2006: one fucked up bitch of a year for the world- a pretty good year for laura gillespie.

i've come to feel that there's not much i can say about the most important things. if you don't believe me (that i feel that way) i couldn't blame you-- i'm always talking. but i think maybe talking is important as a way of things happening more than as a means of naming important things. last year was full of unspeakably important things. intractable things. this year there was less death. more room for life.

i never once succeded, this year or any other year, in speaking the unspeakable. it has sometimes been very disappointing. tremendously endlessly disappointing. but i could talk about most things and it was important to me that i could. i talked as a way of being known to people (who've come to matter to me so much). i talked just to make warm noises, to make people feel welcome in small ways (i maintain that this is a terribly important kind of talking). i talked because i felt like it, and i only have a limited amount of time to enjoy that sneeze-y feeling, that relief.

new year's stock-taking and resolution isn't my bag. it's too arbitrary. i'm going to stop now. but hey, if you're reading this, that means that you most likely had something do with these last twelve months and what they've meant to me. thanks.

the book of tea begins:

'tea is the ultimate mental and medical remedy and has the ability to make one's life more full and complete.'
i'm inclined to believe this.

diesel has teapots now, my readers.
today i've had one pot each of:
jasmine
earl grey (w. soy milk)
wu wei + herbal mint (the rosie mix)
(which isn't technically tea, but an herbal infusion. until someone comes up with a better term, though, i'm just going to call it tea.)

one term paper down, three finals to go.

AMAZING!
[thanks to e.j.]

my dog ate it.

i used to enjoy arguing. i liked thinking of what came next. i had an intuition, i stated it as a point of fact. then came counterpoint. dodge. parry. thrust. first i am the point, and someone else is the counterpoint, but then (and always, really, but more and more as time passed) i'm the point and the counterpoint. i formulate a little argument to myself and i like the way it goes-- i might think it through eight or ten times, running little fingers over it, tweeking-- and then, out of habit (dodge. parry. thrust), i counter. and as it happens i get better and better at countering.

so first it's: point, point--point...point! (counter) point.
and then it's: point...counter...point...counter.
and then it's point. counter. point. counter. point.
and then it's pointcounterpointcounterpointcounter.

the counters gain. they're unanswerable. (it's not always or even generally unpleasant. when i'm thinking of a thing in the world that interests me i learn more or differently about it. but when decisiveness is called for i'm occasionally horrible, sometimes unforgivable. ideas of what to do are rejected as quickly as they occur and i stand there while the whole thing burns or grows or does whatever it does, no thanks to me.) and the day finally came when the point was overtaken (pointcounterpoincounterpoicounterpocounterpcounter) and a little part of who i was imploded, and i sat there in the middle of it for a longtime and couldn't say a goddamned thing that mattered.

why make a point when its unanswerable contradiction is right on top of it? you can't even tell them apart anymore.

this is a story-- a little argument-- that i told myself today while i walked. it's not particularly true.
[i was born/ you begin, and already each word/ makes you smaller. -n.flynn]

vessel networks. neuron forests.

take the brain tour!
[nevermind about the context.]

study break.

i could seriously use a coke habit right about now. sleep is the enemy.
in three weeks i'll court it and find myself devastatingly unrequited, but for now i'll enjoy/loath this unprecedented moment. and speak wistfully of copping some adderall.