"I'm not saying that I want to be better than them, but I want to be different," he explains. And so, instead of tackling his book, he reads one author after another in order to make absolutely certain that he is not going to tread on their private property. And the more he reads, the more disdainful he becomes. None of them are satisfying; none of them arrive at that perfection which he has imposed on himself. And forgetting completely that he has not written so much as a chapter he talks about them condescendingly, quite as though there existed a shelf of books bearing his name, books which everyone is familiar with and the titles of which is is therefore superfluous to mention.
--Henry Miller, "Tropic of Cancer."
[Insert Helena's guilty recognition here...]
I'm uh... I'm gonna go read now?
Or not.
Have been having some serious trouble meeting people here. Now, there are no three-days-a-week of classes. Now, there is no meal plan, and therefore no forced seating next to acquaintances at 5 o'clock every evening. Now, there is my room, my books, my computer. And classes twice weekly. Nobody shows up to David's class anyway, except me and a few of the "I'm-gonna-learn-about-meditation!" kids.
There is no one place in Olympia, or on the Evergreen campus, where people gather to socialize. At least not during the day. I'm certain that if I went to a bar some night, I'd make half a dozen new friends. But the busses don't run late enough to get me home at closing time, and I'm still too chickenshit to hitch-hike. This is the problem with Western cities; there is never a center. There is no town meeting place. In Binghamton, the social gathering place was Washington Street, and State Street, and Lost Dog. In Ithaca, the social gathering place is The Commons. There is no such place in Santa Fe, or in Olympia. And in Seattle, there are three or four places to just hang out, bum around, and meet people. Even in Seattle, the "meeting people" part is very difficult unless you're in the pretentious tourist area and you seek out tourists to bother. That shit sucks anyway. Seattle tourists are all old and rich. They're grown-up Cali-kids. And not the nice, wholesome kind of Cali-kids.
Anyway, if I didn't have a room-mate, there's a good chance I would spend most of my days completely silent, never hearing my own voice. And while some people enjoy that extreme solitude, it simply isn't healthy for me. I need other people. I need to hear voices. I need to hear my own voice. I need to know, every day, that somebody gives a damn whether I'm alive or dead. As long as somebody walks up to me and says, "hey, uh... whatcha reading?" or "nice day, huh?" I know that I've mattered to somebody that day. I try to do that for somebody else every day: just walk up to a stranger or a distant acquaintance and say hello, how are you.
My goal though, is to meet two people every day. It's an incredibly difficult goal, because I have almost NO excuses to meet people. But I've been doing okay so far.
Yesterday, in Otto's (I love Otto's so much; it's not enough that they've got a CD-store and thrift shop next door, and a mural of a goat swimming in a cup of coffee on the other side, but the folks who work there are actually disgustingly nice. ALL of them. And this one guy looks EXACTLY like Norman's friend Ganesh. It's eerie... but anyway...) -- Yesterday, in Otto's, I met four or five really nice, really interesting people. We discussed our musical tastes. I told a girl the Super-Secret Clue about how never to get lost in Seattle, and she giggled and thanked me. I got to talking about that whole East/West Coast thing with a guy from Washington D.C. Then the D.C. guy and I talked about isolation in society. I liked that guy. I liked the whole group. But they were from Portland, and they were just stopping in Olympia to, you know, have some coffee, buy a CD, and kick it for a few minutes before going to Seattle. I swear I almost asked if they'd bring me along, just so I'd have some nice people to talk to. But I chickened out at the last minute. The D.C. boy shouted over his shoulder the address of the place he works: a Portland secondhand clothing store. He'd probably shit a brick if I went down to Portland sometime and just stopped in and said, "hi, you're nice, so I thought I'd come say hello."
I swear I'm going to do that. Why the hell not, after all?! I need to go to Oregon to say I've been to Oregon. And I need to ride a train to say I've ridden a train. And I met some nice people from there; I bet it wouldn't be very hard to find them again. Or nice people like them.
Nice people are everywhere. I just don't know where to find them.
I did not meet any nice people today. But I said hi to some hippies down at the beach, and I petted a dog whose owner was not very nice at all. So I've made at least something of an effort.
Wrote the essay that's due tomorrow for class. I did it in fifteen minutes. It's double the length it's supposed to be. My professor will forgive me.
De-fragmented my hard drive last night. It took ALL of last night. In the meantime, I got drunk with Douglass and we played Strip Blackjack. I don't play stripping games with just two people though, so after awhile Douglass just took his own clothes off and I just dealt. I would have won anyway; after one hand, Douglass was in his boxers and I hadn't removed anything but my socks. There were two parties on campus, but both were lame and neither was playing decent music, and so I left. Spent the rest of the evening watching my computer defragment itself. Real enlightening stuff, I'll tell you. But don't be so hasty to judge: when you're drunk, it IS pretty damned interesting.
Went to Otto's today. Felt kind of out-of-place. No nice Portland kids to play with. Just me and the barrista, the barrista's girlfriend, and her posse of nineteen friends who were all kind of swarmed around her. Left quickly. Went to the beach. Found what I'm pretty sure was a geoduck shell, but it had slime on it, so I didn't bring it home. Sat on a big log and read Henry Miller in the sunshine. Didn't seem appropriate to be reading Henry Miller in the sunshine, so I took him back inside. Henry Miller may be a wonderful writer, but he's really a dick, AND he's fairly depressing. He doesn't deserve sunshine.
Going to go read now.
*sigh*
After I finish this book, I write.
Safety First...
~Helena*