Moot Point

­I’m mostly better now, than I was.

I am just wanting something to be excited about. A project, a love affair, a job. Something that will jump into my mind when I wake up in the morning so I’ll smile and say “I am lucky,” and then I’ll dance in the shower to the happiest songs I know.

I don’t wake up angry anymore.

Everything seems somehow more fully loaded now. I blow around like a leaf. The Weakerthans record I’ve listened to a hundred times still stirs my heart up like it was new. My eyes are wet from Stepmom on TV. Weblog entries make humble and I don’t ever want to put down The Hours. Belle and Sebastian make me sing along like I was brand new.

I’m open, wide open, and ready for something better.

I can’t think of any (printable) personal experience stories that will fill 1,000 words. Something about Calgary.

When I feel like this, all I want to do is sit in the coffeshop or my room all day and read. I definitely don’t want to work on an assignment for an elective. Or go to a night class I’m only taking because I had to.

I went to Starbucks to do some work. I have a certain Starbucks I like more dislike less than the other 50 Starbuckses in a five-block radius from my home (Yorkville is like that), and I managed to get one of the big soft purple chairs at the back.

There was a vaguely interesting-looking guy sitting in one of the chairs on the other side of the shop, reading and drinking tea through a straw. He looked my age, maybe a bit younger, he had his feet slung over the side of the chair. I stole a few glances at him, but I didn’t even check to see what book he was reading. I think he looked at me a few times, cozied up with photocopied Intimate Journal of George Sand (What is it about cute boys that turn even the most independent women to mush?), which he of course didn’t know was the Intimate Journal of George Sand. I felt a little bit like we were reading together, only not. I just felt a little less lonely, somehow. The whole thing would have fallen apart if it were in any way acknowledged. Then he left.

A little while later, someone who may possibly be the most beautiful man I have ever spoken to asked if I minded if he took the chair opposite me. I don’t usually think men I see at Starbucks are attractive, but this guy was like an angel. He wasn’t the sort of pseudo-gritty/interesting kind of good looks I usually go for. He had a full beard and plain brown hair and a gentle face and kind eyes. I kept sort of sneaking glances at him from behind Death Comes for the Archbishop. I’m pretty sure he caught me almost crying at this one part where Kit Carson helps this poor Mexican woman who’d married a murderous American man. (I think I was crying because I was so happy something exciting was finally happening. Willa Cather always seems to start out slow. Really slow.) He probably thought I was weird. He probably didn’t know I thought he was dreamy.

The Lost in Translation soundtrack has been my lullaby since Friday. Everyone wants to be found.

Last night after The Daily Show (Jon Stewart is the latest in my stream of nonsensical TV crushes), I caught the last half of Pennies From Heaven, which has Steve Martin daydream-lipsynching to all these old ’30s songs, like “We’re in the Money,” in order to get him through his grim Depression-era life. I’d forgotten how good it was; it had been recommended it to me as being in the same vein as Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, which also had Steve Martin and invoked movies of old, but was much funnier and less dark, so when I realized how grim Pennies From Heaven was, I was taken a little aback.

Also, I was really into old musicals at the time**, so seeing a movie that was basically about how they give you false hope and that living by these cheerful Depression-era jazz-pop songs or Fred and Ginger movies just made your life disintegrate was kind of disturbing for me. Actually, the first time I watched it, I saw Follow the Fleet, the movie Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters do their last fantasy dance number to, right before, so it all seemed to fit together and be trying to tell me something a little too clearly. I was in high school, I didn’t listen to the world back then. Even now it takes me awhile to get the message.

As the credits rolled, I realized that it was directed by Herbert Ross, who also directed Play It Again, Sam, in which a hallucination of Humphrey Bogart gives Woody Allen love advice.

Play It Again, Sam has this scene where Woody is on a date that doesn’t go well. They’re eating Chinese food and he’s explaining how the Chinese, they use the chopsticks to shovel rice into their mouths and he demonstrates, and he’s all trying to impress her, and she’s not impressed. I saw this movie a few months before my first date with an old boyfriend***. We went out for Vietnamese, and we were eating with chopsticks and I can’t totally remember how it came up, but he made the exact same explanation as in that scene. I just kind of smiled and said, yeah, I’d heard that. I didn’t try, because there was no way of explaining it that wouldn’t embarrass him, and make it seem like I was judging him, when I was in point of fact utterly charmed. What can I say?

Today, when I friend emailed me about a calamitous situation he’d recently been in, instead of writing back sympathetically, I related it to an episode of Full House.

Includes: Bruce McCulloch, both Masterson brothers, Mickey Dolenz (when he had curly hair), Dave Foley, Rick Mercer (very briefly), &c.

**Shut up.

***Not the one I just split up with.

The walls are all this clean modern white. The carpet’s grey with beige stripes. The walls between study areas are all glass with faint grey writing so people don’t walk through them. There are lots of snow-covered Canadian landscapes on the walls. Everything’s minimalist. It’s like the platonic ideal of bland good taste.

I’m at the only computer in the “Information Commons” with a black keyboard and mouse. It’s my favourite one.

Curse my computer for being broken and keeping me prisoner in this keyboarding clicking hell.

My head feels like it was stuffed with cotton. I’m gonna go watch TV, I don’t care what.

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div id=”29022_kdub2″>One: Ann Miller died a couple days ago. She could tap like nobody’s business. When you watched the “Prehistoric Man” number from On the Town as many times as I have, you could see Gene Kelly watching her in total awe when she did those crazy spins. Also, her autobiography was called Miller’s High Life, which is my new favourite celebrity autobiography title ever.

Two: Go Ask Alice, the tawdry real-life, drug-addled diary that I snuck bits of in my elementary school library is a fraud. It makes sense in retrospect. (Thank you, Cati Fabulous.)

Three: The only comment I’ve gotten so far I had to delete because the commenter defended Ashton Kutcher and called me gayyyyy with five y’s for disliking him enough to mention it in my weblog sidebar. She both wrote them out and noted that there were five of them (like I did just now), which seemed redundant to me. I don’t think I ever got a random comment so mean from my old website. I did once get an email that someone named Lance thought he was in love with me because of my website, which was flattering. If I was into omens, I’d call this a bad one.

They say people dream every time they go into a certain stage of sleep, but I’ve never been sure how they’ve known something like that if even the people who are dreaming don’t know it. I’ve almost never remembered my dreams, with the exception of that one time last year I dreamt that raccoons invaded my building and only Jen was smart enough to keep them away from her computer with a decoy raccoon.

That was a funny dream, not in itself disturbing.

In the last couple of weeks though, I’ve been waking up suddenly in the night a lot, often from these tense awful dreams that make want to hide in my warm white bed and not face the hostile outside world. The guy I just split up with has shown up in a couple.

The worst one was the one where I dreamed we were just going to the movies like normal and it felt as though this whole thing had been just some horrible dream, because then I woke up and realized that we weren’t just going to the movies like normal and the normal part was the dream and the horrible dream part had actually happened.

I’m no dream expert, but I’m pretty sure that was indicative of my innermost desire for life to just go back to normal. Of course, it’s not that simple, that normal doesn’t really exist anymore, but try explaining that to a frustrated Id.

He also made an awkward appearance in one that mostly concerned with packing and/or unpacking these suitcases that were just too full, and having to choose which stuff to keep and which stuff not to keep. I remember debating particularly over a slightly trampy black skirt that I still have in real life; I’m not sure what I decided. Baggage seems like a pretty obvious metaphor.

Last night was the worst one yet. I went to bed feeling pretty happy about the world, but I had this whole awful dream where my mom came to visit and I didn’t have very much time to spend with her because I had all this work to do. She was staying in some hotel and I was staying with her and our whole extended family was apparently there too. I was lying in a bed with red sheets and I didn’t want to get up and I could hear her talking to a cousin of mine at the other end of the room, but I felt trapped in bed and I was totally isolated from them. Later, when Mom was leaving, I apologized for not spending more time with her and she said oh, that’s okay she didn’t mind, she had everyone else there, and I wound up sobbing on her shoulder.

I’m not doing justice to just how tense and disturbing these dreams were, how ill at ease I felt when I woke up. Do people who remember their dreams go through this torture-by-subconscious every day? Or is it just because a big part of my life has changed and everything still kind of feels in flux?

“How you doin’, Brenda?”

“I just got my skates sharpened. I feel like a new woman.”

I wish I could say that the night didn’t end with dead baby jokes, but it did.

Hello, internet. I’m back. I quit moot point before because I was bored of it and starting to feel like it was insignificant. I sort of became disenchanted with everything. The phrase “quarter-life crisis” leaps to mind, but then it leaps back out because it’s the flakiest thing I’ve ever said and it – and this is why I hate psychobabble – reduces my specific experience to a catchphrase. I’m not saying “Oh, look at me, my experience is unique and important,” I’m just saying it matters. Because it’s mine. Like Mrs. Dalloway and her parties.

Having your heart broken is even more of a college-student cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less singular, either. I’d never really had a bad breakup before; I’ve never had someone I loved disappoint me as much as he did in so many ways. I walked around like a Sad Zombie for about a week before I could even really accept it. Listened to Sad Jazz and read Sad Books about Unfulfilled Lives. Whined Vented to anyone who would listen. Literally cried myself to sleep one night. My voice breaking at random intervals in conversation. I didn’t eat much, I thought out of grief, it turns out because of an actual unrelated health concern. I thought about developing a dependency on drugs, alcohol, over-the-counter sleeping pills. About giving up.

I’m not okay yet. I’m not over it. It was sudden, it was crushing, but it happened. And in a way I’m kind of glad it happened now, not after I’d given him more of my time, my heart, my body, my mind. I still think about it too much. I still have this angry little hard place in my chest when I think about how he treated me.

When I write something like “I don’t need him” or “I will be okay” or “It’s his loss,” they just sound like empty, flat words. Things you say to try to convince yourself that they were true. I would sit there, talking to whichever friend I was depressing that day, tears filling my eyes, and say these phrases. There are no words to convey the shift I underwent when I realized these things were true.

My whole life was opening up. Somewhere in the last year I’d decided that I needed to resign myself to mediocrity to be happy.

Last Friday, walking down College on some unsuccessful errands, a crazy lady looked me straight in the face and started yelling at me about pigeons as she passed. Today, I passed an acquaintance on the way into the library. I just smiled in sort “I know you, but not very well,” recognition. “Looking good,” he said, commenting especially on my boots.

I’m going straight to the top.