is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Ups and Downs. Also: Only in a Building Full of Professors.
It's spring break. Nonetheless I've been a bit stressed out and up-and-down moodwise with some formidable extremes. When I am depressed or low I don't sleep well. (It is, for instance, when I end up insomaniacally thinking about Levinas' phenomenological descriptions of insomnia. All night. Etc. Or sinking into pit-of-stomach self-loathing terrors. Perhaps you know what I mean.) All this just to set the scene: The other morning I was really really ready to sleep the shit out of a whole morning in bed. Yet some sort of noise started happening at about 7:00 am. I was vaguely awake because of it, but trying to ignore it. Around 7:40 I realized I had become sleepily annoyed and tense, so I turned on the machine that sounds like rain. I could still hear the sound through the fake-rain. So I started to think, "how odd that [downstairs neighbors] are being so loud. i never hear them. they are never loud. and it's spring break. what are they doing?!" Then it seemed like it must not be them making the noise. I got out of bed and began walking around the apartment trying to figure out where the noise was coming from. Every now and then the guestroom next door to my apartment will house someone who thinks really loud television is a good idea. That wasn't it. Then I stood near my apartment's front door and realized the sound was coming from the hallway. I opened the door and further realized not only that the noise was coming from the apartment across and down the hall, but that the noise was NPR! National Public Radio. All Things Considered. As loud as a rock show!
That's right. Someone was totally blasting NPR for over an hour early in the morning during spring break in a building full of professors. I really wanted to laugh but I also felt exhausted and enraged, so I put my crazy-lady unruly bed-hair in a pony tail and walked down the hall and knocked on the door. No answer. Knocking again. No answer. KNOCKING. Voice: who is it? Me: Your neighbor. Finally, the door opens a crack. Me: "I'm sorry, but I am desperately tired and I was wondering if you could turn your radio down." She was appropriately horrified that her radio program was loud enough to be heard all the way through her door down the hall and through the walls into my bedroom. But still, did I mention that it was loud enough to be heard all the way through her door down the hall and through the walls into my bedroom? HOW DID SHE NOT KNOW THIS?
And. She was doing all this loud raging to the sounds of NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO!? Now I can laugh about it.
The weekend was also full of ups and downs left unreflected in the diary entries. Really great ups, and really low downs. I tried to deal with these by taking long walks, which twice ended with me watching movies at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. I saw Pan's Labyrinth again. Almost ready to write about it, now. And I saw Venus. Venus is the film starring Peter O'Toole, about an old old man romancing a young young girl. About this film you must know this: it tells its story without being creepy or sentimental. Imagine that! Creepy and Sentimental have the same initials as Charybdis and Scylla, and those, really, are the deadly whirlpools and the rocks involved in telling a story about an old man going after a young girl. But it's really a story about desire, how it doesn't just leave you as you age, and how it is a complex kind of thing not reducible to lust (though lust is surely part of it), and also it is about how odd, singular, and unexpected are the things that draw people together. Which leads me to its subtle investigation of one my favorite themes: how no one outside of an intimate couple really understands what happens in that relationship. From the outside you can only see what you can see, which is what shows. But in any relationship worth having, there is so much that doesn't appear.
11:47 p.m. - March 13, 2007
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