No Skirts!

19:59, 09 April 2003

Ha! I'm getting ready for Piyush to come get me and I'm listening to Divinyls, "I Touch Myself." What the hell is going on? Two glasses of wine down. Ohhhh, that's what's going on.

I'm not that freaked about tonight, frankly. I mean, not just b/c of the wine. I rushed around all afternoon, so I really didn't have time to panic, like I normally do leading up to social events. Plus the fact that I'm not going on a date, per se. I'm just getting picked up and taken to a party at a bar. Christ. Calm the fuck down, freakazoid.

Therapist forbade me from wearing a skirt tonight. "You're already good at catch-and-release sportfishing, you know that. What, you think you need to make him think you're hot? He's slavering all over you. Wear pants. Don't imply things you don't want." Ha. She makes me laugh. And she's right. Because I don't want what my skirt implies. I don't think I'm ready for that jelly.

"What do you want, tonight?" she asked. Gulp. I don't know. I want him to slaver over me but take no action beyond basic chivalry. I want him to think I'm hot as hell but not get hard. Or at least not let me know that he's turned on. I'm trying to split the atom here, huh? Yeah, pretty much.

My assignment for tonight is to get to know him. Like, pull out my journalism major and ask him some questions so that I know who he is and what he thinks and where he came from and where he's going. Because I all too easily rest on the fact that a guy likes me and flirts with me. Often that's enough. And I don't even care who he his as a person, for a while, because I'm so drunk on his approving eyes.

A funny juxtaposition is this guy that I chat with online sometimes, whom I've never seen and have not seduced with my smouldering good looks. I know more about him and his views, etc. than I do about most guys I kiss. And he still chats with me, which means I must have something going for me besides the junk in my trunk, you know?

One day I'm going to figure out this whole guy thing, I swear. I'm going to realise that guys can like me as a friend and can see past physical appearances. I'm going to realise that I have more to offer than just a body. One day.

The L.A. Feeling

08:05, 09 April 2003

Last night, the feeling returned: the one that chokes me as the sun sets outside the windows of my apartment. The one that holds my head underwater, pushing me deeper and deeper into the cold, lonely, swirling depths of my life in this place.

...through the day
as if on an ocean
waiting here
always failing to remember why I came, came, came
I wonder why I came...

The sadness came quickly, dangling on the precipice of a turn in a benign conversation, a quick skid as thoughts turned their heads to look at the darker side. I am truly alone. No human being can survive in solitude, moving anonymously through the masses, returning to a dark and comfortless holding cell to await the next morning. My telephone stays silent for days. Emails from afar bear the only bits of friendship sprinkled on my day.

In this place I'll take whatever you give me. I don't even know what to ask for anymore. It's as if I'm in a restaurant but cannot order a meal, and instead am relegated to humbly take whatever scraps the restauranteur discards at the end of the night. I get the scraps of people's time because I am not their friends. I get the spur-of-the-moment invite to a party, the casual "do you want to come with us?" when an invitation is extended to someone else in my presence and it would be awkward to exclude me.

I went to Lee-Ann's last night. I consider that an act of true desperation. I went to her house to smoke and watch TV against all my will. But another night alone in my apartment gaped like the rising darkness of the whale's mouth as it closed over Jonah, blocking out the sun and enveloping him in suffocating solitude. I, an introverted person who has always needed my "alone time" am so frightened of the unattended walk in the dark which are my years on this coast that I will sink to the level of visiting Lee-Ann, because the alternative is worse.

And I hate this entry because there are too many metaphors, a landfill of mixed trash.