Gates of the Mind

6 March, 2006

Well, I had to turn in a forty page novel excerpt submission a week ago. It was pretty hard work, but I got it done and was reasonably happy with it. I was so nervous about everyone in class reading it and talking (s*) about it, so I took some benzo's and recorded the session on a tape in case I was too out of it to remember what people said. I think I did okay. I was so scared, and, as unprofessional as it sounds, it was mostly because of my subject matter. (I wrote about a fifteen-year-old guy in a wheelchair who loses his virginity to a prostitute). I was so afraid everyone would be like, "how can he have sex if he's in a wheelchair?"

Well, because I was so absorbed by getting that turned in, I got behind in math, which I am now failing. Probably going to have to drop that. I've already been advised to drop French. It's sad. I'm doing well in an upper division writing class (I'm not even supposed to be taking it--I'm not a junior and I don't have the prerequisites) but I am failing remedial algebra.

After Vei was born, Jos and I did not have sex for a solid year. I hated sex. I'd had enough of it in the week we were trying to get pregnant, I felt, for a lifetime. It was so bad (not the sex, but the situation, where I wouldn't put out) I nearly told Jos it was okay if he wanted to try to find someone else (for this purpose--I wasn't suggesting divorce). I really didn't care. The only reason I didn't is because, since I've been going back to church, I've become more aware of what happens when I do something I know is wrong, even if it seems alright to me. So, I actually prayed about it, and I know this sounds nuts, but I think that God has answered, because we're having better sex now. There've been a few times when I just randomly wanted to do it. The bad thing is, the reason, I believe, that I don't like sex, is because, before I ever had sex, for like, nine years, I got into the habit of...handling things myself. It was hard to break. I was so imaginative, I had built sex up to be this whole big glorious thing that it couldn't live up to. Plus, I think I have like the female counterpart to the madonna-whore syndrome, because, although intercourse I always thought of as an act of love, other devises seemed, you know, lustfull...and until I was sixteen, I had no ideal how difficult it could be for a woman to climax from basic intercourse. So, when Jos and I did stuff, sex itself was uncomfortable and irritating, and when he did things for me, I just felt like it wasn't...appropriate. Like it wasn't an expression of love, but like, "Here. Pleasure me. Now. No, not there. There. No, move over. The other way! D*it Slow down! Now speed up. Now what the h* are you doing? Oh, just nevermind. I'll do it myself."

I've been thinking more about what my cousin Li told me about when he and my brother Tuc fooled around when they were young. I've been wondering, for a while, how our unusual development has affected Tuc, if it explains why he seems so cold and distant. I never had anything like that with Tuc. But he and I used to take baths together, until I was, like, ten. I was like already wearing a bra by then. I know that's sick. But I think it should have been my mom's responsibility to set limits. She just thought it was good we were so close, I guess. This faulty teaching, I think, may have affected both of our psycho-sexual development. Not so much, me, I guess, but there is the fact that I was, for the most part, on a practical level, unable to become involved, physically, with someone. In highschool, every guy I fooled around with, I would, like, act like I was into it, when in reality, it did nothing. Like I wasn't comfortable having someone else do that to me. Only I did that, and I wasn't proud of it. I was so ashamed that I didn't get anything out of even just kissing someone, so I faked it. Anyway, so , I worried about Tuc. He always seemed kinda...strange. He seems to be fairly well-adjusted relationship-wise. He's been with Nea for, like, over five years. But his personality's a little...I don't know. Aloof. I think it's possible that all three of us--me, Tuc, and Li--were subjected to faulty learning. Maybe our Kris cousins too. I think Li messed around with Ney when they were little. Bel and Ney always used to sit on their dad's lap, when they were in their teens. I didn't do that with my dad myself, but I didn't really think anything of it until my novel-writing class brought it up based on something similar I'd written in my submission. And my cousin Fef used to ask me about my underware and such.

Oh my gosh, my family is all freaks!!!!!

I really don't think there was any incest or sexual abuse. It was just the wake of the seventies and all our parents wanted to be nudists and share a family bed and breastfeed us until we were three. Because they thought it was like, healthy, or natural, ironically. But, you know, when I was in this intense partial-hospitalization program, they did this psych testing on me, and my results lit up like a switchboard to indicate sexual abuse. I'm sure I wasn't molested, but I think that stuff from my childhood probably had some effect on me. I have like that dissociation thing & stuff. My therapist told me the kinds of things that went on with us were not appropriate.

Vei is doing pretty good. She is very precious to me. When she was born, I just loved her so much the way she was. I was afraid to have her grow up. There are times when I still miss the baby Vei. But there are so many joys that I found as she grew. When she was a few months old, she would lay on the floor, and I would come up to her, and when she saw me, she'd smile and flap her little arms and kick her little legs. And I loved it when she could see me when I came to pick her up from nursery and she'd run up to me with her arms open and says, "Mommy!" Now, whenever she hurts herself, she comes up to me and says, "Kiss it better?" Instead of hellicopter, she says, "Apercoper". She says, "Blana" for banana. When she was first trying to put sentences together, she'd say, "Please help you?" when she wanted help, and "Do you, moooore milk?" "Mooore Veggie Tales?" "Baby 'steins?" (Baby Einstein). When I put her in bed, she asks me, "Do you, lay down a Mommy?" (She wants me to lay down with her.) I love to snuggle with her. She'll put her little arms around me and give me a kiss. But I can't do it because she'll never go to sleep. It breaks my heart to tell her no and have her scream and cry.

I'm so scared to have her grow up. I know it's hypocrital to not want her to do stuff I did. But we love our children more than we love ourselves. And when you don't know, you can get into trouble with stuff. Like I got drunk once and just started drinking Jack straight from the bottle and it was bad. At least I always thought I was in control. But if my Vei's out and I'm not with her, there's nothing I can do to protect her. And, me personally, because of my nature, I never should have done all the stuff I did with guys I wasn't in love with. I don't know why I did, when I didn't even like it. It wasn't really like I couldn't say no, I was just like what's the point? Everything's meaningless. I was just, passive, I guess. Maybe I allowed it because I realized I didn't enjoy it and wanted to prove otherwise. Who knows? I don't even know why sex always mattered to me so much anyway. I made it out to be this huge, wonderfully big deal. Maybe it's because I'm a writer. Fiction can create things, ostinsibly from this world, that take on qualities far beyond it. I can imagine, and write about, romantic love and passionate coupling with such zest. It feels so real. Yet anything I've ever experienced felt somewhat unreal.

My mind just travels all the time now. I have no real grounding in reality. I get totally lost in this alternate existence, stacking intangible ideas onto one another. I'm like a Tom Wolfe novel all of the time. You know, like that concept--the doors of perception--I think it's a book--from which the Doors extract their name? I think my mind is a little off-set. Like its natural state of consciousness leans a little to the abstract.

The idea is that, I think, our minds have capacity that we can't access--creative ways of inventing and elaborating on things outside of ourselves. But you know how they say we only use like ten percent of our brain power? It's because the rest of it is closed off. Similar to the way the chemicals that cause us to feel euphoria exist already in our brains. The only thing opioids do is access those chemicals. I guess the big movement in the sixties was that psychlotropic drugs opened the portals into the mind's deeper interior that we'd had no idea even existed.

I think that some people's minds are a little inclined toward these imaginative tendencies by themselves. Sometimes it makes them brilliant artists. But everything is distorted. Those people tend to be very maladaptive to all other areas of life. Like Edgar Allen Poe and Vincent Van Gogh and Samuel Taylor Colleridge. The had serious psychiatric disorders--undiagnosed manic depression, schitzophrenia, etc. Usually self medicated. It's nuts, because they all had miserable lives and died young, but whenever I start to feel like in all my life, I've never been successful at anything, I think, well maybe I'm just one of those artists who could potentially do one thing really well, while being completely inept at all practical living skills. I've already had the poor coping techniques all of my life. I'd love to think there's just one thing I could be good at.