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.

Taxing

I finished my 2010 Federal Taxes this morning and now I'm having a panic attack. My business came out either $1300 or $3000 (I'm still confused) in the red according to standard deductions and accounting and all that and I'm freaking out, even though I know much of that has to do with car and house depreciation numbers and deducting $300 for an office supply that was a gift from my parents. Still, that's kind of the real cost of  my  business and I'm just sucking money from the universe and I had no W-2s all of 2010 so I feel like a giant suck on society and a useless human being. I'm still not over the can't-hold-a-real-job-with-headaches-but-need-one-to-feel-like-a-real-person thing. Like if I'm not leaving my house on a daily basis and doing something for seven hours a day, I'm wasting community air. Never mind how bad my head got in 2010. Never mind being hospitalized half-way through. That feels like an excuse when I'm having a day without a headache, with just a pathetic panic attack that makes me feel even less human and more..well, pathetic. What I'm doing seems so useless when you put a big number up like -$3000. Will it ever be profitable in a real sense? If not, what should and can I be doing instead? And why can't I just logic through this like a strong real grown-up instead of a sniveling useless panic-attacker?

I'm hard on myself. But shouldn't I be? How will I ever be a grown-up otherwise? Except right now being hard on myself is making my cry and panic like a fucking baby. I take photos of things. I sell those photos and/or those things. People buy them. It isn't enough. When will it be enough? What do I have to do to constitute "enough?"

Down with Down

I'm having an icky down time. I've been wrestling and fretting, tears and furrowed brow, bile working the backwards path of post-nasal drip.
So I'm having a down time. My clawing around for a reason and a way out makes me bleed a little deeper without finding firmer footing.
Relax, take a deep breth, and remember it's ok to go through the sad, lonely, depressed shit, too. Fighting so hard is what makes it so hard.

Decisions, Stress

I leave for Santa Barbara tomorrow morning.
There are things I wanted to do before I left.
I cannot do all of them.
I absolutely have to go to the DMV and renew my drivers license, which apparently expired on my birthday.
I absolutely have to pack.
I absolutely have to shower.

Just shy of absolutely, I have to photograph as many items as possible and upload them to my computer. Every time I go to take photos of something, I want to scream. Even the things I thought would be super-quick shots need to be cleaned or don't sit straight or something else killing the super-easy. And now that I know how to find all  kinds of  information on any given item, I feel much more obligated to keep digging until I have at least the manufacturer and time period. So no more instant gratification, and I've spent the last two weeks pushing pushing pushing without taking a breath, stoking my anxiety fire.

Not absolutely but I really wanted to, I was going to go to a movie with Possible Boy this afternoon. I haven't hung out with him or Aural Girl in ages and his school year is over now so he's a bundle of free time. Last night, "everyone" was at the bar watching the Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup, but HDS was cooking really fabulous dinner and she's still far from ready to plunge into the bar, no matter how tame it is. By the time dinner was over, so was the game and I was back to stressing.
But somewhere in the "watching the game at the bar" was an invitation to today's movie watching, and in my last night thinking, going to a movie today would be an excellent break from the crazy, a reunion with the last time I blinked and a person I'd like to see.

Now it's already after 2 PM and my body is begging to lay down again. I don't want to cancel movie time. I don't want  to feel like I've let someone down or messed up his plans for the day. I already blew off Neighbor Guy who called with boy troubles and really wanted to hang out and talk, my mother when she called with one of her non-reasons, and my dog by cutting his morning walk to bad-weather length. I know I have to call Possible Boy and say no movie. I know writing this instead of using these minutes on one of the  time-requesting entities is extremely narcissistic, but I have to consider this a case of  putting on my own oxygen mask first before assisting others.

See? Starting to breathe better already.

In college, Post Modernists were PoMos, over-educated hipsters

Oh, oh, silly PoMo
So we don't know what's  real
So?
I, too, have days in which I lash out in outfits
We are so rebellious
Twist up in the meta meta meta
Every generation has us
So so subversive
Can instead we laugh?
Not hate ourselves but laugh?
Twirl our perception of perception around in our fingertips
Love every echo of the meta meta meta
Lose ourselves in it, instead of thinking about trying to lose ourselves in it.
PoMo, let go.

moblogged from Kingston Mines

Its a good thing im feeling well & enjoying unbelievably good music. Not wasting my time on drama or misalignment. Im here & theres plenty of wonderful.

Addendum: 1:08 AM. Home now. AG was tired and a bit fussy tonight, mostly at PB. Why do I feel like "Mom, Dad, I hate it when you fight," and the impulse to "fix" every recognizable hurt and sadness I think I see on PB's face? When did my protective side show up? I don't want it to be a narcisistic protective side--my mom does that a lot and I have, too, in the past.

Um, I had two drinks and I feel like I'm writing with rocks for brains.

Also, I made fairly clear but not particularly intense genstures in Ken's direction that were well received. The world is full of maybe.

I'm going over to Possible Boy's house to talk. I don't know what I'm going to say or what I think I want to hear, I just know I'm churning up dark things inside that can't be allowed to continue. These are my friends. Letting them know what's bothering me so they can be there for me is a big part of friendship. I'm much better at monologuing into the general cosmos and waiting for someone to pick up on it, which may be why I also take stab-in-the-dark guesses at what other people are really thinking or feeling when they pause too long on a name or touch an object a certain way.
I need to talk to Aural Girl, too, but I think seperately from Possible Boy.

When I'm playing a game or writing something or fixing a picture in Photoshop and I mess up or don't like the way it's going, I start over. Wipe the slate clean and start fresh. I have that impulse with chunks of my real life, too. All of my papers and filing crap, I just want to restart and have everything that's everywhere right now go away. I want some sort of  reboot on my doctors and medications. Another one for my vintage/antique inventory, now that I'm finally getting a sense of what sells and how to sell it.
I guess I try to start things over a lot. I think of how many jobs I've had, things get too tangled and I get too frazzled and all I can do is curl up into a ball and run away.
Is that so terrible? I know it should be. Put that on the list of Terrible Things I Do along with forgetting to pay bills, being jealous of my friends, and punching old people.*
When I can't feel and think the things I want to feel and think, I get very upset with myself. Control. Should. Get me out of here.

*(I don't really punch old people)

Disbelief

Dear Annabell,

Being human and being alive is hard. Some times and some things are harder for some people. You are doing a good job dealing with now. You are working really hard. Dark clouds may say otherwise. You may say otherwise. But I can see the progress, I can see all the things you do and try and think and push every second of every day. I know how hard you are fighting, and even if you're going nowhere or fighting in the wrong direction, you deserve a lot of credit for your effort and your experience. You are a deeply wonderful human and I am proud of your humanity.

Love,
Annabell who needs to believe what she writes

Expanding

Feeling really weird today...indecisive,  too. Go to the auction as a proactive move and hope to find something I can turn around for a larger profit or stay home and do the million things I want to get done here?
It's good that  I'm back to doing things and feeling  like I can do things, but I've also welcomed back that unnecessary anxiety that every minute I'm wasting and there's a world of ToDos hovering above. Sort and clean and list and sell go go GO! That's the life I'm trying to step away from. I'm not saying I want to sit around doing nothing all day. I'm trying to see things to do as things that give my life more dimension. Maybe that's the real key--make my daily choices based on some guess as to what will bring the most dimension (which is different from happiness) to my life, knowing full well that each choice is a guess, that I can only measure in relation to myself, and that that's still a worthwhile measure to make.

An undiscussed side effect of migraine: too much time to think.

In other news, I could sure use a fuck-buddy right now. I need something extremely hot and physical and emotionally uncomplicated. I'm going through my head all the Boys who have expressed interest like a closet full of clothes with nothing to wear. It's all a nasty little hornets nest of me making excuses not to go to the ball because I'm afraid my admirers won't want to dance with me and if they do I'll freak out and spend the rest of the night hiding in the powder room. But aside from all that, fuck buddy. Want one. Now.

Be A Part Of It

Next Sunday I'm flying to New York. Possible Boy will have already driven Aural Girl and her dog to her parents' house and experienced a big bustling family Christmas. Birdie and NBF are both in New York. So are lots of other swell people I know. And I like visiting New York. I used to want to live there, but now it feels too crowded, too nonstop, too type-A to make it my permanent residence. The Annabell who wanted to live in New York had no children, a string of not-so-seriuos boyfriends, lived in an apartment the size of a closet, wrote for a major publication, and wore spiky heals and feather boas right through menopause.
I'm not that Annabell anymore. The spiky heals and feather boas perhaps, but current Annabell craves something concrete, grounded, stable to hold onto.
Speaking of which, I need to clean up again. The Mess is back on all available surfaces. I'm finishing projects. trying to see things to absolute completion. Right now, my life is the sum of my projects. Everything is a project. Photograph things, list things online, mail things, fix this chandelier, fix and clean up those shoes, find a way to wash the lace, photograph the things that are now fixed and clean, do online promotion things, go to stores and try to sell them things, make cards, make envelopes, buy more things to sell, buy basic life necessities, make food, eat food, tidy things, clean things, call to straighten out a doctor billing issue (because at any given moment in my life, there's always at least one), pay the bills, balance the checkbook, turn a ceramic nativity into a menorah, etc. etc. etc.
My life is juggling bubbles, and since I'm the juggler, I have a huge amount of influence and control, but since I'm not a very good juggler, I get frazzled and punch myself instead of catching any bubbles.

Last night Aural Girl brought over a bottle of wine and we got silly and went to the bar. I had on a sweater dress I'd gotten from my parents for Chanukah and she was trying out her new stretch belt with satiny shirt thing and jeans. I didn't think my outfit was anything particularly special, but one of the bar regulars who has repeatedly made it clear he wants to do me (and I've repeatedly made it clear I have zero interest) thought this dress was the hottest thing ever and kept telling me so. As I flitted about the bar, talking to a few of the people I like talking to, Aural Girl stayed glued to her seat. When I noticed she hadn't moved and wasn't talking to anyone, I made my way back to her corner.
If I had my entire life on film, internal monologue included, I could find all the scenes where I was in AG's place. As we talked, I recognized that feeling and space in the universe: feeling inferior, jealous in a way that you don't wish the other person had less but just wished you could do or be what they do or are. I want so badly for AG to see that she is every bit as shiny as I am, that it's her turn to be the Pretty One, too. We're both so used to being The Smart One or The Friend. She's actually done far better than I have pulling relationships out of nerd status. I tried to remind her that for all the random boys who like me when I'm smiling, the one I was interested in wanted her. But I of all people should know, when you don't think you're pretty, you just don't believe the people who say otherwise.

Dog is warm. Night is late. Tummy is hungry again.
Until next time

Sense of Smell

I smell like my college dining cooperative: bleach, onion, and cooking oil gone cold. Add in my appropriately pruny fingers and the brand of Annoyed-At-A-Certain-Type-Of-Person I'm chewing and this is a total flashback to Nameless Liberal Arts College.
Birdie, you'll know what I mean. (Token Pakistani friend, too, if you still ever read this...)

James Spader and Neighbor Guy and a lot of the people at the coop back at Nameless (and, come to think of it, in my family...good thing I have the most recent two so I know it's not just Jews...) have been seriously, deeply, validly hurt by people close to them. We see these scars, conscious or not, and sooner or later we find one another.
But I don't think James, NG, and many many other Wounded Souls ever see beyond themselves. It's not something they do to be cruel or hurtful, their minds just don't work in a way that fully and meaningfully feel for and empathize with other people. It's like the difference between being able to translate from a foreign language and actually thinking in the foreign language. Empathy v. sympathy suggests (to me at least) that you had to have gone through the experience or something comparable in order to empathize, but not to sympathize. What I'm trying to express is different. It's for those of us who can't help but care. Maybe we get labeled "too sensitive" and we still think we're assholes because we can empathize with assholes, too.
Like most things, people come in various shades. In the Wounded Souls Club, I think the wounding process shoves members to one side or another: you can't see beyond yourself and can only relate to people in terms of yourself -or- you're hypersensitive and fear the consequences of exhaling.
I'm afraid to exhale, so I can only spend so much time with people on the other side without recouping. I used to think I had to spend time with and help those people. They are my parents, a number of Boys I've Liked and even Loved, my life-defining friendships. Punish myself for thinking of myself and being a selfish, spoiled little brat and feeling jealousy and disappointment. Find someone truly self-centered and serve them, follow them, fix them.

I get points for realizing that's exactly what Neighbor Guy is very early in our friendship. Maybe I'm being too quick to judge my most blatant current Male Suitors, but every time I tell myself I should give them another chance, spend more time with them, I'm back with the sense that they're somewhere between charity work and punishment.

I've said it before, I'll say it again:
I just want to be understood. By a person I understand. Reciprocal sharing the burden of the universe. And no being mean.
Really, as many people as possible, all within walking distance, would be great. I'm getting so much closer. Stupid non-reciprocal levels of feeling with Possible Boy. Stupid him going on all these dates and enjoying himself and still having his stupid heartstrigns get yanked by Aural Girl and me not being able to be the friend he needs because I am, alas, the stupid girl that I am.

Hating Myself over Boy

There's a girl. Possible Girl for Possible Boy.
I want to be perfect. I want to be the perfect friend and perfect person who can objectively see how good it is for Possible Boy to have a romantic interest that isn't me or Aural Girl, allowing him to start separating his friendship support system from his amorous subplots. It's something I need to do, too. Logical Annabell knows this.
But Logical Annabell also has support systems stationed in random pockets around the country. And Annabell's imperfect human emotional side craves a hypothetical boy who can look at all my inside goop and understand and hold me, who has the same inside goop and wants to be heard and held back, and then kissed until all the lonely pain stops tasting so bitter because now you're tasting it on love's lips.
With Possible Boy, I ran things backwards. I was trying so hard to look shiny and perfect, I didn't let him near all the important things. Between phone sex and my disastrous long-term friends-with-benefits non-relationship, all things sex default to a setting of fun with quarantined emotions. Hell, even before I myself got near sex, these are the two versions of it that existed in my world:
1) sex for unemotional fun, power and procreation
2) sex as the extension and completion of the perfect kiss

Now the stuff that makes me feel like an asshole re: Possible Boy.
I'm trying really hard lately to do things differently and do things for myself and not treat myself like crap. To that end, it's either fish or cut bait, either see about reentering myself in the more-than-friends pool or put some space between us so I can move on.
But Possible Boy doesn't have another support system. He needs a friend, and while I'm not so fabulous that I'm the only person in the entire world capable of providing adequate and proper friendship, I do understand in a way that seems manageable by a limited percentage of the populace. Everybody has different pieces of things they do and don't see. Maybe I like feeling important, or maybe after growing up with my parents hyper-controlling every aspect of my life, it's just more familiar for me to be entirely codependent. But Possible Boy is good at the codependency thing, too. He might say every mushy thing I've said about him, only about Aural Girl. It's this wonderful chain of low self-esteem. We are human and we treat ourselves like garbage so that no one else can treat us worse.

I may have to ask him not to read this post. Will someone please tell me what to do and then blame me when it goes wrong? That's what I seem to find most familiar and comforting.

Crazy, Evolved, or Crazy Self-Critical?

I can't concentrate properly. I get frustrated when I'm trying to sew the zipper on Aural Girl's dog's hoodie but put the needle in the wrong side and under and over and wrong wrong wrong when my mind wanders. I was trying to finish the damn thing while watching Colbert Report, but it proved too much distraction.
I've always feared The Crazy. Is my wandering mind The Crazy? My short-term memory getting less and less reliable, attention taken by the shiniest and brightest of the moment and lost to what I was doing seconds before, phantom smells and ringing sounds and flashes in the corners of my peripheral vision. The doctors attribute all this to the migraines, but what if there's something more? Migraines as a symptom of Crazy?
or
Migraine sufferers are a baby-step further along the evolutionary scale and/or we have access to bits of another dimension but since we're still mostly the same old humans, peering into whatever's next tends to cause pain.
or
I just spent time with my family again and anything less than an instantly generated optimal solution is considered a screw-up. I now say things like, "Well, we're human," a lot, especially to and around my parents.
Parable:
Yesterday at brunch, my dad made people omelets to order. I can't eat cheese anymore, so I had mine with egg and tomato. As we were cleaning up, he seemed very concerned that I'd had enough to eat. I explained that I'd eaten lots of egg and more than my share of the lox that was set out for bagels, even though I couldn't eat bagels.
"I could have made you a lox omelet!" This dawned on him like he'd forgotten his prom date. I told him it was really no big deal as I'd eaten both ingredients and ended up quite satisfied, but my dad couldn't let it go because he hadn't optimized everything. So I told him a story.
"Today, I wanted to get a bunch of things done. I realized on my way here that, had I done them in a different order, I could have made it to more places and accomplished more things, but it was already too late to go back in time and change my morning. I am a person, not a robot, and it's pretty impressive that I could ever figure out the puzzle to see places to do more; that doesn't mean I'm always required to do it. I had a productive morning for doing as much as I did because that's exactly how much I could."
My dad liked and appreciated this very much.
I expect both of us still have traces in our hearts of the dwelling self-reproach for not being Perfect Saturday morning.

Like Family

Last night, my parents and brother came over for dinner. It's the first time I've truly hosted them for dinner. It was my chance to show off all my shiny things that seem so absurd when I wave them around at my friends; things like a fully set table with crystal wine glasses and appetizers in the living room (well, bags of chips and humus from the store and guacamole I'd made days before) and my general ability to hostess like a grown-up to sufficiently meet and exceed their expectations. Growing up, I watched my parents wig out when their families (my dad's side in particular) came to visit, cleaning the house top to bottom, never serving anything in its original container, making presentation prime. When my dad was growing up, they wore ties to dinner and had white linen table cloths every night and a maid. Both of his parents were doctors and his mother went to finishing school in Switzerland. Her father was a somewhat notorious lawyer in New York City who defended a Communist spy. My grandmother was herself a card-carrying communist for a time. Same grandmother who was a Freudian psychiatrist. At their formal nightly dinners, she and her medical degrees and her Smith College and her finishing school background would frequently stand up under five feet tall and pronounce "You ass!" in response to my grandfather. She could cuss like a sailor and would, but over lobster bisque served in silver tureen.

So never mind the mess in my office or in my head or everything else. If I can be a good hostess, if I can prove whatever it is I think I need to prove to my parents and to myself, then I am officially a successful human being, deserving of their love and praise, deserving of their financial assistance, deserving of my share of the oxygen on this planet and the space I occupy and everything else.

Between A and B

Possible Boy said everything I've ever wanted to hear a person say about something I wrote. And he meant it. Really, really meant it. If I could make myself cry honey and rose petals.

Aside: Other Girl needs a different name in here. It's the code name that seems wrong every time I write it. NBF always cracks me up to call him New Best Friend because how the name came about, the irony of it, the double-edged smirk. Possible Boy is a bundle of still-blooming kinetic energy, so I think of him as Possible Boy like a super-hero name: Super Man, Wonder Woman, Batgirl and Possible Boy.
I discussed Other Girl's need for a new name with Other Girl and, plied with wine, we decided on Aural Girl. We think it's funny.

We can talk now. All the things I was so careful to hide. Hide the crazy, right?
I want to fix him. I want to take all of his sad and make it go away. I don't know how to make my own sad go away, and I'm back on my weird self-defeatism again. When I feel physically ok, what am I doing to make money or somehow improve the world every moment of the day? Oh, look, it's that little hole in my heart. I can't just stuff it full of imaginary Possibilities and dreams to distract myself, so how do I fill it? I ate all the cookies last week. Warm dog, that feels good. I want something bigger, something to pop or burst or push me in some direction. I have to recognize that I'm the one who makes the choices, chooses to pop and burst things, can set things in motion at any moment. But I keep waiting for something external to happen; peg my emotional currency to random forces. I'll just keep playing until I get one good score, take a nap until I wake up refreshed, walk my dog in any direction until we come across something interesting. If I'm a feather in the wind, then I don't have to take responsibility for any of the decisions I make. Decisions have consequences and then I dwell dwell dwell. That came up in therapy today. Therapy that I had over the phone because I forgot we switched it today to her new office. I definitely didn't remember when I crawled back into my nice warm bed this morning post-writing, but I've been weird about it changing to a new place on a new day. What the fuck? People go about their business all the time with changing appointments and things. Ok, so this has been the only constant appointment in my life over the past year, but I also walk my dog every day and go to the bathroom and ingest food. The other things that I don't keep constant, I wrestle with my real commitment to them being constant. What is my life? What do I want it to be? How and when do I remember I'm alive? At least I'm not jumping off airplanes or anything, but I over-analyze every thought and action and then try to insulate myself from myself by hiding in the hole in my heart and reading or watching Hulu. Never mind all the things I got done today because look at all the time I spent not getting things done. Look at all the oxygen I wasted.
Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.
I'm not the only one like this, but can I use that to inspire myself to keep improving? Hello, Annabell! Do you not remember what you were like six months ago? I'm making insanely tremendous leaps here. Patience. Rome wasn't built in a day, and other such sayings and aphorisms and blah blah blah. How much do I coddle myself and say "look how well you're doing!" and how much do I yell at myself to get the fuck off my ass and stop analyzing my lack of motion and (apologies to Nike) just do it? Carrot, stick, carrot, stick. Isn't there another way? An easy answer? Something solid and definitive I can hold onto? I wanted a human to be that thing I could hold. I've imagined that as my panacea. I had a friend a few years ago who was adopted, and she always thought finding her birth parents would be her "cure." White wales and golden fleece, why do people all feel so incomplete?
My parents have all kinds of faults and difficulties and incompatibilities, but there is no question in my mind that they are the ends of one anther's beginnings. They also still have the incompleteness and the insecurity and the melancholy.
Books and movies and television are filled with lies. Like drugs, they get us high on the illusion of a simple answer, a simple happiness, definitive answers and paths from point A to B with story arc and happy ever after. When I wake up and remember I'm trying to narrate myself in a complicated universe, I throw temper tantrums and curl back into my head and books and tv and don't want to do anything that doesn't go into the story. No paying bills or daily tedium. No routine. You don't write about all the days you got up, flossed, brushed your teeth, walked the dog, ate cornflakes, watch Colbert Report, and then farted around on the computer for two hours before showering if you even bothered to shower. The narrative skips to what you did, and I feel I'm failing myself and the narrative and my debt to being alive every moment that isn't story-worthy. At least, that's how I feel while I'm writing.

While I'm talking to Possible Boy, I want to make everything whole, in myself and in him.
While I'm talking to Aural Girl, it's scaffolding around an archaeological dig; building up more support, digging a little deeper.
And then there's the general flock of Boys at the bar. It takes so little for them to tell me I'm pretty.

"She had begun to notice something strange.
Her ugly duckling features
Had undergone a change.
In short, she was growing pretty.
For the
first time in her whole life--pretty.
And the shock so stunned and thrilled her
That she became
Almost immediate
Incurably
Insane."

(From The Fantasticks by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt)

That's enough rambling and ranting for tonight.
And they all lived happily ever after
and had direction and purpose and willpower and shined like cattle guard on the Little Engine that Could.
Amen.

Half Measures and Slow Sinking

The sum of today's productivity:

• Cleaned my kitchen (bleach spray makes me feel like I'm doing something)
  Took photos of cards that may need to be retaken, but I didn't actually bothered editing the photos (yet) so I'm not even ready to say if I need to retake them or not
• Went to therapy
• Wrote the beginning of something that I realize ties in with my old creator/creation Frankenstein/Golem/Genesis/writer thing that may or may not some day solidify into an actual work of something whole. Golem musical is still the closest I come to a mazzoh ball in that idea soup.
• Talked briefly to Birdie to determine that my weirdness about another work-related thing is now entirely moot (was probably moot to begin with, but I'm weird, thus weirdness) so I should go ahead and write an email and get something going whereby I decorate a person's life in exchange for vegetables. Have I sent the email yet? No, of course not. Today is a day for half-measures.
• I gathered some newspapers off the floor of my office and moved a few things around and took out the dirty dishes. It would be a stretch to say I actually cleaned my office, but these things are at least a step in the right direction.
• Took my pills on time
• Told my mother I wasn't going to take my parents' opera tickets this weekend because I'm trying my hardest to go to my brother's NCAA Division III Soccer game in Iowa on Saturday

Some people teach, others build shelters for the homeless, others cure disease. I'm doing little to justify my use of oxygen and since I'm annoyed with myself, I'm curling up and doing less. I thought about going to the bar for human contact, but somewhere along the line I decided I didn't deserve to go out. Maybe not my best move, since now I'm going to spend more time at home smelling like bleach and fake-tidying my office while watching random tv episodes on Hulu. I should eat something, too. I've gotten away from the regularly scheduled meals thing again, even though I know better. The self-punishing torture misery thing is really satisfying and cleansing when done right for just a day or two, but I have to be careful not to get sucked in. It has to be a low point I bounce off of, not a sticky mud puddle.

If I don't go to at least one lighting store tomorrow to sell my shmancy lamp, please bitch-slap me.

Hanibal Lecture

I need a regimen. Structure. Some skelleton for my daily activity. I'm so scared of what happens when I get locked into things and then "fail" to do them, I instead go for the amorphous blob life.

I need to write. Every day. Make a schedule. Give myself hours of writing instead of hours of fucking around on the internet. Write in my journal. Write on here. Write blips and stories and anythings. Just write. Set a timer. There are alarms on my phone. I have one set daily for waking me up so I get up at roughly the same time every day. Get up, walk dog, eat and write until noon? I can do that. Write anything. Write about not writing if I'm feeling that stuck stuff. Write reviews of movies. Just make sure I'm producing words in such a way that those words can be read by another person at another time.
Maybe that'll help my recent brain self-cannibalism....
Chomp chomp chomp there is nothing in the universe to hold onto chomp everything is relative chomp all I have is perception chomp and perception chomp is relative and unreliable chomp so who am I? chomp! What am I? chomp! there is absolutely no way of knowing and no stationary unquestionable and dammit I want something stationary to hold onto chomp chomp gobble gobble swallow wipe juices off corner of mouth with napkin.
I'm reading Tom Robbins's Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. I hated the first 40ish pages. Now I'm much more mixed about it. Staggering. Totally post-modernist. Totally those guys in creative writing classes who are so amused by their own uber-randomness and creativity. Like, come up with some really obscure bit of subconscious something that you force together and make it work because life is crazy anyway, man. Tip your hat as often as possible to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. It reminds me of a boy I liked a lot one summer at camp. I couldn't write shit that summer. It's not my style. I'm forcing myself to read it anyway for the parts I do like and because it is a style and I don't really like the currently popular mid-century revivalist decor, like what 1970 thought 2010 would look like. But I'm studying it because it's popular and people buy it and it doesn't hurt to know what other people like. There's no right answer. Opinion. All opinion. I like to think that what's "right" is what causes the least amount of pain, stress, oppression, etc. But that's all subjective, too. Too much subjective. Give me ether.

These are thoughts I've had since elementary school. Some are more developed than others. Some bother me more than others. Sometimes I can ignore things, like basic questions of existence. Sometimes I trip over those things every step I take. I don't give myself enough credit, allow myself to ponder and wonder without feeling like a pompous asshole. Why, if everything is so subjective and ok, am I so infinitely critical of myself? It's like I use the subjectivity to move from perspective to perspective so that I can shoot myself down wherever I go, whatever I think or do. Use your powers for good, Annabell. And self good. I think about Neighbor Guy. He's imposed all these rules on himself so he'll think about others, but he's just never dealt with his own issues and is way too fucked up to care or notice anybody else's existence. Is there an answer to that? Does society have it? Am I doing the "right" things? What am I doing anyway? Doubt doubt doubt. I am a parfait of doubt.

Then there are the fruit flies. In the last few days, they've attacked in force. I leave out an empty beer bottle from when people came over Saturday night, and the next morning it's a macroscopic orgy. The food that gets caught in the drain stopper after I do dishes is also very popular. I empty it into the garbage under the sink, which has also attracted quite the colony. I attack each space with bleach. Fruit fly holocaust after fruit fly holocaust, and still they send in reinforcements. Why do they like the paper towels sitting in the bathroom? Why do they like the bathroom? My office desk lamp? My printer? When I was a slob, the appearance of bugs told me I needed to clean up. But now, what more am I supposed to clean? I'm sorry I have a garbage can! What can I do! Apples! Those apples are very good and they get mealy in the fridge! I don't want to put them in the fridge, but what else can I do! I'm no longer asking for a fruit fly infestation. How do you ever know when you're doing as much as you can do and the rest is just futile?

And there again is the big question. I want to know something. I want some sense that I'm doing something right. That cleaning my house has a positive cause-and-effect relationship and I'm not just putting on makeup before I get in the shower. I want an answer. When I get like this, I just stay like this until I can sufficiently distract myself back into the day-to-day and ignore my lack of gratifyingly believed purpose and motivation until the next time. Something shiny and busy, or extremely tactile. Boys are good distractions. I need to find a Boy other than Possible Boy. And have more local female friends I can bitch at and talk to about thinking, because we womenfolk don't get enough credit for thinking about thinking, and most of my favorite thinking she-people live anywhere from 45-minutes to 45 countries away.

I ate, I wrote, now I should clean and do errands but I may crawl back into bed with Tom Robbins. It's my first day adding to the "schedule." Go easy on myself. I have to go to my parents' house for dinner tonight. That's enough stress.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Male protagonists have deep, conflicting lives. Women comfort, support, inhibit the men. Women's stories rarely get treated with the same depth or complexity. I'm trying to think of some good meaty female main characters to disspell my own theory and at the moment none come to mind. I just watched Munich.

Help me out here, people. Great gritty girl character where the whole point of the movie isn't that it's a girl in what "should" be a male role?

One of my friends who is black and female apparently used to imagine clothes and things on Generic White Person when she saw them in the store and wondered how they'd look on her. I wonder how much of my over-valuing of boys as friends and humans in general is because all the best characters have always been boys. Either that or the grass is always greener when you are beige shag carpeting.

I ditched the auction today. I need to sell off more of what I currently have before loading up on any of the things that I saw at preview night last night, but since the real spark of my not going was much more of an emotional temper-tantrum I feel unnecessarily guilty. I'm still trying to find my controlled grip again post-NBF visit. It's all quite fragile; this thin layer of awesome is dangerous. People see the thin layer and expect me to be able to do things, and I expect myself to be able to do things, too. I have to remember that I am still a) human and b) gimpy. Neighbor Guy set me off earlier today when he came over as I was trying to leave. He needed to use my printer right at that moment to print out his resume. I was in the midst of printing things out so I could leave and get to one of my lamp buyers before they closed and the auction began. By the time Neighbor Guy left and all my pictures were printed out, there was no way I'd make it in time and I was stressed enough without the rush. I was a good friend even though I wanted to hit him and maybe it's best I didn't spend 8 hours at the auction today since now I'm rested and well-fed and tomorrow I can finish the phone calls from my "DO NOW" folder before therapy and then try to sell all my rare old books and the lamps and get my car emptied out and my wallet filled up.

I wonder if Possible Boy or Other Girl are at the bar...that would be nice. I could use the non-Neighbor Guy-human contact. I think Neighbor Guy is from another planet, anyway.

Bird Shit

The sharp pain is back. Just the last two days. I earned it while NBF was here. Albatross upon albatross around my neck. Black clouds. Whatever you want to call the things that I now stuff in a folder labeled "DO NOW." I forgot to take my before-bed drugs two nights in a row. I smoked pot wrapped in a tobacco casing. I drank an entire beer. And a medium sprite. And I had to confront the difference between me and me just a few months ago. And NBF. And many many other major friendships I've had over the course of my life.

Even before elementary school and the mean children, I learned to be snarky. Both sides of my family are very sarcastic and sharp. We play with eachother's words and mannerisms and turn them into our own witticisms and put-downs. My dad is a notoriously slow and awkward joke teller, so when I was still in elementary school I started doing an impression of him trying to tell "why did the chicken cross the road?" that had everybody in stitches. Barney Frank's recent town hall reply reminded me of our old big family get-togethers.

Some people seem able to give eachother shit but then balance it out with love and affection. My dad's side is bigger on the zingers, but my mom's side was well versed at just criticizing the hell out of absolutely anything and everything. She and her siblings seem to be crawling out of that now that their own children have grown up and born the brunt of it, but hey, it's progress. Still, both my parents have a very specific idea of right and wrong, good and bad, black and white, including on the many many many many many many things in the universe that aren't. Like, um, everything. So when you put together the sarcasm and the "humorous" put-downs with a constant directive that you're doing this wrong or that wrong or everything wrong even if it feels right to you, you're no longer just "giving people shit." It becomes deep and seething and paraded with a laugh until you don't know where the joke is anymore. Snarky 5-year-olds are only cute for a few minutes.

I watched a lot of sit-coms, too. Alf. Small Wonder. Golden Girls. Empty Nest. The snappy come-back always wins on television. Earns respect in my family (my brother can be a long series of one-liners).

Elementary school. Bad bad bad. I'd spend all day every day in teasing battles where a new and zingy come-back wasn't worth shit if you didn't have a posse. The kids would use the same insults over and over and over again. I'd ask my parents what to do and they'd give me new sharp things to say. I'd go back to school and say those things and the kids would tease me for being smart, for using big words, for everything they could.

My mom wrote me notes on my napkins in the lunches she packed for me. "Catherine" would steal them and read them out loud and have the whole grade laughing hysterically. I told my mom. I didn't really want her to stop writing the notes because then Catherine would win, but at the same time I wanted the notes and humiliation to just end. My mom started writing the notes to say things like "I'm glad I'm your mother and not the mom of a vicious note-stealing child." Catherine then started making fun of me for telling and being a tattle-tale "as usual" and everybody just had new fodder for the teasing.

Over the years I've created many friendships based largely in giving eachother shit. Some of you at least used to read this blog, and I am sorry. As all of my friends will attest, my shit-to-compliments ration varies and I'm much more comfortable with the shit than the compliments, but sometimes I'm able to spew out just the right thing at just the right time. The other big variable is how much love v. malice goes into the shit. It changes day to day, friend to friend, moment to moment.

I'm just not sure how to show affection any other way. When it comes to letting Boys know I'm remotely interested, I still blush and freak out and tell them they're stupid. That may be part of why I'm more comfortable being friends with guys in general: they're used to the shit-giving friendship model.

Life lessons:
The way to be recognized as a person looking to make connections is to give shit.
Everybody I ever wanted to have accept me growing up gave me shit.
Kindness? Happiness? Fake! Bullshit! You're being effusive!

I'm learning to be happy for more than a moment at a time and it's working. I wish there was a way for me to go sit in the big Depression Ditch and tell everybody there that it's possible, but even a few days with NBF toppled my latest streak of joy because I couldn't get through to him. I'm a compulsive sharer. When I find something I like, I want everybody to know.

stigma(ta)

I like to martyr myself to selfish boys. It's not healthy and I feel like crap, but it's a nice familiar pattern, stemming from both my parents but particularly my mother. It's this idea that you should do and give everything for your family, and it should make you miserable.