I don't wanna do my laundry, I don't wanna do my laundry, do do do do do do, maybe Shalini'll do my laundry, maybe Shalini'll do my laundry do do do do do do (sung to the tune of The Thesis Song).

I need to do my laundry desperately yet I don't want to even more desperately. But I must, alas!

After that heavy hard entry last time I'm still a bit wiped out. Telling the truth is hard work.

I am so dissatisfied in not knowing what I want to do with my life, and scared to investigate.

But at least I'm putting it out there that so I can ruminate.

(oh boy, more rumination!)

But, happy news, I've got the dates set for my San Francisco trip! I leave Monday August 11th and come back Monday August 18th. Neatly enough, Brian and Keith may very well be in SF then too - we can celebrate Brian's birthday on the opposite coast!

I had a few incidents this weekend that really battered my feeling of efficacy, and I feel stupid for letting such minor things make me feel SO bad about myself. Sunday Andi and Doron and I went bike riding over the George Washington Bridge and the view was spectacular and so much fun, but we had a lot more hills to climb than I'm used to and I had to walk the bike up a lot of them, and then I bumped into a lot of stuff, and I scraped my leg pretty badly on a railing that I was trying to avoid - I treated it quickly and kept going (hooray for purse first-aid kits!) but it's still a bit painful and ugly looking. All in all nothing horrible, but I was absolutely obsessed with this feeling of being utterly out of control, that I couldn't control the bike, that I'm every bit the klutz my family thinks I am, that I'm again, somehow marked, different, unable to do the most basic things. I hate this feeling, because I love the bike riding, and don't want to stop enjoying it because of a small setback and a crushing sense of incompetence.

And then I started taking pictures with the camera my dad got me a few years ago.. it's a used Canon, about as old as me, and it's snazzy, but it's cumbersome - I'm torn between loving that it's a real camera, and disliking how tricky and clumsy it is. Yesterday I went to rewind the film and forgot which button to press to release it first and I ripped the film, and all day I had that fucking monologue in my head, "you idiot asshole why do you think you can do anything why do you even try?" and so on and so forth and goddamn, I'm almost 30 and I've still got all those tapes in my head, courtesy of my dad.

I love him, but I am SO resentful sometimes of the way he taught me that product is the only thing that matters, fuck process, and that mistakes are bad, and people who make mistakes are bad and stupid and worthy of ridicule, and art and creativity is pointless and all these things that stick in my head like glue or molasses or sludge. I don't know if he thinks this way now, but that's how he acted when I was a kid, and damn, how I hate it now that I can't get rid of it! (I must be able to find a way!)

I keep re-reading The Artist's Way and something in me must resonate with the idea of creating, of relaxing, of trusting that this world can be a good place, and that I can be a worthy person even if I'm happy, and that damnit, happiness is not a sin, I don't need to be a martyr, I don't have to be selfless (my mom talking here? I hate to keep throwing all this stuff at my parents but I never rebelled as a teenager and I guess it's bound to catch up to me).

When I was 16 I went to art camp, The Center for Creative Youth at Wesleyan University, and it was amazing, 5 weeks away from home where I made my first friends - not that Brian wasn't my friend, but my first group of friends that I belonged to - and I got some writing done, it was very fledgling, but not bad stuff, it had potential, but more than anything it was just this amazing, amazing experience, I felt alive and wonderful for the first time in my adolescent life. (Not to mention that I fell madly-half-in-love with the girl across the hall, in that way that 16 year old girls do, where it doesn't even have anything to do with orientation or politics, just raw feeling and god she still can get under my skin sometimes, and what a writer she was, Dara, such a beautiful name and she was so beautiful and she left a mark on me I'll always have.)

But my parents were just horrible about it. And my parents almost never were horrible about anything. I wrote a poem about a day out with Brian#1 (I wish I could find it, I do remember the line "and i put peroxide in my hair because i wanted to be just like you" and that's the feeling of it, how much I wanted to be like him, how much I admired him) and it was the one I chose to put in our lit magazine, and to read aloud for Parents' weekend, because everything else I was working on was in progress, and they were furious at me. They couldn't believe that I would write about Brian (they didn't know he was gay then, and hated our relationship - my dad especially - and I feel like calling him on it someday, hey, look who turned out to be the best friend I ever had!) and they were enraged that I didn't do a different piece for the performance. My mother told me she was glad her mother couldn't come, because she would have been so ashamed to have her there that day, ashamed of me.

Goddamn, here it is 13 years later, and this still gets me. Fucking ASHAMED!!! Because I dared write about something close to my heart? Because my creative process didn't conform to their schedule? And when I got back my evaluation, after the five weeks - saying that I've got potential and talent, but that I still had some ways to go - my father threw a fit, saying that my going was a total waste of time because I didn't get a perfect evaluation. I didn't get perfect straight A's. As far as they were concerned, it wouldn't help me get into college, and that's all that counted. Even though I wrote a kick-ass entrance essay that I never let them read, and even though my writing quantity and quality skyrocketed after, and even though I submitted a bunch of writing samples that the admissions office repsonded to on my admission & scholarship letter, nope, wasn't worth a thing, it was a waste of money, I was worth nothing but product, product, product, and my process had better be damn quick and cheap and linear.

I feel immature to be so bitter about this so many years later, but it's been brewing in me for a long time, obviously. 29 and just now getting angry with my parents. Yeesh.

Laundry is suddenly sounding more appealing.