the habit of being

CAPTURE, and do not deny, I promise myself before writing the following. I did resolve to accept the things I cannot change. Remember that.

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Write a couple words, scribble through them, repeat: this is how I attempt to convey my current situation. The situation, of course, is vital to all else, and I cannot attempt philosophy or even imagery (again) before I have set it straight for you. Weeks ago, I was condemned. I am serving an emotional sentence here; the prison is my mind, barred with something so intense it can no longer be called drama.

“What happens when a noun marries a verb?”, asks Dr. Enola Mosley on her grammar tests, I’ve heard. And the articles are the bridesmaids. What is public education coming to? (Emotional sentence, you see, it was a pun.)

Well, my computer was broken, and it is of no consequence to the story, but I was without a computer for a week and spent my time in the library. Before that, even, I fasted for 48 hours, nothing but water. I’ve been uncommonly obsessed with purity, lately. Eating, to me, seems highly gross, for all its earthliness and bother. Why is there no spiritual counterpart, as with other earthly pleasures? Can it really even be described as a sumptuous thing, food? So I didn’t eat because I thought I would be less gross for it. (I didn�t do it long enough to really see the effects in that respect, but I plan on pursuing the matter further at some time when I will not be expected to concentrate on much else.) After eating again, I felt rather ill. In a way this is all relevant, it is, I suppose, the scene - purity issues, eating issues, ongoing illness (since November and counting), isolation and library time.

I’d like my condemner to believe secrecy is no cause for suspicion, though I cannot even believe it myself. What is it, really, to keep things tucked inside? For me, exalt. And yes, at times, shame. Do I not deserve to hold on to my shame, clasp it to my breast, like all other imperfect children? Only it is not always so, and nothing is black and white these days, when I sit alone, alone, like a fourteen year old with fishnet on her arms.

snapshot: There are study rooms with gigantic chalk boards on the fourth floor of the Henderson Library. The walls are clear so that the people (myself included) surveying the shelves of books outside (I was in the Russian Literature section. I will only read Russians now.) can see what is going on. This reminds me of the Georgia Governor�s Honors Program, and I wonder if the walls are clear so that people won’t use the study rooms to have sex in. At GHP everyone seemed preoccupied with finding places on campus in which one could hypothetically have sex without being caught by the mob the state had hired to keep “Georgia�s finest young minds” from being wasted on teenage mothers and such. On the day in question, it was not copulation but calculus going on in the fourth floor study room. Proudly I exclaimed to myself that I knew how to do every problem scrawled on the big chalkboard. Indeed, I made a perfect score on my last test, and this is comforting, when it seems I have lost my mind, the dramatic prison. Math will always, always, be clean, even imaginary numbers. I cling to these tangibles, even when not so fine.

You see the state of things, when my violet (streaked with blue) aura can no longer be massaged.

But when a sweet, deceivingly normal girl (her hair is straight and dark, she is no willow) gives me a handful of ponytail holders, saying she worries the plain rubber bands I use will cause split ends, I am touched. Old men in Lazy Boy recliners think these types of things no longer happen - I mean that a likable girl (even a perfectly friendly one) might dip into her own private collection of coiffeur accessories, probably immaculately organized by color and texture, to save shorter, less organized hair (belonging to someone who barely notices whether or not said hair is brushed these days) from a fate worse than death (as it is, of course, already dead). These glorified elastics now reside in the middle compartment of my pocketbook, but occasionally still get forgotten in the shadow of my rubber band word bracelets (sensuous and envy are worn almost always), which seem to be around. The girl, T… I have let read some of my writing. She is to niceness what I am to condescension, and I admire that. Let it be known, I admire her for her sweetness and her dancing, for her generosity with hair thingies.

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A realization of late: Though I am so often occupied by thoughts of art and of science (see past entries, from when I had a goal, of some sort), the science of art terrifies me, while the art of science does not. All is well when polyps resemble flowers and lab technique resembles ballet. However, I happened to be looking through a certain “student’s guide to painting” the other day, as I should have been painting my own abstractly magnified house fly (an electron micrograph really - to tie in with the theme), and found myself shocked. Here were multiple pages on how one should lay out a pallet, as if the proximity of the colors to one another were absolutely vital. There are actually “schools” of pallet organization, yes, and it is quite the serious matter. The same holds true for brushes and canvas prepping. The act of painting itself is even more odd - apparently there are various steps of immaturity a painting simply must go through before it can reach completion. It is a process, you see. Now this all worries me, as I think of art in the context of the creative spark hypothesis, that one night or another something will click and inspiration will occur and all together there shall be light, from this light shall come forth Art. I’d like to think of greatness in this sense as almost a fluke, but I see this is not so, it takes work work work, and that does not appeal to my sedentary state. I want to believe creation is the easiest, most natural thing in the world. More natural even than simplicity, a concept that is driving me mad.

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“She has been in despair so often she has train tracks across her face,” comments my mother, calling me, yes, Anna. A joke.