Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child...

And if I died today
I'll be the happy phantom
And I’ll go chasin’ the nuns out in the yard
And I’ll run naked through the streets without my mask on
And I will never need umbrellas in the rain
I’ll wake up in strawberry fields everday
And the atrocities of school I can forgive
The happy phantom has no right to bitch

Damn, Tori takes me back. Me in my room in the corner with my journal, feeling just as angsty as Ms. Amos and not being able to truly understand the lyrics in any sort of realistic way, because I'm pretty sure they don't even make much sense to her, but you get it anyway. You identify with the mood of it, and she hits is dead-on. Some sort of longing tragedy, a girl driven mad by too much empathy and too much intellectualization. You should listen to Tori on a dreary, drizzly day on a hill somewhere with plants that are overgrown and wild with the wind whipping at your hair and your skirts and the ocean in the distance. And the pining swirls around you as much as the wind and you stand there like a pagan goddess, wanting and waiting for something you're pretty sure isn't really visceral at all.

The lost Bronte sister, I am.

I am constantly occupying myself. The BlackBerry the firm got me has pretty much made it acceptable for me to never really have to look up ever again. If I'm not on that, I'm reading a book. My current selection (after finishing with the kings' mistresses, but don't worry, royal mistresses are used to being used and then tossed aside--nature of the beast, I guess) is Love in the Time of Cholera. Or I listen to music.

I went down for a cigarette a minute ago. I reached for the BlackBerry and then I stopped myself.

What am I distracting myself from? What thoughts am I trying to push away? What feelings or thoughts do I not want to feel or think?

So I sat there with my own mind for ten minutes.

I thought about the conversation I had last night with Jason. We were talking about the relativity of suffering. We discussed how black culture always gets absorbed by the mainstream--old slave songs, blues, even hip hop these days. We postulated that it has something to do with the suffering contained in them, and since most of the music of true tragedy (not of the Mortician kind)can always be related to. All humans suffer. And none is greater or worse because it is a particular phenomenon that does not know that there are greater tragedies happening elsewhere. A little girl who has been lucky enough not to see too much suffering has the same level of anguish when her kitten dies as someone who has seen the ravages of war. They're both valid. And yes, we can look upon it and say that seeing the horror of death and destruction are a greater pain than a kitten dying, but try telling that to the little girl. Suffering is contained within ourselves and the only scale we can ever go by is our own.

I thought about my grandmother, who I never particularly cared for and certainly didn't have much love for me, but that woman had a fairly impressive story to tell. Living in England during the time that it was getting bombed by the Germans. And her climbing through rubble to get home. Maybe that's why she was such a tough bitch. Maybe it touched her too closely. I wish that I had greater wisdom to understand her while she was alive. But who knows? Maybe she was just mean. I don't know.

These things I think about.

I think about my silly heart and how easily it sways to and fro from boy to boy and each time seemingly optimistic about truly horrendous circumstances. Why do I feel pulled toward romantic catastrophes? I hate admitting defeat. And yet, I have nothing but a series of bad ideas in a endless promenade of pining. Maybe it's safer to get your heart broken when you can anticipate the arrival of that pain. Maybe it's the good ideas that then have to end, as all things do, that I avoid because I don't like to be blindsighted. To quote a fabulous character, Inez, from No Exit:

"Well, I won't stand for that, I prefer to choose my hell; I prefer to look you in the eyes and fight it out face to face."

Face your suffering like a tiger, I say. Or have said. Or act as. And if you choose it, maybe you control it.

But we all know that's not true. But I have a feeling in the simmering stew of my restless emotions and unrequited love, that maybe is what has driven me to do it. I don't really know how to change that, though. When do you start choosing the right things for yourself? You can intellectualize all you want and know the path that you should choose, but we all know that hearts have absolutely no sense of direction. And they never stop to ask. And by its sheer brute strength, won't let you squash it.

So it's kinda like a man.

Hmmm...

These are the things that I think about.

Now it's time to Google stuff.