was wondering just now with lisa why we're both so far downhill than last year, re: the joyous bounce and loose curl which characterized us at our best. in the past. last year and the year before. the potential definitely lay/lies in both of us to be spectacularly unhappy, compulsive, irrational. but for this long? where 'this long' = the first month and a half of our sophomore year in college. and here, then, i'll stop talking for lisa. but as for myself, in trying to compare in some kind of mktg 396 way what has physically or really changed from last year i would really just like to once and for all, blame my having gone to korea. i know that at least these days, i envelope myself in a silence, cracking jokes and sending out other firecrackers so as not to give a sign of my actual muteness, but i don't talk. or i talk in such folds of tautology and fallacy that it's again, just noise. the people whom i trust i threw and throw far afield. i walked around with anand on friday night, not saying a word until i was about to step on the train up and i knew i could start crying if i responded to what he said, finally. the most obvious thing, and the thing that i thought would liberate me if i heard it from someone else, but it didn't. not as much as, say, watching movies on USA or going to woodbury w/ mum today, which was in the warm ale sunlight. and i lose everything, i discard everything, i kill everything with a weary and detached word which comes at a distance, like it was said light years ago, when things were different.

maybe i can hope to do well. things are probably or possibly going well for me in some ways, though certainly not in any of the ways that matter to me. so i don't know. i have to write a paper by wednesday in a class where i am the youngest by like a lifetime of smartness. i'm always coming up at the bottom of my personal lists, these days. 'why do i think that everything i like is bad for me?' i always thought it was enough just to know that you liked something, just to like something. i didn't know i had to live according to something like that.