Englewood Cliffs, NJ

There are two places I go to be alone with my thoughts. It depends on whether I want my mind on the inside or the outside. If I want my mind inside, I go to a mall. Disgusting institutions, so oppressive that I shut myself up in my own little head. The commercialism, greed, wealth, products, the desire and wanting. If I want my mind outside, I go to the cemetery. Then my mind can be free to stretch out as far as it wants and nothing bothers me in the cemetery. It’s peaceful and I’m surrounded by tombstones and human remains. My world stops in the cemetery. Today I went to the mall.

I went to a small, informal high school reunion this evening. I don’t know why I went, maybe to be more mature and pro-active about how I treat my past and facing it. It was awful and annoying and I’ll never look back at high school again.

I haven’t mentioned my gerbils at all. Weekend and Wreathe. In the waning days of August, Hershey was dying. I thought Hershey may have been dying of loneliness since Sesame had died recently. I didn’t want her to die alone, so I sent Myung Soo out to the pet store to get a companion, even if it would only last for a short while. The car wasn’t out of earshot when Hershey went into her death throes. It was heart-wrenching and she died in the palm of my hand.

When Myung Soo got back, I had to decide what to do with the new gerbil, whether to keep it or not. We decided it was fate and that I was meant to have these gerbils so I kept it and named him Wreathe and sent Myung Soo out again to get another one for companionship. Thus, Weekend.

Weekend and Wreathe mated a couple days before Sakuko and I broke up and they had babies on the morning of my Japanese exam, December 17. They had a lot of babies that I don’t know what to do with. Since then Weekend has developed some condition which makes her itch and she has scratched off a lot of her hair. She has these hideous bald spots, but she’s as chipper and active as ever. I can’t figure it out. She’s paranoid now, though. She used to climb onto my hand when I put it in the aquarium, but now she runs away. Wreathe is fine through all this and the babies also seem to have some sort of rash, but none of them got eaten as far as I can tell. That was gross.


Cute Sakuko with cute Sesame in Providence over the Summer.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

I found a bunch of high school writings while I was looking for stuff to throw away. Mostly Senior year English class stuff. My writing was so different just four years ago, carefree and really pretentious. Of course I know my influences and who I was trying to be. Shameless. I could tell how troubled I was then, and I already had my critical view towards the world lined up. My memories and observations were very different back then.

What would I do over again if I could go back to high school? That assumes that there is a truth I know now that I would live out if I could go back and do things again. But there is no “truth”, nothing is constant and what I know and feel now may not be the same later. I know I felt a certain way back then, a way that was very real, and to say I’d go back and do things different would be saying it wasn’t real, it would negate the fabric of the reality of that time. My feelings created my reality. If there is anything I’d like to redo, it would be my future. My future could be a lot better. And since it hasn’t happened yet, there is more potential to change. As for the past, I wish it hadn’t existed at all.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

I’ve been running the gamut of feelings towards Sakuko, even touching on rage and betrayal. It’s very confusing and hard to deal with. Oddly enough, at the same time I’m having very forgiving feelings towards family, perhaps Audrey's influence on me. We may not get along or even like each other, but I don’t sense any malice or double-dealing in this family. Not that I know this family.

My thoughts drift back to this past summer. A very hot July 4. The streets around Providence lined with cars. We had a barbecue that day with a bunch of Bob’s friends. The sun went down, they all went over to some park to watch the fireworks and I stayed at the apartment to read and watch some TV.

What a weird summer, I stayed with Bob and Tom, with family. I’m not particularly close to them. We’re familiar and I respect them and extend courtesies, but we’re not warm.

Why do they live together? Do they need each other in some way? Do they get support from each other from other family scars, or is it just practical to live together? If they did, it would be passively, no doubt. They are closer to each other than they are with me, meaning they are close enough to yell at each other. When Bob yelled at Tom, that took me totally by surprise. I couldn’t imagine either of them yelling at me that way. I wouldn’t give a shit if they did, maybe they know that.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

This house again, the same old feelings. Stagnation. I can’t do anything here. I can’t think right. Life doesn’t exist in this house; it’s a shelter, a womb. Life stops, no responsibilities in this house and money takes care of everything. I don’t have to do anything, I can sit on my ass all day long if I wanted. This is what it has been for seven important years of my life. Whenever I wanted to run away, all I had to do was come here.

Two more weeks of this. I hope Lisa comes and visits for a few days at the end if she’s driving back to Oberlin with Wendell and me. I have to make arrangements to have Haruna stay also. There’s going to be a party at Wendell’s house, but I’m not sure I want to go, there’s a lot of people I’d rather avoid. I’m too annoyed at people.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

I’m in the midst of attempting to de-personalize my room. I don’t feel any attachment to the years I’ve inhabited this room. Those years are so far away and belong to someone else. A lot of baggage, but none it is mine, none of it has anything to do with me. So I purge, throwing away anything posing as a part of me.

I noticed that when I left for college, no one did anything to make the room at least presentable. Is that a way of identifying the room as mine? It’s not, it should be a guest room, and when I return from college, perhaps the room is reserved for me, but as a guest.

It’s been a brutal semester. I just finished one of my Junior semesters, I’m not sure which one. A lot happened, but not a lot of substance to it. There weren’t any “main characters” who had major impacts on my life. Nothing positive happened.

I broke up with Sakuko on the day after Thanksgiving. It was a painful break up and now I’m doing everything just to get her out of my life for good. It’s permanent, no chance of getting back together. We thought it was something so special, so permanent, that it would last. We wrote to each other almost every day in the beginning.

She knit me a sweater that had come to symbolize something permanent, it was commitment and dedication. It was her heart that she put into that sweater. It’s those reminders that are so painful.

Nothing's permanent. Isn’t that the most obvious thing? I never went into a relationship with that attitude. Maybe I should and see what happens. Go into the relationship with the full expectation that it will only last for a few months or a year. No expectations of permanence.

I had been drifting from Sakuko for a while. It got exacerbated, I think, over fall break when I met up with my cousin Audrey. She came to the U.S. this summer for college and it was really weird, there was an immediate closeness. I know Sakuko noticed something about our closeness. For me, it emphasized the lack of closeness between us.

Audrey and I have met before, once when I was eleven and she was seven, and that was not a good scene at all. If anything, we should have been lifetime enemies. We met again when I was fourteen and she was ten and that time was much better. She forgave a lot. Now it looks like we’re really going to be friends.

The things that Sakuko said, I can’t believe she said those things. She was drunk and the deterioration of our relationship was very stressful, but the things she said really emphasized what little communication and understanding there is between us.

I feel like such a failure.

82 S. Park St, Oberlin OH

But we didn’t break up over the Summer. We kept at it for whatever reason; fear of being alone, fear of losing something that we thought was so good, sex, not wanting to make all our efforts and sacrifices go in vain. Now it seems clear that all we’ve done since the Summer is postpone a break-up. We were resisting something that was definitely going down.

It’s the same pattern. It’s my fault, I know. I pull someone in as hard and as close as possible, but when it gets too close and expectations change, I bail. There’s nothing wrong with Sakuko. The faults I find are perfectly human, I make them into something huge and unacceptable. I don’t know why.

What am I learning from all this? Why am I so stupid? Couldn’t I have foreseen this? Why do I do what I do? We didn’t really connect, even in the beginning. It was just attraction, nothing special, a decision perhaps more of the mind than the heart. I never sensed that she was interested in my life or aware of my situations. Her attention was so much on superficial things, not substantive things.

I don’t want my life just to be ordinary, conforming to social molds. I don’t want to be in a relationship just to be in one. I don’t want to live life just to live it, I want to get something out of it, it has to have meaning and connection. I want to explore and enrich my life and that includes the people I’m close to.

What a myth! I’m my own myth. I grew up thinking that I’m special. My parents’ neglect didn’t bring me down in my eyes, it lifted me up. I’m a survivor. I compensated for my parents’ treatment and built my own pride and survived by maintaining a high self-esteem.

But I’m so ordinary, I can’t do anything well, I can’t make anything work. I’m nothing, a loser by my own assessment. The irony is that to survive, I perpetuated an illusion. To survive I needed something I can’t live with. I have to deconstruct myself.

It’s done. It couldn’t have been more painful. I have no idea where my life is going. I’m lost, comfortably numb, crazy. I think I want to be alone. Just for several years.



That’s it, the end, goodbye Sakuko.

Providence, RI

For some reason I’ve always thought that people only lost me. I’ve always thought that I don’t lose people and that I never got so attached to people that I could “lose” them. I’ve always thought that I’ve been invulnerable to that and that I could just let them go. I’ve always been grateful for that insensitivity. But that’s exactly what it’s turning out to be - an insensitivity, a numbness, a deadness.

I have lost a lot of people, people that I didn’t want to lose, people that I chased away. I keep building a life around people who get close to me. I make it feel so permanent and plan the future and then I go and topple and destroy it.

Sakuko and I are breaking up. It was really weird, too. We just sat down and decided to separate. I don’t want to but I don’t want to turn back now. I have a pain, a growing loneliness inside me. A severe self-destructive hate. I’ve betrayed all that I’m supposed to be true to. I’ve breached my own truths and living a great delusion. I’m slipping again, maybe I didn’t get so much better last Summer. Or it was just another illusion.

Providence, RI

I grew up alone, even though parents are both alive and together and never even encountered a marriage threatening situation. I have two older brothers, neither of whom were particularly rebellious and I shared a room with one of them most of my life. Growing up alone made me crave attention or at least the company of others. But with the likes of them, I turned out really choosy of the people I let get close to me.

So I’ve always had the dilemma of wanting people around and at the same time I’ve been fiercely protective of my personal space. I feel crowded when someone gets close and then I go running back to being alone. And while I’m alone, I always imagine someone else there and I want to be sharing things with someone else.

But I hate people getting too close without getting to know me. And I don’t think Sakuko knows me, even after all this time.

Providence, RI

Isn’t life about survival and finding ways to survive? I don’t have to do anything to survive, everything is just handed to me in my glorious privilege. There are plenty of people who would love to be in my position and they would probably be making better use of the privilege. Not me, no. All it has done is stifle me and has been instrumental in keeping me from not starting my life. I haven’t done anything, I have no ambition, everything is just handed to me.

I haven’t starved enough to get anywhere with music. I can literally afford to be self-conscious and inhibited. My inspiration is totally self-destructive instead of creative. Music isn’t about survival, and that’s why it’s so hard, that’s why I hate what I come up with. It feels good to write something, but inevitably I realize that what I wrote was crap.

Providence, RI

Sakuko is my girlfriend, but she doesn’t feel like she’s a focus in my life. There’s a problem in that. I think I missed again.

A year ago, I think I would have killed myself for an answer. Six months ago I think I would have entered a monastery to search for an answer. I probably would have entered one to not search for an answer. Now I don’t even have the drive to find an answer. I’m alive and here because of Sakuko, but I’m only here.

I don’t know if Sakuko and I are moving apart, it feels like we are, but it also feels like we aren’t. I’m numb again, putting it down and not taking it too seriously. And I can tell that she doesn’t like how things are changing. There’s a growing tension between us.

Rob and Lizzie left for a vacation today. They are driving down South, something I totally don’t comprehend.

Providence, RI

I’m in Providence now. I came up on June 7, and have been here since. I went down to New Jersey once for a dentist appointment and to take Sesame to a vet. Sesame died on July 5th. The sweetest gerbil in the world, I’ll never forget her. Even though I thought she was a he (hint: boy gerbils can't have baby gerbils).



I’m taking a Women’s Studies course at Brown which has been harrowing with constant readings and weekly essays. A good course; very enlightening. An introductory Women’s Studies course should be requisite for any liberal arts degree. It has me thinking about other forms of injustice - oppression, sexism, racism, exploitation, objectification, imperialism, misogyny - basically, the history of the world.

Why don’t I have ambitious goals and admirable ideas? Instead, I question the material trappings of causes and I don’t have any goals.

I’m an introvert. I have been all my life. I’ve always been self-conscious of how I appear and have always seen my situations from a slight distance, slightly removed from myself. I don’t react spontaneously, everything is at least slightly premeditated, no bubbling emotions pouring over. No animal instinct, no blind passion.

At the same time, I don’t have much of a view of myself. I have no conception of how I look in my surroundings and around other people. It’s like I don’t exist to myself. I can’t place what I see in the mirror within the physical scenery I see around me.

Always right behind my eyes is the question of the meaning of life. Yes, really. Just sitting around, looking at my legs and feeling them, I feel the control, I feel that they are part of me. I see the muscles moving to move my toes and I have complete control and that’s . . . fascinating. I’m doing that, those muscles are mine.

What is the process manifested in that movement? What happens between thought and movement and how? I’m not talking about the medical or mechanical explanation. How is the will transmitted and then manifested in movement and is there any meaning in it? I see the movement, but I have no idea what is the nature of the cause of the will of that movement, the truth behind it.

I’m looking for the significance of living in this form with this history and reality. I think it’s fairly clear that this is not reality as far as understanding absolutes go. Then why am I caught so much in this material world? But how can I have goals, ambitions, and plans in a world whose meaning I question, whose reality I question?

I know this isn’t real, but I don’t have anything with which to replace this concept of reality. How can I want to do something in this life without having solved, resolved, or come to grips with the problem of why am I here? How can I do anything for other people if I can’t even liberate myself? Is my status as a human deserved? Is my need to ponder the problem of meaning earned?

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

This house is poison.
It sucks away my morale like a black hole. Naturally, my sleeping hours have shifted so that my waking hours are when everyone else is asleep. That helps a little, but what a way to run a railroad. I’m wasting so much time.

But what a view of the western horizon my room has. I never speculated what it would mean to be out there beyond the edge of it. That’s where I go when I drive off to school.

I woke up late, took a long time to get out of bed, decided to go running to the George Washington Bridge since it was a cool day. Took my time, had a horrible run, came home and drove out to a mall for no reason, got frustrated, came back, ate, went to sleep, woke up, watched TV, ate more, read, ugh it just goes on, doesn’t it. And all the while a great big fat doubt grows and looms.

Heaven/Nirvana: Objectivity and truth.
What is it that people keep describing as heaven? They make entering heaven a happy thing, it’s always painted in terms of human aesthetics. A regal type of place with lots of gold and scented with perfumes with beautiful things and beautiful beings. Or it’s a clean, peaceful sort of place all in white with angels with peaceful comforting countenances playing harps. Always white people.

It’s a nice thing to dream about to assuage human fears of what is actually the end of the line, but is it truth? And if it isn’t truth, how can it be the end of the line? And if it is the end of the line and it is the truth, then why care? Is happiness and bliss truth, or is truth cold and objective with nothing to do with sorrow or happiness?

Or is entering nirvana simply an objective realization of truth? Not as nice a picture, but a little more easy to swallow, not tainted by someone’s bias of what heaven is. Or maybe heaven is exactly what is imagined right at the time it’s time to enter.

An old acquaintance from high school came by this evening. It was quite a surprise. You start thinking of high school as meaningless and the people as just passing by, but then a revisit makes you realize that they had some meaning, and you might as well be meeting them today and liking them just fine. And the teachers in high school, once they were symbolic, they were authority figures. They had responsibility and to some extent they demanded respect, but now they are just people with jobs.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

Life is devoid of meaning. Life is suffering. This is despair. How things have changed since last Summer. What is making this Summer so far bad? Is it that I have to deal with people this Summer? Is it the being alone last year that gave me confidence and if so, isn’t that confidence false?

Last Summer was extraordinary. I didn’t have to deal with people, I only had to think of them on a distant, abstract level. People as concepts; how they ought to be considered. I was untouchable. Now I’m in New Jersey with no one here I particularly like. I’m going to be in Providence with my brothers, and we’ve never been buddy-buddy close, so I don’t know how comfortable that will be.

And what am I now? I’m not feeling so hot. I’m just here. Not being anybody, doing nothing for nobody. Physically I’m shot. I feel weak and uncoordinated. Spiritually I’m dead, morally I’m dead. I’m just wasting my life. I hate people. I hate myself.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

This evening, Rob, Lizzie, Smylie, Joe, Tanya, her Summer housemate, and I went to Nancy Weber’s place in the city. All of them except Tanya, her housemate, and me just graduated from college. Actually, Smylie dropped out of Columbia a few months ago, right before his last semester there. He is currently living somewhere in New Jersey trying to come up with a comic book character. That must have been quite a decision to drop out right before graduating. I’m sure his parents weren’t pleased.

Nancy just graduated from Oberlin. She was actually the one who mentioned Oberlin to me in high school and that was the seed that eventually made me go there. She was an English major with a Creative Writing concentration and I went to her Senior Reading at the end of the semester.

It was a strange sort of reunion. It was one of those things that reinforced my realization that I haven’t come far and I’m going nowhere. I still feel so inadequate among them and I admire them a lot. Everything is so interesting to them and they are just so gosh darned clever!

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

It does strike me. It does hurt, what happened, but nothing can be changed. Warning signs sounded, and things just didn’t click anyway, they stopped clicking after the first month or two. I became too dominant. I don’t want to dominate in a relationship, there needs to be balance.

I don’t like the upper hand in a power play and that’s what relationships are or become. I hate it when the other person starts sacrificing too much of their personalities in order to accommodate my wants, needs, and, eventually, my whims.

I can’t deal with it when it feels like it’s becoming all about me. I want the person I love to just be themselves and not feel a need to accommodate me. Am I that scary to get along with? Is the problem me? Will it happen with Sakuko? It has been a pattern so far, and the relationship gets dull when I call all the shots and everything is about making me happy. That doesn’t make me happy.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

I lie in my room. My room lies in a mess. But it’s not my room, it’s not my mess. It’s not my home. I travel lightly to make it easier to go back and forth from Ohio and New Jersey. To travel lightly I throw things away. I purge.

In my room are dregs, skeletons, people, friends, lovers, myself, left by the wayside and flow like water into the sewer on a sunny Summer afternoon on an abandoned suburban block. I’ve really lost it.

I shed skin and it piles high. So much to throw away. I glide my sight along a row of clothes that I used to wear. I wouldn’t wear those clothes anymore. This one I wore when . . . This was taken off by . . . This was touched by . . . This one was Shiho’s. I’m only wearing grey these days.

Posters that once spanned every inch of wall space now lie in a corner. In how many positions has that desk been moved? It’s ironic how a lot of this furniture was headed for the garbage and ended up here. Memories pile high. And all of it will be left behind for someone else to acquire or throw away. This is not my room.

If I could go back. That closet full of clothes would not be there. Some of the nicer shirts, none of those jackets, good lord. All the shit on the floor would get chucked. How did all this shit get here anyway? What do we acquire and accumulate in our lifetime? What “riches” do we amass? What does our greed and instinctive attachments bring us? What do we fill our houses with?

Houses. Warehouses for our memories. Evidence of where we roam, where we’ve been, proof of how worldly we are; we fill our houses thinking it’s a bastion of some sort of permanency. Eventually you run out of corners, closets, attics, and basements in which to stuff shit. I’d never have a place like that. Shit, all of it shit.

Oberlin, OH

Life is suffering.

It’s been over a year since the first entry in this journal. I figure a year from now, maybe I’d want to see what I was doing a year ago.

This past semester at Oberlin was pretty bad overall. I fucked up again and my graduation might be delayed. Again. I don’t know, I don’t really care. I spent Commencement Week here with Sakuko. I took her back to Columbus yesterday. The steel drum band has its traditional, pre-Commencement Illumination gig tonight, and then I leave for New Jersey. I’m going to be doing Summer School at Brown and staying at Bob’s. After Sakuko’s Summer session, she’ll probably come to Providence to stay for a while; see more of the U.S.



My romantic life is perfect. My academics are in shambles. My social life is non-existent. Family life is the same shit. Mentally I’m numb, confused, also happy. Oh, I guess that sort of sums it up. I really think my mental health is better now; there is a difference. Not perfect, no need to be. It’s pretty much where I want it. I still would rather be dead, but I can deal with being alive. I am sort of disgusted with myself but I don’t feel things as extremely as I did at the beginning of the year. I still hate people, people still suck, but I can’t say that I’ve gotten close to anyone except Sakuko.