A Lament for Life
I wrote this after having accidently deleted (in the act of attempting to save) an earlier version, one that was perhaps truer to (and fuller of) my emotions and thoughts for the day. I still feel this is an inadequate representation of what I had lost.
I mourn not just for a lost election or a lost country. I don’t know what I expected. I didn’t expect Kerry to win. But I thought if I didn’t know the results of the election, they couldn’t be bad. If you don’t ask, they can’t say "no" (a good rule for life, if you ask me). At least this will be the end of Bush’s re-elections. Now I am just worried about appointing Supreme Court Justices. I worry about government expansion and the disappearance of civil liberties. I worry about reinstating the draft (Kerry would not have gotten us out of Iraq any faster, but at least he would not have resorted to the draft). I worry about an Alaska wilderness it seems I will never get the chance to see, and I worry about all my stupid fellow Americans. This morning when I read the news in the paper, I almost started crying, but somehow I don’t think it was because someone won the election and someone else lost, or because of what that implies. I never used to cry, and now it seems I cry at almost anything and everything; however, I still can’t cry about the things that really matter. But at least the state amendment passed, along with the three city propositions, which I was rather surprised about. If only the other 48 states would change their electoral college allocation laws to match those of Maine and Nebraska. If only we could rid ourselves of this two party system! But the election results did not affect me as much as I had anticipated. It seems they didn’t affect me at all. Sometimes, like Septimus Smith, I fear I can no longer feel emotions.
Today I discovered I had three aliases, aside from the one I use for email. Aliases I had forgotten about since their induction in oh-so-long-ago junior high. Aliases that meant more to me then, and mean more to me now, than any other name I have ever gone by (save, perhaps, the one). Those names were so full of nostalgia (no, it was something more, something else entirely, perhaps, something bigger) that I again almost began to cry. These names were so emotionally charged. But it is so much harder to feel these emotions in the sterile, impersonal, temporary hotel-style dorm rooms than in one’s own home, one’s own room. A room of one’s own. The blank white walls and industrial lights here absorb all my emotions before I can register them, before I can enjoy them. But sometimes I wonder if those old philosophers were right when they argued that an object does not exist until we give it a name.
Searching for the truth can be so overwhelming sometimes that I am inclined to begin telling lies and believing the lies others tell (sometimes? do I not do this all the time?). As Calvin (the six year old boy, not that silly Presbyterian guy) so aptly said: ultimately, knowledge is paralyzing. Sometimes there are so many shades of grey they cancel out everything else. Sometimes the black and white are at once in such fierce opposition and agreement that it seems existence must cease to be. But here it stays, plodding along as ever.
On an unrelated note: I have spent so much of my life looking for something, and I don’t even know what it is (which makes the search very difficult indeed). Each time I think I have found it, something convinces me that what I have found was not even what I was looking for in the first place. Every time I think I know what to look for, it changes, mutates into something else. I love the cyclicity of the wheel of existence, but sometimes I get motion sick. Other times I feel restricted and frustrated by the same scenery being repeated again and again. Sometimes I need a little variety in life. Or at least a new scene to have rotated before my eyes.
I am now of legal drinking age, if I am counting in base eight. At least I was still counting in Terran years (the saddest part is that I took the time to figure it out in the first place). I suppose some day I’ll be making up several new numbers in order to make my age younger than it really is. Or I could start giving it in, instead of Venusian years, Martian years. I should try the base eight thing the next time I go to a bar. I wonder what they would say?
I am obsessed with keeping records. (I thought for a while that I had gotten over it, but apparently that is not the case: take this "diary," for example). Before we ever had Word, we had Word Perfect, and that is what I learned to love. Unfortunately for me, I was forced to use Word because the schools (or anyone else, for that matter) did not have or use Perfect. Consequently Word became for me something associated with business and impersonal things, something I only used when I had to. And Word Perfect became then my secret stash of personal life. I keep things there, locked under a password, from DOS word processors and my first consciousness of being an individual creative force, typing with one finger; to my days of middle school, typing with two fingers; to junior high, high school, and finally college, utilizing all ten digits of my two hands. Occasionally I will go back and read things I wrote, and sometimes I think I must have been struck with a moment of clarity when writing what I did. I do not like to share things that are sacred to me, and what I keep locked in Word Perfect has certainly become something sacred. But, in an overwhelming sensation of vanity, I feel I must reveal what I think was genius on my part. I wrote, once, that: the love between a mother and daughter is shared in expressions of hate. Bear in mind, though, that it is still love.
I bear in mind my continuing fear of the real world
I’d like to end with a closing quote, before I die of frustration from losing all that I had written and the inadequacy of what I attempted to reconstruct. I attribute this one to Mr. Michael Cunningham:
"She has never lied like that before, not to someone she doesn’t know or love."
I mourn not just for a lost election or a lost country. I don’t know what I expected. I didn’t expect Kerry to win. But I thought if I didn’t know the results of the election, they couldn’t be bad. If you don’t ask, they can’t say "no" (a good rule for life, if you ask me). At least this will be the end of Bush’s re-elections. Now I am just worried about appointing Supreme Court Justices. I worry about government expansion and the disappearance of civil liberties. I worry about reinstating the draft (Kerry would not have gotten us out of Iraq any faster, but at least he would not have resorted to the draft). I worry about an Alaska wilderness it seems I will never get the chance to see, and I worry about all my stupid fellow Americans. This morning when I read the news in the paper, I almost started crying, but somehow I don’t think it was because someone won the election and someone else lost, or because of what that implies. I never used to cry, and now it seems I cry at almost anything and everything; however, I still can’t cry about the things that really matter. But at least the state amendment passed, along with the three city propositions, which I was rather surprised about. If only the other 48 states would change their electoral college allocation laws to match those of Maine and Nebraska. If only we could rid ourselves of this two party system! But the election results did not affect me as much as I had anticipated. It seems they didn’t affect me at all. Sometimes, like Septimus Smith, I fear I can no longer feel emotions.
Today I discovered I had three aliases, aside from the one I use for email. Aliases I had forgotten about since their induction in oh-so-long-ago junior high. Aliases that meant more to me then, and mean more to me now, than any other name I have ever gone by (save, perhaps, the one). Those names were so full of nostalgia (no, it was something more, something else entirely, perhaps, something bigger) that I again almost began to cry. These names were so emotionally charged. But it is so much harder to feel these emotions in the sterile, impersonal, temporary hotel-style dorm rooms than in one’s own home, one’s own room. A room of one’s own. The blank white walls and industrial lights here absorb all my emotions before I can register them, before I can enjoy them. But sometimes I wonder if those old philosophers were right when they argued that an object does not exist until we give it a name.
Searching for the truth can be so overwhelming sometimes that I am inclined to begin telling lies and believing the lies others tell (sometimes? do I not do this all the time?). As Calvin (the six year old boy, not that silly Presbyterian guy) so aptly said: ultimately, knowledge is paralyzing. Sometimes there are so many shades of grey they cancel out everything else. Sometimes the black and white are at once in such fierce opposition and agreement that it seems existence must cease to be. But here it stays, plodding along as ever.
On an unrelated note: I have spent so much of my life looking for something, and I don’t even know what it is (which makes the search very difficult indeed). Each time I think I have found it, something convinces me that what I have found was not even what I was looking for in the first place. Every time I think I know what to look for, it changes, mutates into something else. I love the cyclicity of the wheel of existence, but sometimes I get motion sick. Other times I feel restricted and frustrated by the same scenery being repeated again and again. Sometimes I need a little variety in life. Or at least a new scene to have rotated before my eyes.
I am now of legal drinking age, if I am counting in base eight. At least I was still counting in Terran years (the saddest part is that I took the time to figure it out in the first place). I suppose some day I’ll be making up several new numbers in order to make my age younger than it really is. Or I could start giving it in, instead of Venusian years, Martian years. I should try the base eight thing the next time I go to a bar. I wonder what they would say?
I am obsessed with keeping records. (I thought for a while that I had gotten over it, but apparently that is not the case: take this "diary," for example). Before we ever had Word, we had Word Perfect, and that is what I learned to love. Unfortunately for me, I was forced to use Word because the schools (or anyone else, for that matter) did not have or use Perfect. Consequently Word became for me something associated with business and impersonal things, something I only used when I had to. And Word Perfect became then my secret stash of personal life. I keep things there, locked under a password, from DOS word processors and my first consciousness of being an individual creative force, typing with one finger; to my days of middle school, typing with two fingers; to junior high, high school, and finally college, utilizing all ten digits of my two hands. Occasionally I will go back and read things I wrote, and sometimes I think I must have been struck with a moment of clarity when writing what I did. I do not like to share things that are sacred to me, and what I keep locked in Word Perfect has certainly become something sacred. But, in an overwhelming sensation of vanity, I feel I must reveal what I think was genius on my part. I wrote, once, that: the love between a mother and daughter is shared in expressions of hate. Bear in mind, though, that it is still love.
I bear in mind my continuing fear of the real world
I’d like to end with a closing quote, before I die of frustration from losing all that I had written and the inadequacy of what I attempted to reconstruct. I attribute this one to Mr. Michael Cunningham:
"She has never lied like that before, not to someone she doesn’t know or love."
posted by Emma at 5:41:00 PM
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