I feel sick

Tomorrow(today) I am starting over.

I'm so deep.

I was racking my brain today (don't worry, it's a decidedly short rack.) trying to remember the last time I felt happy. And I'm not talking about feeling happiness, but feeling overall happy for some extended period of time. Thoroughly, out and out contented. That no matter what happened not just that everything would work out, would in the end be okay, but that the sadness did not matter. That beneath the surface, when you hit bedrock, it would be diamonds or gold, or maybe granite because all the yuppies make countertops out of that shit and it's becoming quite pricey. Anyway, the time I could come up with was about three years ago, right around this time in fact. Sometimes I wonder if I'm doomed to repeat my past in cycles, always becoming happy or sad based upon how I felt at the same time a year or two prior, but this would be one I wouldn't mind repeating.

Somewhere that year I made a decision, just to be happy. To be confident in my life and to enjoy it. It's strange since only a month earlier I had broken up with someone I loved very much. But I guess I was so confident in the fact that we had indeed loved each other, and it was not someone's fault we were not together, it was fine with me.

I don't know that I can do that again. I don't know I can decide my life is good. That I'm lucky and that I'm succeeding at what I want to do. I only have the anxiety of knowing that I can be those things, not that I am what I can be. It's a lot of pressure to be who you can be. (I seem to remember a post about potential in my not so distant past.) Falling short is truly terrifying to me at times.

Psychoanalysis has a notion it cals the "ego ideal." This ego ideal is pretty self explanatory. It is a part of yourself that contains all the qualities of a person that you wish were manifest within you. Often, this it is located within the super-ego (though a part, it is not the super ego in totale though). Yet as a part of the super-ego it regulates your actions, but not as a conscience which you listen to, but as a task master. As a sexual object. A thing of desire. You begin to desire the ideal more than yourself, causing self masochism. The ego ideal beat upon the ego, deriving pleasure from it. This is incredibly dangerous, because the ego is essentially destroying itself in hopes that the ego ideal will take over. That is not possible though, and once the ego is shattered, there is nothing left but sand.

I think I've always thought of myself as someone who had gotten bad lot in life. And for a long time, it was probably true. Things were not exactly all fun and games for me my first fourteen or so years. I think a lot of people feel this way. Maybe most people feel this way. What I wonder is why? It seems to provide kind of a poor base for a later life. Maybe its a struggle we all have to get over. Maybe I'm over estimating how many people feel this way.

Well I can feel this rambling, but at least I feel much better. I guess I'm really realizing that though the struggle might be constant, it doesn't have to be overwhelming. Most people see me as someone that it is hard to overwhelm, but as per usual I'm my own worst enemy. I sometimes forget too that the people around me have their own problems,defenses, hang ups, etc. And that just because they do, it doesn't mean I have to get angry about it. Alright I'm gonna quit before this becomes twenty pages. Have fun everybody.

Seventy-six Trombones

I am right now listening to an old mix that I made for someone. Yes it was for a girl. I came across it in my CD collection, unlabelled, just sitting there. Wondering what it was I popped it in my computer and pressed play. I knew immediately, by the first song, who I had made it for. Before you start wondering why I have this mix, I often make two copies. Most often this is not so i can have a copy, but because there are often two slightly different versions made. Many a time I think of a perfect song a couple of hours after burning, and since I am an anal music snob, I feel a great need to remake the mix.

Many of the songs present were particular favorites at the time I made it, about two years ago. I haven't listened to most of them in over a year. Its strange I feel no real nostalgia for the person I made this for, but for the songs I have a deep happiness. This does not always happen. For instance, I have a couple of mixes from a relationship long past that I will not even listen to out of fear for the memories they may conjure, of times too good and too bad to be placed in any actual reality.

I often contemplate bringing these things back into my life. They are, after all, as representative of me as of another person. And even the image these mixes present of that other person is my representation of them to me.

I love this song. Currently listening to: Grandaddy - Now it's on

Well my grades are in

I have come to the conclusion that I totally suck. My grades came in and I got an A- and two B+'s. That's right, all shit half grades, which I probably deserved. Why? Because I do a lot of nothing everyday. And my schoolwork suffers. So I am becoming a Monk. I'm shutting myself in my room for the next year and a half. Do not try to contact me. I need to bring it up to a 3.8, Which means I need A's in all of my other classes. Not A-'s, A's. I can't help but shake the feeling that I am however still a failure, yet I know I'm smarter than my grade reflect I just need to get my ass to work.

/end self-loathing, self-deprication.

I am procrastinating

So I have a ton of work to do. A ton. I have to write fifty+ pages in the next 9 days. Number written so far 0. That is approximately 5 pages per day for those of you keeping up. Fifty is the low end by the way. So I'm postinf here instead to ask myself, why do I procrastinate so much? well the reason is two fold as far as I can tell.

1st: I have no desire to write the paper that is due on thursday. Its the shortest paper and also the most boring. I don't even like the class that much. Stupid Hegel.

2nd: I seem to reach the height isnpiration the more furiously close to a due date I become. I simply have crap ideas up until the last four days or so of the writing process. And four days is if I'm lucky.

So here I am posting a blog. I promised by one'clock I'd start reading so I can write. So I'm off. One last word of wisdom:

Winter Album of the moment: El-P, Collecting the Kid. Peep.

The Interpretation of Dreams. WebOpus 1

The way we think of dreams and use the word dream revels in contradiction. Dreams take on a variety of meaning for us. The question may be whether there is any truth or just convience in these uses.

I. The Dream of the Pharoh
The dream as prophecy.

For those of you perhaps unfamiliar, in the book of Genesis, the Pharoh has a dream. In the Pharoh's dream, he sees seven fat handsome cows by the Nile. The seven handsome cows are eaten by seven gaunt cows. The Pharoh seeking an interpretation finally hears of a man in prison named Joseph. Joseph interprets the dream (with the help of the LORD) as signifying seven years of opulence followed by seven years of derth. This allows Egypt to prepare, meaning they are not found lacking during the thin years.

What a nice story. Perhaps how we would hope all dreams might be. Even though there is bad news in the future, at least we know what's coming so we can get ready. This belief betrays the feeling that dreams come from somewhere beyond. that somehow in our sleep we mingle with something greater than ourselves. God, nature, others. A lovely sentiment, though probably not the truest. If only there were something omniscient to convene with. This is not to say that God exists, but how could we ever make sense of what God might tell us in dreams. That's why Joseph needed God's guidance. Unfortunately I don't think God's consciousness leaks that explicitly into ours. But its a nice dream.

II. Obre Los Ojos
The dream as delusion.

I'm actually going to refer to the American version, but the Spanish one has a much better title so, onward. In Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise's character, horribly disfigured has himself implanted into a dream world where he can be rehabilitated and made normal looking again. How lovely. This is the kind of dream we talk about when we tell someone "You're dreaming," or "In your dreams." The dream as delusion. As fantasy. As what-you-wish. As as-you-wish. The culmination of romantic love is the dream delusion. But it must be the dream delusion in fruition, and decay. The true dream as delusion is never fuitful, it can therefore never decay. It is always that which eludes reality, cannot break into it, cannot disrupt and replace, without the severe consequence of disorder.

III. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The dream as hope.

The dream as delusion must always be coupled with the dream as hope. The delusion must be hoped for. Its imagined manifestation cannot overtake reality, but it must include within it hope. In fact it may be said that the dream as hope, is merely that healthy incarnation of the dream as delusion. The dream as hope gives into reality instead of attempting to usurp it. It works with reality, but it is always rife/ripe with the sense of lost cause. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I have a dream speech is the stuff of legends. It allows hope to enter through the only pore in reality possible, that of the unreal. The posited(hypothetical) possible real. The safe reality of the unreal. It strokes the chin of the present and whispers its possibilities, without disrupting its trajectory.

IV. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The dream as truth and refuge.

Jim Carrey's character is having his mind erased. But while its happening he is asleep sheltered in dream. The dream in this story harbors truth. It harbors the truth about how he feels. The truth that he is an aggregation of his past, mistakes and all, that cannot be eradicated. Neither does he desire it's eradication. It is the place in which he erects a cave. In his dream, to protect, to fight against, to have control.

It is often encouraged to hold onto your dreams. this is the sense of the dream as refuge and truth. Our dreams speak something to us. They betray something to ourselves. Hence Freud's fascination with them. They allow us windows to some truth. And properly butressed, cannot allow us to forget who we are in who want to be.

V. Fear and Loathing
The dream as illusion.

"We can't stop here. It's bat country" Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is perhaps the ultimate example of the dream as illusion. Not just because the things seen were hallucinatory, but because in the end it must be run from. The entire trip is a wash, that must be salvaged. It might well not exist, not have existed. And that is the emptying of the temptation of dreams, the illusion. The laying bare of the dream reveals its illusion. The dream cannot be relied upon. It, of itself, is fickle. But it may not, cannot travel alone. Its very existence requires presupposition of a reality, as the mirror of such, and the presupposition of an agent as such to bring it to the light, hold it clearly and determine it to its greatest focus.

Listening to: Haley Bonar - Razor that Wins nonstop.

On why I like pie.

I really really like pie. Many of you have no doubt heard me utter my almost ubiquitous "hmmm pie." at the mere mention of the word, or something that sounds like the word, or drunk, whatnot. But there is more to pie than that. For me, pie is a transcendental act. Its enjoyment, its consumption more than just the satisfaction of the craving (a craving is momentary; pie, is anything but for me.) Pie is not just something that fills the void. It is where we find ourselves. It is the act of being in a place of being. That is why the very best place to eat pie is at a diner. and it is always best at night, in the quiet stillness that even the busiest of late nights finds in its passive drone of conversation, clinking, buzzing, laughing, and sighing. The diner is a place that is always there, always open, perpetual in reminding you of itself.

But its consumption is more than that. The same is not true for cake. Cake holds with it indulgence, decadence. Its sugars and starches are all filling. It is to be avoided until weakness overtakes us. Pie has somehow escaped this pigeon hole. It is something altogether else. In it alone we find a place to revel in the moment and reconnect. Sitting at a bar or table, finding it out, seperating, mixing, enjoying, noticing. In it together we find each other. Laughing, consoling, being in relation, sharing, comforting, reassuring.

In the show Dead Like Me one of the characters, Rube, eats quite a bit of pie. He often shares it, or offers it in a time of need. When one of his friends sits down next to him the evening, in clear need of advice, he orders them a slice. Not cake. Not ice cream (unless of course its on pie). Pie carries with it, the whole of human connection. It is care, regard and responsibility for each other. Would anyone care to join me?