cerebrotonic

cerebrotonic @ 2008-05-09T23:46:00

2008-05-10T04:47:03Z

either my laptop or my net connection here is crap, so i haven't been inclined to making much of an online presence these days. that, and i feel like i've been insanely, ridiculously busy. i feel stretched so thin. i'll be happy when this week is over. i work all day mother's day. (Fuck mother's day. My mom's on my shitlist right now.) working six days this week. and i had the move...and i had to finish my final paper. i'm a crab right now. there's just been a lot to juggle lately.

but i went for a nice walk when i came home tonight. found out the place where i'm living was actually an innsbrook development - the company my dad worked for. they have a really sweet development style. they buy up a lot of wooded acreage and farmland, dam up some valleys, make lakes, and sell the land off in large lots that, for the most part, stay wooded and rustic. so that's how the lake i live by originally got here. and since it's been raining a lot, there's a nice little stream created by the spillway that i'll have to take the camera to when i get settled.

got my economic stimulus package $$ today. Nice. Nice of the government to return to me an incremental portion of what they have stolen from the masses.

reading Milan Kundera's Testaments Betrayed now. He rocks. I am consistently inspired and humbled by anything of his that I open...

It's so candlelit, coffee drinking bath time. I am exhausted.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-25T11:21:00

2008-04-25T16:27:04Z

got to see jason last night, which cheered me up a lot. taking Cat over there tonight, so that I can take Bosephus with me to my grandparents. I might beg them to let Buster be our garage cat or something. I don't know what else to do with him.

productive morning. so far i got my hair cut, got my oil changed, went to the bank, and lugged in a bunch of boxes. i may need a little nap, though, to catch up on missed sleep.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-23T09:02:00

2008-04-23T14:02:19Z

moving more stuff this morning. if i take a load today and another friday, i'll be in pretty good shape to enjoy my weekend without feeling like i'm blowing it off. by sunday or monday i should mostly have just clothes, furniture, and all my kitchen stuff, i hope.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-22T23:19:00

2008-04-23T04:19:03Z

i'm all out of it from a half a glass of white zinfandel i drank with my dinner. haha. bread dipped in olive oil and parmesan cheese, almonds, walnuts, apricots, some gouda cheese, and some wine. what kind of yuppie am i trying to pretend i am? haha.

only one more class, thank god. i find myself feeling more and more weird and small and solitary as grad school progresses. dunno, probably just me being more and more weird socially.

but Cat loves me, I guess. even if i can't communicate.

howard, my professor from last semester, walked past in the hall and asked me what class i was waiting for. when i told him he laughed and said that i seemed like "a memoir in waiting." said i seem to have more of that kind of material than the rest of them. which is kind of a good thing...but kind of weird too. drama drama.

...

busy week. work kicked my ass. again. moving stuff tomorrow. and work. 99 cent ribs. bargain day at the bbq place - one can imagine the caliber of clientele this brings out of the suburban woodwork. i miss my boyfriend because we didn't see each other much this weekend and probably won't till friday or so. but...anticipation can be a good thing.

...

that half glass of wine totally killed my motivation to rant or work on my essay revisions. how do writers do the whole alcoholic tortured artist thing? it's naaaaptime.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-22T03:05:00

2008-04-22T08:05:58Z

i saw my mom tonight, briefly. just long enough to be sufficient to piss me off.

she has another boyfriend, whose name is something like heine. not that i need to remember that. i'm sure he won't be around long, and certainly won't be a part of our lives. it only came up coincidentally. my grandparents and the kids thought it was pronounced like "high-knee" which has always been family slang for private parts. with this association in mind, my grandma got her wires crossed and remembered him as "Fannie Mae or something like that" when she was trying to recall his name.

all of that, irrelevant to why i'm pissed off. i'm pissed off because AGAIN she said she didn't have kids. she's only recently started claiming her younger two. Kelsey (my sister) told me this as my mom sat casually a few feet away, staring into her laptop screen. we see one another once a month at best, sometimes, once every three months. we speak very little. when we do see one another, still, she'd rather be on the computer. I don't give a fuck if the man she's dating knows I exist. I'm upset by the fact that my mom feels like we aren't important enough in her life to merit inclusion. It makes me very unhappy that she thinks it's all some kind of trivial joke. And it's very hurtful that she isn't proud enough of us to WANT to talk about us, like most mothers do.

All it takes is something stupid like that and I feel fifteen and emo again. She talks all her shit about loving her kids and being a good mother, but it's all in her own mind. No parent who's worth the title would be so lacking in pride or compassion for her chlidren. i'm less mad that i am kind of hurt by it all. but it's not exactly hurt, either, it's a cynical, jaded kind of resignation. she really can be a complete peice of shit. and what do i do about it? nothing. i just sit back and take it and take it and take it, and get all happy when she does some tiny mom thing like remember to call me on my birthday.

and another thing. she said the pilots were asking if she has daughters and (wink wink) if they might meet them. my mom says, no, they're not meeting her daughters and besides, the oldest one's still dating some guy she doesn't like anyway. why doesn't she like jason? early in our relationship i can understand, though it's not really accurate, that she would blame my depression and my insecurities on my dating partner. it's an assumption that a lot of my family made in the beginning, and it makes sense. i don't see that as his doing, but the confusion and limited communication we had early on didn't really help my head at the time, though they (and i) probably hoped and/or expected a relationship should. it's not really a fair expectation. it never is or was jason's responsibility to fix my emotional state. i had to sort my problems out myself, to a very great extent, or we'd never be where i feel we are now. but back then they just saw me being an emotional wreck and chose the simple causal scenario. however, my entire family has really come to see him and our relationship very differently. Jimmy, my grandma, even my grandpa - all of the people in my life who think no one is worthy actually approve. everyone has really come to like him and to appreciate what the relationship means to me. Except my mom. Though I tell her why it works, that i'm happy, she only retains the negatives.

But what the fuck do I care if she doesn't like my boyfriend? It makes no difference. If anything, I still have a teenage desire to rebel against anything she thinks. Ha. But I do find myself very defensive of him, and very bristly at her of all people voicing any negative opinion. She has no basis for it. It irritates me that she thinks she has any clue about what is really going on in my life or what is best for me. Like she might have privileged information or some insight into my internal life. Bitch, please. She doesn't know the first thing about who I am. All she knows is the timid child that I can't quite shed when I'm around her. All she knows is the old bullshit roles we fell into and will probably never escape. And I'll probably always resent her for her blindness and her ignorance.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-21T04:48:00

2008-04-21T09:48:29Z

holy shit - i just fell asleep on decongestant in an uncomfortable way on my futon. while sleeping, i had this insane scifi dream that incorporated the neck and back discomfort into this elaborate bizzare blade runnerish dream that i had to wake to write down. if i could fulfill the basic plot it outlined for me and write that way well, it could be a book. that's right - this is me, considering writing sci-fi.

this decongestant doesn't do fuck for my congestion, but it's neat shit for recreation alone.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-21T01:37:00

2008-04-21T06:44:02Z

i worked my ass off this weekend.
not long hours, really, just very intense ones.
the worst were saturday and tonight. i'm sick, AGAIN. so running around like crazy, being congested, and hacking weren't exactly a good time. and it sucks when i work sundays because i needs my cuddly time. but i did make fat stacks, as the young ones say these days. so that's good. i just hope i didn't infect jason with this over the weekend...

tomorrow=cleaning room, moving shit, paying bills, doing homework. etc etc etc

i should be sleeping but there was another tremor (i think) and it's got me a little scared. plus i was watching rock of love 2 episodes on vh1 and now i'm just awake. and it's rotted my brain so that i don't think i have anything particularly meaningful, intelligent, or even noteworthy to talk about right now. damn.

but maybe my momentary numbness is good. i could be brooding fruitlessly over the food crisis i've been hearing about a lot in the last week or so. it only makes me feel better about vegetarian leanings. when there are people starving in the world because food is expensive and scarce and there's not enough grain to go around, and it takes 10lbs of grain to make 1lb of meat, there is definitely a moral choice being made when opting for steak. as much as i feel like crap about being a part of the consumption driven culture that is the modern West, at least I know that there's some small thing I do on a daily basis that i can feel good about.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-18T13:47:00

2008-04-18T18:47:02Z

bad

waking up at 4:45 to earthquake
waking up at 8 to john knocking on my door b/c maintenance wanted to work on a/c unit
waking up at 11 to aftershock
feeling sickish - throat/head/bodyache stuff
having to work at 5pm
having to work all day tomorrow
having to work Sunday, which is LazyCoffeeshopDay for Jason and i
still feeling torn about Buster and Cat. it's an issue of loyalty vs requited love, respectively

good

finally catching up on some sleep
coffee
i have chop suey left over at work to eat
i got some of my living room deco boxed up
there are three girls on tonight so we can't be too swamped
i did all hell of sidework yesterday so today will be easier

to do

call att to cancel service
call laclede to cancel service
call ameren to cancel service
change my mailing address on cards, bank statements, student loan account, umsl paperwork, etc
get gas
go to bank
make new ipod playlists

try to

finish my essay revisions this weekend
type up response papers and see prof with them before class tues
type up and flesh out some recent poem work
drink lots of water
see if jeff will return dvds for me
box up about 3 full car loads to take monday morning
get oil changed monday

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/primarysources

2008-04-18T17:32:33Z

Manifest Density

The secret of Wal-Mart’s success may also be its Achilles’ heel. Thomas J. Holmes, an economist at the University of Minnesota, found that as Wal-Mart started colonizing the U.S. retail market, in the 1960s, it methodically expanded outward from its base in Arkansas, keeping its stores close together. When Holmes measured the effects of this “economy of density,” he found that although the strategy was key in boosting Wal-Mart’s enormous profits, growth opportunities are now limited, as the company has essentially exhausted its ability to expand. Building stores in tight clusters saves money by keeping trucking costs down and helping the company respond to shifts in demand. But those stores also tend to cannibalize each other’s sales. The author estimates that existing Wal-Marts cut sales at new stores by about 10 percent on average. That overlap hurts, but the cost of spacing stores farther apart is astronomical. Moving a store 100 miles from a distribution center can raise its yearly costs by more than $500,000. If every Wal-Mart store moved 100 miles farther from its distributor, total costs would go up by at least $1 billion a year. The author also points out that Wal-Mart can no longer simply spread to new turf at will. Its attempts to conquer urban markets have foundered, not only because of higher property costs and stronger unions, but also because greater population density hurts the company’s bottom line. In rural areas where Wal-Mart is the only game in town, erecting a store five miles from a population center barely affects demand. But in larger urban areas with more stores to choose from, those five miles would cut demand by 80 percent. People who fear that yellow smiling faces will one day rule America can take solace: even Wal-Mart has its limits.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-18T04:49:00

2008-04-18T09:49:50Z

holy shit - i think we just had an earthquake! it's 4:45 and I was just awakened by the shaking - and Cat freaking out. It stopped within fifteen seconds and was very minor but it was enough to scare me and to wake john and jeff too!

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-16T10:37:00

2008-04-16T15:38:31Z

dude, i am so tired.

and my grandma either changed her mind or i misunderstood her initially. i have to pick one cat to take with me.

i seriously couldn't sleep last night over it.

what a rotten choice to make. like picking a favorite kid.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-15T13:12:00

2008-04-15T18:12:14Z

poor jimmy has appendicitis. they removed his appendix last night.

fucking crazy. poor guy.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-12T15:40:00

2008-04-12T20:40:31Z

my friend bridget was giddy off of red wine at the poetry reading last night. she turned to her friend and asked, "doesn't she look just like a modigliani painting?" "Yes, it's very striking," the friend agreed. So I look up Modigliani and have to laugh.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-09T12:39:00

2008-04-09T17:39:12Z

i got a rejection letter yesterday. something strangely gratifying about that - like i have it buried in my head that one earns a place as a Real Writer through them. My grad school even has a contest going to see who can get the most in a year - they get rewarded with a bottle of wine of their choosing and some subscriptions to litmags, i think. the logic being the more that you submit, even if rejected, the more likely you'll be to get published.

...

also had a peice workshopped yesterday, which makes me a nervous wreck and always makes me kind of feel shitty and embarassed...afterwards i always find myself feeling kind of dirty, and more fucked up psychologically than i did when i started. i'm always kind of embarassed by what i've exposed of myself to this room full of critical strangers, but there's no hiding yourself emotionally when you're doing poetry or autobiographical stuff. but the criticism of the writing is usually, by its very nature, criticism of the person who spawned it.

so i feel like i got skewered, though it wasn't unfair. there's just a strangely masturbatory quality about criticism when people get going aloud and get riffing on a certain point - i think of one woman in particular in my class who just goes and goes and i dread her because i know she's gonna work herself up into a frenzy every time. apparently she is the subject of an unflattering, ongoing blog that she mentioned having found in class - i am so finding that after i finish this. it will make me feel much better, i'm sure.

in this case what i intended as a humorous peice about relating in the internet age became something that sounded something like the guarded confessions of an insecure doormat and/or bragging about how lucky i've been to fall into my current life. as my ego on defense sees it, the problem was that i didn't confess enough, that i didn't present a more easily digested emotional development, no dr. phil AHA moment of enlightenment. Which makes me think that the essay should face that fact head on as a closing point, if i finish it at all. i think our time is fascinated with the confession and redemption of psychological ills, and that my peice written for entertainment's sake didn't satisfy that expectation. i don't know. i wrote a lot about insecurity and old jealousies, too, which the people in the class found objectionable because a) i was sitting right there in front of them and they've never seen what i looked like in high school with my frizzy bowl cuts and my bad skin and even more extreme crippling fear of people and, well, penis and b) i didn't explain where the feeling that i was hideous came from - because i don't really know. i don't have the answers that they felt should be in the peice.

so i guess the valid part of the criticism that i have to really take to heart is that a peice written to entertain isn't going to be nearly as satisfying as one that describes deep personal progression, and that if it's sheer entertainment, make it light and funny and self contained, without dredging at the deeper emotional mechanisms behind events because doing so only makes the absence of deeper resolution more obvious??

and in having written about those i've been involved with, i feel uncomfortable, as if i'm exposing something that belongs to them. i don't know how to overcome that. it's how i feel in writing abot my family, too - i feel like a cold detached fuck for doing it. for always observing things with a casual, distant eye even as i live it and feel it so deeply. it feels like a guilty little traitorous meanness, to reduce your loves to two dimensions, ink and paper, that will never, ever get it right. and just with perception being what it is, no matter how fair i try to be to them, i'll never be completely just in my act of representation. there's something carnivorous and predatory about writing, in the same way that i'm made uncomfortable by the appetite of camera lens - when you make someone into the static image, be it literary or visual, you are reducing them to a symbol that, by virtue of its simplicity, will never be the truth. the representation is always built on something that feels like a lie.

having written about my present life in what i felt were positive terms, i was uncomfortable with the collective response. how would i write honestly about it without sounding like i was bragging? how do you convey happiness without sounding like a douchebag or a cliche??? and given how shitty my life has been at times, shouldn't i be shouting my gratitude from the mountaintops now that i'm finally content? how do you be grateful for a life, appreciate it fully, without being an asshole no one wants to hear??

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-07T13:09:00

2008-04-07T18:10:29Z

my critique is tomorrow. nervous, though i'm kind of proud of the piece. in a grin-and-bear-it way.

...

signing up for courses for next semester very soon: form and theory of poetry, literary journal editing. I'm also opting for a summer course:

Playwriting Workshop: New Narrative Strategies. The contemporary playwright faces an audience bombarded with a thousand stories every day. Modernist and postmodernist dramatists have turned this to their advantage by making disorienting choices in how to show (and tell) a story, making the familiar strange by taking traditional narrative apart to find out how it works. In this workshop, we will confront some of these radical narrative strategies and respond to them in our own writing.

That sounds SOOO fun.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-04-02T17:25:00

2008-04-02T22:25:01Z

i spent the last few days in a very pleasant haze, working on stuff. i tried to go back in some of my old journals to find some things i'd written, and it was nearly impossible to do. i don't usually go back and reread things, so it was really interesting. just makes it more clearly evident to me what a godawful cluttery mess i am. i really, really, really need to organize all my old writing. not that it's even that great, but it's a wealth of personal experience (as it actually happened at the time) to draw on.

memory is a tricky fucker. jason and i have been joking around about our first impressions of each other, who said/did what, etc. he mentioned that he was rereading some of our first ever emails, so i did, too, and laughed my ass off. it's amazing to me how much my memory has contorted even those basic facts. it's also fucking hilarious to me how weird we were with each other. haha.

strange night in class. i gave the asshole guy his criticism. when i turned it in the prof, she laughed, turned to me "Yeah, me too, me too," agreeing with some of the harsh comments i'd made about his work. class always reminds me of how far i have to go, mentally, before i'm ready to teach. how far i have to go before i can wrench my interests into a good line of work. i just keep trying not to care what people think of what i say, or write. it's soo hard, though. so frustrating to feel this limited by it.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-03-27T15:16:00

2008-03-27T20:15:36Z

dyed my hair very, very black again. *breathes a huge sigh of relief* i like it. feels better.

silliness, i know. worse than silly. feels trivial to waste the water, use these harsh chemicals and put them into the water, waste it all by my ridiculous, culturally created desire for consumption/fixation on superficial when there's an ice shelf ready to fall off of antartica (where, as in alaska, the temperature has risen 47 degrees in the last 50 years). worse than trivial.

grave.

...

my white guilt is compounded by my Western guilt. i've got a bigger slice of the pie than most, though it doesn't really confer a simple happiness. i read yesterday that pacific salmon are on the verge of disappearance. i think of all the delicious grilled salmon i've eaten in the last five years. there's a world worth of things to feel guilty for. and even if i were to do more to counteract that guilt, work in a positive direction, in some sense i feel as if that would be working against the aweful momentum of human history as it builds toward its own inevitable fall.

...

i'm a cheery one.

sometimes my quietness stems from a desire not to infect other people with the pessimism that plagues my perspective on the world. when it comes to people i love, i'd rather them not consider the things that i can't help but brood over. feels cruel to point out what my loved ones are blessedly oblivious of 99% of the time when it serves no purpose. like arguing against their idea of god when it gives them a solace i can't feel. i don't have the heart to fuck with that, and i'm not arrogant enough to believe so completely in the truth of my own point of view.

...

guy on jon stewart last night promoting a book, the great warming, i believe. sounds very interesting. i liked his attitude. not wringing his hands, not idiotically optimistic either. he said human beings are incredibly clever creatures. something will be done, even if millions die before we change our ways.

these kinds of thoughts are why i don't think i will ever consciously decide to have children. i mean, if i found at some point that i'd accidentally conceived, i don't know that i'd have the detachment necessary to take active steps to rid myself of it or to rid it of the joy and burden that a life is, but...ugh. i would be very worried for its future. sometimes i wonder if this whole way of life will come crashing down at some point, and i can only hope it's after i and my loved ones have passed from this world in all of its misery and all of its splendor.

at least in the meantime i got to experience the multiple orgasm.
biology is not without its consolations.
thank god for that much.

...

watching the constant gardener and blood diamond in the last few months has fucked my head.
and is it me or is the environmental worry everywhere in the media? i'm glad of it, thank god some people are trying to change awareness, but it affects me deeply. makes me sad, makes me feel helpless, makes me wonder at the meaning of any of this experience that i as a middle class westerner have when it is predicated on such a fucked up scale of privilege and oppression of other people for resources.

for some reason, my grooming practices get my angst all in twitch. i'm so weird about that. growing up thinking all of female preening was shallow and meaningless makes me embarassed that i've come to enjoy it. i can't quite get over my old puritanical self righteous streak that thought i'd do better to spend that time reading or making something of my mind. (but when i don't shave my legs i feel hideous, and then i can't enjoy physicality without self-consciousness, and it's ridiculous and sad, but i've been trained to see myself through the lens of culture and i don't like myself without the mediation of cosmetic practice. my days of being proud of my armpit hair are long gone.) and then i compound the unease with the ways i satisfy my own vanity with my ideas about the state of the world in general and i can't even dye my hair or put on makeup without this weird ideological disturbance in my head. an aneurism of social conditioning (must look pretty) and social awareness (that idea and those connected to it are part of what makes the world suck. all of it, marketing, selling us a superficial idea of who we are and what the good life is. and here i am, buying in, in my way... ).

cerebrotonic @ 2008-03-25T16:23:00

2008-03-25T21:46:40Z

sushi (cooked crab) for dinner + chocolate and coffee for dessert
my dietary habits are effin bizarre

went to a coffeeshop to work this morning though they didn't open till noon
putting my bag back in the car my hair got caught in my hands and i pulled my own head into the roof of my car really hard and have a little goose egg now
and of course, someone saw it

i wish i had a way to refrigerate milk in my room because with that and my espresso maker total reclusivity while at my place might actually be possible

listening to damien rice really loudly and getting to work on that essay

got a rejection slip from one of my contest submissions yesterday
odd that this makes me feel at least validated as a "writer" - i have a rejection slip, therefore some minor claim to the title
grad school for the activity is humbling, frustrating, disheartening, punctuated by brief moments of extreme nearly manic excitement at having one's minor work praised by a professor or fellow student you respect
making it seems much like the lottery, only it costs way more to play and even if you win and get some acclaim you might not get bread on your table from it, and in a hundred years so few of us will be remembered, even the great ones
so what's it all for? dunno. the satisfaction of inner compulsions, the fulfillment of one's natural inclinations, i suppose. it's a good hobby. makes me pay more attention to my life, appreciate its details, savor it, more than i would without the impetus to continual reflection.

stupid cold won't go away, dammit

nightmare about dad last night. as if somewhere in my brain he is forever in that illness, trapped in that pain. always dreams of him suffering, and my helplessness to change it or help him. and i wake from the dreams sad to remember what that time was like, and sad because those dreams have the residue of what it felt like to have him in my life, even in that awful state. i miss him, and dreams are like a transport directly back to that feeling of comfort in his presence, even then, that i've lost so completely and can't consciously recall. and i always feel so ambushed by the sadness that sleeps in my mind so much of the time, caught off guard by the old, old sadness of it even as i sleep happily next to this man who i'm so lucky to spend my time with... hard to dispell the fog of that feeling in the middle of the night. just remind myself it's my own head replaying the fantastical film reel of that time, comfort myself by curling up into him again, and try to just leave it unnamed, unanalyzed, let it all sink back into the darkness it rose up from... memory makes such strange contortions of the past, against the conscious will. unnerving.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-03-21T10:49:00

2008-03-21T16:37:45Z

i've been in a bad slump the last few days.

been driving out to warrenton a lot for doctor visits, returning the heart monitor, etc. i do have to say my head hasn't been hurting much at all since dr. man instituted the 16oz of water per cup rule. makes me think a lot of my "caffeine headaches" are more likely the result of being improperly hydrated, which coffee only makes worse, which might explain some of my occasional sunday lethargies. funny that it's so simple. also amusing to me that no matter how i try i can't get myself to drink more water...unless it's to earn another cup of coffee. ha.

my cats woke me up again this morning, pawing at my door. they aren't liking the diet at all. and my cat buster had crapped in the middle of the living room. he's been peeing on our curtain in there, too. so he's confined to the bathroom. again. where he'll just pee on my shower curtains and any laundry or towels that might be on the floor or within range to be pulled onto the floor. and again i'm considering getting rid of him. he's so bad about bathroom issues with other cats around. i can't have him doing that at my grandparents.

this move is going to absolutely kill my ego for awhile. i can tell already. i keep joking (halfassedly) that something better come of this poetry shit because at least that would make me a loser with a talent. i told my grandpa i feel like my mother. i am only grateful to them, of course, for the welcome they always extend to me and any of us grandkids or kids or whatever. in some ways, i really love the idea. but i'd be lying if i didn't say it's going to be extremely hard for me, too. my grandpa wants to fix up a room he hadn't drywalled yet and it upsets me in some low level way i try not to make visible because i don't want them to go through any trouble at all for my sake. i guess he wants to do it because he enjoys doing things for his family, and i respect that. you can see it in the way he gets up to get breakfast ready for my sisters, the way he dotes on their caretaking. it's adorable when it's a kid. but even though i know he's just being his usual loving self, it's hard for me to know that my grandpa's going to be down in his basement drywalling a room for me, a fully grown adult, because i can't function well enough in the world to be in a more secure place financially or practically speaking than this. i feel like a mess. it'd be better if i had a job that i could respect or get fulfillment from, but i can't seem to find anything that does that for me, because i'm such a fucking knot of social anxieties and weird interests and idealistic notions that just get in the way of me knuckling down and getting a real job. for example: waiting tables last night, i had a family come in that looked familiar. i thought maybe they were from the other location i used to work at, and asked them if they used to come in there. they said no, but that they recognized me too, and it turns out they used to come in the pizza place i worked at four years ago. i thought it was funny. and then i thought, wow, in some ways i'm still in the same fucking place. i know that's not entirely true, with school and all, but let's face it, i'm not even that great of a student either... i hate attending class, i hate talking in class, and i procrastinate everything, which all means i turn in stuff that's far below what i should be capable of doing...i haven't published a thing in, eh, four years...i don't know what kind of job i'll be able to get or even bear to have when i finish? will i really be able to teach classes or am i just fooling myself about my ability to speak in front of others when it's about something i care about and i feel like i'm qualified to be there? no way to really know until i invest the time and money in the education required to even attain the job in question.

so...that's where my head's at. not pleasant. pete and i were joking at work that sometimes the quarterlife crisis weighs upon one more heavily than at others. i joked that i was trying to drown my sorrows in chow mein last night, and he said try alcohol, it works better. i replied that i better get on it if i intend to become an alcoholic, as i only have five weeks left in my own place, and to be an alcoholic living in my grandparents basement would be just too much.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-03-19T22:31:00

2008-03-20T03:30:50Z

i went to the doctor yesterday and again today. had blood drawn, had an ekg? ecg? something like that, and have been wearing a heart monitor attached to five nodes taped to my chest all day. the doctor doesn't think it's anything too major, but wants to be thorough, which i like. he explained that the shower dizziness i have is probably a blood supply to the brain thing - your blood rushes to your skin when under hot water, your brain isn't getting enough, so it sends messages to your heart to slow way down and then you pass out - like the brain's survival instinct kicking in, because when you pass out you end up lying down and the blood goes to your brain. that makes sense, and it eases my mind to have things make sense...but i want to know how to keep it from happening when i'm doing stuff like standing there doing nothing at a job orientation...?

i like the doctor a lot. he was really funny in a dark way, really chatty, had me laughing most of the time. he told me i can drink as much coffee as i want, but that i should just take care to keep hydrated - he said 16 oz of water to every cup of coffee and have at it, "it's not gonna hurt you." also recommended a multivitamin daily and a b-complex vitamin to supply what might be lacking from eating little meat. he was telling me stories about drawing patients elaborate diagrams to help them out in their sex lives because, well, someone's gotta do it. he recommended a form of birth control that is used, eh, internally - a ring of stuff that sort of sits on the cervix for a month before it gets switched out - which makes me squeamish just to think of. Dr. says, "What? It's just a vagina." That it is, that it is... And he started quoting family guy when I explained what I'm going to college for. (Stewie voice: So, how's the novel comin'? Got a lot of pages?)

also got my weird arm bump that i've been paranoid about for months checked out - a dermatofibroma, most likely. read: harmless weird skin formation that isn't a problem unless it changes dramatically. so that's good.

the moral of the story: i'm not dying from an eating disorder, my weight is at the low end of the healthy range which is normal with a vegetarian diet, and seem pretty healthy though it couldn't hurt to gain five or ten pounds.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-03-14T12:42:00

2008-03-14T17:42:30Z

taking apps up to my apartment complex office.
i've resigned myself to the possibility that we may not get the apartment. my only real worry in this regard is what would happen with my cats. granted, it will suck if we have to move, and it will really, really suck to have to give in to the roommate, but...it might be for the best.

i agreed to go to the doctor next week, with my grandma. it might not be a bad idea to get the blood sugar business checked out. also've been lethargic, sleeping constantly. who knows. maybe i'm just lazy. i have started taking vitamins again, though. maybe that will help.

...

edit: we are SO not getting this apartment. the lady at the office said stealing charges never get approved, and what jimmy put on his lease sounded fishy at face value anyway.

fuck.

my brother doesn't want to move, doesn't want to end up back at warrenton, doesn't want to give in to john. while i understand, it's hard to get why someone who hasn't worked in three months feels so deeply entitled to getting his wishes.

on some level, it would be a relief to be out of this mess. to not have to rely on anyone else (minus my grandparents). and i'd be totally lying if i said i didn't miss being a part of that kind of warm household on a regular basis. not sure if that's immaturity or loneliness or what. or maybe just that i really love my grandparents and don't feel an overwhelming need for ego independence in their case. who knows...

cerebrotonic @ 2008-03-13T13:54:00

2008-03-13T18:54:37Z

holy shit - my little brother's dad, the ex-stepdad, sent me an email this morning. nothing major, just a "testing my memory here - isn't today your birthday? if so, happy birthday!" followed by another short one - "Oops, I thought today was the fourteenth. So it's tomorrow." It's a nice feeling to be remembered. And my brother finally talked to him, so that's a good feeling too. Whew.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-03-13T06:31:00

2008-03-13T11:31:29Z

almost six thirty and i'm still awake.

at least i'm writing and it's going somewhere. yay! that is the most addictive feeling.

the hard part about writing essays is keeping everything from spilling into the frame of your story. everything in your life is obviously connected to you, hard to select one thread from the tangled ball of causes and effects and trace it in an entertaining way. for example, my one, small, short, humorous thing i meant to put to paper tonight (jason and i: the second date) becomes an outline for the sprawling epic drama that is my lovelife over the last six years. Dammit! Better to put it on paper and weed out the extraneous stuff later, though.
and there's something deeply satisfying about how full it makes my life feel...like maybe i'm not as boring as i think i am.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-03-11T15:15:00

2008-03-11T20:15:30Z

wish i knew what my problem is lately. feeling unmotivated as fuck, grouchy, groggy... i'll have to get some vitamins later, see if that helps anything. class tonight, and i dread it, as usual. the times when we go around the table make me a nervous wreck, and the next three classes are 3 discussion classes, which means i have to talk 3+ times per class. not sure if my fear of speaking is something i've babied myself on too long or something more deeply rooted than i can overcome with sheer willpower or practicing in front of a mirror shit. people insist that it's a matter i can deal with. i always suspect these people have never experienced this degree of panic at the prospect, but there's no way to compare internal states and i don't have any basis for my argument that they don't know what this is like. so i think it's usually best to just shut up and keep my dread of it to myself. *sigh* perhaps the most maddening part of it all is that i don't really give a fuck what the people i'm in front of think. most of the kids in my grad classes i see as pretensious idiots who criticize other people to stoke the fires of their own ego. most of them don't write very well, though i respect that they're trying, and i do think anyone could learn. but i can't stand most of the people i'm in class with, and i don't care what they think of my curmudgeonly grouchy trollish ass. but i still completely panic at the idea of speaking in front of them, having to be the focus of the collective attention, having to listen to their opinions of what i've said/written.

i have another essay due in three weeks. not sure what exactly to write it on, though i've got some good starting points for a few essays underway. a few thousand words on my mother issues that i'm doing for my own purposes - no desire to vent that any further in public, thanks - , a few on growing up, memoir style stuff. a few embryonic structures that are less personal, more about the external conditions of things. i like the latter better. feels less exposed, less confessional, less group-therapy "hear me tell about my personal tragedies and the catharsis will magically heal me" oriented. i hate that about grad school for writing. it stands in for therapy for so many of us.

i think a lot of my free floatng sense of frustration lately has to do with feeling as if i haven't accomplished shit with writing so far. par for the course, i suppose. the nature of the artistic medium. i'll feel better when i get some publications under my belt, i suspect. some external validation - again, how writing stands in for therapy.

also made the mistake of mentioning to my grandma that i had a problem with getting dizzy/feeling like i was going to pass out this weekend. she's convinced i have an eating disorder. that, like my dad (though he used turned it in a socially acceptable direction via bodybuilding) i'm obsessed with eating and i don't see it because my brain is starved for nutrients and no longer able to reason properly. while i don't think i have a problem (other than moderate hypoglycemic tendencies which i have been slacking on proper care of lately) i am amazed by my grandma's grasp of the subject - she was insisting that this kind of thing tends to happen when people feel out of control, etc, and had a really developed theory on how it's like a subconscious coping mechanism for the chaos of my current conditions, etc. She cited my anal retentiveness about eating organic, eating vegetarian, etc - which is true - i'm definitely weird about food, but have been since i was a child. i was impressed with her understanding and compassion, though i think it's misdirected in my case, and more about her projecting a pathology onto my current state than anything about my actual health... (It's consoling that she thinks Jeff is too skinny and needs to eat better, too.) it's already worked into family humor. while jimmy was here last night, i ate: nachos full of beans and cheese, four peices of wheat toast with jelly, about two cups of strawberries, some chocolate, and two cups of coffee. we've concluded that i'm not anorexic - i must have worms.

cerebrotonic @ 2008-03-11T03:10:00

2008-03-11T08:10:21Z

my day started out horribly - woke up not wanting to get out of bed. sometimes leaving jason's feels like coming back to the normal worried everyday crap of the workweek. i wasn't doing well with all of it, for some reason. at the end of my rope with stuff as far as my brother goes. i'm virtually worthless when i get like that, feeling so bad i just want to curl up in a ball and sleep. bawling in the bathtub in complete frustration. Earlier today all the worry over the apartment, what we'll do, worrying about how i'll work it all out and feeling like i can't rely on anybody for help with it just got to be too much. I was thinking I should just move home, beg my grandma to let me keep at least one of the cats, go crawling back to live in her basement. not a good morning. felt defeated, i guess. and john's been having these serious conversations with me that go something like: "Let me ask you something. Do you really want to stay here and have to work two jobs to support your brother? I mean, why would you? Is that it, or is there some other reason? What makes you want to?" Which I feel is none of his business. I don't have to justify any of my actions to the guy who just expects me to happily move out of my apartment at his convenience.

(and john was in my room again, apparently, because AGAIN my computer was off. What the fuck?)

but i talked to jimmy about it all tonight, very honestly, very seriously, and he had jeff on the phone with his old boss by the time i got home from work.

THANK FUCK. That's right, my brother got a job. He starts working there again this week. Which means, hopefully, we'll be approved on the apartment.

i'm relieved. not as relieved as i'll be when our lease is all signed, but...it's a start. we all hung out and watched a movie tonight. jimmy just left - i think there was an unspoken standoff going on - John trying to keep the living room, Jimmy trying to wait it out to take it over to sleep here as he has been a lot lately... it's been dramatic and awkward as all fuck here this last week.