DIARY
I am writing this in my room (my apartment, which is a room) beginning at 11:09
on a night when I hope to get a great deal of sleep so that I might need none
tomorrow, and can stay up all night, working on my novel, which I love and hate
and need to finish.
I have the window open because it’s uncharacteristically warm tonight for a
Chicago February, but I’m sitting at my computer at the floor with a
Presbyterian and the song “Where I End and You begin,” which is dreary and
inspiriting. Outside it’s hazy and wet.
I never know where to begin this sort of thing. I want to plunge right in and
talk about what I’m doing right now. But so much of what I experience, so many
of my actions, are all connected and bound up in prior experiences that I feel
I’m omitting something useful unless I begin, “I was born on blah blah blah.”
Which of course leads to obscenely long entries which are nevertheless
incomplete.
So I’ll give a mediocre compromise.
With a rush and a hurry hurry, so, for some reason all through growing up and
high school and college I just assumed that if I did the obvious thing in front
of me, I would achieve my goals, that is, becoming a famous writer/artist,
reshaping the world on messianic proporitions, and transcending mundane tedium
into a state of spiritual ecstasy.
I’ve been out of college three years, and this hasn’t happened. >:(
There’ve been high points: I have an amazing, wonderful, girlfriend. I’ve made
some incredible friends. I’ve grown closer to my family, even from a greater
distance. I’ve changed religions. I went to California. I discovered Harry
Potter. You know: that sort of thing. The way isn’t obvious anymore, and I’m
still temping at that damn hospital in downtown Chicago, a great city, but one
I feel is increasingly worn thin around me.
Anyway.
I took a week off work for Christmas. The week before and after I was almost
alone in Chicago; most of my friends are students at the U of C, and so I did
things like go and see Return of the King alone in the theater on opening
night, or watch Romeo and Juliet in my apartment four consecutive times while
having an unreasonable amount to drink, or simply seeing how many times I could
beat Super Castlevania IV in a single evening.
You might thing these things were fun, but made depressing memories, but
actually it turned out being the other way around.
My week off of work, on the other hand, was spectacular. I rode the train from
Chicago to Kalamazoo, where my mom picked me up and we gabbed all the way back
to Flint. I got back to a beehive of activity, as we immediately jumped into
two cars and flew to Pontiac to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Christmas
was warm. I had Swedish Meatballs… a lot. I saw my friend Sam almost every
night, and we continued our tradition of driving around the city late at
night. And when I went back to Chicago, I was depressed immediately.
I don’t feel that way very often. I’m generally a little over-sensitive, but
optimistic. I felt dead being back here, though. Life in Chicago, life
temping, working downtown, filing papers, most of which are useless and
unneeded at a job where I get paid ten dollars to the seven my coordinator is
paid on my behalf for my work across the street. I know I am lucky. I don’t
take-for-granted what I have. I am not unaware of what I lack: a bank account,
medical coverage, savings, any kind of insurance at all. I know that cavities
are probably multiplying in my mouth as I type. But this isn’t what I am
worried about.
A sense of direction and focus propelled me through the first twenty-two years
of my life, and for the last three, I feel like I’ve been improvising a
schedule that is both arbitrary and, worse, illusory.