At times I think that my anger just might be the single most powerful force in my life. It is my greatest enemy and at the same time it is what keeps me alive. It destroys me but simultaneously prevents me from being destroyed. I do not know how to cope with it, and yet I am incapable of coping without it. I am not entirely sure how I got this way. I was aware that I, like all people, am a person who can be angry, but it hadn't really occurred to me that I am an angry person, in general. I never wanted it to take the precedence in my life that it has. But there it is.

The universe is a mix of beautiful patterns of webs and lines across time and space, always converging mysteriously or running parallel courses that weave in and out or separating yet remaining connected. They always move according to some unknown plan just beyond the edges of our comprehension, and we can almost see them as history repeats itself with new twists each time and as certain people dance into and out of and around our lives, whether we want them to or not. And what is most stunning to me is that my thread has remained somehow charmed through its whole length, despite -- or because of? -- all the threads to which it is linked and to which it runs parallel and with which it converges and separates over time. With an infuriating degree of unfairness it floats in a calm breeze somewhere above a hurricane.

I think I need to see The Butterfly Effect just because lately, it seems, the past has a grip on me and won't let go. Over and over in my mind I can't help but wonder what if I'd done a certain thing differently, and keep running into the wall of time that keeps me from knowing. I passed the fork in the road where I could have changed something, but I'm endlessly fascinated and somehow inextricably obsessed with the idea of going back and trying to do it right. Because hard though I try, the dreams I've had of things long gone won't leave my mind, and the past is tugging at my sleeve in a way that it rarely has before.

Also, maybe not seeing teenager movies (Empire Records was the midnight movie tonight) will help me not randomly get stuck feeling like I did when I was a teenager. Bah. The past wraps itself around everything.

Sometimes I wish desperately that I could play violin. For some reason in my head I often imagine violin playing and improvising on the melody of various pop/rock songs, and I ache to be able to try it out for myself. (Most notably, at the moment, "Migraine" by Troubled Hubble, and "Why Can't I" by Liz Phair.) As though the few instruments I could do it on aren't enough! These days, with a decent fingering chart, I can pick up many wind instruments and work myself up to a reasonable level of competence without too much frustration. But strings are an entirely different story, and way too far from intuitive for me to be able to pick them up on the basis of my random fanatical cravings. Alas!

I want to deconstruct the whole world, I want to tear down the value systems that say that someone who comes out of Colgate as a pretentious businessperson is worth more than someone who comes out of Colgate and becomes a carpenter, and that certain eating and drinking habits and work habits and socializing habits and ways of managing to get around in this crazy world are allegedly normal and some are abnormal, and that skin colors and genitals and who you love make any value difference at all among people, ever. I want to tear it all down until there is nothing but chaos again, like at the beginning of the world. I want to love everything like that, without naming or defining it, even though I know perfectly well that I would be the first to again start putting things together and defining and organizing and seeking patterns in the chaos.

I hate it when I have a moment to myself -- for instance, in the kitchen, washing out the popcorn bowl before bed -- and some sort of emotional state that I need an outlet to express -- such as, the strange loneliness that can occur when you are not in fact alone but among friends -- and yet, can't find the right song to sing to fill the silence and somehow invoke the sort of peace that comes from being able to surround a feeling with words or music to give it a place to live. After all, it is almost impossible to pin down and define a feeling. But I think if you give a feeling a home, then it won't wander the streets of your mind and trouble you late at night.

Sometimes I wonder how much of my own history I unintentionally revise each day, just by imposing my ideas and feelings of the present on situations from the past. Often when I remember things, I reinterpret them, and the interpretation then becomes the memory, until I remember and reinterpret again. Eventually, I think, I will be talking to someone about an experience that we shared and find that what I remember isn't what happened at all. It's somewhat disturbing to think that maybe I don't even have an objective history of myself.

I have for several years mourned my (not quite completely) lost ability to immerse myself in books. While with this came the passing of a haven of sorts, I told myself that it was really better to live in the real world. In more recent years I have also lost my ability to immerse myself in the world of the internet: reading blogs, writing blog, talking on AIM for hours on end, hardly hearing anything around me. I have told myself that that is good too, but again a certain haven has been left behind. Now with these things providing me only superficial entertainment (which is probably healthy) I find myself wondering if I have any alternate world at all now, any way to get away from the daily routine and tribulations which I find so unsatisfying of late. The answer, I think, is that each sphere of my life feels so disjointed from the rest these days that I live in an alternate universe every few hours or few days, every time I switch locations or groups of friends, every time my list of concerns shifts to bring some things into focus and allow others to fade away and seem distant. My life fails to be a cohesive whole, and therefore it manages to serve as an escape from itself.

But also, I have as rich an inner life as ever before, and my imaginings are nearly as strong as they were in my second-grade days when my daydreaming kept me too busy to complete my work. (Or perhaps they have always been this strong, but in my years of books and of internet they were pushed to the side and acknowledged less frequently.) And perhaps that is at least partially my present haven. But I am just as incapable as I always have been of transferring those imaginings into written stories, which would be a useful accomplishment, and one that could give some sense of direction to my presently disjointed and purposeless life. If only I could hone my writing skills -- or really, my imagining skills -- into something I could use to make a living! Then I would have both a haven and a purpose in one.

earlier -- later