Change

Sleeping my days away.  The time I'm awake in the night seems to mean nothing, it seems to be nothing.  I stay up all night and go to my classes exhausting and fall asleep immediately after I get home.  I wake up at something like one in the morning.  I sit around for four or five hours, mostly just watching TV or playing video games with whoever's up - usually my roommate Ben, who is on co-op but doesn't have a real job and has nothing better to do with his time than have trouble getting to sleep at four in the morning.

Meanwhile, I'm not even close to tired.  It's six in the morning and I haven't done anything.  I do have work to do sometimes.  I talked about that in my last posting.  Hell, it's even worse, because I found out I would have to take a "W" if I wanted to drop my Music of Asia class, and that takes paperwork, not just a phone call to an automated system.

This is the old vampire sleeping schedule.  I've done this before, though this time is more of an accident that I'll probably break out of soon enough.  Before, I thought it was the greatest thing ever.  I got so much work done.  I don't think I'm getting work done now, though.  It's too much right now.  I'm hungry for the daylight, for real life, for fucking going out every once in awhile to somewhere other than Burger King or Store 24.

They're accepting applications at Trident.  Or they were last time I was there about a week ago.  I want to go out there and see if they still are.  Sure, a job on top of school and my work study job (five hours a week) could mean never having any time again.  But would it really?  I mean, all "time," as we're speaking of, is really a perspective thing.  It's not like time itself is actually disappearing.  Perhaps if I worked at Trident it would seem like I had more time, because I'd be doing something with my time, maybe it would go more slowly, more meaningfully, instead of melting away into hour after hour of late night Acid Tetris with a decidedly depressing soundtrack made up of a lot of Bright Eyes.

I don't know if I'd get the job, though.  I probably wouldn't.  Who would want to hire me.  I don't have any experience working at a bookstore OR a cafe, much less than a bookstore / cafe.  Who knows.  I'm thinking it might at least make me feel a bit more meaningful if I at least went out and tried, even if I'm doomed to failure.

It's such a repeating cycle, this whole thing.  I'm even coming to realize that me pointing out that this is a repeating cycle for me is part of the repeating cycle.  Putting lots of responsibility on myself, getting overwhelmed, withdrawing to a lazy pit, then becoming restless and more demanding of myself.  Then being unsure of what to demand of myself next.  What I should want of myself.  If I should want anything of myself at all.  Throwing in random thoughts about love.  Wondering how that all fits in.  Staring aimlessly at my computer screen, losing sleep promising myself that I'll do everything tomorrow; I'll get started on the rest of my life.  Then becoming so tired that I sleep through it all and it starts all over again the next night.

It's funny.  Sometimes I marvel at how I've changed over the course of years, or even months.  I'm listening to my friend Jason's band, An Almost Perfect Existence.  I'd never been impressed with them, except live, when they have a good energy.  But now I think this CD is great.  Short, but great.  And High Fidelity.  I didn't use to like that movie all that much.  Not when I first saw it, with Jenny, while we were still going out.  But now I think it's great, maybe because now I've been in a break up, and I know what it's like to be an asshole who's totally confused about what he's doing with his life because he's caught up on one girl or another.

But these are little changes.  Changes in taste, aren't they?  Have I really changed at all, ever?  Is it even possible?  I still look at the world in the same way.  The same, alternating optimistic, pessimistic light, where I look for happiness in all the wrong places while completely ignoring it where it's right at hand.  I'm never satisfied, I think that's obvious.  But have I even been satisfied?  Has there ever been a point where I might have been able to see that the grass isn't always greener on the other side?  Not since I was a child, at least.  Not since before memory, before breaking into adulthood filled with hormones and lusts and desires and fucking ridiculous dreams.

Let's get this straight.  In general, I never want what I have, and I always miss what I've lost.  Is that any way to live?  Is that how I really am living?  Am I just missing some key component to how I'm supposed to be thinking?  Am I somehow unable to see the reasons that I like the things I have and unable to remember the reasons I didn't like whatever I pushed away?

There's no answer to any of these questions.  There shouldn't be.  It's all the same god awful self-pitying that I've always done.  The same dissatisfaction that I've had since before I can remember.  The same way that I've always been.  I want a change.  I need a change.  It would be so much better if I could not think this way at all, if I could find satisfaction in something, anything at all.  But isn't it kind of hopeful thinking to expect it to be possible to change something like that?  And isn't it ironic that this is another wishful dream, that I'm founding hope for change, for escape from dissatisfaction, on my own dissatisfaction.  That all I'm doing is thinking once again that the grass is greener on the other side.