i suppose i'm going to have to get up sometime in the near morning. get up and go to work, chastising myself for not having done the grocery shopping that so badly needs to be done ( i preempt even myself... making brief forays for coffee, milk, cheese, and saltines: the staples without which i can't even pretend to be living a form of a life ).

i am starting to sink into it- the thing i was wanting to see through- past the scrawled ledgers of theory and theory and theory i wasn't reading enough of but always thinking and dreaming and griping with. now: meeting the abstracts i wasn't thinking or feeling, so blind school makes me to the movements churning without any direct consent.

i haven't been reading so much news. or talking too much to people. although i have been spoiled by friends who come over and make food for me in my apartment, and who sit on candled balconies teaching me card games that might even be hopeless for me.

and now, post spoiled, i have set a one-week moratorium on seeing people although i might break it pretty much most of the time, although not today, within which i have read one point five cheasy, trashy novels that make me pleased to be able to read and regain my willingness to read also and later, nontrashy novels, as soon as my brain has had time to figure out where the hell the rest of me has been lurking about.

realizations of the day. it's no longer okay that i haven't had a relationship since i was twenty-seven. it's no longer all right with me to stumble from awkward moment to another, to live in quarter-wishfulness and emulsion. i must find something that makes art my true life-practice or else get serious about opening myself to something else.

i have been too busy to cry, but i'm not any longer. been crying (and that's not a sign of depression, but that everything is really, truly is, catching up).

generous hearts make something beat faster in me, but it gets easier and easier to distance myself, but distance doesn't make anything happen that really should be happening. i want to make, and i'm being patient, very very patient with myself, but making would be good and one of these days i want to stumble.
into it.
there is a wide wide world i want to find, but find myself unskilled at locating the techniques to make myself a new dog, not bitter, not bored, not boring.

is innocence--a primary gift--doomed to less space by the squeezing of lime to jar?

i bought a new plant the other day. a dragon-clawed fire, and these tender lusts make a littlehope stubborn its way out of a blind. and perhaps this makes no sense, but the incessant need to purchase color, perhaps that's not to say anything about unhappiness, but rather something strangely about how i think of the idea of path, of moving, of seeing things fresh and wanting to process them, and then feeling myself present, not in simply a moment (because i'm always good at that) but at a moment honed to the understanding that others are with me and there is a constant surge of communication that goes on between the slenderist tendril of words:

"do you have boxes for the soil?"
"boxes?"
"yes, to store it in?"
"no, i don't think so. but you can roll up the bag and the soil will keep all the nutrients within it."
"oh. okay."
[her boyfriend: "actually, she's just looking for anything to make the soil look pretty, instead of just a curled-up bag"]

ha-ha.
but what is a prettier container than soil?
or.

"You're rude."
"No, you're rude."
"I can't believe it. Here I am, a handicapped woman in a wheelchair, all sore. And when you jerked me out of my position, you were rough and hurt my legs. I want your name, or a card."
"We don't have any."
"You have no name?"
"My name is Jerry."
"Well, I can't believe how rude you were."
"No. You're the rude one."

how will we ever know?

anyhow. life is full of considerations and i plan on getting to the bottom of them. i will continue reading my trashy novels for awhile and thinking about exactly what it is that i want.

i'm just not sure.

oh, by the way, and speaking of wanting and then not knowing; i had to turn down the TA-ship that i very badly wanted. in order to get this job, i would have had to reschedule my tickets to fishing and visiting family in order to get 'enough' planning time in. i felt deeply resentful towards the teacher i'd be assisting--about how the two months i'm actually going to be in chicago this summer weren't happily coinciding with the time she was not working on her exhibit or vacation in europe, etc, time. she gave me the option of changing my plans, and i looked into it and decided that it would put too much pressure on my tentatively balanced budget... i'd have to change a ticket, buy a whole new ticket, and possibly quit paid work a whole month early... with the payoff being a TA-ship in a grad-level class on a topic that's incredibly, and dangerously, close to my life-interest. very tough. but aren't TA-ships supposed to be as much about me being given the opportunity to service-learn in a sector i want to dedicate my life to, as they are about meeting the scheduling needs of a well-established artist/professor who wants someone to plug the holes in the eternal dam?

i guess some things were meant to be learned solo. i called the prof up a couple of days ago and declined the job. And am now thinking about what i can do in the fall and final semester to make a different kind of mark.

it's now 5:30am and the birds are out and i have to sleep before work, so i will stop yapping even if this whining is the first 'creative' impulse that's overtaken me for a few weeks...