Januaries 23

(or, The Ghost of Jan. 23 Past)

2000

     A week or so ago, I realized that part of the reason I slouch is that I'm taller than most mirrors.  Recently I've been in a state of nihilistic despair which I just now, sitting on my toilet with diarrhea, attributed to the confusion of a new life.  Having discarded my nonchalance as E— discarded me, I am left confused as to how to conduct myself.  K— visited for the weekend, and love her though I do, I spent the whole time in a sort of a quiet neurotic frenzy.  I have reread Pale Fire for my senior essay.  Perhaps in sympathy with Gradus my stomach has engendered within itself a liquid hell.

     Hopefully the articulation of a sorry state will falsify it just as all truths of life fade to fiction under the Gorgon's gaze of biography.

2002

     I find myself addicted to Microsoft Minesweeper.  My God, what a waste.

2005

     I decided that the irrational attention I'll sometimes pay to my Friendster profile must have something to do with identity issues.  The Friendster profile is supposed to be a little sketch of you or a part of you, the picture you want to present.  And I think that my inability just to sit back and say, "Sure, that'll do," has everything to do with an inability to decide what I am or to decide that "what I am" isn't a problem that needs solving...  I'm like, "Should I have just one favorite each?  Should I list every band or musician that I like?  Should I select the ones I think are my three or five or seven favorites, or maybe three or five or seven that just illustrate the range of my taste or the focus of my taste or just what makes my taste different from your average person's taste?"  And this ties in with what I was thinking lately...about music that you really like...  Dylan Ebdus in The Fortress of Solitude says something about realizing when he allowed himself to realize it that his favorite music was x, y, and z.  And this (along, now that I think of it, with an article in Vice that was supposed to be a list of the top 10 bands that everybody claims to like but actually doesn't) made me see that so much of our "favorite" stuff is more a stance than a preference—or I guess really the point is that it's more an effort to define yourself than it is taste.  (Or is that what taste is?)  So I found myself wondering what music I most enjoy listening to, separate from context, style, irony, post-ironic posing, and so on.

     But before I get sidetracked by my desire to answer that question, let me make the point I wanted to make by raising that question: much of what motivates me in filling in a "Favorite Music" blank is less an effort to let people know what my favorite music is (who cares, after all?) than it is a belief that writing down the right bands will (a) convey something essential to my identity and (b) demonstrate that I'm incredibly awesome...  All my recent Friendster futzing is evidence, in other words, of a basic insecurity about my identity...

     The real story here is less the lame whodunnit of what my favorite music actually is than it is the story of my for some reason spending mental energy trying to figure that out.  Why do I care?  (Answer above.)

     The scary part of it is that I wonder whether I long for absolutes in an authoritarian way: I want to glom on to some group in order to define myself.  "I like this band!"  Is it really so different (in its motivation, I mean, not its effect) from "I support the National Socialist movement"?

     ...[That paragraph] works nicely as a segue into the other topic I wanted to address: politics.

     Wait—am I done with identity?  Well, when are we ever done with identity?

     Fuck politics.  I don't want to write about politics right now.  Except to say that I was reading something—New York Review of Books, I think—and reflecting on the fact that Bush seems to have won not so much in spite of the weight of the facts as because of the irrelevance of the facts, and the Tom Lehrer lyric came to mind: "They may have won all the battles, but we had all the good songs!"

Jan. 27, 2000 [a kind of epilogue]

     I spent thirtysix-odd hours in the DUH^a infirmary, with an IV hydrating me through my arm.  Today I was able to eat a banana, some toast, and a bowl of milkless Rice Krispies.  Illness, as I believe I noted after my last vacation at DUH, has the positive characteristic of simulating rebirth.  When I went to bed last night in Pierson 1486, I felt as though the semester were just beginning, which is good, given how unpleasant things lately had seemed.  I'd lost something, and here's my chance to get it back.  It's not backtracking, it's Nabokov's spiral—"We can call 'thetic' the small curve or arc that initiates the convolution centrally, 'antithetic' the larger arc that faces the first in the process of continuing it, and 'synthetic' the still ampler arc that continues the second while following the first along the outer side."

     So the return of DUH brought along with it a younger Y—, stepping out from a group of Pierson freshmen to hand me a tape of Blue (side A) and Ani DiFranco (side B), and me at 18 with a Walkman and pneumonia, hearing, "I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some," and knowing she did...

^a I believe that (a) this stood for Department of Undergraduate Health and (b) this was no longer actually the name of the thing, but everyone called it that anyway.  Ah, college.