I’m writing this at work.
No, I’m not slacking. I’m sitting
through the SAME GODDAMN ORIENTATION PRESENTATION for the THIRD TIME.
I’m nearly bored to tears.
Anger is probably a better option.
Chapter 9: Theory
28 June, 2012
11 June, 2012
Twilight, Chapter 8
This chapter is Hell on Earth.
There should a lot of facepalming
going on.
But that’s what you’re here for,
isn’t it?
You people are sick…
Chapter 8: Port Angeles
11 May, 2012
Twilight, Chapter 7
I’m trying to get better at this. I really am.
It’s just… Packing… And college… And this is painful…
But that’s why you read this, isn’t it?
I hate you all…
Chapter 7: Nightmare
08 May, 2012
Twilight, Chapter 6
Well, these are getting closer together. Maybe by the next book, I’ll be doing them
every day!
The next book… Mithros forbid…
Chapter 6: Scary Stories
05 May, 2012
I Wrote A List This Week
This isn't all that uncommon a thing for me to do. I write lots of lists. Lists of books I want need to get. Lists of things I have to do. Lists of what my mom needs me to get at the store. I remember things better when I write them down, and I feel more accomplished when I check things off. Plus, I know that everything is done when the whole list is finished.
But this list is a special list. This list is a list of things I need to bring with me to college.
I'm sure some of you are thinking "Already? It's only the beginning of May!" I'm sure I'd be thinking that, too, if the person were anyone other than me. But only if I didn't know the reason. The reason I already wrote this list is that I'm leaving soon. Twenty-three days from now, actually.
See, I got a job this summer, working at my college. My big brother goes there, and he hooked me up at the theater he works at. I'll be working forty hours a week, and living with his awesome, geektastic girlfriend, Jordan. This is going to be a huge change for me; I know that it will be Fun and A Good Experience, but it could also be Frightening and Lonely, and it will definitely be New and Different. I have many complicated feels about this, and it will probably be a good thing for me to get them down and sort them out.
The first think I'd like to address is my house and homelife. In this aspect, things can only get better. Yes, I'll be providing for myself, living with someone who I have only met three or four times, and will have to manage everything on my own, but I honestly can only see this as an improvement. I currently live with my parents and two younger sisters; my oldest brother has moved out, and lives in Chicago, and I will be joining my other big brother in Wisconsin this summer. I love my family, don't get me wrong, but my baby sister (she's almost nine now, but she'll always be the baby) has an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and it can make life hell sometimes. She can be this sweet little girl, who loves to hug you and hang out with you and looks up to me and our other sister so much and wants to be just as cool as we are, but suddenly, with no visible cause, she can become unreasonable, throwing fits over the smallest thing; she won't respect our personal space, she has no filter between her brain and her mouth, and never thinks how hurtful the things she says can be, she doesn't get that sometimes, big girls are irritable and in so much pain they literally cannot move and just don't have the patience or the will to deal with anything stressful.
I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea. Like I said, I love her, with all my heart, and I will do anything to help her. I'm so grateful to the people at her school, to the staff, who know exactly how to handle her, and to the other students, who love her imagination and think she's the coolest and are almost always so nice to her and make her feel like the most popular girl in school and, really, I think she might be. I'm so happy that she can have that, because I know the hell that kids with mental disabilities can go through in school. I flew completely off the handle one day in Gym class because the teacher was being an ass to someone like my sister, and nobody said so much as a negative word about the kid in my hearing for the rest of the year. I hope that my baby sister doesn't ever have anything like that happen to her, but if she does, I hope that there is someone like me to stand up for her.
Now that I (hopefully) have convinced you of my love of my sister, I think it's safe to say that she is one of the things that make me cry the most often. The unreasonableness, the temper tantrums, the just not getting the fact that Neenie and I just need to be left alone sometimes, are so hard to reconcile with the sweet girl she can be. It's desperately difficult to deal with, and there are times when I have to babysit her, and once she's in bed, I just sit down and cry, and I'm damn certain that it will be so much easier when I don't have to deal with that sort of thing on a daily basis. But then I love her so much, it hurts to think that.
Also included in my homelife are my parents. I remember saying, when I was little, how my parents were probably the best parents in the world. I think back and remember that, and then remember how much they managed to screw up. Maybe Neenie and Grace have it best, because my parents had three kids to practice on before them, or maybe what they do is more noticeable. Or maybe my parents were so afraid of doing the wrong thing that they did it anyway.
When Neenie was in fourth grade, her teacher was a bitch of the highest degree. This was the final year in our elementary school before the students started switching classes; English, spelling, math, science, social studies, all were taught by the same teacher, so Neenie had to spend the whole day with the same woman. My sister would come home sobbing, because the teacher made fun of her, almost every single day. My parents went to see the principal, and I think I'm going to love that woman for my whole life because of what she did. She couldn't fire the teacher, because the pastor had the final say in those matters (don't get me started on him), but she told Neenie that she could come down to the office whenever she needed to, because the teacher was being mean, because another student was being mean, or just because Neenie was feeling down. So my parents did something about that. They don't seem too bad, do they?
Well, look at the other side of the story.
When Neenie was in fourth grade, I was in seventh. Now, I didn't have a teacher going after me, but I had most of my classmates on my back. Neenie has always exuded an aura of confidence (however much we both know she lacks it) that has made her a favorite among her classmates. I never had that. I was smart, geeky, and socially awkward from the ground up. I had been homeschooled until sixth grade, and I didn't have any idea how to interact with my peers until about eighth grade. I'm still kind of clueless. They teased me mercilessly because of this, and I came home crying almost as often as Neenie. My parents never did anything.
When I started to self-injure, I think it was kind of obvious. I'd show up in the morning in my pajamas--a tank top and pajama pants--with cuts criss-crossing my shoulders, but my mom took the cock-and-bull story about falling into bushes that I fed her for the longest time. She only ever did anything about it when my dad saw them, too.
My big brother thinks that she was afraid of making a mistake. Perhaps she was thinking that I was just clumsy and kept taking the same fall over and over, or maybe she was in denial. All that I know is that it made me feel even more alone.
But they did eventually get me help, and I got better. I'm still better. You could almost say that I'm flourishing. Almost.
They got better, too. They helped me get through things, they did what they could to help me get better, and they were very, very gentle with me. For about five months.
Once those five months were up, though, I started seeming like I was okay again, the support and the gentleness and the care that they had been showing me faded slowly away, until they got to the point where they act like nothing is different from before. They have started, again, some of the behaviors that put me in the hospital in the first place. They yell at me for doing things wrong when I think I'm doing them right but I'm not because my parents have changed the rules again and forgot to tell me. They don't take what I do seriously. They tell me that I need to take time for myself, but get angry with me when I do. They make hurting, cutting remarks that undermine my self-esteem and confidence.
I have to deal with this sort of shit in my own home. And my friends wonder why I think so poorly of myself.
I never get out. I'm trapped in a house that isn't a home, with people who don't seem concerned about my welfare, and I'm dying to just leave. These are the reasons that I got the job at the theater in the first place, and why I'm so happy to be going. But there are reasons that I want to stay, too.
I'm a part of a wonderful youth group. I left St. Damian, the parish of my childhood, and the school where I spent three years learning, to go to a church twenty minutes from where I live, where my only connection is that it was the place my dad and his siblings went to school. Why did I do this, you ask? Because my three years at the school sucked. Because the pastor was a homophobe, and I couldn't sit through another damn sermon about how gays were bad and wrong and going to Hell because they didn't conform to the Bible. Because the place where I ended up had a group of loving, supporting people who let me be myself and stood by me through hell and high water. Because the sixty-something-year-old youth minister told one boy to get off another boy's lap because "that's so gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that."
They are wonderful human beings, the epitome of what the Catholic Church really should be, who take the real meaning of the word "catholic" to heart, and make it truly universal. I'm going to miss being a part of this group, all the friends I leave behind, the love and support they have given me, and the two hours of being open and honest and just having fun every week, and I know that they are going to miss me.
My social life has taken an upturn recently. Specifically, I actually got asked to prom by a friend of mine, and that's something that I never thought would happen. But this kid; he's a friend of mine, and I've sort of half-liked him ever since we met. He's cute and geeky, and he's one of the few guys I've met who are actually really nice (the total is, like, seven or something, and two of them are my blood brothers and another is like my little brother). I mean, I have quite a few guy friends, but most of them can be complete assholes sometimes.
But anyway, so there's this boy who has asked me to prom. Unfortunately for the both of us, I had to say no. No, I'm not doing anything the night of or whatever. I just really hate dances; I hate dancing and crowds and noise and really bad music, and that's pretty much the summary of a school dance. So we're currently treading those awkward waters frequented by two socially awkward people between a slight miscommunication (he thinks I was out-and-out rejecting him) and clearing it up, but hopefully this will work.
Except that I'm leaving soon, so God only knows where this will actually end up going.
Then there are my other friends. My best guy friend (and my "little brother") and I came up with this hilarious plan to build ourselves a little hut thing behind my house this summer, and it would have been so much fun to build it and paint it and hang out in it all summer before I left for college and he started classes (at a local community college) in the fall. Because I'm going away to work, that plan completely fell through.
This is just a little sample of what's going on. My friends and I had a bunch of plans (road trip, hanging out, swimming, and all sorts of other stuff) that won't happen now because I'm really only going to have ten days of summer break between my last day of school and when I leave to start work.
But the hardest part of leaving is definitely the fact that I don't get to take my little sister and my best friend with me.
These are two different people, but they can both share the same two roles. Neenie, my freshman (they make great pets), has been considered my best friend since sophomore year. I don't know how it happened, other than gradually, but suddenly we were super close and loving each other and still a little teasing but in a nice way now and sharing interests and all sorts of things, sort of like what happened with me and my big brother, Chris, but fortunately before my senior year. Emma Lee, my lovely co-host on our recently-conceived podcast (shameless!plug is shameless), has been my best friend since the first day we met in 2008. We are similar enough for it to be awesome and kind of freaky, but different enough that we fill in the gaps in the other's character. When a lot of people think about soulmates, they picture the perfect couple. Emma and I aren't in a romantic relationship--we never will be and the thought is pretty weird. We are soulmates, though, completing each other, best friends for forever and a day, and we know we'll make it through hard times because we have done before.
I'm going to miss these two desperately. Even though I don't get to see Emma every day like I do Neenie, it's still going to be hard being so much farther away from her. Nothing will change in our relationships because we are four hours apart, I know that, but it still hurts to leave.
So, when the day comes to go, I'm going to leave with mingled joy and sadness, because sometimes good-bye is a second chance, but the hardest part of this is leaving you.
But this list is a special list. This list is a list of things I need to bring with me to college.
I'm sure some of you are thinking "Already? It's only the beginning of May!" I'm sure I'd be thinking that, too, if the person were anyone other than me. But only if I didn't know the reason. The reason I already wrote this list is that I'm leaving soon. Twenty-three days from now, actually.
See, I got a job this summer, working at my college. My big brother goes there, and he hooked me up at the theater he works at. I'll be working forty hours a week, and living with his awesome, geektastic girlfriend, Jordan. This is going to be a huge change for me; I know that it will be Fun and A Good Experience, but it could also be Frightening and Lonely, and it will definitely be New and Different. I have many complicated feels about this, and it will probably be a good thing for me to get them down and sort them out.
The first think I'd like to address is my house and homelife. In this aspect, things can only get better. Yes, I'll be providing for myself, living with someone who I have only met three or four times, and will have to manage everything on my own, but I honestly can only see this as an improvement. I currently live with my parents and two younger sisters; my oldest brother has moved out, and lives in Chicago, and I will be joining my other big brother in Wisconsin this summer. I love my family, don't get me wrong, but my baby sister (she's almost nine now, but she'll always be the baby) has an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and it can make life hell sometimes. She can be this sweet little girl, who loves to hug you and hang out with you and looks up to me and our other sister so much and wants to be just as cool as we are, but suddenly, with no visible cause, she can become unreasonable, throwing fits over the smallest thing; she won't respect our personal space, she has no filter between her brain and her mouth, and never thinks how hurtful the things she says can be, she doesn't get that sometimes, big girls are irritable and in so much pain they literally cannot move and just don't have the patience or the will to deal with anything stressful.
I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea. Like I said, I love her, with all my heart, and I will do anything to help her. I'm so grateful to the people at her school, to the staff, who know exactly how to handle her, and to the other students, who love her imagination and think she's the coolest and are almost always so nice to her and make her feel like the most popular girl in school and, really, I think she might be. I'm so happy that she can have that, because I know the hell that kids with mental disabilities can go through in school. I flew completely off the handle one day in Gym class because the teacher was being an ass to someone like my sister, and nobody said so much as a negative word about the kid in my hearing for the rest of the year. I hope that my baby sister doesn't ever have anything like that happen to her, but if she does, I hope that there is someone like me to stand up for her.
Now that I (hopefully) have convinced you of my love of my sister, I think it's safe to say that she is one of the things that make me cry the most often. The unreasonableness, the temper tantrums, the just not getting the fact that Neenie and I just need to be left alone sometimes, are so hard to reconcile with the sweet girl she can be. It's desperately difficult to deal with, and there are times when I have to babysit her, and once she's in bed, I just sit down and cry, and I'm damn certain that it will be so much easier when I don't have to deal with that sort of thing on a daily basis. But then I love her so much, it hurts to think that.
Also included in my homelife are my parents. I remember saying, when I was little, how my parents were probably the best parents in the world. I think back and remember that, and then remember how much they managed to screw up. Maybe Neenie and Grace have it best, because my parents had three kids to practice on before them, or maybe what they do is more noticeable. Or maybe my parents were so afraid of doing the wrong thing that they did it anyway.
When Neenie was in fourth grade, her teacher was a bitch of the highest degree. This was the final year in our elementary school before the students started switching classes; English, spelling, math, science, social studies, all were taught by the same teacher, so Neenie had to spend the whole day with the same woman. My sister would come home sobbing, because the teacher made fun of her, almost every single day. My parents went to see the principal, and I think I'm going to love that woman for my whole life because of what she did. She couldn't fire the teacher, because the pastor had the final say in those matters (don't get me started on him), but she told Neenie that she could come down to the office whenever she needed to, because the teacher was being mean, because another student was being mean, or just because Neenie was feeling down. So my parents did something about that. They don't seem too bad, do they?
Well, look at the other side of the story.
When Neenie was in fourth grade, I was in seventh. Now, I didn't have a teacher going after me, but I had most of my classmates on my back. Neenie has always exuded an aura of confidence (however much we both know she lacks it) that has made her a favorite among her classmates. I never had that. I was smart, geeky, and socially awkward from the ground up. I had been homeschooled until sixth grade, and I didn't have any idea how to interact with my peers until about eighth grade. I'm still kind of clueless. They teased me mercilessly because of this, and I came home crying almost as often as Neenie. My parents never did anything.
When I started to self-injure, I think it was kind of obvious. I'd show up in the morning in my pajamas--a tank top and pajama pants--with cuts criss-crossing my shoulders, but my mom took the cock-and-bull story about falling into bushes that I fed her for the longest time. She only ever did anything about it when my dad saw them, too.
My big brother thinks that she was afraid of making a mistake. Perhaps she was thinking that I was just clumsy and kept taking the same fall over and over, or maybe she was in denial. All that I know is that it made me feel even more alone.
But they did eventually get me help, and I got better. I'm still better. You could almost say that I'm flourishing. Almost.
They got better, too. They helped me get through things, they did what they could to help me get better, and they were very, very gentle with me. For about five months.
Once those five months were up, though, I started seeming like I was okay again, the support and the gentleness and the care that they had been showing me faded slowly away, until they got to the point where they act like nothing is different from before. They have started, again, some of the behaviors that put me in the hospital in the first place. They yell at me for doing things wrong when I think I'm doing them right but I'm not because my parents have changed the rules again and forgot to tell me. They don't take what I do seriously. They tell me that I need to take time for myself, but get angry with me when I do. They make hurting, cutting remarks that undermine my self-esteem and confidence.
I have to deal with this sort of shit in my own home. And my friends wonder why I think so poorly of myself.
I never get out. I'm trapped in a house that isn't a home, with people who don't seem concerned about my welfare, and I'm dying to just leave. These are the reasons that I got the job at the theater in the first place, and why I'm so happy to be going. But there are reasons that I want to stay, too.
I'm a part of a wonderful youth group. I left St. Damian, the parish of my childhood, and the school where I spent three years learning, to go to a church twenty minutes from where I live, where my only connection is that it was the place my dad and his siblings went to school. Why did I do this, you ask? Because my three years at the school sucked. Because the pastor was a homophobe, and I couldn't sit through another damn sermon about how gays were bad and wrong and going to Hell because they didn't conform to the Bible. Because the place where I ended up had a group of loving, supporting people who let me be myself and stood by me through hell and high water. Because the sixty-something-year-old youth minister told one boy to get off another boy's lap because "that's so gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that."
They are wonderful human beings, the epitome of what the Catholic Church really should be, who take the real meaning of the word "catholic" to heart, and make it truly universal. I'm going to miss being a part of this group, all the friends I leave behind, the love and support they have given me, and the two hours of being open and honest and just having fun every week, and I know that they are going to miss me.
My social life has taken an upturn recently. Specifically, I actually got asked to prom by a friend of mine, and that's something that I never thought would happen. But this kid; he's a friend of mine, and I've sort of half-liked him ever since we met. He's cute and geeky, and he's one of the few guys I've met who are actually really nice (the total is, like, seven or something, and two of them are my blood brothers and another is like my little brother). I mean, I have quite a few guy friends, but most of them can be complete assholes sometimes.
But anyway, so there's this boy who has asked me to prom. Unfortunately for the both of us, I had to say no. No, I'm not doing anything the night of or whatever. I just really hate dances; I hate dancing and crowds and noise and really bad music, and that's pretty much the summary of a school dance. So we're currently treading those awkward waters frequented by two socially awkward people between a slight miscommunication (he thinks I was out-and-out rejecting him) and clearing it up, but hopefully this will work.
Except that I'm leaving soon, so God only knows where this will actually end up going.
Then there are my other friends. My best guy friend (and my "little brother") and I came up with this hilarious plan to build ourselves a little hut thing behind my house this summer, and it would have been so much fun to build it and paint it and hang out in it all summer before I left for college and he started classes (at a local community college) in the fall. Because I'm going away to work, that plan completely fell through.
This is just a little sample of what's going on. My friends and I had a bunch of plans (road trip, hanging out, swimming, and all sorts of other stuff) that won't happen now because I'm really only going to have ten days of summer break between my last day of school and when I leave to start work.
But the hardest part of leaving is definitely the fact that I don't get to take my little sister and my best friend with me.
These are two different people, but they can both share the same two roles. Neenie, my freshman (they make great pets), has been considered my best friend since sophomore year. I don't know how it happened, other than gradually, but suddenly we were super close and loving each other and still a little teasing but in a nice way now and sharing interests and all sorts of things, sort of like what happened with me and my big brother, Chris, but fortunately before my senior year. Emma Lee, my lovely co-host on our recently-conceived podcast (shameless!plug is shameless), has been my best friend since the first day we met in 2008. We are similar enough for it to be awesome and kind of freaky, but different enough that we fill in the gaps in the other's character. When a lot of people think about soulmates, they picture the perfect couple. Emma and I aren't in a romantic relationship--we never will be and the thought is pretty weird. We are soulmates, though, completing each other, best friends for forever and a day, and we know we'll make it through hard times because we have done before.
I'm going to miss these two desperately. Even though I don't get to see Emma every day like I do Neenie, it's still going to be hard being so much farther away from her. Nothing will change in our relationships because we are four hours apart, I know that, but it still hurts to leave.
So, when the day comes to go, I'm going to leave with mingled joy and sadness, because sometimes good-bye is a second chance, but the hardest part of this is leaving you.
18 April, 2012
What Friends Are For
If you’ve read my entire blog, you should know what happened last year. I wrote about it in my YASaves post. For those of you who don’t remember, just got here, and/or are too lazy to go and read that, let me explain.
…No, that will take too long. Let me sum up:
Depression runs in my family. It’s a genetic thing. In addition to the unfortunately high risk for depression that I was born with, when I was ten, something traumatic happened (I’m not going to get into that just now; it deserves a post of its own.). Not a year later, I was tossed into the maelstrom that is sixth grade with no prior experience dealing with my so-called peers, and that was hellish. Things got better through junior high, and, when I started high school, I thought things were going to be okay. They weren’t. Through fuckwittery, bullshit, lying, and way too much estrogen for anyone’s good, I was deeply wounded and lost almost all my friends. More than a year later, my mom finally managed to wrestle her head out of her ass and I was hospitalized for self-injury.
I’m proud to say that in I have been safe for one year, three months, and twenty-three days. Life is still hard, and things still hurt, yet I’ve not once slipped on the long road to recovery.
Today, though, I almost did.
Tomorrow, it will have been one year since Elisabeth Sladen left us forever. This morning, my Psych teacher played a very sad documentary called Boy, Interrupted, the true story of a boy with bipolar disorder who committed suicide at fifteen. My mom has been cracking down hard on me. I don’t know whether or not I’m going to get a job up at my college over the summer, and it’s starting to stress me out.
All these elements combined to make a really shitty day.
I got the frightening, sickening empty feeling that has a long history of leading to doing things I later regret. It is an emptiness so fierce and intense that it aches. It physically hurts, and it is one of the few pains that I cannot bear.
As I left my school’s library, where I spend my study halls, to go to my last class of the day, I was in the worst state I had been in for months. I walked along the hallway, and met a very close friend of mine, as always happens. Like usual, he gave me a hug—the kid has to be the most physically affectionate guy I’ve ever met. I meet him on the opposite end of the school from my class, and I have to wade through freshmen to get to where I need to go, so I normally keep that particular hallway encounter relatively short. Today, I let myself cling. My friend realized something was wrong, so he set his books down and embraced me fully.
Just a moment of his affection, the reminder of his love for me, was enough to make the emptiness inside me go away. Letting my friend hold me up, just for one moment, gave me the strength to get keep going. I made it through the school day. I worked on the set for my school’s play. I walked home. I’m still safe.
There are some times when I look at my friends, with all their idiocy and problems and the necessity for me to be the adult, even when I’m the youngest, and I wonder why I bother. I wonder how much easier it would be if I didn’t have to deal with their hangovers and family troubles and school absences and dropping grades and the knowledge that I can fix at least some of these things and the worry about the ones I can’t fix. Then I have days like today, when I’m feeling broken and lost, and all it takes is a hug from a friend to feel better.
Maybe they can’t help me as much as I can help them, but the help they can give is damn important.
And that’s what friends are for.
…No, that will take too long. Let me sum up:
Depression runs in my family. It’s a genetic thing. In addition to the unfortunately high risk for depression that I was born with, when I was ten, something traumatic happened (I’m not going to get into that just now; it deserves a post of its own.). Not a year later, I was tossed into the maelstrom that is sixth grade with no prior experience dealing with my so-called peers, and that was hellish. Things got better through junior high, and, when I started high school, I thought things were going to be okay. They weren’t. Through fuckwittery, bullshit, lying, and way too much estrogen for anyone’s good, I was deeply wounded and lost almost all my friends. More than a year later, my mom finally managed to wrestle her head out of her ass and I was hospitalized for self-injury.
I’m proud to say that in I have been safe for one year, three months, and twenty-three days. Life is still hard, and things still hurt, yet I’ve not once slipped on the long road to recovery.
Today, though, I almost did.
Tomorrow, it will have been one year since Elisabeth Sladen left us forever. This morning, my Psych teacher played a very sad documentary called Boy, Interrupted, the true story of a boy with bipolar disorder who committed suicide at fifteen. My mom has been cracking down hard on me. I don’t know whether or not I’m going to get a job up at my college over the summer, and it’s starting to stress me out.
All these elements combined to make a really shitty day.
I got the frightening, sickening empty feeling that has a long history of leading to doing things I later regret. It is an emptiness so fierce and intense that it aches. It physically hurts, and it is one of the few pains that I cannot bear.
As I left my school’s library, where I spend my study halls, to go to my last class of the day, I was in the worst state I had been in for months. I walked along the hallway, and met a very close friend of mine, as always happens. Like usual, he gave me a hug—the kid has to be the most physically affectionate guy I’ve ever met. I meet him on the opposite end of the school from my class, and I have to wade through freshmen to get to where I need to go, so I normally keep that particular hallway encounter relatively short. Today, I let myself cling. My friend realized something was wrong, so he set his books down and embraced me fully.
Just a moment of his affection, the reminder of his love for me, was enough to make the emptiness inside me go away. Letting my friend hold me up, just for one moment, gave me the strength to get keep going. I made it through the school day. I worked on the set for my school’s play. I walked home. I’m still safe.
There are some times when I look at my friends, with all their idiocy and problems and the necessity for me to be the adult, even when I’m the youngest, and I wonder why I bother. I wonder how much easier it would be if I didn’t have to deal with their hangovers and family troubles and school absences and dropping grades and the knowledge that I can fix at least some of these things and the worry about the ones I can’t fix. Then I have days like today, when I’m feeling broken and lost, and all it takes is a hug from a friend to feel better.
Maybe they can’t help me as much as I can help them, but the help they can give is damn important.
And that’s what friends are for.
13 April, 2012
Twilight, Chapter 5
We should make this more interesting. How, though? Hm…
Oo! I got it! Naked blogging!
…You aren’t allowed to be naked! I get to be!
On second thought, how about not?
Chapter 5: Blood Type
Oo! I got it! Naked blogging!
…You aren’t allowed to be naked! I get to be!
On second thought, how about not?
Chapter 5: Blood Type
05 April, 2012
Unpopular Opinion Time
I’m going to do something I don’t normally, and give this a preface. Why? Because I don’t want my head bit off, and I know that’s what can happen if someone with a strong opinion reads this. I’m probably going to anyway. But the preface:
My opinion on contraception is that…I don’t have one. If you want to use it, that’s fine. If you don’t, that’s also fine. I have no need of an opinion on this matter, and don’t foresee one for a good long time. The issue of contraception is something that should be decided between partners, not in Congress.
That being said, I’m getting fed up with the hullabaloo around the contraception issue. No, a bunch of old, white men should not have the final say in women’s health. No, women going to get abortions1 should have to have wands stuck in their privates, just because. Yes, women who want contraception should have access to it.
Note my last statement, especially the bit about women who want it. The picture that has been painted of the Catholic Church during this whole thing is unflattering: it’s a huge, mammoth beast who gives no craps about women and their health. It’s unreasonable and demanding and misogynistic. It wants what it wants, and it’s not going to take no for an answer.
Okay, again with the backing up. Yes, the Church wants what it wants, but d’you know what it wants? It wants its rights as laid out by the First Amendment. It wants freedom to practice it’s religion peacefully, without other people horning in and telling it what it can and can’t do in relation to faith.
You know something that’s bothered me about this whole shebang? You people protesting the Church’s protest have lost sight of something important. You know how what they don’t want to do is to have to provide insurance covering contraception for employees of Catholic organizations? You know how it makes sense that most people employed by Catholic organizations would be Catholic themselves? Can you see what I’m getting at?
Chances are, the women whose rights you are defending2 would not use the contraception in the first place. Because of their beliefs. Because they are Catholic women, making their own choice to follow their beliefs and not use contraception. Would you want to take a wad of bills and flush it down the toilet? Because that is basically what you are asking these companies to do.
Maybe you’re one of those who have been vocal about this, and you’re feeling attacked. I’m sorry; that was not my intent. Maybe you never thought about it this way, and need time for contemplation. Take all the time you need. Maybe you’re unswayed, and still think that Catholic organizations should provide the insurance. Okay, you do that. I just feel like, good as your intentions may be, the women who this would actually affect should be taken into consideration.
*shrugs* Just a thought.
1I’m not getting into this. I have an opinion, and well-thought-out arguments to defend myself with. What I don’t have is the energy or patience to deal with the foot-stamping, whining, and childish “No, you’re wrong and I’m right and LALALALA I’M NOT LISTENING” that inevitably, in my experience, comes of this.
2Yes, I see that you’re defending them. I thank you for the thought, and I’m sure they do, too.
02 April, 2012
In Which I Get Personal And Interpret a Song in a Way it Probably Wasn't Intended to Be
There is a song called “Jar of Hearts”, sung by Christina Perri. It’s about a girl running from the hopeful return of someone she has been in an abusive relationship with before. Looking at it, it would appear that the relationship was with a boy who has a history of abusing and abandoning people, and maybe that’s what the writer intended. Maybe it is the story of a girl staying away from a boy, who has hurt her before, when he tries to come back. But maybe it’s something more.
I heard this song on a bad day. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard it, and it wasn’t the first time this idea occurred to me. But this time, it was a source of strength against temptation.
No, I can’t take one more step towards you
‘Cause all that’s waiting is regret.
Don’t you know I’m not you ghost anymore?
You lost the love I loved the most.
In this, the first verse, there is a declaration of independence. “I’m not going to accept you this time,” it says. “I don’t love you anymore, I don’t need you anymore. I’m walking away. The only thing choosing you would give me is regret, and I don’t want that.”
I’ve learned to live half alive
And now you want me one more time.
This small couplet is accusatory. “By the time you left,” it says, “I was half dead. And you’re thinking about coming back?” The implied anger and indignation of this couplet can be easily felt.
And who do you think you are
Running ‘round leaving scars
Collecting your jar of hearts
And tearing love apart?
You’re gonna catch a cold
From the ice inside your soul
So don’t come back for me.
Who do you think you are?
The same indignation from the previous couplet is echoed in the refrain. “Who are you to do all this?” it demands. “Who are you to hurt so many people?” It continues, “If you keep going like this, you’re going to end up cold and dead, and if you have me in your clutches then, I’m going to go down with you. But I don’t want to, so keep away.”
I hear you’re asking all around
If I am anywhere to be found
But I have grown too strong
To ever fall back in your arms
The second verse again declares independence. “I don’t need you,” it says again. “You may be looking for me, you may be tempting me back to you, and yes, it would be easy to come back, but I’m strong now. I won’t take the easy way out, especially because I know what it will do to me in the long run.”
The couplet and the refrain are repeated.
And it took so long just to feel all right
Remember how to put back the light in my eyes
I wish I had missed the first time that we kissed
‘Cause you broke all your promises
And you’re back
You don’t get to get me back.
The bridge is perhaps my favorite part of the song. It admits weakness, the struggle to regain control, and expresses the wish that it had never happened. “You promised me things,” it says. “You promised me relief and hope and happiness, and you didn’t give me any of that. You made me hurt. You can apologize and smile and look pretty all you want, but I’m standing firm, and you are not getting me back. I refuse to surrender to you again.”
As the refrain repeats twice more, I wonder at the hearts that have been collected. In my interpretation of the song, what is doing the hurting and collecting is not someone who moves from person to person, snagging their hearts on the way past, but a self-destructive tendency. So do these hearts represent everyone who has participated in this tendency?
I rather think not. The song can be sung by everyone who has hurt themselves intentionally, but the hearts do not refer to the others who have done so. The hearts represent all the people who are touched by one person’s self-destructive acts. So many things are hurt by this action; trusts are broken, relationships are damaged, people are wracked by guilt, wondering what they could have done to stop this.
So many of us do this, thinking that we are only hurting ourselves, that this is okay, because at least we’re not taking it out on other people, and besides, we’re not really worth as much anyway, are we? I tend to think that maybe, the people who think like that would stop when they realize how much else they’re hurting. I know I did.
As I lay here, under my warm, toasty covers, at quarter after three in the morning, typing despite the fact that I know I need to get up in two and a half hours, I look back at what I wrote and realize that, no matter what this song is really talking about, no matter how you interpret it, it has a message it’s shouting loud and clear, and that message is, “I don’t need you anymore.”
“I don’t need you anymore.” It’s a thought I myself often express, in the usual arrogant, pigheaded manner of teenagers everywhere. Of course I don’t need older, wiser people. I know everything, and I know it way better than they do! A lot of the time, that arrogance and pigheadedness is undeserved, unwarranted, and I do need these older, smarter, wiser people. But sometimes, it’s not. Sometimes, I really don’t need what these people and things are giving me. I don’t need my aunt’s opinion on being “weird” and what will come of that. I don’t need my mother’s lectures on tolerating other people’s stupidity. I don’t need my father’s angry glares every time I make the slightest mistake.
I don’t need the silver flash of a knife and the scarlet drip of blood to make me feel okay. Not anymore. I am stronger than the pull of this, I have walked away from it once, and I can damn well stay away. I’d like to think that I never needed it, but now I know I don’t. So you can bloody well stop tempting me, because really, who do you think you are?
29 March, 2012
Twilight, Chapter 4
So, who’s been waiting for this?
*crickets*
Yeah, I thought so.
Onward anyway…
Chapter 4: Invitations
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