48 degrees today. It feels warm in the clothes strewn squalor of the bedroom, light and heat cutting through the plastic on the window.

Everything reminds me of something else. PD talked about a graduate school advisor last night, P---n, a defender of modernity and the prevailing social order. Any attempt to go beyond, know beyond traditional institutions of the family, state, and university are essentially futile - The Problem of Modernity.

Reminds me of C. the Nietzsche scholar and how we both would poke fun at the nothingness of postmodern thinkers. But in different ways - me, not much of a fan of theory or an academic by any means. C. would say, "I have to believe in a fundamental rightness."

He brought up a feminist problem of FGM in Africa. Is it our place to condemn another culture? Yes would be his answer. Cultural relativism - he saw it as a plague and natural outcome of this new way of looking at things - the trashing of all ethical certainties, of the universality of anything.

In defense of order and rationality - that was C. His knowledge and intellect may have exceeded my own, but that meant nothing. Too stodgy. I left.

It always feels like I will be consumed.

Life without a center. A duck in the sea.

These feelings that come up . . . I would like to ignore. I end up in the labyrinth of self analysis, through memory, through the halls of self loathing and loneliness. Sometimes a little light shines through the rock, but it's the same place. A pointless game.

Perhaps everyone feels helpless to a degree. Lost in the quagmire of thought and feeling and going nowhere except, perhaps, to insanity.

What can we do?

P and I argue. He takes his frustration out on me. I can feel sometimes a sort of contempt from him. I can feel a contempt in me. And yet. . all of these emotional manipulations and petty cruelties - the withholding of affection and so on - they signify nothing in terms of "the end." Some relationships are crooked, communication is rough and calloused. It means nothing. You endure it or you don't. It comes down to that.

I struggle with it. He gives no insight to his mind. He's the sort that would fade. I'm the sort that would surprise by leaving.

Little scraps of kindness and tenderness in bed at night. We can only be so close.

My withdrawal, my dissatisfaction becomes less in protest and more out of adaptation. I don't feel so powerful anymore. He's got me to the place where I can no longer long for his affection. I just don't care. Endure or leave.

This is how it is. It's his way. He does what he wants. Neither of us our skilled at togetherness - it isn't just him - but here it is.

My Mom thinks I should leave because it will get no better. The tantrums, his frustrations. But I feel that frames me in a helpless light. As if there weren't some calculating part of me that withholds. . . and for f**** sake, where would I go? I remember this model of emotional chaos from my family of origin. Where did I get so comfortable with silencing myself, walking on eggshells, feeling alone, not questioning another's bad behavior?

I think about these things and feel sadness. Like a rag doll, like a stick in the sea, lacking will and pulled by the strongest current, the strongest arm, the strongest appeal. My love. . . responds to the illusion of strength, the aggressiveness of another, the amount of control they exercise. It is passive and reactive. In some ways I fear that I need this hell.