the habit of being

I was reading an edgy fashion magazine with pictures of Paris at a bookstore that was not at all trendy when a middle-aged man’s ass knocked my latte. Jennifer was with me and she’d been crying all day, though I’d stopped before noon myself. My red broken umbrella (one of a large collection of broken umbrellas I need to get rid of before I move) was on the table. The man apologized and I mumbled.

This is my day-to-day life, which makes me wish I could forget writing altogether and do something decidedly more intriguing. I think I’d like to get very drunk and take soft-focus photographs of beautiful naked girls sprawled out on orange couches with good lighting.

We haven’t taken the magnetic poetry off the fridge yet. My favorite line says “men leave those who elaborate.”

I’m reading Flannery O’Connor again. She was born under an hour’s drive from where I was born, and published her first short story when she was my age. It’s pointless to make any comparison. She wrote all the time and otherwise spent her time with ducks and peacocks. I ordered her letters and her essays yesterday, in hopes of an epiphany.

My mother swears that I am happiest and most beautiful when I am concentrating hard on something, working, thinking. But I think I’d rather just take to the tub. I’d rather just drink wine and make love on the floor and never have to choose anything.

I was explaining to Mitsu at three in the morning how I cannot stand to make any choices that affect others. I don’t ever want to impose, to enforce my will on someone else. I often will refuse to choose a restaurant for dinner. When asked, I will say I just cannot do it. When pressed, I will be preoccupied with trying to make the choice that I think the other person would make, rather than the one I would make were it just me. But in trying to give someone else what they want, I am completely disregarding what they’ve told me outright that they want - for me to choose for myself. I have a horribly selfish way of being unselfish. I don’t see how I am tolerable, sometimes.

It would be nice not to have a real job, to be one of those people who just do little projects and pay rent by some seemingly magical force of charisma or luck. I could make an overpriced zine from time to time, explaining the expense as survival. Maybe I could live on coffee and piroulines, or find an old matriarch to teach yoga lessons too, or attract a very generous lover. But I suppose I won’t do any of those things.

I am sick of myself already, this one week at home, but I still don’t want to be an office girl. I’m bored, and I don’t know what to do. Three years out of school is so many.