Sunday, March 21, 2010

I feel like a bitch

May 19, 1987

I feel like a bitch. I haven't done anything nice. All I do is yell. I am not getting enough sleep or rest. All I am doing is heavy duty house cleaning. Thinking about a house where nothing is extra - no extra - everything is useful - ha! not this house. I hate everything. Why do people need so many things just to survive? Why do we have all these objects around us when we use them only once or twice a year? It would be nice to have a tool shed that the whole world could share - just a couple of tools we rarely use like a plunger (take for instance) or maybe the scrubber (brush) - you know what I mean - corkscrew! ! ! It drives me NUTS! I work and work to make a room sparkling clean - but it is of no use. Cris was saying how corners suck - always corners and cracks - always dirty places where things get stuck - YUCK! "Wouldn't it be nice," he said, "To have a house made of sprayed concrete?" YES, it would.

Cleaning the bathroom pipes I kept wishing that they hadn't been painted. Everybody paints everything! People are always painting the woodwork and hinges and pipes and door knobs and electrical plate covers and windows and window latches and god you name it, they paint it! Even the bottom of the tub and sink! Help!

How about some honesty of materials - that's what I want - honest use of material. If you are going to have exposed pipes in the bathroom don't try to camouflage them - be honest - leave them be - to rust or whatever pipes do - sweat! That's what they do. I love sweaty pipes.

And, If you are going to use an outside door as an interior door - don't paint the glass windows! Give me a break. Funny that one side of our painted glass window door is broken.

What exactly is wrong with me? What is the cause of my mood? I do not know. Maybe it has to do with mixed feelings: being happy that school is over, yet knowing that I am less than welcome at home. I need to get away from here - just for everyone's sake. I do want to work but I feel I need a short time to relax after working at school so hard all semester. But on the other hand I feel Cris thinks the same way - now that I am done with school I can give him a break. It's like the weekend when we both think we deserve to sleep in.

I am going away with Halle, camping, I think, soon. We both would enjoy each other's company. We both need to get away. This will help my feelings of feeling unwanted. Then I will work for the summer. I just want to work part-time for some photo (?) related thing. I am confused as to what to do. That makes it really hard to just start looking for a job, not knowing where to begin to look.

I have been reading Memoirs from the House of the Dead - I know I mentioned this before- and it is near the middle of the book that Dostoevsky is talking about being in the hospital. He suddenly changed gears. I don't know what it was, but all of a sudden, he was no longer physically detached from the information. He let down his idea that someone else was writing the memoirs and let it come through shining. That it is he and that his experiences that he had in the prison camps made him the great writer that he is. That 10 years of human insight - insight into what is human - bare to the bones - the true human element and striving and desires and motivations. He had nothing to do but learn and devour information. I don't know how he survived such a life.

I wonder how I survived such a life as well. A young mother with a cheating, unloving husband and three very young children, living in a one bedroom duplex. Cris said that since welfare paid us money, we shouldn't work. I wanted to work, but had no idea about how to get a job. 

Reading Camus, Sartre and Dostoevsky was the led into my special interest of what it means to be human. I have been fascinated by humanity, probably driven by my own quest to figure myself out. My research has taken me from paleolithic art history, to study of early hominids, to how Homo sapiens differed from Neanderthals (Neanderthals had complex burial rituals and ritual hearth fires, whereas Homo sapiens are the only hominids that create art). I have studied and compared myths from different cultures and have drawn some conclusions of my own.

This entry exhibits the Aspergian trait of a limited emotional vocabulary. I am confused about the origins of my mood. I can be angry one minute, the next minute, calm and intellectual again. My feelings and emotions are directly related to the physical feelings in my body. As long as the adrenaline is surging through my body I am angry. When it dissipates, I am calm again as if nothing had happened.

To tell you the truth, I am relieved that there are only 3 more entries in this journal. I tire of it. It repeats the same complaints. I am exhausted repeating the same sorts of comments about such boring material. Painting pipes and windows, pretty exciting stuff!  ::rolls eyes::

3 comments:

  1. It's almost as if all your emotions are reduced to the chemical process of biological reaction. When the chemical reaction subsides, the emotional reaction dissipates. I think for most of us we are less aware of the chemical response of emotion and wallow instead in the psychological interpretation. Am I making sense? Does that sound kind of like what you go through? I really do want to understand and it is hard for me. Not as hard as for you, though, I'm sure.

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  2. I think that is it. My moods are almost exclusively associated with how my body feels. I can grind on anxiety for days at a time, yet anger is just a flash in the pan.

    I am only certain of my own responses and feelings, but from what I have observed, most people don't seem as aware of their body sensations in the same way that I am.

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  3. oh no, all that about not painting pipes, i completely agree. i've always thought it was a strange thing but as a child didn't have the words for describing it. in high school i remember going on a few tirades to friends about "deceptive material traits" like making aluminum siding appear to be made of wood, and painted wood at that. why not just make the siding flat so it would be easier to keep clean? you could even slope the siding outward from top to bottom and remove the need for drainpipes. that last part was a different thought train, but yeah, why do people try to hide what things are? painted pipes, painted wood trim, painted wood cabinets, painted brick, fake wood paneling. i guess any sort of plastic or aluminum mold that is meant to look like brick or wood or any other natural texture really bothers me more than it should, or even particle board with fake wood-grain.
    /shiver
    gross.

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