Premeditated Misconduct

I have entered some quietly beatific Zen calm. I am the eye of the storm, perfect stillness in the middle of chaos.

We're moving. Packing things up and living in huge piles of boxes and unsorted stuff and donate heaps. We're calling the landlord, the utility company, the internet company, family, the landlord, friends. We're cramming vans full of boxes and doing three loads from one address to the other after work. We're juggling finances. Trying to remember what we need and what we already have. We're working. I'm still studying algebra; Jinya's jogging.

I recognize that I should feel stressed. In fact, I should feel frustrated and short-tempered and emotionally exhausted.

I don't though. I don't really feel anything but calm and mildly pleasant. Easy-going. Unfazed.


I think that living with depression for so long-- struggling against the burden of it-- strengthened my emotional "muscles", as it were. (Hahahaha, my metaphor just makes me think of Rock Lee and his weights, but that's exactly what I'm talking about.)

I sort of hate the sudden onset of spring. While everyone else is cheerfully exclaiming, "Isn't it beeeeyyyuuutiful!? and sighing like they've finally reached orgasm, I'm restless and short-tempered and weepy. Oh, and half the time I feel like I'm baking inside of my own skin, which absolutely no one understands; about a third of the people I meet are still cold, and everyone else is happy.

Fuckers.

In a few weeks, I'll adjust better. After all, the weather shifted from 45 to 75/80 in about 36 hours, and my body really doesn't like abrupt changes like that. In a few weeks, there will be leaves on the trees and thus some shade instead of blaring sunlight that feels like it's searing my translucent skin to a nice, crispy, well-done consistency.

In a few weeks, I'll be packing and moving. I'll have stuff to do and a lot to think about. I'll be re-experiencing the joys of having my own place, of having space in the fridge for my food, of not living in a cluttered shit-hole.

But right now I'm miserable.

The house is so damn cluttered that even if I began packing what little I have in my room-- most is still in storage from when we moved here, so packing up should only take me a few hours, tops-- there's no where to put the boxes. No where.

The warm weather makes me feel sweaty and nauseous, but also restless, fidgety, obligated to go somewhere and do something so that I don't waste these few temperate days that exist between our frigid, icy winter and tropically hot, humid summer. But I don't know what to do. My piece o' shit bike is still up where I can't get it even if I wanted to ride it. I do go for walks, but they're unsatisfying. There's nothing green yet anywhere except for a few sprouts and a little grass, not even dandelions yet. I go for walks in bare sunlight in empty woods, bored and unfulfilled.


( Food, body, weight issues. Trigger warning if this topic is upsetting for you. )

I really want to see a doctor. I need to get on state insurance first. I want to ask about my non-stop periods and hypoglycemia and weight and depression and bad reactions to birth control and non-reactions to anti-depressants.

If I knew how to quit without committing suicide, I would.

Then again, committing suicide would be far more pro-active of an action than I am capable of taking at this juncture in time. If I had that kind of resolve, I wouldn't be in this position.


( I'm sitting alone and crying into my coffee like a loser. )

- I'm in the kind of mood to write a new story or draw up a doujinshi or something like that. Maybe simply pick up a good fantasy novel or get sucked back into a good anime. I want to take a vacation from this reality into one fast-paced, exciting, nostalgic, terrible and wonderful and real and full of people I fall in love with and who will never love me because they are simply characters. I want to let my brain accumulate all sorts of new material, make new connections, stew in a marinade for a few days, and then come back to this world with a better sense of what the hell is going on.
I'd simply rewatch all of FMA (or any of the thirteen other series I've been hoarding on my hard drive), but I'm holding out until I lose my internet either through moving or through not being able to pay the bill.

- Talking to chauni last night made me realize how muh I miss Ashland. The soothing flow of mellow days, the calm ease that seems to fill the very air throughout the seasons, from the cool bite of autumn until the blaze of apathy-inducing heat at the end of summer. The rustle of the aspens and maples in the wind off the Lake. The slanting evening sunlight laying gold against the side of Wheeler Hall. The flat, deep blue ceiling of the sky. God, I could cry just thinking about it.

- I am fucking depressed. Even taking my meds like I'm supposed to, like a good girl. It's not enough. I'm still irrationally bitchy, cranky, tired, stressed, despairing, and hopeless. I hate you, dysfunctional brain chemistry. I want to stop sucking ass, so you better start recalibrating ASAP. This is not a suggestion; this is an order.

- I want to make more icons, but I struggle coming up with text. Amuse me and suggest something; maybe I'll use it. I really like icon-making; I'm just not that clever at matching an image with text. -_-;; I do think I'm getting pretty good at this particular little party-trick though, and I'm learning a lot about PS. I'll take requests, if anyone's actually interested.

- Speaking of FMA, Edward Elric has started to take over my life. I spend far too much of my time thinking about this made-up, not-real person, and it makes feel me sad and pathetic.
I'm not sure if I want an Ed in my life, or if I want to be Ed. Does the distinction matter?
...yeah, I think it does. I only wish I knew which one it was. (Ok, I don't mean that. Sitting back and thinking about it more makes me cringe at what either option might say about me. Dammit, I am not envious of a fictional character's personality traits! That's just fucking silly!)

- I want to go swimming and horseback riding. This is probably related to my Ashland-longings. I also want to actually feel happy, and not just tired, bored, amused, entertained, etc, etc... but that can be filed with the "I'm fucking depressed" rant.

Right. I'm going to go to set my alarm to get me up in the early afternoon and get my ass to bed.

Feeling a bit out of it now and then the last few days. Sleepy, tired, lethargic, bored and yet restless, angry, obstinate. I don't know what my problem is.

I'm getting stuff done, and sometimes I'm even doing a good job on it. I'm very happy with my Taoism midterm (in which I compared the tao of the Tao-Te Ching and the logos of The Gospel of John); I've stitched up the massive holes in three pairs of my jeans; I mailed off my FAFSA, organized my closet, located my sandals, did most of my reading for tomorrow's classes, wrote more on my original story for my writing class, and started a new piece of fanfic (Envy/Ed/Wrath, for those curious).

There's a free Stuart Davis concert in St. Paul this Sunday that I will, of course, be attending.

Speaking of this weekend... *raises a brow* May or may not be having company. *pokes wolfe_guardian* I don't know if that plan's still go, but you are always welcome here, darlin', and I do mean always. (What? Don't you know? You were adopted! ^_^) You're a delight, truly.
And in another week, ozen will be gracing me with her lovely, lively presence. Yippie! I'm so looking forward to it.

I actually have a job interview with--of all places!--the Sanrio store in the Mall of America on Monday. (Because I'm such a Hello Kitty-type person! *snortlaugh*)
Hell, I even got my hundred dollar room deposit back from Northland today, so I have a little more money.

(Things I Still Need to Get Done:
-Develop film
-Return library books!
-Deposit check
-Patch other two pairs of pants
-Write up evaluation)

But I'm just not feelin' the love for some reason.
I'm not feeling like I'm hitting my stride. Everything's a bit off. I'm not trying hard enough. I'm not living up to my potential. I'm not doing good enough; I'm slacking.
But at the same time, I don't want to do anything but slack.

Damn it, I want to be a better person! I want to be someone worthwhile; I want to be someone competent and respectable and friendly and responsible and approachable.
I want to be me, but all the good and none of the bad. I want to be the Mary Sue version of me.
I get so tired of being a fuck-up. Of being a slacker. Or sitting on my ass and blowing time. Of being lazy. Of being irresponsible. Of wasting who I am and what I could be if I just applied myself.

I hate my own hypocrisy.
I hate my envy and useless rage.
I hate my helplessness in the face of my own failings.
I hate all my faults, and if I could take a razor to them and excise them-- like cutting out my right eye or my hand-- I would.
I hate my hatred, but I can't see to do anything about it.

(God, I feel now the way I usually feel when I've been off my Zoloft for a few weeks...and that's not a good sign, 'cause I'm taking the damned stuff. >.< Fuck you, expensive medication.)

I think I need to take some time to back off and assess myself.
*sigh*

[WARNING: Entering Jess's unmedicated psyche. Probably TMI and disturbing for most people. Proceed at your own risk. You've been warned.]



There is nothing.
Nothing here but a screen, nothing but a fruitless interface through which I fail to communicate anything to anyone except-- at least once daily-- almost palpable shame and idiocy when I say something profoundly stupid or over-step my bounds or lose my temper over one more pointless thing. Nothing real gets through... or rather, it does, but only when I force it to, when I push until I sweat blood to get a valid and important point past the borderland of my fumbling tongue, the vapid wasteland of the English language, through the arrogant, silly, cockiness of my vain personality.
Word fall from my mouth in an uncontrollable stream of drivel, wasting air and assaulting people's ears and saying nothing, until it comes to the point that when I try to speak and mean it, it seems that no one listens at first... not really blowing me off, but simply saying, "Ah, that's Jess, and that is her way."
("Ah," the villagers say, "that shepherd boy is yelling about a wolf again, but we will not be fooled and go running up to the hills again just because he is bored and jesting.")

I am frantic, absolutely frantic, for some kind of affection, some touch, and so I am burying myself in porn and cybersex; it's about the only thing I seem to be able to find any amount of real interest in right now, and I am simultaneously hungry for more and repulsed by my own...sluttishness? boredom? debasement? I don't understand why I keep searching for more and logging onto the MUCK and so forth-- really, I'm covering the same territory over and over and over and...--but I can't seem to stop, either. Nothing else catches any spark of my interest. I am not studying any of my languages; I'm barely reading (usually when the 'net's down or when someone else is on my computer); I'm currently not working nor do I have classes this week.

And I feel vaguely self-mutilating.
Not that I would act on it-- Ok, I would if someone made one more comment about my hair and Valentine's Day, but that's to prove a point-- but I feel it just the same.
I wanna shave off my hair, or shave off patches of it. Nair it. Dye chunks of it other unnatural, contrasting colors. Take a pair of scissors to it.
Sit in a corner and do nothing. Glare at people who try to get me to move. Maybe bite them. Maybe bite myself. Smash my head into the wall a few times.
You know, the usual.

It's ok, by the way, you brave souls still reading. Perfectly ok. I just need to vent, even though I know damned well that this is all because I haven't popped my little blue pill in like, over a week. I really need to take them daily, or at least every other day.
I'll be alright, maybe by tomorrow night...
"Mata haru ni aimashou
Haru ni aimashou
Haru ni aimashou"

Life sucks:

Everyone's bouncy and happy and relatively successful...except me. I serve no higher purpose. I have no job. I don't know what in the hell I am doing at seminary besides having fun (most of the time). Teresa-san obviously isn't interested. It's not as cold, but is now snowing instead of being frigid. I tried to dye my hair and failed. Spending money I don't have on stuff I don't need.

...I need something. Any suggestions?

So.

Last Thursday morning I met with the psychiatrist, who seemed to not believe that I have depression but gave me a trial packet of Zoloft anyway and told me to come back in three weeks. Cool. I was a third of the way home when I got a call from Wendy saying that they would be arriving in about an hour and a half, and then I had to worry about whether or not I would be able to beat them home.
I did. Barely. I was walking out the outside stairs, and I took one last glance at the street, and a dark blue car rolled by and I grinned 'cause I knew it was them.
Wendy had driven straight out-- no stops for sleep-- so she crashed out on my couch and Derrick and I sat around and talk for a bit, then walked to a liquor store, got a bottle of vodka, and went home, all the while talking.

(~Stories of mine should stop involving vodka, ne?~)

Tom came home late from Ashland and he went to bed, and a fairly drunken Derrick asked me to "cuddle" up with him on the floor. So I did. I suppose I should have known better, but I really wasn't thinking about being groped. o.O!
("What in the hell are you doing? Stop that, stop... What? No, I will not have sex with you! ...why? Um, lessee: we just met, Wendy's sleeping less than a foot away from us, I'm not on birth control, and oh yeah, housemates shouldn't fuck!)
O.O;;;;

This kind of stuff needs to stop happening to me.

Right. So after I convince him that trying to have sex with me is not in his best interest, I manage to get to bed. It was about 4 am.

The next day we get up, and thinking about the night before was kind of embarrassing, but whatever. At least nothing much actually happened. We went for drives around the city; we talked; we made plans to move shit.
Really, I don't remember most of what we did on Friday...

On Saturday, we rented a Uhaul and moved all the heavy big stuff. A friend from seminary gave us tons-- I think literally-- of furniture, so first that went in, and then all our old stuff. In the process of moving one of the dressers, my pinkie finger got crushed between the dresser and the edge of a stair, and I heard it go "crunch." I don't think it's broken-- I wouldn't be able to move it if it was-- but it's been completely numb since Saturday so I think I squished some nerves pretty damned bad.

I hurt myself a LOT that day. I crushed my finger, twisted my ankle, bruised and scraped up one shin, whacked my knee... I look like I went ten rounds with Mohammad Ali.

We're still moving some odds and ends over, but almost everything is done. (OK, except Wendy's room, but that's completely understandable. Wendy-- along with Derrick-- did most of the heavy lifting; I mean, she worked like a mule moving stuff in, and then she began work at Wal*Mart already yesterday. She hasn't really had much of a chance to get her crap together.)

As for Derrick, who I describe before as excessively heterosexual stereotypically male... well, I can see why Wendy has a hard time dealing with him sometimes. Sexist pig? Oh, yeah, and what really clinches it is the fact that he doesn't think he's being sexist.
("Me and Tom will handle the big stuff, and you girls can take care of the littler things...Short hair is a boy's haircut; women should have long hair...you could be beautiful if you just tried, Jess..."
Now is that a helluva backhanded compliment, or what?
Crap like that. All the time. Depending on how he say it and what it's about I have handled these kind of statements with out and out violent protests ("Oh hell no, you ain't stickin' me on bitch detail! I can carry heavy things; who do you think helped Tom get all the furniture into this place?!") to placid shrugging off ("That's your opinion. I disagree.") to good-humored sarcasm ("I 'could be beautiful'? Oh my, thank you ever so much; I feel like putting on a pink dress and high heels and make-up and groveling for you!")
He really hates my sarcasm. ^_^ I don't give a flying fuck what he hates. He's going to have to learn how to deal with it.

Yeah, and he's a Crispie. Believes in the literal truth of the Bible. Went to the Unitarian church with me and Tom though, and he was ok with that, but he doesn't really get how UUism is a "real" religion.

(I think I've decided to become a minister, btw. I ain't got nothing else better to do, right?)

...
Tom's waiting for me to go, so I guess I'll continue this tomorrow or something. We gotta go move more crap.

...I feel so shallow.

I was trying to explain it today to my colleagues in my IS151 small group, and became so much more aware of it. Compared to the other people around me, I feel shallow.
I don't have a job; I don't have a mate or a potential mate; I don't have children; I don't have my family nearby; I don't have any friends down here; I don't do anything...besides survival-type living stuff such as shopping and cooking, schoolwork, and lying around reading. I have nothing to converse with people about; I have nothing--right now--really, at all.

I have no more effect on this world than a vagrant breeze does on the ocean... I don't even make a ripple. There is me, and that's all there is in my life. There is no one else. There is nothing else. Just me, and the things I do to amuse myself or provide for myself. If that's not shallow, then I don't know what is.

*sigh* I guess it's not that I'm shallow, just that my life is. Right now, it has all the depth and richness of a mudpuddle. I don't know what to do with myself. I feel motivated when I cannot do anything because of money or time or whatever, and when the constraints are removed I sit and stare at the fucking ceiling, feeling insincere, feeling like a hypocrite. I could be doing volunteer work, instead I'm lying around rereading books I've read a thousand times and fantasizing about dating people when I don't have the courage to even get off my couch.

Lazy, pathetic, cowardly, apathetic, boring, daydreaming, delusional...
Beating myself up? Yeah, I am, you got a fucking problem with it? 'Cause I don't.

How can I attempt to deal with other people when I have such a problem dealing with myself? How can I force myself to get up and get going when it doesn't seem to matter to anyone besides myself that I'm not? No one cares what I do or do not do here... How can I speak to a beautiful woman when I look down at myself and see poorly-dressed, out-of-shape, foul-mouthed, rough-tongued trailor trash? And how do I begin to "correct" my views of myself and of this piss-poor world when my loneliness only seems to enforce them?

...
Julia, one of the members of my small group, invited me over for Thanksgiving. Really, it makes me want to cry, so I'm not thinking too much about it; it's too kind. Still, it's nice to be thought of.
It's funny too, 'cause when Julia and I "met" on the class's online discussion forum, Blackboard, I didn't think there was any way in hell that we'd be able to get along, but...I guess I don't know everything. *laugh*

God, I hate my life. I think I've hated it since I graduated. I hope moving into a new space and getting new roommates will help fix that.


___
Oh, yeah, unrelated. Paul-sensei quote:
"The Catholics could find one good thing to say about the Protestants: they burned Micheal Servetus at the stake."
(Micheal Servetus was a Unitarian Protestant that was martyred in Calvinist Geneva in the 1500's. Look him up; it's interesting.)

So...

I was feeling reflective last night, talking with Tom about how I feel that, while my personality was great and helpful and useful at Northland, I don't feel that I'm the right kind of person to function in the Real World. I just feel...wrong...somehow, like an incorrectly-sized cog in a machine, grinding down into powder. My persona is too... well, too something (real, maybe)... to mesh well with common society, and I'm not interested in changing to suite the world; I don't feel that I should have to.

Tom kinda followed me, but I lost him again when I said that I thought maybe the problem lies in the fact that I have no "feminine mystery." He really didn't get that, so stumbled around for a while trying to explain.
I said, "You know that commercial that's been playing on the radio, like, every five minutes, about the 60 mile breast cancer run? It starts out with a guy saying that his wife is the most beautiful person in the world, right? ...I can't imagine anyone saying that about me (and not just because I doubt I'll ever get married). I'm not-- as the standards of the world would have it-- a beautiful person, especially once you get to know me. I'm not kind, gentle, or sensitive; I speak my mind, sometimes sarcastically, sometimes causticly; I cuss; I'm aggressive and confrontational; I snap and shout and rave and get so angry I cry and kick things. I nag and bitch, and my-oh-my, no one likes a nagging bitchy woman. I want things to be my way."
He still didn't get it.
So I tried the word "charming."
As in, "You know, women (and by this I mean "nice date-worthy girls" as opposed to " taken-em-home-and-screw-em sluts") are expected to be charming and gracious. It's an old-fashioned concept, but in some ways it's still in effect. Women are supposed to look nice and be nice and defer to others, care about when everyone else thinks and says, be reluctant to speak of themselves, and refuse to speak forcefully at all. And I just don't honor that."
Tom still doesn't get it, but I moved on.

And asked him what constituted a successful life.
Tom feels that if you find your vocation, what you are meant to do, and through that, if you manage to change even one other person's life for the better, you have lived successfully.
Fabulous.
I'm not sure what I am meant to be doing; by Tom's standard, my life is unsuccessful thus far.

And for the sake of curiosity, I'm throwing the question out to y'all:
What do you think constitutes a a successful life?
Because I realize that I myself have no idea how to define success.