skyscraper

the scaffolds
erected
long ago
on idle streets
now bustling
with driven dreamers

constructing
(deconstruct then
reconstruct)
in oscillatory fashion
like motorists
switching radio presets

the berlin wall
exists
here, seperating
fate & destiny.

recovery

i did not expect to cry, curled up with my daddy full of animal-free food in the first quarter of the cowboys game, but i realized that if the world still exited as i expeted it to a year ago there wouldn’t be room for me on that couch,
i think i cry because we’re more of a family than we have been in years.

eating in

i am
sitting,
watching
this girl
i know tie her
hair
into a knot
to keep
it
off her neck,
and
the girl is me

three glances

i watch you through the corner of my eye as you watch my hand through the corner of yours, you note its position: right of my leg with nothing in the way of your hand.  as if my hand has eyes that see you, you look away. you allow your eyes to rest on my hand. again, you look away.  you allow your eyes to rest on my hand again. you look away.  i watch you through the corner of my eye as you watch my hand through the corner of yours, you note its position: right of my leg under your hand.

realizations

i just reread my entry from last night when i got home from steves and realized that i don’t know if i write this with the intention of it being read. i don’t know. a lot of things have changed about how i write in my blog since i started blogging so many years ago. for one, i know that now i censor a lot more of what i write. a few months ago i told j that self-censorship is suicide.. but lately i find that publishing what i actually think can be like murder for the people i know who read it. or sometimes its other things. like i have really sincere feelings for someone or about something and don’t want to have them read it before i say it. i’ve also noticed that as a pretty popular idea in the head of jess. i think i used to rely a lot on the truth being poured into my blog. so i wouldn’t necessarily fill my date’s head with all of those coo-ey “oh i like you…”‘s that anyone else would because i could just blog about it and they’d get the idea. so i think there is importance in saying things outloud now. but even then, sometimes i don’t. but i don’t really say them publicly if at all on my blog either so i think i just, in effect, don’t communicate these feelings to people at all. which is probably unfortunate. but i guess that it happens and its something i’m going to have to deal with and get over. a good portion of it is just a really natural fear of rejection of my feelings. cos the conversation could just as easily go
   me: “i like you, like whoa.”
   him: “oh. whoa. i was gonna treat you like you’re not a real person and never return your affection.”
as it could
   me: “i like you, like whoa.”
   him: ::giggle, stares at shoes:: “i like you, too.”
and sometimes i think i’m just not willing to take the risk. and i should be. i know that i’m shorting something in the long run by not being all open about things as they are now but i need to sort through the intensity of newness.

i also decided that i believe my last two relationships were like rose relationships (because when i call something a cocaine relationship it means something intirely different…) and they looked so pretty in the beginning but they wilted fast and pricked a lot. so i’m hoping for an orchid. which is my favorite flower.

i’ve found that astrology love matches are pretty head on with my relationship patterns. very scary. although the sagitarrius-aries mixers ended for completely different reasons the bases of the astrological predictions were true. so rock on stars. i’m gonna go see how close it gets with anyone else i’ve dated. hrm. what’s a january birthday?

rolling, so hard

i’m so glad that we’re not always held to things that happen that are bad. or not even bad necessarily or things that we would completely undo, but things that given other circumstance would have worked out differently.

i’ve been thinking about j lately. he’s decided to refer to my by my last name instead of jess because of something about it being difficult to call me jess because that reminds me of who i was to him or something. but i’m not too comfortable with it. i guess i just feel kind of dehumanized because of it. like he can completely make me in that “just one of the guys” mode that i never was for him. because my last name is totally an identifier used by the guys. i’m not going to make a big deal out of it. if there’s one thing i learned because of j, its that fighting over stupid shit is stupid and you just shouldn’t do it. it’s either worth it to bring it up or you just kind of take it in stride and say “hey whoa, it hurts a little when you don’t call me by my name, name.. but i’m not going to be concerned about it.”

tuesday i had forensics practice until like 5:15ish cos they did all of these rounds of LD and then i decided to see if steve wanted to go out to dinner with me. i basically didn’t want what happened over the weekend to turn into this amazingly awkward relationship mitigator. so we went out to boston market and i had a lot of mac-n-cheese, then we went to washburn park and teetertottered. although i admit that people don’t go to washburn park only to teetertotter.

also, it snowed on tuesday and i was about the happiest camper in the world. lol. i went to kim’s for an hour or so after work and we played this great game with jewels that was kind of like sega swirlz for dreamcast. but cooler. cos there wasn’t that damn Curlz MT font. (geek alert). then i drove back to the dorms in the snow and practically skipped to the door because it all made me so happy. it was pretty awesome, i admit it. after kim’s i went to marcus’ party at the penthouse suites and had a good time. games with those boys are so much fun

i got to see stephanie and josh on wednesday afternoon. stephanie and i went to lola’s and had chai and pumpkin pie and she had coffee and we talked about everything going on in our lives which was really cool. i’m so glad she and i are always so great at being best friends. and we can just pick up where we left off and talk like everything happened in the hours between yesterday and today. josh and i are like that too. its always just he and i being friends and having a great time. totally amazing people. i think they’re wonderful.

wednesday was james birthday party as he was gone today (his birthday). i stayed sober as promised and that was great. i mostly stayed in the living room with whoever happened to be in the living room at that time. we listened to joanna newsom who was amazingly wondeful especially when cecily sang along. steve was there then too and we spent a lot of time on the couch and outside smoking cigarettes. i think i need to quit smoking socially. even if it was just one cigarette. even if it was a lucky strike. or even if it is a parliament. its time to quit that habit before it starts. time to be anti-punk rock.

thanksgiving was pretty good. i didn’t really grieve so much about my uncle as i thought i would. i got kinda teary on the couch next to my dad when he was sleeping and i was watching the game at my cousins house. it’s just a really tough holiday cos its always been my favorite. and i admit that i noticed his absence. but at the same time, i also noticed that we seemed to be much more like a family and this was one of the best thanksgivings we’ve had in years and i’m not too sure that these two facts are a coincidence.
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on the advantage

alright. i have three points to address in the lengthy blog of the session. thus, begin to get excited about reading about sleep deprivation, egoism, change.

alright i’ll start out with how amazingly tired i am. i don’t know what to say about it. it just so happens that i am completely exhausted. my suggested explanation is that i don’t sleep much or correctly anymore. that is, friday night i slept 0 hours. saturday night i slept 8 hours, sunday night i slept 5 hours, and last night i slept 3ish hours. whoa. you’re body really shuts down when its running on so little sleep. so here i am at work all completely exhausted. hooray for caffeine, doll.

next, egoism. j posted a definition of the word selfish and a little thing about egoism and how one is an egoist if they do not accept the beliefs of others. j says that selfish is “believing that one’s beliefs are absolute and that everyone should believe the way one believes.” encarta basically defines it as doing what is in your interests… i for sure uphold the values of egoism as a philosophy in whatever way shape or form. i’ll admit that i prefer rational egoism as a general social descriptor, but if people are going to buy into a theory egoism isn’t that bad really. the idea that what is moral is what protects you is a valid one. like whatever preserves your life and your pursuit of happiness is true. and therefore valid and moral. according to egoism. i personally like the philosophies of David Ross in The Right and the Good which discusses the value of a mixture between egoism and utilitarianism. i don’t like util because of the problems it causes for the minorities it would inevitable create. i don’t buy egoism for the problems it would inevitably create. but the mixture of the two, mostly based on Kant’s Categorical Imperative is relatively sound. it just makes a lot of sense because there are times when what is considered moral does not fall under the realm of Kant’s categories or the ultimate categories would conflict and Ross addresses this. therefore, i don’t think its correct to say that one becomes an egoist if they don’t accept the egoist thoughts of others because morality has so little to do with dictating the morality of others. or accepting it. i mean at the very worst a utilitarian may look at egoism and see that it possesses a lesser utility and wish for it to be eradicated from society. but even then. it doesn’t make them an egoist.

section 3, change. james had a long entry on his xanga that expressed his feelings about change and it made me think about how i feel about change. and how excited i get out of my element. like in washington dc. everything is so new and ready for me to conquer. in that good, let’s change the world way. and that’s what i love about it and about everything. and i know that when i look back at the way things were and notice they changed when i wasn’t paying attention, i still always think i’m living in the best. and that it can really only get better. because so far that’s all been true. i think this is one of the things that i truly love about myself.

i don’t know if i blogged about it when it happened by a month ago tomorrow morning i woke up next to pat and we had this long conversation about ourselves and love and other people and he was like “i just know that i love me” and i realized the same was true for myself. “i love me.” so i don’t let people treat me badly anymore. and i don’t do things that are completely harmful to me anymore. and i take control of my life and live it for the most of what its worth. and i love this. and i love me. and i love this about me.

i am seeing in me now the things you swore you saw yourself..

oh. so.

something so beautiful about cleaning in your favorite dirty pair of jeans and dancing around to the shins, oh inverted world, while spinning on the fun last night. i hope you understand.

like art could save a wretch like me

i’m hungover. from friday night. because i started drinking after going out to get thai food with james at 7. so i started to drink somewhere a little after 9. and i didn’t really stop until about 7:45 the next morning (saturday). wow. so much vodka. not to mention i had to be at the peace symposium at 9:00 am. or i was meeting marcus and cara at 9 am and i wasn’t sure i was going to be sober enough to drive back to campus in time.. but i was. so that was good. then i had to be at the symposium until 9pm on saturday night so i had to ingest a fair amount of safe stimulants to keep me up for the day (really it wasn’t that many. trying to stay awake when you’ve been working off of adrenaline isn’t as hard to do as one might think).

it was by far an interesting night. but i quit drinking at least for a while. that was just way too fucking much.

on the bright sides. the peace symposium was amazing like whoa. some of the best conversation i think i’ve had in a while and it was nice to watch everything develop and watch people learn. i think that the open conversations and debate were the best parts. it was just awesome. the food wasn’t bad either. although i wans’t too hungry at lunch.. i was able to scrounge up at least some veg food for dinner there and it was catered by the brickyard barn inn. which is good too. so it was a nice event. all-in-all.

after that, marcus and joe and i were gonna go to joe’s place at WUvill but when i was getting ready to get in the shower my rbother called and he was really upset because mom got drunk last night and he hates to see her that way cos she rarely does it and so i went out there with marcus and we picked the kid up and came back to hang out in my room for a while. then we went up to marcus’ room (just marcus and i) and watched his suitemates be drunk then we went out with tyler to smoke. and tyler who was trashed already got so fucked up so we had to take him back in to puke a whole lot. ick.

so finally after those adventures, it was time for me to sleep which i did. until this morning when mom called at 6:30 to yell about how i needed to bring devon home because he destroyed her cigarettes. and iw as like “not gonna happen. its 6:30” so she called at 10 and was still angry and i told her i’d bring devon home when i had time to and then we called her at 12:30 and she’d calmed down and was just feeling depressed about last night. so that’s why she said she’s not going to drink.

and i’m not drinking now either. at least for a while. at least not to get drunk.
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