"Angel, Angel, Down We Go Together."

"KNOW? This may suprise you, but I'm backtracking & will not claim to know anything. For me, it's a balance of probabilities - given my own perceptions, and the words of other's alleged experience, I draw what to me are the likely conclusions. Can I live with this? Do I have a choice?"

If I concentrate I can feel the weight of deadened animal between my hands. As I walked back to the car I cried, in much the same was as a day a few years ago when I read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. I have so fequently been told that things are alright. And so after I left, crying and feeling sick at the idea of paralysed body, I convinced myself that she (the cat) would be ok. Just a funny looking plaster cast. But the Vet said that 75% of her body was paralysed (I think). I had that Sadako feeling, as if pain is the most pervasive thing in people's lives, as if there is so much pain that I can't live with it. There is that cry out of shock and indignation (like when a little crushed cat tries to crawl out of a basket) that makes me want to cry until I pass out. I have never decided whether I think crying is a good thing or not. Oh, and don't say all the obvious stuff about it being emotionally healthy etc. Sometimes every action comes with its degree of manipulation and intent???

I think I am seeing everything in the most sinister of ways today (and yesterday and the days before) because I have become disgustingly aware of how crazy my mother is, how angry I am, how sad my father is and how violated I feel my boundaries have been. I can't do this yes thing anymore, and so I have decided that 2006 is the year of finding and defining my boundaries. I can no longer afford to base so much self worth on saying yes to things I don't want. I am so hideously angry with the world at the moment. I can't deal with this. Sorry. Finally my father has left my mother, and I feel guilty because I am so pleased for him, and so relieved for ZP and I. As if our problems will stop here? Certainly not, but in the coming months (years?) we will redefine these problems in a way we have never been capable of before. Everyone deals with family pain, and it is blindlingly horrible, but I wonder if many people try to break each other?

Doesn't this whole being 'in love' thing just reflect our individual need to be loved and adored? I am beginning to feel as if RECOGNITION is the most important thing. There are always people who are not capable of it. Last night I wondered if perhaps the most genuine (jesus, what kind of a stupid concept is that?) form of 'in love' is the one that is unrequited? It is perhaps the one I am most omfortable with. You can break down the idea of love until it no longer exists, but like god, it is something people insist on. Were MP and I ever in love, or did we just despreately need each other? Perhaps love is as mundane and awful as a desperate need? I am angry with humans, and angry withe the idea of love, and angry about the fact that I feel as if at times there are no common understandings between people. Why does my mother seem to exist within a totally different reality to mine? How do we proceed?

I have been watching a Duran Duran DVD, and have fallen in love with Simon Le Bon. I am totally in love with New Romantic hair (and just New Romantic style in general). I can even deal with the headbands, strange trousers and jackets with no shirt underneath.

The reason I asked about pleasure in rejection was becasue of a Dublin experience. I was incredibly attracted to one of my housemates, whilst still with MP. But it was an unsustainable and inappropriate attraction, and so I decided that to derive some pleasure from it, it would have to be in the denial of it. I think you can derive immense pleasure from denial. And it makes me wonder why desire and pleasure always have to do with possessing and sating. Surely the cessation of desire is when we have what we want. I felt as if desire could become a different thing for me: an elongated and pleasurably painful process. You know the pleasure that comes from not knowing, from guessing and interpreting?

"I see and feel and touch and smell and taste stuff. Is this the full extent of it? Probably not! Do others experience more? Maybe, but how the fuck do I know? I catch myself wondering about this stuff a couple of times a month, when I think ‘how the fuck is all this possible? What the fuck is real?' But the net result is the same...does the answer effect me day-to-day? Not really."