gonna attempt to weasel my way into doing volunteer work for the county’s historical society. even if they don’t need it. i have nothing to do every day until the afternoon and it’s not good for me. they just moved from a super cool old big historic house to an actual building with room for all their exhibits and artifacts and such, both places like two seconds from  my actual place of employment. it would be fun. and probably a good resume thing.

thinking about how cool it would be to be an archivist or maybe a museum worker

mostly the archiving. that sounds so good and nice to me. methods of doing stuff and pretty concrete goals and a tangible real result of effort. and important old stuff. and organizing.

very good for how i am so in love with just the existence of lots of things.

and it seems like mostly people who do that have mlis (master of library and information science) degrees. which is what you have to have pretty much to be a librarian, also. just specializing in that.

ah man.

everything is a lot. so much exists!!

Also I feel so connected to characters  or people in stories or books I’ve read for school recently—

Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway, her entire existence and simultaneous joy and exuberance at the world and but then creeping naggling feelings of some very deep and hard to define dissatisfaction. But she is so admirable! I think. It would be good if more people could find and understand that zest and IT IS VERY, VERY DANGEROUS TO LIVE EVEN ONE DAY “She sliced like a knife through everything, at the same time was outside, looking on.” and etcetera. Also I think Virginia Woolf in general as a person, but I don’t know very much about her but what I have read feels very close and hurts to think about, so.

Clov in Beckett’s Endgame. I don’t want to think about this very much because it is not helpful other than being aware that it’s pretty much only me who is holding me back.

Emily Bronte, or at least how she is portrayed in Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay”

(there is a lot more than this in it; it is really good and you should read the whole thing if you want, but here is a little:)

“Emily is in the parlour brushing the carpet,”  
records Charlotte in 1828.  
Unsociable even at home

and unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out,  
Emily made her awkward way
across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers.

This sad stunted life, says one.
Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment  
and despair, says another.

She could have been a great navigator if she’d been male,  
suggests a third. Meanwhile
Emily continued to brush into the carpet the question,

Why cast the world away.
For someone hooked up to Thou,
the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.

But in between the neighbour who recalls her  
coming in from a walk on the moors  
with her face “lit up by a divine light”

and the sister who tells us
Emily never made a friend in her life,  
is a space where the little raw soul

slips through.
It goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel,  
out of sight.

The little raw soul was caught by no one.
She didn’t have friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary
or a fear of death. She worked

in total six months of her life (at a school in Halifax)
and died on the sofa at home at 2 P.M. on a winter afternoon  
in her thirty-first year. She spent

most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet,  
walking the moor
or whaching. She says

it gave her peace.
“All tight and right in which condition it is to be hoped we shall all be this  
    day 4 years,”
she wrote in her Diary Paper of 1837.

Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons,  
vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters,  
locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls.

“Why all the fuss?” asks one critic.
“She wanted liberty. Well didn’t she have it?  
A reasonably satisfactory homelife,

a most satisfactory dreamlife—why all this beating of wings?  
What was this cage, invisible to us,  
which she felt herself to be confined in?”

Well there are many ways of being held prisoner,  
I am thinking as I stride over the moor.

—-

Well I feel a lot better now, thank you internet for giving me a space to put stuff that is so public it almost feels private somehow but really any person in the world can read this and that seems good and I’m off to get ready for work, so goodbye.

Over the last while I have become really increasingly unsure of how to exist as a person. I feel like for me, just living in the world and experiencing it (by which I mean mostly passively, not actively), observing the stuff that other people are doing…is enough to feel content. Almost always. I don’t do very much, I don’t really have any friends (as in normal hey let’s go hang out at this place now friends—I don’t want to seem like I’m devaluing any of the relationships I do have because they mean a lot to me and god do I know it feels so bad to feel excluded or like your friendship isn’t valued). I go out on little adventures alone, like around Cleveland or to shows and so on by myself and I enjoy everything when I am doing it, for the most part, either wandering the streets and going into stores or restaurants or just looking around. I love riding the bus and also find the experience simultaneously beautiful and tragic because it is people. Very individual whole people contained in their skin and consciousness put in close proximity with a lot of other little blobs with brains in them, very hardly reaching out to each other and if so in super surface-level inconsequential ways.

I’m really quiet and boring to be around and probably seem mean? I really can’t tell. It’s so hard to talk to people. I can’t think of how to respond to things or to open myself up enough to think about another person’s feelings or how they’d (I’d) want to be treated in a conversation. I barely ever ask anyone how they’re doing or what’s going on in their life; it never crosses my mind even, but when someone asks me that it makes me so happy and feel so cared about that I want to cry. And then normally I get scared or something and reply with a little unimportant unreal answer or sometimes depending on the person act like it’s an inconvenience that they’ve taken the time to care or pretend to care and all that?

It’s really bad and not good but there are very few people who I see as people on the same kind of level and of the same sort of mindset as me; I tend to see people as either like some higher more persony adult real concrete existing and confident or at least plan-having and authoritative in their actions than I can ever hope or dream of being or seeing orrr as weird pathetic little insecure petty dumb babies who it is an eternal mystery to me that they can even function in society or exist or have families or jobs or do anything. That’s so terrible!! I can’t stop it though! Only my friends and people I know well feel like me! And that’s not very many people. And it’s so scary to try to think about inserting myself into the lives of people who I don’t know or who don’t know me. Assertiveness is not a thing I am very capable of, except in the realm of FACTS and statements and academics and even then it is not tough to shake me and get me second guessing everything I think about the way stuff works.

The other day on the bus I sat down next to some gangly guy probably a couple years older than me and it was warm and I felt very comfortable and had an overwhelming urge to just lay my head on his shoulder and for him to let me and maybe put his arm around me. But the times I’ve ever acted like that or allowed myself to feel that okay about affection since I was a child are so few and sometimes like that time I just want more than anything to be able to feel mutual love and not be worried about being seen as having some kind of fault or being weird or unwanted.

I’m very suspicious that the relationships I do have with other people mean so much more to me than to the other person. That I put too much weight into and think way too much about things that other people often disregard or discard or whatever. Not like romantic love because I have never ever been spoken to like that or said anything to anyone or any kind of look or feeling in that realm at all in any way and don’t know how people can put their selves out there to either be accepted or rejected so often or boldly, goddamn.

I’m a tiny fragile being and am very good at appreciating and observing and feeling but very bad at doing anything with those feelings besides ruminating on them too much and allowing them to turn into ugly bad hurtful doubts and letting them gnaw at me and me retreating further into myself and right now I am feeling like some very small thing contracting and shrinking until I either disappear or implode and flare out and I need to open up and get bigger and let outside things in but it’s so fucking hard.

~classes~

fall and spring still kind of tentative as of now

Summer 12

• Contemporary British Novel to Film

Fall 12

• Brit Lit I
• ASL (Sign Language) II
• Brit/Irish Drama 1956-Present
• Medieval Satire

Spring 13

• Survey of American Literature
• Brit Lit II
• Media Criticism (this is just a general 300 level elective and I’ll probably find something better/cooler later hopefully)

then fall 13 which’ll be one more english class, another 300 elective, and english senior seminar

ahhhhhhhhhhh

I am going to have to, like, leave the house at 6:30 on mornings I have class (Tu/Th) for the fall and not leave campus until 6pm. So two 8 hour class days. Have to do this because of weird built-in breaks and because M/W/F is puttin a strain on my place of employment. I kind of want to apply to work at the Cleveland Public Library in the fall…it would be so cool to work there and way easier and more fun, probably.

Things to think about @_@

music words

i stopped adding to that new albums in 2012 post i had going because i listened to too much stuff and did not want to expend the effort necessary to upload album art and such

but here are some new to me artists i have found this year (or have finally gotten around to listening to), ordered by most plays in the last 3 months according to last.fm:

• tim fite! indie-ish sometimes, hip hop sometimes, blues sometimes, forever way unique. does whatever the heck and it almost always sounds fantastic and interesting. also he does arts and they own. introduced to me by my rad english prof who is wonderful. you can download lots of music and watch little video series and look at drawings on tim’s site (haha get it).
• [kind of rediscovered math the band, i mean duh they are the best in every possible way but this year i’ve been jammin to them hard & listening to some of their older stuff i hadn’t heard before]
• of montreal. i’m just really slow and dumb and duh they own
• michael jordan touchdown pass. folk punk! this is the younger brother of pat the bunny (who is of ramshackle glory, wingnut dishwashers union, johnny hobo & the freight trains). mega smart, mega good. makes me feel like i’m not doing enough cool stuff w/my life for my age, hah. you can download lots of his music fo free here or give him some $$ (cash money etc is my favorite album of his)
• koo koo kanga roo!!! silly spastic dancey hip hop craziness. songs about rainbows, the alphabet, bestest friends, etc with dance moves and sing alongs built in. blaze has been telling me forever that they put on the best live show but i did not get to experience this until last saturday when they opened for harry and the potters and GOD. they’re my new favorite humans. neil and bryan own. so ridiculously energetic, like just watch this. their set was one of the most excellent fun happy 30 minute chunks of my life i can think of. for real, the day after, my face muscles hurt from smiling so hard. plus also at their merch table they have a friendship bracelet making station and a webcam for people take pictures on which are then uploaded to facebook. and they sell mustaches on a stick. i want to be best friends and hang out with them all the time. all their music is free to dl on their site.
• bomb the music industry! another band i meant to listen to and knew i’d like for a long time but never got around to. mostly punk kinda ska? hoping to see them live in a few weeks but i dunno if i’ll be able to. i need a concert buddy for this stuff and to see andrew jackson jihad w/ also and all good bands. all their music is free to download too! whoa!
• battles. experimental math rock something. different from most of what i listen to but perfect for certain moods/occasions/activities.
• good luck! pop punk loveliness. bloomington, indiana peeps. I DIDN’T KNOW MATTY POP CHART HAD A BAND until i discovered that he had a band. and they’re so good. and i just discovered today that they’re coming to cleveland soon. and i’m excited. they are harry and the potters’s favorite band. joe of hatp writes zines about them and they’re great. can listen to most of their stuff here and stream their newest album here.