Vacation time. I will be back on the 3rd.

Yesterday I was thinking again about leaving, and why I do not try harder.
I almost told myself that getting attached was the worst, but then I realised that was wrong. The worst is when I try and talk myself out of it and tell myself that all the reasons I feel that way are a lie.

The one thing I tried hardest to talk myself away from almost made me leave for good.
I don't want to try that ever again.

I mean...what if I believed myself?

I think I go to movies because I like loud noises.

I wouldn't've said that before, but I think I'm onto something. I am not joking when I say the surround sound, especially at low levels, has the ability to make me cry. It doesn't even have to be an emotional scene--I just get teary-eyed for no reason but that rumbling bass I can feel in my chest. I never have understood why so many people complain about things being too loud. It's my favourite bit about the whole experience.

I am also convinced now that I like to go by myself so I can think.
I went to see a movie after work today, but it wasn't going to be until almost two and a half hours after my shift ended. I went outside and walked around for a while. Everything was closed except the new iced cream shop. It seemed like a good alternative to the bars, which were the only other places still open (and where I was 100% more likely to run into my coworkers), so I went in and got an iced cream and sat out on one of the outdoor couches, in the cold.

For about four days now, I haven't eaten very much. I don't think I'm doing it on purpose. It's just that my body seems to have stopped prompting me to eat, and when I try and force myself to do something about it, I find out after a few bites that I really just can't. It wasn't until I woke up this morning that I even felt hungry, but then I spent the first few hours of my shift feeling extremely sick.
But I ate the iced cream alright. And I searched for a picture and promptly killed my phone battery (and scolded myself for not charging it before leaving the house). Then I got bored and moved to the outdoor area at the other end of the mall. For forty minutes I sat under a bunch of leafy trees strung with Christmas lights, and I watched the people walking around before they went home, and the people closing up the Italian restaurant for the night. My feet hurt, so I wound up being that creepy person who is sitting at a bench at night with their shoes off. Ah well.

I think I like our mall a lot better at night, but I like most places better at night, so that isn't saying much.
It all smells different.

Anyway. I went to my movie. So I could hear the loud noises.
I was slightly envious of Randal's story of going to the movie with Toni and Drew. He agreed it would've been better if I'd been there. (Probably because he is still certain that she and I are almost the same person. I sometimes feel like he goes out of his way to have us near each other for closer comparison.)

We have had some fun conversations lately though. I mean, I've enjoyed them.

Chris, a server, walks into a theatre we are bussing.
Chris: So Star Trek is over?
Toni: No.
pause
Chris: Oh. I get it. You're being sarcastic.
Me: No, she's quite serious.
Chris: Um. There's nothing on screen.
Me: Space is very dark.
Chris: I'm pretty sure I have a college degree--
Me: --as have I. You understand then that space is dark.
Toni: I have a degree in the internet.
Chris: Whatever. Y'all are crazy.
We watch Chris walk away.
Toni: I see what you're saying. Space is dark.
Me: I'm so glad someone understands.

-----

Toni: Ohmygosh! You'll never guess what I saw no less than five times yesterday!
I am 99.9% sure it's something related to tears, which we had been discussing collecting and selling as specialty drinks to the heartless.
Me: Probably not.
Toni: Spock tears! I timed it so I would know how long into the movie that scene was in case I had a free moment between bussing.
Me: I knew it.
Toni: Wait. You said you couldn't guess.
Me: I lied? I'm psychic.
Toni: Oh, right. That. Can I show you something on my phone related to this conversation?
Me: Mmm. I can make an exception.
Toni takes her phone out.
Toni: Look. Isn't it adorable?
Her phone background would take too much text to explain.
Me: Does this mean I should find a mirror shot from the movie and set it as my background? You know. To emphasize our 1% difference?
Toni: *smiling* Um. That's creepy. I won't try to stop you.
Me: Consider it done.

I won't pretend I'm not tickled to have someone around who speaks with my same levels of both sarcasm and false enthusiasm (they are not the same thing). With every single other person at work, there are beats in our conversations that make them seem staged (mostly my doing, I admit), but she never misses a beat. We should talk more.

I've been messing around with ways I talk at work again (gotta be entertained somehow), seeing what responses they get from everyone...I was tricked into using my British accent on a bunch of new people. That irked me a little, but I guess it was a good thing. It's hard to explain, but I think I'd get a similar response if I did a magic trick or brought in a cute puppy--beaming smiles or suddenly rapt attention from everyone around. Exactly what I don't want when I need people to be doing work. >.<"
There is a different one I've been doing when I actually want to disarm people. It's really stupid of me to do, but mostly it consists of using almost all declarative sentences, lots of exclamation marks, and suddenly changing topics. Like the way your dog might talk if it could. Brandi! I helped clean twenty and eighteen! It was bad. We broke a glass. It was really bad! But don't worry! It's all clean now. I'd like to eat. Can I please go for my break now? I can wait if you want. Then looking expectantly at her while she decides whether it's safe to stand near me. Usually things end in my favour though, so I won't write that one off entirely.

I did it yesterday and Randal said he didn't understand how I could even pretend to be that overexcited, but it's incredibly difficult for me to tone down my fake enthusiasm sometimes. It almost makes me believe it's real when that happens. If I didn't feel about the same as Eeyore all the time, I'd know it was real. But I do. And it isn't.
Tristan persuaded me to try and tone down the excitement. But clipped declaratives really do sound stupid when you slow them down. So I subtracted contractions and wound up with a speech mannerism that I probably should use next time Toni and I talk.

Tristan: So, can I ask who's drinking out of this skull cup?
Me: I am the only member of the management team who drinks from skulls.
Tristan: I should've guessed. This trash can probably isn't a good seat.
Me: I would not call it a good seat, but you can sit on it. I assure you it will probably not fall in.
Tristan: Um...I guess I feel assured...
Me: Perhaps my use of the word probably was ill thought out.
Tristan: *laughs* Don't worry, Spock, I trust you.
Me: ................
Tristan: And your expressionless face isn't creepy at all.
Me: It is very difficult to maintain.

That really is hard to keep up. Even with expressions. It's hard to keep myself from using apostrophes for any length of time. And I defy anyone who says otherwise. (Kind of like my effort to not use ellipses in this very long post!) I mean, I may even keep at it, just as a challenge to myself. (Not the ellipses thing, but the apostrophes and contractions in my speech.)

Because that's what happens when you spend 25-30 hours a week in a 6'x6' room with no air vent, and are expected to constantly be looking at hundreds of thousands of tiny numbers every day and make yourself a living daily-planner book because nobody can keep track of anything and you're overwhelmed with guilt if you don't make every effort to ensure that everything you knew needed to be done got done, and that it was done right.

I almost hate sometimes that I seem to be ideally suited to the job I do, simply because of my unfortunate combination of obsessive compulsion and a guilty conscience. At some point, I began to hate the notion of even thinking of myself as obsessive compulsive...but I still am.
Example: if you told me to get off the computer and go to bed, I could not just switch off the computer and do so. I would have to go to the bathroom twice to make sure I would not wake up, and one of those times I would have to wash my hands all the way up to the elbows because, all day long, I am often touching unclean surfaces with my elbows so as to not touch them with my newly washed hands.

It's terrible.
And, along with stupid stuff like that goes statements like this about OCD, "Its sufferers commonly share personality traits such as high attention to detail, avoidance of risk, careful planning, exaggerated sense of responsibility and a tendency to take time in making decisions."

That is 1000% me at work. Not in my personal life, maybe, but definitely at work.

And I sigh. And get back to my original point: I like to go to movies so I can think.
I thought about all this while I was at my show, and about some new drama that's going on at the theatre...we might be losing another manager, which I feel slightly responsible for even though it has zero things to do with me. I may only feel that way because it's the admin manager.
My counterpart and I have had four different managers in charge of us in less than a year. One of whom was fired, one who is currently suspended, and one who has proven so unreliable that senior management has refused to reassign this person to another work group.

It's like she and I are the equivalent of the Defense Against the Dark Arts position at Hogwarts. You get to be in charge of us and bad things happen to you.

And Wolf started whispering to me about that, and about why it keeps happening, and I wished and wished and wished I could stop being paranoid and stop with these ridiculous superstitious thoughts that get rooted in my brain and that I try so so so hard to let go of and can't once they take hold.

I just want to be wrong. It's not a good experience to feel so intensely that something is right, when you know your feeling is baseless and probably wrong, and to want so badly to actually be wrong, and it never turns out that way.

It's why I think I know things when I can't possibly know them, and why my bad feelings are so intensely bad.
I just want to be shown that this is all not true, and it keeps not happening.

It's very distressing.
I went for a very long drive after the movie, and I still don't know what to think.
It's bad enough that I may even write this much again tomorrow.

I decided yesterday that I hate myself...so I scheduled myself to work with the bussers tonight. Things went really well though, up until some of our sold-out theatres started ending and the other managers failed to respond to my request for assistance. But even then all that happened was that we had three shows that started seating about 5 minutes late. That's pretty good. (The perfectionist in me is just irritated to know that none of them needed to have been late at all.)

I am extremely sore right now though, from running around and around all night. I feel like for every step the bussers took, I took three because I still wound up doing admin tasks before my counterpart arrived, and had to put on my friendliest face for the new people so they would be off to a good start on their first day...

And at some point during the evening, I learned that one of our newer servers is seeking me out specifically to help them with problems...which is adorable, but that definitely added a lot of distance to what I already would have walked today. Unsure what to do with that one. Need to get them to trust the other managers more.

I may be paranoid...but I think I'm seeing a trend among our staff members who've come to sit in the office and cry for a minute. They seem to gravitate to me. Not in an excessive way...but...when things are going bad for them, they seem to look for me. It's touching...but ultimately, terrifying for me because even in a work environment that I am familiar with, I feel like I lose confidence in myself when I actually know someone is looking to me to make things better. There are enough sources of stress at work without my feeling like I need to look after anyone.

Which brings me to a story I had kind of forgotten about...
I always park at the top of our parking garage, and today I saw two little birds at the wall around the lot. They seemed like they could be baby birds, but I wasn't sure, so I parked and walked back over to where they were. They didn't fly away or even try very hard to hop away from me...I could have picked them up. I wanted to, but I didn't know where to put them. I couldn't put them on the ledge around the wall, because what if they fell off? :(
I looked at them for a few minutes, and they looked at me, and I could almost hear their little bird voices asking me if I was going to eat them, or if they were going to die, or what was happening...and I couldn't think of what to do, so I had to leave them there and hope they didn't get squashed.

It was horrible.
It made me think of little hurt birds, and how they just shiver and shiver, or breathe so hard and fast they look like they might pop...and you know they're going to die, but they do it so slowly and it makes you feel sick and awful and you want it to be okay...but it isn't.

*hugs all the little birds*

But don't worry. I managed to avoid getting overly emotional about little birds...probably only because I told three or four other people and, in doing so, wiped all traces of happiness from each of their faces. I hadn't really meant to...but...I won't pretend I didn't feel a little better.
I'm just there was not a trace of the birds when I left.

*sigh*
I think I'm getting obsessed with something again. I don't mean to...and usually I know when it might happen, but not this time. I mean, I guess I can kind of see how it happened...way back in college with an awful, annoying, feminist-rooted article that somehow happened to be based on this...but I wouldn't have guessed that it could sneak up on me and, in the span of two days, actually attempt to hijack the narrative I have been building and retelling myself every single day for seven years.

That's pretty strong stuff. I'm not sure how it managed to bowl me over like that.

I'm a little disappointed that I will probably be unable to find that article again...I has the overpowering curiosity...
I ought to have held on to more of my notes, it seems.

I have an obnoxios thought that keeps resurfacing...that I should find a book...we'll see how well I stave that off, eh?

Dear diary,

Today I was walking down the hall at work. Not usually a noteworthy experience, but there was a slow-moving knot of employees that was in my way. I swept briskly around them, and for some reason this freaked out one of the other supervisors. He said I was like a shark, zooming past a school of slow-moving fish.

Later, we were in our little 6'x6' office. He was eating iced cream and I was working on payroll when he told me he could not remember if he clocked in. I put on my serious face and said in my most deadly patient voice that I was getting tired of spending half my life chasing down his in/out times, and that if he knew what was good for him, he would please eat his iced cream in silence and try hard to avoid attracting my attention. He wound up snorting iced cream, but my serious face didn't flicker. I think I used up a week's worth of willpower on it.

Still later, I was doing a server's check-out. He seemed to think I was sad, and asked if the reason was because I had not received enough child sacrifices for the day. I was unsure how to respond and cannot recall how I got out of that conversation.

Then, I came home and saw on facebook that one of my professors wrote about missing me, and said he would be a much better teacher if he could teach one of me every semester.

Unsure what conclusions I should draw from all of this...
But I think I can say that I've succeeded in making other people be weird in regard to me.

I don't know how I feel about that.

Saw the Star Trek movie. Liked the first one better.
Although I was reminded of when I saw the last one. I'd forgotten all about it, but it was one of those peculiar moments in my life that I look back upon and want to punch my own face. Except I'm conflicted about that, too. Technically it wasn't my fault...that one...it was just one of those times where I open my mouth to speak, and something awkward comes out. *shrug*

Anyway. Today I could not talk again, but it was more literal...I had in mind what I wanted to say, but my body was rebelling and making sounds that were definitely not English words...and then my fiance declared me a Creagle.
I told him something about work yesterday, and it being determined that I had the eyes of an eagle, and the voice of a crow (I don't really have either...). I guess a mishmash of these birds are would be a Creagle.

I forget if I had anything else.

K, maybe. I still have not written to her. But I thought about things she'd say to me, and how annoyed I would get. I wanted to punch her face in sometimes, too. But she is one of the best people I know. I feel bad that I think of her in relation to Star Trek and then want to punch her face...but for me, the very word logic has strong (and not altogether positive) associations with her.

*considers*
It's frustrating that my fiance and one of my best friends both have this habit of telling me I'm being irrational (that seems to be his word...she always favors logical) when I'm already pissed off. It's one of those things that pushes Wolf closer to the surface...not that they're wrong about me. Now and then, I'm prone to fits of seriously flawed thinking...but I've never found it helpful to have this pointed out to me like that.

I feel better, but the last time I had yesterday's thought lodged in my head, she kept using that argument on me. It was painful. Possibly the coldest pep talk I've ever been given in my life. I was so mad at being spoken to like that...I told her later, of course, and she cried and I felt like a monster. But really...

I think I did what she told me to out of sheer spite.

And here I am.

So.

I have had the worst two days ever.
The kind where, must be time to die keeps popping into my mind.

I guess not. Maybe.
I am so, so tired.

Dreamed I should stop taking that acid-reduction medicine. Someone in my dream told me it would kill me. Now I definitely don't want to take it.

Then I dreamed something bizarre about...what? My cat, maybe? I can't recall. Something small and furry.

Goodbye.

He's broken, I swear.

Anyway. I guess I am done with winning. We did so good at it. This is the longest I have ever been winning. Ever. But we're broken. I can't be mad. I lost. It happens. *shrug* But it didn't need to happen.

if i just didn't get so angry

The other me would take care of it. But I'm broken. I was supposed to just hush. I did. I did so good at it. He was taking care of everything until we got angry. And just started saying words. I knew they were all wrong. It could be said better. Or unsaid. But I couldn't stop saying words, and all I remember is always the same. The bloody-red mist or the white-hot blindness that covers over what I was doing, but doesn't stop me saying the words.

I could have saved it if I wasn't broken. :(

Now I just can't think too closely about anything. I am listening to music, obsessive-compulsively arranging the songs depending on whether I was in high school, college, or out of school when I first heard them. I don't really hear them though. I hear nothing.

I think, deep down, that I destroyed something. I didn't mean to. I didn't mean it at all. I wanted to just be able to say nothing because at some point in my life I stopped being able to talk honestly about how I feel. I'm not a liar. That doesn't make me a liar. It just means I'm broken and I mess it up whenever I do try to say how I feel.

i can't breathe. its the same pain as when i was dying. i just know now and hope maybe i will not feel it.
I took my stomach medicine that I was trying to persuade myself I didn't need. Because the sudden stress of it is hurting me.

I should have learned better how to just shut up.

There's a lot I have that I could tell you about...like being visited not once, but TWICE this month by my best friend who has not visited me in my home state since I was 17. (She lives in Memphis, I live in Ohio.) I could also tell you about a band I went to see last night that was my favourite band ever during my formative teenage years, and that broke up when I was...16? And whose lead singer I have called myself after for the past 11 years...oh, the nostalgia!

But I have something else.

Dreams.

Dreams that I am kind of curious about, since I had two with the same theme, two nights in a row.

Two nights ago, I dreamt I was at work...a lot of our employees I knew were there, but we weren't open and there were a lot of other people there, too. It was very late at night, and the only way I knew was because, in my dream, I had that too-tired feeling I get between 3 and 6 am (you know...if you're like me and view that time frame as when you know you stayed up too long, then you know what I mean and can also sense that time when it rolls around, regardless of whether you can see a clock or out a window to know if it is still dark out).
We seemed to all be waiting for something, but I don't know what...there was kind of a fun atmosphere...like the kind you might remember if you ever went to a camp or something where you all stayed up late one night for something special. I remember eating these funky little Japanese candies...they were round and kind of crunchy like milk duds, but they had a bumpy outer shell. No idea if I've ever seen such a thing in my life...

But, not long after eating the candy, something happened to me in my dream, and I started changing.
I started out as the me you would know in real life, but I started turning into my Wolf...not the one with the tail and yellow eyes, but the one who looks like me. Me, if I had a twin brother.

He's taller, and I guess that must be what tipped people off that something was not right with me...so people started crowding around and talking in those quiet, concerned voices I hate so much...and I growled at them. And that was when I started changing again into the wolf-creature that I talk so much about.

I don't know why it happened. Just that it did, and the end of my dream was me, half wolf and half human, looking like some silly horror movie monster, trotting down a hallway that dead ended, and then turning around to face the people who were coming after me, still pretending to be concerned, but moving cautiously, like they were planning to catch me or do me harm.

I have never dreamed before about actually turning into a wolf.

But then I did again last night.

My dreams have interesting visuals sometimes, and the one last night kept flickering between cartoon animation and live-action.

I can't really remember how it got started, but I think originally that I was just watching the dream happen. I had a sense I was at someone's shoulder, but I couldn't actually see this person.
There was a lot of snow, and some little hills that were burial mounds. Then, as we/I watched, one of the mounds crumbled inward a little, like it had just been a hollow crust of snow. Out of it ran this creepy, white thing that was a sort of scorpion, but with a more pronounced, alien-like head. It shook itself and then ran, legs making a spine-tingling noise on the ice. It didn't seem to see anyone, but as it ran past, I followed it and saw a character who resembled Loki from the Avenger movies. He ran after it and my dream changed its point of view to his, so I was running after it.

The scorpion thing started running up a wall, and at that point I realised I had something heavy in my hand, so I threw it hard at the scorpion and hit it. It screeched and hit the ground, and when I got to it, I kept hitting it until it curled up the way dead spiders do. It was weird though, because the exoskeleton looked completely undamaged...nothing oozed out.

Then I went back to just observing the dream, and other characters started to show up. They looked vaguely Viking-like, and wanted to know where the monster had come from, and why the Loki character hadn't stopped it before it started climbing the walls. He told them something about it just popping out of Odin's tomb (to which my dream consciousness was like, um...Odin's dead? how does that work out?) and that he could show them.
It seemed like a long walk back across the snow, but finally we all made it to where the little hills were, but there was a pack of wolves surrounding the broken hill.

None of the other Vikings wanted to go closer, but it occurred to me that the Loki character could shape-change, and so something weird happened...usually my dreams just shift POV naturally, but this time it was like I took possession of the Loki character. He seemed to know I was there, and be dismayed by it.

But he understood we could shape-change, and why I wanted him to do it, so we did...and we became a wolf. Not my Wolf, but a wolf nevertheless. And we went over to the other wolves, who seemed to have anthropomorphic intelligence instead of just wolf intelligence...and they were laughing a kind of psychic laugh that we could sense but not hear. They smelled him/me all over, and said (telepathically) that they could smell me. Not him, although they knew the Loki character was not a wolf. They could smell me. And that amused them. But they also said they would talk with me, because they could see I believed myself a wolf-creature and that was second-best to actually being one....

And my dream ended.

It was weird in a new way because, although I was an invisible entity, there were other characters in the dream who were aware of me...Loki knew I was "possessing" him, and was afraid of me...and the wolves knew I was there and knew things about me that had nothing to do with the action of the dream...

It was kind of creepy, really.

And now...it's almost time to go to work and hope I don't actually turn into anything monsterlike.

Good day. I'll take it.

Slept badly....dreamt about being in a field at night with some people from work...apparently we or maybe just one person was practising falconry and was not very good at it because I was being attacked by a hawk. No bueno.

OH!
And I dreamed another sequence where I got stabbed by a fragment of narwhal tusk.

Yeah. Those are real. Whales with unicorn horns.
But don't worry. I wasn't stabbed by a narwhal. Just a broken piece of tusk that happened to be around...it was a very unpleasant dream because I could feel the tusk piece jabbed into my hand. *shudder*

But yeah. Eventually I gave up on sleeping and instead got up to get my hair cut. And the girl who cut my hair did something with the trimmer when she was working on my neck...it HURT. I feel like I have a billion tiny cuts there, but one of the other supervisors checked and there's nothing weird, so idk...still hurts. :/

Went and looked at a car. Liked it...still gotta wait for some things to be fixed up, but I'll likely have a new car within a fortnight. Yay.

And I got to go to our second staff party and see Iron Man 3. I wasn't going to get to...but our sr. mgr relented and said I could go and clock in late. And yes, that's pay I could've had...but I feel really excluded sometimes. It's nice to feel like I'm part of a team or a group of people who is there because, ultimately, we like movies, and not just there because it's a job. Maybe I'm stupid for thinking that way...but I feel a lot better. (And, you know...the film in question underlines my statement that people like me become villains from being excluded one too many times. Not that I'm on a fast track to villainy or anything :P)

And then I worked and left so I could go home and sleep before I have to open...but then I went to see Jester and talk to him for a little bit...and then I came home and I am wide awake. :(

Tomorrow is going to be a very, very long day.