a wolf angel is not a good angel

from my sister’s webcam

He looks so sweet and innocent.

But don’t be fooled by his outsize ears.

He will eat your camera.

of emails sent to people I have lost touch with: 2
of emails I planned to send: 3
of emails I received in response: 1

of postcards I got from people I have lost touch with: 1
of minutes spent on the phone with this person: 90

of days I have spent 10 minutes cleaning my room since I planned to start: 0
of these days, including days I did laundry: 2

of cats in my room right now: 3 4 hi Sammy!
of cats who are allowed in my room, in general: 3
overlap between these two sets: 2 3

iPod case do I get?

Do I get just one, or two, so that I can make a choice? Or three, because I’m indecisive and can’t choose between pink, blue and purple (the greens are not so nice)? Or do I want one of the sort-of rainbow coloured ones?

Do I get one of the funky cases? What about one of the little sticky skins with 70 zillion designs? (I could even select my own and get a lovely picture of my cats, or one of the many other pictures I have.)

Decisions, decisions. Suggestions welcome, especially from veteran iPod owners.

Until then I’m carrying it around in a sock.

It ebbs and flows, unhappiness, with the weather, with the seasons, with the light. Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I cry, sometimes I do both at once. Happiness, too, ebbs and flows.

I need to remember this. Even my worst days end and I sleep; even my worst nightmares end and I wake up.

We are lucky, even the worst of us, because daylight comes.
-Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

I feel altogether hideous tonight. I have no clean clothes, and we’re out of hot water so I can’t wash and the bath I took was lukewarm at best. I don’t have any books I particularly want to read. The heater in my room has stopped working.

Winter? Sucks.

via feministe

I went and got an iPod, and it *doesn’t work*. I am on hold, hoping to find another one on the island which I can get instead.

On the other hand, given this, I might be getting a new one for the price of the open box one, if I ever get off hold.

Update: well, quite likely I won’t be, since no one has one, but, you know, maybe next week. I’m debating finding a different store.

Update: got another used one. It took over an hour. I am frustrated. Or was. And, I realise, I am also depressed. This explains so much. Stupid winter.

I can fail at brevity too.

But this post brought back much, and I will be narcissistic: isn’t that rather the point of the blog? I have a confessional blog. Not solely, but in part. But let me avoid getting into the post (which I have sitting in the drafts) about the nature of my blog, and other metaissues, and instead muse about myself. Again.

I wanted to write a brief post about the emptiness that seems to have become the essential fact of my life, but after drafting it for a couple of hours I realized it was not going to be brief at all. And as I don’t want this to be a confessional, my life is miserable, kind of place - I deleted it.

Not that I have anything against posts and blogs like that, but all too often I’ve found that when I write about this sort of thing I only make myself feel worse - which is exactly how I feel now. This is why I’ve never been able to keep a journal, and why I’ve had misgivings about blogging: this kind of isolated writing is such a strong reminder of how completely, utterly alone I feel (and, to tell the truth, am).

I knew graduate school would have its isolating aspects, but I never imagined it would be like this. I mean, I didn’t expect to make tons of friends (I’m more comfortable with having a few close friends, anyway), or to find myself suddenly transformed into some wild party-er, or to go on some dating spree, or anything like that. But I also didn’t expect to feel no real connection with anyone I’ve met here, or with anyone I could see regularly.

And this was, in short, my problem in graduate school. Oh, maybe it would have changed, new people came in year after year, and so on — but by then I was too sad, too tired to keep making the efforts. (That and not exactly suicidal, but not exactly not.) The internet helped, but also not, because as much as this is communication, it lacks immediacy — good and bad — and it lacks touch. And that — there is nothing lonelier than no physical contact at all, ever.

It’s just that most of my friends are married or engaged or at least in serious relationships, and my single friends seem to be into the whole go-out-and-get-drunk type of social life, which is not something that interests me at all. I’ve been to my department’s happy hour a few times, but it’s held at a bar where it’s so loud it’s almost impossible to have a real conversation. So most of the times I go out I’m left wondering how it is that I’ve managed to turn out so differently than everyone else.

This is a more eloquent way of what I had intended to say in my not cool post. How come I don’t like bars when everyone else does? How come I don’t like alcohol much? Why don’t I have any interest in drugs? Am I crazy, or is everyone else?

And it’s hard to meet people. Even back here, back home — I have friends who have friends I don’t like, friends who just moved back and know 3 people in the city, friends who for whatever reason, don’t have big groups of friends to introduce me to. Why should they, after all: I don’t.

So I don’t know anyone new, any friends I didn’t have 2 years ago, before I moved away. And I am in flux, and so my friendships here, some of them, are also in flux, and not always in good ways.

I am confused. Nothing much changes.

Well, actually, probably it won’t. But a post at Cindy’s made me think about advice, and about being self-destructive, and about the odd interfaces sometimes between the two.

As everyone who’s ever met me in winter will attest to, I regularly do not zip my jacket in the winter. Yes, it’s cold. Yes, I stand there shivering. Yes, this irritates everyone I know to no end. No, I don’t ask inane advice like “How can I warm up?”, but it’s no less irritating to other people. I know this. And I’m cold, too, when I do this.

This is almost certainly some sort of subtle self-destructive stuff. But it doesn’t feel quite like it. It lacks the crucial (to me) element of control. It’s also in many ways unconscious, not deliberate. Still: it is something I have done for years.

I am sure I sometimes ask advice, knowing I intend to do the wrong thing, hoping both that someone will talk me out of it and that no one will — that someone will agree with this course of action, bad though it may be. (Sometimes I just ask for advice hoping people will tell me to buy things for myself.)

As I said at Cindy’s:

Depends what the question is, really. But usually it’s that they need someone to tell them what they’ve already decided on is ok, or to otherwise balance off what they want and what they know.

Sometimes they’ve decided on something good and sometimes something self-destructive, though.

I can’t always tease apart what I want when I’m asking for advice until after I get it: sometimes, advice is good for just that — figuring out what you want by your response to different suggestions. (Flipping a coin also works, sometimes.) But I can be looking for so many different sorts of things that it becomes difficult — and perhaps silly — to try to figure it out beforehand: the advice is crucially part of this process.

get myself the iPod I have wanted for the past year?

If so, should I get the iPod photo, given that I know if I get it, I will never use the photo function, and if I don’t, I will want it daily? Should I try to get it on ebay and avoid at least some of the taxes, or at a store here for the “yes, I’m sure I have a warranty” factor? Or should I go to NY or VT to pick it up (what are the taxes at, and what’s the exchange rate? Can I wait till my planned trip to Albany, or my maybe-eventually trip to VT)?

How much money should I bet on being sick of all this stupid dithering and just heading off to the nearby store (which I don’t like much, but is nearby, and the prices are always the same) and picking it up one day soon at lunch, then feeling very sorry when I see my credit card bill? Can I find someone to bet against me, to offset the price of the iPod somewhat? Shouldn’t I buy new bras first, since after I make a huge purchase I will likely be unwilling to spend any money for several weeks, and I am at a crucial bra-needing point?