Into the void...

2002-06-25

1:44 p.m.

I have seriously got to look into seeing if nicotine can be prescribed as a treatment for anxiety. Don't give me that crap about nicotine being a stimulant, either, because if you don't have an anxiety disorder and you don't smoke, you have no idea what the effects of nicotine on anxiety are.

I just learned that this magnificent university of universities at which I am now a staff member has a no smoking policy. It's not like it's THAT big a deal, seeing as how I've been intending to quit smoking for quite some time now, but jesus, at least give me the opportunity to make it through the first few weeks at a new job without hassling me about the fact that I smoke.

I'm nervous as hell; give me a break.

Now would be a good time to stop thinking about smoking, though, since I am trying not to smoke today. Thinking about it will only make matters worse. I'll just suck on my cinnamon Altoids all day, and if I'm lucky, perhaps I won't end up with painful sores on the bottom of my tongue from the cinnamon like the last time I quit smoking.

My head is swimming right now with all the benefits information they just shoved in my face at my orientation session. Orientation a week after beginning work? Yup. At least it sounds like the benefits are good, though, so I shouldn't have much more of a problem getting meds and doctor visits in these days. I also just found out that the health insurance goes into effect the moment I sign the paper and turn it in to the Human Resources office. After just a few more days of determining precisely which plan works best for me, I should be all set with health insurance, and that makes the load on my shoulders about half as heavy as it's been.

Health insurance -- hurray!

Now I can start thinking more steadily about the major project ahead of me: the next Great American Novel. I've been doing a ton of research these days about Vincent van Gogh, and let me tell you how seriously amazed I am by him. He's the apotheosis of artists, the quintessential rendering of art into a human form frustrated by mental illness and torn apart by despair.

I like van Gogh; he reminds me of me.

It really doesn't come as much of a surprise to me that I find such a deep connection with his struggles. I am an artist struggling with much the same trouble, and I have nothing but sincere respect and admiration for someone who could put so much time and effort into pursuing the realization of a dream that may not be possible.

Yesterday, I was delighted by the discovery that an actual, original painting by van Gogh is in one of the many museums on the campus of this particular university. I have yet to see the painting, but I assure you I'll see it as soon as I get my staff ID picture taken one of these days after all my hiring paperwork has been processed.

It's really quite a wonderful feeling to be in the midst of greatness. Even though the collective whole of the student body here and the history of the university may not ALL be amazing achievement and progress, the fact remains that greatness is here, has been here, and will be here for ages to come.

I'm in the right place.

The more I come here and learn the names of people I work with and places I go, the more I like it. It has the tendency to be a bit stuffy -- yes -- but the general atmosphere of worthwhile endeavor and intellectual refinement sure beats the bunch of pot-smoking wannabe rock stars from the last school at which I worked. This place actually reminds me somewhat of the people I used to be in classes with way back in high school.

High school....

Sometimes I almost forget that I ever went to high school. The overwhelming feeling I get when I reminisce about high school is entirely dark and foreboding, and the sense of impending despair warns me not to think too hard about the memories made there because the end result will cause a tragic collapse into a ravine of darkness and nightmarish horror that I've already visited a few times too many. Any attempts to remember something other than the darkness appear to be folded away in a hidden compartment somewhere in my subconscious -- the place in my brain that allows my body to continue existing in compliance with the rules of generally acceptable social behavior while my mind eats away at itself and drives continual blows into the walls surrounding my inevitable doom. If I try really hard, sometimes I can carefully unfold bits of my subconscious and peer into the tiny crevices that remain, and it is there where I vaguely see visions of my high school classmates and my interactions with them.

Moments of clarity did not exist for me in high school; it was all a sham, a show, a facade of the person I was supposed to be for the sake of everyone else. It all went on too long, too. By the time I realized what I was doing was unhealthy, or at least by the time it was bad enough that I cared, it was positively too late. The damage had been done, and now all of high school is viewed through the lens of a cracked-mirrored dream.

In any case, when I try really hard to shove that aside, I can occasionally see fragments of my past classmates. And the atmosphere here reminds me of what I see at those strikingly rare, haunted moments. What I see is room after room filled with the intellectual stiffness that usually surrounds the nerdy people in high school who are too smart for their own good. I see myself as a drop in the ocean -- the drop that doesn't fit, that doesn't care, that doesn't need to, that doesn't know why it's variegated instead of translucent, and yet doesn't have the energy or will to look closely into the issue -- and I can see the way I was seen by all the others.

The intellectuals in my high school classes didn't dislike me. I think a lot of them wanted to get to know me better because I seemed a little too cool, too pretty, or too carefree to be one of the smart ones viewed by the rest of the school as a nerdy little freak unworthy of a second thought. They were intrigued by me. Why they didn't hate me, I don't know. I sure as hell hated all of them. I looked down on everyone in high school so much that it's a wonder they didn't think I was the snottiest bitch on the face of the planet.

I never told anyone what I thought, though. How could they have known that the girl who couldn't possibly be as smart as she seemed was actually being tormented by demons? How could they have known that I was hallucinating and convulsing internally, cutting myself every other day because the sight of blood was the only thing that could trigger my ability to breathe?

How could they have known?

So, they thought I was a bit eccentric, but not so much that it caused a disturbance. Everyone talked to me, smiled at me, tried to befriend me. Of course, I was always too far engulfed by the waves of depression for anyone to get through to me. So I floated. And I floated. And no one really knew what to make of the intellectual wayfarer who seemed slightly disconnected from everything.

I feel I have to mention at this point that of course I didn't feel like I was cool, pretty, or carefree. The other several hundred pages of my website have discussed that over the course of the past ten years. That's merely how I imagine my fellow classmates from high school viewed me. Perhaps I'm completely wrong; I don't know. What I do know is that the environment in which I find myself these days hails back to those days in the past when I was intelligent but inconclusive fodder for the inquiring minds which surrounded me.

It's interesting.

In a way, I feel like I've reverted back to the pariah I used to be. In some ways, I feel extremely, extremely far removed from everyone else here. I feel like I don't belong at all. I feel like I don't fit in. I feel like the slightly unusual oddity that everyone tolerates for the sake of tolerance.

In other ways, though, I feel like I'm home. I feel like I've finally regained my place among people who can comprehend what I'm trying to say to them, and let me tell you: that's an amazing feeling I didn't know I'd ever find again. I wasn't looking for stuffy intellectualism, but now that I'm here, I realize how much I've missed it in my affairs with musicians and artists. Musicians and artists tend to be very interesting people, but they're not always the smartest folks in the world. On the other hand, intelligent people can sometimes be rather dull and unimaginative. It's extremely rare to find the two forces working together, but when it happens, it's stunning.

Few things are more powerful than intelligent art, and that is the goal for which I strive

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