i need someone to follow me around saying, "action!" and i'm not lazy. i really hate relaxing. i feel much better in motion. i just have trouble starting. it's easier when i'm staying at gabe's house in the city. the suburbs have so much more inertia.

it amazes me how some people can create their own schedule and actually get a lot of things done. self-motivation? i'm self motivated but i need at least a minimal framework or i lose myself.

"Nonusers wonder why junkies with serious habits don't see the absurdity of arranging their whole day around their need for heroin, but they've got it the wrong way around. One reason people become junkies is to find some compelling way of arranging their lives on an hour-to-hour basis... Heroin re-inserts you in a harsh chronology based, like the old, outmoded one, on the body, but this time on the waxing and waning of heroin in your bloodstream. "Here" is defined by where in the dosage schedule you are. Certain decisions are out of your hands." -ann marlowe

it's true. when i stopped doing dope i started drinking coffee again, and so on... i don't like coffee as much (duh) but it's less evil. it tells me when to start. when i was doing dope, after i shot up in the evening i started being productive. after a while i was basically a zombie until i got home from school and did some. and then all of a sudden i could talk, i was happy, i would go outside or clean or do homework or cook, etc, etc. the nice thing is, the stability of depending on that feeling. bad before, good after. very simple.

back in high school i was free of chemical based schedules (even coffee), but high school itself is very rigidly arranged. i liked that, backhandedly. or rather after it was over i realized the benefits i hadn't seen at the time. it's well known: great things come from adversity. dissidents struggling under oppressive regimes thrive despite the restrictions, and when the oppressor is gone, sometimes the energy just falls away. i know, it's not that simple. but that is at least part of the larger truth.

i spent today slumming around the west bank, at the library and hard times. i drank coffee and read about russia. i also helped a hispanic couple buy a monthly bus pass at a drugstore. they didn't speak a word of english and the cashier didn't speak a word of spanish. the cashier kept saying, "it's for ONE MONTH." and the girl said, "uno mes?" "ONE MONTH" "uno mes?" "no, ONE MONTH!" "uno mes?" until i came along and said, "she's saying one month." except no one could figure out how to convey "rush hour" in spanish. we were doing charades of "rush." "la hora de... *rush*" (with rushing motion).