Magdalena O!

I get to the doctor’s after way too many hours at work to finally get rid of the warts on my foot. He sprays my entire left side with liquid nitrogen. I have to go back three more times just to be sure. I had warts on my foot for almost five years, walking around with a calamity for that long, I guess my vanity isn’t that realized yet. My pedicurist, in broken English, asked me once, “You play with toads yes? I fix it for you. Cut Cut.” She pried open my warts with her cuticle scissors until I bled all over her latex gloves. My foot was left alone in subsequent visits, even though she kept insisting. I would have let her, really, but every six weeks was futile.

It’s difficult to get any moment to sit down and write, but really write, taking that twenty minutes to just pour out shit before the realness comes out, before I start to get it. I’ve started working on my portfolio piece for school, researching mostly before I seek out equipment and get rolling with interviews. I’ve been meandering with fear of what to re-present to the Ryerson committee, and these fantastical ideas would come to me, but really they were just hallucinations of grandeur. I stole that from the Henry Rollins book I picked up at BMV tonight. I thought it was quite pricey for an oldie at $8.99 but on Amazon it starts at $80 and up. Maybe this is the drug deal I’ve been looking for. It’s a volume of his diaries from 1986. Rollins could have been my Miller, except I was born too late and the closest thing I had was Courtney Love or Harmony Korine, who published books that really were “hallucinations of grandeur.” That expression is going to be my cliche in about four days, maybe less.

My new therapist is lovely, and has me excited about introspection and self-awareness again. No one will ever replace D.F. and the way she guided me to be, to let myself be. Sometimes I get really upset in the way we all do, “She was so fucking amazing, why does she get cancer? She doesn’t deserve it.” But then I grieve more, grieve for her, not just because I miss the sessions and her voice and the books she got me reading and the way my relationship blossomed when I was seeing her, because that’s not grief, that’s unrequited victimization and selfishness.

Being a true victim is difficult and often denied, yet becoming a victim as a way of justification is often accepted, making it more prospective than the truth.

My love is trying to get me to read Atlas Shrugged, and it’s making me really indignant because I always try to get him to read, and this is what he gets excited about? The more frustrated I become with his reasons on why I would love it, the more I fall in love with him and the more I fall in love with him because of that, my irritation enlivens, and then so on and so on. Part of him loves ribbing me, and part of him knows that my reactions will be just like the ones I describe. He’s a diabolical genius.

It’s almost 11:30pm. I spiked my left over pasta with too much red wine. I started re-watching parts of Evangelion on the internet, but being tipsy is too easily distracting. I hopped from one IM conversation to another before I logged off to read a few stories in No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July. It came by post from my dear friend Fabien, who just got married last month. Married. I stopped after three stories because I didn’t want to exhaust myself on July and I want to be able to sit with each story, with the images, and her words, and the displays of life she writes about that no one else does. I couldn’t stop reading and got 50 pages into Normal Girl, which I found at the Goodwill on my birthday, it’s by Erica Jong’s daughter, Molly Jong-Fast. It’s so easy to read about a 19-year old coked up socialite. It’s so easy to remember this summer, and not sleeping for days while the mirror and hand became your two best friends. I stopped reading because I wanted to masturbate before it got too late. Walking over to my mahogany desk to pull out the Doc Johnson vibrator, I noticed the batteries were still in there and they were working. There was power! There is usually no power left in the shitty generic batteries I pilfer from work or my roommate (ok, I’ve only done that a few times, and I put them back!). When I used to live at home, my parents would always get frustrated at any battery-powered device because after such a short time, they would stop working. It was because I would steal all the batteries for my vibrator, and sometimes to avoid any further suspicion I would put them back, empty. Now, my work bought me a battery charger because I am the hotel photographer, and the generic batteries were not good enough for my camera flash anymore. I am happy. This way I can charge up my own batteries and jerk off without worry, even though I always forget. But this time, like in a teenage comedy, as soon as I laid down on my bed, I heard the lock shuffle and my roommate was walking through the door. Of course, I couldn’t just close my door then and enjoy my orgasms. Orgasming with another person is fine when he is awake, but I feel awkward doing it alone with him awake even though he would probably never hear me. I could never bring myself to do it.

I laugh, only because if you knew me, you would laugh too.

mp3: Miranda July, The Arky Girl

The whitening Listerine still lingers on the inside of my mouth from this morning while I flit across Dufferin Street. I don’t realize I’m actually crossing until I am nearly hit by a black Chrysler, and only then I jump back into the world. More and more I can tune out my surroundings. Since I started taking the Creative Writing class I’ve developed a different appreciation of authors and books, and I read better now. It’s easier for me to fall into the pages, into the world they’ve created for me, so much so that even while not reading the book, I leave myself behind and do things like almost get hit by a car. I was reading Jong’s Serenissima (that is now known as Shylock’s Daughter, but I picked up the first edition at the discount rack at BMV for $2). Reading books is a great privilege. I just think of one of the the high-school trilogy required reading – Fahrenheit 451. The triad being: Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451.