almost there

strange as it seems i think i've encountered much more normative people in this large metropolitan city as opposed to when i was sequestered in a small town in upstate new york. people with normal thoughts and normal desires, people who did "the right thing" in life, the existence of which i had shut off behind an iron wall in my head in the category of things that don't concern me. right now the forced encounter with which (and the implicit comparison to my personal choices) seems to breach a very core part of my being in a manner that is physically painful, like a part of my reality rupturing in my brain. life goals are funny things because in my instance, they are relatively easy to achieve (study hard, work hard, go to a good college and see the yeah yeah yeahs in concert) and tend to wriggle out of your grasp in an anticlimactic trail of smoke once realized. destinations are not final, but porous markers on the road at which life spills through. my current life goals are just to have a small room to myself in a warm place, an officious landlady, and books to read, paper to write on, sunlight trickling in through the windows. i have all of these things now, except i would like to feel less hustle and bustle, and less of this modernity business. to be able entomb myself with my thoughts a little more. to know what it's like to cocoon myself for 24 hours straight (and what piece of flickering mothwing may emerge). privacy and secret things, mental playgrounds, i miss you.

i read something really good somewhere about adolescence and integrity, but now i can't find it. CRAP!

dear lorrie moore

even though your paean to being twenty is, in fact, lovely and insightful, i would ask that you reconsider the universal age of passion. it's actually seventeen.

love,
carol

"Here’s the thing about being 20 years old. It’s actually the universal age of passion. It’s the age at which nature and form come together and your individual passion achieves its final shape and expression. When, later in life, when you’re older, you feel furious, it’s the fury of a 20-year-old. When you fall in love, it’s the love of a 20-year-old. It’s articulate, it’s visceral, it’s platonic. It’s the pure form of the emotion. When you observe the hypocrisies and injustices of the world, and feel shocked and betrayed by them, you’re actually being 20 again. And yet, you’re just shy of being able to drink. How perfectly completed, and thwarted, at the same time."
-lorrie moore