"The more you suffer, the more it shows you really care"
--Self Esteem, Offspring
This journal, for the moment, is going to be a few separate ideas that have entered my mind in the past few days. Five ideas, three divisions. I will expand on each of them as I get the time. The original thoughts (in case you're reading this after I finish) are the first sentence of each of the five paragraphs.
***
Traveling alone always makes me feel older and more mature, makes me think and decide. I come up with plans that will fix my life, get my priorities in order, recognize all my flaws and shortcomings and find ways to overcome them. I decide to exercise, do my work on time, get out more, start my games as soon aas I get back... as soon as I get back to campus, the epiphany is over. The plans fall by the wayside, things go back to being the way they were. My resolve dissolves when confronted with my life's current state. It has inertia, my life does - a life at rest tends to stay at rest, and whatnot.
***
A round trip ticket is a magic talisman that proudly declares that your life has no room for chance or adventure. It's a thought that I had on the train to New York. You're basically promising yourself that no matter what happens over a certain period of time, that time has a proscribed end. That you refuse to allow chance or change in your life, that if anything interesting occurs you can tell it to fuck off and leave you alone. They depress me, in a way. Whenever I buy one, it means that I am going to return myself to the status-quo. I will be no different after the trip than when I left on it.
The problem is, I want adventure with a guaranteed minimum comfort level - admittedly low, but still unrealistic. I want chance and all the other exciting things. I'm willing to take the risks, but only to a certain danger point. And that point is way too high. I want to be able to drink every day, eat every other day, sleep under a roof every night, be physically safe, and be able to clean myself when I so choose. That's all I want. Everything else can fluctuate, be put to luck and circumstance. Where I sleep is unimportant, how I'm living, the condition of clothes and belongings, whether I really have any belongings. Then I can wander, throw myself out to drift on the wind. But those few things can not be guaranteed to me. And so I keep things the way they are, safe and sterile. I continue to buy my round trip tickets.
***
I've had the strangest feeling this weekend that I've been training my replacement. Taking Daniel around, explaining to him the way the city works, why it does, filling his head with whatever odd bits of trivia I can think of... The point of the exercise is his eventual transformation into a New Yorker. But the more I did of that, the more I felt that the differences between us were dissapearing. His New Rocks frighten me more than I would like to admit, and every band I get him to like is a blow against my individuality. I am slowly wearing away at my own usefulness. I know that this is not true - you don't have to bother telling me why I'm a wonderful unique person. I know the reasons. But we've all had feelings that just won't match up with what we know in our heads.
I'm trying to hold back from a full Catharsis, but it's kind of difficult when your Shadow has this much Angst to work with. Watching Sasha and Daniel together isn't fun for me in general. But as time goes by, my Shadow wears me down with constant reminders of the way things used to be, things we could be doing, things they are doing. You can never trust what your Shadow tells you, but it's too smart for outright lies - none of it is anything I haven't thought before, and every time I point out that they're sitting right next to me (making it impossible for them to be off somewhere else cuddling and fucking) it responds by pointing out that they wish they were. Damn lying Shadow. It is lying, right? Right? Sigh. Every comment, every image is more emotion for it to work with, more fodder to pull more Angst out of me. I can hold Catharsis back for a while, I know. But it's hard to ignore the voice in my head that keeps telling me that I'm just torturing myself without any reward. I mean, why do I have to be the one who stares awkwardly at the floor while they kiss? Why do I have to be the one who wishes his headphones were on at full volume, or that he wasn't in the cab at all, so he doesn't have to listen to them talk about all the sex they're planning on having? This isn't There's Something About Mary - I don't get the girl at the end because I did the right thing and ignored the way I felt. I just hurt myself.