5.31pm
Tuesday
19 October 2004
So now we're at a club
You watch the woman dancing, she is drunk
She is smiling and she's falling in a slow, descending funk
You play the artist, saying,
"Is it how she moves, or how she looks?"
I say, "It's loneliness, suspended to our own like
grappling hooks,"
And as long as she's got noise, she's fine
But I could teach her how I learned to dance
when the music's ended
Ohh and that's not petty, as cool as I am,
I thought you'd know this already
I will not be afraid of women, I will not be afraid of
women
You tried to make me doubt, to make me guess,
tried to make me feel like a little less,
Oh, I liked you when your soul was bared,
I thought you knew how to be scared,
And now it's amazing what you did to make me stay,
But truth is just like time,
it catches up and it just keeps going
Saw Brandon, Matt and Karl last night, wooed them with smoke and mirrors in my pretty new house. Had a great and only semi-awkward time, especially considering that I've barely exchanged a word with Mr. Zipperer in many many years, Matt likes to heighten any sense of the bizarre as much as possible, and I have this tremendous thing for Brandon (mostly just that he is one of my favorite people in the world), but he lives in Athens and has a girlfriend.
• × • × • × •
Recovered my old diaryland adjunct, and am in awe of how long ago it was that I was twenty, and what a different set of priorities I had. I think one of them was being really cliche. And a sucker. Of course, lately (oh, as of the past couple of hours) I have such a craving for being in love that I'm sure I'll be a sucker again. It is too bad for that part of me that knows that that's what it's all about and will always hate me for it.
• × • × • × •
I remember in the summer before eighth grade I went to summer camp in the North Carolina mountains and there are two pieces of that summer that were key.
At one point, a group of girls were sitting around, and two of them were confessing to having done something they probably shouldn't have. One of the older girls, who was probably a junior counselor of some sort—just cool enough to get little details out of us, just young enough to still care too much about whether we thought she was cool—was asking 20 questions typed inquiries to get her detective on the crime. One of the questions was "Who here has probably done this before?" and both of the girls said, "Oh, definitely Marilyn has."
The naughty deed it turned out they had partaken of was a sneaked cig. I had, in fact, NOT ever smoked a cigarette, and didn't try one until I was over 20. I never got a satisfactory answer as to why those two girls assumed I obviously would have. Perhaps it is only because it was a snooty camp and I was one of the few public school girls, or perhaps my future desires to try things before I allow myself to be completely disinterested in them were showing through.
I wonder a little as to whether people just assume that smart kids will do whatever the hell they want, and screw what other people say. I did do that, as far as what I thought and said, but as a child, I never equated a disregard for authority in my actions as a mark of genius. I certainly didn't care for my teachers' insistence that I do bullshit exercises instead of reading my book, but I still knew exactly what to do in order to keep them impressed with my intelligence and my ability to please them as well.
Maybe I should have known that there are a magnificent amount of people that I should not bother trying to keep happy.
The other memory has to do with trying to set the time record for treading water, which has mostly to do with mind over matter and intense stubbornness in the face of chilly mountain spring water. One of the older male counselors—the one whose nickname for me was Norma Jean—leaned over said something encouraging. Just to let me know he was rooting for me. And as my fingers and toes numbed, I thought about how things like that, little things or big things that just... make you happy... they are what life is about. Perhaps my brain was freezing, but I really felt like I had come across a pretty fucking huge epiphany on The Meaning Of Life. Just to be happy. There is not anything else.