Joan was quizzical...

Lately I've been losing myself a lot, and remembering who I am a lot. (This post is going to be candid and unflowery, so brace yourselves.) I've been sitting in a lot of coffee shops, and I made some random-NYU-musician-friends last week who wave at me on the street while rolling their upright basses and and readjusting their berets. They like my taste in literature and smile and play music for me. They're kind of dorky, too, and listen to lots of jazz. My kind of people, my kinds of places.

I went back to John's Pizza with Harry on Thursday and remembered how good their pizza really is. The last time I ate there I must have been at least eight. I remember what a shock it was to my eight-year-old self to realize that the paintings on the walls were not, as I had believed, masterpieces of the modern era, but crappy lazily-painted splurges of off-colored vigor applied tastelessly by an underpaid waitress decades ago. I'm not even sure what the painting depicts. I used to think it was a magic cave with waterfalls on every side, or a fairy glen underneath a mountain, like a gollum-lair but happier. Now it just kind of looks like a grey cave. Hmmm.

And earlier on Thursday there was a jazz concert at school, and Bob got to prove once again that he's not really alone in the world, and I remembered why I love jazz. And then on Friday I walked through the Village and stood in the presence of the greats and conspired with my darling Oona about our future lairs as queens of the literary revolution, once we escape our furious parents and the tyrannical nuns. I started spouting beat-poet facts and Ron Singer said, "Where do you keep all this excess information? How do you remember all this stuff?" and I blushed a bit. That's not a good sign, I told myself, especially coming from him. Still, one can't help but love him. He's really quite brilliant.

Saturday was an affair unto itself. Matt and I decided to go see a band called ...And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, but we weren't able to get enough tickets for anyone else, and we flipped a coin and determined to sell our tickets and paint the town. We tried to go to Lucille's Bar, but the wait was too long, so we went to Starbucks for a while and then rode an eight-person circular bike through Times Square with a loserish-cool starving stand-up comedian driving. Eventually we met up with some other people and had a nice night, and I subwayed home with LK and fell asleep contentedly.

I guess what I've been getting at is that every morning I wake up feeling like a different person. I tried to explain this to a certain sweet mexicali rose, and she misunderstood what I was saying a little, mostly because I kind of tried to express it in terms of stereotypes. Actually, I was pleasantly surprised when Harry said something in this vein that was exactly what I'd been thinking. One day I'll wake up and really feel like the true-blue hippie I once was, and another day I'll just feel like wearing black and sitting in a coffee shop with a good book. Some days I'm honestly angry. Some days I just want peace. I think it has to do with the seasons changing... but all my life I've been stereotyped, and I still am, but these days I don't accept the way I'm stereotyped as much as I used to. I don't really have a particular dress style, and I don't even really like what little style I do have, and I don't really know what I want to say about myself because... I guess I just don't really know who I am. That's why I treasure these little moments of reassurance, wafting jazz music and coffee and musicians who smile and books I enjoy and things that move me. They remind me of who I am. Maybe that's what my late materialistic bent has been about. Harry and LK have both noticed that I've become a little obsessive about prom, and other similarly unimportant material things. I think I like things that I can form opinions about because the reassure me that I have opinions, that I'm a solid, real person with my own personality and taste. The other night at Whole Foods I ate sushi with Harry and discovered something I hadn't known about myself and was frightened. We ran into Tanya and I tried to hide my red eyes, but I think she saw. That night I dreamed that I was standing at the edge of a precipice and looking down and realizing that the ugly gorge was me.

I keep thinking of the scene is Slaughter-House Five where the main character hears a song and is so jolted by the wave of emotion that arises in him that he eventually passes out in the middle of his own birthday party. When he wakes up he realizes exactly how much he doesn't know about himself, sees for the first time that there is a huge ol' complex hiding beneath his cheerful exterior, that the things he thinks are irrational about him are actually all facets of a great dark all-consuming thing.


^^^I wrote that this morning. After that I took a shower and realized (again) while I belted Dusty Springfield that this, here, these people, this blog, these hands, this face is (are) my life. Then I went out with my dad and bought some clothes at a thrift shop and had lunch with Greg Sans-Tongue and went to a bunch more thrift shops and bought a bunch more useless crap. Greg played my Ovation and I reorganized my closet and got rid of a lot of stuff that I didn't need. (Anyone want some clothes? I'm serious, I have far too many! I like giving things to people, so please drop by!) It was very comfortable and cozy. We had chinese food and I put on a dress I'd just bought and picked up some ice cream and he went home. Oona called and we chatted cheerfully about our weekends, people we knew and didn't know, the Lit Mag, clothes, parties... normal high-school stuff. And somehow I ended up here again, finishing the post I wrote this morning and feeling a lot more self-knowledgeable than I did yesterday. All I have to do to remember who I am is read something I've written, I guess, or think of a conversation I've had, or something I've made or chosen myself. Anything with my opinion in it. Maybe it has to do with my never having been allowed to decorate my room the way I wanted to or leave my things lying around as a child. I couldn't choose my own clothes, either, although I learned to arrange them artfully out of sheer necessity.

Erm... I don't know how to end this now. I'm going to work on my one-act now. (Matt teased me about naming my character after Joan Baez and changing Elena to Ellen... yeah...)

Peace. I love you all. May you be saner than I am.