my daughter just woke up with a pain in her knee.  i tried to feel the different aspects of her knee to find a region of cramping.  it seemed as though her hamstrings (semitendinosis/semimembranosis) were tighter than the surrounding tissue, and she complained that the pain was worse upon bending, so it made sense.  i held the muscles in question with steady but gentle pressure, and it seemed to calm her down...

while this happened, i had an insight of sorts.  why did i choose acupuncture?  why do i choose special education?  why do i, in short, choose "hopeless situations?"

i was thinking about this, because in the midst of treatment, there is always this feeling of implicit despair and impotence, that i am given basic methods of treatment, but i always wrestle with the fear of nothing working, of having no effective means of addressing the problem...  maybe, maybe i chose these careers because of the implicit gamble associated with it...  and failure would be safe, in the sense that it might reflect the nature of the stacked situation, and not me...

a gamble...

i was thinking about impotence.  about being powerless to affect a situation.  to make a difference.

i was thinking about responsibility.  about being unable to respond...  don't know if i ever mentioned this, but i have always felt an inability to control my voice.  to control spoken language.  with written language, i could see my words, there was a kind of solidity to it that could not be denied...  but with speaking, it seemed as though there was a choking off of the flow, and what's more, a lack of faith that my words would reach others, would ever be heard...

this, in a sense, created a double economy of words, two systems.  in one, the spoken, the more immediate economy, i felt a pauper.  i felt like a non-participant.  i don't know if it was because i was implicitly a non-speaker, or because others around me silenced me, choked my voice off.  but whatever the case, i always felt that speaking was unreliable, a wind that could neither be shaped, nor had the power to bridge distances...  "no one can hear me.  i am powerless to be heard."

in the second economy, in the myriad second economies that exist, i had power.  i found a kind of influence in art, in drawing, in writing, and even in singing.  funny.  these are all economies that work through "impression."  they are not involved in direct linguistic events, the communication of a feeling or thought or direction that changes the course of immediate surroundings.  they CAN, but only through the mediation of a recognition on the part of the listener...  a recognition and acknowledgment...

***

i want to help.  "i want to help" is a statement of intent, on the surface, but it is also implicitly a statement of fundamental impotence...  it also betrays a need to participate, in a muted way, in an economy of power.  it betrays a distrust in a system of those who do NOT want to help, who either actively harm or neglect others...

i say "goodbye" periodically because i want to recoup influence and power ("did you miss me?") through absence...  and one might say that it is also a repetition of the second economies of communication, i.e. writing, communication which is not direct or immediate, which only truly takes effect in one's absence...  it is all about influence, recognition, power...  i hate it, but i must be honest with myself...

the desire to die is largely due to a feeling that i am already dead in the immediate economy of presence/intimacy...  and i want to recoup worth through death, through the indirect mediums of memory and reflection.  like written words, especially with hidden meanings...  read between the lines of my life, and you might find that i was a person of worth...

disgusting.