small change

I have to admit that I am… well, sometimes I fail the English major challenge. I hate some classics. Just HATE them. Ethan Fromme: Edith Wharton unmedicated, and sadly in need. Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Thomas Hardy’s cross-dressing fetishes unleashed. Little Women — well, I can’t even formulate a pithy single-sentence indictment of that disaster. Suffice it to say I hated all of them, even as a little girl who was given those books to read as the only type of fiction that was presentable, because it was litt’riture. With that specter before me I have no idea why I became and English major. Anyway, all this is to say some idiot is making things worse… Now we have Wuthering Heights: in manga. Obviously, Heathcliff and chibi Cathy are the puce icing on the nauseas cake.

Strange drift lately… read two stories on two different science fiction ezine pages, and ended up following links to two different literary erotica websites. What’s that about? Probably because my brain’s attuned to A.I. nowadays, thanks to D.’s researching that direction… gotta admit, I hope University of Maastricht, the school that alleges robot sex will be happening soon isn’t on his list of schools to check out. Sometimes, philosophy seems full of pointless questions — but this!!? The guy says the minute someone in Cosmo says “I had sex with a robot,” everyone will jump on the bandwagon. Right

Christmas this year is a scab to be picked. If I can’t have home, I don’t want anything. And I can’t have home: it’s too expensive, and anyway, nothing has changed there, and there really isn’t any point. (You can be brainwashed with holiday hype tripe in any country. If you find one where you can’t, take me with you.) And people keep asking what they can send, our Anglophilic friends enviously thinking of us at evensongs and rounds of holiday parties presided over by hearty, pink-cheeked Wenceslas lookalikes. And I stand on floor five of our fourth floor flat, looking down from the windows, wondering if I cut myself and bled on the passers-by, they would look up. Merriment and joy to all, of course. I hate this city. I hate cities in general, but this one is frozen filth.

I think the worst thing about being here, away from the me that was, is that I thought I’d grown up. House: check. Car: check. Life:…check. So, I thought it would be an adventure to go away and be elsewhere, and surely everyone else thinks its an adventure; that’s all I hear is “aren’t you so lucky.” Problem is, wherever you go, there you are. You try and do what you want, give up on all the boundaries you’ve placed and just let yourself be, but all you do is end up eating your bodyweight in Cheetos or something, and wake up lying on the floor in a squalid house with your hair sticking to your face. The need to regress implicitly tangles with the yearning to evolve — leaving one stuck in the middle where we stay. It is astounding how all of our houses of cards crash when we get down to the gears and metal of ourselves. No illusions: we hate ourselves. We hate the world. And it isn’t even winter yet.

I see why there are more places to drink here than there are grocery stores.

It’s clear today, though. And the sunset — at 3:39 p.m. — is tinged with silent peach.

EDIT: 12/12 – Again — the robot sex. WHAT. IS. UP. WITH. THAT.