Boiled Eggs #8
What I did and thought about 23rd to 25th July
23rd July
E asked R + S (best friends and flatmates) if they would have sex if they were each other’s physical types and they both said yes. E and I both think it’s shallow to not have sex if that’s the only thing that’s stopping them. Got me thinking about attractiveness, which is intangible 4 me and rooted in a sense of mystery and curiosity. Have actively fancied people I thought were stupid or bad people in the past because they were intriguing to me… thank goodness that I ended up fancying M who is hot and kind but still interesting.
G has influenced me + mum to get Monzo perks and I am now consumed by thoughts of claiming my weekly free greggs treat and monthly cinema ticket. Have done neither thus far but am thinking about it a lot. Also SKINT so shouldn’t be spending money on monthly subscriptions designed to increase my savings WHICH DON’T EXIST.
Watching M stand at the window watching for his driving instructor to turn onto the street like a kid waiting to be picked up by a divorced parent to go to McDonalds.
24th July
Read Ode to a Nightingale and felt emotional, especially at the lines: Now more than ever it seems rich to die / To cease upon the midnight with no pain. Probably because I have a migraine which causes my emotions to bob closer to the surface.
Keats was 23 when he wrote Ode and he died at 27 after a lifetime of illness. In one of his final letters he wrote: Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
I read the poem first at 20 when I was ignoring my own illness and turning away from anything I found confronting (like Keats, who I deemed mopey). Now I have accepted being sick but still find it difficult to think of hard periods in my life where I was struggling with the existential questions of pain and how it shaped (and shapes) my life. I still find it hard to quantify which traits are mine alone and which belong to my illness, and I still lust after a version of myself that was never ill. How different I would be, and not necessarily for the better. Read To His Coy Mistress (another old friend from uni!) which is a funny poem that pretends to be about sex but is actually (like everything) about death. What a palate cleanser!
25th July
Reading about ‘the uncanny’ which Freud calls ‘all that arouses dead and creeping horror.’ A key element of the uncanny is doppelgängers and an idea of ‘doubling’. Reminded me of when Pie started referring to herself as Double Pie out of nowhere. Double Pie was, in a way, herself, but also not. She would talk on the phone to Double Pie for example but also sometimes I would call her by her given name and she’d say ‘no, I’m not her, I’m Double Pie.’ It was spooky!
According to Freud doubles are uncanny because they function as a simultaneous promise of immortality and harbinger of Death - the presence of a double undermines the logic of reality. In Pie’s case I suspect the inspiration behind this conjured doppelgänger was having a scapegoat to blame for naughty things that the Real Pie had done… though maybe Double Pie is an omen of doom….
Romanticising my migraine by wearing my silk robe. Sort of working.
