April sucks, I guess.

My entries are super boring in Aprils past, and most of them are on the unhappy side.

4.19.08
I dreamt last night that something horrible happened and all of my front teeth—the canines and all the ones in-between—fell out and that my dad was supposed to drive me someplace to get them put back in, and he didn’t want to go so we went to the hardware store instead. It was horrible…

Then, somehow in my dream, I ended up in this sort of dead-looking, yellowish, autumn-time field with my little brother and the older of my younger sisters… and we walked to these woods that were on the far side of the field, and when we got into the woods, my sister went ahead of my brother and I.

She came to this sort of little clearing dealy that was all sunken into the ground… and there was this pretty creature-y thing, surrounded by roses… and it asked my sister if she wanted one, and she said she did and walked into the clearing to go get it, but once she stepped into the sunken, dead-leafy part, the creature turned into this nasty ghoulie thing and you could see that all the roses were dead and wilted… and as soon as my sister took the rose, she turned into a rotting ghoulie thing and started chasing my brother and I…

I don’t really know what came of my brother in my dream, but I ran to this other part of the woods and came to another clearing where there was this huge pumpkin in a tree… only when I got closer, the pumpkin opened its eyes and had this creepy, attempting-to-be-endearing pumpkin grin, and it jumped down from the tree and it had a body that was all made of tree-limbs and branches…

So my dream ended with me being stuck between that and my zombified sister with her face all rotted off…

4.19.09
One of the profs wrote on my evaluation paper “hair covers left eye.”

4.1.10

Lemony, if you didn’t know, is one of our beagle puppies. This is what she looks like.

  

And yes, she is named after a children’s author. Katelyn wanted to call her “Leprosy,” but we were forbidden from naming any pets after diseases…

4.5.10
I do tend towards defeatist. I don’t like to be happy. I don’t expect to be happy. Do you know why that is? No?

It’s because I hate to hope for things and to get excited about things and to want to experience that happiness in full, only for it to be dashed away right before I could lay hands on it. I hate that. I hate to feel like I could be happy and be left with the buildup and then nothing. I’m sure you know what this is like.

So that’s why I will probably almost never seem genuinely happy. I’m not. Any time I am, I’m always secretly worried that something will come along and wretch that happiness away from me. So I try not to be too happy. I try not to get excited about things that I can never be sure about. If I try to want things and look forward to things, then maybe the disappointment will be a little less when they don’t pan out.

4.18.10
Today has been a testament to the fact that everything good that ever happens to me gets ruined. More often than not, by my own hand as I resort to progressively more desperate and cruel ways of coping…

Will I tell you more than that? No. Although the ladies of Xanga have been very good to me and offered their sympathies and their ears, I am painfully aware that almost none of them would take my side.
That doesn’t stop me being appreciative though.

I can tell you this though: I’m a horrible person. If you ever pit yourself against me—unwittingly or on purpose—and I perceive you as being unfair to the point where you could and would hurt my psyche, I swear I will fight back until I hurt you and in so doing, damage our relationship.
I wish I didn’t do this, but I don’t want to be weak and I won’t want to be walked on and I don’t want to let you damage me if I can help it…

I never claimed that I was unselfish. Quite the opposite. More and more, in fact, I find myself warning people of this before they ever even have a chance to develop any closeness with me. I want them to be warned. I want them to have the chance to walk away.

Of course they don’t. They don’t take me seriously enough. Probably they think I’m being self-depreciating to garner their pity or to make myself artificially humble, but it’s not true. I say cruel things when people push me too far. I mean a lot of them, but not all of them. For instance, I don’t hate anyone. I just hate what they do to me.

 

4.20.10
I’m concerned about my lack of interest in my usual persuits…sure…reading…whatever… keep losing my place or skimming and having to re-read pages because I wasn’t paying attention. I try to listen to some music, but then I turn it off after a few minutes because I don’t care about it. Even songs I’ve always especially liked.

I don’t really feel that interested in doing this anymore either, because really…what’s the point? It doesn’t make me happy. Nothing makes me happy. Sure I’ll go ahead and do it for the sake of something to do…but if things turn out badly, then I can’t see myself being motivated to do thing much at all anymore. What would be the point.

That would be nice…you know…telling me to “be happy” when I feel worse than I have in a very, very long time. Ha ha. Funny.

I have nothing good to say, and nobody to say it candidly to.

4.25.10
When I was maybe six or seven, I caught a robin that was bathing in an upturned trashcan lid. It didn’t try to get away, so I held it for my sister to pat it before I set it on our chain-link fence and let it go. I forget about this incident for long stretches of time, but whenever I remember it, I feel like it’s one of my more unique accomplishments. How many people have actually caught (come on…you all know you’ve tried) a wild bird with their bare hands?

4.7.11
It’s this pool of water, you see. It’s blue and bowl-shaped, and there is something in the middle of the bottom of the pool that he wants.
black glossy glassy circular

He keeps circling around the edges of the pool, or crouching with his nose just above the water, and I can almost see the cartoon bubble with his thoughts—“how can I get it out without touching the water?” Like a cat with a fish. Or…after a fish.

I think he left it briefly twice today because there is a vague idea regarding possession that’s trying to come together and crystallize in our brain. It’s about something I wrote, and kind of about something dead that waits dreaming. Possibly about the thing in the pool and with April (which he has been after all this time anyway) and psychic disturbances……………I don’t know if I believe what I wrote anymore. Except of monsters. Bigger monsters than I am. It still applies to them. But we’re a small monster, so what shall we do?

He’s annoying me, both with this possession idea, and with his going around and around that pool like he is [possessed], and I told him there was no way to get it out without touching the water…and without a word or a flash of yellow iris, he tells me to shut up because I’m only talking to hear my own voice.
And

has a thought. He looks coolly up at me and says without words that he knows he can’t get it, as he has no hands to hold a stick or a net and fish it out.

But I could do it.

4.8.11
Today I’ve been arguing with myself in the back of my mind…on one hand, the brusque, cutting voice of my Wolf, and on the other hand…this cold, velvety voice that I can only assume is the remnants of my Dog.

I haven’t heard him speak in almost two years, and now it just wants to ask me a question. Just one, and I don’t have an answer for it. It’s scary…which is…also…scary. It creeps me out that I can creep myself out like this, but this voice that asks me this question…I can hear it in my ear. I can hear it and it sounds dead…but not detached and not angry. It sounds…I can’t even think of the word to describe it.

But I don’t know what to answer it.
And then Wolf, when he’s not unloading expletives at this part of myself that I don’t know how to appease…Wolf gets overcome with shivers and starts cowering…

4.20.10
I cannot live (I can not die)
I will not fall (I’ll carry on until the end)
Though years may pass (with some regrets)
I cannot live (I will not die)

There were the words that could have been spoken by the voices that are simultaneously me. A me then and a me now, the me now that refused to give over. The me that, for all the ways that it he I fall short, is am the only one that has ever grasped the notion that we will never die. And the sound gets into our blood, and I wonder when the sounds do this, just what is happening. What am I really taking?

4.21.10
I did feel creepy about being on campus though…I feel like all the time I spent there wasn’t mine at all, but that all the things I did were done by someone else. Someone who has died. I was never there, except when I was walking to the beat of my doom tracks, and all my warmth was compressed into a molten ball in my chest, so the snow that deigned to fall on my skin did not melt because I was so cold and did not care…and then yesterday, in my wolf hood and with the half-dead red tulip that I took from the statue of whichever saint that was in front of the greenhouse, and vaguely wondered what student had put the flower in his hand and why.

But I walked through all the old buildings that I used to spend so much time in, and I saw no one I knew, and no one knew me. And I sat on a low wall above where more tulips in pinks and yellows and purples were planted, and remembered that when I was in high school, we were not allowed to use them as our class flower because, according to our teachers, tulips are funeral flowers. It’s not true, but the memory did increase my uneasy sense that I was visiting my own grave.

...and the memory of making myself late for class, because I was on the phone with her and standing outside the library, where the red tulips are always planted, and she was telling me I should get off and go to humanities so I could be a better human…

I don’t know if I became one. All I learnt from most of my classes was how to take symbols and abuse them until nobody can understand what I’m saying. It amuses me, and I think that since I’ve graduated, I’ve done increasing amounts of it…but to what end?

4.25.11
And I felt that little flicker of rage again. It’s so small compared to what it was when I first heard what was being said to me, but it’s still there. I can feel it in my chest, flickering up and dying down again, but never quite going out…
But I can ignore that feeling. Because I already know about them, I can go for stretches and pretend I don’t see the pretty, shattered pieces of creatures I know and have known…but I do. I still see them when I look, and it’s a sight that makes me angry like nothing else.

I thought about those stanzas I wrote, and especially about the last line, and I wondered who I am so angry with.
It wouldn’t matter if I weren’t still angry, but I am. When I remember to look at the things that I will go mad if I don’t pretend not to see, then I remember how angry I still am.

I think that might be part of what my problem has been lately…that although I am letting it take a backseat to other things, I am still nearly sick with rage. But how do I confront myself over this? I mean, yeah, sure…I acknowledge in this post and others like it that I have this problem…but how do I stop myself from continuing? This is where I get stuck, because as much as I know that I can’t continue in this way, I feel an immense resistance in myself. I don’t want to let go of my feeling angry at these things. It would seem wrong to let it go. Like I was becoming cold like so many people are—like I was shrugging it all off because it’s not my problem and it is because I want it.

I think…and I admit that my grasp on what’s happening to me is tenuous and probably unreliable…but, I think that I’ve allowed myself to believe that if I properly apply my anger, I can turn situations to where I want them to go.

I know it’s wrong, and this knowledge is why I detest myself sometimes for getting angry so easily, but I do it anyway. And I feel like I’ve gotten angry with other people a lot less lately…but I think that’s because my angry feelings are primarily directed at some people that I absolutely have to conceal it from because they won’t understand why I’m angry, and an individual that absolutely doesn’t deserve my anger, if only because the things on whose behalf I am angry were, in a sense, given to me for the very reasons I’m getting angry. (Yeah. Figure that one out.) I’m not doing the right thing. And I know it.

4.25.12
Outside of work, I saw a movie (Okay...so I guess I was still at work) and towards the end there is a scene where a unicorn gores someone to death. I laughed out loud. I never do that. It was a little bit awkward. I just...wasn't expecting that, out of all the things that had already been crammed into the movie.
I also saw a for real zombie in the parking lot at Jester's apartment complex. This old lady was sort of standing where I needed to drive, and she didn't move and just watched me try and maneuver my car around her...then I saw her watching me in my rear-view mirror, and when she finally started walking away, she was dragging one leg behind her. I am still sort of worried that I was either hallucinating or being overly imaginative...but I told Jesse anyway, just so he knows to look out for zombies when he's out at night.

4.25.12
Read a lot. Read a whole series of short books, and a guide book, and a book from a series that I am embarrassed to say I've enjoyed and am trying to not look forward to the movie adaptations...and am still secretly annoyed about because the only reason I started reading them in the first place was because my sisters told me I reminded them of a character that turned out to be the fabulously gay high warlock of Brooklyn... (yes, somewhere deep down, there is still a small flickering anger that lights up when these particular comparisons are made.....plus.....passive sentence structure! ahh! run away!!! fragments and lack of capitalization and such! multiple exclamation points and bad writing all around, just to detract from what I actually said!!! *panic and characters scattering in all directions*  hdfshfggukyrgQHJVRTYQFRQJHV. *Caps lock makes a brief appearance.*)

Been feeling very low the last few days. No reason for it. *shrugs* Oh well, I guess.  :/

More interesting stuff:

There is a girl at work who is, according to half of our staff, 99% me. We don't know how we feel about this, but have discussed it every time we've seen each other the last week or so...and I guess we have to admit we do have some uncanny connection going on. Despite our conversations about bones, serial killers, pagan deities, songs about cannibal transvestites, and tuberculosis, I wasn't sure about it until the other day when she came out of the kitchen with a tray and hissed at me.

I am severely embarrassed that my first reaction was to growl at her.

Nobody was around to witness this exchange, so I guess I can't be that embarrassed, but even if someone had been around...she hissed at me first.

As much as it annoys me sometimes...I can't ever claim that work is never interesting.

I walked in with a look on my face that I wasn't really thinking about, and I guess it freaked Qaman out because he started wailing about how I wasn't allowed to be so full of chagrin. Except...I always am? I reminded him as much and he tried to explain it to me, that "it's different from your usual take-over-the-world malice...it's scary when you get angry".

Oh. Um.

Yeah.

You know the difference between the semi-staged conversations you have with people, where your words are extra-theatrical for no reason in particular, and the more natural conversations that you have all the time with people you know? I wonder a lot what the persona is that I've created for myself, since people say stuff like to me in natural-talk mode. Maybe I went too far?
I wasn't mad though. All I can guess is that it was another one of those instances where people can see my Wolf. They don't know my description of that me, but they do see him sometimes...

And then in my email box, I had a note from a manager who annoys me frequently...I will need to look back at it again and determine if someone put this person up to writing me a kind note, but I feel put-off by it. I am not placated by a kind note that is very probably the product of being guilt-tripped by people who could've written the same thing and meant it.

Then, the cherry on the top of my work day...staff members coming to hide in my office and have a cry.
And then fill out the bi-annual staff survey and give us some good marks solely because of me. Because I am always there to listen.

I always feel terribly empty when people say things like that. I want to believe they have someone else who is there for them to listen and be kind to them...but I live in perpetual terror of that little whisper in the back of my mind, asking me what if there is nobody?

As malicious as I might feel sometimes, and as untrusting as I might be of some people's intentions...none of that is as important to me as keeping everyone I can from feeling like there is nobody at all. And now I won't be able to sleep for thinking about it.

Have you ever been lying down, closed your eyes, and suddenly found that the room was spinning and you are completely disoriented and know that, A) if you felt that way when standing, you would have surely fallen, and B) if you were standing, you would definitely not be feeling that way?

I keep getting this feeling when I lie down to sleep. No idea what it could possibly mean. And it never happens when my eyes are open. Just when they're closed. And not when I am sitting or standing...just when I am lying down, which seems like the least logical position to be in and having feelings of dizzyness.

But I feel fine if I sit up. I feel perfectly normal. Except for, you know, the residual terror of spinning or flying and not knowing what direction anything was when I'd had my eyes shut.

In my own feeble attempt to work things out on my own, I know this is not a normal feeling--obviously I am not moving at all, and feeling that way maybe means something is wrong with me. But I feel 100% normal otherwise. And that just makes me worry more...that either I am definitely having dizzy feelings for no reason, or that there is a reason and ignoring it could be bad...

I'm becoming quite the hypochondriac, am I not?

That was fun. (although my family may possibly murder me for being on the phone until after 3am...)

It feels like forever that our conversations have consisted of me quietly listening to her natter on...I don't think I've had the opportunity in a long time to have the kind of talk that is a constant stream of sarcasm and witty remarks that keeps circling out and then going back to things we already talked about and that makes her laugh and choke on her tea and say incredibly stupid things back to me...

I don't think it ever dawned on me before that our every conversation like that was a kind of game. She saying silly things that she knew I wouldn't leave alone and would make all kinds of outrageous responses to. It never occured to me that she was doing it on purpose because it actually amuses her to hear me talk like that. How stupid of me.

Before I'd at least felt like I was terribly clever, but I also felt bad thinking that because of the other sense I've always had that the ridiculous things she says are, in part, honest...and that by worrying those silly things she says, I was being cruel...

But I think I understand better now. At least, I hope I do.
It's hard to know, after you admit to yourself that you've spent hundreds of hours speculating about a person, what's real and what you maybe only imagined. But maybe it doesn't matter too much.

What matters is making her laugh.
That makes me happy.

Hm.

Anyone else ever discover an author or a musician or an actor/actress or something where, after the first thing you read/hear/see from them, you're like, "huh, that was kind of awesome...must look more into this", and then been really disappointed?

I feel that way about Steven King.
I mean, I should like him, right? He writes about all manner of terrifying things, right? I like terrifying things. His characters have pretty active inner narratives. I like that. Enough that I can see myself mimicking parts of it when I write as a character.
But somehow, the only two books I've read by him and then thought, "that was a really good book...I'm glad I spent my time reading that" are his book about writing, and Cell.

I read Desperation because of a story I read by Andrew Schwab (vocalist of a band called Project 86), and he was talking about a book where some cop in the desert "goes crazy and starts killing everyone", and while I hated a lot of it, some bits were too good for me to write it off completely...and I read The Regulators because it was the companion book to Desperation, and it was awful...

I read Insomnia because something about the idea of not sleeping and so getting caught up in the hallucinatory world of higher powers and good and evil appealed to me...and that book also has its moments, but it just seemed lacking something...

And I read The Stand because it was supposed to be really good, but my word, that book is a million billion years long! And I say that as a person who loves The Lord of The Rings!

I don't know...I think...looking back at all the King books I've read, maybe I could have picked the more popular ones, like Carrie (whose movie is being remade), or Pet Semetary or Salem's Lot or something...but I didn't.
I guess after reading Cell, and then making four more attempts at liking his books I just have to give up. You can only go through so many stories where you think something is building up and becoming this spectacular thing and you can't wait to see what it is, and then getting disappointed when it fizzles out and turns into nothing much after all.

Sigh, I guess.

But, if you're ever in the mood for a book filled with good, horrifying details, I definitely recommend Cell. It's a little bit dated, even if it was written only seven years ago (cell phones have changed in new and terrifying ways in that short time) but I liked it enough to read it twice and I still think it's a good book. No disappointments.

And now, sleep time.

*sigh*

It's all very unfair.
(I said, in the kind of voice I might also use to say things such as "The world is round," or "Cats say 'meow' ".)

Listening is difficult, and particularly when every word is a word I myself could have said six years ago and did not because I couldn't bear to think that way.
Come now, if I truly believed it was nonsense to keep after someone who didn't really make an effort to call or text or write (wow, remember writing letters? actual letters, like, that came in the mailbox?) or email or any of that, do you think you would have had that last three hours to talk unceasingly to me? No. Because I would have given up and you would not know me to talk to.

It does reassure me to hear you say it about people who really aren't worth it. Don't get me wrong...but I feel a little guilty in agreeing with you that you are doing the right thing, since my current self was sculpted quite heavily by a chisel shaped like that kind of situation. I couldn't let it go, and I still can't sometimes. I think I can stand it and I think I stopped caring, and in fact I am at times repulsed by it...but ultimately, I still will sit for these three hour conversations and listen to your voice and feel that same pain in my chest that I felt before because I cared so much and there was nothing I could do.

Listening is difficult: I said that already.
Loving is terrible.

I feel very sorry.

He got out today. I didn't mean for that to happen. We haven't been in each other's way much for a while now...but then...he just got out and I don't know what happened.

I've gotten so in control of my temper compared to maybe twoish years ago when it was unacceptably short (by my standards, anyway...I have high standards). I wasn't expecting the smudge of grumpyness I woke up with to keep billowing and blackening and to bare our teeth at the world.

I tried to make it a smile, but a lot of them knew anyway and did what he tried to do before...try to tell me it's okay...but they didn't look sad at me, and instead got these wide-eyed looks, and the way they put their hands up looked like it could be to get me to hold up, or to block me in case I suddenly set upon them...
I wish I didn't feel like that's how it looked. And I feel bad that they like me enough that they know the difference between me smiling (even the fake ones), and me showing my teeth and trying to make it look like smiling. I was trying very hard. I feel abashed...I had no right to let them see him.

I am lucky though. I spent almost all the day notating paperwork, filing things, compiling lists of tasks the managers need to complete asap...I scarcely had to see anyone...it just had to happen that the one time I was requested to come out of that, it was for a reason that left me blind and shaking with rage.

Ridiculous.

You'd think I said that to be theatrical. Because I read it somewhere, maybe. You know by now how much I read and how impressionable I've confessed myself to be.

That's not it at all.
I used to think some things said in books were absurd: people do not behave that way; nobody who has lived has felt like that, etc.

But I don't think that anymore.

It's not right. It's not at all right that I should be sent on my one idiotic errand of the day, and to do it I have to trail my hand on the wall and walk slow down the stairs because I've gotten so worked up that my vision is blurring and swimming between full-colour life and white-hot emptiness.

I have been listening to music for a little bit to see if I could feel calm...I feel a bit better...very tense...I should probably sleep soon.

On the bright side...
My favourite band will have a new album out in two weeks.
*excited!*

I don't get excited about much.

what it was is surprise. i didn't have to answer the questions again.

(all i wanted was to sound intelligent)

Who ever says "aaw, shucks"? Who these days says that?
Not that I wasn't pleased. It was terribly endearing. I will forgive that and even the week it took to get a response.

Do I sound sincere? ever? do i ever sound like truth? because i don't to me. not anymore. i can't tell what from what. and i tried to explain it to her, that i was working ever-so-hard to not do any of those over-the-top expressions. just for a day. just to see what it was like to be honest again. i could not do it.
it makes me a little sad. i want to stop. sometimes i don't think i have it in me to keep it up. and sometimes i just feel sick at myself for making such a show that i don't even know how i really feel anymore...but they love it. it's like his "aaw shucks". nobody does what i do. but i see them trying. I see things they do because they have picked it up from me and it seems to make them happier. Just the tiniest bit. And that's alright. I feel alright about that. And then I see I can not stop myself. Because then I would make them sad. And I would go back to being utterly paranoid.

(paranoid? remember what that was like? huh. but i do still hallucinate. cant sleep anymore. just stay awake and awake and don't feel tired and only try to fall asleep because i have to and if i don't, i will continue to see the little black things vanishing and darting through the edges of my eyesight, and the dark, crouched figures like the one who i dreamt was at the foot of my bed and who looked oh-so-like the me who is Wolf)

He told me to meet up with him so I could get additional training. That sounds hopeful. It does. But I don't trust him. I don't trust him because there is that other me who, while I am making calculations and notes and stapling things and scrapping things...that other creature is watching with those yellow-grey eyes that observe and store away so much information that I know will be useful to me later, making his own calculations and notes...

But how is it useful to me just to know I cannot trust this person?

Not that I use all my powers of observation to, you know. Draw useful conclusions.
I have observed her for eleven years. I know all about flakiness. I know I do. I do know that. But when she says to me without preamble that I will do this or that (with an exclamation mark, no less!), I believe her. The idea that I still feel overwhelmingly that I will do anything she says is, what? Terrifying? Embarrassing? Yes to all.

I hate to hear the birds chirruping at 330AM when I leave work. It's the most depressing sound in the universe.

My new favourite remark to insert into arguments conversations where someone else is utterly wrong and is getting all spitting-cat mad and foolish: Are you speaking emotionally or rationally?

I was walking briskly and heard a splotch of conversation where a server was telling another server that someone was rude and mad. As I passed them, I announced that I was rude and mad (the other kind) and they laughed and said that my rudeness was funny. Oh? So I am rude? Does being funny make it okay?

Man, I don't know who I am half the time anymore.

And my dog and I. We walked today and it was perfect. It felt cool and not windy or bright and everything was so nice...it was probably the best-spent hour of my day.

Something's not good, but I can't figure out what it is. More than one thing, maybe. That's usually the way of it. I've felt alright though. (Have I? I think that might be a lie.)

*pause*

Maybe not. Maybe I knew. I mean, usually I do. But it's like being convinced that you've broken a bone, but when you touch around to try and figure out where it's hurt, there's no place that stands out. It's all of it. But that can't be right, can it?

I'm saying it wrong. It's nothing like a broken bone. It doesn't hurt that bad.

Just...you know...the things like how incredibly difficult it's gotten for me to read. Not that I can't do it, but it takes me so long anymore to get through a few pages. I have never been a slow reader, but now I can't seem to process things anymore. And the fact that I haven't actually been hungry in almost a month? I eat because I'm in the habit of it...and not like...excessive eating. Just any eating. I don't want to do it. I'm not hungry. I've been getting occasional stabbing pains, but they feel more like intestine pains than stomach pains...so probably not an ulcer, right? They aren't consistent, so I don't know if I'm being paranoid when I wonder if something is wrong with me...... (At least we can take comfort in knowing I'm still good at being paranoid.)

I don't think I'm alright, but I can't pinpoint anything besides that being wrong.

The only upsetting thing that's happened lately is something I don't know how to process properly. I had an idea that is waiting on Tuesday to see my next week's schedule, but I don't know. (Lies.)