Haunting Angles;Side long glances

Angles

 

You would not believe how much my life is controlled by Angles. [And yes, I am referring to Angles, opposed to Angels, despite the confusion caused by my uppercase use of “A”.]  Angels – side long glances of the reflection in a passing window or car mirror.  The well know Angels at home that seem to take pleasure in pointing out my every flaw, each misplaced hair, each skin imperfection.

 

Really, I don’t want to look but the Angels get the better of me. A quick glance as I make my way from the living room into the bedroom and back.  Not a real in depth analysis but just an odd Angel of myself, seen reflected back to me as I pass the partly closed bathroom door.  Is that who I am right now?  I must say the most jarring part about the Angels – partial images appearing everywhere around me – is that they return a ‘me’ that is at times drastically different than the ‘me’ I am in my head.  My conception – my perception – of my outward appearance is always off.  This, in truth, I feel I could reconcile myself with if it were not for the eyes.  What do you do when the eyes staring back at you, reflected in the bizarre upward Angle of a car mirror –or what have you- don’t seem familiar?  And even if they are familiar, do not seem to possess the inward passion, desire, bravado and confidence you have come to know as YOUR eyes, your SELF.

 

It’s funny how the Angles have the power to alter my day.  They say every mirror is different, each reflective surface slightly convex or concave, and therefore portraying a more or less agreeable version of that which it reflects.  I know this.  I know they can’t be trusted, but as I exit a mirror containing room I do so with my sense of self completely confirmed – bravado, confidence and charm ablaze – or I don’t.  If not, I exit dejected, lost and somewhat confused, occasionally depressed, trying to build my sense of self up from scratch.  In the meantime feeling an imposter in my own skin – no, that’s not right – an imposter in someone else’s skin.  It’s only an Angle; it’s not to be trusted, yet its confirmation or denial of me through its ability to align some ‘inner’ me with some ‘outer’ version is unbelievably alluring.

 

Can I wash my hands without looking up?  Can I exit my car without a quick glance in the rear view just to make sure my hair is not doing some sort of Alfalfa ‘thing’? Can I look through windows and never at them? 

They say near death experiences change you.  Make you less superficial and more to the point. I must say that I have had more than my fair share. However after abandoning such a lifestyle, my life seems to slowly be filling with such banal, minor trivialities.  Sometimes we may just need bigger fish to fry.

..just BAM and the smoke smells way to good.

The smell of cigarette smoke is doing me in.

My main question is: why now?  Why now am I feeling so vulnerable when faced with the urge to smoke.  The urge that for months has been completely absent and is now rearing it’s alluring inviting enticing ugly head?  Before all I had to do was remind myself how hard it was so stop, the health benefits – both immediate (ability to breath) and future (life itself),how unfair it was to keep smoking after my finance quit, how much I wanted to do this for my father.  Once I reminded myself of these things the desire to smoke would vanish instantaneously.  Now as I sit here I find myself wondering what all the fuss was about.  I miss it.

The funny thing is that I have always been really firm in my commitments to stop something.  Too firm at times perhaps.  It has gone so far as to take on a defining quality.  I AM that person who is strong willed, hard headed, and stubborn.  Who can set her mind to anything (self control wise) and just do it.  Once I concede that it’s time to give something up – well that’s it – done, finito, gone.  But therein lies the problem.

I have become so internally defined with my ability to limit and restrict that I can’t stop.  I have come to thrive on (or rather suffer from) my personal, epic battles of will power.

But now I am left asking: in constantly ’taking away’ from myself with goals of raising my own personal bar, what am I going to be left with?  Life is slowly but surely loosing the fun, the carefree, the enjoyable.  I actually once considered myself SPONTANEOUS.  Where have those days gone?  According to the records I am only 21 years old after all.

Can you understand how unsettling it is to have such urges to smoke?  If I were to give in to such an urge, where would the cycle lead me?  How would I define myself?  How would others’ view of me change?  If I started smoking again and told myself that if I quit once I could do it again – what would stop me from starting everything else I have stopped with the same justification.  What would stop me from winding up back in my car, family and friendless, with drugs as my sole desired companion.  Drugs and words anyway.  I have always believed a saying I once heard, something that has always stuck with me: The first time you try to quit, it’s easy. [ I take that to mean relatively so - in other words, don't throw away your one 'free-pass'.  Not that it is exactly 'easy' the first time, but I sure as hell don't want to know what the non-easy subsequent tries are like.]

I am leading this refined and sifted life that I (non-religiously) imposed upon myself.  For me it has always been all or nothing.  Entirely ‘out there’ or entirely ’here’.  Entirely absent or entirely present.  For some reason there is no give and take in me – it’s entirely give or entirely take.

Why the sudden insecurities?  Nothing bad, nothing troubling, no real bout of depressive thoughts – just BAM and the smoke smells way to good.   

   

Update: Blog Name Change

UPDATE:

The name of this blog has been changed for the sake of anonymity.

Not that anyone should be ‘looking me up’ but more in an effort to cripple[hinder, break down, destroy, eradicate, erase, hog tie, limit, hold back, hamper, encumber, thwart, frustrate, foil, throw a monkey wrench in the works of, stop, etcetera so forth and so on] my own sense of self censorship.

 

Quote

“For centuries tragic playwrights have created powerful, charismatic men and women whose uncompromising faith in themselves is coupled with an indomitable will.  They are devoted to their own subjective vision of the world and their place in it, and this commitment, reinforced by pride or what the Greeks called hubris, bestows upon them both great strength and great vulnerability.”

Russ McDonald

University of North Carolina at Greensboro.  Introduction to the Pelican edition of Shakespeare’s Othello. xxxix.

It’s that time again

Ah, the first week of class.  Always an interesting compilation of intriguing class introductions, and the equally interesting albeit strenuous period of the teachers’ culling of the herds. 

Oh so you want to take my class with three times the approved limit of students crammed into every nook and cranny, every space against the wall occupied by another laptop carting body.  Well that shouldn’t be a problem, just read this over the weekend.

The funny part about it is that next week in class the teachers are going to have this funny look in their eyes when they pose easy questions to their audiences and receive only sleepy, befuddled stares in response.  We are asked to go into this zombie mode to have even a remote chance of completing the work they assign the first week – and then they inevitably wonder why we are not exactly on point by the time we finish such a gauntlet and walk through their doors.  For that matter, exactly how much coffee would you like me to drink trying to finish all this?  I happen to have given up all other, more effective and destructive, stimulants long ago.  You want me to read faster?  Well, I refuse.  I read how I read and it suits me.  I think about things, go off on tangents, pull out corollaries and points of interest, and fill the margins with a large percentage of what occurs to me as I read the text.  To me, this IS reading.  Anything else would be merely glazing over.  I want to digest what I read. 

I think, in part, this compulsion to break down what I read is a common delusion of mine that I can get anything done in one pass.  The same operation can be seen in so many little things I do:

Yes, I can make it out of the car (while locking the doors), across the street, and over to my apartment – with a couple hundred dollars of grocery bags cutting into my arms (and wrists and fingertips) – and still manage to get out my key and open the door.  Why?  Well two (or five or six) trips would be silly… 

Yes, I can burn off over a thousand calories at the gym (or so the ‘trustworthy’ machines tell me) – practically killing myself for hours on end so that walking back to my car I look like an individual who is quite certainly missing her cane – because going several times a week for a reasonable amount of time and pain would (once again) be silly…

So where does this leave me?  Slightly bitter about being assigned more than is reasonable, but hey, I like the challenge.  I will read everything assigned.  I will read them as thoroughly as if I had several weeks to finish them at my leisure (which ironically would most likely lead to my becoming distracted and therefore reading less of them).  I may be a little run down, but come next week I will be fully functioning as I make it into class.  And, importantly, during all this I will not drop off the face of the earth from all friends, family, and blog associations.