lb crush.

on potentiality (lb´s blog, supervalent thought)

this woman is brilliant. today i woke up at 3 in the afternoon and read her blog entry on potentiality. her writing brings tears to my eyes while inspiring a hope for a better life or reaffirming the practices that have brought me to the happy life i find myself in now. it´s a good mix of emotional responses and the language is....swimmable. i swim in it, sometimes almost drowning, mostly slipping through and feeling it surround my body.

as i was reading some of her most recent blog entries i suddenly remembered something which may seem strange to suddenly remember: i have been miserable for a long time. rephrased: for much of my life i have been miserable. this thought brings a familiar feeling to mind, a very known taste and time of night and lack of breath. the way lb writes about trauma in another entry, "bound by the guarantee of the repetition of her impossibility," i think i know this feeling though i am not claiming trauma.

another aspect which i have developed, partially perhaps affected by being really unhappy for a long time, is the conviction that i don´t really know much about anything. i have begun to offer up common experiences in conversation but not authoritatively...it is rare that i would offer advice where instead i could struggle to clarify, to better understand, and through that conversation maybe to bring some light.

it is a strange, lonely place to find myself in though, to know a little about a lot, nothing about everything. when comes this changeover to adulthood, where people speak authoritatively instead of questioning? where observation is secondary to documentation? i am not sure that i want to become another version of myself, though i have a sense that i am storing up all of my observations and knowledge and conversations for some big BAM....a collage, an art project, a conversation, survival, the moment before my death.

this is the two-facedness of potentiality for me. i see potential everywhere and curse myself for being too lazy or busy or underqualified to bring the potential into being, to enact it. yet my mind discounts or overestimates the sweat and difficulty of the process.

i definitely need to take another class with lb this year....what a phenomenal opportunity. perhaps that is enough to keep me at uchicago.
off to a street fair in kreuzberg...bis später.