another disappointment

Yesterday I went to the thrift store in Quakertown with Anna and Alex and bought a coat that changes color depending on how the light hits it. I felt a little sullen. Alex and Anna seemed that way, too. We made plans to go get Mexican food that night and Anna said she would bring booze. In my head I heard loud Spanish music and pictured us doing tequila shots and calling jovially to the waitress for more limes.

The restaurant was dimly lit and there was a large group of people sitting at a long narrow table. There was a plain but pretty looking woman with brown hair that I noticed, I periodically looked in her direction throughout the evening. Anna brought beer with her and I imbibed. Sarah talked about the bus ride she is going to take to the Midwest and Anna remarked that bus rides aren’t so great. Sarah said she would be safe, and I noted that perhaps she’ll be safe, but that the experience won’t be pleasurable. Alex thought that was amusing, or something, so I decided to include it here. I told everyone how I had imagined the evening, and Anna suggested I call this entry “another disappointment.”

Anna also talked about malaise, in describing the character of some of these entries. It was nice to hear a good vocabulary word like that. Maybe if I had started this blog a few years ago, I would’ve have felt angst. Now I feel malaise.

After we left the restaurant there was nothing really to do so we went to Sarah’s house and played Wii. Somehow, the word choad was brought up and Anna didn’t know what it meant, and Alex and I got a good laugh out of that.

When I got home I felt perturbed about the emptiness of these days. Drinking, even moderately, brings that out in me. I slept on the couch a while and then wasted time until I felt tired enough to go to bed.

"Too fearful to assume himself the onus of a decision, said Mr Hackett, he refers it to the frigid machinery of a time-space relation."

I’m thinking a little bit about the past semester. A lot of things seem trivial now, but that is not true. I don’t think anything of note happened today. I finished Philip Roth’s latest novel, Indignation, which wasn’t that good in my final estimation. In it the narrator’s mother tells him, “‘Feelings can be life’s biggest problem. Feelings can play the most terrible tricks.’”

Tried to journal today and couldn't even pay attention to what I was writing."Why not try and eek something out?" I wrote. I showed my film to some of my family today, they were over. My uncle Ernst wanted more explosions.

male enhancement

Saw my chiropractor today, took two naps, went xmas shopping, watched a French movie called The Butcher and then Caddyshack on a sports channel. There were a lot of male enhancement ads during the commercial break.

C'est l'Ennui! L'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,
II rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

christmas cheer

Brunch with the old crew yesterday. Then Sarah and I went to Main Street Eye care in Hellertown to look at the owner’s collection of old glasses. Every time I tried on a pair, he said, “Now those look really good.”

In the evening I went to Ben’s house for a Christmas party. Ben’s mom said I could try her homemade beer or hard cider and I gladly accepted both. Middle-aged people trickled in and neither Ben nor I knew any of them. Then later on Cliff Sunflower the Quaker bee keeper approached me and started talking to me about a discouraged film student he knows who, Cliff felt, might enjoy talking to me and might feel encouraged anew by a conversation about film with a fellow student. I suggested that I myself was a little discouraged, but Cliff insisted that I was thinking on the wrong level. Cliff is a very forceful man, garrulous at times. He seemed drunk, but apparently he wasn’t. It occurred to me after talking to him for a while that he looks and sounds like a mix between Nick Nolte and Sydney Pollack. Once I shoveled shit out of the bottom of his mother in law’s pool.

Anna came by later and we watched youtube videos on Ben’s computer that was connected to the stereo, and then we walked to a gas station to buy cigarettes. Anna kept slipping and falling on the ice and I didn’t know what to say. When we came back the crowd had thinned out and those left over seemed drunk. In particular a tall, tough looking woman named Allison seemed thoroughly soused, she was sitting next to Ben’s mom, complaining about her love life from what I could gather, and squeezing a rubber chicken that made a loud screeching noise. She joked about hitting on Ben’s mom’s boyfriend, and the dog, Langston. When I first saw her earlier in the evening, I had thought, “she looks pissed about something.”

Allison kept referring to the “hipsters” in the room, which I took to mean this guy wearing plastic glasses sitting near her, and Ben, Anna and I. Anna was talking about being pro-cynicism and Allison overheard and said we weren’t allowed to be cynical because we were too young. Then she started wrestling another woman. That lasted for a while. She offered to wrestle me, too, but I declined. Someone was squeezing the rubber chicken the whole time. Someone else started talking about long underwear, and Allison took off her pants to prove that she was wearing them. Then she started referring to us as hipsters again, we were sitting at the other end of the room, and said that she could be one if she had my sweater. She chased me around the house for a while and finally I ran upstairs and hid in Ben’s room. When I came back down we made amends and shook hands.

After that Ben and I took Anna home, she had had a lot to drink too, and on the way back we called our friend Katja from Alaska and pretended to be Mr. and Mrs. Santa-Clause. At Ben’s house everyone had left except his family. I asked about Allison and Ben’s mom told me that she’s a guidance counselor at an elementary school. Interesting, I thought.

cigarette bumming etiquette

At Julia’s Christmas party on Sunday evening I quietly got very drunk. Then in the bathroom I noticed that a board on the door was nearly falling off, so I kicked it and broke it off completely. I don’t have an explanation. Julia initially seemed a little pissed. I felt very badly. The only new person I met there has the same name as my mother. I talked to her for a few minutes and walked away. I noticed a girl with a nice short hair cut but she was with a guy, probably her bif. Oren almost got into a fight with him later that night. Dave and I were ready to help Oren out if needed. Later on Kate, Julia’s friend, asked me for a cigarette and I told her to ask Perrie. I don’t know her, Kate said. I remarked that she didn’t know me very well either, but she still was asking. Her response was that we’d met a bunch of times at Julia’s place. Maybe, but we don’t talk to each other or even greet each other, I thought. Perrie gave her a cigarette.

We ran a lot of the way home because it was cold. I was feeling reflective and mildly perturbed about something I couldn’t articulate. I kicked a garbage bag that was in the middle of the street and scattered shit everywhere. The next day I met Sam from Middlebury, I hadn’t seen him since the summer. That was pleasant.

On the bus ride home again I felt reflective. I felt tired. I didn't reach any conclusions.