Intellectual Self-flagellation.

I’m bored!

And lonely.

I am lonely and bored.

I’m banging around the apartment, talking to my cats too much.

I’ve had a really stressful past few weeks at work (though I have gotten A LOT of work done) and when I’m there, I really just want to come back to the apartment (it has come together quite well and is actually rather cool [except for my bedroom, which basically just has a bed and some books in it]).

But then when I finally do get here, I’m just like, “What the fuck am I supposed to do now?”

It is kinda like I have no idea what to do with myself.

Because I kinda don’t

I wasn’t always like this. I think when I was living in San Diego and got promoted into a C.O.O position that I was completely unprepared for, some kind of switch got flipped in my head and I became this guy thrives on stress (because I had to become that guy). After that I moved to LA and had to hustle to find a job and then hustle to keep it and then move again and then decide to go back to school and then I burned through school while working and then editing that literary journal while still working and going to school and then it school ended but then the break-up and then time to move and now work has gotten even extra stressful and on and on and on.

And I know that some of this is of my own making. I don’t have to work that hard. I don’t have to take my job that seriously.

I don’t have to spend every free second of my day thinking about how I got rejected from the country’s finest creative writing programs and I don’t have to think about all the ways in which I have failed myself and failed so many of the people who have loved me. I don’t have to do any of that.

But that is what I do.

(Typing that paragraph made me tear up a little bit just now.)

But don’t worry, I’m not depressed in like a Sylvia Plath kind of way, I’m just sort of bored and lonely right now and generally feeling unaccomplished. I got my college diploma in the mail the other day and I wasn’t even going to open it, but my roommate Fern Gully (still test driving blog names for her) made me open the thing and at least look at it. So I looked at it and then I went ahead and filed it in my little file box.

The thing is – and you armchair psychiatrists out there are going to love this – the degree makes me really sad. I never really cared that much about finishing my BA, that’s why I didn’t for so long. The thing for me was that the BA was just a stepping stone to an MFA degree and that was the thing that was going to allow me to change the direction of my life. That was going to be the ticket toward a different kind of life, not necessarily fame and fortune, but a life where I didn’t spend a third (or more) of my day crunching numbers while working in an industry that I have never respected.

(This should be qualified: I work with some people that I both respect and enjoy and the company that I work for is up-and-up, but I have just never had a lot of respect for the industries that build their millions and billions of dollars by bilking the margins of other people’s lives. But that’s a discussion for another time.)

The point is that when I looked at that degree, it just felt like another kind of failure, and it continues to.

You know, if I had gotten into Brown I would probably have been moving to Rhode Island this month, right now, this second.

But I didn’t get in. So what is only eight people did?

That means that eight people did!

Eight!

The Workshop at Iowa took something like 25 people. Sure they had more than 2,000 applications and an acceptable rate below 2%, but twenty-fricken-five people got in.

Sorry, I don’t mean to come off all rant-y, but this is what it gets like inside my head. It is thick, dark jungle in there.

So anyway, I think my point was that I don’t know what to do with myself. I have been having a hard time feeling good about myself. You would never know it if we hung out, you don’t know it to look at me. I’m not all goth-ed up and listening to loud music or reading sad poetry. The weird thing is that I do actually enjoy life quite a lot. I do enjoy the people that I know and I do enjoy the moments that feel like life, but there seem to be so many fewer of those moments when you are single.

I guess that I am still figuring everything out right now. And by “everything” I actually do mean everything.

So maybe I should go do that right now, instead of bitching and moaning so much like a little girl.

Or maybe I just need a nap.



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