Thinking about college

Nameless Liberal Arts College was the wrong college for me in so many ways.

I was even more bull-headed then than I am now.

I wish I was consistently well enough to go back to school. Maybe one class this fall as a trial. I miss the awesome Chicago college I started attending right when I got sick.

I want to be one of those people who can overcome shit, and I want to be one of those people who can accept shit, and I don't want to be so frustrated and saddened by my version of life. They say to write down goals and then achieve them. Can that be my goal? I'd like to get my BA and support myself, but the real all-important pie-in-the-mother-fucking-sky is to be accepting of and happy with myself. Be good to myself. Love myself in a real way for once and for good.

Corvus and Aural Girl walked my dog while I was away this weekend at my brother's college graduation. Corvus cleaned my house as a birthday present surprise. He really cleaned my house. He organized my closets and did the laundry in my hamper and everything. And he said beautiful things about me I didn't believe. He can be quite incredible. I should have gone over there tonight but I'm so tired and have to have my car jumped in the morning (booooo) and I didn't. Now it's 1:30 and I'm still awake and I'm all upset and I feel like an ass for not running over there as soon as I got home. I'll call him in the morning once my car is running and we can drive off into the sun(wrongtimeofdayforset).

So many of my Nameless College regrets surround a Boy I let treat me like garbage. I loved this shit out of him, maybe more because I could taste the blood on his lips. Corvus treats me well and I'm holding myself to holding him to it.

My own voice is still so loud in my head, it makes for better writing* than personality or happiness.

*and sometimes not even that.

I Like the Smell of Bleach

"Don't let me forget to buy milk at the store."
My maternal grandmother said this to me once when I was little. We went to the store and both forgot the milk. Twenty plus years later, I still remember forgetting.
Other people try to forget and go to great lengths to do so. Drink to forget, sleep with strange men to forget, play guitar or parasail or set things on fire or join the army. I spend all this time dwelling on thoughts and memories better forgotten, when POOF! I just can't anymore. I can't always reliably remember what just happened, what someone said, any of it. I've been obsessing over my lack of remembering, but really I should take this as a gift. I can't dwell on what happened if I can't remember what happened, and if I stop dwelling on the fact that I'm losing my memory, I can fade into a nice worry-free bliss.

Store(age)

I've been feeling so much better. I think it's the stupid diet. Taking out milk was the real kicker. Today I'm eating tons of eggs to see if it's milk AND eggs. Eggs eggs eggs (in addition to other food, too) over the next few days and we'll see what happens.

I'm already legitimately exhausted from a morning of two estate sales (one sucked, one was an $11.50 goldmine) and one antique store (they didn't want to buy what I had, but I know what that particular store sells now).

Then I went to the grocery store and demonstrated to myself that I'm not all hunky-dory regular person.

I signed up for my own Fresh Values Card. I've been using my mother's forever and keep forgetting to sign myself up so I can reap the occasional benefits. Today, I had time and remembered. But as I filled out the form, my hands were shaking. They do that, sometimes worse than others. They have since high school. As I wrote my name, the shaking was bad enough that you could barely read the first letters and it wasn't the fault of my crummy to begin with handwriting. I don't think I've ever been that shaky before, or at least not when I've done something noticeable.

I contemplated the 20 cent difference between regular and organic limes (organic won) and the $3 difference between regular and organic eggs (regular) and went up and down almost every aisle so I wouldn't forget anything. I didn't trust myself to remember or make decisions without going through the logic very consciously. Pondering the expense of my favorite gluten-free but over-priced cereals, a man I knew I recognized said "Hello!"

I drew a total blank. Did I know him from high school? Familiar, but no clue.

He was the groom at the wedding when I was the makeshift photographer. He had to remind me. I stared at this man through a camera for countless hours, and then again on my computer as I cropped and adjusted picture after picture. Then we met up again to upload everything onto their USB drive. None of that stuck in my head. It's all part of the blurry squish of the past two years. He was totally nice and friendly about it and we talked for a few minutes before I was back to judging milk substitutes.

But AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH! I know it's not my fault. It just frustrates the hell out of me when I go into my brain to find something and it's not where it's supposed to be. Memories used to go in and stay in. Now, it's more like trying to lodge pencils in a classroom ceiling or juggling one more item than you comfortably can handle while wearing baseball gloves. It's that much more frustrating because you can do some of it or a version of it, but under current circumstances, there will be misses. I get fussy when I miss. Fuss fuss fuss.

I want to go crash so maybe I'll feel good tonight and go out. Possible Boy makes me smile. I don't know what's going on, but he's swell and I'll keep being dopey on his behalf for the time being.

Out of this World

I adore the dramatics of Love. The concept. The silliness. Acting out all the bits and pieces. So is it the concept or the person? How can I tell? Am I just giving myself more excuses to run away from any possibility of something real with a real person? Anything that happens in reality doesn't measure up to that weird ethereal dream mush. I keep it that way on purpose, not consciously, but definitely on purpose. The Greatest Loves live in stories and in my head and in their struggle to survive, struggle to maintain. I've trained myself to think that longing and yearning is love, so Boys have to be unattainable to be lovable. The struggle is where love builds. That's what made a certain past Boy so perfect for me: we went through years of not actually being together but fooling around on and off through our melodramatic friendship. That was passion. Until I stopped pining over him and fooling around turned into physical recreation without the big sparklies in my soul.

New goal: associate Love with contentment and Happiness. Love should go along with those moments when everything in the world is just so completely beautiful and awesome I want to take a bite out of it and explode. Those moments have always been very solitary for me, even if I'm surrounded by people. If I can find someone who really sees it and feels it and shares it, that would trump all my whiny piny love.

Ugh. Still setting Love in the ethereal. Still running around on Mars and Venus.
Reality: Flirt with Boys. Talk to Boys. Enjoy spending time with Boys. Find favorite Boy. Smooch Boy.
That's how things are done down here on earth. Just choose a partner and go dancing. Doesn't need to be so cosmic or complicated.

But it still does for me. There's magic and serendipity when I close my eyes and listen. I've spent most of my life trying to fit into LogicLand. Things seem to work out better for me when I tell Logic and Should to go fuck themselves. Something about Rogers Park reminds me of my music camp. It's the feeling and the people and walking by the lake all the time. The feeling. A sense of freedom from my parents and who I try to be at "home." At camp, I never worried about that. I worked on the things I cared about and let things that didn't matter to me slide. I spent every minute possible with people I adored because I could. There wasn't the pressure to have to explain myself and my actions and justify my decisions. I still worried and overthought and freaked out about Boys and did all sorts of typical me things and typical teenager things, but it was a different mold than usual and I liked it.

My parents are the source of much of my anxiety. I think even more than I realized, which was already a terrifying lot. It's not their fault, the same way it's not the fault of the spider when the arachnophobe panics, but they are my spider.

Ohmigawd. Fear Factor needs to start locking people up with their parents.

I think I'm showing up at an estate sale in six hours?

Remembered and Lost

I think I remember a time when I didn't have a migraine. Nixon was president and we were worried about the Y2K virus infecting all the cows in Asia. I thought some day I'd take over the world by being a journalist. I went to a concert and didn't require 23 different chemical compounds to make it past the gate. I went to school or work without a second thought.

I just added cinnamon and sugar to my plain yogurt. It's delicious. I tend to think anything is delicious when it involves cinnamon. Even more than chocolate, though I think of it less often.

How much LOST can I watch in one day?