a toast to wanderlust

agg -> I am experiencing what could probably be the worst bout of wanderlust I have ever experienced. Well, wanderlust might be a misnomer (or possibly a euphamism). It's more of a panic-y, need to escape feeling that comes over me whenever I'm stressed, or anxious, and it pretty much always revolves around school. The thing is, I can't seem to figure out if it's me being lazy and avoidant of work, or if it's symptomatic of the fact that I need to be doing something else.
Does that make sense?
Here: I love learning. I am in love with the world, and I want to know and experience (I would argue that knowing and experiencing are more similar that people seem to think of them as) the world as much as I can in my short amount of time here, and it just feels as if I'm so distracted, so stressed out, so worried, that I become apathetic. The idea of apathy is horrific for me. The fact that I'm at Berkeley, with this tremendous opportunity to get involved and start over and really be consumed by something, and I feel like I want to leave is driving me crazy....
I spent 2 years waiting to get here, waiting to feel this free, and I feel trapt again.
I am horrified at the fact that no matter where I go, I can't feel fulfilled. I'm really worried that I'm not going to ever feel at peace. Don't mistake this with complacent, I will never be complacent, but I want to feel like, at the end of the day, I can be happy about who I am, where I'm going, and the work I'm going to do after the sun rises the next day will make a difference, regardless of how small.
(The sun rising. The sun doesn't rise, the earth rotates. Isn't that odd? I know it's a colloquialism, but if you take it seriously enough, Hemingway is a liar...)


sorry for the massive rant. I just make the mistake of reading grad student's blogs, and they seem so... consumed (?) by their studies, so confident in their path that this wave of anxiety hits me like "wow, I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing, I don't even know why I'm here"
I'm afraid people see that. How can everyone here be so confident?

I know what I like.
I like art
I like dancing
I like understanding, and I'm better at understanding when I'm not stressed out.
I HATE feeling like I'm processing, not learning, and that's what I feel like right now. That's what I feel like.

I like to make art
I sometimes like to read.
I sometimes like to write.
I feel like I can't concentrate.


I typed this ridiculously fast, really stream of conscious.
I might as well tell you about other things.
My mom. ho boy, I know she loves me but she loves me so much she doesn't want to hear when I'm having trouble. She doesn't want to hear when I feel like this, she starts in on her "they make pills for people like you" and I start in on my "mother: I would rather feel everything than feel nothing." It makes me sad that she would rather not listen. She thinks I just say the same thing over and over...
what if I do?

I'm just stressed. and really whiny. I hate how much I complain. I have a nice life. I'm going to one of the best universities in the United States for free, and here I am, typing this shit.

Well, it's 9 oclock, I should probably get cracking on homework :/

I want to tell you...

Well I have 32 minutes left until the battery on my laptop dies.

I have dropped out of Rhetoric 10 for a combination of reasons, the professor is confusing, thus making a confusing subject frustrating, I needed to drop a class, Tuesdays were hectic, I like Rhetoric 20, Archeology and Sociology and I get to leave for vacation 4 days earlier (I know, probably not the most practical reason in the world.

I feel ridiculous because of it, but the class was stressing me out to a point of being unhealthy. Moving up to Berkeley is something huge in my life, living on my own with very few friends is huge, dwindling bank account is huge, and this is one thing that I could do to lighten the load.

(these are the reasons I keep the repeat button held down to hear)

I feel like a fool. I know I shouldn't let other people's perceptions of me effect me, but this one guy in my class was like, "you shouldn't have been so quick to judge the class"
psh.

What this means is that I will most likely not be Rhetoric major. What this means to me is that I'm still ridiculous. Yeah Katie who can never make up her mind.

Well, in other news, I'm actually enjoying living on my own. My apartment is wonderful, I'm especially excited about winter, looking at my window at the cold. I know I'm going to freeze my ass off, but I'm excited.

what can I say, I live though my poetic memory. Right now I'm looking at my hands typing though the thousands of strand s of hair that are covering my face, the wind blowing, and I know that I'm a aesthetic addict. Beauty, why do you trick me?

How do you decide what's important?
How do you decide what to do?

I'm wondering if my "talent" for writing actually stems from the fact that if I want to, I can make my writing fractionally more abstract, thus appearing more artistic.

Here's what I don't want:
dead. dry, no passion, no feeling, a 9-5 kind of mind that looks forward to the one two three paid weeks in the sun, with the job that equals itself, it's nothingness. I don't want sit and watch life go by, I want to swim, and bathe, and rest and run. I want equal parts long days and long nights. I want far off places, and familiar city scapes.
I want New York City, Grand Central Station.


I want Grand Central Station.
Epitome of me.
fluxation, change, a love, a life
not this
pen to the paper to the push to the dollar to the mouth to the bed than start over again kind of life.

travel
kissing.

growth. change.
you've got one chance to get everything right.

I've got 12 minutes till my battery dies.
12 minutes. is what it comes down to

katiebittersweet
the good time are killing me.
Ilove life.

she sighs and walks away (enough)

I have a little over 36 hours before I move to Berkeley.
I find this to be two things simultaneously:
1. Ridiculously exciting. I can't wait to live on my own, to do things I've never done, experience life on my own. I want to grow plants, cook, play music, make music, dance, learn, think, write, scream, feel alive. I want to jump out of my skin into cold water. I'm going to write everyday, and experience winter, and look at the stars, and reclaim a sense of vivacity that's been missing from my life.
2. Nervous. I'm just anxious about the whole thing. It's so new, I just need to ground myself.

hmmph.
well =>
here.I.go.

modern anxiety and the age of indecision

so, as I sit here on the floor of the Shattuck Plaza hotel lobby (which echoes of a glory age long ago past), a cold wind blows into the door with every passing car, and I am cold.

Two weeks until school starts and I have still not secured a place to live. It's funny, deep down inside of myself I am alarmed at this, but I'm starting to feel pretty apathetic.

a Frenchman has closed the door, and the breeze no longer blows inside the lobby.

tomorrow brings me three more potential places to live, and then a long drive home.

well, maybe it will be three different places that will take down my number and call me later.
I don't want to make any decisions tomorrow.
I just need to choose something. I'm at the point where the choosing needs to eclipse the choice.

it's a sad and beautiful world.

Listening to Muse's "Blackout" makes me want to sob. It's such a haunting, almost bordering on heart-aching ballad, that has somewhat nostalgic tones for me (It's a little hard for everything in my life to not be connected to him. Even when we're through)

It makes me feel like dancing, a sad, mournful ballet. Belting out the eulogy of lyrics. It's orchestral sound gives it power, and the vocals, the lyrics give that power the ability to enter you. I love how he semi-contradicts himself with the common phrases, "don't grow up to fast and don't embrace the past" and continues with "this life's too good to last" where he goes from a concentrated point, to a broad, encompassing statement, and then stabs the listener with "I'm too young to care. It makes me feel similar to Sparklehorse's "Sad and Beautiful World" in the sense that you have paired this beautiful, yet sad song, with these tragic words and vocals.

and I'm too old to dream....
So yeah, I like the song


You know, I know I'm a better writer than this.

That song makes me fucking ache. Tinges and twangs of pain. What empathy.
What am I aching for? This inability to pin anything down really frustrates me.
I'm picking my classes, and I don't know what I want. I guess I just need to see that it's going to take time to figure life out, and picking my academic major isn't going to solve any of life's greater philosophical questions.
accountability. Why did you pick that major? What are you going to do with that?
fuck if I know. I thought it would help me become a better thinker...
I guess it's, in the grand scheme of things, not a huge deal.
I think I just need to concentrate on getting out on my own. I think once I move, things will come together for me.

So, evidently everyone in my family thinks I'm naieve. This angers me slightly, partially because they might be right, and partially because they are mistaking my open-mindedness for myopia. My dad/stepfather says I need to "toughen up", and yet all they want to do is shelter me. My family has been bugging me a little bit on this trip. I love them very much, but they sadden me sometimes. Sometimes they are so unnecessarily cruel to one another (myself included) I'm trying to work on this, to be more consciencious of the things I say and the actions I take. It's a little hard to understand but I'm moving soon, and I think time alone will really be good for me. In many aspects. I'll touch on this later.

enter clever title here.

I'm sitting across the room from my Aunt Grace, age 93. I try not to make it noticable, but I'm making a study of method and study she uses while going through the stack of papers she has next to her. She's going through the ninty odd years worth of papers my late Uncle, her brother, had procured during his life, in effort to organize, arrange, and compress. As her shaking hands are grasping at receipts, yellowed magazine pages, and smeared letters, it dawns on me that my aunt is really fucking old.

But then she speaks, and I can't tell the difference in all the twenty years I've known her, her voice is like a child's. The way she speaks to my mother suggests she has all of the time in the world.

So, as you can tell, this trip's meant a lot of things to me.

It's funny, even as I write this, I'm afraid I'll get her wrong. With every word she speaks, I compare it to my words and think, "is this wrong?", and when I listen to her I feel, know, that she is beautiful.

Well, I'm going to write more often. You have my word.

I'm living in an age.

I have this tendency to start journals, blogs, and other writing projects, but never really keep them up. I'm going to try to make this time different.

Wish me luck