serendipti's Diaryland
Diary
10:52 a.m. - Saturday, Mar. 05, 2005
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
x,y,z, etc
oh my goddess, it has been a long time. I was informed that my diary had been put into 'freeze' mode because I had not updated in so long....ouch. I have become one of 'those' bloggers....inconsistent, shutting myself off from the world when stuff gets too hairy....that is precisely what I have done. And I think it is high time to come out of this hibernatory hole o despair. Much has happened since we last parted, my friend. But lets start with the present moment.
I am in the Huntington Beach Main Street Library, laden with yummy Boards books, trying to rope in my focus, which is like trying to rein in a fleet of wild horses with two hands and a single rope, and your palms are scalded by rope burn and you are hanging on for dear life, while trying to assume some posture or expression of being in control, when in fact, you are about to be hurled off your seat. It is extremely clear in my head, and that is about as adequate as a description as you will get. So there.
To bring the metaphor home and give you meat, I had every intention of sitting for a good 9 hour day on thursday. I woke up early, ate a whole wheat bagel with cottage cheese ( I don't care what you say Amy, that IS a super healthy breakfast), and then headed to the library. I studied Pharmacology for two hours and then decided I needed a break. I was going to head over to the computer to write in you, but the one computer that is free to library card holders was unavailable. I returned to my seat with dashed hopes. Unfortunately for me, I had been sitting in the room with all this fiction, bookcases line each wall of the room, with all the large print fiction (for peeps with bad eyesight), all a tantalizing arms length away from me....so I looked around, glanced left, glanced right...surreptitiously slipped a book called "Hissy Fit" (the name got me) into my hands, and told myself, this will be my break, just a couple minutes, its okay.
I finished the book at 1130pm that night. I skipped calling the fam or sheila that night...i didn't want to have to lie to them, and I was in no place of wanting to confess to them what i had done. I had promised myself that I had capped my reading a few weeks ago with 'Listening Now,' but I am an addict. Once a biblioholic, always a biblioholic. (PB, did I use the bibli prefix right? I figured because of bibliophile....lemme know.)
I read books to escape. I love the escape, I love the suspension of my reality to dive into someone elses. To me, it is the most wonderful gift in the world to be able to escape while sitting in one place. It is a rush, and especially when I should be studying, it is like the rush of reading under my blanket with the flashlight on after mom has told me to go to sleep. Except this time, I am both mom and child, and I have to block out the mom voices in order to have the willful child in me win out.
All very dangerous stuff.
I have been living alone for this past week in this strange property that we bought that is temporary housing until the house we are building is done. I have not had this much alone time in FOREVER. And they say that the mind is a terrible thing to waste, but I must say, sometimes, just sometimes, you have to truncate the saying and say simply, the mind is a terrible thing. My mind has been a terrible thing, and it with my emotions have been these wild, untamed, untame-able horses that i have zilcho control over. Bad stuff indeed when you really have got to pass the Boards this time around and they are round the corner.
I think that maybe by writing this down, it will make my head clearer, and thus induce a day muy productivo.
I was sitting in my fiction room, looking at the titles the other day, and I noticed a title with the word assassin in it and all I could do was sit and ponder the word assassin for a bit. Ass ass in. What a bloody fascinating word. That word occupied my attention for oh, a good ten minutes longer than I would like to admit. I am like Veruca Salt trying to eat a whole wheat sprout and tofu sandwich while she is in Willie Wonkas chocolate factory....it is just a matter of time before I break and the library version of the oompa loompas come to roll me out of here.
So this is what isolation does to Dipti.
I have relaized that I have come to look upon myself using the model of a coordinate system. X axis, Y axis, feeling bold? Z axis. So there are all these axes by which we define ourselves in our lives. One axis can be family, other axes friends, job, hobbies....and these axes are there, a lot of the time, you may not even realize it until one is gone. And then, boom, one is gone, someone dies, you no longer are in the city you love, you break up with a lover or a friend, you can no longer do the thing you love to do....and then BOOM! You realize that this axis, this precious precious axis by which you defined yourself, by which you plotted your own personal coordinates, this axis is no longer real, no longer there. So this entire axis, this entire plane, this entire dimension by which you mentally configured yourself by is no longer there....and where does that leave you? And so you flounder, you feel disconnected, you feel like a bobbing rudderless, sail-less boat in the middle of a vast body of water which affords no view of land, no sight of harbor, only vast stretches of sea and sky, and so you sit, knees up to your chin, arms cradling your head, and you try and figure out how to redefine yourself, how to replot your coordinates in such a manner, that it is okay that this axis is gone, so that you still feel like you have your bearings, so that you do not feel moorless, rudderless, anchorless, rootless.
And this is the best way to give you a snapshot into where I am at. I am replotting my coordinates, trying to minimize the axes by which I define myself by in order to be my most essential me without a lot of emphasis on others---other people, other things, other places, other trappings, to define myself by. I am my only constant, and I need to remember that as I try and reconfigure my mental picture of who I am and where I am going. Because, at the end of the day, the axes are all arbitrary, these little crutches we use to shortcut our way to our real understanding of ourself. Axes are shortcuts. Crutches. And it is okay to use them sometimes, but they make us get lazy. And that laziness makes us feel lost when the axes are no longer there.
Apologies for this entry, insofar in its possible inaccessibility to you. I hope you could glean something that you connected with, at the very least. But this was really just for me.
thanks for listening.
love.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
previous - next
|
|
|
|
|
|