The price of admission: love
Devil's gateway. Sensory deprivation chamber. Cattle herding. Highschool.
Oh, this from the girl who (not so long ago) said something like "Highschool hasn't treated me that badly." Oh, I said, I know its bad sometimes. It's just not that bad. It could be worse. I've managed to fairly avoid the hell hole parts of it. I watch (bemused) as hardcore counter culture types act like martyrs. I watch (bemused) as the party barbies eat their hydrogenated oil products with three inch laquered nails. I watch (bemused) everything. I am not a part of highschool.
(Oh, yes I am.)
I don't like it though. I don't like it today, and I wonder if I ever did like it. The boys leering at the girls, the girls not really minding. "I reeked of alcohol."
---
Today, I am trying to be a girl. I am trying to escape the androgyny I feel has set in around me. I am wearing a pale red (flowered) skirt. It is winter. I realize that. I'm being a bit rediculous, but I'd like for this skirt to act as a gesture towards my ambiguous gender. I want to be a girl, goddammit. Despite the fact that I have hips, tits, and lips, I don't feel like a girl. A real girl.
Alright. Enough bitching. When I was a kid, I thought I was highly androgynous. My mother made me keep my hair shorn short because I was deathly afraid of the hair-dryer. (I have recently taken to blowing dry my hair and rather like it.) Sometimes when I tell people that I had cropped hair until first grade, people ask me if I was ever mistaken for a boy. Its so strange, because it never occured to me in the least. I look at pictures of myself as a kid, and I never was a tomboy. It was always clear what my gender was. No one ever asked my mother, or no one ever confused me.
The only gender switching episode I can recall was the time my parents went to Austrailia. For six months my father was gone, and for two weeks my mother was gone with him and we were left in the care of college students. A vegetarian and an animal activist. I loved them. There was one day though, that they dressed my brother in my clothes.
(This is a really pointless story. I don't really care about gender. It isn't on my mind. Nothing is on my mind, I just feel like talking and writing.)
---
(the study hall nazi's are about... if this cuts off abruptly that means I've run for it. I'm not supposed to be online)
My head is aching. Last night my parents threatened to take away the internet connection. "You spent all day talking to becca and foster," hissed my mother. She spat foster's name out. I don't think she believes he exists. "Instead of doing our physics work," said my father. "I've been trying to get you to do your work all day, and what do you do? Waste it typing email."
I made a few weak excuses. Non-excuses.
I said "Let me finish this email, and I'll go upstairs and finish my physics." (and the connection went on the fritz and I had to reboot)
My father came into the computer room, as I was on the cusp of sending the letter, and nearly wrenched the keyboard away from me.
"You've forfeited our sympathy." (He didn't say that. He might as well've.)
---
I'm home from school now, and it is real and it is cold. My cat Sampson is missing. Sometime yesterday we realized he was gone, and he hasn't come home yet. I still have some hope he'll come home, but even if he doesn't, I wonder if I'll care. I feel like I'm far too wrapped up in my own head to really care about anyone else.
I always wonder if I'm capable of feeling grief. I tell you though, once I came home from school and thought my tabby cat had died (for a millesecond.) And in my head I went "You evil girl! You are not sad! You are not crying! You are not even haunted!" When he died, I was inconsolable.
No, I am capable of grief. I just need to know what it is to grieve over. And my kitten Sampson has only been missing since yesterday. He is not dead. Now, perhaps I should feel a little more concerned than I do. I don't know though.
---
"The air, the precious air, pressed against my face" - patti smith.
Yeah, that's how I feel too. I felt air caving in against me. I rasped and gasped and hoped that by hiding in bed it wouldn't make it fester. (it did, though.) I kept hoping, I kept waiting, I kept watching for it to go away. I got to a point where I didn't cry anymore, I just breathed heavily and frantically. And tried to sleep, because (i thought) sleep would make it go away.
I was trying to get the demons in my brain to leave me alone, and thought that if I slept they would find someone else to bother. The more I slept, the more I was just dying. Giving in to the oppresive air. Giving in to whatever was so crippling in the first place.
You know the strange thing about being depressed over Christmas? I have this sense that it could've happened at any time, and it was just a matter of fate, or luck, or bad fortune that my air caved in December 22nd. Everyone says "It's a hard time of year, that's why this happened to you." I don't think I buy that. I keep searching for some source of all of this, and can't find one. This is not because I am overstressed. That's just a factor. I get the feeling that there's something dark lurking under my skin.
---
I turned off the computer (keyboard went on the fritz) and curled up in a bath tub. I lose track of time and space in the bath, I take off my watch and shut down my brain. I felt myself melt and felt myself forget everything during the day that had upset me: my school, my lecherous thoughts concerning my calculus teacher, my kitten, my parents, my depression. I emptied my mind. I felt so clean.
I crawled out of the bath tub and into my bed, and sighed and inhaled the sheets and my elbow and that pervasive scent of soap.
Last night I came upstairs and was horrified to find my bed covered in dowels, metersticks, physics notes. I started to cry, I stood in the corner of my closet mentally cursing my bed for betraying me. The safest place I have! My refuge! How dare it give in to school - that evil. I came from my bath, and saw my bed bathed in the warm low light of my room, and my heart melted. It was all so soft.
All I can say is this: I am a virgin, and don't really care to do anything about that for some time. I can't imagine letting anyone into my bed. It frightens me; what if I had sex and my bed was no longer that haven? What if it was like letting physics notes invade that space?
I mean, maybe it isn't such a big deal. And maybe I shouldn't be so connected to physical spaces. (sigh)
I am very clean.
2000-01-03, Pointless, tired, aching entry.
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