I am considering whether or not I am avoiding people. I think not, but maybe.

Do you ever feel like the longer you are alone the more normal it seems? The first couple weeks back I couldn't handle all the time I was spending alone. Now I'm used to it. I find things to do like puzzles. Like watching tv shows. I think maybe I need to see people though.

My body has been more of an inconvenience than anything else lately. I just want to leave it somewhere.

My tummy hurts. It's hurt for two days. I've tried eating and not eating and when I don't eat my tummy hurts and I'm hungry and when I eat my stomach hurts more.

It's kind of a bummer.

A Lifetime movie
warned that "sadness is catching."
I question this logic.
Is sadness catching
or do sad people simply catch
each other?

In the way that a spider's web
catches it's prey.

Don't you get tired of me?
I grow weary of myself even
My complaints, my sadness
and each day I reveal it
as something new
as if it had never been
that way before
and would not be again
though I am always sad
and always complaining.

I grow tired of you.
Mostly with your unrelenting
tolerence of the way I am.

I preferred the yelling.
Validation is still validation
even if it is completed with a bottle
of whiskey and a puddle of vomit
after we complete our worst suspicions.

I woke up this morning and felt not so great. For reasonable reasons. I managed to make it to the caf for the German Club exec meeting that we have over brunch each week. Then I went back to my room and lay in bed until my ATP meeting (Don't want the Lifetime movie "Confessions of a Go-Go Dancer. It's not as fun as it sounds). I went to Family Video and had a nice conversation with the guy that works there. He is so nice. He always makes me feel better about my pathetic amount of dvd rentals. Then I went back to my room. Which means I was only out of my room for a maximum of maybe 2 and a half hours today.

Tomorrow: I will leave my room more.

I always forget how smiley I can be when something makes me happy. I just smile to myself for a long time. I haven't done that for a long time. At least a month now. It feels really good to feel good.

Why do I feel like I go through my entire day and don't talk to anybody?

I just hate it, you know, when things kill me like that and they kill me because I like it and I don't like it all at the same time.

I need a goddamn roommate I can tell these things to.

No one else blogs ever.

Write a goddamn blog. Please?

Need: something to lift you from your boots out into the sky, something to make you like little things again

In class I am lacking. I read stories and love them, but can't articulate why. I become confused when I search for explanations of motive. I say, "Why does she do things that support the patriarchy," when most things I do support the patriarchy and I do them without question. Then I wonder, "Why is this story surreal and why is it when you come to the end you find out that none of it actually happened and it was all made up in her head," when I am fairly certain that I have made up most of my life in my head. Language is gone. All of them. German, English, I can't even read people anymore. I want to go through every story, line by line, like it will help me understand.

I realized it didn't help me to disappear for a bit. I started to miss people I didn't realize I would miss.

The Future

I wait for it
as if it contains a hover car
or the cure for skin
and aging.

But even land bound
vehicles only interest me
as a means of getting
from one place to another
and for once
my skin is not the problem.

Above all else,
in this I have faith.
It didn't occur to me until this morning
that it is possible for it not to exist.

Reading stories that are really good always make me want to talk differently.

Sometimes I pretend to have forgotten his name. When I make lists, count them on my fingers, he conveniently disappears. It's just three letters. Not a big deal. I pretend not to worry about it.

It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library

I always think a lot when I work out. I like gyms because they baffle me. Working out is an intensely intimate situation. People wear very little clothing, they are sweating, people make noises. It could be equated with having sex. Yet, we expose ourselves to lots of people while we do this. We put aside our vanity in order to have vanity. I recognize that not everyone goes to the gym for vanities sake. I also acknowledge that the main reason I go to the gym is for vanity.

Today I saw someone both in the gym and at History Club, but we made no acknowledgment that we had seen each other earlier that day, because earlier we had been working out and I had been red faced and sweaty because I haven't worked out for a long time.

On the way to the gym I saw a girl kissing a boy on the neck. I had heard gossip about them a few days earlier. It was like witnessing gossip. The sad thing was, I know they aren't happy.

One time a friend and I were talking about our passive aggressive punishments. When we get mad, our version of getting angry is to ignore the person that we're mad at. The problem is, those people never notice. I'm not angry at anyone, so don't think that. It's just that whenever I distance myself, I always want the people I am distancing myself from to notice that I have disappeared. But those people never do.

I lied. I am angry, but I'm probably not angry with you. To my knowledge, the person I am angry with doesn't read this. Those people never do.

Well, some of those people do.

But when they aren't people anymore they stop.

The lymph node behind my ear is swollen and slightly painful. At least, I think it's a lymph node. Web md is being really unhelpful because you can't pick "behind the ear" as a place to hurt. Other research tells me this could br a sign of infection. Let's hope not.

I am sitting in a coffeeshop and there is a boy in the coffeeshop sitting in a table opposite of mine and we both looked up and looked at each other at the same moment and it was really unnerving and I immediately looked down and opened my computer even though before I had been reading a book.

I am reading a book of short stories for my fiction workshop. We pulled authors names out of a hat and that was the book we had to read, but my book is perfect for me right now. It's called "Self-Help" by Lorrie Moore. A lot of the stories are written in second person and are instructions on how to do things. My favorites have been "How to be an Other Woman" and "How to be a Writer." Coincidentally one of our prompts this week was to write a "How to" guide. I had to pick a different prompt. I picked the prompt where you find a picture of a person and pretend someone has just asked them what they want most in the world and we have to answer in 400 words or less. I posted that below.

The problem with being anywhere is that sometimes the wrong things happen. I'm in a coffeeshop and Iron and Wine came on and I like Iron and Wine except a lot of times it makes me really sad and I don't want to be really sad. I want academic music. Like, I'm studying with a cute hat on type of music. Like I'm filling this role of me in a coffeeshop, drinking tea, with too many books and a computer and an umbrella because it's raining. I think about how I want to write things, but everything that comes in my mind is sad and then I think how I want to write happy things, but I don't really want to write happy things, because I don't really want to read anything that is happy, even when I am happy myself.

Another story about a boy and a bicycle

He wanted to bike across the street, but the cars and buses and the perpendicularly moving bicycles were preventing him from doing so. It was imperative that he cross the street, even more imperative that he do so immediately. He had almost gotten his chance, when a van turned onto the road, thus blocking his crossing. It, of course, was not as simple as this. After he crossed, he would want to bike for two blocks before he took a left and went south for several miles and then he would finally reach his destination where he would feel relieved. This relief was all presumed and not at all promised, but he felt if he could at least cross the goddamn street then he would on his way to this alleviation. To make matters worse, it had started raining in the approximately four minutes that he had been standing there, his foot perched on the peddle, ready to push off. It was not hard rain, but a cold miserable drizzle, which was almost worse than something pouring. There was a romantic association between pouring rain and when a person is going to profess their love to a girl, but there were little to no positive benefits that stemmed from the chilly droplets that always seemed to land on the worst possible spot on his neck. The lights were timed against him. The sky too, had joined in this brigade. That feeling of certainty that he had woken up with, that yes, today was the day that he was going to do what he thought about doing every day, but never actually did, had dissipated, had dissipated in a manner so quickly he wanted to call it violent. Confessions of love never go quite right though and he wasn’t sure if professions of love could be planned at all. Every single other time that he had told a girl about his deep profound feelings he had been drunk and none of his feeling had been deep or profound at all and could be summed up entirely with the statement, “I think you are pretty.” He turned around, even though he still wanted to cross the street. This wasn’t new. He wanted to cross the street everyday and never did.