“Moyers Quote”

I’ve gone a little silent lately. Today, I read this Bill Moyer’s piece on Salon.com and was so glad for it. There’s one particular quote he uses from a retired Supreme Court justice that really encapsulates my own feelings about society, social justice, things of that nature:

“We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses… Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.” --Supreme Court Justice William Brennan.

Here follows the full Moyers piece…

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Thursday, Dec 12, 2013 06:13 AM PST
Bill Moyers: “We are this close to losing our democracy”
The legendary journalist warns about the devastating impact of dark money and voter suppression
Bill Moyers, TomDispatch.com

I met Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1987 when I was creating a series for public television called In Search of the Constitution, celebrating the bicentennial of our founding document. By then, he had served on the court longer than any of his colleagues and had written close to 500 majority opinions, many of them addressing fundamental questions of equality, voting rights, school segregation, and — in New York Times v. Sullivan in particular — the defense of a free press.

Those decisions brought a storm of protest from across the country. He claimed that he never took personally the resentment and anger directed at him. He did, however, subsequently reveal that his own mother told him she had always liked his opinions when he was on the New Jersey court, but wondered now that he was on the Supreme Court, “Why can’t you do it the same way?” His answer: “We have to discharge our responsibility to enforce the rights in favor of minorities, whatever the majority reaction may be.”

Although a liberal, he worried about the looming size of government. When he mentioned that modern science might be creating “a Frankenstein,” I asked, “How so?” He looked around his chambers and replied, “The very conversation we’re now having can be overheard. Science has done things that, as I understand it, makes it possible through these drapes and those windows to get something in here that takes down what we’re talking about.”

That was long before the era of cyberspace and the maximum surveillance state that grows topsy-turvy with every administration. How I wish he were here now — and still on the Court!

My interview with him was one of 12 episodes in that series on the Constitution. Another concerned a case he had heard back in 1967. It involved a teacher named Harry Keyishian who had been fired because he would not sign a New York State loyalty oath. Justice Brennan ruled that the loyalty oath and other anti-subversive state statutes of that era violated First Amendment protections of academic freedom.

I tracked Keyishian down and interviewed him. Justice Brennan watched that program and was fascinated to see the actual person behind the name on his decision. The journalist Nat Hentoff, who followed Brennan’s work closely, wrote, “He may have seen hardly any of the litigants before him, but he searched for a sense of them in the cases that reached him.” Watching the interview with Keyishian, he said, “It was the first time I had seen him. Until then, I had no idea that he and the other teachers would have lost everything if the case had gone the other way.”

Toward the end of his tenure, when he was writing an increasing number of dissents on the Rehnquist Court, Brennan was asked if he was getting discouraged. He smiled and said, “Look, pal, we’ve always known — the Framers knew — that liberty is a fragile thing. You can’t give up.” And he didn’t.

The Donor Class and Streams of Dark Money

The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. “The abuse of buying and selling votes,” he wrote of Rome, “crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.”

We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class.

We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, “Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.”

We don’t have emperors yet, but we have a House of Representatives controlled by the far right that is now nourished by streams of “dark money” unleashed thanks to the gift bestowed on the rich by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case.

We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities, and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.

Writing in the Guardian recently, the social critic George Monbiot commented, “So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics… When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians [of the main parties] stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?”

Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do. Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality.

Class Prerogatives

Listen! That sound you hear is the shredding of the social contract.

Ten years ago the Economist magazine — no friend of Marxism — warned: “The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.” And as a recent headline in the Columbia Journalism Review put it: “The line between democracy and a darker social order is thinner than you think.”

We are this close – this close! – to losing our democracy to the mercenary class. So close it’s as if we’re leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon waiting for a swift kick in the pants.

When Justice Brennan and I talked privately in his chambers before that interview almost 20 years ago, I asked him how he had come to his liberal sentiments. “It was my neighborhood,” he said. Born to Irish immigrants in 1906, as the harsh indignities of the Gilded Age brought hardship and deprivation to his kinfolk and neighbors, he saw “all kinds of suffering — people had to struggle.” He never forgot those people or their struggles, and he believed it to be our collective responsibility to create a country where they would have a fair chance to a decent life. “If you doubt it,” he said, “read the Preamble [to the Constitution].”

He then asked me how I had come to my philosophy about government (knowing that I had been in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations). I don’t remember my exact words, but I reminded him that I had been born in the midst of the Great Depression to parents, one of whom had to drop out of school in the fourth grade, the other in the eighth, because they were needed in the fields to pick cotton to help support their families.

Franklin Roosevelt, I recalled, had been president during the first 11 years of my life. My father had listened to his radio “fireside chats” as if they were gospel; my brother went to college on the G.I. Bill; and I had been the beneficiary of public schools, public libraries, public parks, public roads, and two public universities. How could I not think that what had been so good for me would be good for others, too?

That was the essence of what I told Justice Brennan. Now, I wish that I could talk to him again, because I failed to mention perhaps the most important lesson about democracy I ever learned.

On my 16th birthday in 1950, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew up. It was a racially divided town — about 20,000 people, half of them white, half of them black — a place where you could grow up well-loved, well-taught, and well-churched, and still be unaware of the lives of others merely blocks away. It was nonetheless a good place to be a cub reporter: small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something new every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the old-timers in the newsroom were on vacation or out sick, and I got assigned to report on what came to be known as the “Housewives’ Rebellion.” Fifteen women in town (all white) decided not to pay the Social Security withholding tax for their domestic workers (all black).

They argued that Social Security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that — here’s my favorite part — “requiring us to collect [the tax] is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage.” They hired themselves a lawyer — none other than Martin Dies, Jr., the former congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the witch-hunting days of the 1930s and 1940s. They went to court — and lost. Social Security was constitutional, after all. They held their noses and paid the tax.

The stories I helped report were picked up by the Associated Press and circulated nationwide. One day, the managing editor, Spencer Jones, called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing the reporters on our paper for the reporting we had done on the “rebellion.” I spotted my name and was hooked. In one way or another, after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government, I’ve been covering the class war ever since.

Those women in Marshall, Texas, were among its advance guard. Not bad people, they were regulars at church, their children were my classmates, many of them were active in community affairs, and their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all, so it took me a while to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary defiance. It came to me one day, much later: they simply couldn’t see beyond their own prerogatives.

Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities, and congregations — fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind — they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like themselves. The black women who washed and ironed their laundry, cooked their families’ meals, cleaned their bathrooms, wiped their children’s bottoms, and made their husbands’ beds, these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show for their years of labor but the creases on their brows and the knots on their knuckles. There would be nothing for them to live on but the modest return on their toil secured by the collaborative guarantee of a safety net.

The Unfinished Work of America

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

I should make it clear that I don’t harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy. Remember, I worked for Lyndon Johnson. Nor do I romanticize “the people.” You should read my mail and posts on right-wing websites. I understand the politician in Texas who said of the state legislature, “If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents.”

But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.

Toward the end of Justice Brennan’s tenure on the Supreme Court, he made a speech that went to the heart of the matter. He said:

“We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses… Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.”

And so we are. One hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood on the blood-soaked battlefield of Gettysburg and called Americans to “the great task remaining.” That “unfinished work,” as he named it, remained the same then as it was when America’s founding generation began it. And it remains the same today: to breathe new life into the promise of the Declaration of Independence and to assure that the Union so many have sacrificed to save is a union worth saving.

Bill Moyers has received 35 Emmy awards, nine Peabody Awards, the National Academy of Television’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and an honorary doctor of fine arts from the American Film Institute over his 40 years in broadcast journalism. He is currently host of the weekly public television series Moyers & Company and president of the Schumann Media Center, a non-profit organization which supports independent journalism. He delivered these remarks (slightly adapted here) at the annual Legacy Awards dinner of the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan public policy institute in New York City that focuses on voting rights, money in politics, equal justice, and other seminal issues of democracy.

“Early Weekend”

So have I mentioned yet that there are some mornings where my workplace totally smells like weed? I don’t know what the deal is, but some days I come in and the place reeks. Like, I think it’s being pumped through the ventilation system. They say the air system is all new, so it can’t be leftover from when the building was a skating rink. Or can it? Ah, whatever. Anyway, yeah some mornings I come in and the place totally reeks.

Got another date happening tonight. Got no idea how this is going to go, but in the getting to know you back and forth there seems to be a lot in common. It sounds like she might still be married. Actually, no, that’s not it. She definitely IS still married; what it sounds like is that even though she’s living on her own, she hasn’t actually filed for divorce yet. How do I feel about that? Not too happy. So we’ll see how things go.

I’m still hopeful about a movement from my quintet being played next week. Can’t wait to hear the read-through. My presentation is done, I’ll have one more lesson next week and then a class next Wednesday where I get to just show up and listen to the other students give their papers. And then a month and a half break. Nice. I’m thinking seriously adding French in to my class schedule. We’ll see if there’s something that works, time-wise.

I think this entry will post Saturday, but I’m writing it the Friday before. I’m stoked to only have to deal with a half-day at work—I’m heading out early to hear my quintet be read. It’s a great way to end the work week—early lol.

There’s a number of thoughts running through my mind, but I think what I want most is to just sign off and coast the last hour and half of work I’ve got left. Give me my weekend, please!

“Scattered Brain”

I was out for a walk, on break from work, and thought about my upcoming appointment with the therapist, trying to sort out what I want to talk about this week. If I go in with just a busy brain, then I feel like whatever spits out first is what gets worked on. I think talking about the recent depression pangs might be a good idea? Or how about the relationship fears/struggles about not being able to get one going. Or maybe my frustration that everything in my life isn’t perfect LOL. And now I’m feeling some serious resistance to writing about all that, so I think I’ll change subjects.

My paper/presentation went fine. I feel like I wasn’t able to give good answers to the questions I was asked, but it went fine and I got some kudos from my fellow students afterwards. Just one more week and then the semester will be done. Wow. I’m relieved to not have the heavy workload, but while school is going it gives me a lot to look forward to.

A reading of the quintet I wrote this semester has been scheduled, and I’m hopeful that one of the movements will get performed. It feels so obscenely last-minute to make arrangements like this, but my professor had said he should be the one to make the arrangements, so I let him.

My brain is spacing today. Going all over the place. Maybe I’ll do another entry later.

“Anti-Crowds and/or Homebody”

I don’t like crowds. Like, as a general rule. We had a staff appreciation day at work. Folks from other offices came and joined us, and our 150+ capacity building was suddenly filled to capacity. Way too many people. I had planned on attending, went down, but saw and heard the massive volume of people crowded in, milling around, meeting and greeting and I just could not hang.

There’s a lot of peer pressure in an office to attend things like this, so I’m feeling a bit of something about not going. But I’m also feeling a lot of fuck you about needing to go and it’s like hey, I can not go to these things if I want to! Ugh. See, this is why I don’t fit in in an office culture. Or maybe I’m just one of those who doesn’t go to the group functions. Whatever. Just leave me out of it lol.

Since it’s the big appreciation day and all these other folks are here, we’ve got tons and tons of random people walking around the building. I’ve been introduced to many many folks whose names I will never remember. It just highlights how the setup for my cubicle drives me crazy. Instead of facing the aisle, where I can see and say hello to everyone, I’ve got my back to them and they can see into my workspace and everything I’m doing. I’ve heard a couple folks comment on how nice it looks and I really have to restrain myself and not make a crack about how they wouldn’t think it was so nice if they had to work here, and if they had a bunch of strangers wandering all through your workspace. Bleh. I can’t wait to get out of here today.

* * *

It’s almost an afterthought, but I find myself wishing for something deep and profound and philosophical to write about. Some deep thought to explore or pontificate on. But the truth is that I’m tired and I just want to relax. I’ll go home, grab a quick bite, do the school thing, and then I’ll be free. And I think I do need to do something special for myself, even if special means make a pizza and go shoot pool. That’s special-ish enough.

I remember thinking of treating myself to a weekend down in SoCal as a reward for finishing this semester. I’m pretty sure now that I’m not going to do that. Should I do something else instead? The idea of spending more money—a lot—to go some place by myself, that doesn’t appeal to me very much. Go gambling in Tahoe or Reno? Meh. Maybe I’ll take a day trip down to SF? Or Santa Cruz? It’s strange. I used to have no problem taking off for anywhere all by myself. Now, I’m feeling the need to hunker down for some reason. Or maybe I just don’t want to spend hours driving in my uncomfortable car, or tons of money on a decent hotel room because I don’t want to sleep in an uncomfortable bed.

Or maybe, I really need to go do something by myself just to do it and to have the experience of it. I think I’m a bit afraid of getting some place and being overwhelmed by loneliness. But that could just be something I’m feeling because of what I’m going through right now. Ah, I’ll think on it some more.

“Family Pains”

Or, more accurately, *no* family pains. As in, pain of not having a family.

I was walking up and down the row of cubicles and looking at various pictures of husbands and kids. At first, I was just noticing the attractive gals in the office and how none of them are single, but then I started realizing how just about everyone is paired up or at least has kids. And the ones who aren’t paired up are the more emotionally unhealthy folks. Which I suppose I still fall into. I mean, hey, I am seeing a therapist every week, and haven’t been able to maintain a healthy romantic relationship like, ever. So why not call a spade a spade? Damn, I just want to cry right now.

Depression is such a perception warper. I am understanding better how things go in my dumb head, though. It’s not that I look around, see all these people paired up with partners, and this of myself as a loser because I don’t have someone in my life. It’s that I think I’m a loser and so I look around for reasons to justify that feeling. When I don’t feel down on myself, these kind of thoughts don’t really occur to me.

Do I want a family? I ask myself this question from time to time. I’m not sure, or I don’t know seems to be the answer. Or maybe, looking at the evidence, it seems that if I do it’s pretty far down on the priority list. I guess what I always wanted was to meet someone, feel that spark of connection, things progress, we fall in love, get married, then after a few years decide it’s time to start having kids. Is that artificial? Romantic? A fairy tale?

I don’t know. And it does hurt a little to think about, because I always come back to some ‘reasonable’ thoughts on how I’m in school and don’t have time for a family right now and how if all goes well I’m going to be in school for some time. Then there are the words I’ve heard more than once about how I ‘still have time.’ Excuse me, but just what the fuck does that mean anyway?

I guess… I guess I’m bitter and scared. Bitter and frustrated because something which seems to be so common, finding a partner and having a family, seems to be a life path shrouded in mystery for me. I can’t even look back on my life and find a ‘should have.’ Except maybe the gal I went out with in my early 20s, after me & my first wife split up. Maybe.

It’s getting harder and harder to trust ‘if it’s meant to happen, it will happen.’ The best I seem to do is to not think about it. I’m dating, I’m meeting people, going out with them, even occasionally having some sex (which, I’m sorry to say is usually pretty shitty). So it’s not like I can sit here and say I’m just moping and not doing anything about the situation. Ah well, whatever.

* * *

I bumped into The Goddess online. I reached out, made an offer to talk about what happened between us. She says she’s interested so we set up a time to talk. I have no idea how that will go, but it felt like the right thing to do. What do I have to say? Not a lot, but I was thinking about it and I might talk about how when she showed up that Friday it was almost like she was a different person. Like, there had been some closeness between us and when we got together for that third date it was like she had closed herself off. Or maybe about how she dumped a lot of emotion on me and that was not fair—especially to someone you’re on just a third date with. Or I don’t know, maybe I’ll just listen.

But just thinking about all this gets me into another mode of thought. Like, how I’ve thought before about work—is it really possible that I’ve always had such shitty luck with jobs? Or is it more likely that the problem is me? Maybe that’s my issue with women, too—it’s not that all women are crazy, or unstable, or whatever, just that I’m the one who… Ah, I don’t know how to finish that sentence. Yes, there is a common thread—me—in all that stuff, but there have been good ones that I’ve let go. The Engineer is probably the best example. But even on that one, I mean, the sex was really unsatisfying (in every sense of the phrase) and I wasn’t happy with her.

But then, I wasn’t happy with a lot of my ex’s. That’s why they’re ex’s! Ah, I’ve gotten myself lost in all this introspection. Summary: damn being alone sucks; man I really miss having good sex; I sure hope I figure out my shit and am able to have a partner some day; having kids would be nice, too.

* * *

Tonight is my night to present my paper in my seminar. I actually don’t feel too much about it one way or the other. The paper is good. It’s not stellar, there’s nothing groundbreaking about it. I wish it was great, that it was the kind of paper my professor was pushing me to publish. Oh well. I’m not too nervous about reading it in front of the class. I’m just looking forward to it being done.

I will say I feel like something of a hack. I mean, I’ve got a couple dozen sources for this paper, but it’s not like I actually read them all all the way through. But the paper holds together, it’s at least mildly interesting. I wish it were longer, but oh well.

Maybe I need a vacation.

“Boredom”

I’m having a severe ‘I don’t want to be here’ day at work. It’s one of those days where there isn’t tons for me to do and I’ve got zero interest in looking for something to do. I read my political news on the internet, take long strolls, go to the bathroom-sometimes even to just sit in the stall and play games on my phone. It’s a marking of time. It is nice that I’m not getting harassed, but how’s that for lame? It’s a “good day” because I’m not getting harassed? You’re not supposed to get harassed! Oh man, I so don’t belong here.

ANYWAY, since I’m so down in the dumps and feeling such an instinctive-level emotional reaction, let’s try the deconstruction trick that therapy has been training into me. What are the feelings? Boredom. Hatred. Disgust. Revulsion. Although to put them all down like that sounds much more negative than I’m actually feeling. What’s a lighter less nasty word for ‘revulsion’? I don’t know. And what’s the thinking behind all those emotions?

Boredom. Nothing for me to do. I suppose I could find something to do, or ask my boss for something, but I’m pissed off at my boss. We had a thing last week where she really came down on me for doing a whole bunch of things wrong, some of which she didn’t even train me properly on. But there’s also a fuck-you in there too. I feel like I’m not good at my job, and I don’t want to stick my neck out and be reminded of what a fuck-up I am. Or maybe having my boss correct my mistakes makes me feel like a fuck-up. Or maybe no matter what I do, I’ll get criticized for it (or what sounds in my sensitive ears as criticism) and so why bother? Apathy. Boredom. Meh, just leave me alone.

Hatred. This one isn’t that bad. And I don’t necessarily feel like I hate it here or hate this place today. Or that I have better things I could be doing instead of sitting here. What I’d really like is to just be at home all curled up on the couch. Hmm, that’s another withdrawal thing. Two in a row. Maybe the depression still has its grip on me.

Disgust. Yeah, but this one is close enough to the surface that it’s easy for me to get to. I looked up doctoral programs yesterday to see what all would be involved if/when I make it to the next level of schooling. It was pretty intimidating stuff. I mean, I guess it should be, right? Anyway, it brought up all the fears about not being successful in school, and even if I am successful that it still doesn’t guarantee a successful shift to a career in music. And so what does that leave me with but this financial analyst shit that I hate so much and am so afraid I will be stuck in.

Revulsion. Yeah, this is at me. At the fact that I’m here at all instead of doing something that suits, instead of doing music. It’s a harsh anti-me sentiment. And it’s an insidious one because it leads right on to a sentiment of ‘hey, and you’re not even working hard you slacker who doesn’t know anything I mean if you were at least good at the day job that would be something’ *sigh* That self-sabotaging voice. I get so tired of it.

So then what I have here is a negative loop. Okay. And the engine driving it is this last step here, the self-sabotage. What’s the hidden meaning behind all this? What’s the thinking behind this self sabotage? Feels like… worthlessness. Sad. Alone. But is that what it is, or is it just the seasonal depression crap? Or is all of this just an interesting intellectual exercise? Ah, whatever. I just want to go home and camp out on the couch. Too bad.

“Winter Depression”

I’ve been suffering through some really fierce depression lately. My best guess is it’s just the seasonal thing that happens, the change to winter, less sun, etc. It also probably has something to do with the holidays. There’s no time of year that reminds us single people we’re without a partner than the holidays. But it’s not just the pain of not having a partner, it’s at having so few others in my life in general.

Earlier this year, when I was going out with The Actress, I made a split from my 12-step meetings that had been a long time coming. I almost never go to meetings any more. Once in a blue moon maybe. Abut when I was going to meetings… I got some interaction with other people. It was hard and painful, the memories of friendships gone bad, and of course the rambling insanity of so many people in the groups. But it got me around other people at least. It’s too bad the trade-off became too much. What I did gain was outweighed by having to deal with the crap.

Thinking about that has got me thinking about something else, too. I remember my guy friends from there saying how I cared too much. I heard that more than once. I’ve written about this before, and I feel like many times. But what the hell is wrong with caring so much?! And as a slight addendum here, how am I supposed to *stop* doing that? Brings up all kinds of stuff about being weak, that I’m a weakling or a pussy or whatever for being sensitive and all that crap from being a kid.

Anyway, so as the winter has set in with the shorter days and the darkness, I’m really noticing how few other people I have in my life. It’s been pretty hard, painful. And there’s been a mindfulness there, too, which is interesting. It’s almost like I can see the pain happening, as if it were happening to someone else. I see it, feel it, and at the same time am thinking about it on a different level just recognizing how sharp it is, how painful it is.

The emotions are there--loneliness, thinking no one will ever love, me, all that—but there’s also a presence of mind that it will pass, that it isn’t as bad as the emotions say they are. It’s tough to describe. And being clinical about it does nothing to convey the deep sharp pain of feeling it. Having that detached voice in my head is helpful, sure, but what I’d much rather have is friends in my life and a family or at least a partner.

A couple things to throw in before I forget. I started talking with the therapist about sex stuff. Not sure how much I’ll include of that here. Old issues that I’ve worked with other therapists on that I’ve never gotten anywhere with. And now I forget what the other thing was that I was going to jot down. Dammit. Oh well. Hopefully it will come back to me. Maybe it’s just the thought/pain of having so few friends, and those I do have inevitably become not friends. It’s enough to make me wonder from time to time if I have borderline personality disorder. I think not, though. I think (as I pretty much always have) that I’m just different. Sensitive, smart, passionate, caring, all that stuff that guys aren’t supposed to be. Yep, still me over here caring too much. Oh well, what are you gonna do right? It’s not like I can decide tomorrow that I’m going to be someone I’m not.

UPDATE: ah-ha, I remembered the other thing. My weight is back up. It’s got me *really* upset, and I’m sure it doesn’t help at all with my depression. Feels like no matter what I do, I’m stuck at this higher weight. It’s got me thinking more and more about picking smoking back up, though considering how hard I worked to quite I am almost certain I won’t do that. Besides, what if I start smoking again and then DON’T lose the weight? What then? Then I’ll be fat AND a smoker. Ugh. Anyway, all attempts at humor aside, this is really upsetting to me.

“Friends and Family”

My good friend The Priestess is in the hospital. She had a severe reaction to some medication she was given to combat another illness. I swear that woman has some serious issues with her body. Rarely healthy. Anyway, it freaked me out a bit, but I got a card to her and have been watching the discussion surrounding. It sounds like she’ll be alright, it will just take awhile for her to heal.

We’re coming up on Thanksgiving. Dinner is at my sister and brother-in-law’s house this year. I’m not exactly looking forward to it. I am not optimistic about dinner happening at 4 when they say it will, and it sounds like there’s going to be a lot of people crammed into that tiny house of theirs. We’ll see how that goes. Not well, I expect. There will be kids there. I swear my own apartment is bigger than their house. And I’m not coming down on them about having a small place, but what are they thinking trying to cram a bunch of folks into it?

It seems like there’s considerable animosity between my mom and my sister these days. I’m not sure what that’s all about, except that my sister has been getting progressively bitchier these past couple years. She confided in me recently about realizing she has anger issues. But when I brought it up with her again, she said she’d pushed it to the back burner. So it would seem that it’s an issue she knows she needs to work on but isn’t willing to.

There’s starting to be some bubbling about another performance of my music at school. This would be on the end of semester concert. Not too much to say about that yet, but hopefully it will happen. I’ve done my part, that’s all I can say. Now to turn my attention to the next piece. I’m thinking of a string quartet.

Not much else to say today, I guess. Further updates as events warrant.

“Bad Third Date”

Oh. My. God. I am even loathe to write today in this space. Ya know, my online journal? Full of anonymous-ness? Even in the privacy of my own mind, I have a hard time with certain things, such as admitting to myself it’s okay to tell a woman I don’t want to see again that I don’t want to see her again. So let’s start back a few days.

The Goddess came up for our third date last Friday. I don’t want to even waste time with the details. Here’s the important part: she cried. As in sobbed, wailed, soaked the shirt I was wearing. We were back at my place, had watched a movie, and she came completely unglued on me. Fell apart entirely. This woman is clearly in a LOT of pain.

I held her, did my best to comfort her and let her do what she needed to do. I even told her at some point that if she was waiting for me to tell her to knock it off, that was never going to happen. And I didn’t say that, but I definitely decided oh yeah, this is so not gonna work. We finished off the evening, she stayed the night. The night was alright. No fireworks, but in all honesty I’m not sure how there could have been. I hate to say it like this, but I was pretty repulsed. Well, not repulsed so much as very firm in my internal decision about oh yeah, this shit is NOT happening. I made us breakfast in the morning and she took off back to the bay. She called me last night, but I didn’t pick up. I’ve sent her a text apologizing and letting her know that I’ll call her tonight after I get done with my composition lesson.

My mind keeps turning over all the different ways to say what I need to say, trying to find a way to balance my needing to tell her I won’t see her anymore with compassion and kindness, but still being honest. I hate having to do this. I really hate having to tell a woman I don’t want to see her again. And I hate seeing the pain it causes. The Stalker once tried to wield that against me—how could I possibly be a feminist or even just a plain old nice guy if I ‘hurt’ women? I told her that the possibility of getting hurt is part and parcel of relationship. It’s what we always take the risk of when we open ourselves up to letting someone in our life.

A woman who spends a considerable amount of time crying on a third date (and lets not forget how she did something similar on the second date) is not capable of being what I need in a partner. There’s no there there. Aw, maybe that’s unfair to say. There’s a lot there, a lot of pain in particular. But that’s not something I can do anything about, and in the meantime it means she’s not emotionally available.

The PhD was a crier, too. And The Stalker, in a sense. Neither of them as bad as the Goddess. The Stalker at least realized that what she was doing was inappropriate, and tried to calm herself down. When I tried to comfort her, she wasn’t interested, pushed me away. The PhD, for her it came up sometimes. She suffered from severe bouts of Depression, and I helped where I could.

There is a part of me that’s tempted to wax philosophical about how damaged we all are, and it is possible with love and kindness and hard work to heal (I consider myself an example of that) but as a wise therapist once helped me to voice: I need a partner not a project.

How do I find someone who is stable? Maybe the outward indications of stability—a job, a place to live—are even more important, are better indicators, than I realized. I don’t know. I’m frustrated. I’m a little disgusted. I just want to meet someone who I have some stuff in common with who’s mostly got it together and that I’m physically attracted to. Is that such an unreasonable combination??? But yes, this is of course what so many single people experience. There are plenty of single people out there, but finding someone who matches well is the hard part.

“Doing Well In School”

This week at school has been a sort of check in week with my professors. Both of whom have given me really good feedback, say I’m doing well. That feels god, for sure, but I also don’t trust it.

For so many years growing up, I had my mom giving me praise. A lot of times it was in response to me getting bullied. And there’s also a bit of how this is just want moms do—like, all moms think their kids are the best and the brightest. There have also been issues with bosses, where I was praised not so much on a personal level but as more of a manipulation to make me do more, not so much more work for less money, though there has been some of that, but more like I don’t know, manipulation, dishonest, like it was them praising me it was them placating me. I’m not sure I’m making sense. Anyway…

For a long time too I had difficulty in receiving compliments. I’ve learned to not respond with false modesty. And I can take praise much better than I used to be able to, but still it’s difficult. Especially when it comes to something I care so much about. It’s so important to me to do well in school, and I very clearly am, but there’s still this element I feel about my professors shining me on. I know it’s not real, or logical, and that it’s just my head fucking with me, but it’s still there.

But you know, all analysis aside, there’s a simpler way to describe how I feel about my professors giving me their approval, and it feels like the old adage of ‘Too good to be true’. I’ve got so much of my hopes invested in this shift in my life. I’ve got all the fears about failure, not being good enough, not being capable, etc., and to hear them say ‘yup, doin good/great/etc’ just leaves me feeling like ‘really? Are you sure??”

I was joking with The Goddess last night about how more than feeling good about my success, what I most feel is relief. There’s a lot of baggage attached still to my feeling good about doing well at something I love and want for myself, but I can feel relieved about succeeding better than I imagined I would or could.

We’ll get to feeling good, though. Maybe even soon :)

“Thinking and Feeling”

Last week the therapist talked about how there’s a thought process behind feelings. This reminds me of something another therapist had tried to tell me before that I never could quite buy into. I’ve always thought (felt? Ha!) that emotions are just what they are, that they come up and that’s that. They can be dealt with or not, action taken or not, etc.

This is the second good therapist in a row to tell me that emotions aren’t just there, that they’re the result of a brain process, and that there’s thinking that happens first before the emotions come into play. Like, as in that’s how the brain itself is structured.

In my session, we got to talking specifically about what was the thinking behind all my uh shall we stay strong emotions about work. A bunch of stuff came up and out, but in the time that’s passed since then, I’ve been thinking about how I’ve been more relaxed, how work hasn’t been getting to me nearly as much, how I’ve been feeling good/better/etc.

Before I left last week, she talked about me working on that, interrupting that process. Like, that feeling of being angry about work is a well-travelled, well-worn path. It’s easy for me to do, feels good in that it’s so familiar, and also because of that, that’s why it’s so easy for me to fall into that rut. So the therapist gave me a suggestion for how to start breaking out of it. She said whenever I start to go down that emotional path, like where everything is intense and volatile, to examine the thinking behind what I’m feeling.

So I have been trying this in the week since my last appointment. It may have something to do with my feeling better. But mostly today when I see her I want to talk about the being let down by authority figures. Or I think disappointed was her word last week. It felt like something huge that we just hit on like right at the end of the appointment.

“Cool Couple of Days”

I had my lesson Monday night. My professor had god things to say about my piece, basically summing up that I’m finished if I think I am. He had a couple suggestions for additional material at the end, but said it was up to me. I promised him I’d look at seeing if I could make his ideas work.

He also gave me some props on a good first semester, complimented my writing, and mentioned how prolific I’ve been. That one was nice to hear again. It’s something my undergrad composition professor first noticed about me when I was doing my bachelors. He asked about my seminar and we chatted about my paper, about Wagner and Debussy and that pivot from the romantic era to the modern era. I told him that my other professor had been very complimentary of my writing and he said that’s a very good thing.

So it would seem that I really am doing well. Kind of funny how I don’t quite trust that. Maybe that’s something to talk with the therapist about.

I’ve also been spending more time on the phone with The Goddess, and I think I’m changing my mind there. I’m a little concerned about something a former therapist said to me once—that I need a partner not a project. But we’re all of us under construction to some degree. What’s important is that I not date someone with the purpose of making them a project. Like that old thinking I used to have where I’d meet someone and think about how if this thing about them changed, and if they just did that, etc. etc. then they’d be perfect for me. I don’t feel that happening this time. The Goddess has her struggles, but I feel acceptance about that. Not that she’s got to get her shit together, just acceptance about where she is in life. At least that’s how it seems to me today; I hope it’s actually true.

I’ve done some shopping. I got a new jacket—my god I’ve been needing a new jacket for so long I don’t remember. I also ordered a couple pairs of shoes. After dealing with shitty shoes for a few years, I decided it was worth it to me to spend the money and buy some good pairs. So I’ve got back to the Doc Martens. Yea :) I ordered a pair for everyday casual use, and I also ordered this amazingly cool pair that’s like oxford wingtips, except they’ve got the doc sole. Righteous. Can’t wait for those to show up.

“First rain”

Wet concrete, scratchy throat
Sort of. Enough to take a mental health day
First stop: pay the special rainy-day markup price for
New windshield wiper blades

It's noisy at the coffee house,
So much more so than I except for a Tuesday.
There's a group of 30/40 somethings covering the couch
One man, five women. I wonder who they are
And I keep on wondering

Two new guys behind the counter are being trained by the no-nonsense gal
I've seen her here from time to time. Not totally friendly, but very real
It's why I come here

A thin young woman sneaks in
says hello briefly to someone
then steals back out
If her blond hair hadn't had those streaks of turquoise,
I wouldn't have noticed.
Meek. Mousy.
And I've now spent more time thinking about her than I did seeing her.

My neck hurts
I may need to try the hot shower thing again.
But it can wait until Led Zeppelin's "Over the hills and far away" finishes playing on the stereo; I love that song.

“The Shift”

I’ve had a very cool idea for how to decorate my cubicle space at work. I’ve got a large panel which normally might be used for pinning up pictures or papers or something. I’ve decided to do scale prints of famous artwork and turn the whole space into a salon-style gallery. Righteous, jah? I’ve even started a new excel file to help me plan it out with all the info for the paintings as I list them out, along with the scaled sizes. Some of the canvases are HUGE. So I’ve got two columns going, one with a 1:6 and the other at half that size 1:12.

And it just occurs to me. The salon wall will be what catches people’s eye when they look at my space from a distance. It will subconsciously draw their attention away from my computer screen. Right. On. Capital idea. Now I really have to do it.

I was talking to The Goddess yesterday. I’m having some serious doubts about this woman. I’d told myself to break things off, even called her and let her know that between my school, work, and the distance between us, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to do this. But I let myself be convinced otherwise. It’s nice to be liked. We’ll see. It could just be my fears. It could be just that I really want to sleep with her and don’t want to let go before that happens. Or it could be that she’s totally screwed up and completely incapable of a real relationship. Or maybe it will turn into something amazing and wonderful. Time will tell.

I’ve been in the market for new shoes. I’m tired of buying cheap shoes that don’t last. I’m thinking I’ll go back to the Doc Martens. I saw some in Ross last few times I was out there. They were all too small, but it’s really given me the bug to buy some. Their website is pretty good, and I know what size I need to wear, but I’d still rather get them in person for some reason. Online I even found a pair of wingtips. So badass. I’m totally gonna get those to wear for my concerts.

I finished my woodwind quintet over the weekend. I’m really happy with how I ended it. I suspect my professor will feel like it’s not adventurous enough, but in the end I have to be happy with what I compose. So we’ll see. I’ve got my lesson tonight. Fingers totally crossed.

Something else. It’s a Monday here at work and I’m feeling alright. I’m surprised. Like, seriously. I don’t know how much of it was the therapy last week, but somehow I found a way to chill the fuck out and not let this get to me. It’s kinda like, oh yeah—work. There’s a distance there now, breathing room. I wish I could explain it. Or maybe I’m feeling good because of other things in my life? The music is rising in prominence so the work situation doesn’t have to take on so much weight? Maybe a rise in confidence as the semester is winding down?

A quick aside: I’ve been fiddling with the global settings on my home studio again, trying to figure out a way to get the sound I want out of it. The singer/songwriter album I did last fall I’ve been wanting to work on and re-do. That’s another one where time will tell if I’ve got it going correctly. I’m always tinkering with that, trying to get my space to pump out a quality, professional sound.

I don’t know what else to say. I feel good today. It’s a wonderful change. Thank you god for the shift.

“The Women: A Primer”

I was reading back through some previous entries and realized I’d made an error—I’d used some proper names. Even though I don’t advertise this blog, it is public and you never know what might happen, so I’ve decided to go back through and eliminate those names. But how to know who it is in my life or from my past that I’m talking about? Feels very misogynist to come up with nicknames or labels or whatever, but I don’t see a better solution. Family is fine, I can just describe the relationship and have been. But for women? Let’s see if we can go reverse chronological here…

• The Goddess: the woman I’m currently dating (but for how much longer?? not long, I'm guessing). Nickname taken from her name which when I looked it up said that it’s the name of an ancient fertility/mother goddess (I think?)
• The Stalker: I don’t know if she’ll come up. We’d been communicating, talked about getting together, then abruptly I stopped hearing from her. Really don’t know why. We did have a spat where out of the blue she decided I was a horrible MAN and dumped a lot of shit on me. The story is a long one.
• The Actress: my most recent ex-girlfriend.
• The Engineer: this is more a joke to myself about my girlfriend from before, who had been an engineer but went on to make a massive career change and became a minister.
• The Phd: who wasn’t actually a PhD. That was the one I was so hopeful about, where everything looked so good on paper. Music interests in common, bodies REALLY liked each other. Still disappointed that didn’t work out.
• The Babygirl: wow. Yeah, I hope I don’t need to mention her again. The really young one. The way way way too young one.

So, okay, there’s a rundown of prominent figures from the last number of years who might come up. Any others we’re forgetting? Um, can you say YES. How about the ex-wives?

• ThePoorGal: Yeah, I think that will suffice for my second wife. I put her through hell.
• The CrazyCheatingBabyFactory: wife #1, from many years ago. She doesn’t come up very often.

I’ll come up with more nicknames as I need to, but that should be more than enough.Oh, but I also need to denote two other longtime friends:

• The Sistah: who lives over in San Francisco and is majorly into the Jesus stuff.
• The Priestess: who lives here in Sac and is the dark gothic pagan priestess.

“The Goddess: Second Date”

Had a second date with The Goddess this week. And now I’m not feeling nearly as certain/interested/etc. She lives down in the bay area, I drove down there to see her. Things were going mostly well, then the bill came and sort of nothing happened. So after a few minutes I asked how she felt about splitting it. She seemed ok about it, but when we got outside, it turns out that she hadn’t been.

A little interjection here: I paid for lunch when we went out last time, and I had driven down to see her. I was sort of expecting she would pay for dinner. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, I thought halving things was a good solution.

Anyway, a bunch of stuff starts coming out of her about how she wants to be treated like a queen, wined and dined and all that. Okay, fine. Not what I had been expecting and not sure if it’s what I’m looking for. But whatever, her work situation is a little unstable, but this is giving me shadows of The Actress. I have no interest in being a sugar daddy. Hrm. My friend The Sistah talks a lot about being treated like a queen. Maybe she has some pointers for me on how to treat a lady right, but not let yourself be taken advantage of.

All this being treated like a queen, wanting to be wined and dined is all good; that’s what you date someone for, to find out what they’re like and what they want out of dating. I’m not sure I’m cool with it, but the point I keep distracting myself from here is that The Goddess totally started crying, burst into full out tears, right there on the sidewalk as we were walking. Very emotional for her. All sorts of stuff about not wanting to be one of the guys or just somebody’s fuck buddy anymore. I folded her up in my arms, dried her tears, and yes there was a voice inside me thinking oh crap another crier, here we go again. Just like The Stalker and we all know what she was like. Unstable, to put it mildly.

It’s not that I’m not compassionate, we’ve all seen pain in our lives. But do I really want to go out with someone who has a severe emotional reaction to paying for half of dinner when the guy you’re having dinner with already drove 100 miles to see you? Just asking questions, here. No, not just asking questions. Being annoyed and pissed off. And a little disappointed.

We kept on talking, kept on walking. Other stuff came out. Her living situation is pretty unstable too. Where she’s at now she hasn’t been for long at all. She’s been on the broke side of things, doing a lot of couch surfing for months. Okay, so starting to see a pattern instability here.

Nice gal, don’t get me wrong. She is sweet, very hippie dippy, feels very comfortable in my arms. We fooled around some, too, and that was (mostly) excellent, except for the fact that her living situation… she can’t have people over or won’t unless we’ve been going out a while or whatever. So we ended up just fooling around in the car. We both joked about it, but still there’s an edge there for me. I’m just like ‘really? I have to do this again??’ Oh great, another gal who doesn’t have her own place. Who wants to mooch off me.

I won’t lie, I’m seriously interested in sleeping with this woman. The physical vibes are there, feels like it would be a lot of fun. But I’m pretty sure all this extra stuff that goes along with it is not worth it. We got some basic passes—physical attraction, emotional connection, fun silly, all good stuff. But there are some pretty serious basic fails, too. No steady job, doesn’t have her own place. Not terribly emotionally stable. Oh but she also mentioned that she’d been out on a date with another guy, that not nothing physical had happened with him, but that that was there and she didn’t feel right about not letting me know. As in, hey, I’m still seeing other people, just so you know. I told her that I’d need to think about that, and how I only really date one person at a time. I talked too about how busy I am with work and school and if the person I’m seeing really isn’t it, then hey your loss but I don’t have time to waste. I didn’t say it exactly like that, but that was the gist of it.

Yeah, so I think I’m not feeling this one. Which is too bad.

“Therapy Notes: Authority Figures & Abandonment”

Had the therapy session for the week. Talked a lot about my struggles with work. She helped me figure out some patterns, see some connections. We’re really sketching out a good image of me, where I’ve been, what I’ve been through. It’s hard for me to fully grip my shitty childhood. I keep wanting to fall back into things like but I wasn’t beat by my parents or molested or anything like that (that I can recall). What I was, was let down. A lot. No one showed me healthy ways of dealing with emotions, or with life. When I was hurting, I wasn’t helped. I was more or less left dangling out there to try and deal with the world by the skin of my teeth, no knowledge, no nothing. Abandonment. Damn, I hate looking at that, using that word. Gonna have to talk with her more about it.

One thing she hit on just at the end of my appointment that we should talk more about too. She said that I’ve had a lot of disappointment with authority figures. I sorta jumped the gun on that a bit, going to me having a problem with authority figures—which to a certain extent I have. But who are the ones I’ve had a problem with? The ones who have let me down. And all that has tendrils going back to my folks.

If my boss says she’s gonna support me in something, then doesn’t. Or is just a straight up bad manager, that’s gonna hurt make me angry, etc. If my professor comes down on me even though it’s just cause he had a bad day or even if he has a legitimate point, that’s all gonna hurt more. Because I’m feeling it with the weight of all the times it’s happened before in the past, going all the way back to my folks.

So I think that’s a note to myself for next week to talk some more about those two things: authority figures & abandonment.

“Portrait of an Office”

On my way inside, I stop in the kitchen/break room to put my salad for lunch in the fridge. I overhear two building personnel talking about ongoing unresolved issues they’re still dealing with from the move to this new space. At one point I hear them say “okay, well let’s plan on going to that plan when the other plan doesn’t pan out…” and I once again think to myself, God Dammit.

In the bathroom later, I walk in and some guys are in there talking. At the urinal, at the sink, and they’re having some kind of fraternity induced khaki pants convention bro love fest. Or maybe it’s just their morning chatter. Whatever. You don’t fucking talk in the men’s room. Period. If you want conversation while you pee, go use the women’s. Seriously.

It’s 8:48am.

I’ve been instructed to smile. Why? No reason given, except that she’ll start calling me ‘grumpy’ if I don’t. I told her I have a license to not smile before 9 am. But maybe I don’t, at least not without being ostracized. So here I sit in my cubicle, forced to keep my ever-increasing fury to myself, facing lovely windows to the outside, but with my back to an aisle where anyone can walk down and see everything I’m doing.

God. Dammit.

Curse this need I have to give people the benefit of the doubt, to make allowances for those different from myself. Plenty of people have no problem with this modern office culture, and even if they do have a problem with it, they know all too well that there isn’t anything they can do to change it and that attempting to change it gets one labelled a trouble maker, a rabble rouser, a “problem”. Oh yes that guy, I know the one you mean he’s nice enough but he’s always complaining about being treated like cattle instead of a human so we all just pretty much leave him alone and try not to upset him but you know he’s sensitive!

Give those gossiping bitches some gum to chew, a pair of pom-poms, and send them back to the high school their psyches are still trapped in.

The ergonomic furniture guy comes around to show me how to use my new chair. He does so by way of changing all the settings that I had already worked so hard to get right. Mother. Fucker. But he wants to make sure I know how to use all the different levers. “We want to fit the chair to you and not the other way around.” Yeah, because a flimsy piece of plastic that happens to be adjustable in sixteen useless ways definitely makes up for the fact that I work with my dick hanging out for all to see.

It’s Thursday. I don’t have a case of the Mondays, I have a case of the everydays.

ErgoMan leaves, but not before reminding me to sit all the way back in my chair. I tell him I sit at the front of my chair. He says, well, we’ll see what we can do to fix that. Because apparently I’m not even allowed to sit in my chair what way’s comfortable for me without being harassed for it. Maybe I should inflate a smiling, pose-able, blowup doll who never needs to shit and just stick him in place at my desk. I bet they promote him within a week.

The stillness outside draws my eyes. I look out the windows and see trees in fall colors—red, gold, yellow, and ever some green. An empty field. Train tracks. The freeway with cars and trucks and busses moving by. Buildings in the distance. The sky is blue, blankets of clouds with wispy tendrils. And in here the air conditioning blows, keeping the building space at a pre-determined optimal temperature that’s just a little too cold.

What have we done to ourselves?

“Wednesday On The Job”

It’s very tempting to wax philosophical about how dehumanizing my work situation is and how modern day corporatism is just the 21st century version of slavery. But I’m going to try and veer away from that, towards something more like … when am I going to get to be me? That’s much of my thought process as I do the day job, how this is not me and how trying to be this other person is like killing me. It’s like a mask that simply will not fit anymore. Holding it in place takes so much effort. I really hope a third way shows itself soon. I ask for help, pray to God that I will See it when it shows up and have the strength to latch on it, or do whatever it is that’s required of me.

There’s a lot of time spent during the day too of looking forward to the good things that are coming. Tonight I have class; tomorrow I have my therapy appointment and then after work I’m headed on down to Berkeley to see The Goddess for a second date. She & I talked on the phone last night. I feel this sort of silly giddiness when I talk to her. Not sure what that is. Feels very strange. I’d be tempted to say I like this woman—a lot—but that’s… but I’m not really sure what that looks like.

For a long time, I had a seriously broken picker. Women who came into my life that I chose to go out with, it turned all bad so many times. And even the last woman I was with, I was not happy with her. I’m hesitant about starting something new, worried about picking someone unconsciously that will lead us both down a path of pain, and at the same time excited by this new person in my life and more hopeful or maybe it’s more interested than I have been in a woman in a while. And being genuinely attracted to her physically is huge. That’s one that so often seems to be missing for me.

At class tonight we turn in our rough draft for our papers. I’ve got the writing done on mine but the citations aren’t formatted, or the bibliography. Ah well. It’s just a rough draft. I’ll get it back with plenty of notes. Am I happy with it? It’s definitely good enough for a rough draft, but I feel like I haven’t really contributed anything new. Feels like a lot of reporting facts and very thin on the analysis. I’m anxious to see what the professor thinks of it.

“So Much To Write About”

Well here we are, Tuesday morning (after a Monday holiday) at work and I am of course so pissed off. I’m praying a lot, asking for help, asking for willingness to see another way. No answers yet. The network here isn’t working so I can’t actually do any actual work. Just as well. I don’t want to do any actual work anyway. So much negativity. God help me find a way to deal with it or change or something. God give me what I need, whatever it is.

I had a date on Sunday. She’s cute. Short, sweet, very hippie dippie. She lives down in Oakland, so we met in Fairfield, halfway between there and Sac. We had a good Thai lunch, all very get to know you, but I like her. At one point I found myself just grinning because I do. We made out a little before leaving. Felt intense. I hope it wasn’t the bad kind of intensity. Feelings can be tough to describe. I really liked holding her there in my arms. There’s still a lot of getting-to-know-you to be done, and I’m not sure how much we have in common, but I do want to see her again.

My piece “Either/Or” was performed last Friday on the Student Composer’s concert. The players did a really good job, I’m so pleased. It was great to hear my music being played again, and even better to see it be well-received. The conductor gave me a little approving nod, and the audience liked it a lot. I was told that the judges reacted well to it also. I would really like to win the competition. There is a monetary prize, which would be nice, but I’m more interested in being able to list it on my resume.

I’ve got a rough draft for my big paper for my seminar due Wednesday. Writing this has been a long haul, and I feel like I should have more written for all the work I’ve done on it. I guess the length isn’t as important as whether it’s good. I don’t know if it’s good enough to get published, but I think it’s a pretty good paper for just the class. I wrote it in its separate sections and this weekend put the whole thing together for the first time. Over 20 sources, pushing 60 citations. But the actual length of it seems shorter to me than I would expect for all that. Oh well, that’s what the rough draft is for. I’ll get it back with notes from the professor, and have a private meeting with her on ways to improve it. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself, thinking I should be writing a paper for publication. Anyway, reading through it all the way through for the first time, I’m actually pretty pleased. It’s got some good places in it, and I think it’s a good read. I’m really curious to see my professor’s thoughts.

Back to the work thing. I try to remind myself of why I do this—so I don’t have to stress over money. That’s a big deal. But being here is painful. But there’s something else I worry about, too. I worry that not being at work, I would still hurt and be in pain and have fits of depression and sadness and anger. I don’t know. Maybe it’s something I can talk more to my therapist about. Geez, am I ever glad to have those appointments. It’s only one hour a week, but it feels like an eternity between those sessions. I really don’t know what I’d do without them.

“‘Either/Or’ Performance”

The Festival of New American Music is going on at school right now—big deal, lots of concerts, master classes, etc. The student composer’s concert is this afternoon and I’m very excited—one of my pieces is being performed. It’s Either/Or, the piece I wrote for when I applied to grad school. For Clarinet, Bassoon, and Violin.

I met with the players last night, listened to them go through the piece. It sounds good. The fact it’s being performed at all is amazing to me. I hadn’t ever really expected or intended that, it was just the piece I wrote so that I would have something current to go in my portfolio when I applied to grad school. But sitting down with the players at a rehearsal last night was awesome. (The bassoon player is really hot, which was almost a problem for me; well, not a problem, so much as a distraction. And I’m definitely still thinking about it).

I’m really proud of myself for this (with even more gratitude to the players). And I have a lot of gratitude for the fact of it happening. The universe/fate/reality is allowing this, responding to my attempts/requests.

Last night I hung out with my old friend the Priestess. It had been way too long since we’d seen each other. She’s been really supportive of the music making career change. I was talking to her about how good it feels to be back in school, how that’s going well, and how the going well of it is making work more difficult. She talked about how I’m swimming upstream right now and that in time I’ll be into the new career/life path full bore and once that happens I’ll be doing the backstroke.

Imagine that—not having to fight anymore. Having all my emotional and psychic energy available to me, to use when I want to and not because I have to maintain some false persona. Well and the work thing isn’t even so much a false persona as it is an incorrect life. Ack, well, as I have written before and will undoubtedly write again, I don’t belong in this work under the fluorescents cubicle lifestyle.

The Priestess talks about it as me pretending to be normal when I so am not. And she’s totally right. Pushing back against this idea of living the ‘office’ work life, that that’s why I have to do or the only thing I’m good for or worthy of, has been a challenge. But it’s one I’m meeting. Succeeding. Having this piece performed today is just one of many manifestations of it.

I plan to get cards for each of the players as thank you’s. That’s just good business, but I also really mean it, and I told them last night.

That bassoon player is really hot. She’s probably like fifteen years younger than me. Ouch. Oh well, how about that :) I can still appreciate how good she looks without taking any action. Feelings are just that—feelings. That’s good old program right there—feelings, no matter how strong, won’t kill you, and they don’t mean you have to take action.

“Blood. Guidance.”

Even before I got in to the work space, I was of course already struggling with my job. Just last night I took a moment to bare my soul to God. I told him I was hurting and asked for help. I Asked specifically for another way on this path. I’m going to school for music, doing well, working towards a massive career shift, and I asked for a way to this goal that isn’t so painful as this one I’m on now doing the work thing. He has let me know multiple times that he’s hear my prayer.

A few months ago, a new spell began itself. It started with river rock from one my nightstands that had gotten candle wax on it. I boiled the wax away, cleansing the rocks and they told me they were the beginning of a new spell. I called my friend The Priestess and asked what she thought it might be for. The answer she received was that it was for guidance and that I should put it by my shoes.

I bundled the rocks up for temporary and set them on the altar to charge where all my spells sit to charge. It’s been pretty quiet. The only thing I’ve gotten from it (until just recently) was a request for a white doily to officially bundle the rocks in. I haven’t encountered one, however. And I’m wondering if the spell is getting cranky, impatient.

Just yesterday, I cut open the tip of my pinky finger when I was getting out of my car. It was on the very tip of my finger, right where I cut to give blood for a spell. Very unusual, and I Knew right away that I had to give the blood to the spell that’s been working. I went upstairs to my altar, sat before it, and realized I needed to light the candles for ceremony. When reaching down to get the matches, I discovered more rocks. They wanted to be added to the spell. So I do so. Once the candles were lit, I tried to drop blood onto the rocks, but needed to make more cuts so as to bleed more for it.

I squeezed out three drops that fell, then wiped my finger on the rocks for more. I’m not sure if I need to go get a doily or how long I should wait to encounter one. Maybe I’ll ask my friend The Priestess about it.

I don’t know if the spell and my prayers for deliverance from the pain of pretending to be who I’m not are connected. They may be, they may separate. I am tired of hurting, that much I know.

“Move at Work”

My office has moved to a new building. The set up is very different than what I had before. A whole bunch of different departments have been put together. The floorplan is very open, with everyone’s workspace open and viewable to everyone else. As a private person, this makes me really, really, really uncomfortable.

I sat down at my workstation this morning unhappy. Then after walking away and coming back, I realized I could see my computer screens from really far away and so could anyone else. Anyone else who looked over would be able to see what I was doing. God I so don’t belong here.

I want to go on a big long diatribe about this corporate think and not giving people personal space and forcing everyone, preventing them from doing anything personal. It’s evil, manipulative, bullying, distrustful, ugh. I’m really unhappy about it, so much so that I really don’t think there’s much more I can say. Pissed off. Fuck you assholes pissed off. This is no place for a private person to work.

“A ‘well, duh!’ Moment With My Sister”

I was talking with my sister the other day. Doing well in school has been such an amazing thing for me and I was telling her about it. Her response was something like ‘well yeah, duh!’ as in of course I was doing well. I asked her if she felt that way about me and academia, how come she never said so before. She was like she thought she had. Anyway, all that really stung to hear and still does. So I’m gonna unpack that a little, as the saying goes.

For starters, I don’t remember her ever telling me that. And that’s something I’m unhappy about when it comes to my family—there’s old stuff that hangs on about them not supporting me. About how I wish I’d had family who told me they believed in me. Like, I’ve worked in office environments most of my life. That’s what my folks did, and what my sister does too. I wish there had been a point where someone in my family had said, “you don’t have to do this; you weren’t made to work in an office; you don’t have to be miserable, pretending to be someone you’re not.”

Of course, my family didn’t know anything about artistic careers and how to make an income doing that. And I have the impression of a lot of fear from my mother about not earning enough to live on. I guess I’m wishing that my mom had been able to say something like, there’s no need to be afraid—you’ll find a way. Or that my sister in listening to me be unhappy with work had encouraged me to go back to school and pursue composition. Or that my dad had been involved lol. I can imagine him saying I could do whatever I wanted to with my life, but I think what I would rather have heard is that I could do music with my life.

I don’t know. Somehow, a lot of this feels like whining. I suppose in the end it’s up to me to figure out what it is that I want to do with my life, career-wise. And it’s up to me to pursue that, regardless of how much or little support I get from my family. I just have this thing that hangs on, a feeling that it may be officially alright for me to pursue my dreams, but in reality it’s something that I shouldn’t do. That I should play it safe instead.

It’s not even about “well, you should try and maybe you’ll succeed” I feel like I wish someone had said, “Well duh, of course you’ll succeed. No question about it.” That kind of unequivocal confidence. Or unconditional love.

If my sister really felt I would be so successful in academics, why hasn’t she said so in all these years? Why now, now that I’m finally doing it and proud of what I’m achieving. It’s almost like her saying that robs me of my achievement. “Oh, you’re succeeding? Well, duh, of course you are.” Ya know? It’s so self-evident that I would, no SHOULD, be totally successful. Like I would be some kind of a total failure if I didn’t wildly succeed.

I’m working hard to do well in school. Having my sister respond to me being proud of myself with a “well duh” made me feel like I’d been robbed of that achievement.

“Work Sucks; Good Weekend; New Woman?”

I wonder if the reason I’ve started this journal up is so that I have a place to bitch about work. I don’t do nothing, but I don’t do tons. My boss is a neurotic workaholic control freak. She had me covering for our admin while she was out for surgery. Lots of extra stuff to deal with, but no training and definitely no thanks. We’re moving into a new building this week, so everyone is going crazy over that. I’m not optimistic about things calming down once we’re over there. I hope that I’m able to take all this energy about hating this day job and feed it into doing well in school. I so don’t belong here.

* * *

I had a good weekend, got a lot done. My paper is progressing. I’ve got about 8 pages done, so I’m roughly halfway through. I have to have a rough draft ready for class a week from Wednesday. I think I’ll make that. I’ve got Wednesday off from work because of the move, so I’ll have all day to work on it. I don’t really know how to feel about the paper. It’s really well researched, but I still feel like it’s just a collection of facts. I’m not sure how strong the argument part of it is.

I made good progress on my woodwind quintet. I’m concerned that the last movement won’t be as long as I’d wanted it to be. It’s a good piece. Not stellar, not something I’m in love with, but it’s good and I can get behind it. Sometimes I feel like I’m just writing nonsense, but I know that’s my own personal opinion about art music taking over. The second of the three movements is still my favorite. It’s the one with the thick lush harmonies that I love writing so much.

The end of the semester is coming up soon. I’m looking forward to not having the intense stress of all the school and work. But I would rather it were work that I was getting a break from and just school that I had to do for a while. As hard as school is, it feels so much better to do that than this work shit.

Though, I will admit I can’t remember a time when I DIDN’T wish I was just doing music and not a day job.

I got in my exercise again this weekend, jogged both Saturday and Sunday. I don’t feel proud so much about that as I do satisfied. My eating habits are getting better, and I’m noticing the weight loss in my clothes. My boxers aren’t so tight, and my jeans aren’t so tight. My legs hurt when I jog, and even the day after I’m feeling some pain in the shins. But that’s after doing it two days in a row. I hope that gets easier as I lose weight.

* * *

Aha! A space where I can let out all my insta-reactions to meeting a woman! I put a profile together for a dating site and I matched me up with a woman who lives down in Berkeley. Looks like a really good match. We talked on the phone last night for like 45 min or so. She’s very… she talks really fast. I kept wishing for things to slow down.

Get to know you stuff is hard. Like, writing back and forth with her, I thought things were cool, talking to her I was a little more concerned. Wasn’t sure if there was a connection, but I don’t know how much of that was because I was just overwhelmed by the fast talking. But there were some sweet moments. It would be nice to have something going that worked. It sounds like she’s in good shape, maybe isn’t so good with money, has a strong spiritual side. Actually, she sounds kinda like a hippie chick. Which could be alright. One of the things she wrote about was needing to cuddle with her partner at night. That’s required for me. After spending all those months with my last girlfriend, The Actress, sleeping together but not touching each other—ugh. Reminded me of the nights with my ex wife, ThePoorGal.

I would be nice if this turned out to be something. It doesn’t have to be something huge, but something. Someone to talk to, share stuff with, spend time with. Have sex with, okay, yeah that would be nice too lol. But more than that, have enjoyable sex with. That one has been a while.

“Where Are The Women?”

How about women? Haven’t touched on that yet. Yeah, I think I’d much rather write on that than discussing with my therapist what it was like being in jail. Unfortunately, there isn’t much on the women subject to discuss. But a journal of mine where I didn’t write about women at all? Wouldn’t be my journal.

I’m not seeing anyone right now. I got together with a woman at the start of the year, but we broke up over a month ago. There had been another woman I was talking to, but she’s gone silent on me. Not sure why, and I’m not sure how much I care about it. A little disappointed, somewhat annoyed. But twice now I’ve put feelers out and haven’t gotten a response. Maybe some day I’ll hear from her about why.

Which leaves me with basically zero prospects. Okay, that’s fine, I’ve been here before. With school and work, I’m pretty busy. I’ve got zero time for bullshit. Hm. Zero time, zero prospects. That’s a lot of zero. My therapist would probably ask me if I’m feeling less-than because of it. Truthfully? Not really. I’d rather this than be trying to deal with a relationship that wasn’t working.

But it sure would be nice to be in a relationship that worked.

Ah well. I’m changing (I’m always changing). Growing, shifting more towards being who I really am, who I really want to be. And it really is true that I don’t have the time or inclination for any BS. Yours truly, unfiltered, that’s what’s being offered. Actually, I’m a little embarrassed. What’s that about?

Ah. It’s about I do feel less-than because I don’t have a partner. And I feel lonely. As I said to someone recently, I’m going through this amazing, transformative experience in my life and it’s really amazing and it really sucks to not have someone to share it with. Or to share life with, in general.

The therapist and I talked about me having trust issues with women. I won’t argue, because I can see all the flashing neon signs from my past that spell out why. There’s still so much work to do on me. In the meantime, well, I guess it’s just a lot of ‘is what it is’. I’m not seeing someone; if the opportunity comes up I’ll deal with that then.

“Work = The Twilight Zone”

I have got to get better sleep. Or more of it somehow.

Seminar this week was amazing for me. Every week we have a scholarly article to read and a response paper to write on it. The one we got back this time was one I’d been dreading getting back, at least a little. In it, I argued about the importance of emotion in music and how frustrating it is that scholars continue to leave out this vital aspect of it. I thought my writing was a little heavy-handed, or that the opinion I was expressing wasn’t one that was allowed or something. There was something in the writing that I felt as I was writing it like well, this will never fly but I feel so strongly about it, I’ve got to write it. So we got the papers back and I got a 99/100 – my highest mark yet. I was stunned.

I’m still a little stunned. I’m not sure at what point I’ll get over this feeling. I’m doing well in grad school—really well. I know I won’t get high marks on every paper, and no doubt there will be serious struggles, but with all the hard work I’m putting in it feels so good to be rewarded for it.

As a brief aside, it really makes work annoying. Lame. How suck that I’ve got to deal with this bullshit everyday. And it’s not bullshit, of course. I’m doing this for a reason. I want to not have to stress over money while I’m in grad school. It’s a trade-off I’ve chosen to make, and I really think it’s the right one. I won’t have to do this forever. But after a rush like last night, to walk in here today… I don’t know. This is just so… wow. Words are failing me.

But school is amazing. To be doing well in it is amazing to me. Why am I so surprised? Why I am surprised that an intelligent, great writer, great composer, should do well? Why am I surprised by this? I have my therapy coming up, and I may talk with her about it. Is it lack of self-confidence? Maybe. But it feels more like a check against becoming an egoist. Like, I don’ t want to believe in myself too strongly or think too highly of myself because then bad things will happen. Actually, me and the therapist have talked about this a little already, this fear of doing well and being confident about my success in school. It’s just holdover fear from being a kid and being teased, bullied by my peers when I did well. Though, I supposed ‘just’ doesn’t apply if it’s still got a grip on me. Maybe ‘from’ is good enough. There’s no judgment there.

I’ve often wished I could just do music, not have to do this day job. Now with school, I’m getting a glimpse of what it’s like for life to be like that. It’s a shift, and it will take time, but being on the road to it… maybe I need to enjoy my journal more, not so much focus on the destination? But even that isn’t it. It’s that I *am* enjoying the journey so much. To come into this work place feels like, like going into a coma or a zombie-state. No, that’s not right. More like, walking back into a Twilight Zone episode where I’m some office guy under florescent lights instead of the musician I really am.

Oh, and my coworker is having major B.O. problems today, which definitely doesn’t help.

“Health Improvement”

I went to the doctor about a month ago. It was a routine appointment, but I did have something on my mind. After I quit smoking last year, I put on about 20lbs. of weight. They say that’s normal, but I used to weigh over 200lbs and had worked really hard to get myself down to 175 (well, okay, I ended up sticking at around 180). I didn’t stress too much about the weight, figuring I’d lost it before and that I could again. And then when it didn’t come right back off, I started to be concerned. The real kicker was later on this past year when I started to gain even more. Next thing I knew, I was weighing in at 214 at the doctor’s office. Now I know everyone says those scales are higher than our home scales, but I’ll be honest—I weighed on my home scale before going in and it told me exactly the same thing.

So I freaked out just a hair. Talked to the doc, asked him about my ideas. For a long time I only ate 1 meal a day, so I wanted to change that. And I used to run/jog. At one point I was doing a couple miles 3-4 times a week, or a mile everyday. And I had to absolutely cut out the sugars and cut down on the carbs as much as possible. He said that all sounded good. Keep the food ingestion going on a more regular basis to get the body out of starvation mode, exercise, and try to burn more calories than what I take in. That’s the general formula, after all.

I started eating breakfast, adding in some healthier choices. I’ve tried to cut way back on the carbs and sugar especially. I’ve started jogging again. Not everyday, but 4 times a week. I have a plan going to slowly work my way back up to a mile. It will take a bit, but what I remember from when I did it before was I was successful when I kept the attitude that it wasn’t so much about how far I went, but more the discipline of going.

And speaking of that discipline, for the past month I’ve kept the exercising up. The eating is much improved. I had a total lapse with fast food (stuffing those depressed feelings), but bravely stepped on the scales the next morning for the first time in a month anyway. The results? 209.

Much improvement.

Five pounds in a month is a good, solid amount. And who knows how much less it would have been had I not binged on fast food? So I’m feeling really good about that. Solid. Still eyeing it suspiciously, because I will need to sustain that type of losing for awhile. But I figure it’s like this: when the doc looked at my chart, he saw that two years prior to my seeing him a month ago, I’d weighed 178. Well, 214 minus 178 is 36 lbs. A big weight loss goal like that takes time. So if I lose an average of just 3 pounds a month, then in a year I’ll be back to where I was. Losing 5 pounds? Huge victory from that perspective.

And that’s why I’m only weighing myself once a month. I used to go once a week so that I could really see and track. But when I was unable to lose, I ended up depressing myself, which would lead to stress eating, which just made things worse. So to be on a downward trend of a pound a week feels good, and I hope I can keep it up.

“Plank Challenge”

So I saw this online. Not sure if I'll do it or not, but I sure like the idea better than situps.

The 30 Day Plank Challenge will send your core strength through the roof!

• Day 1 - 20 seconds 
• Day 2 - 20 seconds 
• Day 3 - 30 seconds 
• Day 4 - 30 seconds 
• Day 5 - 40 seconds 
• Day 6 - REST 
• Day 7 - 45 seconds 
• Day 8 - 45 seconds 
• Day 9 - 60 seconds 
• Day 10 - 60 seconds 
• Day 11 - 60 seconds 
• Day 12 - 90 seconds 
• Day 13 - REST 
• Day 14 - 90 seconds 
• Day 15 - 90 seconds 
• Day 16 - 120 seconds 
• Day 17 - 120 seconds 
• Day 18 - 150 seconds 
• Day 19 - REST 
• Day 20 - 150 seconds
• Day 21 - 150 seconds 
• Day 22 - 180 seconds 
• Day 23 - 180 seconds 
• Day 24 - 210 seconds 
• Day 25 - 210 seconds 
• Day 26 - REST 
• Day 27 - 240 seconds 
• Day 28 - 240 seconds 
• Day 29 - 270 seconds 
• Day 30 - PLANK FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE!!

“Get Over Yourself”

So I’m still thinking about this ‘get over yourself’ bit. Grr. But before that, a more general check in ...

I’ve not been getting a lot of sleep lately. I think I see why it’s important to do your college schooling when you’re young—the body just doesn’t handle lots of late nights nearly as well as it gets older. Thank god I’m not partying anymore. That would really be too much.

I had another fairly vivid dream last night. I don’t remember too much about it, just that it was about my most recent ex-girlfriend. I think she was over at my apartment for some reason. We were reconciling, or we reconciled while she was there. But then I went into the bathroom and the toilet and the sink was covered with all her stuff just like from when we were together and she’d stay over.

My brain has been pretty cranky lately with the imaginary conversations. My current boss, my former boss, my school professor, etc. I’m better about noticing that it’s happening, and the shutting it down is going a little different these days. Instead of feeling at the mercy of a mind that’s out of my control, there’s more disgust there, and also less attachment to it. So where as before when it would happen, it could be really overwhelming and I’d be just praying for it to stop and go away, counseling myself to stop hurting myself; now it’s like when it happens its nastier, but it doesn’t have as much power I think? Or at least I’m not as emotionally invested in it. Which seems like a contradiction. These things are tough to describe.

I really, really, really want to just go home and hole up in the studio. Finish dad’s project. Go have a relaxing coffee at my favorite coffee shop. Maybe write on my research paper a little.

And another random cool note: it’s been over a year since I quit smoking cigarettes. In just a couple weeks it will be one year completely nicotine free. Amazing shit. Still. Yeah, I still think about lighting up from time to time, but haven’t yet. I really hope it sticks. After smoking for 17 years, I really thought I’d never be able to quit.

So back to the ‘get over yourself’. I don’t think I’m obsessing over it, just had an additional thought. There’s a piece of emotional content there in the pain that has to do with not being smart, or right, or something like that. I’ve worked with my therapist a bit on the whole not being special (well, okay, only a little bit), but this piece got me thinking. Like, what is appropriate? Where is the happy healthy medium? I may see my behavior as just being really enthusiastic, joyful at being a grad student and succeeding for example.

But something comes across as egotistical (maybe? Still not sure it’s me; might be others’ issues). But clicking back to the modeling thing, that makes sense. Of course I don’t know what a behavior that’s got an appropriate amount of pride and confidence without being egotistical looks like. I’ve had no model. And to further extend it, if I’m trying to create one myself, then it’s going to be very fragile and easily slapped down by any negative comment. Except that any negative comment has always felt like a painful slap down.

So there’s something happening here that’s been happening a long time. Not sure what. Work with the therapist pointed to issues with Dad growing up. That may well be, but how do I ‘fix’ it so that I’m not feeling those pangs every time? Maybe I need to do the Buddhist thing and just accept that I’m sensitive, that these things will hurt, and recognize the only real problem there is my wishing it weren’t so. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll still try the therapy first.

Oh and on a totally random note, I’m thinking also about how I seem to have issues with authority figures. What a surprise.

“Woke Up Emotional”

A depressing thought just ran through my head. I’ve spent a lot of my life looking for a place I belong, a group of people I belong with; a place where people want me, that I want to be, where there are others who are like me and I am like them. But there are no people like me. It’s the double-edged sword of being such an eccentric, unique individual. How do I feel about it? Some days it doesn’t bother me. Some days it makes me really sad. Some days I just hate it.

* * *

I woke up really angry this morning. On the way in to work, there was a wave of depression. I don’t know how much of it is from the dream. There’s also some stressful stuff going on in my life—my work is moving to a new building. That’s stressful, but more so because of how it’s stressful for everyone around me. I try to not let other people’s issues affect me, but I’m not as good at it as I wish I were. I’m just really feeling the need to curl up and hide away somewhere.

* * *

At my lesson yesterday, my professor made a joke about me needing to get over myself. It’s really stuck with me. Upset me. I can’t seem to tease out why. It was one of those meant to be funny like a joke but was just too edgy to dismiss. It’s hard to write about. But I think this is a kind of thing that comes up for me.

I think about it, and the incident was over the way I had notated something in the score of my piece. He let me know that the right way to do it was blah blah, and he showed me how. And that was fine. I let him know the reason why I did it the other way was to save myself time and to keep the music looking neat. At which point he told me to get over myself. Like, it’s a hey, “hey you don’t get to be special, do it the way everybody does it” kind of thing.

Curious. That I should be feeling so isolated and alone, the day after being slapped down for supposedly asserting my different-ness.

I don’t see it that way. And it’s weird to me that I should slapped down for being different when there’s so much non-standard notation out there anyway. But that’s not the point. There’s something in me that hurts really bad when I get told (or when I hear) that I’m not special. What is that about? Something to talk to the therapist about, for sure.

“Crazy Dream: Alien Invasion (?)”

I had a crazy dream last night. It’s pretty sketchy now, but I’ll do my best.
I was riding in a car in the passenger seat. The driver was a woman I sort of know; she’s the daughter of a friend I’ve lost track of. Mid-twenties. Sometimes it feels like there’s an attraction between us. In the dream, that was definitely happening. Anyway, it was night time and I was riding in the car with her. Muscle-car kind of car. I think it was hers. There was some kind of military action going on, because there was lots of air force planes flying. They were gray. I remember specifically seeing an SR-71 blackbird, but it was gray two. Something about how the planes flew was different; the wings moved almost like birds.

Definitely at one point we had a spin out and got thrown from the car. No big deal, nobody hurt. One of the seats from the car got thrown out too, so I picked it up and carried it back, chiding myself afterward for only being nice/helpful because I was attracted to her. At times there was lots of traffic. At one point we were even stopped behind a long line because there were alien ships above us. There was a point when we turned down a side road to try and go around and got stopped to wait (I don’t remember the reason) and the brush slowly crept out until there was a wall of it blocking the road.

There’s more stuff that is embarrassing to write. As time went on and she wasn’t responding to my advances, like towards the end of the dream I started to take out my penis (I had a shirt on but no pants, just boxer shorts). Not sure at all why or what that was about, but it is REALLY embarrassing to write about, even here in this space for just myself.

I’m big on dream interpretation, but I’m at a loss for what all this means. I’m going to look up some symbol interpretations:

• Gray - indicates fear, fright, depression, ill health, ambivalence and confusion. You may feel emotionally distant isolated, or detached. Alternatively, the color gray symbolizes your individualism.
• Car Accident - to dream of a car accident symbolizes your emotional state. You may be harboring deep anxieties and fears. Are you "driving" yourself too hard?
• Car - to dream that you are driving a car denotes your ambition, your drive and your ability to navigate from one stage of your life to another. Consider how smooth or rough the car ride is. If you are driving the car, then you are taking an active role in the way your life is going. However, if you are the passenger, then you are taking a passive role.
• Night - to have a dream that takes place at night represents some major setbacks and obstacles in achieving your goals. You are being faced with an issue that is not so clear cut. Perhaps, you should put the issues aside so you can clear your head and come back to it later. Alternatively, night may be synonymous with death, rebirth, reflection, and new beginnings.
• War - to dream of a war signifies disorder and chaos in your waking life. You are experiencing some internal conflict or emotional struggle which is tearing you up inside. Alternatively, the dream indicates that you are either being overly aggressive or that you are not being assertive enough. Perhaps you need to be prepared to put up a fight in some area of your life.
• Spaceship - to see a spaceship in your dream symbolizes your creative mind. It denotes a spiritual journey into the unknown and signals self-development and self-awareness.
• UFO - to see a UFO in your dream signifies your desires to find your spiritual purpose in life. Alternatively, it indicates that you are feeling alienated from those around you.
• Aliens ((I never really saw any aliens, and the dream was really about this, but…) - to dream that you are an alien symbolizes the undiscovered part of yourself. Your manifestation as an alien may be your way of "escaping" from reality. Dreams of this nature also symbolize your outlandish ideas and your wild imagination. To dream that you are being invaded or abducted by aliens indicates your fear of your changing surroundings or your fear of losing your home and family. You feel that your space and/or privacy is being invaded. To see aliens in your dream signify that you are having difficulties adapting and adjusting to your new surroundings. You are feeling "alienated" and disconnected. You may also be having difficulties with how to handle or deal with a certain situation or person. On a psychological level, seeing aliens represent an encounter with an unfamiliar or neglected aspect of your own self.

I’m not sure I’m fully awake enough to put this together. I may need to come back to it later. I’m also really emotional today. Woke up angry, felt sharp pangs of depression on the way in to work. I’ll close here and write another entry to cover all that.