Ferris Mx > Recent Status Updates

Because I was emphatically a brown girl fucking. I related to the term abject so much that I made endless puns about it: abject permanence, abject story, abject of your affection. For that was how I felt, melodramatic as it was: cast-off, objectified.

All along I'd had the sense that something was different about the way men treated me, different from the free-spirited adolescent romances I'd grown up watching and reading. No one had told me it was going to be different for me. That it would feel so much harder to be loved. I felt crazy for not understanding.

Two years after the retrospective closed, I'd get a tattoo of Agnes's last drawing. A small, looping sketch of a potted plant, the lines shaky, as if done in ballpoint pen -= more an idea of a plant than the plant itself, its species unidentifiable. It occurs to me now that, at the end of her life, she did return to the material, the explicable, and through the movement of her hand, make it inexplicable again.

Achieving a sense of euphoria from the fantasized relationship, feeling desperate or uneasy when separated from the partner, using the relationship to hide from negative feelings or situations, excessive interest in the new relationship to the exclusion of other interests and responsibilities, neglecting other key relationships in your life for the sake of pursuing the fantasized relationship.

Typical signs of love addiction include: mistaking intense sexual experiences and new romantic excitement for love. Constantly craving and searching for a romantic relationship. An unhealthy fixation on another person which may include excessive fantasizing and obsessive compulsions, potentially even stalking.

Every time before, we've been trying to hide so we don't get caught, shoehorning our feelings for each other into hungry sex and hushed conversations, our limited access fueling our desire even more, a sexual supply and demand. Every second risky and dangerous, frenzied and exhilarating. But now there's so much space. And so much time. And so much of each other. Scarcity is tension. Excess is ... whatever this is.

"I was worried about you."
I hate that phrase. "I was worried about you." Frannie uses it all the time. It skirts around the truth. Rather than own their own feelings, the sense of rejection or disappointment or whatever they experienced in reaction to something I did, they find a way of making themselves bigger and me smaller. *I'm* the one *they* have to worry about because they're the adult and I'm the child.

That's my issue. I'm so ruled by the present. Buddhists talk about living in the present like it's the antidote to all of life's problems. Living in the present is the worst problem. You don't learn from your mistakes and you don't consider the consequences. You just act; you just do. Living in the present might work for a monk, but if you're an actual living, breathing human, living in the present is a disaster.

I've thought about emailing him. I've drafted two.
One an angrier, more aggressive hue. The other the more "xoxo, no worries if not!" type. The bifurcation of every woman. The split personalities.

I could tell he was somewhere else. I even asked him, twice, if something was the matter. And he said no. But I knew something was. The air doesn't get thicker for no reason.

He chuckles, trying to downplay it, but I can tell that the novel still means something to him, that he calls it a pipe dream as a way to try to distance himself from it. Feel power over it. Feel above it. When really the disappointment of it still stings. I don't know why people prefer to grow bitter than to acknowledge disappointment. Maybe someday I will.

He breathes deeply. "You're not skinless." He touches my wrist. "You're just sensitive. It's fine. I can get that way too sometimes."

But I think, it's different, him sometimes getting overwhelmed by the world and my ceaseless watchfulness, my flinching at sounds, expecting violence. It's not the same.

She actually sneers. "If that's the type of people you want to be with, by all means go ahead. You do know what it says about you right?" She stares at me and I don't want to say any more so I reduce my facial expression to blank. She turns around and walks out of the room.

Whatever anger I felt is now fully extinguished by the raw unsorted emotions Hanna just heaved onto the parquet. I feel beaten up.

Hanna is in deep conference with Noor and I look away when I see Noor hand her a pill. I want to stay out of it because I have no information on good pill manners and I don't think I want to decline a pill and I definitely know I don't want to accept one.

Remarks and comments that stand out I write down verbatim on the left-hand page. ... This takes a little while and is mentally demanding. It is my favourite mode of meditation. Also it sharpens my ability to read interactions and understand subtext, the real meaning under all those niceties, and how to deploy this polite vagueness myself. Even though it makes my bag heavy, I bring a notebook most places.

He gets like this, mock-pompous, whenever there are strong emotions around. Although the pompousness is put on, I have come to recognise its backhanded authenticity since it only surfaces to mask real, overwhelming feelings. Or maybe he doesn't experience large emotions and this is just his approximation of human behavior. But I prefer the first alternative.

Soon we were discussing crypto because somehow all lectures still led to crypto and Konrad talked about the psychological intricacies of establishing a digital currency which the owner believed to have value but which the intended adopter often viewed with skepticism or reluctance. Without raising her hand Hanna said, "So basically like dick pics."

Men's stories weren't all so different. The men talked about having unwanted sex because they felt too awkward to stop things, or because it was "mean" to say something. They worried people would question their sexual orientation or laugh at them if they didn't have sex anytime it was offered to them.

Jackie, an eighteen-year-old freshman in the study, had sex with a man simply because he was "looming". His physical size made her think about the possibility of violence, even though he was never violent and never forced her to do anything. But for her, at the time, it was better to have sex with him than risk any possibility of violence. "Consensualish", she called it. "Consensual but unwanted".

The woman's bag was easily large enough to conceal a weapon. Even in the grip of her own paranoia, Juliet could acknowledge that it was an unlikely guise for an assassin. She feared that she was beginning to tread the wilder shores of her imagination. Juliet could only imagine the havoc she would cause if she started brandishing her own gun. And she couldn't shoot every drab housewife - she'd be here all day.

"Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck," Juliet murmured and Lester flinched - not so much at the word, she suspected (his father was a bastard, after all), but at the consequences of the word. There was an interesting ethical debate to be had about the difference, but now was most certainly not the time.

"Crumhorns and flageolets, I expect. A sackbut or two as well," Juliet said, pulling these words off an obscure shelf in her memory. Were these real instruments, she wondered, or was she just making them up? They sounded ridiculous.

Libby, you're a wonderful person, I wrote. I adore you. But there's nothing remotely romantic about any of this. She didn't reply for forty-five minutes, which made me wonder if instead I'd hurt her feelings. Her response when it came: If that's really what you think, I envy your ability to delude yourself.

I've come to understand that there are two types of people: Beginners and Enders.

In romance movie, when you meet the person you're supposed to be with, time parts. It has a way of happening around the two lovers. In action films, when someone dies, there is that similar slowing down. Time bends for those on the precipice.

Of course he hadn't been to LA; as usual he was moved by his incomprehensible whims, not by outside imperatives.

His father always knew how to find the soft spot. Tobias did have a lifelong weakness for the suffering of others. What his father failed to understand was that, unlike in his own case, Tobias's weakness didn't arise from belief in himself as a force of salvation, but from obscure and infinitely adaptable feelings of guilt.

Louisa wanted to say, Oh really? in response to this new information that the age of nineteen was quite young, when she was frequently told, at age nine, that she was "too old" for any number of things, but delicious as it felt to refuse to submit quietly, interruptions also lengthened the conversation, which already in its inaugural seconds felt interminable.

She wouldn't turn and couldn't be made to, not when her mother was clearly winding up to inflict information, just when it suited her, just the same way she withheld information when it suited her, either way never considering Louisa's preferences at all.