Maybe it's because everyone seems really happy now. The weight of winter is lifting ever so slightly, and bodies are moving, the blood is beginning to be pumped into the veins of the city.
Maybe it's because I feel full of questions, and I'm less scared of asking them. I must admit, even though I am very comfortable with my friends, sometimes I feel uncomfortable asking questions I think are too obvious, or weird, or boring. More and more I realize that if I use these as starting points, and I forget about being scared, I will be able to have much more meaningful conversations with people.
It keeps hitting me like a tonne of bricks how brilliant all the people around me are. I've always know this, but it's amazing when you feel it.
I shouldn't ruin these good thoughts with what I'm about to write, but, it's a recurring feeling, so I gotta get it off my mind so I can move on.
Okay. So. Sometimes, I feel like a fraud. I feel constantly amazed by the brilliance of the people around me and I wonder, how they hell did they become my friends? And when I talk to them about school projects and they contribute such incredible insight, I think 'gee, that person is so incredibly smart, I wish I could return them the favor somehow' but then I think, 'nah.. they're way beyond me, there's nothing I can do for them besides make cynical jokes'.
I had a (somewhat stressful) conversation with Sm the other night. I was writing my Tarkovsky paper (struggling to anyway) and we started talking about my future grad school plans. Something was said like 'why don't you make films?' or something along those lines and I said 'because I know I would never be good enough to make something I would think is good'. Then he would say stuff like 'you can do anything you want to do if you try hard enough'. And I was convinced that that wasn't necessarily true. I try to be realist about most things in life (even though previous blog posts would beg to differ) and I'm not trying to be modest when I believe wholeheartedly that there are some thing I just couldn't be good at. I base this on the fact that I (and most other people) have standards; standards that means a job is well done, and I think if it's not well done, it's not worth doing.
Anyway, this is more about me feeling inferior to the intelligence of my friends. I don't know why I feel that way -- clearly it is something that comes from inside me. I don't know how to get to the place where this deep insecurity is buried.
Tonight in class, our professor read aloud some of the feedback he got by email about the previous week's film (A Woman Under the Influence -- which everyone should see). I had sent him an email, making associations to other films (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore -- also worth seeing) and had discussed this with P since he's in the class too. When the prof was reading them, I was in awe. Utterly in awe. They were so well written, so thoughtful, so eloquent. P nudged my leg once or twice, I glanced over at him quickly, but I was so mesmerized by what I was hearing, I couldn't really acknowledge him. Then he whispered 'that one was mine' and my eyes shot a glance at him. Jealous? Probably. I mean, I knew he was smart, but I didn't know he was brilliant.
He's got so much creative energy flowing it's amazing. He's so well spoken and he reads a lot. He takes books out of the library all the time (speaking of which, I got a 60$ fine. Libraries hate me) and reads them. He always trying to figure things out, trying to make things better.
It's also cool because I sat with his friend L (a pretty girl director) in a class we're both in. She asked me: 'hey, est-ce que P est frustré ces jours ci? je le sens un peu chepas trop..' My first instinct was: what are you talking about girl? He's great! but then I thought, no wait, that's going to make me seem like I don't know anything that's going on in his life. So I said: 'Peut-etre qu'il est un peu stressé. Je sais que son screenwriting class l'énerve un peu.. mais j'sais pas trop non plus' and that seemed like a satisfactory answer. What it made me realise is how much he keeps his work/school frustration separate from me (besides funny things of course) and how awesome that is. I used to think it was better to be completely involved in every facet of your partner's life. I would feel sad if they didn't tell me everything about everything. But now, I realize that this mini separation is kind of good. It prompts me to do the same, which is doubly good, because I do have a tendency to talk, talk and over talk these things thereby putting some unnecessary weight on other people's shoulders.
He treats me so well, and makes me feel so secure that I feel no need to know everything about everything about someone, as if that guaranteed me some sort of importance in their lives. I think that's what I used to do with Vncnt. I would see him often and talk daily. P I see twice per week and talk daily (usually gchat -- and we surprisingly don't talk that much).
This calm is amazing. Me not talking and not neuroticizing about everything is amazing. I wish everyone could meet him.
For now though, this image I landed on tonight, expresses exactly how I feel about each and every one of you.
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