2000-08-23 :: 06:37:22
I don't owe you anything
Soundtrack: M�a, "Universal" album sampler (from the now-somewhat-old "Hot" issue of Rolling Stone with Angelina Jolie on the cover); Various Artists, "Too Much Scratchie Makes You Itch!!!"; Remy Zero, "Villa Elaine"
I've been re-reading archives. Yours and mine. I'm afraid I'm getting a little too todayidid, which is against my rules. Have you figured out my rules yet? I think they're pretty simple, actually. Why I have the rules I have is a little harder to answer. I thought of something lately, which means it's been cooking around for a while (thank you for that idea, Alex Garland), and now I just got my souffl� to rise. Now the question is if it will stay put so I can serve it properly.
You may have noticed my rules about the audience (hello). I've even talked about it a few times. This has never been a public diary; I try not to ask too much from my readers, except perhaps a good rib joint in the area. The audience inherently gives an impetus to write. Or I take it. Either way. Look:
Jordan (11:33:05 PM): i was thinking about ally mcbeal and how she was talking about not wanting to harden
Meg (11:33:13 PM): harden?
Jordan (11:33:15 PM): and how it's sort of the opposite for me, when writing, not wanting to soften
Jordan (11:33:24 PM): when, upon seeing a murder victim, not say
Jordan (11:33:25 PM): reasonable doubt
Jordan (11:33:26 PM): but
Jordan (11:33:26 PM): why?
Meg (11:34:13 PM): hmm
Jordan (11:36:04 PM): hmm
Meg (11:36:20 PM): can you elaborate?
Jordan (11:37:10 PM): like
Jordan (11:37:26 PM): well i dont know
Jordan (11:37:33 PM): i mean, i am a pretty caring person
Jordan (11:37:41 PM): but if i think about you, or somebody i know when i write
Jordan (11:37:44 PM): i dont want that to affect it
Jordan (11:38:08 PM): if i ever wrote for a living, if i ever were to be published -- even in a school paper -- i'd want to be very careful about how far i let my relationships cloud my writing
Jordan (11:38:18 PM): but then i wouldnt want it to affect my relationships either
Jordan (11:38:26 PM): unfortunately it seems as though that is a very difficult conflict to resolve
Jordan (11:38:40 PM): the audience helps push a drive to create
Jordan (11:38:46 PM): but then it also feeds, and feeds back
Jordan (11:38:50 PM): and therein is the trouble
Jordan (11:38:55 PM): does that make sense?
Meg (11:40:00 PM): yeah
Meg (11:40:08 PM): to make it impersonally personal
Meg (11:40:09 PM): ?
Jordan (11:40:16 PM): yes. exactly.
Jordan (11:40:27 PM): you have no idea how perfect that is.
Meg (11:40:44 PM): hehe
How horrible and beautiful that is. Meg doesn't even know this diary exists, but she got [im]personalness to a T. I once compared online diaries to a hall of mirrors. Now I want to extend that (further than it probably deserves) somehow to one-way mirrors, the kind people on the outside of Diaryland can't see through. You still get a good look at them, though, or good enough. There are a couple of notable problems with this.
Problem the First: the idea of the artist as one who must create, regardless of audience vs. the idea of the artist working for recognition. I write down my dreams in my sketchbook but that's about as far as I take it outside this diary save for emails, chat, and their ilk. You mix enough ego to think what you have to say is important with enough self-doubt to question that sentiment and you get this. My voice and spin are worth your time. Stop it, somebody.
Problem the Second: I am giving up control. It would be all well and good if this diary only affected me (that would be ideal, I think), but when I begin to care about the audience, it begins to affect the product. And I can't control how those words get shaped, totally. I'd like to, really, I'd like to wrap these symbols around your neurons and talk brainspeak, but that's a wash (though I'm still quite enamored with how script-perfect that conversation snippet was, more on that later). I don't even have the luxury of a parity bit to error check all of this. Worse than a CD, with all of its lovely zeros and ones.
I've been talking to some of you lately. We have cute little moments like this one I shared with Christine (why does a link like that feel like a name-check?):
Jordan (1:00:43 AM): haha. my spin the bottle story was horrible and awkward. we hit noses. anne, my horrible crush, and i hit her nose. great.
Christine (1:01:11 AM): that's sweet.
Jordan (1:01:23 AM): then my spin i landed on janna, which was no big deal. we kinda knew each other so it just sorta was what it was.
Christine (1:01:46 AM): how old?
Jordan (1:01:59 AM): yeah but we had to hold it while they counted and i had no clue, and she was popular and pretty and blahblah.
Jordan (1:02:05 AM): 15, i guess? freshman year.
Christine (1:02:17 AM): man, i kinda wish we still played spin the bottle at parties, so that i'd at least have a chance at kissing the cute boys at my parties!
Christine (1:02:37 AM): er, that was a really dorky sounding sentence.
Jordan (1:02:44 AM): that would be an idea.
Aww. So dorky and cute and nostalgic. (Ironically, Anne performed "I Will Remember You" with acoustic guitar accompaniment by this boy Arny sometime towards the end of the senior year in the cafeteria. If you've played graphical Tetris on the TI-82, you've probably encountered Arny's handiwork. The ironic part is that I'm sure Anne does not remember that kiss or me at all, and I have a pretty good memory lock on it, and her, however meaningless it was. It was only a song, anyway.) This dorky cuteness is pretty good, but with enough of it you people could become part of the real world. And how are Diaryland and the real world supposed to play together; I can't switch my caring on and off (I already let too many things [not] get to me). Sometimes it's even good to care a smidge here and there, because you've got to edit yourself. You've got to put some value in the words or else you just water them down to nothing.
On The Catcher In The Rye, unplanned coincidental readings of:
Laura (11:41:57 PM): you know how people write to famous singers or whatever saying they know exactly how they feel?
Jordan (11:42:01 PM): yeah
Laura (11:42:56 PM): well..I always think that those people are very generic people, I mean, most of the time when people write songs they do it in a general way.
Jordan (11:44:02 PM): yeah
Jordan (11:44:03 PM): well
Jordan (11:44:07 PM): i think maybe you mean ambiguous
Jordan (11:44:11 PM): i dont mind that, though
Jordan (11:44:18 PM): well, cleverly done ambiguity
Laura (11:45:02 PM): either way, I didn't think that he did that
Jordan (11:45:29 PM): for example, "absolutely (story of a girl)" is pretty ambiguous, not too many details, it's a sad girl, and a poppy song, and oh how cute. but it's ambiguous in a way everyone can relate to because they can paint themselves into it in the same way. catcher in the rye has that, indeed, but it has a layer of complexity in terms of the depression and disillusion of the narrator and how he sees things. so you are forced to question the truth of what he says to you.
Laura (11:45:32 PM): like, in a general sense I could say "I kinda know how that feels" but in a whole, I don't know how it feels
Laura (11:45:55 PM): exactly
Jordan (11:46:20 PM): so there is average ambiguity, and there there is talented ambiguity, and one is easy and the other is not.
Laura (11:46:21 PM): when I met the guys from nine days I asked them about it
Jordan (11:46:31 PM): haha how'd you meet them? hfstival?
Laura (11:47:31 PM): and of course they said that the lead guy had a girlfriend that was so beautiful but she never smiled because she was sad about something a lot of the time and within enough time they were realyl good together or something, I don't know taht I got the whole story right cause he was writing on my shirt and chest so he kept muffling himself out.
Jordan (11:47:54 PM): heh im sure he enjoyed that
Laura (11:48:19 PM): anyway, the point is, you sometimes write for a general or generic amount of people, and sometimes you write and dont care who can easily relate, just so someone cares
Ah, yes. The problem is how easily you can shift from the latter to the former, and I don't want that. I want that reasonable doubt.
Holy. Explorer just crashed. Man, am I glad this was in Word, too. Note to self: Word, forever.
I said I'd talk more about script-perfectness. The problem with script-perfect interaction is that I'm afraid it would be very boring. You'd have no thought drift, everything would in essence be pre-determined, like a finite state machine. Well, Heather and I talked about it because of some stuff on said.diaryland.com, which is probably the best freespeak-esque diary around:
Jordan (12:04:27 AM): http://said.diaryland.com/000719_65.html
Jordan (12:04:30 AM): crikey
Heather (12:05:21 AM): apparantly your neck as a baby is important historical fact
Heather (12:05:22 AM): heehee
Jordan (12:05:35 AM): YES
Jordan (12:05:43 AM): because it tells you much about me
Heather (12:05:44 AM): i love that
Heather (12:05:46 AM): seriously
Jordan (12:05:47 AM): what
Jordan (12:05:50 AM): the neck fact?
Heather (12:05:55 AM): when you say stuff you have the intended reply in your head
Heather (12:06:01 AM): when you get a reply that is not that
Heather (12:06:05 AM): it's so bizzare
Heather (12:06:08 AM): i wonder what it is
Jordan (12:06:13 AM): yeah it is weird
Jordan (12:06:15 AM): well
Jordan (12:06:17 AM): we script our lives
Heather (12:06:17 AM): do we condition ourselves for these responses?
Heather (12:06:20 AM): i mean
Jordan (12:06:21 AM): then try to live them out
Heather (12:06:27 AM): it's beautiful and sad
Jordan (12:06:30 AM): but then of course the shooting script is rewritten on the fly
Heather (12:06:37 AM): yeah
Jordan (12:06:39 AM): which responses?
Heather (12:06:40 AM): it's intense
Heather (12:06:45 AM): that was a really good post
Jordan (12:06:48 AM): yes
Jordan (12:06:51 AM): in fact i shall link it
Jordan (12:07:11 AM): http://said.diaryland.com/000720_95.html i liked too
Heather (12:07:12 AM): i mean do we hold it against the other person for not reading our mind
Heather (12:07:13 AM): i do
Jordan (12:07:19 AM): yeah we do
Jordan (12:07:26 AM): but of course that is retarded
Heather (12:07:27 AM): you SO want that person to know what to say
Jordan (12:07:29 AM): that is the weakness of words
Jordan (12:07:35 AM): yeah sad
Heather (12:07:40 AM): sometimes i want to ask them to turn away while i whisper them the right answer so they can give it back to me
Jordan (12:07:41 AM): poignant really
Jordan (12:07:59 AM): wow that is a really moving image
Jordan (12:08:03 AM): sentence
Jordan (12:08:08 AM): whatever
Heather (12:08:48 AM): how weird that is
Heather (12:08:50 AM): i dont get it
Jordan (12:09:10 AM): we want other people's brains to fire like ours do
Jordan (12:09:17 AM): to process a thought that we are expressing faultily
Jordan (12:09:20 AM): to "get" us
Jordan (12:09:25 AM): so when they don't respond the way you plan
Heather (12:09:40 AM): of course
Jordan (12:09:41 AM): you feel you are misunderstood, either you are saying it wrong or they don't get you or a mix, none of it is a good answer
Heather (12:09:43 AM): no i mean that last link
Heather (12:09:45 AM): about the dad
Jordan (12:09:45 AM): oh
Heather (12:09:49 AM): why do you like that one?
Heather (12:09:53 AM): no jordan i totally get the other thing
Jordan (12:09:59 AM): oh ahhahaha
Jordan (12:10:04 AM): sorry!
Jordan (12:10:06 AM): i like it cause
Jordan (12:10:25 AM): it gives you a lot with very few words
Jordan (12:10:38 AM): and it doesn't embellish the self-hate thing, it captures it all in one good sentence
Jordan (12:10:49 AM): it shows you how fractured the dad is
Jordan (12:10:56 AM): without even telling you history or things like that
Jordan (12:11:03 AM): lets you fill in the story
Heather (12:11:09 AM): yeah
Heather (12:11:15 AM): that's why short stories are lovely
Heather (12:11:19 AM): sometimes theyre all you need
Jordan (12:11:20 AM): yes
Jordan (12:11:24 AM): !
Heather (12:11:26 AM): to get the perfect image of the situation
Jordan (12:11:44 AM): i think sometimes about sketching people in sentences
Jordan (12:11:49 AM): the way an artist can sketch a person in a few lines
Jordan (12:11:54 AM): i want to sketch people in a few sentences
Jordan (12:12:09 AM): i want to be able to talk about a mole on someone's neck and have it capture a decade of their life
Jordan (12:12:25 AM): that's when you've got your words under control
Heather (12:12:43 AM): yeah
That mole thing is tryhard but I'll stick with it anyway.
Some said entries I feel like linking for various reasons:
Later in our conversation I said this:
Jordan (12:33:05 AM): i was thinking today of the image of an integral cause i keep talking about the integration
Jordan (12:33:38 AM): the funny thing about talking about that is how integrals have that constant c value that can only be determined if you have points on the graph -- a rather fitting analogy when i began to think about it
All of this talk of people posting their stuff in superpublic forums and artistic purity makes me think of the need for attention. (Did anyone catch any similarities between that entry and my thinking about things?) From my digital sketchbook, added notes in []'s:
the point: most annoyed by darcy brown at the allergist. blue bikini strapped top and flowery shorts [too short/tight], fat thighs, small breasts, and a cell phone. gets a call, screens it, yammers about pizza and going out tonight, when people will show up, and how she would call back of course. call waiting. sorry about that. yes, well call me back in an hour if i don't call you back, but i'll call you back. hit my flip flop [the pronouns are switching there, the "my" refers to me, literally]. nice hair. ugly person. attention whore. most amusing: flashing the white cotton panties of sophisticated ladies.
I'm pretty pleased with that sketch. I didn't know the girl at all; the one part I left out is how she had this quiet friend that was playing the indentured servant role. Sad. What I wanted to do was ask that friend (when Darcy had gone for her shots) why she hung out with Darcy. I would tell her that Darcy seemed like a loudmouth waste of time and surely she could do better - Darcy's only communication with this girl was telling her to give the obnoxious ringing cell phone over. But I didn't, of course. Darcy really bothered me though, talking so loudly. It was like she was talking at me. She was younger than my sister, for chrissakes. Who are you trying to impress at the allergist; couldn't you tell these party people you are out somewhere else (with a bit more glamour) instead of getting a shot? You could even avoid specific details: "I'm out at the moment." Twice she shared her location like it was a very important fact that she had allergies to which she had to attend. (She was gone awfully long for the shots too, makes you wonder.) What are those boys thinking when you tell them you are getting your shots, partygirl?
On the subject of sketches, I talked to Pa�l recently, like last night recently. He told me about sketching (line sketching, not "word sketching" or whatever) some girls in California and giving them one of the napkins on a lark. They were silent when he handed it over, but eventually it seems they were very impressed (oooh, an artist!) and ended up coming up to him later and such. I told him my ideas of sketching, and valuing how many lines and words it takes you (I didn't value the words enough in that sketch there, but it's sparse enough). So now we are going to do a collaborative thing next time we hang out, and people-watch and sketch them in our ways, then see how we feed off each other. I'm very excited about that, actually. My time with Pa�l in Ocean City wasn't really discussed much, but when we talked this time I remembered again how we people-watched on the boardwalk, sitting on a bench and letting time go. I remember turning to him and recalling how when I was little I could never understand why adults were happy to do nothing sometimes, and now, at that moment, I could understand. It was a good time, a good slow time. At the end of our talk last night, we both acknowledged how great it was that our interests had re-coincided and our discussions had gone to a better level.
Fragments follow...
"Your lethargy is self-propelled. ...Self-actualizing." - Mom (08/21/00). That killed me. It really did. "Well at least I'm actualizing something," I think I said in response, after laughing quite a bit.Wondering what percentage of the world is dedicated to graveyards and trash dumps.Non-linearity of relationships has been a hot topic lately (is it more like a scatter plot?), and the problems of net relationships stick on tangentially but forcefully. This is something that has become painfully evident today with an email that included these sentences: "i think it's too bad there was never any real ending, or climax to all of our discussions - that ending being in the realization of who the other person really is, that other side that sight can only explain. it kinda leaves this empty hole because you only know so much.. but you're missing out on some important and comforting aspects of friendship." In the same way I don't forget my kidneys exist, I don't forget that seeing and spending real time in the real world is still a pressing need that exists when I talk to people online. Still, I remember my kidneys a lot more when I get punched in the back. Only this hurt my heart.How very incredible on-the-fly sign language translators are, or any on-the-fly translator for that matter."psps-poll. how does one tell the difference between love-desire and sexual-desire for someone? does one involve dreaming about saving their lives, getting married, etc, while the other involves imagining them giving you head (exclusively). Maybe the difference between love-sex daydreams and sex-sex daydreams are whether you picture foreplay involved."I don't think so. Let's make some huge, [potentially] offensive generalizations, shall we? Yes, we shall. I think love-sex is passionate sex at 50 or 60, with a potbelly and saggy tits. And both people still shave faces/legs carefully because they want to feel each other's skin. My original answer for sex-sex wasn't very nice. I took it out. See what caring makes me do. I'll say sex-sex is what most people have. It often leads to boredom, and, consequently, affairs and/or divorce. That's more of a fill-in answer, though.
It seems to me that similar to realizing the fact that you will one day die (thank you Tom Stoppard), there must be a time when you realize there's been a shift in the dynamic of your love with another person (see also: High Fidelity). No more infatuation, you've gone into stable-mode. You aren't calling your lover at work with how much you want to fuck them and leaving dirty Polaroids in potentially embarrassing (and therefore extremely titillating) locations. You're calling your lover at work to remind them to pick up milk and gas up the car.
Mom says that's okay, you may not get new things, but you will always be reminded of your love whenever you complement one another or bring home sweet little things (such as chocolate covered marshmallows) without a reason, etc. (Oops, I used a lazy "etc." Bad Jordan.) So I guess there is always potential newness, or, perhaps worded better, reminders of what built your love that keep it renewed. Okay.
I am meeting a Diarylander tomorrow. It will probably not be anything like this. That means I need to go to sleep now.
Oh, bless you Fairypond, here's a lovely sample to close on: "That's really all that's been happening and I was just too lazy to sit in front of my computer and go on to Diaryland though I went everywhere else but here."
last five [im]personal journal entries: