Recent reading:

– Finished A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson. I hadn’t known much about the history of my own people, so I decided to read this. It covers approximately 4,000 years of Jewish history. I’d taken it out of the library, and it was hardcover, so it weighed down my messenger bag a lot.

– Currently reading The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson, the third chapter of his Baroque Cycle trilogy. I read the first 80 pages about six months ago and had been meaning to get back to it. I’m glad I have. Fun fun fun. But this one weighs a lot, too.

Recent doings:

– Friday night: Matt and I saw Jere in his production of My Favorite Year. I saw this on Broadway 12 years ago. It’s a flawed but fun show. Jere was great to watch in a bunch of different roles.

– Saturday night: We went to a small birthday party for Matt Jacobs at his place in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Matt’s a very nice guy, and there was lots of ice cream.

– Sunday: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, as mentioned earlier.

– Monday night: Trivia. Our team, Hello Kitty Genovese, came in fifth place (out of 14 teams), which is far from our best showing. We recently won twice in a row. Still, trivia’s always fun, and it’s a good opportunity for us to see Mike (and sometimes Matt P.).

– Last night: Chorus rehearsal. Our concert, much of which is in German or Italian, has to be memorized. Yikes. We’ve got two months to go; I guess we can do it. Also, I got to display my newly-clean-shaven face to everyone. (I shaved off the goatee last week.)

– Tonight: Sweet Charity, starring Christina Applegate. I’m not particularly looking forward to this, but hey, it’s theater.

It’s odd that despite all these happenings, I’m feeling restless lately. I might need sex, or a vacation, or exercise, or some quiet time by myself. I don’t know. I’m just… out of whack.

So I have this friend, my best, oldest friend in the world, who’s currently living at the South Pole. He’s doing construction work there. It’s his third time in Antarctica. We were born a month apart, and when we met at age three, it turned out that our Hebrew names were the reverse of each other. Sometimes I consider him my alter ego, because we have very opposite personalities. He’s outgoing and adventurous, and he doesn’t seem to worry about the future or about having his life “mean” something, like I do. Rather than worrying about the significance of everything, he just lives life and seems to enjoy it. I wish I could be more like him.

I was talking about him with my therapist last week, about how envious I am of his ability to not dwell on that stuff like I do. I tend to live a lot from fear — not overtly, but deep down. She asked me what I would be like if I were more like him. One thing I said is that I would stop worrying about dying. I’ve told her that I sometimes wish I believed in an afterlife, because I’d worry less about death. She responded that there are lots of people who don’t believe in an afterlife and yet don’t worry about dying. They realize that all you have is what you have here on earth.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to live like that. Me, I worry about making the wrong choices and majorly fucking up my life beyond repair.

I am totally not living up to the ambitions I once set for myself. Or that were set for me. Kindergarten, in retrospect, screwed me up. I know this sounds ridiculous, to have been screwed up by kindergarten, but there you have it. I was the king of my kindergarten class. I was the smartest kid in it. My teacher and her aides adored me and gave me special attention. Remember how Mr. Rogers used to put on an opera in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe every so often? Like Bubble-Land and stuff like that? Well, I had seen one of those, and I told my teacher about it, and I decided that I wanted to write songs. So at one point they let me work with some of the students and help them write songs. I was allowed to sit just outside the classroom door with a student and some sheets of paper and help them write songs. It didn’t go anywhere, though. Nobody could think of any lyrics, including me.

Then there was the time that I got to take over for a week the part of the classroom that had these big wooden blocks. I was allowed to make a fort out of them, and during the rest period I was allowed to nap in the fort with some other kids. It started a trend, and the next week some of the kids got to use the blocks and turn them into a restaurant, and our class had the parents come in and we served them hamburgers.

Kindergarten really fucked me up. I was only five/six years old, and for an entire year I got treated like royalty. It had actually started the year before in pre-K, when I had been allowed to read a book to the class. (It was a Golden Book – I can’t remember which one – but I remember that I kept trying to show the pictures only to the boy I had a crush on until the other kids started to complain.) A year is a long time when you’re five or six; it’s nearly a fifth of your life thus far; and I guessed this was what life was supposed to be like for me. I never really knew what normal was.

But then there was the other side of kindergarten. It was June, around Father’s Day, and we sat in a circle on the floor. Each of us had an opportunity to say what our favorite thing was that we liked to do with our dad. When it came to my turn, I was shy and reluctant to give my answer, “I like to go to stores with my dad.” Why was I reluctant? Because someone had already said that one. I thought that we weren’t allowed to repeat answers, and when I said so, I was told that of course we could. Silly, huh? I was confining myself by rules that were totally needless.

First grade was where things started to go downhill. That was the year I realized I was not so unique. That year I met three other smart kids. There were four of us, three boys and a girl. From then on, I had competition — I was no longer special.

So anyway, I was raised to think I was better than everyone else, or at least was supposed to be. I felt burdened with a greater responsibility than other people to Be Something (and sometimes I was explicitly told this – “I would hate to see you throw away your talents!”). In some sense, ever since first grade I’ve been wondering what went wrong.

I wonder what I’d be like if I’d grown up thinking I was a normal kid, an average kid – if less pressure had been put on me, if I’d expected less of life.

At any rate, none of this is explaining my blahs. But I’ve spent so much time writing it, I may as well post it.