anger

So yeah … I thought that it was supposed to slowly ebb away.  Get a little better.  I was going to kind of sit on the front porch of the coffee shop – and obsessively … uh … surf the internet, we’ll just say.  But I’m not doing that.  The website in question will not cooperate with the server here, or something.  So I’m listening to country western pour out of someone’s cab.  It’s reminding me of my marine – which is just making me sad.  I’m wondering if I will have any people who are just mine left – or if they are all going to be absconded with.

I know that I’m just being bitter and absolutist, but I’m starting to freak out a little bit here.

I wanted to do some pro-active audio work today.  Finishing the troubleshooting that I need to do to move on with some of my stuff requires a cool head and concentration.  Neither of which I have.  My engineering buddy called me a day or two ago and told me that he’s going to help me soon – like next week or something.  That’s really good of him – but the fact is that I want to be able to do all the things I need to do and just ask him a few intelligent questions.  I don’t want to bug him with asinine BS.  I would rather just have done with all that.

Maybe there will be better reception for my voyeuring in the humidor.

addiction

I have a little sneaky and insidious problem.  I don’t talk about it, because when you put it on paper it seems like a really righteous thing.  It actually sounds really cool.  Actually, I’m sort of proud of it.  As far as addiction goes, I think it’s much better and less shameful than other addictions – which actually makes it more shameful, and probably (for me) more dangerous.

I seriously think that this is probably worse for me than drugs, or eating, or sex, or smoking, or whatever I’ve been doing.  It’s over-practice.

Over-practice has caused me physical pain, emotional pain.  It’s broken my heart and my spirit.  It’s made me sick.  It’s alienated me from my friends.  It’s completely stagnated me in my career.  It’s given me an illusion of control.  It’s made me feel completely justified that I’m doing the right thing.

You can’t get arrested for over-practice.  Now I actually have had to go to rehab for my addiction, when I had a binge and I popped my arm and gave myself tendonitis or something like that – in January.  I’m lucky I don’t have carpel tunnel.  But there’s really no methadone for the hacking that I do.  In some ways it shares some traits with anorexia; with the striving for perfection.  Anything that is self-loathing about oneself can be rectified in the abuse heaped upon me in the quest for ultimate perfection.  Because it is impossible to score a perfect performance.  If I restrict myself and my career to when I score a perfect performance … that’s a harshness.  An ultimate punishment.  Something that I probably will never live up to as a professional.

Over-practice has its benefits too.  It’s one of those addictions that I’m good at, like sex or eating.  The ones that are legal … that you could do fine if only you could do them in moderation.  See, I’m fine at the just-staying-away from it stuff.  I can’t get hard drugs – nor have I tried them.  I’m a wussy – because if I actually did something like coke and I could get it easily and I derived any benefit from it, I would be totally screwed and I’d be hooked.  And that would be bad because there is a stigma and I am not good at being that kind of problem child.  I am too secretive and I would not be able to handle that kind of pressure.  I think that I’m so above all that though, and I’m really just exactly the same.  Except I’m kind of worse, because I’m in loads of denial about my problem.  And my problem really isn’t seen that seriously because it’s not really that dangerous (like meth or whatever) or troubling (like cannibalism).  I’m totally in denial, bent double-over like Igor with laughing drool squibbling out the corner of my mouth, 3AM-crazy-eyed and wheezy.

But I secretly know I’m not any better than anyone else.  I won’t take signs and signals or no for an answer - the eyes are bugging.  And this scares me in the dead of night, at 3:28 AM when I’ve played the first four systems of the Rondo from the Pathetique over and over and over and over and over for the past hour and a half.  Making it faster and faster and faster and faster.  Thinking that if I could just make it absolutely perfect … that my life would be completely okay and that everything would change for me.  And it’s all because I’m acting out.

My husband says that all these feelings of mine – these feelings about the “new person” and the “old person” (and my lack of control particularly on the latter issue) are really all about the fact that I don’t have my enviornment under control.  I’ve got to finish setting up my room.  I’ve got to clean up my area.  I’ve got to finish putting my software together – that last little bit so that I can do the rest of the stuff that I’ve got to do for the musical.  Then I will be good to go.  Perhaps I will not be obsessing about stupid crap.  But as it is now, I dread the morning – and I sit around and over-practice rather than go to sleep.  Of course, I make sure that I’ll over-practice by ingesting four cups of coffee during the day.  

None of this is smart.  None of it.

But it all looks good on paper as I get more and more flawless technique and I slowly die inside – heading for another bout of tendonitis like I had in January because I pushed my luck with a Liszt piece I shouldn’t have been abusing myself with.

And then, after, the shame of knowing what I have done, and how bad I will hurt in the morning and how I don’t know if I’ll be able to function.  Just how sick will I be from it all?

everything falls apart …

It’s all in a complete mess.  There’s no stability, no excuse.  No center.

I try to do the right things.  Try to move on.  I don’t understand why she gets to behave as she does.  Gets to do whatever she pleases.  It’s completely untoward.  God only knows what else she is doing …

Is she trying to reactivate the little social group that got her into trouble in the first place and ruined things for me?  Does she really think that it’s going to all just be fine, fine, fine?  It was bad enough with EXT sending stupid update emails to my husband – but there was really nothing that we could do about that.  I hadn’t decided what to do about his mother’s birthday card.  None of this makes any sense to anyone but me.

He’s not allowed to talk to me.  I’m a huge threat.

So what on earth is going on with emailing my husband.  Who does this?  Are the rules just changed somehow.  I just want to write a stupid email or something:

“Dear Clueless Wad of Denial - 

Things are good with me.  Had a birthday.  Yeah, the Denise lot’s actually slowly improving … although one thing that hasn’t changed is that I still talk to my husband all the time, every day … about every little thing.

The All Knowing, All Seeing, 

Not Really.

PS.  What’s in your wallet?

PPS.  If your mail is still being screened, my husband actually comes with baggage; and thusly cannot be an object of nostalgia for anyone …”

Now wouldn’t that be lover-ley? {evil smile}

On paper …

I have never advertised any blog that I’ve ever written on.  I have one little signature which I put at the bottom of some emails.  Mostly I don’t like to blog because all my blogs are about not blogging.  Now, my diary entries are about not writing in my journal.  I don’t write in the morning now much either, which used to be my old routine.  I used to be able to count on at least all of the writing routines.  Now, rather than just avoiding a public that wasn’t really ever interested in me, and then avoiding my friends (who have too much to do to listen to my never-changing crapola); I am now also avoiding myself.

I think that “me” is sick of my self-loathing.  It is now causing me to avoid work, even.

It’s been quite a year.  Mostly, I have just sat around staring at people and feeling.  Having strange little thoughts and trying strange little things on for size.  And always, trying to figure out how I could write without nauseating myself with this whining.  I still have not been very johnny-on-the-spot about the writing.

I don’t know what to do about all of that.  

I am very afraid.  There have been some “hard knocks.”  That’s what my dad’s side of the family calls it … the “school of hard knocks.”  I feel bad even saying it, because I live the luscious Western life.  I am fed and clothed and am in the top eschelon of the top 1% or whatever.  I live in a city where bad things hardly ever happen.  I am safe from everyone but myself.  When I want to complain about the “horrors in my life,” it’s really not going to impress anyone that much.  But it’s very scary to me.

On paper, I do not look very brave.  There are a lot of things about my life that look very different on paper than they do in my head.

I’ve decided to be okay with the fact that I’m not perfect.  This hurts a lot.  I want to be perfect.  It feels like giving up.  I didn’t really want to do anything at all unless I had an unshakable plan.  This includes writing anywhere every day.  I thought “I’ll come back and do this-or-that when I am a whole person.”  So I have vegetated.  Waiting for perfection.  I was going to come out of nowhere, a complete being.  If I am ever complete, I will be too old to care.

So I will write some things down and stare at them until they make sense.  It’s important that I keep words spooling out onto the page and that they keep popping up onto a screen.  And that I keep organizing them somehow.  And that they are going through a filter, because I still have my secrets.  I used to not think I deserved to have little things that were just mine.  I am a married woman of 35 … who has blown all her chances at stuff.  I didn’t get to have any mystery.  But I don’t think that’s fair.  I’m sick of being told what to do.

I have rediscovered the simple pleasures of writing this kind of thing in a cafe where all the songs are just stunningly perfect.