I accidentally left one of my burners on and the fire alarm went off. To remedy the situation I opened all the windows and tried to fan the fire alarm, but I accidentally hit the fire alarm and now I can't get it back on because it's too high up. Bummer.

New life plan: I am going to become one of those indifferent human beings. I quite like indifferent people. They are perhaps my favorite kind of people, which always ends terribly for me. Thus I am going to become one. Never mind the fact that this is something I have desired for years, for perhaps my entire life. Lately I've been thinking a lot about myself as a child. I always had a lot of friends. Sometimes though, certain girls would be mean to me until I cried. There was no reason for it, they just knew they could make me cry. I understood that they were just trying to make me cry, which made me really angry and when I get angry, I cry. Maybe that's why I haven't cried for the past couple of days. I am just complacent and not angry. When I am sad I watch television shows. When I am angry I cry.

Also, I have like a billion potatoes. What can I make with potatoes?

I wonder if when actors are killed off in television shows they experience a death.

How to feel better:
1. Tell yourself repeatedly that the thing making you feel bad isn't making you feel bad at all, but something else entirely.
2. Watch a lot of television shows. They are better than movies because they take less concentration.
3. When waking up in the middle of the night or the early morning continue to watch television shows.
4. Tell everyone what's wrong, but tell them you are okay and it doesn't bother you.

I say all these things about being dysfunctional, but this isn't true. When I'm upset I tend to get hyper functional.

I feel mostly okay, but I'm sort of dreading the shower. The shower is the one place where there is nothing to distract myself with.

"Tasha, you can't just distract yourself all the time and expect yourself to be happy. You have to actually be happy."

I want to watch endless episodes of 30 Rock and pretend this is reality.

Maybe I am not sad. Maybe I am just neutral. I sort of hate being neutral. I have this theory that I've had a lot of really enjoyable times in my life, thus when times are less enjoyable I fall into a minor depression because life seems so not fun. I want to read a book. I want to read 5 books. I have two books to read. Neither of them are the type of book I want to be reading right now.

I don't want to go home so I am sitting on the computer at school. Paaaaathetic.

Teaching a class with a cough:
Open your COUGH books to page COUGH COUGH COUGH and look at COUGH COUGH exercise 3 COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH.

I brought my knitting to school today.
 'Was strickst du?'
'Handschuhe.'
'Sie heisst mittens? Hahahaha'

'What are you knitting?'
'Mittens.'
'My son is learning to knit. Knitting is harder for boys.'
'Oh.'
'There is an island in South American where only knit.'
'Oh.'

I woke up half an hour before my alarm went off. Wrote a sonnet for my double sonnet crown. I now have three. They are sonnets only in that they are fourteen lines each. I feel sort of terrible, but it's the type of terrible I cannot pinpoint. I have nothing more to think about. The sadness just sits there and doesn't say anything. The conclusion I came to last night was that very few people have actually broke my heart, I just miss warm bodies.

I feel completely non-functional. The next few days of my life: curled up in ex-boyfriend's sweatshirt, t-shirt, and shorts, watching things, if I can find things to watch. Maybe I will buy a movie or two. I don't even know where to buy movies.

I like being in houses. I also like being in cars. It makes me feel at home in ways I never am otherwise.

In 3rd grade my teacher had a little basket of jelly beans and whenever I got the chance I would steal one. Eventually, I ate all of them. I don't know why I'm thinking of this now. I got two hours of sleep. Had post-drinking/overthinking insonia, had still drunk walk to the trainstation at 6:30 in the morning, had best shower ever for the fifteen minutes my hot water lasts, wrote a letter that will never be read. On the brightside, life will only get better.

"I knew that Ivy, like every woman, really only wanted to know what I felt - or thought, if I didn't feel anything."

Max Frisch, Homo Faber

While recognizing that this is horribly sexist, I must point out that I find this to be true. I constantly want to talk about how I'm feeling or you're feeling or if neither of us are talking or together I think about what I'm feeling or you're feeling. This of course is an absolutely terrible way to live, this constant assessment, how am I feeling at the moment. I would prefer to think in terms of activities like, I will now do this activity or that activity. Things I am not saying: I would really like to see you this weekend.

I'm really excited for the next few days. This is good.

I have a piece of glass embedded in my foot. A glass shattered on my floor Monday morning and in everything that happened I forgot to wear shoes in my kitchen and now there is a piece of glass in my foot. It only hurts sometimes. I don't know how to get it out. I've tried using tweezers. This is so awkward.

Also, it's snowing.

Pretending I'm happy when I'm actually feeling really awful makes me feel sort of miserable.

I am going to wander around Linz alone. I am going to buy a book. Maybe other things. I am going to sit in the bookstore and read. Shit.

Cosmo said I am going to leave all my feelings behind and just be able to enjoy sex without thinking. Really good.

What I want right now: I want to go to the caf at Knox almost crying. I want to find a few of my friends sitting there, done eating, but who wait for me to eat and when I sort of almost cry in the caf they tell me nice things to make it better and I still leave and cry because I cry a lot. Can it be the weekend now? I just want to have fun and pretend I'm completely okay.

Liz Lemon is dating Matt Damon the pilot. They better break up soon.

I have this plan to stay in Linz until the early evening/late afternoon. I will buy a book. Maybe some yarn. Maybe a puzzle. Maybe a movie. Things to distract me. Then I will go home and be comforted by the fact that I haven't been there in awhile. I just have to make it till Thursday. Then I will be all right.

Remember that time we saw that play and it was really fantastic and I put my knees next to your knee because we couldn't hold hands?

I can't sleep, which is unsurprising. I feel reasonably okay. Reasonably meaning that I feel like shit, but am not crying or horribly panicking in any way. I am going to tell all of my readers (who are dwindling due to my poor blogging habits as of late) what I am thinking right now, but some parts will be really vague.

1. I really like the movie "500 Days of Summer" I saw it while drunk summer '09 and instantly hated how much I loved it. It's like a chick flick for uncertain young people who are too fucking cool to go watch romantic comedies in theaters and too fucking uncertain of everything to want or be in a relationship, but really like the notion of love. I am thinking of it now. The scene at the end with expectations versus reality. I feel like I have both expectation and reality running through my mind, but neither of them are really what is going to happen. What will happen will be something in the middle. Probably something painfully in the middle.

2. I just emailed Monica to ask for a writing assignment. I read over my blog posts from last April to figure out how I make myself feel better. It made me miss my little room with all my pictures hanging up and all my dresses in the closet and all my nice little routines. It made me miss sitting on the Gizmo patio squinting at my computer. It made me miss going to Kaldi's and writing papers. I miss German class. I miss German Club. I miss my sorority. I miss my sorority sisters. I miss having to create a huge document. I miss having classes until midnight. I miss my comforter. I even miss Knox parties.

3. I was in Maddie's kitchen and her roommate from Thailand came in really mad because the landlord won't let a guy from Ghana move into the building because he said he will make things "dirty" because he's black. It was awful enough that it wholly distracted me from how I was feeling. I didn't realize people were openly racist like this. I have to admit. I come from a very white neighborhood in St. Paul. A lot of my friends are white. But somehow I've always very actively cared about oppression and bigotry. I remember being a very small child and reading lots of books about the holocaust and wondering why anyone would do such things. Then in college I read a lot of books by "women of color." A lot of literature by Chicanas. Black feminists. Black feminism always appealed to me more because a lot of times black feminists are not separatists. I can never be a black feminist. I am a very white person. I will always be one of those educated white feminists who likes to talk about feminism, who likes to comment about gender, while being incredibly hetereonormative. Somehow I love it. I've always loved it. I like reading books by feminists. I like being a feminist. I like doing things that are clearly anti-feminist because it gets me off doing something that is so against what I believe in. When I get mad at boys for acting like ourselves I say, "Why do we live in a society that raises boys to be this way?"

4. Monica wants me to write a double sonnet crown. I will take this challenge, but they will not rhyme. They will not be wholly formal sonnets. They will be the correct length with no rhymes. They will be about what I always write about (boys and love and food and absence).

5. I talk about writing a lot because I am a writer. If I were to introduce myself in any manner possible, I would say "I'm Tasha and I am a writer." I hated calling myself a writer for a long time. I felt like it was a preemptive title, but it is who I am.

6. I asked Julia things I do when I feel better as she knows better than anyone and her suggestions were these:
And to feel better in general:
- Take a bubble bath.
- Knit something. Perhaps a pair of slippers for me. Like these ones:

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/113-32-crochet-slippers-in-eskimo

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/plain-or-cabled-slippers

I like the colors of the green ones and the cabling and strap of the beige ones.
- Cook Thanksgiving dinner and/or any other dinner
- Make pancakes and/or French Toast from scratch
- Drink whiskey and dance wildly to La Roux
- Cry
- Read melancholy poetry
- watch movies about baby animals
- find an animal shelter or pet store that will let you pet tiny, fuzzy kittens


When I think of more things, I will send you another message.
And then I will dream about laying next to you in a warm bed, staring up at the ceiling and sometimes looking out the window. While eating cheese and bread and roasted garlic tomatoes.

What a wonderful friend Julia is.

7. I am having three Thanksgivings. I still feel really thankful for lots of things despite feeling like shit.

8. Current life plans: Come back to Austria next year. Figure out grad school shit in the summer. Apply to graduate school. Be an academic fuck who gets to talk about books and art and abstract concepts all day.

9. I really need to take a shower.

I feel pretty terrible at the moment. You would think after a while I would get used to this and not care, but I do care. Every time I have these same little thoughts, but I still understand the inevitable. Nice little vagueries, right? I did not spell vagueries correctly. I don't care. Maybe I will write now. I just don't know. I will read some Sarah Manguso and some Sandra Cisneros. I will talk to people and tell them why people are awful, knowing that I am awful myself. I will write letters. I will spend a lot of time crying and think, "This moment will not possibly pass because I feel too terrible" and it will pass and I will feel better again because that is how things work. I will write in my blog more. I will curl up in the fetal position and miss sleeping with other people. I will curl up in the fetal position so long I will forget how nice it is to sleep with other people (I have done this before). But in the end it will be okay and I will move on and forget about everything.

I don't sleep well when I drink. The idea of a nightcap sounds terrible to me. I don't go to sleep, I don't stay asleep. I try to sleep at seven and then wake up three hours later feeling wide awake and hungover and bored. I am going to start writing and I am going to start posting it here at the risk of making thing unpublishable elsewhere, at the risk of people not reading my blog because no one read blogs because they like writing, but because they like to know what's going on in peoples lives, but I don't really know what it going on in mine. I've become a much more calm and relaxed person than I used to be, but I still cry when I get drunk sometimes. When that happens it's mostly because I'm angry. I still try to go off and do it by myself and I still do a terrible job of that. For some reason I feel okay about things despite uncertainties.

Ugh I need retail therapy. I want to buy everything in IKEA tomorrow.

On the bright side, I really approve of the Freistadt Christmas decorations. I'm pretty sure they wired the entire Altstadt with Christmas lights.

Also: How do you say hair conditioner in German?

I don't check the internet for two days and there are a million new blog posts. I follow too many blogs or it's finals at Knox so everyone is posting a lot.

In other news: I don't know what to do. No one seems to be able to tell me what to do. Fuck.

I'm being a bad blogger. I am being a bad everything right now.

I woke up still drunk. Why is it that one week a bottle of vodka can do such little harm and the next week leave me horribly drunk? Any way, I am going to have my normal hangover food of eggs and toast and bacon even though the Austrian bacon is so little and substandard to American bacon.

Eventually I reach the point where I just stop caring and wearing tights with runs in them to work. This point is in November.

I just remembered a book that I didn't finish last year, The Book of Salt. I am suddenly extremely perturbed by this. Monica lent it to me when I was feeling awful and all I wanted was to disappear into something and so I spent an entire day reading Deb Olin Unferth's Vacation, , but somehow I could never get into The Book of Salt in the same way and now I feel bad about it.

I had a dream that my cleaning lady and her entire family were trying to come in and clean my apartment while I was sleeping. This was enough to wake me up. I did however speak German in my dream.

I feel a little bit guilty by how happy I am with my life right now. But only a bit.

I am checking blogs at work on one of the two computers, not because they are super interesting (though some are), but because I don't have a seat in the teacher's room and I just stand around uncomfortably otherwise.

It is raining. I just taught a class that didn't speak. There are still four days until it is the weekend. I hate today.

I have not been posting with my normal overzealousness. I'm not sure why. It could be argued that it is because I don't consistently have internet, that all I do during the week is sleep in my apartment. I think I've been happy though and when I'm happy I don't feel the need to document everything that I've ever felt and show it to everyone. I also haven't really been writing. As I was falling asleep last night I thought about writing and it came so easily, but I was in bed, half asleep in the stage where everything that exists is mostly hallucination. I become so much more desperate to talk to people here. At home there are so many times when I think about coming, but instead sit around waiting for my phone to do anything. If anything, I understand the self-preservation of my happiness.

I used to be a person who cared a lot about politics. Now I am a person who tries their hardest not to think about it, otherwise it makes me start to feel sick.

My apartment is a den of filth that must be cleaned immediately.

I want to write something poetic, but I have nothing good to say, I spend all my time sitting around in a beater and underwear. So here's a Matthew Dickman (my great love) poem.

Today I went to school after a four day weekend and they had failed to make a schedule for me. So I sat reading for the first two periods, went to third period where I didn't do anything, read through fourth period in case someone needed me and then went home at noon. I basically don't have a job.

I have 12 euros to last me 13 days. My plan thus far: buy no food.

Crazy, confusing weekend. Spent Saturday in Gmunden with Becca and then went to Linz for Sunday and Monday night. An anonymous TA may or may not have gotten really lost while drunk and alone leaving the club on Sunday, wandered into the industrial area of Linz, climbed a barb-wire fence, lost a shoe on the wrong side, climbed back over, climbed over again, hitched a ride on two dump trunks, and mysteriously broken his elbow. I got to watch multiple movies in English which was lovely. I was alone in Freistadt for approximately five minutes before I left and got tea at Mcdo's. I haven't showered since Sunday. It's a really good look for me. 

I'm just going with the flow.

Last night I went to a club with the same name as the phone company that had approximately 500 rooms. I dressed as a bunny rabbit and felt much cuter than I normally feel and drank more vodka than I do on most days. I lost one of my contacts in the sink and now have a very confusing blister on my foot. Overall I would say it was a good and highly confusing Halloween.