Ordinary Days

To set the scene: I am in my apartment in New York City and it is almost 9 pm.  Music I do not recognize is playing on the radio – a violin. Schubert maybe? My apartment smells like cigarette smoke, my dining table is clear of paper and pens and could actually function as a dining table rather than a desk.

I’m brooding.

This afternoon, I went to Brooklyn to meet a friend to see Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. I wish I’d seen it alone—there was hardly anyone in the theater and it was the kind of movie where other’s people’s opinions are best unheard.  Devastating is not too harsh of a word.  And I mean that in every sense of good and bad.

Supposedly the original miniseries that was shown in Sweden includes an abortion.  If that had been included in the cut I saw today, I don’t know if I would have been able to stand it.

“I love you in my own imperfect and selfish way…and I know you love me in your own pestering way.” –Johan to Marianne

Tomorrow I am going to see Figaro – I’ve realized that I do like company at the opera. And so I’m going with a friend. A comedy will be good after today’s entertainment.

A few minutes ago, I came across this blog: http://limagequotidienne.blogspot.com/

One portrait of one person every day for one year. Pretty awesome.

I need to some lightheartedness in my life.  But the thing is, I don’t enjoy light as much as I enjoy the kind of shit that keeps me awake at night. Call it masochism. I’ve always been drawn to a kind of sadness.  Not the poverty-stricken, hopeless, drug-addicted, hungry kind of sadness (I think that is unbearable); it is the emotional struggle of people that sucks me in.  The trouble we get ourselves into knowingly, as if we do not have a choice.  And really, do we?

I remember a conversation I had with CC about A.  I was aware of the flaws of character, his as well my own, but I said to CC, “what am I not going to do it?”  And I think I said the same thing to her about some other event in her life. 

Do you turn down newness out of fear?  Does that make you a smarter person when a year or two later, you are unscathed? Or does that make you a coward who has shut herself/himself into your world, which needed a little shake up anyway?

Four years ago, I was well on my way to being a permanent supporting actor in my own life.  It seemed to me that everything was happening to everyone except me.  I was the listener and the supporter, the one to provide the snarky one-liners—the Rosie O’Donnell/Carrie Fisher to the Meg Ryans of the world.

I hope I am not on my way there again – it might seem like a strange thing to say because when I think of my life, I realize it’s someone’s idea of interesting. I have a friend who would even go so far as to say it’s a sophisticated life, vaguely intellectual, something to be desired. I could go out every night of the week if I wanted and I would have the appropriate clothes to wear for each occasion. I even have a stalker.  (Well, HAD.  I sent the email asking him to go away.  More on that later.) And I feel myself getting smarter and better.  Is that a crazy thing to say about oneself?

But I’m locked inside myself, I have chosen to be quite visible but no one is really allowed to see me. I don’t talk on the phone, I don’t talk to A. I’m on retreat even as I move forward.  My life feels a bit like a game of pretend – I enjoy it, but I realize its limitations, its artificiality and I know that it can’t go on forever.

Am I going to have to make a conscious decision to end this way that I’m living at the moment or will I find my way out without my even knowing?

I’m reading Lark and Termite. But tonight I don’t know if I’ll get anywhere with it.

This has been quite an ordinary day and while I’m not in crisis mode or anything quite so dramatic, I am restless.

Sleeping with Mahler

I lie awake late into the night and fall asleep only after I find Mahler on my iPod.  Sleep is getting closer, I know, when suddenly I notice that the music is too loud. So I turn the volume down gradually, lower and lower still until finally, the iPod is powered off. This is  not a bad way to be an insomniac.

There is nothing to report about Thanksgiving.  It was not a joyous occasion or a disaster--I had feared both.

I am reading Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, trying to read slowly because I hate for these things to end. It's actually quite a lovely book.

Christmas promises to be a big soiree this year.  My mother tells me that my Aunt Lydia's youngest daughter and her family will be there.  So will Aunt Lydia's son but he and my mom have always had a freakishly close relationship (and I do not mean of the incestuous sort).

So these cousins are actually also aunts and uncle.  I have been thinking about that a lot since I had that conversation with my sister.

I sent Professor Dick the go away email today and he responded quite graciously. I hope this means he will not contact me anymore.

JV called this afternoon to discuss her love life.  She slept with her ex and her current in the same day. Two women and she loves them both, she said.  I don't know what she's talking about -- I think loving one person is hard enough. 

JV and I did not communicate with each other for at least 8 years and now it is as if no time at all has passed. She has always been my one Filipino friend even though I think there were times when we've hated each other for reasons neither of us will remember now.  

Her brother killed himself in January.   Last week, I thought about that again and again and I could not sleep.  If JV were to read this, she might be angry with me but it should be clear that no one knows this address.   I wanted to say that maybe this desire for sex has something to do with death.  

That happened to me after the abortion.  I wanted to have sex even though I couldn't feel much of anything. Will yourself back to life, little girl is what I seemed to be begging of myself. Life will keep on going. Maybe that is what JV is doing. 

This weekend, I'm going to Brooklyn to see Scenes from a Marriage.  Hopefully this Bergman flick does not cause my mental health to deteriorate. Tonight, I hope to sleep long and to sleep well.  I think I'm a little sad.

Foreign Films and Dead Composers

Last Saturday I was at Film Forum for a screening of La Danse and while waiting to get into the theater, L and I were talking. Well, I was talking about my old roommate, the gay German lawyer with Poland Syndrome who also happens to be one of the funniest, smartest, most maddening, most self destructive people I know. And for whom I also happen to have a deep strange love. He has a way of getting what he wants, fucking it up, and then starting over.

T and I met in 2004, I think.  Love at first sight in a fringe neighborhood Brooklyn brownstone. He drove me insane when we lived together.

Anyway, the short of this story is that I was describing this crazy man in detail and a woman behind us was listening to me the entire time. At first she was embarrassed and tried to conceal her amusement. And then she abandoned all pretense and laughed gaily at my stories.  And I performed for her.

As we were getting seated, this woman told me that I should write a book. I think people meet me and expect me to be funny all the time when the truth is that I'm not very funny when I write.

Nice compliment anyway.  I'm not knocking it.

And also got me thinking about being a fame whore.  There is something of the performer in me.

So far -- no A and no M. I miss them both but not nearly as much as I would thought.  I'm mostly talking about A.  I don't miss him that much.

I have to admit that earlier today, I wrote something about how when one insists to vehemently on something, it means they are lying.  So maybe I'm lying.  But right now it doesn't feel that way.

Last night I got a bought a book about the opera. Just a reference guide to the more popular ones.  I'm pretty obsessed with music lately -- I wake up in the middle of the night and fall asleep listening to Mahler.

This morning, my last memory was of listening to a piece called Blue by Michael Galasso from In the Mood for Love (by Wong Kar Wai). I hate his movies -- there is something flat about them, too stylized, interminable. But they are always the most beautiful things to look at and listen to.

My favorite WKW movie is Comrades. I liked everything about it. God, that was a long time ago.  What a strange memory.

The writing is going well lately.  I write for work, I write for this, I write for the novel. If I were to do a word count, the number might be pretty impressive. But I'm writing for three discrete areas so it doesn't add up to much.  Still I'm rather proud of myself.

I worry about money a lot lately. When I was not working, I hardly thought of money at all. But now,  I do mental calculations (poorly) all the time.