endless and everlasting.

I feel so stupid for ever falling for him. What an idiot I must have been to think he was worth more than a minute of my time and energy.

The way that I am looking at it, life couldn't get much better than this. Every day, I am running around frantically trying to figure my life out, slowly realizing my infinite potential, feeling more myself than I have ever possibly felt. Every day, I am astonished at how much my undergraduate experience has changed me. I am so grateful for it every single day.

And so, as I said before, I feel so dumb -- like such a dumb little girl -- for ever forgetting my own value. I will never let it happen again, and I will certainly never be with someone intellectually, aspirationally beneath me. Just wanted to clear up that point so everyone knows I can laugh about it now. It didn't take too long to stop hurting, and I never plan on hurting on an unworthy person's behalf again. So there!

Also, today I went to a graduate programs fair and I had a wonderful talk with an admissions adviser at NYU's professional school. More doors open as I close this huge, heavy one behind me.

squint your eyes and look closer.

the height of pretentiousness.

I recently purchased a Nikon D40. Well, it's no D90, but I got what my money (credit card) could pay for. I'm mostly just messing around with it, but it has reminded me how important the camera is in our culture. Photography is hardly an art form in most people's hands, but it brings people together. It captures and conveys, it distorts and crops out the unwanted. A lot can be said about the dangers of photography, and certainly a lot will continue to be argued. But as a personal tool, it makes people smile. And it makes people happy to be where they are. Sometimes it's the only reason people get together in a beautiful place. Sometimes proof is all we need. One morning on a tour bus in Ireland, I was so hung over that I got out at every stop just to be in a picture. Then I stumbled back inside and tried to fit in five minutes' sleep. In a way, I'm okay with that.

Thesis is coming along. Page 20.

We watched Martin Luther King, Jr.'s March on Washington speech in my communications class today, and right in the middle, my eyes filled up with tears. I want to start something. I want to be so completely passionate as to give my life for a cause. I want that equality he dreamed of, that we are still so far from reaching. What can I do? I am hardly eloquent. I am one woman. I want to bang my head against the wall. Thus the tears. Because forty years later, we're still frustrated. We should be frustrated. We should be making change happen. Instead, I'm in class, talking and not acting, thinking and not doing. I'm part of the problem, yes.

I studied for my midterm with a guy from my English class today. It was nicer than studying alone. Especially because of his British accent. He knew how to pronounce all those British-y words in Victorian novels that I always mess up! Quite an accomplishment.

So now you understand.

there's barely time.

A few days ago in my English class, my professor read a passage from "Walden":

"...Not till we are completely lost, or turned round... do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he wakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."

And this, perhaps more than any other reason, is why I am not so scared of my fast-approaching graduation date. When Zora Neale Hurston arrived in New York after having lived all her life in the rural South, she took that big step with the mantra "No job, no friends, and a lot of hope" playing over and over in her head. I plan on not planning anything except maybe a country, a vague understanding of the program I will be going on, and a place to sleep for the first few months. But if I get lost along the way, I will not be lost at all. I will be finding my way back with every move I make.

If there are several accepted modes of femininity, several ways that women are socially allowed to look at their lives in America, I cannot find my place in any of them. I don't feel comfortable taking a job I know I could get in New York and working until I get so stressed out that I have eight ulcers. I don't feel comfortable following in any man's footsteps. I don't feel right going home and being near my family, no matter what that means. I certainly am not ready to settle into eight years of graduate school. I am not a writer. Stop trying to make me a writer. Whatever job I want to assume when I have the experience to assume it has not yet been created. My father is an entrepreneur of sorts. He has his own consulting company, started a record label, created a motorcycle photography website, does whatever he wants.

I realize that those types of things only happen with time, and I am more than prepared to work hard toward an unknown goal for many years. Because I know that all of that work will lead me somewhere - will lead to slow incremental self-discovery.

So I plan on getting hopelessly lost before I find myself again. I am tired of people discouraging me from such ill-planned ideas. I look at the people who critique me, and I feel sorry for them. Because what they have in life makes them live, but it is only a means to an end, they are not truly happy with what they have made of themselves -- especially many of the women who criticize these ideas.

For a woman to stand up and refuse to assume her role as a future mother, future corporate ladder climber is a bit threatening, I think. I refuse to participate in a system that is inherently unequal. When I get back, maybe things will be different, maybe my perspective will have changed. But I am more stubborn than most people realize.

everything i do.

So my computer monitor broke yesterday. And I have a lot that I want to write about that has nothing to do with my day-to-day boring updates, but I can't until I back up all of my thesis research.

and in the morning.

I wish Larry Burrows were still alive. I would have had a major crush on him. Oh well, he can be my Jacques Cousteau. I haven't had a picture in a while, so....



Things are good. Page 13 of my thesis (actually page 16 if I put it into Times New Roman, a font which I hate and can't work with until the final copy). I have written 3 pages today alone. I read in a book somewhere that I'm supposed to congratulate myself on every small victory, so that's what that's about.

I think each step of life is important, and I am happy to be taking the step that I am taking right now. When people ask me how I am, I always say I'm good. And that's because I am. It's a reserved, controlled kind of good that any self-directed woman would be proud of. My roommates and I sat in my bedroom last night, talking about men. I told Nina I would only want to be in a "right now" relationship if it all. The truth is, I'm not even sure I want that. I've never not cared so much. It's nice. Then again, if I really didn't care, would I be writing about it right now, you might ask? I think coming to terms with my apathy is different than the apathy itself. I'm surprising myself, and I think that's a good thing. Do I make any sense? Do I ever? Yeah, no, probably not. Especially since this really cute guy reading a long novel totally caught my eye at Literati the other night.

Can't wait to leave the country for a long long time. Might move to Greece with Leslie in any case. Or might keep to Ireland. Finding out about Japan and the two-year program on Wednesday. In my heart, I know I am a romantic (not in the 'love' sense (I am not that at all), but in the poetic sense), so I will be building this up for a long time to come.

Why can't I stop rambling?

Back to work. I'm at the Charles Young Library. It is dark and dusty and there are spiders everywhere. I'm pressed up against the wall on the fifth floor. Maybe I should just leave. I think I'm going crazy because of the place I am in, not because of my own inner turbulence. Something about ecocriticism.

thursday.

Going to Tennessee?

filled with gray.

I can no longer think in a linear fashion, so instead I am going to throw random things out here onto the Internet.

Ernesto Laclau is coming to UCLA on Friday to discuss post-Marxist theory and I can't go because I work at a magazine on Fridays that promotes the kind of positive social change that ultimately reinforces the socially inscribed class system and the idea of paternalism to its fullest.

My Uncle Tommy passed away this morning and my dad is flying to Tennessee for the funeral. I can't go. He and my dad were very close (he's actually my dad's uncle, my grandpa's brother, but we call him my uncle). I can see his face in my mind, hear his laugh tinged with East Tennessee goodwill. I see his house on the river bend, the porch swing, the old Chevy he restored in their dirt driveway. I think of his patio and the paddleboat and the family reunions and the potato salad. And I can't help but think of how everything is falling away, my connection to my southern identity. My grandpa has passed away, one of my grandmas has dementia and can no longer remember my name, I missed my cousin's wedding (still very upset about this), my Uncle Tommy is gone.

Tennessee is inscribed in me. But what happens when my family no longer owns the land? What happens when I can't afford to fly to see my cousins and aunts and uncles and my grandmas? I guess the most honest answer would be to say that I simply cannot let that happen. No matter how deeply I want to travel the world, I need to come full circle. And not in the single lifetime sense, but in the deeply ingrained family ties and blood connection and hundreds of years old psychological connection to the landscape kind of sense. None of my friends from California seem to understand this. My parents probably know exactly how I feel, not that we ever speak of it. To move away from Tennessee is only to move away bodily. It is always with you: the guitars and the harmonicas and the jokes and the cold chill wind in the winter and the barbecue joints.

There is a homesickness in me deeper than I understand. It's not a homesickness for the Bay Area, but for the place where my family actually really truly belongs. And that place is not San Francisco. It's on that old dirt road leading up to the house my grandpa built or running down the hills or even at Wal-Mart. It's strange. Very strange. Perhaps my thesis on the Southern connection to place, which became dislodged and redefined in the Great Depression through photographic and journalistic representation is my way of exploring this hardly understandable, certainly inexpressible nostalgia.

I was going to keep going, but that really took everything out of me. I will miss you, Uncle Tommy.

on my mind.

I danced for four hours last night, and all the sudden when the DJ picked the beat back up again, I understood the Sherwood Anderson short story "Adventure." I felt more myself than I have felt in years. It was defiance and comprehension and simplicity. I have never been more happy to be nothing but myself. All of my friends were there and the DJ was amazing and everyone was dancing and, oh, I was just so happy to be grown up. Not that any of that had to do with the short story, because that short story is depressing and fatalistic. But I understood what it meant to walk out the door uninhibited and run and dance in the rain. I'm still not so sure that I understand what it means to crawl back inside and hide my sexuality, but I think that's a generational thing.

once a cheetah...

Last night was my birthday, and last night was also wonderful.

In other news:

• My hair is now red. No more blonde for me for now.
  
• I have almost finished the first section of my thesis.
  
• I am a bondage librarian. Apparently.
  
• A Nikon DSLR is in my future. Today.
  
• I know where to find all the guys who are my type now. Kind of ridiculous. I ran into the creative, funny, dark, mysterious boy mecca.
  

just say no to graduate school.

I know I had my heart set on Ireland. I know I wanted green hills and salty air and Norman architecture.

But I think I may teach English in Greece instead. I could learn Greek, learn to like kids, make money, and meet a charming guy distantly related to Alexander the Great... or something.

I'm also applying for a year-long teacher assistant program in Japan, where I could do all of the above except with Japanese and the charming guy would be related to legendary samurai warriors... or something else.

I'd spend my days on islands steeped in history and delicious foods. I'd stop being vegan. Life would be so simple and easy.

Then after all of that is done, I can return to Ireland, where maybe I could even work on those organic farms for a few weeks like I've dreamed of.

Perhaps these plans may never happen. Perhaps they will be compromised and changed and transformed and I will end up in India or London or Puerto Rico. But I do know that the prospect of such things - the availability of such adventures to graduating students - makes this quite definitely the most exciting turning point in my life so far.

the lights are out.

I think of Brian sometimes when my days are long and when I watch too many romantic comedies. Oh, who am I kidding? I think of him at least once a day, probably a hell of a lot more.

I think of other people too, though. I think of Tyler and the mysterious way he made me lose myself for a few weeks. I think of Mark and how that only ever could have happened in a foreign country.

I think of how I could have done without most of the relationships I’ve been in, if I could just erase everything but those three weeks, that one night, and Brian.

Brian won’t speak to me anymore. It doesn’t matter how much I think of him. He’s right not to talk to me. I’ve broken his heart ten times too many, and, apparently, I’m incapable of doing anything else. So until we both find other people to make us happy, our relationship will be a continual torture. A euphoric torture at times. But painful and fucked up nonetheless.

At the end of the day, though, when Wilshire calms down and we have to turn the lights on in the living room and when we start to get ready to go out on Friday and Saturday nights, I think of how much I needed this. How much I needed Tyler to show me – completely unintentionally – that I will never settle for anything again. That I shouldn’t fear being alone. That finding love and feeling wanted, that won’t solve anything.

I think I was in continual relationships for so long because I desperately wanted to lose myself to someone else. Just forget who I was and know that I was in love, so my identity would come second. Then, a few months in, I would realize what I was doing and I would run as fast as I could (which is pretty fast these days), try to discover myself again. But then I would end up back in another blissful beginning, forgetting why I ran away in the first place.

Now, I have thrown all that away - recycled it, actually. This year will be about myself. I will be leaving Los Angeles in 8 months, hopefully never to return. There is no point in losing myself because, after those 8 months are up, my own identity is the only thing I can be sure of. I think that most days this makes me very proud. It makes me happy even. Nine times out of ten, you will see me with a smile on my face. Whether I’m at work at the magazine, with my friends, out at a party, running in the morning before the dry heat comes and swallows up Brentwood, dashing around campus trying to write my thesis, or sitting in class pondering gendered narratives, I’m quite content with my accomplishments.

But every so often, I catch myself thinking that I want those romantic comedies. And that’s when I think of Brian.

But I also think of him because I know no one else in the world who understands me quite so acutely as he does. Then again, Catherine and Heathcliff understood each other as one soul, and they destroyed one another’s lives.

So if I just leave it alone, just leave myself to my thinking, everything is more than fine. And I know that one day I’ll wake up in New York, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Galway, Knoxville, Chicago…. And I’ll look back and be grateful that I forced myself to exist for no one but me. That is, after all, what a good feminist should have done from the start.

magnetized.

Slain, by your zirconium smile
I was slain by your olivine eyes,
Slain, I was lying in piles, hoping shovels would cast me in.
Furnaces burn everlasting, black tattoos of you on to me.Furnaces burn everlasting, black tattoos.
Burn, brand my memory, black tattoo of you.
Wash me with your mouth, brackish bright water from your eyes.
Homing pigeons fly to hover by your window white and shy.
Homing pigeons fly to hover by.
Spill my ashes to the wind.
Ghosts gather what they found
Now we can struggle in the web.
We can struggle
With white spider stars come down.
And night blowing black from the ground.

Laura Veirs