accumulation

Today was a very exciting day of procrastination.  It began when I woke up at 4:30 with residual anxiety from a terrible piano performance.

(At this recital)

I wrote a terrible poem:
If you were slightly further on the autistic spectrum, I told him, you would be a lot better at piano
       I know, he said firmly, like he’d already thought about it.
Isn’t it hard to persist so averagely. Next to exceptional people you seem to fail a lot.
       I don’t know - is 4:30 am too early to get up and think about something else ?
As for myself, I don’t attach worth to scholastic success or good looks
       I know yes, but I suppose I ought to know better

I tried very hard to listen in music theory and economics but my leg was bouncing and I kept looking out the window.  I've recently learned my jaw and neck and scalp have all these muscles twisted in tight little knots, and learned the wonder of massaging these myself.  I get very involved in massaging my face and  half-heartedly wonder if it is something to not do during class.  I made a list of overlapping philosophical quandaries for both economies and college students:

1. Is acting in your self-interest the best way to guarantee  that you get what you want/need, or does it alienate individual actors from each other and bring out the worst in them? (people definitely date like capitalists - myself included, the asshole out of means of self-preservation)
2. What is success?  Money?  Material wealth?  Freedom to not work?  Popularity?
3. Can an economy/college student function consistently at less than optimal levels (say, 85% in everything) and this still be considered a healthy equilibrium?
4. If individual thought is so important to innovation and guaranteeing the freedoms of future self-expression, why does the reward of popularity drive endlessly toward group thought?
5. Must you be either a self-starter (entrepreneur), a good natured side-kick (proletariat), or partier (landlord)
6. Is it better to be a self-starter or to defer your future to institutions (college, prison) ?
7. Depression: to be avoided at all costs? (Even suppressed from mention, for fear of giving it additional psychological power?)
Or, a natural and necessary time for reflection and excision of wasteful ventures?
And, is it better to leave it to its own devices or intervene?

I have very much reading to do and many papers to write (two) and due to my inability to sit still I went into the woods to read "Happiness and Hardship" for my paper on Capitalism and Happiness.  I kept stepping in mud and sliding down hills and I thought there has got to be something I can do besides walk and read books at the same time.  I thought maybe I could actually get diagnosed with adult ADHD very easily.  Then I thought that the whole process seemed like a lot of unnecessary sitting still.


When I spilled burned butter brownie batter on the sonata I was supposed to be analyzing I realized I wasn't going to get anything done but daydreaming, so I went to yoga.  I talked to my mother and I said "what? after college I will teach yoga and gig piano and be a life drawing model.  how is that not a career?"


I tried to quit piano, ear training, and not go to ahmad jamal last night, but I couldn't get away with the first and the last.  I'm not going to tell anyone about ear training so that I can get away with it.   I used to be a lot better at weaseling out of things.

but thank God for ahmad jamal

 

When you are not in college you are in life

It is the day before thanksgiving in my large empty house. I ought to be lonely, it is the season and hour to be lonely. I'm forgiving of loneliness in other people and myself, it is no sin: it's stigmatically embarassing to be alone by circumstance and not choice, for certain persuasions of people. It's structurally guaranteed, though, especially when you interact with misaligned idiosyncratic types. A surprise gap of being alone for an entire day will sneak up the way an entire room full of people falls silent at the exact same moment. Every twelve minutes or something, I'll time at thanksgiving. other structural causes: school vacation weeks when roommates leave town; or in another case, you are an asshole at thanksgiving eve eve chicken roast and get uninvited and must spend the entire holiday composing atonal music in the music building computer lab.
        I was terribly lonely today, for two hours when I wasn't texting anybody. for two hours twice today when I wasn't texting anybody. one time I was riding my bike for two hours - the samoa/eureka/old arcata rd loop - but I managed to get in a little texting in sunny brae while riding with no hands.         
                    The second time I was in yoga for one and a half hours. the half hour after class without texting was the worst because it was getting late at night (this was three hours ago) and I was getting concerned about my diminishing opportunities to text about inane things. then madeline texted me about theory homework and quarters and my little fix switch flipped but the half hour after the class without texting, that was the worst. you see I had sent out some texting before the class and I was like yes I am going to be so happy when I come back from this class all yoga glowing to popularity on a screen. but there was nothing. there was actually a little sprint logo that said I am qualified and appropriate and overdue for an upgrade on my apps.       
                    So I was cleaning om shala (which is my job that pays in yoga) and I was in this tailspin of miserable-I-am-going-to-die-aloneness which I sometimes have in situations like these. I was going to figure out loneliness, that was my goal while mopping the floor: why is this sensation so unbearable. I was empathizing and forgiving all the lonely people and their texting, missing the unconditional, backhanded sardonicism of their childhood home.
                It's silly, of course. I see chauncey nearly every day, for hours at a time, to practice long-form conversationalism. I'm up to my ears in dinner parties, and other regulating events. chicken tortilla soup night with the literates, succeeded by roasted chicken night with the bellicose musicians, followed by take nyssa out to drinks to finnish coffee shops to the park to distract her from harsh truths I just gave her because she asked, to pleasant ice cream outings with the piano dears.
        up to my ears in texting. I couldn't have a spare moment to be lonely even if I were being not so snarky about the subject. texting politics: really, you should feel gratified that your brain is so large as to organize all of these complicated rules. that you have so many opportunities to practice your short form. to align your intention and connotation delicately and acutely within one hundred and sixty characters, with the unquestioned certainty of feedback. we're more enabled to discover The Perfect Sentence than unfortunate generations before, who had only dinner parties and philosophers conclaves

and it is explains why the fine art of sexting was beyond them.  Out of respect for our predecessors, may it never be below us. From a real-life philosophers conclave two candidates were: "When you die and everyone who knows you dies, it is like you never existed." "You can't judge a book by its last page." as The Perfect Sentence, neither stands alone sufficiently. They were show-stopping suggestions in the middle of a dinner party - I said the first one, in regard to the first/last thanksgiving on the first mars colony, which is a play I dreamt of writing in time for thanksgiving dinner to be performed. and the sentence also is the reason I dreamt of such things.   Dry and on paper, it's a useless and whimsical thing. The second Perfect Sentence Candidate from the one evening it was discussed was TK, who has no anxiety about writing the perfect sentence.  I was at a party with hyper-literates who debated motivation and implied voice while TK did not second guess himself while delivering this at precisely the right time, nor after. 
            Sometimes I send a text which has a potential reaction at the extremity of what I can expect.  I mean this text messaging situation is less frequent and delicate and I have insufficient experience.  Examples are texting your piano student, texting a shy freshman who asks you a question, texting a cool person you don't really know and the situations are: how much texting are we allowed to do before you get attached/can I not text back without you thinking I hate you and you are a worthless person (which is extremely erroneous), how much texting can I do before you get attached, and how much of your coolness can I exploit without being crazy or a bitch.  So I craft the delicate perfect text sentence and it goes out and inside is the festering impatience for validation.  after a long time I am sick to my stomach with anxiety, I have fucked up and said the wrong thing again, I feel it in my gut. you are a horrible excuse of a person.  Then I am like Nyssa your stomach is sore from Yoga.  and you never overreact about anything.
             anyway I remember real loneliness, the kind that hits you before you learn to apply chemicals (endorphins, dopamine, carbohydrates, caffeine, omega 3s) in the most productive way to induce stability of brain. Before I got strong back muscles from yoga which have made me stand up straight and fooled everyone into thinking that I'm confident and their reaction fooled me.  when the things I was very attached to actively prevented me from getting close to anyone or thing so that I was miserable and it was entirely my own fault.  and I forgive and misapply and correctly and incorrectly feel guilty for about everything that seems lonely or possibly isn't. and relish in the crux of time and space where I am a vain little social butterfly with valid opinions since it seems a fugacious phenomenon.  it is really only texting a lot anyway but I plan to keep up my practice in long-form conversationalism.

last night on the swing set chauncey and I discussed artistic intent: I said I have to make people feel better about being who they are and he said I want to help people not worry about the little things which was pretty adorable