Relationships, the past, and uncertainty.

I miss the way my friendships and relationships used to be, and I'm not sure if they aren't that way anymore because I just currently don't have around me the right people or if it's to do with the fact that I've gotten older and whatever made the old friendships so special is age-specific, one of those things you can't get back when you get older.

I'm okay if it's something I can't get back because I've grown up, I'll accept that if that's the case, and I'll accept it with grace. It's just not knowing that terrifies me. If and when I know, I'll be able to correctly understand and predict the nature of whatever future relationships I might have. I'll know if there's something in particular to look forward to. If I can expect things to be as they were in the past. Because things don't happen the same way twice, but sometimes certain events are repeated just because they're events that happen to people with a relative degree of frequency, so it makes sense it should happen to you again.

It's making me a bit nervous due to some writing projects that I've gotten myself into that rely upon the premise that I understand friendship and relationships well enough to write a fictional example of one that 1. reads fairly realistically (i.e. you can imagine it being real without a whole lot of suspension of disbelief), and 2. says some things about the nature of friendships and human interactions in general. It's because - and I think a lot of writers do the same - I tend to write examples of things to say something about the thing of which they're an example. A character serves as a reflection of humanity, a situation proves something about how humans react to things, a relationship says something about how people interact with and in relation to each other. It's based on relationships I've had in the past, which is all well and good (sensible, I should think), but I realized that I was much younger than I am now and much younger than the characters in the story when those took place, so...were they like the way they were just because I happened to be lucky enough to meet certain people? Was it because I was young and certain things happen to you only when you're young? Was it because I was young and thus not as jaded about interpersonal interactions as experience and time have made me, and that someone whose experience wasn't the same as mine might be able to experience something much like I did at a different time in my life?

What is realistic for me to imagine for the future and what has been lost with time?

I just wish I knew.

None of this would even be a thing if I didn't think of myself in terms of a case study.

Sometimes I think about how the way I think and the way my thought processes/emotions work are apparently so different from everyone else's that anything i learn that may be true of me is not necessarily true (actually, almost certainly not true) about humanity in general and that I'll never be able to use self-observation and self-analysis (which is one of the few things I'm actually very good at) to understand the species I live in (i.e. one of the things I want to understand and that I think is most important to me to understand - really, most important for any human to understand).

Sometimes I think about how my ability to understand myself will not help me understand the species of which I am by all appearances a part.

Sometimes I think about how one of the things I'm best at will not help me understand anything about anything but myself - i.e. the most selfish thing I could hope to understand, which helps no one but myself and maybe the few people who actually think I'm interesting enough to hear me explain in great depth. (No one is that interested in me as a case study to let me do that, to ask for that. No one.)

Sometimes I think about this fact. I got stuck with a human whose nature wouldn't tell me anything about human nature. I got stuck with such an outlier that I can't learn anything from it. The only thing it will teach me is about itself. And that's not important or vast enough for me to find this knowledge sufficient.

And when I say I got stuck with this human, what I mean is I got stuck being this human.

I don't like it.

Symbolism.

You know what? I as a writer have a tendency to keep putting bits of imagery or vaguely symbolic things in my stories, with no idea HOW exactly they're symbolic. But I don't do it to be pretentious. I do it because I like looking at my story halfway through writing it and then realizing that I'd been doing something clever all along without realizing it.

My mind works in a way that likes patterns. It likes seeing patterns in other things, and it likes working in terms of patterns. It likes working in terms of patterns to the point where it creates patterns without me consciously realizing it. And symbolism is a kind of pattern, really - a phrase or image repeated, meaning the same thing each time. That's a pattern, though I don't suppose most people realize that's what it is. People who look for such things realize it.

It's more exciting that way, anyway. It's like finding something that way. It's kind of like reading tea leaves or something; looking at what is and what wasn't consciously made that way with a meaning in mind, and finding a shape in it from which you extract meaning. Although in my case I'm placing the tea leaves on purpose without knowing what they're going to look like or what it's going to make. Finding images in places where they aren't. Seeing patterns in places when they aren't there. Making meaning. Like an existential reading of what I'm doing, like taking something initially apparently meaningless and then giving it meaning.

I don't know but that's what I like to do.

Help from a smoke detector

Sometimes, one finds oneself at one of one's lower points in life. It isn't necessarily one's lowest point, nor even necessarily one of one's lowest points. All one knows it that the point one was previously at was higher than the point at which one finds oneself now.

Sometimes, one doesn't even know why they've sunken so low. One doesn't know why one is no longer at the point one was at previously, the one that was higher than this current point. One might not know what it is exactly about this current point that makes it lower than the point that preceded it. One might not even know what point one is at - one might not even be able to describe this point, not just in a way that makes it clear why it is so low but in a way that makes it clear what it is at all. Nevertheless, one finds oneself here, and it is confusing and a little bit terrifying but mostly just accompanied by low feelings, the sort of feelings in every low point in anyone's life. It's just low.

I say all this because I found myself at such a point earlier today.

I'm not really sure what it was about. This happens with me - as much as I like to put forth an image of control over or at least understand of my emotions, and as much as this image is usually indicative of reality, I do find myself in situations where I can't explain to myself how I got where I am now, much like someone might find themself in their kitchen and think, "Wait, when did I go here and what was I trying to get?"

I don't remember what led me to sit on my bedroom floor and try to hold a conversation with a stuffed African wild dog, trying to justify to it the choices I had made throughout the day. I held its head and occasionally made it nod in agreement. I liked the illusion that it was actually communicating with me. Among the things I justified to the dog (and by extension - actually, as was my real intent - myself) were not doing anything productive all day, not wanting to write, being too afraid to do any writing submissions today, and making a weak cup of tea whose weakness I tried to disguise with excess amounts of orange extract.

At some point, I realized I was literally just sitting on my bedroom floor and trying to justify myself to a stuffed dog. And not even a sentient stuffed dog; this whole thing would have been justified were I in a speculative fiction piece where sentient stuffed animals existed, but I am to best my knowledge not in a speculative fiction piece where sentient stuffed animals exist, so it wasn't justified. 

I couldn't justify myself.

I gave it up and just lay down on the floor, putting the stuffed dog beneath my head. For a while, I lay there shouting at who-knows-whom (probably myself, when you get down to it). My shouts went to the effect that I didn't know what I was doing with my life and I was having a existential mini-crisis and I didn't even know what it was about and I was going to get places with my life but they wouldn't be places I wanted, and what was I even talking about anyway.

It was futile. I finally gave up and silently stared up at the ceiling. I've heard it said that sometimes you have to lie on your back in the dirt if you want to see the stars overhead. Or that when you find yourself lying on your back in the dirt, you can look up to see the stars. Or something like that. Something to the effect that, if you want to see something beautiful, you have to humble yourself and find yourself in an uncomfortable, undignified position, or if you're at the lowest point in your life, you have a better view of things than you would otherwise and somehow this is supposed to bring enlightenment.

However, I was not lying in the dirt, and I was not looking at the stars. I was lying on hardwood and I was looking at a plaster ceiling.

Sometimes, one finds oneself at one of one's lower points in life and then finds oneself suddenly lifted from that low point and back to a higher point. It can be through something that actually makes sense, like a solution to the problem that put one at that low point or a friend who actually has some sensible, helpful advice for once (unlike all the other friends who had offered unsensible, unhelpful advice). But sometimes, it is through something purely random.

Yeah, it was the latter of these that helped me in the end.

It was the smoke detector. I saw the smoke detector on my ceiling. I didn't know why I found it funny - by all accounts, I shouldn't find smoke detectors funny, because I have a small history of unpleasant experiences involving smoke detectors that didn't work and the tedious solutions to this problem. I should, by all accounts, find smoke detectors unfunny.

But nope. I found that smoke detector funny. I started laughing - silently at first, as though I were crying with no noise, and then out loud, raucously and hugely and sincerely.

I had found myself on my back in the dirt - or the hardwood, as the case was - and I was finally seeing the stars - or the smoke detector, as the case was.

I lifted myself from the ground. I looked at the place where I had previously been, shouting at life and its incomprehensibility and my inability to do anything worthwhile and my general inability to do anything, period.

I was back to a higher place in my life, figuratively as well as literally.

I could carry on.

The point of this narrative is that no matter how low you find yourself, you can almost certainly find a way back up, and maybe you can't help yourself back up but something will happen to help you get there, and sometimes that something is a smoke detector and the inexplicable amusement derived thereof.

I fell in love with a place

I was a little upset today; anhedonic, really. Good things were coming up, good things had happened, and I didn't care. I didn't feel a thing, really. Couldn't. It happens sometimes, where nothing in the world feels any good and I keep on living but not for the joy of living because joy's not a word I can understand.

I was at a place really near my house. It's one of those "old town" places that your town might have if it's old enough and small enough. All these antique shops and eateries. I probably sound like I'm making it out to be sort of phoney or dull but I really do love it, it's a good place. It's where the library was.

I went to the library for a meeting I was having there. The meeting didn't go nearly as well as I'd liked, and after loitering in the library thereafter and feeling like a miserable little git, I decided to solve my problem by going out for ice cream.

After some deliberation as to where in the area I should get ice cream, I settled for an Italian cafe that I've been to a few times but mostly with my family for the times they all wanted to go out and get gelato. It was gelato, you see, that I got in the end, not ice cream. It's similar but I liked it just as much.

I'm sitting here now at my computer. This place is beautiful. There's a chandelier and those off-yellow plaster walls that look like they're stained by something in a good way and soft glowing lamps along the wall at intervals and those windows who are made of regular panes and whose edges do that slopey sort of thing in relation to the iron surrounding the pieces of glass, so you can see out but it's distorted by the glass but that's all you need to know about what's outside you, that needn't distract you now.

It's very European for lack of a better way of describing it, and it's the sort of place that some might call "pretentious" and some might call "hipster" and that I would call "probably where Jean Paul Sartre stayed up til 2 AM writing his philosophical ramblings, which he turned in to the publishers unedited". Except Jean Paul Sartre didn't write in this cafe. He wrote in a cafe in some place in Europe. I don't know much about Jean Paul Sartre other than that he was an existentialist, he said "Hell is other people", and he wrote his philosophical ramblings in cafes at 2 AM and he'd hand his stuff in to the publishers unedited.

I had a bit of a breakdown at a coffee shop recently because I was with a friend and I read her the poem I wrote while we were there and she called it "pretentious". It made me think I wasn't writing with enough candor or sincerity or realness, and that's the only way I can tell if a poem is good, really, if it's real. Turns out she meant it as a compliment but I still couldn't shake the feeling of irony present in my writing and subsequently having an existential crisis in a coffee shop. 

I went for gelato and I ate it outside the place but I went in, figuring I'd loiter inside (where it was air conditioned and where the location of the electrical outlets was more convenient). I ordered an Italian soda. It's violet-flavored. They have an astounding array of flavors for their sodas.

I sat down at a table and did some poem-writing. There's no one else here save for the staff. Empty chairs at empty tables. I've chosen a place towards but not quite at the back where I can look at them all. Doesn't look like anyone else is coming, too.

It's pretentious as anything.

And you know what?

I love it.

I love it sincerely and non-ironically and with whatever sort of thing I have that passes for a heart. And because I love it sincerely, then it's not pretentious. And if it is, then it doesn't matter because it's pretentiousness that comes in earnest. It doesn't matter because I love where I am. I love it. And that's what matters.

Love at first sight has happened today. I have fallen in love with this gorgeous place and I will continue to see it as gorgeous and I will write here and I will submit my poetry here and I will bleed words onto pages here and my poems and stories will tear out of whatever foreign thing constitutes my heart and I will put them to words here.

I will drink their tea and eat their biscuits. I will drink their sodas whose flavors - violet, cinnamon, lavender - do not exist in most people's imaginations as soda flavors. I will drink these which surpass others' attempts at mundanity. I will drink these non-mundane sodas, I will drink them. On the warmer days I will order their gelatos and I will ask for the two most unlikely flavors mixed in the same cup and they'll give me what I asked for, and it will be delicious.

I will fall in love with this place and I will occupy a corner here forever. Even when I'm not here, my heart and mind will be. A funny thing happens to me; sections of whatever metaphor for a heart I have, they split themselves off and leave themselves in places. And sometimes those places are familiar and are the locations I visit every day and sometimes the bits of my heart stay in places to which I never return. But I fall in love with places. That's the one thing you could say I love. Places. And I've come in this short piece of time to love this place. That insanity called love - at first sight, even - has stricken me and my heart has immediately filled the room. A piece of me has lodged here indefinitely. Maybe even indelibly.

This is what love feels like. I've fallen in love. I will write here and I will love this place and I will be the most pretentious git imaginable.

And it will be good because it will be earnest and pure and real.

And these feelings counteract any of the pretension that is so often what we call it when one loves in earnest something beautiful.

Red Vines at work

Today, at my volunteer job, I did an experiment to see if I could eat a pack of Red Vines and work at the same time.

I could.

I kept fearing my supervisor would come and catch me and disapprove, but one of my coworkers was siding with me (i.e. she approved of my activity) so I felt vindicated. Besides, I was living on the edge. Doing things I shouldn't do. Veering into the realm of the unallowed.

And it was incredible.

(Also, my discovery was that yes, I can indeed do my job and eat Red Vines at the same time.)

Summer concerns

I'm a little concerned about the summer.

I finally figured out why I dislike being out of school, and it's because, when I'm in school, I have a way to judge how well I'm doing in my function in life (i.e. that of a student). When I'm in school, I get grades, and they tell me how well I'm doing, and thus I can judge my self-worth and my value as a performer of my function in life. But when I'm not in school, there's no grades and thus no way for me to understand how well I'm doing. And given that I essentially base my self-worth off of my grades, my way of thinking does not accommodate not being in school without experiencing a lot of dissonance.

And yet I don't want to take summer classes because being in school literally all the time does stress me. But even when I'm de-stressing and trying to enjoy myself (a monumentally hard task, really, I don't know how to enjoy myself), I don't know how to judge how well I'm doing at life. I could judge it by how much fun I'm having, but 1. I'm bad at having fun, and 2. it makes me feel hedonistic to judge myself over how much I'm enjoying myself (and then that makes me feel utterly repulsed by myself - like viscerally physically sick). I could judge it by how much I'm writing, which would actually be good, but I can't tell the quality of my work, only the quantity, and when I do my writing, I don't have OTHER people judging it, and I don't trust my own judgment, nor the judgment of my peers, so it's not like in school where authority figures validate what I do. Because I can really only feel validated by authority.

Basically, I'm having a small existential crisis because it's summer and I feel it's at least partly to do with how schools are run and how screwed by the system I possibly am.