the bitter with the sour

Finals crunch, and I'm feeling pretty ragged. Had my first one a couple of days ago, and it was shit. I only studied the day before (having clearly not learned my lesson from midterms), and pretty half-heartedly at that. Seriously. I don't have any more free passes, this is it, and all I have to show for all my posturing are dropped balls and decapitated toes. Ok, just bruised toes maybe. Like overripe fruit in a Marrakesh market.

I don't know. I've had quite a lot of alone-time these past few, mostly self-imposed, sometimes random. I think I've learned a lot of things about myself, little nuggets of thought (slow, self-indulgent, torturous) and contemplation (shit), but nothing I want to commit to. Sometimes it feels like I can't do this. The returns are obscure, the path too contrived, too obviously secondhand. That's always been my beef with the world, I think. Not having anything of my own; having the monies, ideals, religion, dreams, poetry of others shoved down my throat, injected into my tinny bloodstream. I've never been invested in life. In general. In general, I could just disappear right now and I wouldn't mind. Maybe it worries me that I don't find that depressing. (Not really.)

But all this begs the question: what am I doing? Maybe if I'd stayed in the Philippines, I'd have been better sucked in, better plugged in. I wouldn't be worrying about these fringe issues (existence, subsistence, obsolescence), I'd be worrying about the trivialities of a job I secretly hate, which of my father's cars I should bring to work, how to lose weight with minimal expended effort. But I'm not in the Philippines anymore. And while part of me is thankful, part of me is still heartsick. I've let go of a lot of things this year. Sometimes I'm able to trick myself into thinking that I've moved on, too. They're not the same, letting go and moving on. They float and flutter past me, nefarious intentions riding blithely on their wings, these things (issues, people) I've let go of. Sometimes I don't even let them go, they just slip through my fingers, and I'm left bewildered, staring at my peeling hands, hoping to divine reason from the meandering lines of my palms. What am I doing? (Drowning in loose ends, lost and demented in the flowchart from hell, writing you a letter I may never send.)

I remember, I dug out an old pair of pants from the rotting carcass that is my closet (haven't been doing my laundry, clearly). It smelled like last year. Like last year's clean laundry. And it made me want to cry. That's been happening a lot. I come across a familiar scene (dusk shimmering through a tree's gnarled branches), an old smell (a friend's car), an old song (Hoppipolla, Everlong, 405), and I just can't function properly. It baffles me; what were my motivations back then, my thoughts, how did I feel those things, what made me feel them? I get slivers of it, just enough to break my heart, before they recede back into inconceivability. Does that make sense? (Does it matter?)

Maybe it's Christmas. I know a lot of people think I'm just gloomy by nature, and while that's somewhat warranted, it's also mostly bullshit (like Santa). I'm just a snob.

I think I'm just going to go watch The Royal Tenenbaums again. That scene wherein Chas tells Royal he's had a rough year, it always gets to me.