May 25, 2002

I shiver, and I wait.

The day all my friends log on to E2 and discover I am a member, they will surely hang around.

They day they find my user name and check up on my writeups, they will surely stumble upon my many daylogs.

The day they find my daylogs, they will surely take offence.

I have quite a few daylogs.

Eep.

---

"I can't believe he'd write about his friends for all the world to see!"

"But I didn't give any names!"

"It doesn't matter, its the princible of the thing!"

"It means nothing!"

"It means everything! I'm never talking to you again!"

I was standing in my bedroom with the lights out facing the wall while the speakers blasted forth their enchanting music; just standing there, solitary, listening to the music. I don’t know how long I stood there but about twenty minutes later I realized I was laying face up on the ground as each individual note penetrated my body. I closed my eyes and let the music travel through me until my body lost itself along with all feeling. As I lay there perfectly relaxed, my mind drifting in and out, I suddenly realized a small window in the black of it all.

Through this small window I could actually see my bedroom as if my eyes were open. As I concentrated more the window began to expand slightly, showing more in my vision. And then the view switched from my bedroom to the kitchen. And standing in the kitchen was a little girl, about eight years old. It was hard to make out any real features because rather than being in colour, everything seemed to me as if it were the negatives of a camera's film. The little girl smiled at me and lifted up a can of beans. Suddenly my view switched to one of the couches in our living room, only the bottom half of it could I see through the window. And I saw someone’s legs crossed and a magazine open as if they were reading it.

All this intrigued me but I came out of it suddenly and thought nothing of it. I didn’t really know what the point of the girl in the kitchen was, but just today I noticed a picture of my mom when she was a girl and it looked exactly like the little kid had. Little strings in my mind that had been tangled suddenly unraveled. I felt a realization had come over me that I had already been pondering for quite some time. What was the little girl doing in the kitchen? Was my mom in the kitchen at the time of this meditative session?

My mother had always seemed to be a good solid authority figure until I began to question her authority. Then she would either explode or stay subtle and complain to my father. This always made me feel like she had a fragile view on what the world was like and when anything challenged that it had to be smudged out or else her whole world would collapse. And it always seemed somewhat childish. Like when you’re a child you have this simple view of the world but as you get older you realize there’s a lot more to it than that, a lot more complications. But she had never really let that simple view be torn apart, and as she grew up she only reinforced it by guarding it with her religion.

So when I began to put these things together, it seemed I had been struck by an epiphany of some sort. That what I had seen was really my mother’s soul, and it was still a child. And for some reason now I am downcast.

Well, it's been a long time since I've really been here. Stopped by, checked my messages, corrected a few things here and there... Today I find myself reading sad stories of people who, through some fault of their own, lost someone they loved.

I love these stories and I don't know why... Well, I suppose I do know why. I've been struggling for so long with my own failing relationship, and I don't think there's anything I can do now. He fell out of love a long time ago.

I really wonder why he never ended it. Sometimes I think I'm just waiting for him to end it. Not giving up hope because he at least won't do that, yet. Even though I haven't admitted it, we've both just been hanging on for some reason. Do you love me or are you in love? I read that node today and it just about made me cry. I know he's not in love, but does he still love me? Is that worth hanging on to?

It's so hard being so far away... He's never been one for idle conversation, and now, with only the phone and email for contact, I find myself feeling so isolated from him. He won't talk about deep things because he's afraid of being hurt, and he won't talk about shallow things because he has no patience for them.

I just don't understand why it has to be like this. There were days, long past, when I was sure that nothing could stop us, but now we seem to have stopped ourselves. He's back in his fortress with the walls up, and I've grown increasingly clingy and dependent. I'm afraid to be alone. Well, I suppose I can't get to much more alone than being over 400 miles from everyone I know, but it would be nice to still feel connected to the people I know there.

Why am I writing this? I suppose I just need to get it off my chest. Not good to keep things bottled up and all that. I'm not hoping to spur him into some sort of action, I'm too scared of the outcome for that. Hopefully he never even sees this. I just need to try to let go, stop the foolish teenage-girl fantasies of getting married and living happily ever after. I'm too old for that now. I have to learn to accept that it becomes increasingly unlikely with every day when we talk of mindless things and learn to ignore each other even more.

A disabled person made my day, today.

I was outside my apartment, getting something from my car, and an older man in a wheelchair rolled by in the parking lot. He's a resident at this apartment complex, too.

"How's it going?" I asked.
"Good, and you?"

Now why did I stop there? For the last two weeks my life has become more and more stressful, I've picked up the feeling that I'm doomed, for various reasons as I push to graduate after five years of college. I'm making ends meet, trying to pass my classes, put up with the slow bureaucracy of the school, and their "we're not responsible for losing your paperwork" attitude towards me.... and so many little little things that hit me at once, making me want to cry....

...and this older man, buzzing around in his wheelchair, the only visible functions left in him are talking, writing with one hand, the other on the joystick to his chair.... Is doing good.

And so with that, in consideration that my life is only in shambles so far as I perceive it to be.... I guess I'm doing good, too.

I got another email from my boyfriend (Teruaki) today, another email that I had to use the online kanji dictionary in order to understand. Teruaki is Japanese and I am an ugly American whom he seems to not find so ugly, but we do not speak the same language. The funny thing about this is that I don't feel uncomfortable not speaking the same language. There has never been a time when we felt we couldn't communicate. For all my grammatical analyses of various languages, it comes down to this: Teruaki and I understand each other just fine without sharing a common grammar. It is vexing and thrilling and comforting.

The thing I love most about coming to this silly little Internet cafe in this silly little town is not so much the free drinks, but that I never quite know what I am going to get in terms of computer. Some nights I come online and everything is in Portuguese¹, a noble tongue with a lot of stunning diacritics, many of which are undecipherable to me. Occasionally it is English I get; usually, obviously, it is Japanese. Tonight, much to my astonishment, I came on and had everything (including Everything) written in Korean. Fortunately I have memorized the prompt boxes so I can negotiate them no matter what surprise language comes out.

The Korean thing tonight was a bit irksome at first as it changed the functions of many of the keys on the keyboard. The keyboard is printed Japanese style, so that the @ mark, for example, is sort of up in Wisconsin, rather than over the 2. But tonight, along with the Korean alphabet (or syllabery? I'm not sure which), it rearranged the function of the keys to match that of a standard American keyboard. In other words, despite the key's assurance to the contrary, tonight to type the @ sign, I actually have to hit Shift+2. After all this time, I had finally got used to the Japanese keyboard, and now this. Tomorrow night I am sure I will come here to find the computer all set to type in Arabic. Except there aren't all that many Arabs here.

I've spent all day hopped up on Sudafed and green tea, and now I am going home and going to bed. It is a full moon tonight, and the sky is clear, so I will be able to watch the few clouds drift about the top of Mount Fuji as I walk. And that always gives me sweet dreams.

¹This area of Japan--Shizuoka--has a lot of Brazilian people living here, so there are many advertisements and such in Portuguese. Thus, finding the computer set to Portuguese is not as shocking as I would have liked for you to believe. But let's just keep that under our hats, shall we?

The plans for LA completely fell apart -- exactly why I wanted to bypass LA with an option to go into it if things came together. We were now required to descend into hell not knowing what we were going to do when we got there. Chris's idiosyncracies were getting to me, a sure sign that I was in a pissy mood. We stopped at a state beach for a bathroom break, and as I waited for Chris I realized what I needed to do. A jump in the ocean would do me good (and hopefully stop my mind from going over all the bad things that I dwell on when I'm in a pissy mood).

We locked the bikes up, I stripped, and did a running leap into the Pacific. I bodysurfed a bit, half froze to death, grinning like a maniac the whole time even though I was repeatedly getting my sinuses flushed by gallons of seawater.

We sat on the beach for a while. It was an ANSI standard California beach: about a half mile long, sparsely covered by families trying to keep their kids from covering the towels in sand, young attractive people trying to be seen and not act like they are, sun nazis in their broad brimmed straw hats and fishbelly white skin, the one guy with the metal detector...

Then things started to happen. I noticed a pinniped working its way north about 20 feet out from the shore. A few minutes later a pair of dolphins started coming south, just a little farther out than where I had seen the seal. A few minutes after that, a small commotion formed farther south. I thought it was just people being excited about the dolphins, but they were forming a circle around something on the beach. Chris and I strolled towards the crowd.

Dead seal. As it rolled back and forth, tossed towards and away from the people, folks started to filter out of the crowd and back to their towels. By the time I had done the same, everyone on the beach was out of the water, and half the people had packed up and left the beach. I guess people don't like to be reminded of their mortality at the beach.

A Japanese family ran hand in hand towards the seal. At the same moment, all three saw it was dead. They turned in unison, and ran back up to their umbrella.