happiness?

DAVID: You see, maybe it’s a boy thing. Maybe you don’t get it.

MARGARET: Well, you know, no, it’s this sort of obsession with sex.

DAVID: It’s a boy thing.

MARGARET: I think girls are obsessed with romance, you see.

DAVID: That’s the difference between us, Margaret.

____transcript: At the Movies With Margaret and David, reviewing Sex ____Drive


untitled, isa marcelli

i am uncertain about happiness. firstly, it's not something i know. is it even a noun or an adjective? why don't i know it?, i feel like i should. it's something we're soo often concerned with, our 'happiness'. certainly i know about all its opposites (and it has alot of opposites). i know about its half-opposites and its nearly-the-same-thing-but-not-reallys.
____every so often, it's important i think to take account of life. and every time, i find the same result: i don't like my life. don't get me wrong, in hindsight i'm always satisfied (enough) with it. in hindsight i even look back on certain phases of it with tremendous affection (and equal loathing). (this is maybe the crux of who i am. the history conundrum is who i am). perhaps only behind the glass of time, bars that prevent me from tampering with it, the folds and wrinkles, the aberations in photographs, sentiment and nostalgia changing the colors, maybe only after all that, am i able to view it, this distorted bastard of myself, this frankenstien stictched together from rainbows that weren't there, and from first kisses that tasted like french-fries and there were no earthquakes at all... the flickering light was just a moth to a lightbulb, making a mild burning noise everytime it landed, maybe after i've dipped it in watercolors and used red-eye-reduction on it, after that, maybe it's ok to look at it. diluted versions of my moments, and think, oh yes, it wasn't so bad was it?

But while i live through it, there is a brutality to mornings. like something being cleaved. i am lonely when i am alone, and more so when i am in large groups. i am unimpressed with women, and them, i think, with me. an impromptu conversation about mathematics algorithms that traditionally i'd enjoy and enjoy i perfunctorily nod and play my moves through. after some digression in our conversation, (we consider: Japan, the Trivium, my Swedish designed wristwatch), i'm invited out. come hang with us, why not? i don't know. but i don't. i can't.

i enjoy playing the piano. it allows me to concentrate on minute movements in my hands. it focusses my body into two palms and i can ignore the rest of it. all the rest of it. i just listen and feel my hands moving. make mistakes. make adjustments. like cooking. like putting a bed back together. i like playing with children. there's something distinctly anti-me about being found on my hands and knees growling like a lion at a 3-year-old. i hate writing. mostly i do not have qualities that i dislike. ("oh, i'm so shy, i wish i wasn't" or... "i must get this whole compulsive-lying thing under control". nothing like that) but i loathe writing. it is after being shot, the trail you leave behind. it's jagged, and imprefect, and never-quite-right, and must be the sort of sickening 'not-again' compulsion drug and sex addicts get before they do something they know they're going to regret. that sort of shaking, 'oh no not now' werewolf transmutation. pains and stretches and aches and reorganization of internal organs.

"What is this thing happiness that I've talked myself out of it a million times and never once in?"
____Jonathan Safran Foer

In the best of times, i still feel as though i am in a dark room grasping for lightswitches. Sitting by banks, waiting for the line to twitch, unable to relax in the scenery. there is something that's missing here. some element that should make Friday night worth its own self.

[shrug]
(but not even once?)