Friday

A packed-up room is strange. It keeps spitting me out. I feel incredibly drifty-around-the-house, and unproductive. Two days, and tomorrow doesn't count because I'll be in Sherwood Park from eight in the morning.

I miss his brain terribly. Starbucks is my mortal enemy for stealing all his hours.

I like the word 'catharsis'.

In which Lizzy makes a mildly arrogant, but heartfelt diatribe

The prospect of this Sunday afternoon petrifies me. This Sunday afternoon I will move out of my parents' basement [and more importantly, out of access to free internet, free emergency transportation and free use-of-a-telephone-number], and into a two-room apartment halfway across the city. After this Sunday afternoon, I will not be bothered by Kindermusik CDs played full blast through the thin floors, or requests for babysitting when I have things to do. I am petrified.

People keep telling me that I really have nothing serious to worry about. They point out the several thousand dollars in my bank account, my good grades, my cheap rent, my general self-sufficiency. They point out that I will survive. I know. I am not in the least concerned about eating or paying rent. I am terribly concerned about the animalistic tendencies that come with spending too much time surviving.

Is there anything in the world more depressing than a human who resembles a penguin from a BBC documentary? Doing nothing but moving from food source to food source, huddling away from the cold, and procreating like mad? Is there any factor that defines a level of civilization more than the time freed up from providing for one's survival for the pursuit of pleasure and learning?

The sight of penguin people makes me sick. I can think of nothing worse than being forced, through lack of intelligence or good money management or education or ambition, to spend most of my time on a job which does not utilize my mind or involve anything interesting. It drives people crazy, or turns them in zombies, and even their little free time is wasted because they cannot enjoy anything but cheap entertainment. I am very, very afraid of this.

I am not interested in becoming disgustingly rich. I am interested in earning enough, at a job I want to work at, to not have to worry about necessary expenses, to have freedom and money to study what I want in my [considerable] free time, to socialize with people I respect and enjoy,
to not waste hours on the bus, to buy healthy food, to plan for projects, perhaps to invest. I do not plan to spend vast sums of money on big houses or cars, vacations to dull tourist resorts, ridiculous clothing, gadgets, or pure-bred animals. But I do very much want to buy as much time and lack of complication as I possibly can, so I can read a lot of books.

Which is why I am afraid of moving out on Sunday, and of the job search next week, and of deciding what to take my first degree in. In my brief experience so far it does not seem like intelligence and hard work are very employable qualities, and it does not seem like most of the people who exist are worth talking to. The things I want most to do, even in the short term, require time and a relative lack of intruding stress, and this happy circumstance will take weeks at the least to establish even in a small degree. I am determined however. Wish me luck.

exhausted

"Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!"
hums the underconsciousness.
''Love and produce! Love and produce!''
cackles the upper consciousness.
And the world hears onlythe 'love and produce' cackle.
Refuses to hear the hum of destruction underneath...
until such time as it will have to hear.

The American has got to destroy!
It is his destiny.

I am drained in a half-satisfying, half-restless way. I've spent the day applying for jobs, reading an Ian McEwan novel, knitting for my enormous project which is now almost one-quarter to completion, writing, preparing and tracking magazine submissions [if I don't keep track I could get in trouble], practicing, setting up my new printer, and failing to do math. I finished one poem, which is not very good but not nauseating. I can't wait for Friday. I am going mad.

New York by Valzhyna Mort

new york, madame,
is a monument to a city

it is
TA-DA
a gigantic pike
whose scales
bristled up stunned

and what used to be just smoke
found a fire that gave it birth

champagne foam
melted into metal
glass rivers
flowing upwards
and things you won't tell to a priest
you reveal to a cabdriver

even time is sold out
when to the public's "wow" and "shhh"
out of a black top hat
a tailed magician
is pulling new york out
by the ears of skyscrapers

Nevermind two days, it's The-Day-After-Tomorrow.

One of those

I am one of those simultaneous submitters. The few poems I think should be published by someone are sent to everyone, all at once.

I just adopted this strategy. We'll see how it goes.

This is where I am going to live:

9806 85 Avenue

It will be my own pad. Suddenly it is quite clear that it is the most wonderful thing in the world that I will live alone, work and feed myself, amuse myself with whatever projects I like, not answering to anyone, study and work toward competence in the field of my choice, talk to people I want to talk to. For the first time it will finally be my acknowledged prime responsibility to produce my own happiness and build what will be my own life. I think this will be worth the considerable stress and trouble, and the necessary contact with unpleasant semi-morons and other frustrations.

Something beyond nice

20 - 12 = 8 days

"For the intellectual, material comforts are relatively unimportant; what he cares about most is spiritual freedom. The strength of the Catholic church has always been that it demands the sacrifice of that freedom uncompromisingly, and condemns spiritual pride as deadly sin. The Communist novice, subjecting his soul to the cannon law of the Kremlin, felt something of the release which Catholicism also brings to the intellectual, wearied and worried by the privilege of freedom."

-Richard Crossman

La Petite Vie by Allen Edwin Butt

Love is the kindest
expression
of absence—

Or else
is a day
by the river,

in which by
motion
it becomes clear—

there have been
in an hour an
infinite train

of rivers, & which
did you want
to see? One

comes slowly
to realize
there is no evading things

(the heart will have
its way, though
its will go

unfulfilled),
& there is no shame
in this.

The pleasures in this world—
soft breeze, soft
thighs, a bit of music,

words that make
a good sound—
suggest when taken

whole that the
thing
the body longs for

is not & never has been
some petite mort,
a true thing

known to grass
& the elderly man
with a kind word

in greeting. And
the woman saying
that she is about

to come, as in
going to arrive—
at last to fill

the body held so long
by stewards
in her name.

She's lovely.

My new address is close to the bus, the colleges, and the river valley.