Echo

My biggest problem, is that I don’t trust people. My perceptions run deeper than the average surface. Borderline psychic intuition. My imagination knows no bounds. Do I find things, or did I imagine them? Sometimes, it’s just a feeling of something under the surface, the princess disturbed by the pea. When I have distance from people, I crave to know their secrets. I’ll take care of their secrets, because their secrets don’t touch anything that is me. When I get close to people, I’m terrified of their secrets. Every closed door makes me anxious, even though I would never try to open them if they haven’t opened it for me themselves. But then, these dark corners start to seep into my dreams. And it’s hard to know what is real perception and what is imagination. Most disturbing, is how I don’t know exactly how to protect myself from them.

I am suffering from amorphous bad feeling. I’m stressed but I don’t know where it’s coming from. Gonna try to quietly ride out the day and hope tomorrow comes more clarity or the dissipation of this feeling.

Today’s a 7 day. A solitude day. Woke up to a heavy rainstorm and sadness around me. Just one of those days.

Got in touch with my friend Michelle, a fellow screenwriter who moved to Jersey and just had a baby girl in December. Wanted to find out how she’s doing and to get her to send some pictures of her kids.

In her email, she wrote:

You’re an incredibly talented, driven, creative, and courageous person. I miss having an adventuresome friend like you nearby. Despite all the things and people in your life that can tie you down, you continue to fly by the seat of your pants. I admire that because it’s the only way to truly live.

That’s a nice thing for her to write. But it makes me wonder…if someone flies by the seat of their pants, are they approaching life ass-first?

Perhaps those are the trade-offs I’ve decided to make. I sacrifice ties and stability for freedom and to feed my appetite in curiosity and inquisition. I would prefer a short and fulfilled life than a long one where I barely stirred the surface.

It has been exhilarating, rewarding, and rich with colors, tastes, feelings and textures. As Blair once said, he believes I experience emotions he didn’t even know existed. I have touched so many people’s lives, and they have touched mine. But underneath it all, the sacrifice. My closest companion has always been loneliness.

I’m a great analyzer of patterns and trends. But its so much easier to see outcome and big picture if what you’re analyzing isn’t too close to you. In relationships I have always vacillated between enthusiasm and caution. Aka, sometimes I get gripped with fear and freak out, because my aim in life is to have goals without being attached to wanting. When I want something, it scares me. In this way, I always needed someone bigger, someone better at navigating emotions who could earn my trust and coax me out of my tangled fears. Fears start as potentials in the mind, but are realities if details enforce them on this plane. One day, I would like to find my fears to be just fears.

Looking at patterns, I can say, this kind of feels like this, or I’ve gone through that before. And the relationship failed. But are these signs of failed relationships, or the initial steps of all relationships, including one day, the one that will work? I’m getting closer to the things I want, that make me feel comfortable. New situations, new heights. But why is the fear the same?
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I had a dream last night that I was in Fremont and at home with Michael and my mom. Some of the Clubsport boys–Curtis, Andrew, Jeremy, had come over and were in the backyard grilling. I guess I didn’t even know they were there, because I’d come home and had been roasting a turkey in the oven when my mom told me the guys had come over and were making food. I went outside and there were 3 grills going, one gas and two charcoal. There was a lot of meat. And Jeremy had brought it in a big black truck. They said they were almost done. My mom asked me if I would go to Blockbuster exchange some DVDs (we’re on a monthly program so we can keep 2 DVDs at any given time). I asked the guys if they wanted to watch anything in particular. Andrew didn’t care, Jeremy wanted something action, Curtis wanted something from the 80’s. I told him I was a 90’s girl, so what if I got a movie made in 89-90. So I went, but Blockbuster was inside a supermarket. And for whatever reason, I had only decided to put on a single shoe, and was carrying a bowl of turkey drippings that I wanted to use to make a gravy with.

I got in line to return the movies, but it was Sunday so it was crowded. There was a middle-eastern guy, about dad age, who insisted that I go before him. I guess wearing only one shoe and carrying a bowl of drippings made me look like I was in quite a hurry. I can’t remember what movies I got, but before checking out, I hit the bakery thinking I would get some bread. I found a 6 foot long loaf of Irish soda bread and tried to bring that to the checkout. While looking for bread, I had somehow lost my bowl of drippings. At the checkout, the guy said I couldn’t take the movies because we owed $15.71 in 3 months worth of late fees for a Lost  Season 3 DVD that had a missing pin code. I told him we must have returned that DVD a long time ago, and I didn’t know anything about a pin code that would come with a DVD. He said he could extend it for another day, and I said I would go home and ask my family.

I had to walk home with my one shoe and giant loaf of bread because I didn’t know how I actually got to the supermarket, but upon leaving, I had no car.

By the time I finally got home, they’d eaten without me.

Frustrating dream.

“But Julia, aren’t you the black queen?”

“Queen of Spades, indeed. I hope you weren’t busy following the red queen around.”

1/12/10

Ran into fellow Gemini Marc when I went to LA in January to clean up my place.

At the same time, also ran into an old coworker. The one who told me he loved me when I’d left. It was a day full of random encounters.

Later that night, Marc wrote on my Facebook:

Random encounters with flounders.

I wrote back:

Female who can breathe underwater seeking fish who can breathe on land.

I just looked up that exchange because the post below about teaching a fish to fly made me think of it.

I don’t think anyone gets up in the morning and thinks, “Today I might use the word ‘rearing’ in casual conversation.”

My defense is either the potato bug defense if I don’t want to hurt you, or a blitzing flurry offense.

status of the zoo:

the panther got loose. i’m pretty sure she either fucked or ate something. no one knows which because we were all too afraid to follow her.

the monkeys formed a union and have “quit,” whatever that means. like fine then. where’re you gonna go? how do you quit a zoo?

the birds, all of them, are constipated; they seem really confused by the last batch of erratic weather

and the penguins have learned how to use computers.

perhaps that last point was the one i should have led with.

why such a rebound in personality, j? did the moon split you up?

in a moment, everything can change.

watch the red queen. here we go now…watch the red queen.

here we go audience, we have to find a bigger venue. i’ve got less than a week to prepare if i’m gonna work a room. what would i like to do to get the rawest parts of everyone in the room involved. i’ve gotta get the rawest places of me involved.

for one night only, what would people like to see?

I am not afraid to hit a man who is grossly out of line, but I won’t hit a woman. I am simultaneously cautious of them, as I find them erratic, as I also feel it is a disadvantage of my strength to hit a woman.

This alarm scares me. It ticks like a time bomb and it doesn’t just ding, it dings like an old school rattle-your-teeth alarm clock. The good news is I can melt out the ticking with music. It becomes a metronome. But when it hits zero, there’s no way to turn it off. You have to let the alarm play out. So what’s happened here today, is like a writer’s version of Speed. I have to keep turning that clock back from zero, and I have to keep working.

I’m stressed.

But it’s a good stress. A gettin’ shit done, stress.

Why am I so afraid of people who bargain with sex?

Perhaps because if I am believing in them, then I am becoming one of them, too.

Teaching a fish to fly is much harder than teaching a butterfly to breathe underwater.
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Things can change in a moment.
People can change in a moment.
Reality can change in a moment.
Define moment

Everything in life is a spectrum. It’s all a matter of degrees.
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