I feel embarrassed & scared today. But things are looking up.

For Christmas I asked for & received some lovely pomegranate bath salts & a
gorgeous glass radiometer that slowly turns & turns on my windowsill (even
though right now it's hidden behind my blinds). But my favorite gift of all is
a tin of 120 colored pencils; I've used it every day since I got it.

My feeling is that if I pray correctly, I won't want or need to talk about
right or wrong anymore, because a light will shine from behind my descriptions
of other things & I won't have to appeal explicitly to what's higher. The
burden of expression will no longer fall on a small set of charged abstractions
but instead on something larger & more diffuse --- a tone or a style, if you
like.

I've been listening to the Melvins song "Joan of Arc" over & over.

I recently bought some CDs: "Bullhead" & "Lysol" by Melvins; "Urban Dance" by
Boris; "Advaitic Songs" by Om; & "Let Us Prey" & "Black Masses" by Electric
Wizard. I also got my friend a copy of "Purple Mountains" on cassette. (I buy
them cassettes because that's all their car stereo can play.) I didn't buy this
for them because I want them to be sad, even though "Purple Mountains" is
certainly the saddest album I've ever heard. "Nights That Won't Happen" often
makes me cry. I also picked up a copy of "The Art of Self-Defense" at the
recent High on Fire show I went to. 

Faith doesn't consist in believing or asserting a particular notion of what's
most important but instead paying attention to what we already know is most
important. If you really pay attention to it, it will change you.

Oh, & I also ordered CD copies of "Future Days" by Can & "Lookout Mountain,
Lookout Sea" by Silver Jews online.

Right now my CD holder has too much heavy stuff in it. I don't want non-stop
heaviness...

Today is Sunday: I'll probably have Ethiopian food at the farmers' market in a
few hours even though it's expensive. It's really excellent, I'm very hungry.

My concerns at the moment are quite childish, I think. All I seem to care about
is socializing & partying & interpersonal drama. I can't tell my age. I really
ought to eat better & exercise, that's true!

Even though it's experienced as a lack, the pain of emptiness does appear from
the outside like the presence of something...ironically such pain is often best
treated with various kinds of negation & subtraction, not by supplying what the
suffering person supposes to be missing --- or at any rate, if something is
supplied, it addresses a lack in another part of life. Someone suffering from
an acute feeling of emptiness might need to abandon a malformed conception of
ethics in order to feel well again, because their present conception is an
insecure one & makes unreasonable demands of them --- moral perfection, say,
unfailing thoughtfulness, or exhaustive self-awareness, etc.

I'm interested in philosophy but I doubt I have the temperament for it.
Wittgenstein is important to me.

I've never had a pet. I wonder if someday I might have one. I'm not very drawn
to cats or dogs, although I like both very much. Really I like pigs & rats
more...I would love to look after a pig for a little while, they make me so
happy...

The other night I was thinking about an unpleasant memory while getting ready
for bed. When I turned off the light I instantly became so overwhelmed with
fear that I sprinted around my apartment turning the lights on. I never use my
phone in bed but I did for a while just to distract myself. What disturbed me
so much was that it felt like my eyes weren't adjusting to the darkness like
usual (I always keep a light on outside my bedroom & leave the door ajar). I
was terrified that someone had unplugged the lights & was waiting for me to try
& turn them back on.

I did have Ethiopian food & it was quite nice...today was the first time I
tried their vegetarian options. Recently while trying to fall asleep I started
crying about people hurting pigs. So I've been ordering vegetarian options
where I used to order meat. (This has been very easy because it turns out, for
instance, that butter paneer curry is just as good as --- if not better than
--- butter chicken.) But I'm also going to have to think about vegan options at
some point.

I recently got a CD boxset of Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music".
This is a valuable collection but I haven't started listening to it yet. They
say that, in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 60s, this was the Bible,
that everyone knew every song by heart, even the ones they hated. That's my
fantasy too, I always want to learn monoliths off by heart!

I'm very interested in Quakers. There's a weekly session of unprogrammed
worship one neighborhood over. Maybe I'll check it out someday.

Lately I've been listening a lot to "The Glow Pt. 2" by The Microphones &
thinking about being young, figuring out who you are & where you feel at home
in the world. My opportunities to explore who I was when I actually was that
young were compromised by pain, from not knowing I was trans, then from not
transitioning, then from being punished for trying to transition. Now I'm
almost 30 & I'm longing to feel like my life isn't over & I'm only on the brink
of it. I don't think I'm fantasizing about innocence, just less dread. I know
28 is still young. So if I want to feel this way, presumably I just need to let
myself. I'm allowed to become a new person.

My cough is nearly healed. It's almost a month old now.