Sounds weird, but I’ve been touching things more lately. It all started with meditation, Sam Harris said to touch our fingertips and keep moving them in little circles so you are constantly aware of the feeling. I did so with my fingers for a while then moved onto softly scratching my fingers, hands, moving up my arms. It felt amazingly visceral. Uncomfortable, but good, like you’re pushing the edge. Wooden bed, the anthro carpet – so many textures in life we choose to not be aware of.
Yesterday, from 4pm and on, I was in the house and no one paid any attention to me. I did a lot of thinking and felt very alone even though I live with people – then I felt trapped and claustrophobic. This is actually what quarantine would make me realize, I have been trying to avoid this feeling but deep down knew it was coming. But a combination of Billie Eilish songs (hostage, i love you, everything I wanted) and Woody Allen’s memoir have plunged me into some sort of withdrawal. I felt lonely and started putting up defense mechanisms which then translated to me being cold toward E, but I couldn’t tell him that was why – it’s hard to express such nuances. Instead it actually ended up translating to “usually I put up with this ish but I’m not in the mood so I’m not going to anymore.”
Reading Apropros of Nothing makes me feel like I should write and it’s okay to be into the random things I’m into even though I’m currently not an expert in any of them, maybe it’ll all come together some day, some how. He keeps saying he’s not a genius, neither am I. But he is knowledgeable and I am not – don’t read enough. The old cliches of work hard and be passionate about what you’re doing resonate more when it comes from him, I feel like my grandpa is teaching me through telling me his life story. Something my parents don’t do (deeply)*, I’ve never had this sort of figure in my life. It also gives me a sense of everything great comes from so many other things and the artist had so many things going on for him and in him that we don’t know or realize – it’s actually pretty insightful. I always thought autobiographies would be boring. Things just don’t appear from thin air which has generally been my approach of wanting to be instantly good at anything that I do – kind of definitely a dumb and arrogant expectation.
*Vietnamese culture just has too much hiding of negative things in it and they have had pretty hard lives that I’m sure are hard to talk about