Though tomorrow I do get to see some faces I haven't seen in years. I'm just not sure which ones they will be, yet. Beth, definitely. My mother still thinks she's a manipulative...but I won't try to guess the names I'm sure she's called her, secretly. That's none of my business. What is my business is I don't like people underestimating my capacity to maneuver.
Jesu is playing at Black Cat on October 18. They are going to level that place. I'm going to that, even if nobody else is. (Nobody else likes electronic doom-shoegaze anyway.) The songs from the Jesu/Eluvium split are great...very concise and poppy vs. the sprawling Sundown/Sunrise. I also like that the beats are starting to have more variety (kind of ironic that the beats are more interesting when programmed drums are used).
My black suede Converse lows with the black stars (now discontinued, alas) have been walked into the ground. They haven't started ripping yet, what with being made of solid suede and all, but the soles on the outsides of my feet have been ground down to nearly nothing. So today I went out and got some new sneakers. Canvas this time, but black nonetheless. I got high-tops as an innovation, and while the first two extra pairs of eyelets are nice in and of themselves (the last one feels kind of weird), I must admit I was reminded of Professor Doug Barrick's preference for highs over lows in the store; I can't remember exactly how many times he asked some kid wearing Converse under long pants, "are those highs or lows?" and then uttering a disappointed "aww" when the shoes were, inevitably, revealed to be lows (lows dominate disproportionately, it seems), but it was at least a couple. One can't blame me for idolizing the man somewhat: I like biophysics and Dinosaur Jr., but I've never ripped pieces from my own shirt to stuff my ears at their shows. Especially not in the 1980s.
Was digging through some of the accumulated refuse I have lying around the house and found some old Lits. I had a few left over from when I sent a bunch out with my college applications. Jesus--what shite writing. Can't believe I was so emotionally invested in every single line of every single story and poem, too. I did find a couple of Andrew's old stories which brought back memories. There was one about getting lost driving in Jersey--something many of us shared in many different combinations of characters. I suppose, having been a bunch of kids in whose lives nothing ever happened, it was inevitable that we would write stories with similar plotlines (that is to say, very little or none).
I looked through the yearbook from Lawrenceville 2003. Over the years I gradually realized how out of my element I was at that school, even more than I knew while I was there. Being a boarder and only interacting with the other kids in the context of school obscured the vast discrepancies between my background and history, and theirs--cultural, geographical, social, economic, and so on. I knew I went to the same school as (mostly) rich suburban white kids, but the meaning of it never really hit me until I left. I'd always just left it at being slightly out of step. I remember, back in 10th grade, reading an entry (this was back in the Opendiary era)--I think it was by Ben--about Ben and Marshall and maybe some other guys holing up in a hotel room in NYC, going on a bender and calling girls, and I remember that I wondered whether it was all some kind of bizarre metaphor, or a chronicle of actual events. How silly I was. The metaphor thing seemed pretty likely to me back in the day (the chroniclers of Classes 2002 and 2003 were notorious for indecipherable entries), but now the actuality thing seems just as likely, and the fact is, that was probably it. Anyway, in retrospect, "out of step" is not as accurate a description of my perspective when I was at Lawrenceville as "impossible to relate"--with the exception of certain characters (whose names one needs not pronounce as one pronounces the names of the dead, the dusted, the only remembered), I had about as much clue about what was going on in other people's lives as the protagonist of a David Lynch movie. It wasn't until senior year that I started to suspect the extent of my lack of understanding, and dark undercurrents and other such things, which everyone else knew by virtue of our class having only 150 people but I simply could not see, and of course by then it was too late, and all I could do was graduate.
That's all four years gone, though, and in a certain way makes me more grateful that I ended up in Baltimore, instead of New York, or Philadelphia, or wherever. Grateful that I ended up in a relative backwater, underdog of a city. I can't keep up with the money, or the culture, or the anything, and I don't think I ever will. I'm mundane, and the only principle I have for self-presentation is I refuse to spend any effort on it. This is why I live the boring scientist life. Nobody cares what I wear to work, and none of my colleagues smoke. Zero.
In other news, I've been reading A Haunted House, which I bought for IFP 2, but we never ended up using. And young Virginia Woolf was cute.
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