A thousand thoughts: on nightmares, college, queer suicide, activism, and too much of me.

Two nights of sleep made up of horrible, violent, terrifying nightmares, and I slept just fine. I was chased and abused and stalked and humiliated and ignored but for whatever reason—Devon posits that I knew I was dreaming, and that's possible; somehow I felt enough distance, enough remove, that even though the dream was happening to me, even thought I was objectively horrified, I could just shrug it off. I slept long and hard, and woke well-rested.

Last night began without dreams but I was up, uncomfortable, restless, and depressed, every hour or three. Eventually I just got up and watched a movie; when I went back to bed I had a dream about going back to school which was so stressful that my heart was pounding when Dev woke me up when he got up. He was able to calm me down a bit, but when I got to sleep again I had another stressful dream about going to a three-day political rally that mirrored a speech and debate event or a con—until I finally stopped attending events, went back to my dorm, and ended up adopting the animals that I found there—a kitten, an adolescent cat, a ferret, a small rodent, and two guinea pigs. Dink was one of them, although his fur was spotted black and white (but I knew it was him) and I woke up miserable and missing him.

Things with the other pigs just haven't been the same since Dink died.

I just don't get it, really—what circumstances and content it is that makes dreams into nightmares for me. Or perhaps I do. I think all of the bad stuff used to get to me, but I've grown inured to some of it by now. Desensitized by repetition. Being stalked and humiliated by an abusive ex-boyfriend? No big deal! It doesn't target my own personal fears and memories and experiences. Objectively, I know it's awful; personally, I have some distance. But man, send me back to school and I turn into a shaking mass of anxiety, because in dreams and out of dreams that is my nightmare. I toss around the idea of finishing my degree one credit at a time at a public school, because the one class I took at PSU actually did me a world of good, it got me out and working but it wasn't stressful—either by being a difficult course, or by immersing me in the college atmosphere—and so, all good things forfend, I was actually able to complete the damn thing. Doing more of that tempts me, under similar circumstances. But college—the people, the culture, the schedules, getting myself on campus, being on campus, doing homework, receiving assignments, trying to complete assignments that require me to work with others and/or come on campus even more, every bit of it adds up, it even seems to multiply, exponential growth that builds a stress greater than I can completely imagine or hope to bear.

And I dream of it, I fear it, all the damn time. I wish that I'd discovered Reed earlier, before Whitman crushed me, I wish I had completed my degree, but I wouldn't be a fulltime student again for my life. I can't.

I have more to say about why I'm thinking about college again, about the death of a Rutgers freshman and how much of all of this anxiety comes from Whitman, not just started there but was born and bred there. But I'm only just starting to realize that I'm not looking objectively at that suicide. I'm taking too personal an angle on it—this happens, I hate it, it's useless. High school for me wasn't fun but it was no big deal, socially, and I still don't understand what made it into living hell for so many people; but college, the social abandonment and ostracization in a society so isolated that when pushed out of it you had nowhere to be, and mine was only a case of that, of rejection rather than ridicule, and I can't even imagine how much worse the latter would be. But I know it happens. I want to warn people that it doesn't get better, like some magical turning point—that depending on person and circumstance it may get quickly, remarkably worse. And what do you do that when they promise you that the day after you leave high school it will all magically improve—and then you get to college and they humiliate you?

And I think those are fair concerns—and then at the same time I know I'm being so negative and hopeless that instead of encouraging a little good I'm denying even that effort. Well done, me. I don't want to think it's hopeless, that there is nothing that can be said or done to make things "get better." Awareness and dialog helps, but wearing purple ain't gonna do a goddamn thing and that breaks my heart because I understand the impulse, I do. But we're looking at a beast that a purple t-shirt can't change: a combination of the social acceptance of bullying and the prevalence of anti-queer sentiment. Just one of those by itself is a monster; together they do horrible things to kids and to promising college students but I can barely even see it, barely even fully understand it, and the size of the problem scares me.

Into nightmares, and inaction.

I do this. I hate it. I hear about someone's rape and it leaves me incapacitated by my fear of rape culture, I hear about a suicide and and it gets me stuck on my own memories and fears of the hell that can be college, and that's selfish and it does no goddamned good. It arises from sympathy and love, it is how I try to understand how I feel about others, but it all comes back to me. How self-indulgent, how privileged, that I can complain about how these big things make me feel so small and curl up into my little ball and hide. I understand the want to wear purple because I can do that, I can wash a purple shirt and put it on, that's easily within my abilities, it's concrete and it's safe. It's also largely useless, and because it is so easy and so satisfying it's all we do do: we make ourselves feel better with a t-shirt, and then go on to ignore that huge and terrifying problem that it's supposed to represent. Awareness matters. Talking about, sharing, realizing, attempting to publicize the existence of these events matters. Symbols for them can matter, too. But that's not all it takes—it just feels like all that we know how to do.

I actually haven't been that depressed, lately. I've been okay. But I interpret this all too personally. I always do. I feel hopeless and I panic and make myself sick with nightmares. It shouldn't be about me. I'm not sure, though, how to wrap my head around the rest.

Book Review: The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan

Title: The Cement Garden
Author: Ian McEwan
Published: New York: Anchor Books, 2003 (1978)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 153
Total Page Count: 92,849
Text Number: 266
Read Because: standing interest in books featuring incest and desert island paradises; purchased from Borders
Review: When their parents die, Jack and his siblings decide to continue on as if nothing has happened. Left to their own devices, the children quickly deviate from the normal social order, adopting odd behaviors and unusual relationships as they attempt to cope with their new lives. The Cement Garden is something of an inversion. Most books of its sort—where children are orphaned and left to create their own society in isolation, and incest is so likely to crop up—are guilty pleasures, and The Cement Garden is that, but it puts emphasis on the guilt. McEwan's characters are unlikable and flawed, his prose sparse and his plot and themes both discomforting, and he creates a remarkably tense and uneasy atmosphere. As a result, his book is gritter and darker than one would expect—but, because of its short length and taboo subject matter, it never loses its addictive qualities. It's almost entirely joyless to read, yet thoughtful and completely compelling. That's an impressive combination, a welcome deviation from expectations, and a work of significant skill.

Yet while I'm impressed with the book's style, I'm conflicted about its content. The Cement Garden is unexpectedly complex and discomforting; dissecting it is likewise. The coping methods and society adopted by the isolated children are provocative, filling the book with everything from emotional regression to crossdressing to incest. Such provocative content begs analysis—why the children behave that way, whether it's healthy or unhealthy, whether it should or shouldn't continue—but, in part because of the narrative voice and the sparsity and brevity that create the book's strong style, the burden of interpretation lies almost entirely on the reader. And while that burden is not unwelcome, it is too heavy: the plot has a strong resolution, but the themes are laid to bare and left too unexplored. In some ways, The Cement Garden punishes itself by exceeding expectations. In doing so it raises the bar, but it can't quite reach the bar's new height. The book is good, surprisingly so, but it begs more, more exploration and resolution, perhaps more length, and by not offering this it is not quite as good as it could be. Still I recommend it—because it is miserable and compelling and intelligent, despite its faults.

Review posted here on Amazon.com.

Book Review: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Dave McKean

Title: The Graveyard Book
Author: Neil Gaiman
Illustrator: Dave McKean
Published: New York: HarperCollin's Publishers, 2008
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 312
Total Page Count: 93,161
Text Number: 267
Read Because: fan of the author, purchased from Borders
Review: When his family is murdered, a nameless infant is adopted by the ghosts of a local graveyard and becomes Nobody Owens, that living boy. But despite the delights of his odd life among the dead, Bod is still threatened by forces beyond the safe boundary of the graveyard. I didn't much like The Graveyard Book when I first read it. I like it more, now. I first read it upon its release—and to say that I didn't like it is something of an overstatement: I found it interesting, and entertaining, but of little lasting value. Perhaps I aimed to compare it too much to Gaiman's wonderful Coraline, the only of his books that I really love. I think that novel is amazing, and The Graveyard Book is not the same. But coming back to it a second time, with more anticipation (because of the advent of autumn) and fewer tendencies to compare it to something else, has made all the difference. The book still isn't perfect: too much of it is episodic, which is enjoyable as storytelling but makes the complete work too easy to box up and dismiss; the ending is both excessively idealized and bittersweet, which is affecting but also a bit silly; the humor throughout is too cutesy—and so, for that matter, is the setting and character design.

Why, then, did I enjoy it so much this time around? Because The Graveyard Book is stylized and overdrawn and cutesy, and as a result it's unique—it's new and intriguing and delightful, and it captures the imagination. Because there's enough darkness, detail, and realism, especially in the themes and the core cast, that the reader immerses despite the stylization, and so the book has a big thematic and emotional payoff—even when those elements are heavy-handed. In many ways The Graveyard Book reminds me of a Tim Burton film: stylized and gothic and gimmicky, but delightful as a result—and containing just enough complexity, some of it slipped in under the safety of silly stylization, to get into your heart and mind and mean something. I returned to The Graveyard Book remembering the gray graveyard and amusing ghosts which are so perfect for early autumn, and I delighted in it for all that and more—but with surprisingly nuanced characters in Silas and Miss Lupescu and above all the unexpectedly dark protagonist Bod, with bittersweet but empowering emotional themes, the book gave me something thoughtful to take away from my stay in the graveyard. It's not perfect, and not Gaiman's best, and perhaps not always the right book for every reader and every reader's mood—but, as something both fun and gothic and meaningful, The Graveyard Book is pretty good. I recommend it.

Review posted here on Amazon.com.

Yes I am horrendously behind on book reviews, how did you guess?