I'm suddenly terrified to realize just how disinterested I am in anything outside my own realm of experience.

I have known I only wish to associate with people like me -- perhaps with one or two negligible differences for color, but in temperament, ideology and pursuits, essentially like me. I don't bother with people of other perspectives and backgrounds -- they are wearying, tiresome I say -- I don't want to labor to change their minds, I don't want them to presume to change mine, and I don't want to agree to disagree.

Well, that's deplorable enough, but it's much deeper --

I'm only interested in writing, music, theory that speaks to me about my life. I don't really want to know about other cultures -- I want to read about other self-centered liberal feminists with similar problems and insecurities. I start to become angry with Sylvia Plath when in her journals she at times sounds helpless and unfeminist, when she speaks of an eroticism I've never shared -- But this is what it amounts to: I become angry with her when she doesn't understand me. I don't really want to understand others; I want all to understand something about me.

And so right now, I feel I'm beginning to be forced into choosing at least a broad category of scholarship to devote the rest of my life to. And I feel I should on principle reject that short-sighted middle class, white view of feminism, which is nearly now as insidious as the middle class, white, Protestant, heterosexual male view of humanity as a whole. But I relate to white middle-class feminists! Emmeline Pankhurst and her bourgeois militancy, Margaret Sanger and her slightly nutty quest for sexual autonomy. These are the women I have chosen to investigate, these are women I can understand -- let's invert it, because what I really mean is: these are women who understand me.

I do not suspect myself of racism or classism. That is, I have no bias against black women writers. It is only that I cannot relate to material that focuses primarily on black women's experience -- which is very nearly as bad.

So now I am trying to devise a topic for consumers &/or citizens, and everytime I try to steer myself toward the spaces opened and closed to immigrant women I feel myself gravitating instead to dress reform.

I really am disgusted with myself right now. I never imagined my inveterate selfishness went this far. Look at the books I read, the movies I watch, the music I listen to -- it is all about me: I am drawn to redehads, to women, to atheists, to the quietly sarcastic and disdainful, to the misfits and outsiders, the introverts, the loners, the soulful types, liberals, vegetarians and vegans. People who speak to me about dissatisfaction, fear of death and transience of life, change and evolution, progress, autonomy, self-defined sexuality and many expressions of love, ambiguities

-- just got off the phone with my mother so my will to hate myself is somewhat diminished --

anbiguities of time and space, self-worship, self-loathing, self-knowledge. I like people more when I find out they've endorsed Dennis Kucinich. I love myself so completely, and when I, rarely, find it in me to love some thing or some one else, it is really no more than loving an extension of myself.

So that I am Virginia Woolf, Tori Amos, Katharine Hepburn, Adrienne Rich -- god, how I wish!

My, the unrelenting vanity; even on the days I cannot bring myself to look in the mirror I can still retreat to my bed and wallow in Sylvia Plath and Elliot Smith. Tell me who I am, I demand of the geniuses, say everything locked up in my sheltered, coward head, say it better.

And so I will say I do not "get": the avant garde, because I am typical; painting, because I am unimaginative; poetry, because I have no gift for rhythm or metaphor; imagery, because I am so attached to the reality of my experience.

There are others whom I deeply admire; I can appreciate the talents of Lauryn Hill or Henry James or Thorstein Verblen or Angelina Jolie, but they have never helped me understand myself.

Isn't that horrifying? To be unable to love or comprehend that which is Other? Aren't the worst atrocities in human history formed from the basic refusal to look outside the self?

Yes -- I'm pretty sure: I have never loved anything that I did not project myself into. I was Catwoman, Captain Janeway, Jane Torvill, Kate Austin, two Noras, CJ Cregg, Elizabeth Bennet, Margaret Schlegel, Beatrice, Clarissa Vaughan. I cannot extract myself from these things I love. I have lived in song lyrics. Now I live in the journals of Sylvia, and I become her when she speaks of academic anxieties and wanting to live each moment, and I become angry with her when she speaks of sex, making scrambled eggs for a man, and suicide -- I cannot inhabit these thoughts.

I love people who speak for me; I admire people who speak to who I want to be. Could I step outside this? Could I love and appreciate Chaucer and Ernest Hemingway and Emily Dickinson for what they are? Could I forgive Sylvia for marrying an abusive man and killing her brilliant self?

And the question looms: what ought I to study for Consumers &/or Citizens? And what ought I to dedicate most of my life to? I feel I must decide something now, and that the decision will speak volumes about who I am. Self-service or authenticity? And can they, ought they to intersect? Then where?

What am I doing, and why? Who am I? No one must speak for me now.

(later)

Today is Francesca's birthday -- and her wallet, passport, everything was stolen -- which is of course not my fault, but I feel like scum. I feel like scum because even considering this, even after she cried in front of me again, I still feel like I don't really like her very much. (Because she's nothing like me? God, shut up, leave yourself out of it for five minutes.) Still I want as little as possible to do with her. Still, I'm going to the police station with her tomorrow, lending her money, and helping her out in any way I can.

(later)

Then again, no -- I felt like scum because I was already in the mood to feel like scum. But no -- it is unfortunate that this happened to F, but still she is using me, and I am not the only disingenuous one. I hugged her stiffly when it felt appropriate and she barely touched me. Still she was all disdain -- need and disdain, a self-defeating combination. She is using me! Yes, she only cried to me because she doesn't want to go to the station alone and she will probably need to borrow money. And I will do all that because it is not a problem; also, I understand: if it were me, I'd use her similarly. That is our relationship: transactional.

Why I even put on the show of hugging her I don't know: she already has me pegged as cold and practical. She already noticed I didn't seem excited to see L&J, though she knew I was; of course I was, but why make a production of it the way she does with everything? I keep my emotions to myself. My excitement was quite evident to L&J; what did it concern anyone else?

But F is so calculated, yes, more calculated even than I: she shows her emotion when she is in need, but cannot be bothered to mask her disdain. Reveal one honest emotion and it all comes screaming out. She is transparent, bloodless.

She can't stand me, either, but she needs me. I don't need her, but I'll put up with it. Fine. Her fault for getting deathly drunk, letting her friends force shots down her throat (rape by alcohol), vomiting in her sleep. She has a voice to say NO, two feet with which to leave the fucking pub. Her fault for taking all her money, credit cards and passport to a bar -- that's plain stupid. Don't feel guilty, and shouldn't: her fault, if anyone's. I will help her, but I will not like her.