092631 The problem is, I like it here. I like my weird, surrealistically meaningless job. That's why I always hope Cheryl assigns me to Directed Study—so I can sit in here and daydream and look at the Internet and occasionally type something wise and mysterious. I like being the inside-outsider. I'm not afraid to work but I'm afraid of people, except I'm also deeply in love with people. It's become so easy to be in these institutions not belonging, surviving—I'm not starving or on the streets—the spectre of my failure only comes up at night when I have time to think about it. My pain is currently insufficient to trigger action, to generate activation energy. So I can't really complain. And yet I do complain. That's the problem. So in order to not lose the girls (fuck *me,* it's too late to not lose me), I have to find some way to bind my point of view to that elusive pain. I have to short-circuit my automatic pain-avoidance systems. And so much of me doesn't want to; the lizard is screaming bloody murder, in complete silence.