我的青春小鸟一去不回来

Making yourself clear
This influence is generally good for the flow of ideas and communication between you and others. You are intellectually alive, curious and willing to learn. This is a good day to attend a lecture or a class in some subject. You are willing to have people challenge your ideas and thereby broaden your thinking. At the same time you are happy to share your insights on any subject. Thus all interchange with others today should be fruitful and expansive, both for yourself and for the people you meet. Travel is sometimes indicated by this influence, although usually not over long distances. In the course of daily business you may cover a lot more ground than usual. This is a good day for conferences and negotiations in which it is important to make yourself clear to others.

(I had meetings with a Japanese lit professor and then later, in Midtown, a film distribution company specializing in Chinese independent. Both went over better than expected and suddenly I'm stoned, happy to loll at home.)

From here on out until 2010, you can just call me Anxious Agnes. There's something not right about shoe shining past midnight, in underwear, crouched on the kitchen tiles like some obsessive-compulsive lunatic.

I was thinking about imagery reversal yesterday:

My fingernails were slivers of a pale moon waxing quietly.

I feel as if I've become suddenly emaciated since Thanksgiving. The word "drawn" seems relevant here.

(of a person or a person's face) looking strained from illness, exhaustion, anxiety, or pain : Cathy was pale and drawn and she looked tired out.

Poof!

I'm a firm believer in delayed gratification, although these days I think I'm more worried about ending up with a handful of disillusionment instead.

Hunger. It's good to feel hunger sometimes. It reminds us we're human. I spent hours at school hammering out a presentation with my friend, then revising my writing sample and statement of purpose. Halfway through I realized I hadn't had dinner. And my body, trembling from coffee or stress or both, suddenly emerged to the forefront of consciousness as a vessel shackled by emotional toil.

Hunger sometimes endows you with a startling lucidity. On the subway, I tried to close my eyes, gulp deep breaths, exhale, without feeling like my retinas were going to burst. I was listening to "Lay Lady Lay" when I remembered the last time I felt such hunger.

In college, I would sometimes forego lunch at my part-time job out of laziness, thrift, or some combination thereof. As banal as it sounds, I think a small degree of hunger makes you feel alive.

But, ah, riding downtown with Bob Dylan crooning in my ear, I rushed back to three years ago and six thousand miles away when I first started seeing my ex-boyfriend: in that exciting, nebulous stage underscored by the fickleness of being twenty-one. I remember I hadn't eaten at all that day when we went to the Griffith Park observatory, perched on a hill overlooking the sparkling boulevards of Los Angeles. Afterward we sat in the park as night fell around us, deepening the shade and the colors of the grass and trees, taking swigs from a bottle of champagne. I was trying to teach him a few words in French. Only when my head was swimming did I realize, and admit sheepishly, that the drink was the first thing I had had all day.

Sometimes hunger makes you feel alive.

Yesterday, before my friends' DJ gig at a sake bar in the Lower East Side, I had promised myself I would only have two drinks. Several carafes of Sho Chiku Bai and one smoked salmon maki later, my Brazilian math Ph.D friend unexpectedly materialized and I found myself inwardly agape at that delirious, mercurial thing called fate or serendipity. I forgot about my drink limit. I always like that we speak French together. On the subway home, I thought about taking chances and indulging whims and how both are very healthy things to keep one from stagnating. You can marshal your wits and tell yourself hunger is good only for so long, but at some point your body demands satiation.

Those fleeting moments of subway intrigue, when someone catches your fancy - a swift clasp in your palm. It's almost better when they don't notice you. Sometimes when your gazes meet, you might as well crumble from the sheer unlikelihood of it.

It's romantic, in the best (and simultaneously the worst) of ways.

You step in, he steps out. A trenchcoat wrapped at the waist. He seemed startled when the train stopped. And there you were. Your eyes darted away. A hint of a smile playing at the edges of the lips.

This would be slow motion in a movie.

I was laying in bed when it hit me like a hammer: maybe you need other outlets for expression and maybe academia isn't cutting it. Maybe you have no idea what your goals in life are and thus this precludes your working toward achieving them. I'll be shouldering quite a pretty sum in student debt once I finish my Master's, yet part of me has been fantasizing about taking the plunge again into the working world. Doing something, I know not what. This city's huge. There's got to be some place that'll recognize my potential and fit me at least like a warm knit scarf if not a glove, right? Perhaps my naïveté shows through too much. But, after all, I spent over an hour updating my CV tonight. It's quite a dense file, even though it reflects my scattered nature: film internships, translation, certificates in French professionalism, light design work. What could this all possibly amount to?

I worry. I worry that the sum of all this is: zero. Yada yada, everybody's got that pesky fear of failure looming over the shoulder, but for some reason it's been particularly acute as of late. I get frustrated in school sometimes when it seems so inconsequential, all this historical-literary-theoretical minutiae. Sure, this may have enlightened many an academic or revolutionized the way we think about issue x. But then again, is this really what is so goddamn important in life?

I want to be consequential.

I also have no time to waste, with people. My ex-boyfriend used to tell me my body gave off so much heat, it was like a furnace. I wonder what this means. I wonder if this is a good or bad sign. I worry that I am the oil lamp burning a bit too fast and fervent. I don't know how to slow down anymore. But it's not as if my life were that volatile or destructive. No, not at all. I just feel things are getting turned up a notch as I get older. The dial casually moves, one surreptitious click at a time, amplifying every hungover misery and joyful frolic and listless hour. Maybe this is just New York, though.

I need to write more, and seminar papers on textual histories are not going to satiate. I also want to make a goddamn film someday. I also want to feel like I know what I'm working toward and what it is I want, not only in a career, but in love. I feel I've gotten incredibly pessimistic. Or, let's say, "practical." Again, this comes back to the whole issue of not wasting time. I usually meet halfway or more on most anything, but lately I've been thinking more along the lines of fuck it you don't compromise.

Sigh, time to end this spout and sleep it off. It's the late night sobriety that's doing this. I also smoked my last Seven Stars cigarette yesterday and am trying to see how long I can last before caving in to a $10 pack. Hopefully that's not why I'm cranky... Nah, I'm just adrift. Not always a terrible feeling either. Just leaves you a bit cold at four in the morning.