five o'clock

Crazy dreams last night. I think it was because I spent a bunch of time writing before I went to bed. I’ve been really excited about writing in my spare time for the last few days. I hope it lasts.

I was at a school, going up in an elevator. Looking for Eric. Instead of buttons in the elevator, there was a lever which you pulled up or down, respectively. Eric had just run inside and told me to meet him, and to hurry up. He seemed distraught, so I was worried. I hopped out of the vehicle that we had been driving in. The weather was going crazy… it seemed warm and cold at the same time, the wind was blowing. I remember thinking that I felt disoriented. As sometimes happens in my dreams, my perspective changed from first person, to an ominous “outside” perspective where I was looking down at the whole scene: a 2 story building, which I was about to walk into, a barn next door. A busy street. Huge, broad-leaf trees. Motorcycles parked in various places. A vast, level field with a few aircraft and other-worldly looking flying contraptions.

Suddenly seated back in my body, I found myself walking toward the school. I looked up and to the left and saw a giant plane – what seemed to be 10 times the size of a 747 – flying nearby. It made a sharp turn, dragging it’s wing next to the ground in the huge field, scarring the soil and leaving a trail of flames shooting half as high as the plane. Also bizarre was that the plane seemed flimsy. Blinking in my dream, I tried to distinguish whether I was looking through heat, or if the wings really were bending slightly, in the same manner as a rubber model of a bird.

Behind me, I heard the wind howl, then a loud crash. I turned in time to see the façade of the barn tear off and fly up into the sky as if possessed by a tornado. It danced wildly in the wind over the field, slamming into the rubber plane, sending it twirling into a firey heap. Apparently, in my distraction, I had walked away from the building in which I was supposed to meet Eric and further toward the road. The barns façade was moving toward me, so I scrambled to find cover inside an old tractor, parked next to the trunk of a mega tree. The façade swirled into the horizon, then almost out of sight. I considered bolting for the front door of the school, until I saw it coming back. It smashed into the tree sending smithereens in every direction, none of which seemed to really affect me.

Without more thought, I scrambled into the school and boarded the elevator. I could hear a multitude of voices as if I was in a ballroom full of people having their own conversations. As I ascended, I could see portraits, some of them moving (yes, I was reading Harry Potter before bed again) of the respective dormitory inhabitants. Some of them were nude and some of them were xxx.

I went through a series of mood fluctuations today after getting a filling at 7:30am. I realized that I had not had a cigarette since the xmas party at our house on Sunday. I walked to the career center at the library and registered with “careerlilnk” which I have to do for my unemployment, and borrowed In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz. We are reading Close to the Knives, also by Wojnarowicz,, for the book group that I’m in, but I haven’t got it in the mail yet.

Anyway, I realized that I was in a bad mood because of the lack of nicotine shortly after calling Skid, who is in DC for the MLA conference. He answered the phone sounding tired and hoarse. “Can I call you back, I’m going to get some breakfast.” For some reason, tears welled up in my eyes when he said this. I get really antsy and worried when I don’t get to see Skid for more than 12 hours and the fact that he is gone during the hardest time of year for me makes it worse. “just write this number down, Carter called and said that she’s going to be in DC on Thursday and wants to pick you up and bring you back here and hang out for New Years,” I said, pissed, and not knowing why. “Okay, hold on.” I new I was being irrational, but at the same time, wanted to be mad, so I remained silent. “Okay, I’m ready.” I rattled off the info. “Okay, I’ll call her.”
“okay, I’ll talk to you later,” I said and pulled the phone away from my face. I heard him say, “hey guess what,” which is what Skid sometimes says when he wants to cheer me up, which is usually followed by, “I love you” (this always works); but I folded the phone up and threw it on the couch. I was immediately confounded and pissed at myself for doing that. There was nothing I wanted to here more at the time. I got pissed at myself and worried again, and that made my mood worse. I ate and sat on the couch reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, and eventually fell asleep for a couple of hours.

I woke up, ate and went to the coffee shop. I worked on my resume for a while, sent it a couple places. Kalie showed up with Marissa. They had come to talk to Hilary about a mutual friend of ours who is being shitty to all of them in regards to romance. I guess he’s like stringing them all along in the same way, but not telling any of them about the others, etc. So, they talked about what they should do about that for a while. I just listened and tried to offer an outsider perspective. I’m not sure if that was valuable.

Doug, who is Kalie’s partner, played a show at the Pittsburgh Deli Co., which is in Shadyside, a rather bourgie neighborhood of the burgh. Every month they have a variety show called “An Evening of Random Bullshit”. Usually there are lots of punks there, but tonight, it was “relatively punk free” as Kalie pointed out. Doug’s set was nice, he covered “Chesterfield King” by Jawbreaker, and some other songs which made me wonder what my relationship is to punk rock now that I’m older. (more on this another day). It also was inspiring, and made me wonder what kind of songs I would write if I could play guitar.

I had a great conversation with Marissa, who is a art/cultural studies major at Chatham. We talked about how hard it is to find good poetry, how so many art forms are dead, or decaying, or inaccessible. How we wished that more artists would approach capitalism from a viciously critical perspective. We wondered aloud how we are supposed to make this world a better place.

I’m at home now, sipping Trader Joe’s shiraz and wondering where my next paycheck will come from, how it is that I have this expensive machine on my lap, missing Portland so bad, especially because of the warm, wet breeze rolling through town right now. Hoping that nothing blocks my way from going to school as soon as possible.

i’m thinking right now about wonder. Like, how wonder is related to my bullshit existentialism. I wonder how idyllic my own wonder is.

I wonder about class and my relationship with academia – I work a low-wage job where academics come to consume services: printing. I receive, what I perceive as, the most foul treatment from students. Requesting a simple service such as color copying and a coil bind, those with the wordiest theses will demand my servility; the slightest infraction against which results in a demoralizing behavioral reaction: I am talked down to, or made to feel stupid. I am reminded that I am a service industry worker who could not possibly understand the plight of the post-structuralist post-colonialist post-manners critical theorist, who is simply trying to get this goddamn-dense guy at the copy shop to just print and cut and laminate and trim and bind and ship my thesis, all while I wait here tapping my debit card against the counter, sighing.

I wonder if I should let these interactions phase me? Should I assign them as much meaning or feeling as I do? Should I be thinking to myself: what is this person’s commitment level to social/political/whatever change if they can’t be nice to the person (me/my co-workers) who could refuse to help them, or purposefully fuck their order up, thus making their assignment late. The person (me/my co-workers) whose livelihood outside of this hell is contingent upon the $8 per hour and the expensive health care, the eight hours a day, then the physical and emotional exhaustion, five days a week in a demoralizing uniform serving ungrateful hypocrites. The person who lives around the corner from the coffee shop they frequent, that they could potentially talk to about life, being poor, or alienated, or Queer, or an anti-capitalist. How productive are these questions? What do they bring me? What’s at stake?

Are these questions valuable in an academic context? I wonder. Are they solipsistic? Are they simplistic?

A note on the individualism contained herein: I try to trust and love myself enough to feel.

the style i chose for this blog is "Herbert," in case any of my adoring fans care. Who would possibly read this? gawd. i hope its nobody i know.