O.M.F.G

Okay, first of all: three words which sum up my work experience for the past ten days or so:

Database, conversion, clusterfuck.

Were it not for my house, I would seriously consider just running a resignation letter up the flagpole and giving this place the one-finger salute. And were that to happen, I could say with conviction: it would all be Billy Corgan's fault.

The iTunes music store, of which I am a passionate devotee (lacking the knowledge to perform illegal downloads, to which I am much more temperamentally-suited) released all the Smashing Pumpkins albums for download yesterday. Which I was only waiting for for MONTHS...

I pounced. I downloaded. I have not--surprisingly--cried yet. (My major "Gish" memory involves sitting in my soon-to-be-ex-mother-in-law's basement, sitting at the computer which would eventually bring about my undoing, listening to "Gish" on the CD player, talking to JP on the phone for hours. The Pumpkins were the other half of the dream--ah, fuck it. I can't make any sense of that time, really, for anyone else. It's impossible to paint that picture; I Guess You Had To Be There.)

The thing about these albums--"Gish" and "Siamese Dream" (I have not forgiven "Mellon Collie" for its place in my memory as the biggest new release around the time of JP's death, plus I think the album itself was kinda bloated and self-indulgent. Self-indulgence I can forgive; bloated self-indulgence, not so much. Which explains a lot about my poor self-esteem.) Anyway, the thing about those albums is that they tap into the internal rebellion that I have suppressed for too damn long. I don't know when I started--I can only assume it was while I was with CR, rebellion being HIS personal territory and not open to mere females like myself--but I know it's still there. And I miss it. I have spent long hours explaining to myself that heroin is not rebellion, it's just something else that controls you--and changing the external agency that controls you is not the point of rebellion, is it. Sex is more rebellion than heroin--or it is if you do it right.

(Goddamn CR, anyway. Not only did he totally hamstring my vision of myself--which by that point wasn't too great to begin with, but it was MINE--but he's also completely crippled my ability to have a reasonable conversation about sexual matters with the person with whom I most need to discuss them. Or as LJ said last night, "You don't know what's bothering somebody til they say somethin'." Truer words were never spoken.)

LJ was gone most of last week; what was supposed to be a daylong trip to southern Illinois became a week-long ordeal, culminating in what had to have been a SERIOUS fucking party on Friday night. Saturday afternoon he staggered in the front door in borrowed clothes, his shirt open all the way down, his glasses lost in a puking-out-the-car-window event. He mumbled something, passed me wordlessly on the stairs, took a 5-minute shower and fell into bed, where he stayed for the next eight hours. I only heard the story a few hours later, as he tested his abused stomach on a can of noodle soup.

The best part of the whole situation--aside from my having the car the whole time he was gone, which spoiled the hell out of me--was that LJ is completely helpless without his glasses, and so he's been home every night since because he doesn't want to risk blind night-driving. It's been kinda nice, actually.

Last night when I came in after class, he told me he needed me to drive him on a quick trip out to Maywood. This was at like 10:00, which was just fine by me; I thrive on lapses in my normal routine, which--as I told him on the ride--is why people like me should not have normal routines. I also told him: "You've never had a chance to see the real me, because I've been dealing with so much shit at work and shit in my head and just shit everywhere. I'll tell you this: I'm much more interesting in real life."

And it's true, if by "real life" you mean "the strange little world I inhabit inside my own head, where I am much prettier and more powerful than I actually am anywhere else". But here's the thing, see: I know that world exists. I lived there for about eighteen months back in 1994 and 1995, and it's a hell of a wonderful place and I miss it almost constantly. In that world I will one day be a famous writer, and it's okay sometimes to just throw things over and start again; I make my own decisions and don't feel guilty about existing, and I can make ends meet without sacrificing my life, my spare time, and all my self-esteem on the Altar of Assholes. The sex is always good in that world and there's a guy there who thinks I'm completely amazing, and we have our own little mutual-admiration society and nobody works in an office and everybody runs around committing art at strange hours. And the soundtrack to that world includes a lot of Smashing Pumpkins.

Some pieces of that world are irretrievable; I know that. But the main infrastructure of that world was my belief that any possibility is open to me, anything I want to do can be done. And some days I wake up in the morning and I believe it again, and I get up and I get on the bus and think about all the things I want out of life, all the ways everything could work out just fine and even though I may never be THAT happy again, at least I could be happy again in a different kind of way.

Then I get to work, and all those hopes go down the drain the minute I walk in the door. If I'm lucky, I manage to pick up some small sad shadow of that feeling on the way home; if not, the feeling goes away for days and weeks at a time, and I plod through the obstacle courses they set up anew every day for me to navigate, listening for their catcalls as I stumble. Or even as I DON'T stumble; sometimes they just attack me for no reason, even when I'm right. When I'm right I'm not allowed to remind them; when I'm wrong, I'm not allowed to forget it. And even when I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to do, they find ways to make me wrong. If I completed the project, I didn't complete it on time. If I completed it on time, I didn't communicate enough through the process. If I communicated enough, I didn't communicate effectively. If I communicated effectively, I was too detailed. After a while I don't care if I'm right, wrong, or dancing a polka. And that's when they know they've won.

I want out. I want out so badly that very soon it's not going to matter to me whether I have a job lined up or not, or whether I can pay the bills or not, or anything else. Very soon it's going to be a matter of whether I leave quietly and of my own volition, or whether I have some completely-inappropriate outburst and they fire me.

That's where it's headed--and I've never felt this close to that particular edge before.