lana insinuated that i write differently, or have been writing differently, this past month. she didn't give specifics. i wonder whether, now that my audience has slimmed down, i'll abandon whatever new tactics i've put on. there are still strangers, people w/ whom i'll never have a conversation, reading what i write here. does it matter that it'll be closer to ten than a hundred per day? i wonder.
anyway, all writing is for an audience, even if you keep it theoretically chaste and tucked away in a real-space notebook. behind every diarist is the anne-frank-sylvia-plath-virginia-woolf-inspired knowledge that if you die before you're 40, there's always the possibility that someone out there wants to hear your voice, cut off as it was so cruely and so prematurely before your song was done. essentially writers are performers, performers egotists, and there you go. but what's the point in feeling bad about it? by that score, most of the world is indicted. certainly most of the worthwhile folks.

i really don't like to think of myself as an egotist. but it's more or less inevitable, isn't it? if you write -- or, more accurately, if you make an effort to publish -- you're assuming you have something interesting to say; you assume you're worth the paper you're printed on. you're saying, I think I'm good; probably even Better; possibly Best. what craziness.
last nite becca ross and i stayed up obscenely late corrolating appearances to personalities. could there be some connection b/w metabolisms and characters? ross has a thesis about a certain type of girl who invaribly looks a certain way. becca argues. we pore over the cygnet, debating, finding only one exception to ross's rule. it's 2:35 a.m., we shouldn't be up wasting time like this -- which is one of the reasons why, roughly six hours later, ross and i wake w/ a start and rush to class, trudging thru underbrush and heavy moist air. i feel like i'm in jurassic park b/c of the backpack and the general surreal spongy feeling of the day.
history is good, tho (if only i could manage to stop yawning), as is lunch w/ mariah later. she complains about a girl who talks too much in her class and i know exactly immediately who she must mean; the same girl is in my history class, only i'm more sympathetic to her; i concoct stories of a childhood that shaped her in a particular way; mariah remains skeptical. we encounter ben in sharples, equipped w/ headphones (wsrn started broadcasting today) and backpack; we all sit together and after listening to mariah and i chat for a while, he observes that women talk more about People (which he finds petty) and men more about Things (which we do.) both talk about Ideas. we discuss this thought intelligently for a while, then the danger/usefulness of Generalizations as a whole.

later, film class: i arrive half an hour early by mistake but luckily Ayja (sp?) does too and we talk til beloved prof Sunka arrives. once back at barn, scribble some reflections. ben appears. i smile at him. "guess what i'm writing about," i say. "me?" he asks. "no," i say. "People."