My mother has always told me that you are what you do. In fact, she has enlightened me on a number of things that will define you such as clothes, bags, shoes, education, poise, and manners; however, the one weighing heaviest with me now is my occupation. More elegantly stated by Annie Dillard, “The way we spend our days is, of course, the way we spend our lives.” This means that I am currently spending my life wearing a polo shirt, standing for 8 hours at a time and eating my lunch hurriedly as I man embroidery machines and attend to customers. I am also spending my life without passion or drive and that, my dear reader, is not what I had planned for myself.

It is a job; it was the first one offered to me and I am grateful for it. I understand the faux-pas of stating a dislike of your job online, where anyone can read it, but I need to share my newfound wisdom with the world! Here follows five important points for consideration that may be forgotten when you are unemployed and broke:

1. When you’re interviewing, ask about lunch breaks.
2. Look at your future co-workers and see what sort of shoe they wear. Are they shoes you would want to wear to work? I hate ugly shoes worn for comfort alone, but if I don’t give in to them soon I’m going to have to get a doctor to re-align my back.
3. Are you willing to bring this job home with you?
4. Is this something you can palette coming up in your dreams and monopolizing conversations with your family and close friends? I am hooping in my dreams every night. I cannot escape it.
5. Will this job grow to be a proud part of your identity? Will this be something you love?

I am quickly finding myself in a familiar place. I’ve picked something for myself that does not fit me, though it is not altogether unappealing. I love working with a family-owned business. Running the machines is pretty fun and I am amused by the customers we see. But, I told myself I would not pursue a degree in something financially sound because I felt that, when God gives you a passion, you cannot ignore it. Here I am working at a job paying just over minimum wage and I am, once again, ignoring my passion.

Just as I’m realizing this irony, God places opportunity in front of me. A beloved professor has referred me to a commercial photography firm to be a photo assistant. Two people have sent me messages looking for tutoring. It’s a sign. I live by signs (though, strictly speaking, I don’t endorse doing so). I am now tutoring Saturdays and Mondays and I have an interview with the photography place tomorrow. With a little bit of luck I’ll be moving on to the next phase of my life.

Well. I guess it’s not that meaningless. There is a sort of beauty to it. Just not my beauty.

I just got out of my contemporary art history class. We learn about art and philosophy. I walk out of that class feeling like I could paint the world into existence, I’m so inspired. After this class is my Design and Algorithms class. I cannot think of any worse drudgery than to study merge sorts after you’ve just realized that Rauschenberg has found the gap between art and life and, somehow, he’s tried to paint in it. how can I think about algorithms when there are so many larger things to think about?

If you divide a problem’s instances into smaller instances, solve these (sometimes recursively) and tie them together at the end, you can solve most problems exponentially faster.

Rothko took large canvases of color fields floating on more color to find the “unbearable silence of God.” These works are in response to the unfathomable tragedies of World War II and the difficulty of bringing those emotions and experiences to a canvas. It brings up a whole discourse of individualism and it’s role in regard to religion, lifestyle, and government. I want to talk about God and whether art is something determined by the artist or the observer or if it’s a dance between the two. Where can art take us? How can a painting have any relationship further than the wall it’s attached to or leaning against?

I just don’t think the subjects are comparable. I can’t think that even a Quicksort would move someone to tears or incite any more passion than a slice of bread. I feel quite dead in that class.

I’m aware of my arms. My arms are so fat they jiggle and shake with everything I do. I have had fat arms since the age of 11, when all sorts of body parts exploded with fat. I love my body, but my arms are so difficult to love. I have often thought that I could love myself more completely if my arms were thinner. I have believed that men would like me better if my arms weren’t so fat. I might actually believe that I would have a Valentine this year if I were not a girl with fat arms. My breasts soar upwards and collapse. My arms feel so heavy.

I am aware of my lips. I am aware of the fullness of my lips. I think my lips are a perfect shape. They are not too large and they are not too small. Tonight they are dry. My breasts tremble with small breaths. I think my lips are perfect for kissing. I think I am a good kisser. I like to oscillate the pressure of my lips when I am kissing. I like to use my tongue. I can tie a cherry stem with my tongue. I am thinking that it would be fun to tie a cherry stem while you are kissing, but I don’t know exactly how well that would work. I am aware of how long it has been since my lips have been kissed. My lips long to feel the pressure of other lips. My lips are lonely and I have no one for Valentine’s day.

I am aware of my eyelids. I am allergic to dust and my left eye is watering a little. I am aware that my vision is blurring as my eyelids suffer to get closer to one another. I imagine my upper and lower eyelid are in love. All day, they are made to be separated across the span of my eye, where they are aware of each other without the ability to touch except in those brief instances of blinking. Then the night comes and they can cling to one another without interruption. As that time draws near they grow heavy with anticipation. I want my eyelids to be happy.

I am aware that my breasts have now developed a steady rhythm. I am thinking about a white knight who may call at my window and rescue me from the men who are not my Valentine. I think I am falling asleep. I am trying to dream of this knight who will love me and kiss me despite my fat arms.

I fell asleep in your arms; you held me so close. I remember, before drifting off, you kissed the nape of my neck a couple times. Your kiss was so gentle and your embrace so tight, I felt precious to you. That’s what made the morning so hard, when I woke up and you were cold and you were distant. I re-live it time and again. I loved waking up to your smiling face. You would look at me with this crazy grin, as if you were either so happy or so amused to find me sleeping there beside you. You would say something stupid like “Good morning sunshine.” I would smile back at you, feeling like an empty cup of coffee. We didn’t like to wake up, so we’d lay around, slipping in and out of sleep. I’d repeat some piece of business one of us had to do that would require our getting out of bed, whatever it was never seemed so urgent. We usually lazed about, talking in your bed about anything and nothing. But when that didn’t happen, that next morning, I knew things would never be the same. I knew that any morning after, I’d feel the same disappointment, the same heartbreak. That’s why I put a stop to it.

I still love you. I love you more than you loved me. But it’s okay, because I’ll get over it. Don’t feel guilty, not because you couldn’t love me enough. Don’t regret what happened, because it needed to happen.

I just need you to know that I won’t forget it. I won’t forget the man who didn’t want me, and I can never let go of the man who clung to me and treated me with such gentle affection. The duality of this man will continue to puzzle me, but I will never forget him. I can’t forget him, but maybe I’ll try.

As soon as I parked and walked into my house I sent him a text. “You’re missing a moody, winter sunrise.” That’s when I realized that, what I was missing, was him.

I guess I always miss him when I leave. Especially after we stay up ’till 7 in the morning. Sometimes I’ll sleep in his bed next to him and I’ll come home saturated with his smell and it drives me nuts. I’ve denied being in love with him for years now. As someone who claims not to believe in romantic love, as someone who calls that sickness mere infatuation, it is difficult for me to admit to it, even in private. I concede that he’s not the most beautiful man I know, he’s not the smartest, the funniest, the richest or any of the things that would drive you to fall in love with someone. He makes me smile. He knows what I’m saying without my having to say it. He takes care of me when I absolutely need someone, and he’ll let me take care of him in little ways. I love him, certainly. I cannot rightly say that I am in love with him, I feel as if one person cannot be in love, but that two people must be in love.

Joni Mitchell says that love is touching souls. It’s a beautiful thought, a beguiling line. It must be the truth. If I am in love with this man, it is not because I can’t get him out of my head or because I’m addicted to his presence in my life. It is because, when we are together, we move with a fluidity that can only come from our souls mingling, bending and mixing and flowing through each other.

Lying in bed in the morning, curled up next to him while we talk about nothing, laughing and smothering each other with pillows, it feels like we’re in love.

The truth is that I am always falling in love with strangers; it is easier to love someone who you do not know. I have old journal entries about a young man who developed film for me at my local camera store, who I was fairly certain I would marry some day (I am not altogether sure I will not marry him still!). His name is Joey and I was in love with him from the first time he smiled and thanked me for bringing him my emulsion-coated strips of plastic. Clear blue eyes, masses of filthy curls. I can’t tell what it was that struck me about him, but I was struck. He possessed a degree of human honesty in his countenance that I found irresistible. My love was not lasting, but it was real and pure. I believe in it.

My personal connections are typically less simple than that. I met a man one night in a bar, he was friends with my friends, and we had one of those deep, soul connections. We eagerly ripped at conversation that was both enthralling and challenging. Some manner of biological instinct tied us to each other. Is that hormonal? I read somewhere that you are subconsciously attracted to the smell of the other person, but I can’t believe that in a smoky bar. All I know is that I left with his aura wrapped around every membrane and firing all relevant synapses in my brain. Butterflies stormed my intestines with no mercy; but I fought this with every ounce of my being because that kid was so damn ugly. I tossed his image around, pondered ways to fix him, but there is no fix for his features. This is no easy eyebrow pluck, he is horrifying. Am I shallow? Probably. I am so repulsed by the idea of his enormous forehead coming toward my face to kiss me that I might scream. I have nightmares about that face crushing me tragically after a romantic date. I know I’m a terrible person because only karma could send me my perfect man in such an unmanageable package. I’m fairly ashamed of myself.

I also hold on to countless daily encounters. The girl with the chicken bag who, I am convinced, is my long-lost soul sister. The guy from last weekend who understood a few nuances in my non-verbal communication that shocked the hell out of me. Sometimes I’ll overhear a conversation between two people and find myself madly in love with one side.

One of my best friends told me that my life is “an endless saga of unexplored romantic possibilities.” I have a sad habit of leaving my connections half-baked and even finding something romantic about doing so. She’s not even referring to the above examples, it’s pathetic. But everyone has someone who is a missed connection in their life. It’s possible that we are the missed connection for someone else, and we don’t know it. So, if you’re reading this and thinking about that guy on the bus or the chick from the grocery store, please post it on CL. I need more fodder for my addiction.

A drunk, gay man complimented my tits last night at Snug. He then asked my friend if I were “her girl.” Remarkably he did not offend me as he should have though he had just objectified my body, assumed I was a lesbian and objectified my whole person in the space of about thirty seconds. I attribute my reaction to either the commonplace nature of this comment in my life or my basic apathy toward objectifying myself.

I know that I am genuinely insulted, as a woman, when I go downtown to the popular night clubs. I see the plastic girls burdened with very little clothing, making love to poles or a mechanical bull or just flirting with patrons over a tray of jello shots. It feels demeaning and anti-feminist; I leave disillusioned. But somehow the dancing ladies at Snug Harbor feel different. I know they’re not wearing much. I know they’re dancing on the stage for atmosphere. These ladies just aren’t up there grinding on a pole, they’re actually dancing and enjoying themselves. It isn’t always so sexual, but their empowerment and possession of their bodies is very sexy. The women aren’t all cast from the same mold. They range from short to tall; thick to thin; bit tits and small. Real, beautiful women. I guess I like their outfits a hell of a lot better, but that’s against my point. I see them and I want the confidence to jump in the spotlight and do the same, I’m in the mood to dance with them. I have never wanted to be a bunny at one of the playgrounds of alcohol and sexual exploitation downtown that everyone else loves so much. Maybe I just don’t understand it.

I want women to be appreciated for their whole presence and not merely for matching up to an illusionary ideal. I don’t want them to play to the sexual desire of men or other women to their own detriment. I supposed the drunk boy from last night didn’t bother me because there was no message between the lines. He liked my tits like he may care for a pair of earrings that look good on someone else, but not something he’d like for himself. I shouldn’t be offended by such blunt havering.

I am often discouraged by the other people of my generation. I feel separated from them somehow. We appear to be an ignorant mass of disillusioned youth. I know it’s not true, if I can randomly meet someone at a bar who feels the same way I do, there must be more. Perhaps they are all silenced by one reason or another. My generation does not know how to enact the changes that they want. We’ve forgotten how much power we hold as individuals. All our lives the baby boomer generation, my mother’s generation, has held the majority and has held the power. But they can’t hold it much longer and we must remember that we can do anything we want. If we remember that, we might remember that power comes with responsibility, that we must be responsible for educating ourselves to make choices based in fact, choices leading to a foreseeable, desirable end. I’d hate to see my generation relinquish all their power to the choices of baby boomers, relinquish power to government, or relinquish any of that power entitled to them as Americans. We have forgotten what that means.

I know that’s a broad statement, it does not apply to several of my friends who are natural born leaders and are making changes in the small ways they know how. There are several exceptions (probably people reading this now) but they are in a minority.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream for America. His dream was for equality among races, a dream that millions fight for and have realized in a thousand ways. I also have a dream for America. I don’t want us to be like every other country in the world. I dream that Americans will be a strong race of people, where every citizen will be educated. American citizens will know that their voice is not limited to a ballot in a box once a year. Their power is wielded in every purchase they make and every decision. Americans will focus on their community and help their neighbor because they want to, and not because the government has redistributed their paycheck to do so. Americans will discuss issues to find an answer that suits all citizens, not for the sake of arguing and distinguishing ourselves from each other. Americans will be one people. We will not define ourselves by race or party or gender, but by the hundred little identifiers that make up an intricate identity. Other countries will envy us because each and every one of us will be so powerful. Let freedom be so much more than the absence of oppression! I want Americans to possess those freedoms they have so that they may understand what it means to be free, to have a democracy, to be part of a free market system. I’m going to get off my soap box. I hope someone else will fill my space, let’s talk about what it means to be American.

I am a girl in my very early twenties who lives in the Queen City. I don’t know if my diary will ever be interesting to anyone other than me, but here it is. Right now it’s nothing more than an exercise since my writing skills are rusty from years of forced passive tense and training my mind to think logically instead of creatively. Think of these as push-ups. I’ll try to do 50 a day, but I’d appreciate it if you don’t laugh at me for scarcely making it through 5 or 6.