a message from 4 years ago

was flipping through my journal just now (am waiting for laundry's rinse cycle to end) and saw that i'm pretty erratic about writing journal entries. i only write when something terribly interesting (or simply something terrible) had just happened. and so my journal makes my days seem more anguished than they actually were. funny how we never really put in stuff like: "brushed my teeth and flossed very carefully after having a huge albap lunch with my two professors" when in fact such mundane events are really the stuff of our lives.

and so i saw that i'd jotted down an SMS sent by a good friend on 31 may 2002, right after a breakup with a certain poststructuralist i had hooked up with. it's a quote from louise gluck and it was exactly the thing i needed at the time.

"we are all human. we protect ourselves as well as we can even to the point of denying clarity, the point of self-deception. and yet within this deception true happiness occured. so that i believe i would repeat these errors exactly. nor does it seem to me crucial to know whether or not such happiness is built on illusion: it has its own reality. and, in either case, it will end."