think big

Goal for the week: to go one whole day without coughing up phlegm balls! Surely this can't be too much to ask!

Random anecdote

And now a break from introspection. Yay!, the crowds exclaim in unison.

I came home yesterday and soon realized that a gigantic fly (and my hyper-bug-phobia is not even exaggerating his girth! (unlike usual)) had moved into my apartment while I was gone for the weekend. I was watching the special features off of a DVD and there he plopped himself upon the television screen, walking about and distracting my view. I shooed him away once but he just came back as soon as I sat down. After the feature was over, I opened my laptop to do some online reading and the fly began to buzz around over my head, swinging past my ear repeatedly and making me skittish every chance he got. I got so frustrated that I packed up my surrounding essentials and went to move into my bedroom for some peace. But as I walked into the room I found him already settled on the wall above my pillow. I approached him, scowling, but the cocky little bugger refused to even flinch. Most people would probably have tried to swat him by now, but I rarely get bugs in my apartment and I always feel bad sentencing things to death just for privacy's sake... mosquitoes, wasps, and centipedes being the no tolerance exceptions. (I actually had a "pet" fly named Ferdinand in the apartment when I first moved in. As I was going about sterilizing the place from its previous tenant, he'd fly around to each room with me and sit on a wall or shelf quietly keeping me company. I was even a bit sad after a few days had passed without me seeing him and I found him dead on a window sill. I also had a non-pet bat named Barney in a previous apartment, but that's a different story that still freaks me out.) So instead of a killer slapping, I waved my hand about until he flew off, and then I settled myself into bed to get some reading done. But within moments he was buzzing about the room, circling and rummaging through my closets and clothes piles. Finally I got fed up enough and managed to chase him out of the room. I didn't catch him re-entering, though I went to bed soon afterwards.

I came home today starving since I'm too lazy to go to the grocery store and had nothing to make for lunch (and was too lazy last night to make a lunch... and too lazy this morning as well). I went straight to the kitchen to boil up the last of the pasta I have and sure enough heard buzzing almost immediately. It took awhile to locate him behind the blinds of the kitchen window. He stayed there the entirety of my cooking time but kept flying around enough to keep me paranoid. It wasn't until I came back to do dishes that I spied him on the kitchen floor. I grabbed the plastic spinach box from my recyclables pile and crept quietly over to where he was resting. Slowly I hovered the upside-down container over him, dropping it lower and lower until I thought it had reached a point where it would become suspicious to him. At that point I hastily dropped it up him and sure enough he was caught. Next I went and grabbed the lid and tried to slide it under on the floor, but knowing he was trapped, he refused to fly and instead remained on the ground where he might escape if I lifted the box too high. I waited him out, sliding the box over more and more so that the side would touch him and hopefully irritate him enough that he would attempt flight. After a few unsuccessful tries on my part, he finally started to climb up the side of the box and I quickly slide the lid under, closing off any chance of his escape. I took the box outside and let him go.

Yes, I'm a dork. And sadly that was the highlight of my day up to that point.

Wake up!

I need to convert my passive interactions into active ones. I’m still not writing enough and more importantly I’m not challenging myself nearly as much in my writing as I need to be doing. Each journal entry feels like a rephrasing of the previous ones with only the mildest of new insights. I finally have the urge to be productive but I’m increasingly bogged down and aggravated by the complete lack of time I have to put forth the effort. An average weekday is spent with ten hours at my job (including commuting time and a cubicle lunch), seven hours of sleep (which is what I should be getting in order to be functional in the time I do have), and a minimum of two hours with self-maintenance (getting ready in the morning, making dinner, eating, cleaning, getting ready for bed, and other miscellaneous tasks). That leaves me only a maximum of five hours out of twenty-four to be productive. If I watch a two-hour movie, which I usually do, that only leaves me three hours. Typically I spend those remaining hours catching up on film related news, chatting online or e-mailing. No wonder I’m getting nowhere. No wonder I feel so hallowed and perfunctory. Weekends are usually my catch-up time but between being depressed, and then sick, and now going up to Chicago three weekends in a row, I haven’t made any progress in months. Surely I’m doing something wrong.

crowds

"And only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming." CB

Spending the day on my own downtown, I realized how much I miss the hoards and the abandonment and energy of which their presence shares. Oh, the open claustrophobia both smothers and relieves, permitting me to reveal all, unnoticed. Away from the bigotry of coworkers, away from the lonesome apartment, away from the ever-escalating expectations inherent in pre-existing relationships, I relish in the tranquility of this anonymity. Here, there are collectives without requirement for conformity, random and unassembled masses which excite my senses, heightening my observations. I lurk, imperceptible, but so very aware. This has been my tactic to life.

I carry a notebook to write and a book to read everywhere I go. I enjoy wandering without direction, stopping here or there to make this or that note. I am content not to say a word, to observe but not connect (not that I'm actually opposed to connection but just that I'm finicky and skeptical to welcome such relationships so easily). Perhaps my recent anxieties are not from increased solitude in itself but instead because my most consuming outlets for interaction are all forced, obligatory, stifling situations. I forget how how much these day-to-day obligations overwhelm my time and mentality.

forced obvious

From months of slump to a now relentless volatility (topped with a fine layer of downer irritability), is this increased recovery or the same sickness masked in different symptoms? Mustering a departure from introspection would do me some good but any attempt at new interaction, no matter how much desired, is still too risky as two lessons learned in the prior week marked. As is, existing bonds are horridly frayed and in need of a delicate repair however impeded by my choleric mood's contradiction of necessity with aversion. My mouth remains mute despite my yearnings to awake. My mind, clouded thick with cynicism, refuses to accept its physical surroundings enough to condone any sort of adaptive harmony. I find myself vigorously compensating (and further deluding myself with distraction from the immediate situation) through study. I'm starting over, yet again and even more so than I originally perceived was necessary. (In my darkened state, I remained oblivious to the depth of my descent. But had I known would I really have stopped sooner?) Presently, I saturate my blank thoughts with a purification by plagiarism, resuscitation in exploration, discovery, memorization. I study and study and study, too pusillanimous to confront the imminent challenges within, and instead bolting off in frantic (though subdued in guise) detachment with the pellucid but subconscious craving to outsource fortitude for later confrontation.

I've been here before. Nothing came of it. What has changed and what is merely reverted?

As I shed and deny more and more of my responsibilities and obligations at the risk of becoming insincere and alone, the reasons for these sacrifices in character remain unrealized. In distance, both tangible and abstract, I hoped to ascertain the seductive freedom of mind which has always lingered so elusively out of reach; however, as much as my pace distances me from what was known I have come no closer to my destination, a bit like an muddied treadmill which wears me out uselessly while kicking up dirt at what I've left behind. Analogies aside, I know that in part the hindrance is a sort of symbiotic separation anxiety of history, namely, my past mistakes clutch just as much to me as I do to them. Externally, the disorder obviates itself only as one-way, but secrets and empathy reveal ties more constricting. My blind eye only exacerbates what is naturally discomforting. What now? Patience and confrontation.

Between enduring this coughing cold that won't die and the recent unduly stress of my job, my reinvigorated semi-sanity hasn't been given the opportunity yet to yield increased productiveness: dilemma strikes again in unanticipated but redundant form. Mainly, time evades and my patience is unwaveringly underdeveloped. Survival actions confusingly consume excessive portions of my days and I find the only way to avert such superfluity is through sacrifice in the opposite extreme, be it in tea-induced insomnia, decreased job performance by distraction, or neglect in self-maintenance. I pick my poisons hoping to find a cure, vacillating in a subtle violence. But at least this wayward motion yields motions and I am glad to have rid myself, however passively, of the debilitating collapse of will I suffered in the most recent month of earlier. But still, I search for the static mental equilibrium which will relieve me of my crooked path.

silence

I despise listening to myself speak. I have no interest in the things that come sputtering out of my mouth and much of the time I don’t even agree with my own utterances; they are alien. I have no control over my external self. She is not me. I don’t recognize myself in her but yet I can't stop her reactionary ways. In most conversations I can feel myself watching her interact, blatantly rolling my eyes while she's in mid-sentence, yet she doesn't flinch, doesn't show a sign of the mockery she can feel hanging over her. In fact, she ends much of what she says with a stupid smile that ensures her listener that she's as blank as can be and so they think nothing of it. I can't stand her and hence I do my best to silence her altogether, but thereby suppress any chance of my own escape. And I need an escape, an outlet, a release. These bottled thoughts are moldy and growing poisonous. Breathing is difficult. I have become so tense and frustrated that my muscles and joints ache. I am thinning and my eyes grow increasingly near-sided.

Can one die of an inability to express oneself?
It nears.

the spectacle

"The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual "having" must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.

"The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object (which is the result of his own unconscious activity) is expressed in the following way: the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere." GD

self-control

New rule: can't watch a movie until I've written something, even if just a lame sentence, about the previous one. (Exception: short-term theatrical releases)

My stubborn demise

I was productive today! Yay me. Isolation only proliferates my ailment - this I know yet I stubbornly (and of course misanthropically) dislike to admit it, let alone avoid it. I suppose seeking refuge in other hypothesized vices would be worse, so for now I shall suck it up, deal, and delve.

tick, tock

This day won't end.

A few days before this weekend, I began to feel newly invigorated, eager to learn again, but all that passions has been thwarted so facilely. Perhaps out of character I became overly optimistic and my expectations for immediacy never had a chance of being fulfilled. I pissed the morning away unsuccessfully battling technical issues, proving yet again how inept I am at my profession. And then before I started my real efforts for the day, I foolishly tried to run a couple errands and make a few required phone calls, but dealing with people, and the (self-induced?) burden of disappointment they weigh on me, drained any remaining ambition I had left. I'm caught in a drowsy daze because the irksome cough I have kept waking me up all last night and is only slightly less bothersome during the day. I was so excited to spend the day reading but the sharp, propagating pain I've had in my neck apparently makes it impossible for me to sit in a comfortable reading position for more than a few minutes. So I ended up, in my frustrated and defeated state, trying to sleep the day away, hoping I'd feel better (i.e., less irritable and more ambitious) tomorrow. But even sleep seems out of my reach as I keep checking the clock, first waiting for the sun to go away and now waiting for it to near its return, downing pain killers and lounging around lethargically bored and miserable.

My efforts are so pathetic, as if I'm purposely setting myself up to fail. But I'm not. I really don't know how to suppress my overly sensitive and frail nature.