Never Know Where I Am...

...until I leave. That's Folk Implosion. It's a good song; first heard it on Sarah's breakup playlist. Weird to hear Lou Barlow's voice over any kind of polished instrumentation; I suppose that was always one of the appeals, that his voice was always more delicate than the fuzz, whether it was brought by Mascis or Gaffney, crashing down around him. Anyway, just one more Will/Lou parallel to be drawn, I should say.

I seem to vacillate between days when I feel paranoid and petrified by work and the prospect of work and feel as though every little thing will take hours and I'll never get to the bottom of the pile, and days when I don't do anything and don't feel anything about not doing anything. Saturday and Sunday were of the latter; today, fittingly enough, was of the former. Not a huge fan of this mode; got to find a balance somehow.

View of the future dim. Would be better if we could get some goddamn sun around here. I wake up at 9AM and it looks like 4PM outside. Maybe I have the old seasonal affective disorder. I wonder if it's even possible to definitively diagnose someone with something like that. In a way, it's so stupid that something as elemental as happiness should rely on something so crudely physical as temperature and exposure to sunlight. But, in the end, everything matters and everything's inextricably convoluted; it's just that physicality is usually not on my side.

Malaise: at some point, the future stopped seeming like a worthy investment. Paradoxically, this comes from stagnation. Talked to Yuli on the phone about this just now. It's terrifying how much senior year of college feels like senior year of high school, despite the immense amount I've learned, willingly or otherwise, in the interim. I was insecure, frustrated, and lonely then, and I'm insecure, frustrated, and lonely now, cleverness be damned--man does not live by cleverness alone. Which makes all these "life plans" or "ambitions" seem so damn null and void--some days it feels as though, even if I do get into MIT hassle-free, all that's going to happen is I'll be an angsty PhD student, and then I'll be an angsty postdoc, and then an angsty professor, and one day I'll die and that'll be that, story ends same way it began, worst character development ever. Put that in your writer's pipe (you behind the fourth wall) and smoke it. I left Jersey four years ago placing all the hopes left unfulfilled in college, in starting again; but you can only do that so many times before the prospect of starting again fails to excite you any longer. If anything's going to change, it might as well change now; and if it doesn't change now, will it ever change? This more or less explains, retrospectively, my simultaneous numbness toward the future and desperation to reclaim the present these days.

I went to a show Saturday night, though. It was Thrushes and Hymnen, and turned out to be Hymnen's last show. Went alone because everyone was either gone or had chickened out (but then again I'm terrible at inviting people--next time I'm going to a gig I'm going to message every last person who could remotely give a damn. If not quality, then quantity). But it ended up being a good time: shot pool and talked music with Andrew and Pat from Hymnen; met Andrew and Matt's (drummer in Hymnen) mother (!?); hung out with Casey from Thrushes and talked to Rachel about Massachusettes (it all comes back to Massachusetts) and school vs. the real world (those two are going to see My Bloody Valentine in Manchester; madly envious); and made friends with Jen, the singer from Brief Candles, a shoegazing band from Milwaukee who opened. It seems I'm happiest at those moments when I best forget what familiar people and places force me to be.