I suppose I'm being dramatic, but I'll post the events of the day just to share with a wide-based audience. Now I wonder if anybody is dissuaded from visiting this site because of La Vita Nuova? Perhaps people think the site is in Spanish or Italian? Or perhaps abstract literary references just aren't a turn-on.

Tonight, I fear I hurt someone I liked. I guess I can't go into too many close details, but I'll say that personal information was divulged, information that must be dealt with, information that must be discussed, sorted out, analyzed, compartmentalized, felt, shared -- and I copped out. I didn't mean to, I didn't want to, but I did, using my sister's project as a sub-conscious excuse to get out of there. It must have been subconscious, because looking back I don't know why I was so insistent on helping my sister -- I didn't end up doing it at all because I was so upset I couldn't concentrate. I guess I felt my parents' disapproval, I guess that I wanted more privacy, I guess I wanted a space in which to deal.

Sometimes I fear the hopes of any love are smashed to bits. Someone I finally felt I was connecting with, and I ruined everything. And then I've obsessed since then. Tried to call several times, apologized via email, a whole disgusting and dramatic saga. I'm reading this book called "Drama Queen" and I fear I am one. This whole damn saga. I don't want people to hate me, and I don't want people to think I hate them, or that I hold them in low regard, or that I don't have time for them. I love everybody, maybe, but I have a hard time expressing it?

I don't feel like I have a right to my opinions or feelings anymore. I don't trust them. When I get jealous, I'm being petty, when I get upset, I'm being either overanalytical or overdramatic. When I call a friend because I'm so obsessed that I just can't do anything except sit and mope with this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach, I feel as if I'm just burdening other people with my problems. I feel as if I were writing this now (I might not be entitled to use the subjunctive there) just to get attention, just to get sympathy. Parading my woes. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I read those lines to myself, wrote them on the door, when I broke up with Ben. Or when I first heard that he was with someone else. I guess now I really am broadcasting personal information. It's more drama I suppose. I felt so awful then. I get so attached to people. What I need is time to process; time to think about my loneliness. JD says I don't understand my loneliness.

And I am so lonely. So terribly lonely. I have so many friends, if I ever sit down to think about it -- real people who actually care about me. My teachers, people from school, my professors, people from home, my family certainly, and Val: after I found out and after I got into a fight with my parents about helping my sister (I'm so very sorry, I just couldn't concentrate, and yet I sleep 'til 12 every morning and don't find a job, lazy bum that I am, and no I am not entitled to this self pity -- so the alternative is love, I guess...I'm beginning to feel the beginnings of a warm glow spreading just from the bottom of my abdomen upwards, the sanctified chantings of an inner peace are spreading, or at least some outer facade of calm) I then went to her house and we watched Six Feet Under and The Critic and made jokes and talked. But I guess that was the problem. I was trying to avoid my problems. I should have faced them, as maybe I'm doing now. Then I could've begun the process of healing instead of trying to call him another three times and desperately clinging onto people for reassurance. I need to make a commitment to myself when I feel upset to write about it. It's therapy. The only difference is that the chair is empty facing across from me, just the blank stare of a computer screen. About as sympathetic as a bad therapist though, it will do as substitution.

Today I was convinced that I love the whole world. But I can't listen to people when they talk to me. I get so involved in the meta-discourse, if you will, that I forget the real world. I think about what people are saying and ride off into a world of hasty conclusions and intellectualism; I miss the moment, I don't see the world and environment around me. My mind is busy scanning and processing things at a thousand miles a minute and I just can't listen, I can't be interested -- perhaps I want to escape from intimacy. Perhaps intimacy is choking me; I can't handle it, other people -- they're too much for me sometimes. Perhaps why I'm not more friendly.

When I get really depressed, coming out of it I get incredible highs. The euphoria encompasses everything -- music, words, art, landscape, and people are redeemed and cloaked in a new beauty (nous sommes revetus dans une nouvelle corpse amoreuse ou quelque chose comme ca) -- and I feel the sheer narcissism of loving a phrase. Phrases become aphrodisiacs, become overpowering symbols of a great and supreme happiness that I cannot reach. Today, entering the mall, I was thinking about mortality transcending itself to become eternity and I was in love. I wanted to embrace the world. Une ivresse belle m'engage. I love the little world that I've made for myself, and I'm afraid to go outside.

But I do feel terribly lonely as a result. I want a boyfriend. I want somebody to love me. Because in the end I won't do it. I don't feel entitled to want a boyfriend. I don't feel as if I deserve a boyfriend, because I'm so whiny and snivelling, I suppose. I don't deserve that either of course. I don't merit self pity. And yet the paradox of that is if you don't merit to pity yourself, then you do merit to love yourself. If you're so low that you can't hate yourself, you must love yourself.

Mental images and thoughts I've always considered to be more powerful than medications. An idea can set the heart racing, can penetrate the pores of the mind, and can forge a broken man anew. The metaphor of grand temperance in the forging of Aragorn's sword -- good new, resplendent, and shining, a glowing light in the dark of Mordor. I don't know why I thougtht of that, but I did. Thoughts are a gleaming sword in the mist and darkness. The lady of the lake.

You see, my world is self contained. But I apologize with love. To my friend -- I hope you are -- if you are reading this, yes I am sorry. Not for being myself, but because you think I am not treating you as you deserve. Because I should be, and if I am not, I am sorry, and let me try, give me the chance and I will.

To the rest of you, the best and most peaceful of nights. I will learn to listen to the secret murmurings of the entire world.