The Socially Anxious Nymphomaniac Goes On A Date

Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I, Valerie Bane, went on a date last night. Finally breaking my months-long streak of flirting with guys via text message, then dropping off the face of the Earth as soon as they actually ask me out.

Anyway, THIS date was an act precipitated partly by boredom, partly by desperation, partly by an incredibly stern talking-to I got via email, wherein I attempted to define myself as “idealistically picky” and she countered with “naively delusional."

Some of the things she said did strike me as being uncomfortably near the truth. I can’t spend my life lying around in my room imagining that Zeus will magically descend to me through my tower window in a thrilling golden shower. I can’t spoil myself for REAL boys, who breathe and smell and sweat, by continuously picturing chiseled gods of sex and darkness who always know what to do in bed because they can literally read my mind. I can’t keep taking these extended leave of absences from reality. So I said yes to someone who, on the minus side, I am not massively attracted to…but who, on the plus side, is a living, breathing human male.

I’ll give it to Real Boy: he tried so hard to do all the right things. In fact, he seemed to think it was necessary to check with me before doing ANYTHING. When I asked him where we were going, he said, “Where do you feel like going?” When we finished dinner, he said, “What would you like to do now?” When he walked me to my door, he said, “Would it be okay if I kissed you?”

Gentlemen, a note: If you want to sweep a girl off her feet, DO NOT PUT THE BURDEN OF EVERY SINGLE DECISION ON HER SHOULDERS! Especially not on the first date! I don’t want to be treated with kid gloves when I’m languishing for you to pin me to the nearest wall and ravish me properly!

I digress. Real Boy was a decent kisser, and by decent, I mean it didn’t hurt. I realized I’d forgotten just how much the other person’s nose can get in the way, and I remembered how much the smell of cologne irks me (seriously, boys, just don’t). I extricated myself from him as gently as possible when he started groping towards second base, and closed my door in his nice face. Then I went to my room and had an incredible orgasm as I pictured getting kidnapped by a fallen angel who traded his soul to Lucifer because of his insatiable lust for a human girl named Valerie Bane…

Fantasy: one, Reality: zero. It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, real world. If you need me, I’ll be in my head.

The Beast Awakens

Yesterday I got very run down. I slept as though some strange fever had taken me. I had vivid hallucinogenic dreams. It was a typical of the mental and physical "breakdown" that hits me from time to time. When I awoke this morning, all the voices in my head had vanished like specters in daylight. But I can feel them still creeping around in my psyche, waiting to catch me and scold me for weakness.

*cough*  I'm sorry.  Did I just say that out loud?

So, according to Max, the Crooked House Project is rebooting. For any of my readers (do I still have readers?) who don't remember what the project is, Her Crooked House was an idea for a summer project. Me and five others (some of whom I met and some of whom I've only met online) were going to pool our resources in order to buy a particular house way out in the middle of nowhere. We were going to repaint and remodel this house. We were also going to blog about our experiences living together in that house.

The problem was that we never bought the house.

However the circle of blogs we made to support the project still exist. Yesterday the self-appointed leader of the project, who writes a kind of hipster filmmaker-y blog, stirred the pot and challenged us all to engage creatively even though technically speaking a crooked house project without a crooked house is a bit, I don't know, metaphysical.  He wrote: Who's With Me.

I'm very curious to see if any of the others are on board.

Cocktail Snobs and Ivy League Strippers

When I went to [my friend's] mixer, I felt a strong sense of the uneasiness I have always felt around Ivy League upper class. I suddenly felt as though I didn't speak as well, wasn't sharp enough, refined enough, and that I was somehow an poser/fraud who sneaked in the side door.

I find myself gravitating towards the less beautiful and the less rich, those with less status, at such events - anybody else who might also have the sneaky suspicion that they don't belong and are only politely tolerated.

Part of me wants to say that I don't belong with a bunch of phony snobs, but another part of me wonders if perhaps I secretly want to be accepted by them. My own insecurity is followed by a backlash of sneering. Sour Grapes.

The person I spent the longest time talking to was a woman who went to Yale but spent a year as a stripper. I think she has experienced some of the same ambivalence about elitism that I have. I'm not sure I agree with the whole "stripping as feminist empowerment thing" but at least she was friendly and didn't look down on anyone.

Not even my friends read this blog anymore. What am I writing it for?

Living in My Head

Twice in the last two days I have found myself driving in a mental state of complete disorientation. I nearly drove into traffic down a one way street in Santa Monica after a meditation class. Then, I made a bad U-turn into on coming traffic and nearly biffed. What a space cadet. Gotta watch what I'm doing.

I have a hard time "waking up" and "becoming mindful" and not "living in my head." The world is often a disappointing boring, uncomfortable place. Conversely, the dreamworld that I spend so much of my time living in is often safe and exiting . . . at least momentarily. For me, giving up "attachments" means giving up attachments to mental phenomenon, sexual and romantic fantasies, and other projections that dominate my thoughts like a heroin addiction.

I'm 22 and a virgin. My aunt told me I needed to go to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous because she read that some girls can get addicted to 50 Shades-style romance fiction at the expense of forming real relationships. Thank for the tip, Auntie May.

I am disappointed with the people around me. I feel in constant danger of my life becoming overrun by ordinary, dull, petty concerns. I was weak and unfocused as a teen and a college student. I wasted the time I had. Now I feel like the buzzer has gone off and I'm working on borrowed time. Isn't it time I grew up? My god I'm depressed.

Is it any wonder I like to linger in the bathtub, lost in day dreams and hallucinations? You would too if you were me.

The Serpent Appears

I feel myself shedding my skin. What sticky-slimy serpent is now peeking out of the folds. Yet, I feel pieces of my old self clinging to me like giant wrinkled sheets of old skin, waiting to fall off. 

Automaton

This cold is ruining my concentration. It's hard to get anything concrete done. It makes me irritable, unfocused, and sleepy. I didn't get much writing done yesterday or the day before. It's frustrating that something as simple as a sore throat can trip me up this way.

Yesterday afternoon, while I was doing yoga, the doorbell rang. Standing at the door was about a nineteen year old black man. He took one look at my expression and said,"Hey, I'm not the bad guy, I'm the good guy." I blushed three shades of purple.

The truth was that I did flash on the face of the thug who robbed me at gunpoint a couple of months ago. I felt like I'd been caught in an ugly, irredeemable thought. As a result, I felt guilty, and as a result of that result, I flirted with him and bought two magazine subscriptions so the guy could build points for a scholarship. I desperately wanted him to like me and to see that I wasn't some horrible, racist white girl.

     
The fear is that I have become, not the unique individual I had hoped to become in my youth, but rather just another generic automaton  with characteristics determined by my race, class, gender, and the psychology of my parents. I observe myself having such programmed reactions and then overcompensating. It's so disappointing.  Even my own disappointment is a adolescent cliche. 

Erotica

Check out my return to writing erotica HERE.

Late Bloomer

  A bad cold, headaches, and mild depression have crept over me, washing away yesterday in restless sleep. I read about the great poets when they were my age and I feel like I am  years behind them. Meaning, they had all accomplished as much at 15 as I have at 23. I know I had about five wasted years since I started college.

  One of the hurdles that I have to get over this year, is my fear and disappointment about arriving at adulthood, not an artist, not a millionaire, not a decadent burnout, not an accomplished poet or painter, all these things I dabbled at "being" (tried to be or wished I was) without much success, rather I arrived as a directionless, unemployed, blogger. 

  I walked back onto campus yesterday. It's interesting that I think I took exactly the same walk five years ago. I remember watching myself, as I bounded onto campus, 18 and starting school all over again. It felt like a Renaissance, a second chance, a burst of unbounded energy. Then, yesterday, I was 23; school was finished, and I was just tying up some loose ends. I felt melancholy but wiser in some sappy sort of way.

  I got all the important things that I needed out of college, I guess. But no matter how hard I worked, I could only get about 50% out of myself. I worked like a madwoman trying to do everything at once. But two things I didn't do . . . I didn't prioritize well and I didn't take care of myself emotionally and  spiritually. By the last semester, I was burned out. I jogged through the finish line... way behind, and exhausted.

  A part of me desperately wishes I knew (at 18) what it has taken me so long to learn: The habits, routines, and little choices one makes in life. I always told myself that I was good at the big things and bad at the little. I pretended to be the savant, but the truth was that my concentration was scattered over disparate discontinuous points of focus. My "backbone" was weak. Art requires a combination of recklessness and precision. Most of the time, I was just lazy.

  If I look back at the journals I wrote five years ago, it is clear that there were many other problems I had to deal with before even getting to the point I'm at now. 

     My hope is that for whatever reason, my timetable is different. Maybe something inside me is still growing... an unrealized potential, gestating, waiting for an opportunity to be born.

Creative Trance

I know my writing is going well when I notice that I have been in a creative trance. The sounds and images have been playing themselves out in my head, like a waking dream or hallucination. Not once, when I was hammering out a draft of my novel did I descend into this creative trance. It only happens with poems.

I'm hoping that through quiet meditation and creative delirium  I can get ready for what is to come. I shouldn't spend too much time in my room, however. I don't want to turn out like Catherine Deneurve in"Repulsion." 

Walls

I'm noticing this morning the beginnings of that dreaded feeling of malaise and indirection. It's important for me to focus myself on specific creative tasks. Otherwise, I can fall back into my most wretched and pathetically ordinary habits - mostly involving food, vodka and the internet. If there is one thing I feel that I must do this year, it's change my basic routine. I worked yesterday. I made tiny bits of progress on a number of poems. No breakthroughs.

On days like that it feels like I am tapping a stone wall with a hammer. Not pounding fiercely, just tapping. As I do this, little strategic fishers begin to appear. I tap and tap, day after day. Then finally, after the wall has been covered with a spider's web of hairline fractures, I apply one firm blow, and the wall comes tumbling down. Only, of course, to reveal another wall. I start tapping anew.

Hope.

A New Life

I am about to embark on a new life, A new chapter. A new movement. For the last year I have been kicking and screaming, like a child in a tantrum, not wanting to go forward. Hopefully this blog will help me in my work. I think my only chance of continuing to develop artistically is to better my physical health, sexual health, and of course, my biggest hurdle, psychological health.

My one great failure has been lack of balance and discipline. Can I write every day? Can I practice yoga every day? Can I really be a poet and prosper financially? Can I temper my intake of alcohol and other drugs? I have faced these challenges before and failed over and over again. Laziness, despair, and self hatred have always tripped me up.

And yet I have always been able, despite it all to go on. But in order to do more, I have to find balance in my life. To become a goddess, a mentor once told me, a woman must overcome herself...she must bend her emotions and escape her to overcome "habit." My habits are my tyrant and the tyrant must be overthrown.

I knew this a year ago, but I didn't act on this knowledge; I've had this information for a long time. I think I knew it when I was fifteen. I must be temperate and controlled in my life so that I can be intemperate and extraordinary in my art. My art is banal because my mind and body are distracted by ordinary excess (drugs, alcohol, internet.)   My biggest fear is one of identity. Too much of my identity is locked up in these petty habits. I am nothing more than what I do every day.

So every day, I will now write a blog.