last night to p

my reflex would be to ask if i'm pathetic. whether you think i'm pathetic. and that's another hole, the one i've dug myself. and here is where i tell myself that it doesn't matter what you think. and that i have to trust you, and you have to trust me. that i'm getting somewhere with this.

funeral home

now i'm just heading directly towards crazy, and i have to be stopped. i'm not only mourning and wallowing in all my past losses, but what's fucking retarded is this mourning of anticipated and future losses, before i've lost anything. when the fuck did i become a mortuary? enough of this shit. really.

holes

I’ve said I’ll come out of this stronger. I really believed it. But now I’m having my doubts. What if I sink deeper? I’m fighting and fighting, but maybe I’m trying to do too much alone? Maybe I’m not fighting hard enough. Maybe it’s as simple as being with people. As simple as going out and switching to a normal day job right now. Like in the next two weeks. It doesn’t even matter what. I suppose I’m supposed to be strategic at this age, with all the waste that’s already been perpetuated, but I can’t wait around to make the ‘right’ move. And classes don’t start for another two months. I look at a typical day here, and think, holy shit. I’ve really isolated myself.

I’m in this place and I have to work really hard to attempt connection, and it doesn’t seem to be happening. Not really. I work at getting out and making friends, and I’ve met a few nice people – and giselle is strong; but there’s something missing too. I can’t stop trying, I know I could be trying harder, but at what point is there supposed to be a payoff? And at what point is it just no fucking good? I think that’s what makes that loss with J so hard, because, even with that borderline’s idiosyncracies and flaws there was connection there, on many levels – or maybe I’m fooling myself on that too? I just know that it felt good. It felt good having someone in the other room while I read in another, it felt good to be challenged and to challenge, it felt good to explore the city and make it ours. Maybe his disappearance reveals that there’s nothing here for me.

I’m so embarrassed to keep writing about him, but it’s bigger than about him and his absence. there's no doubt that his vanishing left a vacuum, but I think his presence may have allowed prolonged avoidance of other issues. I think his being there just masked this larger hole that was there all along. And with him suddenly gone, here it is, black and deep and in my face.

So i have this fucking hole, and i don't know what i'm supposed to do with it.
do you fill it up? with meaning you construct? or is that the same as covering it up? or do you just let it be and go about your business, just marking the location so you don't fall in? or do it gets smaller and less forbidding over time? staring down into it sure as hell doesn’t seem to be helping. Or maybe that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do. maybe you have to stare it down until you stop crying. Or until you just accept it.

but everybody else has holes. what are they doing with theirs?

questionnaire

this is an exercise for those of you who know me, in getting feedback and dialogue on what my next steps for work might be. i found it on a gay lawyer's blog from which i've directly lifted the questions, for now.

i don't know if this idea is good or bad for me, but if it has some merit, i'll revise and tailor it to make some conclusive use of it. of course, i can answer these questions for myself, but i was curious what people who know me have to say. it's put in this format so as to solicit direct and constructive response. there's nothing wrong with stating what my limitations or weaknesses are because everyone has them - they don't make me a stupid or rotten person. listing them simply helps me to focus on which of those issues can be improved, and which of those are perhaps a mismatch and from which i should redirect my energies:

* What are three things I do really well?
* What are three things I don’t do so well?
* Based on what you know about me, what job or experience have I liked the best in the past?
* Based on what you know about me, what job or experience have I liked the least?
* What are three things you can imagine me doing?
* What’s something you can’t really imagine me doing?
* How do I get in my own way?

if these questions help, i'll expand on them to include more specific ones relevant to particular choices i've been mulling over; or to make certain i'm not idealizing a new direction. the point is that i stop isolating myself in all these different aspects of my life. the point is to open myself up for discussion, as well as to expose myself to people to think whatever they're going to think about me and for me to get over it.

istanbul by schjeldahl

he goes in for the show, but ditches it for istanbul's layered city

[it's also a concise story of the art biennial form, [as opposed to the super-money art fairs]], and i love how he describes the one work in the show that impressed him: "The piece is an immense minaret, in cast aluminum, that is propped on a steel framework in the attitude of a Scud-like missile. I’m not sure what it says, but it scared me."

how do you get to do this?

i'd love to work with kids like these.
look at their cnc page, under 'information' is a simple summary of the technology.

raining still

went to a talk by ellen lupton, who was thoroughly charming and funny, with M who told me over dinner that she almost became a nun - twice - but couldn't deal with the blind obedience and bathroom sharing.

something saved

this is the house where my mother's uncle lived in kfar vitkin.
it's one of the few photos that was on a camera whose images i was able to download before it was stolen.
most everything else was on the iphone that's gone.

12:12

godammit. Am I ever going to stop missing him? Am I ever going to stop being haunted? I’ve been calling the end of J. a ‘breakup’ just to use a conventional term. But it’s really a ‘vanishing’.

I can’t even be angry about it. Or I’m past that. I was treated appallingly towards that end, but it had nothing to do with me, and it’s something I’ll probably never understand. I mean, how do you completely sever from someone from whom the last time you were with it was in their arms, like a baby. Or from whom the last time you called was with such pleasure and ease [this was a huge step for him].
How does it happen that a week later I'm talking to a different person? I call, he picks up, and in a tense voice says he’s in the middle of a disaster work crisis and will call back in a minute, but he never calls back. Ever. In one week. After seven months of getting closer to a person. I will never, ever, understand that. And i squirm at how I let myself bleed, in phone calls, in emails, with no response, while i was trying to grasp what was happening. But of course I'm not sorry for any of it.

And then there are the obsessive drive-bys of his house I've been doing. At first they were comforting, like being close to him, and then just obsessive; and now maybe less frequent and obsessive, but more of a curiosity or game, to see if anything changes. Because, for the past month and a half, NOTHING has changed and no one is home. His car is there, parked in the same fucking spot, in the same position; even at hours when it shouldn’t be there, it hasn’t fucking moved, and obviously no one is home, even though the car is. Recently I go back just to see if anything has changed, if the car is gone, or if another one has come, if the shutters have been opened, or if a light is on. I have to stop this, really, but I let myself indulge. Now I just want to see that car move or I want to see it gone. I want to see a sign of life or change.

All I do know is that he struggles with something he can’t control or navigate.
And I know that he’s extraordinarily disciplined and guarded and in need of control. And that he has the constitution and ability to shut off and cut out, mercilessly, those things that cause him pain, or disturb him – at whatever cost to himself or others. This I’ve known. This is how I know I’ll never see him again.

And I’m missing him even more in this land of idiots with no sense of humor, that I find myself in.
But you know, there have been some very good things to come out of this miami misadventure – though, they won’t add to up to shit if I don’t start putting together the things I’ve learned here.

And how many shining people do I need, really? Just a few, even if we’re surrounded by our idiot kingdoms – giselle at the school, and me with the group, and paul, even if it’s just for one evening, in the atrium.
Here we are.

group

I drove home last night so upset and disappointed with the group therapy.
So much so that I took about three wrong exits – which alone is alarming.
I went into it very positively, especially after reading Yalom’s book, and came away completely questioning the authority and judgement of the therapist. And also of the group. If group is supposed to be a social microcosm where you test out your behavior, then does the superficiality and dumbness of it reflect the world in which I’m doing it [Miami?]. Is all group therapy doomed to be stupid and unchallenging here?

The real stuff happened out in the parking lot, where I approached this woman in the group who was being ignored for some reason that evening. She’s the only one, that I can see, who has a high level of awareness and understanding of her condition and is on mark with articulating her feelings, and in responding to others. I’m most sympathetic to her, and I was disturbed by how her issue was constantly sidestepped by the therapist, and wanted to know if there was something she wanted to say.
In short, her issue was quite important, a traumatic event that had happened the week before, that should have been discussed, especially in light of all the dumb chitchat and extraneous items that ensued, apparently with no control, under a therapist who couldn’t or wouldn’t rein in the superficial.
And then all these questions came up - about why D. was ignored 3,4 times? does the therapist feel in competition with D? is it because she’s no longer coming in for private therapy? Is it because the traumatic incident is related to something the therapist has an interest in only speaking positively about?

For me, the real value of this kind of therapy would be to express my disappointment, what specifically I found problematic, and what I want to be getting out of it. The real test for me would be whether I could challenge the group, directly and critically, not be afraid to be crashing the party of a limp and bland group of cheerleaders, which may even include the therapist. But these are not the brightest or strongest people, as far as I can tell. How would they take it? And there’s the therapist and her ego. It could completely blow up in my face. Fuck them. This is my time and money. It’s all of our time and money, we all may as well get something out of it.

11:15

p thank you for being there yesterday, for being there all along.

it's strange how our emotional world has a life of it's own, how each day is different and you can't predict what will emerge from that place; for instance today is another difficult one - this one brought about just because i miss him - profoundly - i miss what he meant to me and the feeling of intimacy, and of what was good in him;
and i'm so sad that he'll never be a part of my life, ever; and that he never trusted me enough to share the pain/difficulty that i could see he was struggling with
.
but one thing i have learned is that it is possible to navigate that emotional world, with your actions and your thoughts,
and that it's such a complex choreography of both willing things and letting go