Naked Truth

I feel like my heart is half-in, half-out of the water right now.
It can't decided to swim or stay dry.
I hate this indecision.

I feel like I am stuck on these feelings of "maybe something better will come along," just because Jarod isn't the stereotypical "steamy, sexy gay man" that I've become so accustomed to in recent bouts with my digital fucks.

I can't see myself deserving to be liked by anyone, but then I'm giving myself these ridiculous ideas of what I should and shouldn't be "settling for" when it comes to standards of beauty.

I fucking hate my surface level, vain, shallow self sometimes.

Looking and Looking

I feel like I'm not letting myself be satisfied.
Then again, aren't I supposed to be hard to please?
Isn't there some maxim that goes "never settle, never be satisfied" or something like that?

I'm really torn between feeling like I want to find something to calmly, relaxedly grow comfortable with and used to...and thus be contented.

It's evident that Jarod likes me.
I'm flattered by that.

I feel like some moments I like him while at others I am getting this painful sense of dissatisfaction. Like once again I'm getting into someone only because they showed signs of affection first and I feel the flattery of a longing touch.

During French class a couple of days ago I was attempting to capture some of the residual feelings from my reactions to the previous night (Jarod and my first date) and wrote something I find to be prosaic but very true.

"I feel inept in attempting to write down what it is that I experienced last night. I feel as if I stepped into a scene I thought I had memorized only to find I was in a completely different play." - Tues. Nov. 27, 2007

I guess I owe it to my literary honesty to explain what that previous section was referring to.

On Monday night Jarod picked me up to go find me something to eat after having a long day of class, work, then class again.
I was looking forward to spending time with him in person because we had had a really great phone conversation the night before.

We talked for a little over an hour and it was very smooth and involved. We both had meaningful input and laughed and I felt like I had a very clear, witty command of my verbiage.

I felt like a live and in person date would go much the same way and, in serving my hope of gaining trust and openness, I was very unguarded in my topics of conversation and personal disclosure.
I thought that if I made the point of being open and figuratively naked in front of Jarod he would experience the anticipated relief of knowing that I wasn't afraid of him knowing the intimate details of my own life thereby feeling liberated to exercise candor in his own self-disclosure.

This was dead wrong.

I found that after I broached the subject of past relationships and sexual mistakes Jarod began to visually shrink down and close off as seen by his self-contained retreating body language.
I immediately halted and he began informing me that he just wasn't ready to talk about such personal information.

I was a little flabbergasted.

This method that I had come up with- yes, it was a tried and true method- had failed me.
It was like I had gotten so deftly used to playing the part of the "first date mold-breaker", the "guy you could instantly be comfortable and open with," someone "everyone can easily and dependably trust."

All of these hoped for, and in essence, assured results were all but actualized by the time I was finished wolfing down my chicken sandwich.

As Jarod told me of his discomfort I felt the blood drain from my face. It was like my stomach just decided that it wanted to eat me from the inside out.

Everything was going wrong.
I was ruining a perfectly good opportunity.
I was burning a bridge before I had even crossed it.

Day 2 or 3

Something of a painful thick surrounds my body.
Inside and out.

Every motion feels like I'm pulling my appendages through gelatin. Nothing is easy, simple, or untroubled.
Everything about me just wants to curl up and let the tension pulse around me until it's through chewing on my bones.

I'm looking ahead right now.
Michelle is coming to pick me up and we're going to Rose's on 23rd.
I almost thought too far ahead and lost the excitement just from knowing that it would end at some point in the eventual future.
I had to mentally back up from the edge, thoughtstep by thoughtstep.

If only I knew some secret pathway where I could guide myself along its mulchy, soft, limited snaking wanderway.

I feel left out in the misty cold with no one to blanket me other than myself.
This will pass.
Perhaps.

Stabbed In The Kidney With A Blunt Object

It simply must be allowed for one to love his setting.
To embrace the lives he has constructed so carefully and finitely.

Yes, I'm materialistic.
Yes, I'm vain.
Yes, my idealism is filtered by a healthy amount of skepticism (sometimes I am seen as too imaginative, too faithful, too hopeful).

Yet I am happy with it.

I'm going to eat my processed foods.
I'm going to text message.
I'm going to check my Myspace and (God forbid) Facebook.

This is the life I have chosen and I am through with feeling the need to compete, repent, or silently, cruelly ridicule.

Be aware of your present self in order to revisit this point of reference once you have gained a better sense of maturity...yes, maturity.

Wisdom follows experience when combined with analytical thinking and comparative logic.
This is a concept of irreducible complexity.

The Point Of Willful Return

There's so much going on.
We're all just being together.

Do I want to be with them?
Do I will myself to just be and not be with?

They feel what I cannot feel and yet I find myself in a place where I do not want to feel with them.

With is so strong.
I remember telling Lance on the balcony in Anchorage that "with you" was one of the most powerful two-word utterances possible.

I continue to learn, more and more, day by day, what that really means.
Maybe I've come around to that place where I am beginning to see what, who, where I should and should not want to be "with you".

I have been so constantly searching for any and all ways I could be "with you" and now I am beginning carefully, thoughtfully filter.

I just want to go home.

Here's the Frank and Honest Truth

How can I be confronted all at once by two people with so much perturbation?
It's like that one-

(your sense of humor makes me want to scoff and gripe to others about your face and voice)

-coaxial moment where two people both hit their stride in a walk away from a house in exchange for a bar.

This is going to be the most interesting situation seeing as how I've brought together very oddly same and different people.

I need to make myself take a break.
I feel like everything is crowding in on me and beginning to fall inward on my head.
Even my arms get scratched up and dirtied by the debris as I try to protect myself.

I'm having this incredibly Woolf-esque moment of wanting to be alone to "write my first line."

I think that missing my writer's event this evening has soured me...quite a bit.

Collections Agencies Call Too Often

This is to every dinner interrupted by that annoying ring of impending awkwardness.
To every unidentified cell phone call answered out of curiosity immediately followed by an unmatched regret.
To every sinking, hungry feeling in the pit of a hostess' stomach when their table assignments turn out to be a large, potentially party-spoiling mistake.

I don't care a fig for your product, your perspective, your attempt at convincing me that my life is incomplete without you.

I want to curl up in a corner padded with 5 pillows and a little, too-tiny afghan.
I want to read the books I keep telling myself I'm going to delve into with unwaivering focus.
I want it to be just a little too cold so my form reserves all of its energies for the betterment of my sustenance.

You pompous, touting idealist.
Don't make me sick to my already disquieted stomach.
Be frank about your points and don't dress up your unnecessary thoughts.
They're extra to me, they're not wanted.
I already said so.

Get some Ritalin and leave my head and my hands alone.
Make everything about your posture submissive and original, you imposing bastard.

(I feel this odd sense of triumph as I spill these words with a decisive poise...like I've been waiting all these weeks for the moment of expounding and it has, indeed, arrived)

Your obliging nature is cut short by your disagreeable taste.

Peeling Back the Veneer

I'm really quite frustrated right now.
Granted, missing the writer's event this evening didn't HAVE to happen but I felt this odd condescension from Chris, as if he was saying, "what's the problem with you? Just go."

I didn't like it and I know I probably (most likely) projected it onto him.
But now I'm just being lame.

Traci is just now coming into Portland and needed someone to smoke with.
I'm looking forward to seeing her.

I'm also very happy that Anna is here.
I know this whole social mess is of my own construction but I kind of feel overwhelmed by all of it.

I think this financial aid money is going to provide me with a temporary but much needed sense of release.

I just need to tell myself to stop actually spending it.

I'm glad I'm writing.

Saxophones and Empty Fountains

As I set out, once again, on the all-too-familiar route to the place I call work I found myself wanting to pull away from everything.
To pull my veins back into my own body and let my lifeblood recirculate in some cheap, not-as-real warmth.

I just wanted to stay where I was so I wouldn't sink any lower.

I saw a man playing a ramshackle ballad on his saxophone, standing on a dry platform in the middle of a dry fountain.
He seemed almost as unsatisfied with his art as I feel with mine these days.
He kept halting to frown, shake his head at himself, then start again with another unpredictable, sad trill.

A woman with her child paused at the top level of the dry fountain, listening to this sad swan. It was as if she found someone who was just a little sadder than she and that made her just a little happier.
She was searching so intently for understanding, for companionship, that she was almost desperate in her want for this, her child, to understand. To feel. With her.

I wanted to stop, to take part in the feeling.
To once again reunite with the flaming leaves on the fall-kissed tree branches.

But on I walked.
Steady on to that foul restaurant.

Steady on to yet another evening of genuiness wasted on random, temporary nobodies.

I just want a somebody but I feel guilty.
I feel like I want to want nobody. I want to frown at myself, shake my head, and keep trying to play an original set of notes.