a martini and some mellow music
Saturday, Jun. 28, 2003 at 1:46 a.m.


I'm trying something new. Writing in my Microsoft Word program and cutting and pasting onto Diaryland later. Hopefully it will encourage me to be a bit less brief, less trivial. Possibly say something that has more to do with me than whatever it is I expect others to hear from me.

I've decided to stop attempting to go to school fulltime. I say "attempting" because I've only had two semesters in the last four years where I didn't drop at least one class and they were both during my first year. I can't do this. Not that I wish I could and haven't figured out a way yet, am not quite motivated yet, am just not trying hard enough and should really stop fucking around and start next semester clean, no screw-ups. It's that I've tried, I desperately want to take a full load of classes and do well in them, as well as I should be doing, as well as I'm capable of, and can't.

And, God, it really sucks, but this is my life apparently. Not the one that I would have chosen but the one that's mine.

I can't help but mourn all those years of expecting, all those years of figuring that if I just tried harder I could succeed, to maybe be normal. This isn't just about the fact that I have a nontraditional style of learning, that I've always prized learning, could weep for the love of learning and never known how to translate that into the experience of going to school. This is something else. Maybe about the expectations I have for myself and the fact that I don't know what they should be anymore. That coming so far in learning about myself has lead me full circle to a sense of peace, only to have that peace not translate into my actions where I had really had wanted all this work to go. So many years of therapy, since I was sixteen, because I couldn't do my homework no matter how easy it was and I just wanted to know why. What was wrong with me that I couldn't do what was easiest for me, that I was obsessed with making things difficult, with that which was truly difficult.

Love and friendship and family are difficult, and I cherish them. Writing and sculpting and taking that which is innermost to you and translating it into something visible, audible, edible almost to those around you, that's difficult. The presentation I did for last years Y|X Conference that was all my own ideas and research, that was difficult.

Pioneering is difficult, a challenge, but it must be pioneering for myself. After all this time, it still doesn't feel like I'm going to school for me. Learning is for me and I do learn in school, but something as intangible as the joy I feel at contemplating a new idea is not strong enough to fight� not my anxiety, that's medicated, but whatever part of me that cannot bring myself to digest some information, study it, get tested on it and then forget it forever, never to tie it into anything else that's happening in my life or the world or whatever else that I'm learning.

My goals are not tests, although I find it easy to study, or cram, ace that tough exam and get over it. My goal is to learn for the rest of my life and I won't be finished until I die, so how can I get myself excited about one test in time? One class of four? One exam or paper of twenty in any given semester?

I wish I could, get myself excited, but I don't have the focus to do it all at once. I need to focus on one or two classes at a time, always measuring and meting out my energies. Not the energy it takes to study, but the energy that it takes me to get myself to study and that's immense. It's not fair, and I'm just starting to realize that straight ahead, solving my problems by force, might not work.

That maybe what I thought were problems aren't, and maybe I'm just different from everyone else around me.

Are you a genius when you haven't produced a work of genius yet, but will someday? What if you're capable of it and never accomplish it? What if it just waits in me forever: potential.

I have so much goddamned potential.


I'm listening to Folklore by Sixteen Horsepower then Eliott Smith's self-titled album
I'm reading nothing right now, but I did go see 28 Days Later
I want to the movies, to roommate's parents

Previous:
- - Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005
back yet again - Thursday, Aug. 04, 2005
Batman - Friday, Jun. 17, 2005
Just fucking around today - Sunday, May. 22, 2005
pre-birthday - Saturday, Apr. 30, 2005