What am I feeling? I want to pin down this feeling. In the first place I am only writing so that I can play my music, which must be played to combat the sound of Inconsiderate Dutch Girl's insipid dance music - pulsating, redundant, intolerable: how does it not drive one insane? It drives me insane; and I bought the cheapest speakers in the store so at their loudest I still get "you think she's an open book thump thump thump." My music does not need a backbeat accompaniment, thank you. No, I cannot listen to my music and read Virginia Woolf - The Waves, which I wanted to save, but I was in no mood to read my assignments for tomorrow - so I turned to her, and just as I began to settle into the rhythm of the unnovel thump thump thump. In no mood for my assignments - what is this mood? For one, I am tired, and why am I always tired after only 13 waking hours? But for those waking hours I have so much energy - is there a cost to living life acutely alive? Or no, really, look what I've had to eat: yogurt with muesli, good start, but then pretzel sticks, wok noodles w/ sweet & sour, peanuts. It's nearly ten: that's what passes for three meals for me. What happened to one glass each of tomato juice, fruit juice and soy milk and enough water to create my own system of tides? Interruption: will have glass of soy milk. And a multi-vitamin. Also will put pretzels out of my reach. Yes, better - peace of mind for having really done nothing. But this mood (what kind of incompetent mixed-cd'er juxtaposes a John Lennon with a Beatles song?): partly having been cut off from Lani before I would have chosen to, this small trampling of my free will. And having arrived at no decision during the course of our conversation: seventy dollars, curbing psychological if not bodily threats and a stable sleep pattern all seem equally important. And my inadequate reply to Benjamin, and my strange sudden inability to articulate my self. And deciding not to go to the women's studies library tomorrow: well similarly I did not understand why they took us to the library in Chicago: if there were time to read or research anything then ok, but why spend two hours or less torturing yourself over a seemingly infinite selection of books you will never actually be able to access? It would be one thing if they would cooperate with my ambition to start a library card collection; but I wasn't last year nor am I now as daring as I was as a senior in high school (also, under the influence of Jeff and Barry) conning my way into a Library of Congress membership. It seems I should go, but what is the point, plus there's the getting up before 8am thing, and bringing or buying a lunch, and a train ticket, and going through the forced nicety of making conversation with people I don't really care to - yet it's a feminist theory course; as likely as not won't I have an experience like this afternoon? Well whatever, I have reserved the morning for reading my assignments and that is the end of that. But my mood! I either cannot stick to the subject or cannot identify my own feelings. Either way, I seem to have written it away. Well then what is this mood? My trash smells - oh god, the things that are in there - (This is not descriptive of a mood) When I came back from break and cleaned out my refrigerator, I touched the half-eaten cucumber, which had been sitting there cut-into but covered for two weeks, and it - it was nearly liquefied - no more solid than a water balloon. I never want to do anything to make produce go so bad ever again. So that, among similar grocery grotesques, is still in the room, easily accounting for the growing smell. (I am disgusting.) It's so hard to shop/eat/cook for one: I have to buy a whole cucumber and eat it within a week. No one eats that much cucumber. I can't even eat a half-loaf of bread before it molds. Yes it would help if I were more ambitious and prepared myself meals, rather than lazily eating pretzel sticks all day. But even so, nothing is packaged with singletons in mind. Or else it is prohibitively expensive: four individual cups of peaches nearly €3; a family-sized can barely more than €1. Why? Unfair to be sure, but with absolutely no bearing on my present mood. Well my past mood was also partly informed by the memory that Dr. Buikem@ only got through 1/3 of her leture on Irigaray because peers kept asking insipid questions (What's the modern-day equivalent of hysteria? compulsive shopping?) - also the course is team-taught by several faculty members and I checked my syllabus: today was her only lecture. This is somehow slightly painful to me. I confess I began to fall a bit in love with her: I need a better word for the type of love I sometimes fall into for older usually professor-type women: I've felt at times the same thing for DHS; I think I might have looked at my Aunt Pat this way when I was younger; it's a lot like my love for Virginia Woolf. Anyway, it's "in love" as hardly anyone intends or understands it, yet for me it is that, sort of: it's part admiration, reverence, and wishing to be that woman - it is indeed a selfish, devouring sort of love - and necessarily removed: the thrust of it is that these women (this particular emotion, always women) are unspeakably brilliant, a quality that gives them a certain godly distance and mortal radiance. Well anyway, I fell into this sort of elevated hero-worship love with her: for honestly considering everything one says yet dismissing it with "well, that's the unoriginal conclusion"; for her pencil-thin lips and freakish height, for her fingers devoid of gold and nonhips that physically could hever have borne children; for putting her legs up as I do, with grace I could never manage; for walking around with a small round piece of paper from a hole punch in her hair (unintentional, one assumes); and naturally for her brilliant analysis of and clear introduction to Irigaray - for all the attraction is contingent upon brilliance, insight and uniqueness. Yes, I fell a little bit in love with this woman, in my way; yes, I am a little sad I will probably not meet her again. Having acknowledged my asexuality, I find it much easier to identify my feelings for other people, what I hope for in relationships: yes, for whatever reason, I do believe I would form the deepest, most loving bonds with women primarily, but women of this sort are never meant to be more than worshipped from the second row: but despite lack of all interaction, I wish for more chances to be in their presence! Oh well. At the same time, having acknowledged my asexuality, men no longer inspire the kind of deadening fear they always have in me: so it is sad and not relieving when Sebastian merely taps me on the shoulder in the computer lab, says "hey," and rushes out. Oh - I'd like to get to know him better now. It is a strange distinction, my feelings for women and men. Still what longings I have for romantic relationships I see with men; but deep, intellectual, lasting relationships, characterized by understanding and communion, that is generally what I seem to envision with women; which is strange, because that intellectual bond is the more meaningful for me, and yet the romantic one is the one I would still hope to be monogamous, a position filled by "the person in my life." What odd perceptions I have. But I will just allow my relationships [to] become what they become: knowing where I stand, that doesn't seem so unpredictable and terrifying. I have in no way isolated or described this or any of my moods, but this feels a good place to end.