I got my tax return today - a very generous amount. It pleased my greed. I don't know what to do with it so I'll just let it stagnate.

After work I visited the op shop and bought a book and a woolen jacket which is pilled all over but perfectly, oh-so-perfectly warm. The jacket was three dollars but the old biddy charged me five because she read it incorrectly and I felt too guilty to correct her. Old ladies in op shops are rarely very friendly towards me and this makes me feel uncomfortable. They hold achingly boring conversations with each other that make me want to die young. Well, okay - now I'm just being bitter.

The jacket doesn't suit me very well but it is AWESOME, despite the pilled wool, and I have regained hope that it's possible to be warm this winter, although the weather today has been exceptionally beautiful. I could feel the sun. I couldn't believe it. I sat outside in it and stuffed orange wedges in my mouth and I could have done that all day.

But alas I have things to do. I have things to return, things to photocopy and letters to post. I have words to write. I have shit to put away in my room, a bookshelf to move in and fill. I think the weather's got something to do with this bout of motivation.

*

ANHEDONIA. For anyone who's read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, (highly recommended and one among the many novels I wish I wrote), you'll understand why I capitalise that word, as I always see it written that way now. Anyway. ANHEDONIA - for those who don't now - means the inability to experience pleasure. Our teacher, Mike, mentioned a word like it, (or was it that same word?) when he was giving me feedback on my short story. This word has been plagueing me ever since, and has come up in letters I've been writing, in trains of thoughts I've been chasing and faces I see. ANHEDONIA. I picked up a friend the other night to go out and, as I passed the kitchen and the lounge to go out the door, I saw her father sitting on an arm chair, spooning some thing of TV Dinner into his mouth over the television. He had either deliberately ignored our hellos and goodbyes or simply not noticed at all. The lighting was kind of low, and on the couch in the lounge sat my friend's grandfather. You know that feeling you get in nursing homes sometimes? You can almost hear a low generic throb humming beneathe the surface of things. And the smell. Although my friend's house doesn't have the smell it certainly had that feeling the other night and it almost broke my heart. I had to take a breathe and in a flash hold back some tears.

ANHEDONIA.

I'm utterly afraid of it, and sometimes I feel something like it coming on inside of me, this mute awareness to things. It only happens when I'm at home. So I'm going to move out of home this year. I love my parents, but, well, you know. The reasons feel too obvious and therefore too boring to explain.

*

I just feel like writing. I keep this blog more so for personal reasons. No offence to my readers/potential-readers, but as I write here I don't really have your best interests at heart! That's right! Cop that! Ha!

aww.
t.

I made a pact with myself the other day that everyday I would do one thing that makes me feel good about myself. Too often I have fallen short of this kind of mantra and settled with, "feel good." I need to discipline myself to appreciating the delayed reward, because I have a tendency to overindulge in my impulsive desires which are more often than not, counterproductive. This is the type of habitual behaviour I've relaxed into especially since I started drinking. I suppose it all began at around the age of sixteen when I decided I didn't want to be mopey and angsty anymore and wanted to feel good as often as possible. Now at twenty-one, on this cusp of adolescence and post-adolescence, I want to focus more on living the life I want to be living, rather than lilting through as a passive victim of my circumstances. Well, okay, "passive victim of my circumstances" is slightly extreme, I suppose what I mean to say is that since leaving high school, I haven't taken my life into my own hands as much as I thought I would have by now.

I have quite high expectations of myself and a fierce aversion towards the mundane, but I'm also a terribly scared person. My friend, Zach, tells me that I need to be brave. "You need to be brave, Tam!" he said. (mad props/representations to Zach, even though he isn't reading this, I send my love into the cosmos anyway). I had a dream this morning which was so rich in symbollism and was pretty much a summation of most of my fears, as most dreams tend to be. I won't go into the details as I already did that on myspace, and that's enough nightmare reliving for one day!

On my train home today I got to thinking about my fears and it started to get me down. Whereas my fifteen year old self would have opened her ribcage for such woe to consume her sensitive little heart, these days I'm much more resilient to such things and so today I found I was quite well recovered by the time I arrived home, (although my mood-shift was due, in parts, to receiving some delightful snail mail - two William Faulkner novels from Tassie/ebay, and a handwritten letter from my friend, Stephen, whom I haven't heard from since before he left for his travels). It's all part of growing up, I know, a learned behaviour, but I do have a tendency still at times to become bogged down with regret, directionlessness and the desire for the unattainable. It's just always good to confront such emotional states with practical solutions. While this is quite abstract and still fairly cerebral, I find this blog entry to be quite cathartic, and after I place the final full-stop at the end of the final sentence, I know I'll feel as though I've disposed of something stinky.

Too much time alone will make a cynic out of anyone. Too much time on the internet will certainly send your sense of human-relationships into the abstract and cerebral. Or mine at least. Shit, I've developed a crush on a guy I know nothing about save for his name, address and voice, (that sounds creepier than it really is).

Don DeLillo says writing is a concentrated form of thinking. Writing is a funny process; the places you delve into, the shit you shovel out of your head, out of nothing. I'm reminded of these beautiful lines by Hayden Carruth from his poem 'Ray'...

'What crazies we writers are
our heads full of language like buckets of minnows
standing in the moonlight on a dock.'

But I think mindlessness is quite sane from time to time. To vacate the mental premises; focus on the physical; eat, drink, dance, break, fuck. It just sucks when I'm riding this wave and realise I have an assignment due.

Next blog will be more profound, I sweaaaarzZ. But now... I'm off to bed.