confusion

hey y'all -

looks like someone is not only stealing my id, but also that of nursefusion. so, some of the recent comments from either she or i aren't really from she or i. and now, i'm confused because i am not so sure i know the identity thief anymore. which means it went from being funny to just feeling icky. maybe i'm just tired. so, if I do know the man behind the curtain, please send me an email and let me know. if not, i'm not really sure what to do.

Old School

Wow. I pulled my first academic all nighter yesterday/today. In the past, if I wasn't prepared, I just skipped class. That would explain 14 years of undergrad. I've never understood the designer roommates and friends that stayed up all night, half of the time in kinkos, and then went to all day classes and crits. But, I pulled it off somehow. Shower at 5:30am. 45 minute nap. 8 hours of class. Then drinks on an empty stomach. And I feel like I've completed some missing rite of passage. Sorry to anyone who had to deal with me after the drinks...you are the best roomies!

Oh, What are you thinking of?

hmmm...
So, I've been busy with school lately and neglectful in my posting. Thankfully, one enterprising reader has posted in the comments section as me. Sweet. I may just turn over the password for a while and let him blog for me. He hit it right on the nose about thinking and feeling (minus the elbow ability), though I doubt I would have made the Divinyls* reference.

also, since my post about anonymous commentors, the anonymous comment spam has been ridiculous. Does spamming actually work? I may have to turn on the verify function, but that seems like a pain in the ass.

I'll try and come up with something to tell you in the next few days or so. Perhaps my SWF commentor will fill in during the interim.

*btw, did you know the original bassist from the Divinyls was from Air Supply? I find that fascinating and disturbing.

It really is a bad neighborhood in here

I am operating on very little sleep today. busy bee at school made worse by a motivational lack earlier in the week. anyway, just to remind you all how really fucked up my brain is, i'll share my thoughts from a few minutes ago.

me to myself: ah, warm fuzzy, people read my blog.

me: hmmm...is this most current anonymous posting from A or T? (yes, I could have done T&A, but give me some credit)

me: funny, how everyone chooses to remain anonymous.

me: fuck. what if other people think i sit and write comments to myself so that i don't look pathetic and sad with no friends?

love,
tyler durden

Do as I say...

Yesterday, Misty and I were discussing the validity of asking advice from those that seem so much worse off than you. As I have said before, my life is serving as a warning to others, but sometimes I do make good rally speeches. I sent this to someone a few days ago, and actually amended its tone for someone else today, so I decided to share. Mostly because I was over being Debbie Downer. Make it applicable to you.

So what if your MFA is indulgent? It strikes me that you are not indulgent enough. Spoil yourself. Allow yourself to do something that causes you to leap out of bed on Monday, frantic and excited. Invest in your soul and
your intellect (which in turn will invest in your other relationships). If you had told me a year ago that I would be in school full time and not working, I would have told you there was no way to make it happen. But being with orange really helped me see that it's ok to leap. And while you may think I am taking a practical direction, it doesn't feel that way. And I’m ok with that. I think doing something you want to do, whatever it is, will help position you for something better. You know how when you are really happy in a relationship, other people start hitting on you? It’s b/c you are putting out this amazing energy. I feel the same things will happen if you enter a scholastic environment you really love. You’ll attract
other opportunities. Will you finish and be a full time novelist? Maybe not, but you will position yourself for the next thing. And you'll have awakened a spirit that is suffocating thoroughly.

This is it. It sounds cliché, but we only get to do this once. Everything is fixable except death. We can DO anything if we allow ourselves. As someone commented on my recent post, "btw its pretty damn easy to forget that this experience is yours, you are the only one having it, and the only thing you can control is you and your experience."

Now, if I could just listen to my external voice, instead of the one that fucks me up all the time.

Paddling the school canoe...ooh, you better believe that's a paddling.

The kid emailed me and asked what happened to my entertaining misadventures. I don’t have as many without him, the kid could make the DMV impound lot fun. I think he’ll like this one.

I used to work in a weird industrial park. During walks at lunch, my co-worker and I would play “guess how many hypodermic needles we’ll find”. I usually took the over and won. One day, I was walking our normal loop alone. On what is normally a raceway, a man pulled along side me on a bicycle. It’s summer, and he is in layers. I wouldn’t say he was homeless, but if we were playing “your boyfriend!”, he would have been a good assignation.

MB (my boyfriend): “Do you need a ride?”

Me: “um, I’m ok. I’m walking.” And you are on a bike.

MB: “Because I think you are really pretty. I have a car I can go get. It’s just down the road.”

He points to the river.

Me: “really, it’s ok.”

MB: “Do you want to be my girlfriend? You’re probably married. Are you married? Do you have any friends that might want to date me?”

Me, back at my office on email: Dear Miguel, who says I don’t have options?

But wait, there’s more. Fast forward seven months to a ding dong. Our office required visitors to be buzzed in. The doorbell rang about every 2 minutes. Let’s just say, that no one was usually looking through the peephole.

Disclosure: I was the one who was supposed to be doing the peeping and I couldn’t be bothered.

MB: “Hi. Remember me? Are you still married? Can I use your bathroom?”

Me: “um, sure?” fuck.

Me to the office floor: “So, some guy who wants to date me is probably taking a bath in the men’s room right now. Anyone with snarky comments is going to feel some philly girl wrath. Oh, and can someone call security?”

Me, later on email: Dear Orange, who says I don’t have options?


(Kid, I miss you! Clerks II and Snakes on a Plane won't be the same without you. Maybe I'll invite MB.)

I read the DSM so you don't have to

I'm really trying to focus on perspective change, to remember that this is my experience. To listen to advice that I give others, which includes the cliched "this is our only chance, take advantage of it, be indulgent". I come in and out of it. I keep rallying back to the positive with a much quicker turn around time than I used to. But, it makes me feel as if I come across as bipolar II* (hypo-mania and depression) or insincere. And I know I need to stop caring. But when I continually act as one minute lar, next minute lar, it's no wonder I find it hard to sustain romantic relationships. In the past three days, I have sent Orange (the boy who is not Miguel) three very different text messages. All of them meant in sincerity at the time, but the sum total makes me look as if I am rapid cycling.

But, I just want you to know,gentle readers, that it is truly a function of me trying to readjust my view. With a healthy dose of hormones thrown in for good measure.

*I like to say that this knowledge comes from my psychopathology class last year. I like to say it, but...

Will the DSM V cover Sunday Dread?

Sundays belong to you or maybe they just belong to boys. Is it leftover from school? They are nights mixed with dread and anxiety and the desire to stay up late to prolong the inevitable. You are always leaving on Sunday or you were, until you left for good. But the Sundays you stayed, we retreated to the horizontal world, with wine and network dramas. I felt domestic, comfortable, together. Now, I am alone again. I feel insecure on Sundays. I feel insecure always. But you made me feel wanted & beautiful, if only for a second before my brain cast the compliment out.

not even SMRT

"Both of them suffer from the same problem. They stand poised, ready to come through for me, but never quite doing so. But I guess the problem is really mine, because I keep watching their stance, hoping."

- me, a few days ago.

damn. I have had so much therapy and yet, I'm constantly slow on the uptake. it's so obvious it pains me to admit. I stand poised. ready to come through for me, but never quite doing so. why should any one else?

seriously, how did this just occur to me?

I'm sorry that I haven't offered anything interesting or smart recently (or at all). I'm annoying myself.

Go read Fark or BoingBoing...

Just a memory without anywhere to stay

I first saw Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps when I was 8 or 9. My brother, who is 9 years older, had a habit of missing curfew and subsequently found himself locked out of the house on an almost daily basis. My parents’ plan for enforcing curfew was that we kids were only given a top lock key. Miss curfew and the bottom lock was engaged. Never a problem for my drunken brother, he just threw rocks at my window until I came downstairs and let him in. If anyone wonders why I am nocturnal, it’s because from 8 – 11 years old, I was accustomed to getting up at 2am and hanging out with my brother, usually watching concert videos. I would cuddle up beside my brother, breathing in beer and absorbing his attention. I learned to expound on why Neil Peart was the best drummer, how Asia wasn’t given the recognition they deserved and at what point the girl threw her bra onstage during Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl. I regard these moments as the best part of childhood. I used to describe my parents as very nice people who let me live in their house. My brother was family. And for a few hours, late at night, I was allowed to be part of his world. He gave me advice and listened to me talk, without ever making me feel less than his equal, his peer.
On a visit to my brother a few years ago, we watched Rust Never Sleeps together. It was about 20 years later and I had stopped regarding my brother as a god. I think we had even had our first fight by now. But we curled on the couch, both of us with beers this time and I still remembered when the bra would fly onstage.
I just returned from seeing Neil Young’s Heart of Gold. It made me miss my brother. Yet it felt like home, hanging out in the dark with 40 strangers drinking beers, reminiscing with Neil.

dark on a sunny day

After my first post, I was asked why I refer to my attempts as just straight up suicides. I haven't answered the question yet. It's something I wonder if I can give words to exactly. I guess I just never liked the word "attempt". Suicide failure, maybe? Failures that I am grateful for now, but failures from the goal at the time, nonetheless. But honestly, always in my head just referred to as suicides. I could offer up that each one brought a death of some part of me. Even if that death was eventually of the suicide spirit. Each change or transition in life is always a small death. The truth is that I don't necessarily know why I consider them suicides. But apparently, I am in good company. Nursefusion sent this amazing link to me today which had this tidbit of an Anne Sexton interview. For the record, I've always admired Sexton as an artist way more than Plath. And that's probably not Plath's fault, but the way her death was romanticized at some point always felt detracting to my own inner turmoil. I resented her for making me feel like a silly, sad girl writer. Essentially, for exposing me.

"Often, very often. Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and in depth—between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it. She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail, and her description in The Bell Jar is just that same story. It is a wonder we didn’t depress George [Starbuck] with our egocentricity; instead, I think, we three were stimulated by it—even George—as if death made each of us a little more real at the moment."

Try not to suck any dick on the way to the parking lot

Miguel asked me yesterday if I thought it was possible to still define someone in our age range as a slut. Having slept with him on Sunday and with someone else on Monday, it hit a bit close to home. He decided that it probably boiled down to intention. I debated that it depended on how the person defined it for himself. In either definition, I’m feeling like a slut.

I shouldn’t have slept with Miguel. We had a perfectly awkward rated G date on Friday that left me feeling as if we had never met before, much less been in love. When I woke up on Saturday and realized someone was in my bed, I felt disappointed that he wasn’t someone else. It was unbelievably depressing. So clearly, I let him spend the night on Saturday and slept with him. Why? A myriad of answers, none of them make any sense, except of course the one I gave to the other boy when he asked the question. “Might as well get off”.

I shouldn’t have slept with the other boy, but that’s entirely less complicated. I do stupid things. I am constantly throwing the drama dice and pretending that my emotional life is dictated by fate rather than by me. I always choose the immediate over the prudent. I like this boy who was only supposed to help me heal from Miguel. I like this boy because I want to win. I slept with him because I wanted to and it was important that he wanted to. And yet, I’ve now lost this boy. Because he shouldn’t have slept with me. Because even if I ever did win, I wouldn’t trust him. Because ultimately “might as well get off” applies to this scenario as well. For both of us.

So now, I’ve lost them both and am truly alone. For a year and a half, I’ve been falling back on Miguel emotionally, if only to express disappointment and anger. For eight months, I’ve felt a strange sense of comfort in the other one, even if it was false. Both of them suffer from the same problem. They stand poised, ready to come through for me, but never quite doing so. But I guess the problem is really mine, because I keep watching their stance, hoping.

Giving the people what they want

I was told last night that I still tell stories better in person and oh, there needs to be more sex in my posts. yeah well, at times, there needs to be more sex in my life. But since I'm currently having a "when it rains, it pours, but I still sleep alone" weekend, I should be able to comply. Once I figure out how to really convey my conversational humourist pathos into print.

Also, if any other ex-boyfriends want to get in on the action, show up on my doorstep now, before I write my piece. It'll save me time in the long run and I can go back to studying for school.