Feeling: divided
Listening to: Tori Amos, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
Reading/Watching: Goethe- Faust

We're studying the Romantic period in English, talking about all those wealthy gentlemen who talked about obeying one's passions and getting back to nature and blah, blah blah.

I used to really love those guys. Rousseau, Goethe, Wordsworth. I wished I could meet someone like them, wished I could write as emotionally as them. Now I'm going back and really looking at who they were (soulful rich boys who sat on their butts and wrote about how everyone should be like them), and wondering why I thought they were so special.

Not saying that the opposite is any better (hell, the neo-classics drove them to it), what with the thinky, practical, doddering types who believed passions paved the road to ruin and eternal damnation. But can't there be a medium? I know I personally swing back and forth between the two, being either manically hedonistic or fantastically anal, but both are equally disastrous.

When I lock myself up behind boundaries, try to think my way through everything, be cold and rational (and distinctly un-me), I'm evil and sharp to everyone and can't even stand myself, and I last maybe five minutes.

When I completely lose myself in feelings, do exactly what I want to do when I want to do it without analyzing the subtext or worrying what people will think, I fall fast and hard and usually wind up heartbroken from trusting and hoping too much. Plus my grades go to crap because I'm doing stupid things like skipping class to sleep in and write poetry.

Either extreme is destructive, selfish, ending where I hate myself one way or another.

How could mankind have vacillated between the two for so long? You'd think all those brilliant minds would realize it was somewhere between volcano and iceberg that people could actually live.

Today my teacher told our entire class that he was bipolar, and later in voice practice I managed to sustain a high E-flat-6 (middle C is C-4). Both moments were rather breathtaking. Just thought I'd share.

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