the minor fall, the major lift

Just tried to look up Pearl's Myspace page and couldn't find it.

I was going to call her last night--I was also going to go to the grocery store last night--but instead I fell into bed the moment I got home & got my coat off. I slept until eight-thirtyish, got up just long enough to eat some soup Dad made, then went back to bed. Woke up at like one forty-five, called Dave, then made some tea and toast and finished re-reading Paksennarion book 1, went back to bed at almost four. Alarm rang at seven fifteen, hit snooze until about ten after eight. And now I am still tired.

Got Hallelujah stuck in my head. One of the guys on American Idol performed it this week (I think it was this week--with DVR I'm not so sure) and the extreme goodness of the song distracted the judges and everyone from the mediocrity of his performance. I figured he deserved the pass just for having the good taste to select Leonard Cohen. Now, though, I've got it stuck in my head and I had to look up the lyrics. Oh, mistake. Too powerful a thing to have bouncing around in your head when all you've done in the past few days is work, sleep, sneakily read novels and complain.

I am envious of Leonard, you see. I know, I know, "decisions, like incisions, stretch to fit / what passes through them" and you can't write a song without something taking a great big bite out of your soul, the bigger the bite, the better it's possible for the song to be, all that. Still envious. 'S worth having your soul missing great big chunks if that's what comes out of it. I have a shrewd, educated guess on exactly how much it would hurt. (A lot. A whole lot.)

Maybe it's that I really want more music in my life right now. Dull and mundane is how my day looks, rolling out in front of me. Which I know is a wrong perspective. Everything is magical; my mind is too narrow if I'm seeing my life this way.

But my life also is too narrow! This morning a lady asked me if I knew where was the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. I pointed right across the street from where we were standing, where the sign next to the door said "Chicago School of Professional Psychology." And again, I was so envious. That's where she's going! I want to be going to there and instead someone else is! Arrgh!

The things I want, I still want them even though I can't have them. The things I am best at are least valued. This makes me feel angry and useless. People close to me will agree with me which of the things I can do are most important. But it doesn't matter. I have to do what I'm doing in order to eat and have a place to live. I fucking hate it. I have to sacrifice the beginning parts of my adult life so Dad can rehabilitate the end of the middle part of his. I won't buy into his emotional dynamic, I won't drink his kool-aid, I have my own kood-aid that I don't know why I even bother to mix because no one's going to drink it.

And there it is, ladies. Mom and Dad are eating our lives right out from under us. They believe their own lies and bullshit and they expect us to believe in it too so we don't mind that they're stealing our best years from us. Most people get to pick a stupid romantic partner that they can hate forever for stealing the best years of their lives. Instead our parents are draining away our money and time and emotional energy as if they had the right to it. We have no future and it's because of their past. I would say it's because they hate us but the truth is that they just don't care. They torment themselves with feelings of horrible guilt and imagine that that's the same thing as accepting responsibility for their actions. Well, if they really accepted responsibility for their actions they wouldn't be constantly mooching off us.

The closer Dad gets to his "deal" happening the less patience I have with him. He's talking about getting his money by the end of April but then not moving out of the apartment until September. Okay, money or not, by the end of April I will not have any patience left. I have been very patient with him. I have sat and gritted my teeth while he depresses me endlessly with his dreams of how he's going to spend all the money he hasn't got yet and the life of ease and plenty we're all going to have when he gets all the money he hasn't got. While he sits there and makes plans for what I'm going to do with my life with all the money he's going to give me that he hasn't got. I have paid rent and bought groceries and paid utility and phone and internet bills. I have sat and listened to his bullshit, the same stories over and over and fucking over, and pretended I didn't think he was horrible and stupid for needing to hammer that same stupid fucking shit into my skull day after squalid boring day. If it's so damn hard for him to convince himself to believe in his own crazy schemes, why the fuck should I waste my time and energy allowing myself to be convinced of something he can't even believe himself without browbeating other people into believing it first?

And it's just as bad for Amber and Pearl. Pearl described to me her feeling that most of the reason she goes out every night to hang out with one person or another is that she wants to spend as little time as possible in a house where she feels like a prisoner. And Amber escapes as best she can into internet and book things but is still paranoid about having written records of what goes on in her brain or exploring spiritual adventures. So Mom ropes them into paying rent and bills on a house they can't afford, and even though Mom is contributing the least she still manages to put herself in charge of everything and make them do what she says. So that she can steal from them and bully them whenever she wants to. Because Mom doesn't have anybody else in her life who will listen to her because she drove them all away by being an insufferable bitch.

I probably would be throwing my life away at a shitty job that doesn't use my best talents anyway. But I fucking resent throwing my life away so that my stupid parent who helped put me in a position where throwing my life away is my only option can continue in their miserable delusions.

And I want this music and I feel this envy for someone who clearly has it because the music counteracts the kind of bitterness I feel. Something takes a great big bite out of you, and the music comes in blazing gloriously and it cauterizes and disinfects the hole in you so that nothing nasty and festering grows in your soul while you heal from whatever took the bite out of you. I feel like I don't even have any clean wounds though, like what hurts is a hundred little papercuts or a thousand little needlepricks. And if I want a nice clean hole big enough to fit a wonderful fiery piece of music in through I am going to have to carve it out myself. And I just can't find a spot where I want to put the edges because there isn't anyplace clean enough to hold a good edge.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.