Long days, scary days, tiring days.
At Uni, that, as dad said, 'must have been strange'.
Lost and confused. Missed many buses trying to get there, they all hurtled by , full. I started to think Uni was slipping out of my control again, and I was returning to the way I was first time I went there. A bobbing cork in a stream, no more in control of my direction than it.
I fight nightly with an already lost fight. I should move on, choose again, another gal.
Love sits in my peripheral vision. In direct sight I have erected an edifice, a monument , a sculpture to people's expectations of love. A private joke, gotten by none, pissing off all my friends.
I wish I had gotten in to Uni this Semester, I wish I had spent the last decade with a girl who loved me.
I remember Sim asked me a year or so ago, 'aren't you lonely?'. Naughty. Breaking the rules of this sculpture game. We don't admit - it's just pretend. We don't admit we're just acting out roles for others benefits, that's not contributing to the sculpture!
**
Another day. I am sure the statement "Everything has turned out the opposite of how I planned" is just another of those gross and incorrect exaggerations that our society is so fond of accepting. We accept it because like the phrase 'Weapons of Mass Destruction', we know there is something else behind it, a story.
If everything turned out exactly the opposite of how we planned, the first inversion that comes to mind is that we would be dead - because most plans involved staying alive for a long time. So turning out the opposite of planned would result in being dead.
DESPITE THIS, the phrase is accepted as the lamentation of a sad person who feels like they have lost control of their life.
I am unsure if any of us ever have any 'real' control over our lives. Sure, we do little things, pass drivers licence exams, go to doctor checkups, and maybe all these little things sum up into overall, a life that may even approach roughly a destiny that we hoped for as children.
When I was younger, I knew, somehow, innately, that to tell the story about this, you told a story about that. You hid the story you wanted, in the story people wanted.
Now I do not know how to tell either story.
It is one of the few real things you can do, to live a life as truly a gangster, to spend your youth in that fast-paced light of crime, then when you are older and wiser and stepping back from the scene, you play a role as a gangster in a crime movie. Just look at the credit list for Carlito's Way and tell me I am lying. "Sonny Zito", "Ángel Salazar", "Caesar Cordova" - they play bodyguards and barbers according to the director's design, but they are playing a bigger part, a search for a truth through un-hiding the life they hid for decades.
...
To spend a week, over a week with your sister, and never to communicate. To wonder if really she sees you as a total failure, or if you are just laying your own perceptions upon her. Nothing she said indicates her opinion of you being so low, but all the things she didn't say add up to the low opinion just as much. Nothing of import is discussed. At a time when we should be planning for an uncertain future, when we should be looking at how to handle ageing parental health issues, all she talked of was trivialities.
She ensured you spent no money. She paid all expenses. She was whacking Hannah within minutes of running into her at Coles Indooroopilly. Hannah was asking for a chocolate bar, refusing to put back on the shelf the chocolate that mum said she could not have. Whack!
I half turn, start to spin impotently on the spot. Torn between wanting to protect my blood, and between not wanting to embarrass my sister, who I feel I must allow to parent her own way. But how far do you let it go? And knowing in the back of your mind that she can always pull out the as-yet unplayed trump card - "You're just a junkie.". Funny how an insult that I would take on the cheek from anyone else, means more from family.
"Ok then Josua be a little shit, go sit in the car and we'll shut the doors and windows and you'll have no oxygen and you'll die", she said as Jos refused to enter his grandparents house on the morning of his flight back to Fiji. He had three crying sessions in the twenty minutes between 805 and 825 - I had to go to work. My sister does not handle his tears very well, but then who does I guess? I am not a parent, I am junkie, I have failings numerous and onerous.
But do I ignore her striking a child? Verbal abuse? If I saw this much in the few hours total I was exposed, how much more goes on after hours? I hope that with nannies and housemaids she has less interaction with her kids, and therefore is less stressed.
But why have the children after all?
***
030810
The muscle theory of luck versus the limited supply theory.
I've been driving around without a spare tyre for about six or ten months now. My mechanic was horrified that first weekend when I said I'd be in on Monday to collect it. Dozens of weekends have since passed - long drives south to Stanthorpe, up north to North Arm, all passed uneventfully.
Was I lucky? And if I was, was I using up a limited supply of luck (the limited supply theory), and therefore will soon run out and terrible things will start happening to me every day. Or does the muscle theory apply - I had a little luck, which I turned into a lot of luck by exercising the luck every day like a muscle, helping it to grow?
I'm hoping for the latter one. The scientist in me (he's down in my left shin somewhere) tells me that every day the stats are started anew. So I am just as likely tomorrow to have a flat as I was today. When seen in a long run of time, days plus days plus days, then the likelihood increases significantly. But on a day by day basis it's always the same odds.
I am never sure how to interpret this, and had hoped to be doing science at uni this semester to help me get a greater understanding of the odds system. But no. My thesis on Lady Luck will have to wait.