Un dia de aquellos...
So some days, ok, lately most days, I sound really down on life in general, but today will not be an exception...
I can't get anything right. I am literally on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and I can't get my f-ing printer to install, or get the programs to do what they are supposed to do. I want my mom. I do. She would just sit down and watch me work, like she did all those years when I needed (silent) company in order to be able to get my schoolwork done. I was a dreadful child, by all accounts, ok, not publicly, outwardly I was a sweet, angelic, and always appropriately well-behaved little girl. Save for at Sunday school, where I was perpetually thrown out of class for my lack of faith or my eternal questioning. Of course, I would end up talking about infinitely more interesting things with Rabbi Rick, which may have been the real reason for getting kicked out in the first place. But at home I was a holy terror. I smashed a window pane with my hand (and a napkin holder in the form of a house) on the coldest day of winter. (I was 10) I would dare my parents to punish me, to take every material possession from me, because ultimately nothing made a difference, we were all bound to our infinitesimal existence in an infinite sphere. Including me.
I have actually had a few invites to go to synagogue lately, and while free food and a Friday evening alone are appealing, I would feel hypocritical and so very anti-Israeli policy that I would have to hide my head... On the other hand, maybe the answers are there, and just needing to be found. I feel so very small, and insignificant and without direction that I can *almost* understand this knee-jerk fundamentalism that is sweeping the nation; giving yourself over to a set of rules that determine your thoughts and actions, must be comforting, mind-numbing, soothing, easy.
Maybe I prefer the pain. I do know that I would prefer to choose the kind of pain to feel, but I guess that is the nature of pain, it hurts because we don't get to choose. I have become less and less proficient or efficient in the kitchen these days. Dinner was dill havarti, half a left-over burrito, an apple with almond butter and banana licuado. Then it happened. I dropped the almost-full glass jar of almond butter from three feet, right on top of my foot. Hence, the "I can't get anything right". I keep injuring myself, the left toe is mostly better, the right hand is maybe almost fully functional again (we'll see;) and then I go and experiment with gravity, testing the force of impact as I lift my right foot to catch the glass before it shatters (it didn't) as if the bottle were a soccer ball. Some habits die hard. I think I have said that before, about a completely unrelated habit. The addage still holds true.
I wish I could fast forward five years, ten years, and then reverse it, I wish I could flip to the end of the novel, to read snatches from the last page. To see who the heroine ends up with. Or if she ends up alone. Or if she discovers the cure to some uncurable disease. Or find out if she lives "happily ever after", but then return to enjoy the telling and unfolding of the story. I don't know. Maybe I just waste my time here writing because it is in English and it feels like some dirty pleasure. Like I am cheating the devil and he will be coming for me soon.
What will it be? I think it will be a cat-nap and then arousal (from sleep... you all have dirty minds) to go do more work. Work, wyrk, werk, wirk. What a strange language this is... what strange animal sounds we make. How nice it feels to let the mother toungue roll around the inside of my mouth, my mind, like marbles that I used to suck on, when not playing with my brother and our building blocks. Why am I not a builder? Why am a I a "destroyer" a self-destroyer, a deconstructor? I wish I were an erector... but them maybe I am after all.
Nah. I wish. I don't have that kind of staying power, everything I touch seems to wither in my hands, leeching liquid sickness, the disease that is within all of us. Once upon a time, I believed in a man, and his vision of AIDS was that we were all infected, every single one of us, that we just had different manifestations of the same sickness, it was either within or without, but still present, nevertheless. I don't know if he expressed it this eloquently, but they were whispered late night words, and I clung to my phone to hear them, and the faith that was professed seemed so very beautiful, and so very far away. Several years later, his brother, it would turn out, had an infection that wouldn't go away, ganglions that swelled beyond imagine, that continued after draining. He had the same birthday as me, June 16, only twenty years before. We were the best of friends, when he must have known what was happening, but refused to let himself know, he would tell me the raciest stories about the dark encounters, the fellatio in Manchester bars. My morbid obsession with the terrible blood disease began much before, for years, every time I would read a book, if the word were on the page my eyes would instantly jump to it, and fixate and my heart would hurt for the loss and the dying. I have lost my fear. Somewhere. I am safe here, I thought, but I am not safe from myself, and the disease it turns out has infected us all.
Self-doubt. Is it nothing more than a spiritual auto-immune disease? Is AIDS a metaphor for our ultimately spritually bald existence. Maybe I should go back and reconsider religion. Maybe I can turn it off. Does the pain subside with death or are we eternally tormented in limbo or hell? I don't know. In the dying is there a return to our spiritual home, are we just the same wandering souls bound to one another for eternity, to get it right, or to languish trying? I don't know anymore, no, I don't know any less either, I am just so much more aware of how little that really is.
I can't get anything right. I am literally on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and I can't get my f-ing printer to install, or get the programs to do what they are supposed to do. I want my mom. I do. She would just sit down and watch me work, like she did all those years when I needed (silent) company in order to be able to get my schoolwork done. I was a dreadful child, by all accounts, ok, not publicly, outwardly I was a sweet, angelic, and always appropriately well-behaved little girl. Save for at Sunday school, where I was perpetually thrown out of class for my lack of faith or my eternal questioning. Of course, I would end up talking about infinitely more interesting things with Rabbi Rick, which may have been the real reason for getting kicked out in the first place. But at home I was a holy terror. I smashed a window pane with my hand (and a napkin holder in the form of a house) on the coldest day of winter. (I was 10) I would dare my parents to punish me, to take every material possession from me, because ultimately nothing made a difference, we were all bound to our infinitesimal existence in an infinite sphere. Including me.
I have actually had a few invites to go to synagogue lately, and while free food and a Friday evening alone are appealing, I would feel hypocritical and so very anti-Israeli policy that I would have to hide my head... On the other hand, maybe the answers are there, and just needing to be found. I feel so very small, and insignificant and without direction that I can *almost* understand this knee-jerk fundamentalism that is sweeping the nation; giving yourself over to a set of rules that determine your thoughts and actions, must be comforting, mind-numbing, soothing, easy.
Maybe I prefer the pain. I do know that I would prefer to choose the kind of pain to feel, but I guess that is the nature of pain, it hurts because we don't get to choose. I have become less and less proficient or efficient in the kitchen these days. Dinner was dill havarti, half a left-over burrito, an apple with almond butter and banana licuado. Then it happened. I dropped the almost-full glass jar of almond butter from three feet, right on top of my foot. Hence, the "I can't get anything right". I keep injuring myself, the left toe is mostly better, the right hand is maybe almost fully functional again (we'll see;) and then I go and experiment with gravity, testing the force of impact as I lift my right foot to catch the glass before it shatters (it didn't) as if the bottle were a soccer ball. Some habits die hard. I think I have said that before, about a completely unrelated habit. The addage still holds true.
I wish I could fast forward five years, ten years, and then reverse it, I wish I could flip to the end of the novel, to read snatches from the last page. To see who the heroine ends up with. Or if she ends up alone. Or if she discovers the cure to some uncurable disease. Or find out if she lives "happily ever after", but then return to enjoy the telling and unfolding of the story. I don't know. Maybe I just waste my time here writing because it is in English and it feels like some dirty pleasure. Like I am cheating the devil and he will be coming for me soon.
What will it be? I think it will be a cat-nap and then arousal (from sleep... you all have dirty minds) to go do more work. Work, wyrk, werk, wirk. What a strange language this is... what strange animal sounds we make. How nice it feels to let the mother toungue roll around the inside of my mouth, my mind, like marbles that I used to suck on, when not playing with my brother and our building blocks. Why am I not a builder? Why am a I a "destroyer" a self-destroyer, a deconstructor? I wish I were an erector... but them maybe I am after all.
Nah. I wish. I don't have that kind of staying power, everything I touch seems to wither in my hands, leeching liquid sickness, the disease that is within all of us. Once upon a time, I believed in a man, and his vision of AIDS was that we were all infected, every single one of us, that we just had different manifestations of the same sickness, it was either within or without, but still present, nevertheless. I don't know if he expressed it this eloquently, but they were whispered late night words, and I clung to my phone to hear them, and the faith that was professed seemed so very beautiful, and so very far away. Several years later, his brother, it would turn out, had an infection that wouldn't go away, ganglions that swelled beyond imagine, that continued after draining. He had the same birthday as me, June 16, only twenty years before. We were the best of friends, when he must have known what was happening, but refused to let himself know, he would tell me the raciest stories about the dark encounters, the fellatio in Manchester bars. My morbid obsession with the terrible blood disease began much before, for years, every time I would read a book, if the word were on the page my eyes would instantly jump to it, and fixate and my heart would hurt for the loss and the dying. I have lost my fear. Somewhere. I am safe here, I thought, but I am not safe from myself, and the disease it turns out has infected us all.
Self-doubt. Is it nothing more than a spiritual auto-immune disease? Is AIDS a metaphor for our ultimately spritually bald existence. Maybe I should go back and reconsider religion. Maybe I can turn it off. Does the pain subside with death or are we eternally tormented in limbo or hell? I don't know. In the dying is there a return to our spiritual home, are we just the same wandering souls bound to one another for eternity, to get it right, or to languish trying? I don't know anymore, no, I don't know any less either, I am just so much more aware of how little that really is.
posted by ilana at 8:17 p.m.
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