It is to you that I turn right now, to you that I will confide. Diary, the sad fact of the matter is that I have no one else to gripe to. Nothing against you at all. You have served me well, treated me more than kindly, but sometimes you (or at least, I) just need a little of that human contact. Forgive me for thinking of you as a last resort, I was raised Catholic, I like to confess to a person, to unload my guilts, troubles by telling them to another person, to someone else, to just say them out loud verbally to another human being. The act itself solves the problems, calms the mind, absolves one of their troubles.
And right now, for my Russian Novel class I am reading Crime and Punishment and I feel so much like Raskolnikov these days. Amelia told our class that she had nightmares about the book - and I did too. Two nights ago, vivid nightmares about being Raskolnikov. The book is having some weird effect on me, where I experience it, passages as I am walking, doing things, living, not reading the book. The other day in the library after reading about his fainting, his dizziness, I felt so dizzy in the library, I could not balance myself on those high chairs, I thought I was going to faint and so made my way out of the library, the scary, bright light flickering place, and made my way home.
And anyways Diary, I digress, but you are used to that with me by now. Raskolnikov also has this mental load weighing him down, this guilt, and it seems that he desires to confess it. And I don't feel guilty, I just feel burdened, and so to you, I am turning to lament to. You will indulge my bitching, my whining because you have no choice in the matter, thank god. You will listen to me bitch about how I am forced to bitch to you, how this means that I have no one to bitch to, that I am lonely and that that is another thing that I can bitch about, be sad about.
Today, after my very long meeting with Miriam Wallace, I came home slightly depressed, wanted to bitch about my life, my confusion about its path, and I wanted to touch someone while doing it, to hold their hand and tell them the story, my story, to be indulged for a few minutes. And I have no one that I can do this with. Drew Geer was sitting on the couch, I sat down at the other end, a good distance between us, a distance where no body contact would be, could be made. And this was the closest I could get. I whined to Drew for a few minutes, and it felt so good, but it made me aware of the distance, of the spatial distance that I keep from people in general. How that now in this moment when I wanted to be close to someone, wanted to make physical contact with a human, how it will not happen.
And so now, I will hold the hands of this keyboard, will pretend that it is the same, and will tell you, my dear Diary what I want to tell someone. Will get this out of my system, off of that chest, so that I can move on to other things, the Social Theory paper that is due Thursday, the other school work I have to do, and the plans of saying Fuck You to school, to Florida, to hatching some grand run-away plan.
Actually, I don't know if I will tell you, I don't want to rehash all the details. I just want to whine. Miriam Wallace hates me. Not really, but it was not a very comforting meeting I had with her today. She seemed to forget all the things I had already told her, and was upset when I told them to her again, explained to me very condescendingly how an advisor/adivsee relationship works, that I tell her I'm dropping or adding a class prior to doing so. She told me that I had alienated most of the literature faculty. I thought I had just alienated Schatz. Appearantly, Dimino is not so enamored with me either. We talked about Schatz, her telling me that anyone would be upset if you told them what they had studied for four years was pointless, was a waste of time.
She told me that when Schatz talked to the committee about me and when Dimino did not say anything positive, she was completely blindsided and could not support my application to a lit major. And my hatred of Schatz is growing into an unmanageable ball of fire that I am going to creatively redirect into the form of a venemous letter concerning his seven-year faculty review.
We talked about the logistics of being a Humanites major, about being a General Studies one, about my contract. She rolled her eyes when I told her I was doing an IRP with John Moore, talked about how the subject of it was not his discipline, and that I could have benefited more from getting a lit faculty member to sponser it. I told her about my discomfort with the lit faculty and how inaccesible they try to make themselves, how John Moore is just as capable, if not more so, to lead the IRP simply because of his being outside the discipline.
I am going to unsat the semester if I unsat Russian Novel which is a very likely possibility, in which case, I think I am going to drop out of school, and move to a city, possibly NY, get a crumby job, and eventually finish my degree at some school.
She asked me if I liked the field of literature, expressed some doubt about my interest in it, and wanted to know what I thought, and I could not even muster a decent defense, a passioned argument. I have been broken. My love of literature has definitly been tempered by recent events. My literature spirit has been thoroughly crushed by the literature faculty here these past weeks. LOB, when I told her my story, said that she had never heard of someone being rejected by a division. Christy told me that she had never heard of anyone being rejected from a literature major. And even Rebecca asked me how I got denied from being a lit major. And all of this sort of makes me feel like shit, like a big idiot, who is not only not intelligent but not even competant. And yeah, it's a little bit of downer, makes it hard to smile and say, yes, I love literature, I love this field. When Miriam asked me that question, I meekly gave some answer, one barely audible, not at all confident in its verbalization - and I really don't understand when I became the most horrible student ever.
The world of the mind, of reason is telling me that it does not want me and perhaps this is why I am searching for physical contact today - believing that hopefully I can find comfort, meaning even, in that, in a hug.
Thanks for your indulgence Diary,
Charlie
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