navel gazing...

at the moment my relationship with chocolate (cake, ice cream, whatever) is like an alcoholic's with alcohol... don't. even. touch. it. i just don't have enough self-discipline to be, well, disciplined about it. as in, eat only one small piece at a time. impossible. it's either nothing at all, or way too much. so i'm eating lots of fruit in the probably vein hope to get still a little closer to the 60 kilo mark before the christmas season will undo all the work anyway. it's such a bother though. on the one hand i know i should be doing this for myself, my body, my self confidence, yadda yadda, and partly i do feel good, grey trousers fit again, but it always has an element of self punishment to me, it's a fight against my body. it's tiring. but strangely enough in some perversely satisfying way it's that, if anything, what keeps me going...


ai* mails from turkey - she's been working for a tv station and is now working for a company trying to market turkish movies in europe or something. ch* mailed a couple of days ago, teaching classes in california, says she's quite happy. they want to know how i am, what i'm doing. sometimes those polite questions are the most difficult to answer, especially with people who know me a bit. what am i supposed to say? no change, no progress, same idiot job, same lack of social life. sometimes i feel like i might be getting a grip on my life, ever so slowly, but other days it feels more like i'm just kidding myself to make resignation a little less bitter. not worth mentioning, either. sad, embarrassed and so ashamed of myself all at once.

i'm not pointing any fingers at the unfairness of life, because i know perfectly well it's no one's fault except my own, but it makes me feel so worthless.


out with g* yesterday. ours has been a weird on and off sort of friendship, but recently i've been feeling rather good about it. he's annoyed me, i've probably hurt him a lot, but in between i believe i've actually learned something, relationship wise. i used to believe i was sufficiently aware of the fact that life is never ideal, but maybe i also used to tacitly assume my own life might be an exception at least in some respects. i'm still too dependent on harmony, to desperate to be liked.
i've been very open with a few people i considered friends and also in the anonymous setting of my journal, but with him it's something very different. there is no easy harmony taken for granted, and, on my side, for the longest time not enough emotions to give a fight a 'safety net', so to speak. to be perfectly honest, if it weren't for him trying to get in touch again and again, we'd probably have stopped talking altogether at one point. i'm grateful he didn't just let go, because it taught me much about myself. at first when we fought i used to withdraw, because i'm not used to arguing on this level. tact isn't a concept he's really familiar with - something one has to get used to. suddenly i found that i needn't run or close up, but could be honest and openly talk about my feelings, what motivates me, with someone whom i didn't like or trust a hundred percent, and it didn't make me weaker - rather it made me stronger. i've learned the lesson about my tendency to avoid conflicts by running away and hopefully won't repeat it any time soon. we've been through a lot of bad shit, withdrawing and sulking on both sides, throwing pretty personal things at each other, but recently i feel that we've now really sounded our personal depths and could move beyond this and maybe arrive at some kind of real friendship. it's a strange feeling for me, because i used to define friendships differently, to me they implied something that worked much smoother, much more naturally. what we have now is something we've both worked for, he probably more than i, if i am to be perfectly honest.

it's probably a testimony to my utter lack of social skills that it took me so long to figure out such basic things about human interaction...


this is just procrastinating. working on what is going to be a lengthy entry on Thomas Mann's 'Dr Faustus', but i'm just too tired for that level of intellectualism right now...