i got diane diprima's memoirs today. i am looking forward to reading them.
recently i read a friend of mine's lowfi internet journal where he documents a good thing about every single day. this continues to inspire.

i bought a new tangible journal. wrote some ideas down in there. something about sewing, something about voice lessons.

saw sean hayes the other night. he brought a friend up on stage who beat boxed. it was truly beautiful.

oliver tells me that he saw the face of a friend of ours in many people at a street party in paris. i had felt like i saw her in the mannerisms and style of a random woman i saw on the sidewalk last week. i postulated that maybe she just has one of those kinds of faces.

i went back to therapy.

i read something new about the meaning of the moon in an astrological chart. you can interpret it as "i come from a line of women who..." then fill in the meaning. been thinking about that. heidi tells me moon opposition jupiter is a mother transit. have definitely been feeling trapped by the legacy of my mother.

my neck seems to crack a lot. going to see chiro/healer/etc on tuesday. before therapy. should be awesome.

i seem to be missing many parts of myself. but i can't remember if they were ever there or if i always just wished for them to be. parts like: being gentle, loving trees, being a devoted lover, having trust in the universe.

i have been doing some research on communities for a paper for school. i've narrowed my topic down to how communal societies deal with money. i'm interested in how twin oaks thrived while the farm was plagued by poverty. the key, i think, is that the farm had too many dependents and accepted too many members without screening or structure. they didn't work but had to be fed. imbalance.

the san francisco library is a living room for homeless people. i feel angry with myself for resenting that. it's a public space and i want people of all walks of life to be able to go there and benefit from it. it is a sorry state of affairs, however, when the library is one of the only places homeless people can hang out, and its bathrooms the only ones they can wander into and have a shit.

additionally, today the library contained a truly disgusting old man who was hacking and wheezing so loudly that i could not concentrate anywhere on the same floor as him. i understand that people are sick and cannot help it, but it is really unpleasant to hear wet sneezes and extended phlegmmy coughs every 30 seconds. stay home!

that's all for now.

fuck, i miss new york so badly i could scream. i want the blooming trees. i want to roam around brooklyn sipping coffee. i want to ride the comforting homebound F train, over and over and over. i want to go to kate's paperie and buy overpriced notecards. i want to eat at the french place by central park. i want to sit with you in the ridiculous white furniture in time warner center, both of us coveting things from williams and sonoma but trying to pretend we aren't. let's go to 14th street and get a coffee from dean and deluca, and some other contraband, maybe a cupcake. then lets haggle with street vendors over 5$ sunglasses, and prodding each other about whether or not we will go to H&M. take me to bloomingdale's and hang out with me while i try on every pair of shoes in the place. let's go order beautiful cocktails in the secret place that i will not name in my journal. let's go to caravan of dreams and eat vegan ravioli, let's go to gobo for yam fries, counter for the veggie burger you always crave. take the A train all the way to the cloisters, cold in the air conditioning though it's so hot outside. walk across the big meadow in prospect park, trying to find the perfect place to lay down. to the co-op on a weekened, vaguely cranky in the long line but so satisfied with the glorious produce. let me bring home branches of blossoms to you, let us go together to the met, scampering through sections of it we never discovered before. randy's farm, omega, DIA Beacon, storm king, the chapel of sacred mirrors and its secret hippies. three of cups, great lakes. new york city, i honor you from afar.

chocopa: i'm going to grow a honeysuckle trellis over my bed
le: i'm not sure what i would do if i came home with a guy and he had a honeysuckle trellis over the bed

chocopa: you'd flip out

i seem to be surrounded by difficult, insane, and beautiful people. i am one of them. sometimes it's very tiring, but mostly, it's better than being dead. and by dead, i mean, being anything other than the passionate creatures we strive to become every single day. sometimes i imagine my friends, scattered as they are, in their rooms or homes, and how they must be feeling. i try to tap in. they mostly don't even know i think of them, maybe.
let's say there are ten qualities of my life. there are millions, in fact, but for this exercise let's say there are ten. ten attributes that make up my being. at any given time, some percentage of them are Bad and some are Good. it's always rotating. For example, on Monday, two of the parts of me were Bad and needed to be changed, punished, or squelched. however, they remain, and today those two parts of me are Good and the other eight parts of me are in a skirmish about which of them is to be concerned about, today.

there is a wave: lapping, rising, falling. sometimes it fades into the ocean. sometimes it crests and seems violent, wearing away at its rock. same wave, different day. same ocean every day.

when will the day come that all the parts are in harmony, and i'm not filled with doubt? not worrying that something out there is a lie, not afraid or ashamed in those tiny ways we all get throughout the course of the time between waking and sleeping?

every day i ask myself a question about what i should do, what is right, what would be best for me. every day i look at my lover and wonder what goes on inside his skull and if i can take not knowing. the desire to merge is so powerful, but i am stuck in my own self too. the problem of other minds.

on wednesday afternoon i talked to davi about the reason why talk therapy can only get you so far - because so much of the reason for being alive is the murky undercurrent that can't be verbalized. i imagined a thin membrane holding back a sea of water.. touch it with your fingertip, drown. but never explain it. i have some kind of nebulous requirement about that undercurrent, that ocean, and how i should feel that i am in it, with my lover. how can you ask for that? there is no way. davi, in her spring wedges, she did her job, rephrasing it back to me: "so you want to be on the same wavelength." well, i guess so.

...

have you ever had an experience where you interacted with someone who you simply knew was a detriment to society, should they continue to exist in their current form? not that they are violent or dangerous, but that the way they are thinking is hurting us all? is this too huggy for you to really want to get?

anyway, last night:

i watched m from phil class smile rudely and roll his eyes, looking up and the ceiling while re-iterating his meanness out loud. at that moment it seemed that the roving focus of the concept LACK OF COMPASSION had stopped to rest upon room 224. to clarify: imagine that the quality LACK OF COMPASSION exists as a sort of conceptual storm cloud. now imagine that it moves freely around the world to rest in different areas and make itself known. last night it stopped for about 15 minutes over the heads of some people involved in my philosophy class. hovered, and hopefully moved on. but i left before i could see it out.

eating toast at midnight, alone. i'm eating the toast so my stomach has something to pad the advil i have to take so i can sleep through the night. leg pain, maybe probably related to estrogen. cried so hard today.. there was no tree i could find so i found a beautiful fractal hedge and stood as closely to it as possible. i've got no comfort left. i used to have an easy obsessive thought memory process i could go to when things were bad. a gentle meditation on the past, on him, or on how a certain corner of a room of my old home once looked. i would focus on it and it would make me insane with grief. then i learned that i could not think this way, that it was hurting me, hurting you, hurting the now, hurting possibilities for the future. so i worked very very hard to stop, and to ask for help from the present. but the help and new comfort never came.. slowly, it started to, but now it is gone, maybe forever. so now i'm all alone here in bed with my toast and my tears.

from now on, i would really like to think very carefully about the decisions i make before i make them, and attempt to only choose options which i'm sure i can commit to, at least at the time. surely, i will make poor choices and need to extricate myself later from some situations that i was able to commit to, but i will attempt to only choose things which i feel very able to commit to.
i'm not sure what to do about it when i don't know if i can commit to something, though. i'd like to say 'i don't know' honestly, but i'd also like to be able to say 'no' when the indecision has gone on too long for all parties. i don't like the idea of saying no often though, and would rather be able to default to yes, as a more positive eggers-like option. but then i'll be back in the situation of having agreed to things which i was not sure i could commit to, thus causing myself and others a lot of pain.

any thoughts on this matter would be welcome.