And it occurs to me...

And it occurs to me that high school might have given me a fear of being alone. Or maybe this is just how nature makes us, how things are. "Nobody wants to be alone" is a phrase I've often heard, and which I believe was repeated to me in sympathy for my recent situation. But I know, or at least it seems to me, that a lot of people operate very well for very long amounts of time being alone. I don't, and not even for short amounts of time. It's a Thursday night, the day before a national holiday, and part of me is complaining that my housemates didn't tell me they were going out, because I happened to have my door closed for 20 minutes or so because one of my housemates' tobacco scent was wafting down the hall from his room to mine and that was annoying so I closed the door. Wow, what a great sentence. But you see, I am also complaining in my mind that none of my (almost entirely female) friends are out doing something tonight. In Japan they almost always would be or at least I'd know why if they weren't. Communication isn't as fluid here; there's no real good central hang-out spot where everybody meets and talks, no great meeting place for a small community. Here it's very much unlike Japan; I think my Paris program's designed that way. And I think it backfired, because a lot of the people here aren't that happy with it or at least seem that way. That's what happens when you don't adequately prepare social events when you know there's going to be a massive strike that will last forever.

And yet I'm not sure whether this is me or what, the person who doesn't like to be alone at all. Who likes to stick out but doesn't want to be left out of the bunch, or left without a fellow comrade outcast. But just now I got cheery for a couple of seconds about being alone and said to myself, hey, they're all working on something, I'll work on something too, and enjoy it! Because when I work I generally never enjoy it. So I decided I'd work on a DDR file. Looked for graphics, then when the time came to pick one of the images, got tired. Went and did something else. Started doing Japanese, which I'm not afraid of doing and is generally a fast process (it was very much so in Japan, at least... haha)... got tired of that. Looked at an art history book, got tired of the thought of how boring reading books in French about old stuff is (no matter what level of "masterpiece" the said stuff is), stopped that. Thought about reading Nerval, got annoyed at the stricken nature of the class and how I'm way behind in it even though it's not really in session, didn't do that. In short, I got tired really quickly of the individual work in each case and stopped and started wanting to do something fun--with other people.

This might mean that whenever I do work, I overwork myself. In other words, my brain wants to do more work than, uh, my brain can take. So it starts and, uh, shorts. I think maybe there's something to that. My brain might be out of shape. In other words, fully capable, but only in short bursts. Short bursts are generally what's required in this world of soundbytes, though. So it wouldn't be any wonder if that's just how it turned out that way.

But that's why, when I go to museums like the museum of Gustave Moreau, I just don't feel in touch with it at all. By "it," I guess I mean the general spirit. Gustave Moreau was a painter who made a museum out of his house for his close to 500 paintings (I think 500) and even more drawings and sketches as the final project of his life. I definitely was down with Moreau for how he left the majority of what he did unfinished; I can understand that for sure (my DDR box is filled with unconstructed Legos, so to speak). But with the general nonstop focus, determination, and work ethic? No! Why didn't he ever go outside? (Well, I mean, more often.) Where was the fun in his life? The doubt? If there was doubt, why did he just work through it? That's a funny question, actually, but it's probably what the one my subconscious wants to ask. How can you just ignore doubt with things like, am I spending my life all right if I spend this much time doing what I'm doing?

Maybe he just really loved it. And still I wonder how I could become or whether I should ever be that impassioned. And I'm back to an earlier question again, an earlier doubt.

No wonder he worked on. Leave your doubts behind you, pave the way.