Threshold 2…

This morning’s dream: Finally it hits that this, today right now is the day that I have to move out. I start piling together the things on the shelves, the remaining things in closets, mentally estimating whether or not they will all make one load. Much is already packed; there aren’t so much loose items as there are collections of flat boxes, stacks of envelopes and yet as I gather things into the center of the slightly shabby hotel room which is some how the room I grew up in things seem to be subtly multiplying: I keep finding things tucked away there and there in drawers and behind the few furnishings. Why did I wait until now to do this and am I reaally being asked to leave where I started? I think fleetingly of my mother: she has set up the ride for me or a meeting with the guy I’m supposed to meet up with next. D is there and we take a break in the coffee shop which becomes chatting and an easy extension o fhte time we spent the day before. With a jump I realize that “Dan D” has been waiting for me in the lobby, waiting much too long while we caroused. I step up and apologise and part of my mind is stil worrying about all that was left unpacked.

I woke to find D’s warm leg pressed alongside mine. Now I think “Sometimes you don’t really have a ‘sub’ conscious.”

Something that D said to me yesterday about my last post is rattling around in my mind. As much as we experience emotions as fluid, in writing they tend to become fixed and seemingly total. In these entries, I do make the attempt to allow the act writing to take me where it will; to lead me into new ideas about my experiences. I’m surprised when people respond to those entries as depressed, or with sympathy about my pain. Not that those responses are inappropriate, but the writing can I think read more dramatic than the feeling is. Those who know me offline can probably attest to the fact that I rarely despair, or allow myself to utterly sink into an emotional fugue. I pretty much take the days as they come, good or ill. SO maybe the fault is in my writing. I have noticed that in my old hand written journals a certain querulous tone predominates: when I don’t know what I write about I fret about something on the page. And LJ writing is also a much more clearly social utterance: an act in a social group. It makes my own contrarian impulses come out to read a collection of others’ posts that seem to be tending in one direction.

0 Comments +

  1. Some days, it’s true, we have to be perky for Live Journal. We don’t always want to slash our wrists or overdose on Seconal, but sometimes we sound that way before the second cup of coffee takes effect.

  2. Remembering how gloomy my own old journals tended to tilt, I think I’ve been pretty self-concious about what I post here on LJ, for the whole world to see – so likely actually skew on the side of perky.

    At one point in grad school I considered doing a short film based on my journal(s), but couldn’t decide whether to call it “Flounder” or “Mope.”

  3. I have this wicked image of you compromising and calling it “Mounders”

    Or maybe “Flope”?

    if only more graduate students would hold back from the idea of making a short film based on their journals.

  4. I’ve been trying to find a new inspiring working-title for the ever-ongoing Nitke doc.

    I’m kinda liking “Flope”!

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