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November 24, 1996. 11:12pm A few weeks ago, I pointed some of my friends to this url: http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/silent/96a26sor.html. It is a drawing of me uttering words reflecting what the artist (Jutta Degener) has diagnosed to be a clinical condition of mine. I invited some of my friends to look at it, and their reactions were mixed. But that is not because of indifference to the drawing itself. It is because I don't talk about my relationships to very many people, and probably never will, so most of my friends who saw this had no perspective on the incident(s) so lovingly captured in Jutta's drawing. The topic of relationships is both embarrassing and mundane to me, and no one needs to hear about all my hopeful arrangements which disintegrated into too much sex too fast and too little sitting around playing Scrabble and walking in big, huge circles around Manhattan. My circumspect failures in those pursuits are not the sort of thing I want to be reminded of in several months time by someone I hardly know right now, nor is it something upon which I myself have much perspective, having not ever come within a zillion miles of any type of success. That was quite a long sentence. In an undeveloped way, I feel that I should really be a natural at being with other people. But I am not, and Jutta's drawing forced me once again to wonder what it is (aside from pompous sarcastic fantasies and sodden delusions of worldliness) that makes me think I should be, and why I or anyone thinks they should be. Is life itself all about being with other people, or is it about numbing yourself to the boredom of it all with the company of others? Or is it about work and accomplishment? I'm not even going to touch that nonsense.
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