February 6, 2008
Years in the Making
Every so often, I get so angry I can’t move. It’s like the fight or flight response went into overdrive and fury just paralyzes me. Breathing and the beating of my heart feel like the only areas that my body is attending to, and both are a struggle. My fingers are just becoming mobile again, and it struck me that I’d better vent via writing, lest I make a poor decision IRL.
2 days ago the nightmares returned. Since my teen years I only ever have nightmares about one thing: the people whom I am tied to by blood. I’m gunna leave it at that. This is a note to self and a warning, all wrapped up in one.
I say, for the bajillionth time: We are through, and I am leaving. I am never good enough for you, and you have never loved me. Go away and never come back. I’m not one of you anymore.
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January 10, 2008
Things I Have Done to Myself
We could all write volumes on this topic.
Around this time of year- days from my birthday and just into the new year- I tend to look at the big picture more often. Reflect on things that had previously slipped by me. I’m noticing that this life has been handcrafted by the choices I’ve made: both the intentional and incidental.
Little voices have, for most of my life, guided me towards these things. Something- whether born from paranoia/fear or innate knowledge- has always said DISAPPEAR. It’s why I severed ties with almost everyone over a period of several years. It’s why I try to stay “off the radar” when it comes to the Vast Machine. (Great phrase from a book I just devoured called The Traveler) It’s why I have been dreaming about leaving the country without telling anyone and dropping off the face of the earth. It feels really important somehow. It was the oddest realization when I was reading. The Corrigan boys had spent their entire life staying “off the grid”, never really knowing why. When one of them fucked up and used his real name and SS… everything became clear.
(Note to self: Mum called here and I spent an hour encouraging her about Alison and her parenting in general. For about the 100th time. I could play her a recording and she wouldn’t remember from one call to the next. Yah, I’m pretty sure not loving my parents makes me a bad person. Then again, their not loving me… eh… nevermind)
I could easily be romanticizing simple paranoid delusions, but I have begun to wonder if this long standing notion to DISAPPEAR is actually based in reality. No idea who might want to find me, but this world is full of people who are pawns, willing to hurt or kill “troublesome” individuals in the name of ideology. Since my ideology is nearly opposite from “the norm”… fuck, I don’t know. I can’t say it without rolling my eyes: I’m on the Red List! The Man is gunna kill me!
But I started this entry with other focuses.
I also realized recently that my intentional lack of connections has had a very sad side affect: I don’t really have anybody mentally stimulating in my life. IRL… and this is both sad and probably a little self-delusional… I’m the smartest person I know. (No eye roll required. Might be untrue, but it doesn’t seem like it.) Questions fly out of my mouth and there is always silence or “gee, I dunno”. I can often get Sean to input a few ideas if I phrase questions like “what if”, but it’s mostly me theorizing alone. The other day this hit me and I was dumbstruck. What if I had surrounded myself with intelligent friends and colleagues instead of choosing solitude? Oh, the endless possibilities that could domino from that! Now every time I ask a question and hear silence… I kind of want to scream. It’s so indicative of how little I actually know, but I feel like the world is, by and large, full of idiots. I’m Luke Wilson in Idiocracy, cept’ I don’t have a sweet jaw and am smarter than his character, too.
I’m suddenly filled with the desire to laugh hysterically until my heart stops. Why does that make me miss Liz so much?
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August 31, 2007
Another reason why cars suck
I swear to God, I’m going to find the technology to silence and severely punish those who have car alarms and who use their horns in non-emergency situations. HATE THOSE TO DEATH.
It’s nice to be able to walk to everything, but living in the city has been grating on my nerves with all of the car horns. Car alarms go off so many times everyday and just drone oooooon. And apparently blowing your horn is the new sigh of displeasure. Why just roll your eyes or mutter a curse when you can HOOOOOONK and let an entire mile radius know that you’re mildly put out?
I Googled this shit, of course, and learned the following;
car alarms do not work
no one likes hearing car alarms
silent car alarms exist where the owner is “paged” instead
some cities are working on banning car alarms
there is no death ray yet for stopping car alarms and reaming the owners
This last point is what troubles me the most. Acting completely contrary to reason is something that I have finally come to expect of my fellow man. Not having a handheld device that extracts justice is not. There are itty bitty portable music machines, police sticks that make people vomit, convulse, or pass out, and ninja TV remotes. WHERE is my car alarm/horn killer? Where is my jerk-seeking missile of retribution? So lame.
I can feel it; someday soon I will be walking along when a driver selfishly plays the “honk at you continually to prove my moot point” game (which happens every. single. day. in my hood) and I will unleash the fury on them. Reach in the drivers window and POW! style. *twitch*
In conclusion, no one is trying to steal your damn car and everyone other than the driver of the car in front of you does not “deserve” to hear your horn. Ride a bike, ass.
And happy birthday, Sean. I hope you’re having fun. Miss you terribly.
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March 8, 2007
We are so very weak
Sometimes I’m so struck by how strong we humans seem. We make it through such emotionally, physically demanding, draining events, and manage to continue on, even if at half mast.
But then other times I see that the “strength” I’m seeing is actually a poor coping mechanism. Like running on near-dead batteries, we’re just going through the motions until we’re totally used up and we breakdown. Just because Alison and I made it out of our childhood home of nightmares doesn’t mean we’re functioning properly, or that we used any real strength. (And yet, not to completely dismiss the true strength that we plumb from our depths, or truly, pull from the heavens.) We feed off each other. When I am upset, she takes a nosedive into the same abyss. When she sobs in her room, my wall comes up, wavers, and then I fantasize about finding a drink: defeated and floating next to her in that river of tears. We’re like mirrors. A science project: watch the plant lean into the light. We’re not even conscious of 90% of what we do and feel, for God sake! Whatever was He thinking when he wired us this way? Are we being protected from something without boundaries until we can handle it? Our minds are like endless mazes, and I wonder what’s truly inside. The illusion of strength seems to be wrapped up in that. What’s inside us all?
She draws pictures of me me with pointed cheeks and a smirk for the world. But maybe my 10 years extra experience, my icy interior and stony facade don’t really mean anything. I’ve just learned to cope in a different way. I’m wired differently. A single wound could still end us both, we’d both be vaporized at Ground Zero, and just 3 little days without water would send us to eternity. Maybe these are the realizations that are required for us to know God’s purposes in the slightest. Wouldn’t that be a terrifying irony… that our pain and confusion is because we just never listened, thought, conversed with Him enough to see… we must be broken. to know His love and begin to see why we are here.
I think perhaps it’s largely instinct that we continue on, not necessarily inherent or learned strength.
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October 11, 2006
More Internet to hate
Ooookay. I’ve bit my tongue on this one for weeks.
Why do people take the brilliant idea of web tags and ruin them with their laziness and poor grasp of their potential? WHY?
This has wasted so much of my fucking time, wading through piles of posts and images where people cut+paste generic tags into entire folders of data or just input tags that make no fucking sense. Try searching MIB in Flickr, and some asshat has decided that every time he snaps a picture of his pugs, we who search for Men in Black must endure looking at him. Yes, there was a character in the movie that was a pug, but the relation to generic pug photos ends there. Add that to the groups of webtards who tag a picture for every item it contains, regardless of true description or usefulness, those who divide up appropriate multiple-word tags into several useless single-word tags, and those who tag their full fucking names (as two single-word tags, of course)… the Internet went from suddenly being content-rich again to absolutely unusable in under 6 months.
I won’t even get started on mommy blogs and sites that read as follows: “then I had lunch, then I went to the bathroom, then I called my aunt, then I went to the store and bought a (trendy product of the day), then I blogged about it all”. For then I would truly know madness. And as it stands I’m nestled in the crevice between functioning sociopath and full on crackers.
Reason 42 why I feel old: I’ve watched the Internet through so many of these starts/stops, seeing new ideas blossom and then prompty die in the hands of web users. Even being pissy at the Internet feels like an ooooold habit. Has it really been 11 years?
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May 6, 2006
Pink is the new stupid effing dumbass
God DAMN IT. I wanted to write in here frequently. I wanted to do a lot of things. But after we left our suburban home, absolutely nothing went as planned. I especially didn’t want to spend the next entry speaking negatively, but I find myself in a very frustrated state and in need of a vent.
What I think I really want is to live someplace where people are magically not aware of celebrity culture. Hearing my 15 year old sister say that she wants to “go to parties all over the world”, “be beautiful and skinny”, and have a life like those represented on celebrity blogs makes me livid! Who the fuck decided this nonsense was was to be accepted? How did so many people agree that we were to emulate, or at least desire, a manufactured image? Why does anybody care what clothing size Lionel Ritchie’s daughter wears or what spoiled heiress some other spoiled hieress is dating? WTF? Why do we even need to remind ourselves that celebrities have stylists, hair and makeup teams, publicists, receive free “designer” clothing and jewelry, spend huge chunks of time exercising and in plastic surgeon’s offices, follow unhealthy diets, play PR games like “being seen” with other celebrities, and get airbrushed to hell in every photo we see of them? Why don’t we instinctively see these fluffy facsimiles of humans as simply the advertising vehicles they are? When I hear that so-and-so just “signed on as the spokesperson” of product X, I don’t think how lucky or famous they must be. Instead I wonder why I am supposed to care that he/she will now be paid to pretend to like some product. Why are we raising a generation of girls, who just a few years ago were told they could run the world, to want to be objects again? When was the last time I heard anyone say they wish they had the knowledge, skill, or morals of a famous person? Where are the posters and fan sites for the people who dedicate their lives to helping others? Am I cynical, practical, or both?
It’s been weird staying here at my family’s house for so long. Every day I hear the damage that has been done to my impressionable teenage sister simply by being exposed to celebrity culture. Her mixture of a bad childhood and their taunts of how small and ugly her life is has become like an albatross around her neck. As an easy, brain-dead activity she looks at pop culture blogs with wide, adoring eyes, and walks away feeling fat, ugly, and useless. If only she saw what I saw. If only more people took a stand, demanding more for their minds than watching actors and actresses (and the genuine do-nothings inbetween) continue to play act their way through life. My sister tells me with conviction that couture is only designed in size 0, and that there’s some Victoria Secret model who wears 00, therefore of course her newly starved size 5 frame is obese. GOD DAMN IT.
I’ve spent what feels like the bulk of my adult years fighting injustice. Maybe I go looking for causes, because despite my full plate I feel further convicted to somehow reverse at least a bit of this insanity. I hope I can find a way to make a difference. I hope I can at least help give my sister another view of the world, free of time wasters like fame.
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July 22, 2005
No, after YOU
I just went obviously out of my way to allow your car to go in front of my scooter. Why must you insist on pulling right up to me, stopping, and waving me on? I stopped for you, slowing myself and other traffic down, in deferrance to you. Why are you throwing this nice gesture back in my face? Take the fucking gift! JUST GO AHEAD.
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