought there was no place on earth for me.

it turns out there is. i live there, which is sort of a problem; i had rehearsed devastation. this? this is so totally improv.

also: my hair is really long.

the parentheses in the last post were not just a mushy aside to my boyfriend. no! they served as a stylistic device to remind you that you are reading a blog, and the blog being a personal document, its writing is influenced directly by people saying such frightened, hopeful things as, “you should write about this in your blog!” or “you can’t write in your blog about this!” i am showing you that just as you crave expression from me addressing you directly, every form of expression (like my blog) craves an audience to address. this blog is not a tree falling the the forest, with no one to hear it.

(okay, possibly it is; maybe an evil genius is faking my feed stats and page hits, as well as making up the rest of the world outside my head. but this kind of writing presupposes a reader who may not exist. i think you probably exist. hi.)

the last parentheses weren’t merely a gesture of brechtian alienation, brushing aside the curtain of my impersonally personal writing to say something to my boyfriend in public just to brag about having a boyfriend, either. i am NOT just trying to congratulate myself on being complicated and theoretical by apologizing for being mushy (it has occurred to me lately that this is a very common way of speaking, being self-congratulatory by offering an apology, or at least while offering an apology, mostly because i think because i do it. it seems like many people[/i] are[/am] often very proud of what they[/i] find most flawed in themselves[/myself)].

i mean, i could have edited the last post! i have no reason to leave it up there/here and explain myself other than because i want to tell you that you’re reading a blog (and by now you’ve probably scrolled down and read what i am responding to in what i wrote before, because you are more than likely reading the blog in reverse chronology, which is not the way it’s written). the blog is written by a person who often stays up very late, and her boyfriend is a morning person, and he’s probably going to read her blog before he checks his email because she told him while he was falling asleep that she was going to write about him, and this is all very strange & mediated & immediate at once.

you’re all in my blog in a way.

got it?

i have begun to believe, at least within what is possibly the happiest relationship of my adult life, that resolving a conflict is not about reaching an understanding (or, if understanding cannot be accomplished, “agreeing to disagree”), but instead being at peace with an endearing amount of misunderstanding. kierkegaard said (or maybe the hyperbole-prone professor who first taught me about kiekegaard said), that thinkers often build vast (metaphorical) mansions in theory and yet remain in the (metaphorical) basement, wary of exploring the consequences of of what they think beyond, well, its foundations. when i expect absolute clarity of intention and purpose from myself, much less anyone else, it is sometimes a useful caution, sometimes laziness, many, many times a cocktail of both with a dash of something else. i know far too much about the defensibility doubt, and feel trying to eradicate uncertainty gives me far too much moral latitude.

to color things less morosely, does my relationship work because i love someone who finds human relationships and communication as obtuse and weird and fascinating as i do? not a rhetorical question, but not looking for an (external) answer either.

steve said to me once, when we were both bleary from a shared flu, that loving me has made him aware that he doesn’t know himself. i said, “oh no! i’m sorry!” he said, “no, it’s good.”

(sweetheart, i wrote another blog post about you. this gives me at least a three day amnesty from being asked to do so again.)

my desktop proves just how gross my relationship is:

i’ve been feeling so lousy that i’m not writing terribly much. i will have news about when, where, why and how my short story collection is being published soon. (well, maybe not why.) also, the whole alicia shvatz debacle (you can google, sweet reader, for i am tired of the whole affair) has convinced me that People On The Internet do not understand anything about either a) modality or b) conceptual art. much less things like autonomy, personhood and the question of truth in media culture. really, though, i think the mass panic over the national threat posed by performance artists that happens every six months is quite giggletastic.

note to self: do not look at comics influenced by r. crumb before napping ever again. you will have yet another looney toons dream about riding an escalator to texas, with grotesque naked people waving at you from the sidelines.

“is speed and marshmallow creme contraindicated?”

“are.”

“what?”

“are they contraindicated, you would have to say. plural. if you want to say ‘is,’ it would have to be, ‘is speed contraindicated with marshmallow creme?’”

“your grammar correcting is out of control.”

“i hate you.”

“do you hate me now, or in the slight past, when i said that?”

“SHUT UP!”

my brain does strike lines through misused words and is generally found anxiously rearranging already-spoken clauses not to end in prepositions. it’s a more or less tourettic impulse to set my mental silverware at ninety degree angles. you can ask the person eating marshmallow creme about whether i am precise in any other remarkable way. short answer is “no.”

i had to go to the dentist on an emergency basis today. and i was perfectly mature and normal about it. except not. i despise dental visits. i am the kind of person who likes to have options at all times and can think of few situations where one has fewer options than when tilted backwards with pokey metal things in one’s mouth.

my coping strategies were as follows: i showed everyone the picture of the building online, and forced them to agree with me that it looked like an old chicken shack and a very bad place. i said to ten people, approximately 120 times total, “i’m going to die.” i fought with steve about whether i really had to go to the dentist (”i don’t have to do anything!” “well, you don’t want to be in pain. you have to go if you don’t want to be in pain.” “i don’t have to do anything!”). i white-knuckled it all the way in the car with my friend todd on the way, complained in the waiting room, only filled out half the health history form and, after my name was unmistakably called a couple times, scurried back and did everything they told me. i am only really a rebellious person in theory. when some one’s in a uniform, i tend to defer my existential responsibility with great gusto.

the great irony is that nothing is wrong with my teeth. it’s all sinus pain. all that chicken-shack, the-dentist-might-eat-me angst for nothing. i need a stiff drink.

not only do i have palm tree sheets on my bed; i have the grossest relationship ever. steve left this on his pillow this morning, so it was the first thing i saw:

the lunar eclipse day was cold, but not cold enough to keep me from scampering out to morrison in my socks to see the obscured moon behind the cluster of trees on the alley where i live. at three a.m., i was walking back from the convenience store and there were fireworks in the sky on to the south. i stopped, slightly startled, and was about to shrug and move on.

“that was awesome…” the hipster guy sitting on his porch was rolling a cigarette. he had the look of someone whose spoken punctuation was always ellipses, from whom even the most complex noun-verb combination would inevitably sound like a sentence fragment.

“yeah,” i agreed, “but for no reason. i mean, who else probably saw it?”

even his shrug seemed to end in an ellipses. i look down at my two hands, two feet, two shoes, two bags of beer and soda, suddenly wanting to count everything and make sure i still had it, before walking all the way home.

sometimes i think i understand the utterly irrelevant things that have made me myself:

my mother married a man who had a fence company. there were often coils of silver chain link laying around. people would call on his business line, and he would answer, “accurate fence erectors!” he told me that the name wasn’t important; it was that it started with an “a,” so he was the first person people saw in the phone book. when i showed him that, actually, “aaa fencing” came first, he said well, that was too obvious: everyone knew “aaa fencing” was just a made up name to be first in the phone book. he explained that “accurate fence erectors” sounded real, like it reflected what the company did. they erected fences. accurately.

i think he injured his back. my mom said he was burned out. he went to the lady up the street, who gave him woven hair transplants in her garage, a lot. my mom seemed mad about that; more about the money and the time, though. she didn’t actually want him to be bald, she admitted, and what was the alternative. she had the hair weaving lady cut our hair, too. and hers. she tried to be friends with the hair weaving lady, who sometimes would bring out the hair she was going to put on my mother’s husband’s head for my mother, my sisters and i to look at and we would all laugh at how ridiculous and fake and expensive it was.

anyway, my mother’s husband had stopped putting fences in. it was the early nineties, and he thought the market was in invisible fences. fences were ugly, expensive, and, in our rural community, mostly just used to keep dogs in. invisible fences could keep your dog in by either making a sound or zapping the dog when it crossed the line, my stepfather explained. it wasn’t physical. it was a system to keep the dog inside whatever bounds you wanted. it didn’t need to be big and obtrusive like a fence. it was more flexible. where the dog went was now between him, the property owner, and the dog. not for everyone to see, where you wanted your dog to go.

our dog never learned to stay in the invisible fence. he would visibly brace himself for the shock at the edge of the lawn but keep running after cars or squirrels. when all the paid-for dog-training videos still lay in the their boxes, and the phone wasn’t ringing, my mother demanded, “even if it worked, what did you think? you’d be a dealer of the invisible?”

i laughed into my hands, standing in the kitchen. the dining room was his office. there were mounds of dog-zapping collars that probably got thrown away. it was all a great, failed idea. the dog was outside, in the only thing i ever really saw the man build: a large cedar pen, with a chain loop on the outside.

“i mean, think about it: if cock-swinging sculptors are our biggest problem, we really have nothing to complain about.”

“but-”

“he interrupted my raymond chandler prose poem. worse things have happened to human beings.”

the world has been coming at me through a veneer of sinus congestion this week. the body is never absent, but sometimes it is annoyingly present in a different way. it comes down to context mattering, even if context is all there is and relativity rules the land. because 98.6 degrees feels way better than months of low grade fever, even if it’s all just tick marks on a thermometer. outliers show us the boundaries of what exists and it’s kind of sad that a mound of discarded kleenexes points to a truth inexpressible by language.

i wonder how much of what we call the pursuit of knowledge is just a way of talking ourselves out of rehearsed mistakes. and you have to rehearse a mistake, to believe you understand its internal logic, its possible defensibility at the time you made it (even if fictitious), because otherwise there’s nothing to say.

i know saying nothing is worse than saying something foolish, but it’s hard for me to live with internal silences. i always want to feel i’ve acted for a good, though ill-conceived, reason, even when there was no reason at all. really, though, what i call “myself” has usually run ahead and done something else stupid and i will inevitably have to invent sentences and intentions and a story that makes it all sensible and  yet seem like it could never happen again.

i guess what i’m saying is that if i have any compulsion, it’s to supply contexts, even when they’re not there; to make sense of what is not in the bounds of sensibility. other compulsions: caffeine and taking pictures of myself.

i’ve been trying to articulate my objections to the postsecret project, or at least what makes me uneasy about it. they are nearly universally loved; they have events; they have a book; they’ve spawned a culture of tucking “secrets” in their books; they sponsor suicide hotlines. there are the obvious aspects one might dislike: the “secrets” are curated to be edgy but ultimately acceptable, focusing largely on such non-so-taboo taboos as sexual orientation, eating disorders, familial dysfunction and sexual health. the “secrets” generally reflect things that are already in social conversation, but might be hard for an individual to talk about (although i was surprised recently by a secret that fell outside these bounds; someone confessing that they had tortured animals and become a veterinarian). the ideology seems to be that these are the sorts of things you should get off your chest, and on to the internet. this will fix the culture that made you unable to tell your “secret” any other way. the “secrets” are illustrated by artsy, often clever collages that stay within certain confines (of post cards, of course). it is anonymous confession of collective misery, exquisite corpse style.

maybe what i have found most disturbing, while reading postsecret these past months, is my own reaction. i often admire the composition of a “secret,” the ability of the few words that can fit on a post card, to reflect a life story or pivotal life event. sometimes i identify. sometimes i laugh. but generally i keep scrolling: momentary admiration, and then i want to read the international news feeds.

it was very strange to find a high school friend’s blog, and to see her dicussing my divorce, including the detail that she still received email reminders to order our wedding photos. she moved immediately on to use this detail to pose a question about the transience of human relationships, how things can seem well and change so quickly. it wasn’t that my friend wrote about me that unsettled me, but that a major event in my life, and the absurdity of our wedding photos remaining up for perusal, was simply a narrative flourish, a way to earn the authorial right to pose grave questions.

it was the same way when i discovered that my exboyfriend had published “fiction” about the events of the end of our relationship. it felt cannibalistic, disrespectful, strange, uncalled for. don’t get me wrong: i totally write about my experience. we all, quite involuntarily, mine our experience to understand what is at hand and find ways to talk about other things. artists in particular can only disavow autobiography by self-deception. sometimes, though, we alienate ourselves from our experience, such that it is an object, evidence, something we can brandish and admire abstractly, in order to become sensationalist historians of ourselves. we draw attention not to what we value in our histories, what is truly hardest and most important to say, but rather what is likely to be published, what others will admire us for saying. thus, the readers of postsecret come to expect a comfortable range of the “unexpected.”

postsecret makes anguish a (by and large) palatable freakshow. this is surely better than silence, but i want better than postsecret. catharsis is wonderful, and needed. catharsis, though, should always demand, i have said this. this is out there. what now? what next? otherwise, it is useless, a palliative, another kind of silence. it’s awful to be reduced to a poetic flourish for someone, particularly for oneself.

i tried to strand myself with just-book yesterday, no laptop or writing utensils, because i feel lately that i can’t listen without taking notes, or resist the urge to stop reading and digress. that completely worked:

the evening was lots of train metaphors, with occasional root beer. also:

me: i totally see why that didn’t work now1:15 PM [she]: why?me: he didn’t understand double negatives.[she]: oh wow how did that last a day with you?

charity’s daughter grace advised me on saturday, “jesus is DEAD right now!”

on easter, kevin and i had the following conversation about my decision to get brunch after all at 2 pm.

me: “well, i guess i’m on my way. i’m putting pants on.”

kevin: “i’m taking mine off, as god intended.”

me: “god has no intentions!”

kevin: “what russian novel did you read that in?”

me: “MY LIFE!”

the coffee shop was closed for the holiday, so we went for hot dogs, and talked about conspiracy theories.

a lot of what i call “my bad habits” are actually the (mostly) involuntary result of the lack of appropriate habits.

of course, it all had a soundtrack and the chorus to that-one-song articulated something i couldn’t. it doesn’t mean this is like that; everything in life happens while you’re listening to pop music. like he said at dinner, “you never see the usual narrative elements in your life, unless things are going really bad.”

i want to write to someone and say i’m writing pretty much in the third person now; no more narrative confessional poetry or anything. but, of course, this craves the first-person orderliness of a second-person audience. i think i like reading posthumous correspondences because of that very order and because of the disruption of that order their publication implies. everything will be forwarded or accidentally preserved, which is a promise and a threat whispering from every third hand volume of emily dickinson.

they say yes or no questions should be thrown out when you’re doing a journalistic interview, because they’re easy, and usually answered without content; same for picking from a list of things. open-ended questions, always. anyone who wants to interview me ever should take note that i am, truly, most loquacious with non-open-ended questions. the smaller the amount of choices for answers you give me, the more i’ll likely say. actually, i am great at treating simple factual utterances as probing, soul-baring interrogation. the best way to hear my life story might be to say something both indisputable and insignificant, such as, “there are sixty minutes in an hour.”

also, dear ayn rand defenders who wrote to me regarding my last post: you’re right. i haven’t read ayn rand. i have only encountered her as a cultural phenomenon associated with teenage boys, venture capitalists and libertarians. i assure you, even if there is a slam-ayn-rand agenda, i haven’t been briefed. i can see why, because i am really bad at advancing agendas. but how did the three of you find my blog? and who keeps searching for +expired +hamburger to find me? it’s flattering! it’s like you were looking for advice on some meat spoiling in your fridge and now you come visit me every day.

p/s: i don’t plan to read ayn rand. and google automatically includes all the words, so you don’t have to type the pluses. just expired hamburger, and here i am. someday, you might bookmark or something, but i understand.

also: i use three different feed readers, not of necessity, but because i get bored of looking at one interface. i switch up what text editor i write in, too. that’s really the problem: no matter how usable something is, i’m just fickle. even if i found perfection, i’d probably ask if it came in another color.