Entry 0000147; 10.30.02
The problem with writing as a method of thought is the first sentence. 9 times out of 10, that first sentence and all the following ones will just pop out at one instant and demand to be written. The other time though - that's when you just have these fragments of thoughts and sentences floating around in your head and you have no idea what to do with them.
Forget first sentences then. I can't make the hurdle so I'll just push it out of my way. Every day feels more like a dream than the last. i'm sure there are millions of reasons why, but for some reason I'm still confused.
Mostly, I still can't get over the fact that I am not now nor will I ever be an engineer with a real-paying job and the life I always expected to have. In a relatively short amount of time, I decided to completely switch the course of my life and make a half-assed effort at it to boot. Questions pang at me...do I deserve punishment for this? Am I really doing this? And most importantly, how the hell could this ever work? I suppose it's just because it's the first thing that I've ever decided to make final in my life. Everything I've ever done has been retractable, I'm so afraid of making mistakes I put all my effort in the ability to re-do it. Staying in Worcester, for example. I kept telling myself it was because I wasn't good enough to get into a real school. Or because of Nathan. Or because it'd be impossible to find a house. But I really know all those things would be dealt with much easier than I even think. What's the real reason? It'd just be easier to quit art school and re-enroll in WPI. That's what my logic says anyway, though my mind keeps telling myself it's because of things like Nathan and such.
I find myself repeatedly thinking that perhaps I should just go back to real school and finish up being an engineer. Worse, I find myself thinking things that start with "when I go back to school..." It's like that school vacation that seems to never end. I find it impossible to take my classes seriously because I don't consider them real tangible classes that are actually doing anything for me. They are more like exercises that I am going through the motions for.
I wake up everymorning convinced I'm dreaming. Random sporadic moments of just normal life, sitting and eating food, reading, taking a shower - I'll suddenly get that intense feeling of vertigo I get right after I realize I'm dreaming and right before I wake up. I constantly have to ask myself whether I already told Nathan to take out the trash, or if that was just a dream. i can't even trust my pictures to be reality, since I could be dreaming that I'm holding them, looking at them.
I try and try and nothing gets rid of this feeling. Part of me knows that I can't be dreaming, since in a dream, I would wake up as soon as I know I'm dreaming (as I am wont to do), but then again, maybe this always happens in dreams, and I'm dreaming that it's the other way around? Confusion.
I feel like I could jump in front of a car or punch an old lady in the face. There are no reprocussions becuase the car and the old lady don't really exist. I keep thinking of whether I should do a serious of photographs on just the fact that I don't know if i'm dreaming but then...what if I am and I waste all my effort on dream film that never develops? And what if I show them in class just to wake up right when someone is going to say something pivitol?
I expect solid material objects like teacups and kittens to melt in my hands like molasses and drip to the floor. And I expect myself to expect that as a perfectly reasonable thing, simply becuase in my dreams, if it's happening, that means it's perfectly reasonable and realistic...because it IS happening.
And tommorro and in an hour and in a minute, am I going to wake up in a completely different place and time? Will I immediately recognize the things that are going on now as a dream, or will I not know who I am or where I am, or rather, will I completely forget everything in this reality ever happened?
One thing that makes it all worse is that my dreams feel no more real or unreal than reality. The last time I felt like a complete entity in the real world was in a completely surrealistic dream.
And now that I've thought of it, that's the perfect word for this vertigo-confusion state I'm in. Everything feels like I'm looking at a surreal painting and accepting it as a perfectly normal thing because the artist expects a certain measure of suspension-of-disbelief from her viewers.