when i feel humiliated, even long ago, i get anxious and angry, even now—and i know i do it to myself, yet it always shocks me, like it's coming from a hidden place—which it is i suppose, but it's hidden in me, in the emotional mine-scape. it'll start from talking about something positive about life now, and then go to a humiliating circumstance in the past, for contrast, but then i'm gone, self-abandoned in that past humiliation. it started at dinner in  conversation about r. doing what she wanted to do, moving into the realm of working for oneself, and the fresh part of my humiliation is her silence when i turned the topic to my humiliation working for a commercial photog years back. also i think of my father, how he was so successful in negotiating with the world, yet he imparted none of his worldly wisdom, or striking self-confidence, to me. i came into the world stunningly unprepared, or prepared to be stunned, which i was.  god damn, i know it's more simple than i make it, or rather, it could be. it's so irksome that i make it confused and complex. i guess that's why they call them complexes. i don't want to be a complex. 

and the next chapter is called the good listener...