I started "Being and Time" this evening. Utterly senseless -- it makes me want to cry. I thought I knew something, that I could understand things if I read them, that I was moderately educated -- there was barely a sentence that made real sense to me and I can only claim a single section honestly interested me. And yet -- Heidigger is trying to figure out what *being* *is*. I *am* -- this concerns *me* -- I should be fascinated. But I can't help but think -- it's unanswerable, it's too obscure, it's...

I've been trying to figure out what being is my whole life. I mean, what existence means, and what it means to me, and whether it means (that is to say, communicates?) at all. But...did he solve the problem? Did he give a definition for being? More words to throw around at parties, I suppose -- impress people: "I'm reading Heidigger" -- "Will you fuck me?" The utter frustration of it! To think that you can apprehend and not know what you're apprehending -- perhaps it challenges me. It definitely challenges me. It challenges me like very few things I've ever encountered; like, in fact, nothing I've ever encountered. There's always a basis for any other question, always some point to claw at, to grasp, but nothing for the question of being except being itself. I'll keep you posted. Part of me wants to put it down and never take it back up ever again. And then there will be a major work of philosophy that influenced everybody in the 20th century that I don't understand. Whatever my carreer, I am a foreigner in my own time, to my own people, well read in ancient sources but ultimately outside of the loop.

This brings me to another question that I often ask: is there anything to be gained by all this study? Beyong pleasure? Is pleasure itself reason enough? Should it bother me that I don't understand how trees work, what a tree essentially is? When a moment passes I don't know what that passing is. I am, but I don't comprehend myself. The utter exhaustion of it. And whatever I write, whatever I think, is an unformed and unthought thought, misunderstand and misapprehended, lost to all comprehension like a quick flash of light in the dark, a raging spark that burns and sputters out, or some thing -- a meaningless nothing. It distances me further from religion, from poetry, from any validation -- how can I validate anything when I understand none of it? How can I, confronted with this nothing, affirm "O youth perspicuous in bloom" when these are images in my mind, but the source, the I, is beyond me? And yet it is comforting to think I enter the illusory world of knowledge, like a dream, like a mist, and through the comparison of one thing to another, I begin to understand this nothing by dividing it, splitting it into smaller infinities, smaller nothings, and rearranging each in a pattern of nothing, and affirming, "be". So I know that bloom is the growth of a flower, a flower the growth of the spring, and spring the growth of life, which is the opposite of fall and winter, death and nothing, being that springs from the absence of being. Youth too, is life, and perspicuous is a clear and firm affirmation, one of absolute existence, and I mean an eternal existence in bloom, in becoming which is not yet nothing but the apex of a movement away from it. My experiences collaborate with each other to give me no ultimate knowing but a prediction of what knowing this being might be.

Again and again it's the same thing -- I want to write something but I have nothing to write. Every time I sit down to write something the only things that I want to write are old and pretentious -- I started writing something in the vein of the Bible and it's interesting, but perfectly awful. It cripples me. I tried to begin, "Kevin was in trouble. He had three thousand dollars in gambling debts due by the end of the month..." but I couldn't finish it. How do gambling debts work? I haven't the slightest clue. Every time I sit down to write something, I feel like everybody is glaring at me. It's the awful comments I get from posting on this site, partly, and partly it's just the immense pressure of the past. That's cliche, but I just hate modern literature. Everything is trying to be...interesting; writers trying so hard to be interesting. I just want to follow a formula.

Another thing that I don't want to do when I write is research. I hate the idea of having to summarize facts and places and other people's ideas in my writing. I just want it to come from me -- I want to be able to produce the world and never be questioned on a single detail. That's why I couldn't start writing about Kevin -- because someone was bound to complain that it was unrealistic -- I hate realism! Realism has ruined literature. But so has fantasy; fantasy narratives are awful -- it's pure escapism. And what's wrong with that? Everything is about the quest to save the world, the brink of destruction, descriptions of fights and battles in the most ludicrous and cliche style to no purpose. Writing has to be redeemed. There has to be some quality about the words that make them worth it, otherwise I can't help but feel like I've been wasting my time. Like I'm just dying.

That's how I've felt, sometimes, about brushing my teeth, washing my face, showering. All these little, annoying things that aren't worth the time it takes to do them; but that's life. I don't like to think that I'm disintegrating. But at the same time, I don't really like being here. I said that last time I wrote, and I'm sorry if that is naive, pretentious, and etc. but...I feel impotent. I feel like I want to do something but I can't. Everything is a struggle. I lay awake nights worrying; I keep the fan on to provide white noise, just so I can go to sleep without hearing other people talking in the hall, keeping me up; ear-plugs in my ears, but still I keep turning familiar concerns over and over again in my mind and I just can't sleep.

Where am I going to find a job this summer? I haven't started looking. Why haven't I started looking? Because I have papers to write. But surely I could call places -- it just feels useless, and I give up before I've even started. And writing these papers, when I begin, I often feel like I have nothing to say. I'm afraid that I don't have anything to say, and that's why I spend so much time trying to write something, anything, because I desperately want to have something worthwhile to say. I know that I'm a good writer, in that I have some facility in constructing sentences and some appreciation for the play of language, so all I need is something, anything to write about.

I really hate all you people who read my journal, because you do nothing but mock me. If you don't have something nice to say, you should keep your big dumb mouths shut. There was that one girl who complimented me, said that I was well read, and that was nice. You know, folks, it isn't a competition. You don't have to prove that you're smarter than me and I don't have to prove that I'm smarter than you. Who cares who's read the most books, who can write the best, who is the most logical, who is the most poetic? All of these things are barriers to our expression of ourselves. I try and I try to please you, but this is getting me nowhere. It would be better to just attempt to please myself.

But how do I please myself? And if I please myself, am I done? The only thing that resolves the constant conflict of life is, of course, death, because the human mind is so unstable that it will always find some new anxiety to land upon as long as we are alive. Perhaps it's a survival strategy -- this has just been my experience; I've never been content for any long period of time. Of course, there have been times, right when I meet a new group of people or after some calamitous or amazing experience, when the whole world seems wider, when I'm constantly discovering new things. But eventually I return to my rut, and my anxieties, and always the pettiest things, so that, looking back, I can't even remember what I was so worried about before.

I spent the early part of this semester trying desperately to find a boyfriend, and now I don't even want sex. I thought that perhaps a man was the thing that was missing from my life, but I don't anymore. I mean, it's just too simple. Or maybe I've given up. It leaves me in a difficult position, because -- you're supposed to have someone to love, but I don't know if I care anymore.

I remember once I criticized a poem someone wrote about self immolation and he told me that I was immature and that I needed to work at soup kitchens. This is the kind of crap that bothers me about people -- why does everybody else have suggestions for me about how I should live my life? Why can't you people all just live your own lives? It's not that I don't care about you, but I generate enough negativity myself, and I don't need yours as well.

I was thinking about how life degenerates into conflict today; about King Lear, in fact, as an expression of people pitted in struggle, one against another. That's tragedy, when community collapses, and when things go to dog eat dog. I hate corporate executives, I hate people who pretend to be nice to you only to get what they want. I especially hate it when what they want from you is your body -- something so close to who you actually are, and yet so far. I'm not under the foolish assumption that my body is anything to want. I'm a very bad lay, I'll admit, when I don't like the person I'm sleeping with, and that's the case only too often.

I was considering becoming a hedonist, and doing only those things which gave me pleasure. But i don't really know what gives me pleasure. For instance, I don't take much pleasure in the company of others, but it's something that I need every once in awhile to avoid going crazy. If I spend too much time alone, in my room, I feel as if the entire world is passing me by. The only time I really feel at peace is during the night, when everything is dark, when you can't feel the world turning (because the stars are always obscured) and when everybody else is sleeping. Then I have time to think -- and if I don't stay awake and worry, I have time to sleep and dream.

I love to dream; there's something so soothing and peaceful about a good dream. Bad dreams are always terrible, of course, and if you don't dream, I think that's the worst of all, because the night passes in a flash in that case, and you have no extension of time in which to enjoy the sensation of being asleep. I hate it especially when you awake at 6 am and have to get up at, say, 8 o'clock, and you have this pleasant sleepiness hanging on your eyelids and you coax yourself back to sleep only to wake up, an instant later, to the feelings of dead exhaustion and an alarm clock. That click of the alarm clock sounding, which has tormented me ever since middle school, is the worst sound in the world. The mind fastens upon it, it is instantly recognizable, and it begins the whole day, along with the drudgery of brushing one's teeth, washing the face, staring sleepy-eyed into mirror, wondering how attractive one really is, showering (which is moderately pleasant if you've slept well, but not stimulating enough to cure insomnia's hangover), getting something to eat, and then rushing headlong into all the petty calamities, all the stresses, all the idle moments of another day wasted.

I used to feel that if I was reading, I was doing something useful, but lately I feel so little inspired or diverted by the things I read, and so slow to comprehend any particular passage, that I just seem to have wasted more time. One is never satisfied with a book; its either too long or too short, and it passes right over my head. If it's poetry, then the play of language darts in front of me, scampers off, but I can never quite grasp -- what's actually being said. Novels are too long, they degenerate into merely their plot. Analysis I never understand, although it fills my head with strange ideas. History is repetitive and disconcerting, biography is a dooms-day prediction, the news is the fulfillment of the prophecy, and what else is there to read? Gossip, jokes, humor. Every social interaction, you might notice, involves laughter. Or at least most of them. Whenever I hear people talking in the halls or at a distance, they're always laughing. Why is that?