(no subject)
Mar. 27th, 2009 11:03 pmSometimes when I'm walking through the apartment late at night with all the lights off and my laptop in hand, I will open it and face it outwards and pretend I'm in some Discovery Channel show using a night-vision camera to investigate a haunted house. And then I freak myself out and shut the laptop really fast.
I have not showered since Sunday. I have, however, taken 3 baths. That is not my usual proportion of things, and I feel a bit indulgent using so much water.
Today has been filled with surreal daydreams, intensified by an afternoon nap and quasi-lucid dreaming involving a familiar stranger and an old friend and a home and a passionate affair, those dreams that bring bliss in quantities dreams usually reserve for terror and panic. It was so hard to wake up, even more so because, really, I had nothing to wake up for, I had the day to myself and could sleep it away if it brought me pleasure, but it seemed like a bad sign, the symptom of depression, and I got ticked off that I ended my reverie because of medication commercial warning signs blaring through my head. So I've poked around the rest of the day, enjoying myself still almost because of the longing and the occasional moment of closing my eyes and slipping back into the sensations of that otherworld, remembering minute details likes the fabric on the couch, the smell of the room, and focusing to make out the details of faces. I am horrible with faces of real-life people, I can often remember names and conversations and hair and outfit and the circle of the face is a flesh-colored blur, like an anonymous whistleblower being interviewed on the news. However, this time I could do it with such perfect clarity, I felt almost the pleasure a sculptor might, in so perfectly capturing the proportions of a face that you can run your (imaginary) hand over and around and feel your success. Keep touching and get hairs tangled up between your fingers, its quite real, for a split second, before I nod off and muscles jerk, splashing the bathwater and waking me up from not-quite-asleep. I close my eyes and do it again.
Synthetic happiness is possibly superior to so-called natural spontaneous happiness, its longer lasting, so perhaps this moment in the tub of remembering a memory of an imaginary event serves an even better purpose than 'authentic nostalgia'. The imaginary sort of longing in stories can be worked and worked and worked over until a proper resolution is found.
I have not showered since Sunday. I have, however, taken 3 baths. That is not my usual proportion of things, and I feel a bit indulgent using so much water.
Today has been filled with surreal daydreams, intensified by an afternoon nap and quasi-lucid dreaming involving a familiar stranger and an old friend and a home and a passionate affair, those dreams that bring bliss in quantities dreams usually reserve for terror and panic. It was so hard to wake up, even more so because, really, I had nothing to wake up for, I had the day to myself and could sleep it away if it brought me pleasure, but it seemed like a bad sign, the symptom of depression, and I got ticked off that I ended my reverie because of medication commercial warning signs blaring through my head. So I've poked around the rest of the day, enjoying myself still almost because of the longing and the occasional moment of closing my eyes and slipping back into the sensations of that otherworld, remembering minute details likes the fabric on the couch, the smell of the room, and focusing to make out the details of faces. I am horrible with faces of real-life people, I can often remember names and conversations and hair and outfit and the circle of the face is a flesh-colored blur, like an anonymous whistleblower being interviewed on the news. However, this time I could do it with such perfect clarity, I felt almost the pleasure a sculptor might, in so perfectly capturing the proportions of a face that you can run your (imaginary) hand over and around and feel your success. Keep touching and get hairs tangled up between your fingers, its quite real, for a split second, before I nod off and muscles jerk, splashing the bathwater and waking me up from not-quite-asleep. I close my eyes and do it again.
Synthetic happiness is possibly superior to so-called natural spontaneous happiness, its longer lasting, so perhaps this moment in the tub of remembering a memory of an imaginary event serves an even better purpose than 'authentic nostalgia'. The imaginary sort of longing in stories can be worked and worked and worked over until a proper resolution is found.