November 27, 1998.

Last weekend I found out that my great grandmother was considered psychic. Now, I'd already known that she was a very colourful figure: she was one of those Ukrainian women built like an ox (she was reputedly able to dangle a clinging child from each bicep), she was a great drinker and at her funeral cabbies came out in force to remember the woman who'd rode so frequently with them to & fro the racetrack. Apparently, she was also psychic. She used to read eggs the way that others read animal entrails.

(I'm also told that at the birth of my late uncle, she held him to her forehead and said 'I'll see you in heaven.' This doesn't really impress me though - if you think about it, she'll see us all. But since he was the first to die, it seems poignant to my mother & her cousins.)

Hearing this made me reconsider a few things about my life. There have been some pretty freaky coincidences in my recent days - for example, I met the Boy this summer in a tartan shop, as he looked for a kilt to wear to his sister's wedding. I was looking for a kilt to wear to a party (tartan and leather was the theme). A month later I invited the Boy and Stacy to that party, where they discovered that Stacy was close friends with the Boy's soon-to-be-wed sister. 2 1/2 months after that, I attended the wedding as the consort of the Boy, and chatted with Stacy all night.

None of that's psychic...it's just funny. But I have infrequently experienced very powerful moments of synchronicity, times when empathy is pushed all the way up and defenses are all the way down, and I actually feel inside the head of another. It happened the day that Ophelia and I both went mad for Paris - for no apparent reason, we felt exactly the same way about the same person, to the same hysterical degree. It happened the night in September when I went to a Nick Cave concert, a rave and did 'shrooms for the first time. It happened last week, when the Boy & I stopped being broken up.

Such closeness makes orgasm seem trivial. (But I have never experienced the 2 things close together, so I may revise my conclusion with further data.)

This is a long way of saying that I have begun to take this information about my great-grandmother a little too seriously. On Wednesday the Boy was supposed to swing by after catching a hockey game, but as the evening wound on, a horrible presentiment gripped me. He wasn't going to show up. I would be unable to restrain myself from making a scene on the phone when he broke the news to me. Or he would show up and I would be unable to act normally, which he would use to dump me.

Generally, I felt that I couldn't trust myself that night. I felt like something was warning me to seal myself off in the bathroom for the night, so as not to fuck up the tenuous peace of the last week. I began to grow numb. My mantra was simple: "You survived Alexi. You survived Paris. You'll survive this. In a week or two, you won't even care." Over and over until I started to believe it. I was in an ecstasy of despair, a positive orgy of pessimism. And since I was psychic, since I was great-granddaughter to a witch and not just a self-declared sorceress, I must be right about the future. I don't know. Maybe the danger was there. But it didn't happen that way, and I felt like an idiot.

The Boy did show up. We did a lot of talking and a lot of not talking, which is just as important. Somewhere along the line, I discovered that the clear plastic layers around me were gone; that I no longer felt violated by the act of touch. I'm not completely happy yet, and it's unlikely I will be until the Boy decides what he wants to do with me. But a lot of the badness I've been carrying since the weekend is gone, hopefully forever.

This means that the hysterical entries are over for now. Good thing too, they're not terribly entertaining.

Last night was a Thursday, and the first Thursday without the Boy since September. It felt really weird. Tried to alleviate the weirdness with a night at Ein.stein's, but no soap. It was entertaining, though...Paris, Agamemnon, Dirk acted reassuringly normal (for them), which meant an awfully nostalgic sort of night for me. Seth was there, with his weirdness & cleverness & amused smirk. He works in the government these days, so I haven't seen him in ages. Apparently, he gathers information and such. Agamemnon twitted him mercilessly about this in front of one of his coworkers, shouting, "Western democracy depends on you making a chart, Seth!" I haven't laughed like that in a long time. To return the favour, I let him make fun of my seldom mentioned 1st boyfriend (the drug dealer, and no I didn't know at the time). Agamemnon makes fun of him the same way, and has for three years. Boy definitely needs new material.

Thursday is also the day of my Renaissance Love Poetry class, which I enjoy immensely. Today we made sense of Donne, which is not the easiest of tasks. About once a class I get the feeling that I'm in something more important that an undergraduate seminar; that I'm actually in a course about Love itself. I've learned so much about Elizabethan ideas on love that I'll never be able to think about it the same again. Sure, it's a narrow lens, but necessarily so - some will argue that all literature is about love.

Maybe.