All the small moments (1108) 2005-04-07 ( Enter your search terms Submit search form Web murk.diaryland.com

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I think the clearest indicator of the type of person I am is represented by the fact that pinupandgun's messages in my notes section made me happpy. Smiley, undiluted, happy.

I got my hair cut today. It's shorter now. I suppose that's not much of a surprise, but I'm always moderately shocked by how different I look with slight alterations to my person.

Anyone who saw me in drag for that murder mystery thing or dressed up goth for that concert know what I mean. Even taking off my glasses makes me look and feel differently.

I think people are poorly represented. Humans don't seem to be able to fully take in who someone is - it's noticible when you ask someone to describe a person they've seen. Beyond hair color and gender, most individuals have trouble.

People are such conglomerations of invisible emotions, motivations, and thoughts. Their lives are reliant on past events.

I have done things I'm almost sure no one would have expect me to. I still do things that go against what is expected of me.

I mean, perhaps there are things I wouldn't do twice - I wouldn't do some things that I have done now, for example.

It's all so hard to even talk about. Everyone's lives are so multi-layered and infinitely more complex than we can ever understand. We know other like we know a book by reading its jacket. We have summaries, foreshadowing, major events, a premise. All the small things are never thought of or imagined.

This comic sums up what I feel. All the time that makes up a life are forgotten, reduced, trivialized. How much of my life is sitting in front of a cathode ray tube, looking at words and pictures I may never see again, and no one else might ever see?

How many seconds have I spent writing these entries? For what purpose? Is it an instinctive grasp at immortality? It sometimes feels that way.

That feeling is worrying sometimes. These entries are foot notes to my day in many cases. They don't talk about what I've really done today. They talk about my thoughts, things I'm sure hundreds of others have already realized before me.

My day went something like this: I woke up late, in the mid-afternoon. I can't remember exactly when. Three or four? I had a bowl of cereal. I played DotA with Transporter and some other online folk. We won, I was on the Sentinel team and played Leshrac. I crashed shyne-of-iel's computer at the very end of the game, on purpose. His graphics card doesn't like Leshrac.

I wrote that earlier entry. I got a haircut after my mom and ate a big bowl of rolo ice cream. Jason went to train with my dad. I had some chips and salsa. Alex came over to use my computer to submit a computer assignment. We didn't read the instructions properly and we spent about ten minutes trying to figure out why something wasn't working. Eventually, we got the Java straightened out and submitted the program. Jason wanted to watch Red Dragon on 15. It was creepy so I went upstairs. Alex played Half-life 2. We went downstairs and Alex played Fable. I convinced him to play Mechwarrior 2 with me. He beat me. We switched to Halo. I chopped him up with the sword, but he killed me with other weapons. He went home around 3:45. I came up here and started this entry.

I've written most of this entry with my glasses off. I'm wearing a pastel blue sweatshirt with dark blue shoulders and collars, with the word CANADA block lettered onto the front, also in dark blue. I'm wearing the same black jeans I always wear, and I still have my March bus pass in my pocket.

Thinking of today, I'm left thinking of previous days. I feel a compulsion to share my life with you. After all if I don't tell someone else and I forget, did it ever happen?

Did I ever write in here about the time Kat and I made rainbow Jello for her class? We ran upstairs in between layers and fucked and kissed, then cursed the egg timer that told us the next layer was ready.

What about the time my cousins and I were lying on a boat moored the dock at our cottage and my mom came up to the dock and started rustling a bush with a broom while growling? We were all so afraid. I picked up an oar and was actually ready to try to fight the bear so maybe my cousins and Jason could run.

When my friends and I were at the cottage, Alex and Sandi drunkenly climbed onto the roof where Kat and I were sleeping. Again, the oar is a reoccuring theme I suppose. I was ready to fight off whoever was going to try and hurt us. I had a panic attack that night, after the danger was passed (when we realized it was Alex and Sandi), and Kat brought me to the cottage. I remember Chris trundling past us, lying o nthe living room floor, and getting a midnight snack - some cake?

I've catalogued some conversations that made me feel like I was the type of person I wanted to be - some with Mandy, others with Tori or Corinna. My conversations over ICQ with Corinna tell a story of two years of life, however limited. Our fights, our apologies, our discussions.

Sometimes, when I do something simple, I'll suddenly experience a transient feeling of continuity. I wrote about this a month or two ago - I stepped outside and it smelled different. It must have been melting snow, or the timbre of the sunlight, but the air reminded me of air. It reminded me of being outside, of spring, of all of the previous 18 springs I've experienced. What I mean is, sometimes I get a momentary sense that this has been done thousands of times before and it links me to all the accessory feelings.

You've all felt this at some point, I would imagine: a smell that reminds you of childhood, a song that brings back memories of carefree love... anything like that.

It's this primal memory, and imprinted remembrance of a sensation, of a perception.

I feel lost in my own memories sometimes. It's the feeling you ahve right after a relationship when you cling to all the good memories in a futile attempt to make them stay.

I wonder if I'll look back on writing this entry some day. Tomorrow maybe? When I reread it? Or maybe in ten years I'll suddenly remember at the oddest time. Or on my death bed (assuming I go quietly)?

So many little memories.

Square gameboys, all big and clunky, with green screens and 4 AA batteries. Looking for lizard skeletons in Florida. Riding our tricycle as far as we dared. Tom Clark falling through ice into two feet of freezing water. Of clearing drains barefoot last summer. Of perfect orgasms, perfect completion. Of laughing D&D moments. Of fights, of crying, of CAPITALIZED SCREAMING ONLINE. Of childhood crushes and childhood cruelty.

I need to take more photos, create more still moments in time. Almsot every photo brings back a memory or two.

There have been times when other people's actions have affected me so strongly I had the wind taken from me. Finding out that a girl named Serena smoked. I walked home in a daze that day. Learning about small secret things, secret tastes and experimentations. Learning about huge life-changing events.

I feel like I could write about this forever... in some ways, maybe that would be a good idea. I'm not sure if I'll ever reread any of these entries. I find the earliest ones, at best childish, and at worst, horrifying.

There are so many secrets we share and secrets we can never admit to. There are things I know about other people that possibly no one else in the entire world knows about. Some secrets are held by one, other secrets are held by groups of friends.

WELL! This might be rather fitting symbolically but I accidentally erased half of this entry. I can't even clearly recall what I was writing about.

I want to be different than I am now. I'm tired of self-pity. I am not tired of darkness, fuckwords, and cynicism. I'm just fucking tired of sickly smiles and self-pity.

I'm going to follow up these three photos. I'm going to go to that movie, finish these essays, study for exams, get out of my house.

I will achieve and I will accomplish. My life means only what I read into it, in the long run. And in the very long run, it means nothing at all.

I can't cling to these failing memories. I can't risk disappearing with them. I have to go out and make more memories, pile them up, shore one memory up with another, until it's a nigh unmovable fortification of past.

I used to write about stepping off the edge, committing mental suicide. I think all this time, I needed to step off that railing and just let myself plummet, enjoying the free fall.

I'll have to express my joy of being human in other ways than the ones I've been trying to use for years. I've rutted those paths. It's time to follow new paths.

I'm going to be a different person when I wake up tomorrow (as usual), but tomorrow, I'm going to be who I've always wanted to be.

I'm done with regret. I'm done with self-pity. And you can all say you saw it happen.

It started with a haircut, three risqué photos, and a christian admiring her breasts. Unlikely, I know, but that's as good a guess as any.

Good night for now, anyone who's read this far. It's been real.

- J.