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Diaryland is da bomb I just *have* to tell you how much this all sucks. Who're these other people he's writing about? Who's the freak writing this, anyway? What's gone before. What's going on right now? Where do *you* visit on the web? What're you building right now?


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Another smart-assed remark from Mike
...the more they stay the same
15:00:00 on 2000-02-24

Feeling (Wednesday):
I took a Remeron last night and it really knocked me on my ass again (I slept about twelve hours). Also, I still feel a little woozy like I did before when I was adapting to the medication. At least I know this feeling only lasts a couple weeks.

Also, I'm feeling down because I've come to a conclusion about the relationships with Gurugrrl and Trinity, and it's not the conclusion that I wanted to come to, but I feel like it's the one that is right for me, no matter how much I wish that it weren't.

Things in my life change too much, but at the same time it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

My life has been a roller coaster of depression and mixed emotion since (well, even before) last Thursday. However, as a sure sign that I'm getting better, I'm coming to some actual decisions as to what I should do about the situations, whereas before I would simply ruminate on them forever until I walked the razor's edge of insanity.

I think part of the problem is that I have unreasonable expectations. For instance, when I first considered trying to do battle with this dragon of a depression last year I thought about maybe if I had something to hold on to in my life that was important, I could use it to buoy myself. For this reason, I latched on to Hypochondria because she seemed to have some interest in me at the time.

Of course, I know from experience that this was the wrong thing to do, and knew it at the time, too, but I ignored that with every fiber of my being. You can't make somebody love you. (Well, that's not entirely true. In fact, sometimes you can; the problem is that if the relationship "works" it turns out to be a codependent relationship, and if it isn't then at least one party ends up resenting the other because they feel used.)

Not very long afterwards I found LitGirl. I ended up ending that relationship after one date (and in a way that was quite embarrassing, publicly) because I didn't have my mind together and... it showed. Pretty badly. And anyway, I had only become interested in LitGirl because she was cute, not because of any greater qualities that she had.

Of course, I continued the chain of tears with Gurugrrl. Things were okay with Gurugrrl because at least this time I was interested in her for the right reasons (I think that smart is damned sexy), but in a sense we were each other's security blankets. As things were, we had someone who cared about us, and someone for each of us to care about, but my latent insecurity and occasional moodiness, and her inability to unconditionally trust those she loves made us remain distant long after I found the situation tolerable. The problem came when I started to get better, and wanted her to pursue treatment for her depression, too. She refused, as she often had before, and even started pulling away. In the end I did what she always expected me to, and moved on, something which apparently she can never forgive. (In retrospect, I think she always realized that I would go, because she always said as much, because she knew in time I'd get tired of waiting on her. Why she did nothing about this is more telling than anything else.)

And then, in the last month, there was Trinity. Things seemed so right - the magic was there, things were progressing nicely. That is... until I had a mood crash because of Celexa and stress from conflicted feelings about her and Gurugrrl. At that point she threw up the red flag and headed for the hills because she has unrealistic expectations of what someone should be in her life, too. She thinks that everyone she brings into her life should be a constant, positive influence, and that anything that isn't wonderful all the time isn't worth keeping around. Hmmm, okay.

It's not worth chasing her into the hills, or even sending up smoke signals from the valley anymore. I just need to continue making for the mountain pass by myself.


You know, I don't know if I believe in happiness or not. When I said that lifelong anything is a cruel myth, I meant happiness, or maybe friendship, or feelings, or something. Okay, okay, I still don't know. It's funny how you can feel it and lose it, and then you obsess about it. You make yourself absolutely miserable because it's gone.

It's the same way I look at medication to treat my mood. I was on the Remeron and I felt like I hadn't felt in a very, very long time. Everybody said I was different, mostly because I'd been depressed since they had known me. Now it has been taken away and I feel like the world is coming down around me. It's like having been given a vacation from Hell and then being plunged back into the brimstone.

It's all I can do to just let it hang together and try to make things work out until I can get back on Remeron, hopefully with a little something so that I don't feel like I'm sleeping my life away (even though Poet told me that she understands that the sedative effect goes down as the dosage is increased to a therapeutic dose).

The last few nights I've been chatting with Bellona again. She has formed a theory on the idea of pursuing happiness and the world based on her own recent experiences with the opposite sex, that goes like this.

We are all actually living in Hell. Not a Hell of our own making, mind you, but we're living in actual Hell.

Why does she say we all live in Hell? Because we can't find happiness. We pursue it but we never manage to acquire it. Occasionally we feel happy for fleeting moments of time so that we know it really exists, but then it goes away and we pursue it even harder because we now have the capacity to miss it.

She even thinks that other people who we envy, who seem happy, really aren't. She thinks they're just better at pretending they are happy than other people. They are part of the Big Lie; that you can pursue happiness because The Joneses next door are happy, right?

I don't think so. I think she's right. We're all condemned.


Well, my cynical entry of the eighteenth was a little cryptic unless you're someone who knows me and talks to me regularly. I'll try to be a little more disclosing this time.

First, the people who I know personally and talk to regularly... I hadn't been contacting lately. That's my fault, though. Lately I'd taken to spending most of my time doing other things like reading or spending time with Trinity or, before that, looking for another job online almost constantly.

Of course, no matter what you call it, it's still abandonment. I'd think about it a lot, and then immerse further into those things I was doing to alleviate my guilty conscience. Classic feedback loop.

I had told Crafty that I would call her last Wednesday so we could catch up. I hadn't seen her recently, hadn't been answering my email to much of anyone except Trinity and Gurugrrl, so I was afraid that we were just losing touch. Of course, Wednesday came and went without me calling for some reason that escapes me at the moment. (This generally means that I have no acceptable reason.)

Thus, I called Thursday, a day late and a dollar short as usual. We talked for a fairly long time (three and a half hours), and it was a good chat, because we hadn't talked in quite a while. We talked about things going on in both our lives (although I felt like she didn't say a whole lot, even though she swears she did, but sometimes I like to listen more than talk because I tend to get repetitive when my mood is... strange) and basically shot the breeze.

What really bothered me most was that she said she wasn't mad at me for having done my disappearing act; instead, she was hurt, and was afraid that everyone was disappearing on her (she isn't into the idea of change the way I am). Mad I can deal with. Mad goes away with time. Hurt means that I really let her down. Guilt welled up in me from deep down. I can't do that again.

(I had the same problem with Poet, too; I just disappeared on her. I talked to her earlier today, but I feel really bad about that on her part, too. I'm just not being a good friend to them, and I have to do better. They tell me that they knew I was there if they needed me, but when Poet related that she had a low mood recently, and said that she didn't feel she could call me because she was afraid she'd wake me up or something... that hurt, too. But I have no one to blame for this pain but myself.)

I said my goodbyes to Crafty, and her advice to me about what to do about Gurugrrl was to just tell her, since I figured it was too late to hide it. Anyway, I'd have this all-consuming guilt if I didn't. I can't hide things, it's not in my nature. (It would have been quite easy to hide, actually; delete the entry about Trinity and then just don't tell her. But I can't do that, it's the cowardly way out, it's acting like a weasel. I can't do that, I couldn't handle the guilt.) Thus, I immediately dialed her number to leave her a message to call me.

The phone rang a couple times, and a man answered. "Hello?"

Blink, blink. A man answered?

I hesitated and hurriedly hung up. I blinked a couple more times and muttered to myself, "now I know why she's been so busy lately." (Yes, I realize the hypocrisy in that statement, after I'd been busy and even avoided her somewhat because I was spending time with Trinity. I even realized it when I first made that statement, too. That was a rude awakening, though.)


Of course, I didn't know quite what to do then. I paced the floor a for a couple minutes after the man answered her phone muttering a lot of "I don't know"s and "I don't know what to do"s and even a few "why are these things happening to me?"s, and then walked down the hallway and collapsed into the ancient, uncomfortable desk chair in my room and pecked at Gillian's keyboard to make the screen come back on. I didn't know exactly what to do, so I started writing Trinity letters at work, telling her what had happened with Crafty and also about calling Gurugrrl's place and getting a guy on the phone, and what was going on.

Of course, she wanted to know what was going on, and how I felt about it. I felt funny telling her how I felt regarding the whole Gurugrrl situation because she's The Other Woman�. Her response to my saying that wasn't something I wanted to hear, on top of what had happened earlier last Thursday - she said that this was further support of her thoughts that we should (that dread statement that no guy likes to hear) just be friends, because she wanted me to be able to tell her anything.

Any remaining good mood instantly collapsed into a miniature black hole, sucking in and destroying everything that could possibly make it better and plummeting to the Earth's core unimpeded. I couldn't understand exactly what was going on when we had such intensity of relationship before, and now she's saying that we should just be friends.

I was in one of those moods that existed pre-Remeron, and seemed to be back for the duration until I got back on Remeron, or they put me on yet another medication, returning me to the status of human Guinea pig.

Of course, since I was reverting back to the old feelings, I also reverted back to the old (so-called) "solution" - crawl into the bed and sulk, throwing out all the trappings of security, a modicum of maturity and the general ability to cope that I had come to rely on again so quickly. I didn't write her back because I didn't know quite what to say.


After a while I knew I couldn't keep sulking (I was actually semi-sulking, semi-trying to sleep; the net result was that I just wanted to render myself unconscious), so I got back up, picked up the phone and dialed Gurugrrl's number again. This time the answering machine picked up.

By now I was pacing the floor of the living room, unsure what to say. I had just had words to say just moments before, but they had slipped away from me. Beeeeep. The moment of truth, the time to speak, and here I am sighing into the phone.

"Hey. Uh, it's me, Michael. I, um... well, I need to talk to you, and it's kind-of important... call me, okay?" I decided there was no point mentioning the guy answering the phone earlier. At least, not yet.

After a while, I started to try to call her again. Busy. Redial, busy, redial, busy. Argh!


Late in the evening I was spending some time chatting with Crafty on IRC. I heard the tell-tale "knock-knock-knock" of ICQ, and since I'm generally nosy I did a hover over the ICQ iconlet in my system tray. Gurugrrl logged on.

Fearful sigh.

She messaged me telling me that she was sorry, but she had to do something (just something, another of those mysterious somethings that never seem to be any of my business) before she called, and she wondered what was up that I had called and obviously sounded so upset. I messaged her back that I had something to tell her, and in typical whipped puppy fashion I also said she'd probably never want to speak to me again.

I know this had to have stressed her out because she immediately went for a cigarette. She always goes for a cigarette when she needs to detach and think. In the meantime, I continued to shoot the breeze with Crafty, waiting with dread.

When she got back she told me to call her. I wandered down the hall, dialed her number and turned off the lamp, plunging the living room into darkness. I didn't want to stare at anything while talking to her, because I knew whatever I fixated on would remind me of this discussion whenever I looked at it again.

"Hello?" she said quietly, like she always does when she is expecting a call from me. She has on her soft voice, the one that I always found so soothing and sweet.

"Hi," I said. My voice cracked a little.

So she asks me what's up. I tell her I don't want to tell her, that she'll be upset with me. "If that's the case, then there's nothing you can do about it, so go ahead and tell me."

I sit quietly for a moment, and then ask what's probably a bad question to lead with, but my curiosity is killing me. I ask her if her father was there earlier that day.

"... Why do you ask?" She moves from the soft voice to the slightly-evasive voice that she puts on any time I ask her something that she doesn't really feel like sharing, which is many, many things.

People don't know 'bout
The things I say or do
They don't understand 'bout
The shit that I've been through

It's been so long
Since I've been home
I've been gone,
I've been gone for way to long

Maybe I forgot
All the things I'd miss;
Oh, somehow I know
There's more to life then this

I said it too many times,
And I still stand firm:
You get what you put in,
And people get what deserve

- Kid Rock, from "Only God Knows Why"

"I tried to call you earlier today and a man answered."

Another voice change, this time to one somewhere between her evasive voice and her firm, strong voice, the one I don't like because generally it means that I'm going to get griped out or she's getting really upset relating a story about work or her life or that I am being intrusive in her estimation.

What's scariest is what she says, though: "Really? Hmmm. That's strange." (Or "...that's weird," I forget which.)

What exactly does that mean? I think to myself. It's weird that somebody would answer her phone? Or that maybe she told him not to answer the phone? Or what? What's most upsetting is that she is truly acting like this is obviously none of my concern, just like she acts like so much of what goes on in her life isn't for me to know. Since she's being completely evasive, and thus hurtful, it makes what I have to say so much easier, so I lead right into it without hesitation this time.

"Well," I said, and then sighed, and continued, "I met somebody else. I don't know if it's going to work out, but I thought I should tell you."

It was like a Candice Bergen Sprint long-distance commercial: you could hear a pin drop. The silence was deafening for at least thirty or forty-five seconds, and then she finally went, "mmmm hmmm. Oh."

I'm not exactly sure how things transpired after that. I remember her telling me that she's glad to know I'm not different from the other men she's cared about after all, and something about how she always knew I would do something like this, and that she didn't want to contact her anymore. Basically, she was dumping serious guilt on me, which I was accepting without question because I felt like a serious louse, even though I knew that I hadn't really done anything wrong, I was just looking out for my interests and wanted to be up-front with her.

All the while I'm trying to slip in words edgewise, but all I get pushed in is, "but!" and "!" and "hey!" I tried to muscle in a retort to one thing she said, about how she is always so distant and inaccessible, but every time I say something, she says, "I don't want to hear it."

And then she hangs up. "Shit!" I yelled, turned off the cordless and dropped it on the ground. I turned the lamp back on and sat in the living room, staring at the wall for a couple seconds before I hear the other phone down the hall in the bedroom ringing.

I got up and went down the hallway. I pick up the phone and hardly get "hello?" out of my mouth before I hear Gurugrrl with her 100% firm, cold-bitch, all-business voice saying, "and one more thing."

Thus commences the blur, part two, whereupon I am told that she deserves better than someone who is just another little boy who isn't ready for a relationship , someone who would do something like this to her, she's still telling me she doesn't want to hear it and doesn't even care anymore, when I try to get her to slow down so we can talk, and can we at least be friendly about this she tells me that she has heard everything she wants to hear from me.

Then she hangs up again.

Over the course of the next couple hours I get an email from her asking me to never write about her again (fat chance), never write her (she'll delete my emails unread), delete everything on Gillian pertaining to her (again, fat chance), don't call her, send her anything, or basically think about her.

I guess she's pissed. Sigh.


I've felt guilty about this ever since Thursday night. Monday and Tuesday I called her, and Tuesday night I got an email that was obviously from her, but with a fake email address (like I won't remember her email, right?) and no message body. The subject just says, "don't ever contact me again."

Like an idiot, I forwarded the message to her regular address at Worldnet with a message attached.

I got no reply. (It's not as though I expected one, though.)


Things haven't been going well on the front dealing with Trinity, either.

Ever since she told me that she just wants to be friends I've not been very comfortable with being around her. I was wondering how somebody could seem to be that into someone else and then turn it off almost immediately.

Sigh.  Just sigh.  At least I finally took it off Gillian's monitor.
Of course, there are a number of factors in that decision on her part. First, being separated, she is facing a life with two sons along with all the stresses and responsibilities of caring for and supporting them. Her husband is jerking her around financially and emotionally, obviously hoping that she will find she can't make it without him and end up coming back.

Thus, she's got a lot of stress in her life right now already. She is taking the tack with me that since I am having a variable mood because of medication changes and, in fact, I seem to be having a deep recurrence of my depression, then she can't take the added stress that comes from that. She won't look on my presence in her life as a net positive; instead, since there is any negative at all she has chosen to distance herself from me.

In addition to that, I think she realized that she was spending too much time with me, and was consequently spending less with her sons. She was getting really run down, and it seemed like she was spending more time at work answering my emails than actually working (although she kept urging me to write her, so I figured she knew what she was doing, and complied, because I have more free time at work that she does).

One night we were talking on the phone, and one of her sons woke up upset. I could hear a change come over her after that was happening, and later she confirmed this by saying, quite literally, that something in her changed that night. She must have wondered what she was doing, and if she wanted to bring someone or something new into her life, when so much was going on, and apparently, for me, the answer was no.

What sucks most of all, at least in my mind, is that I really understand and support her reasoning, intellectually. Emotionally, though, I still feel very hurt that I am being pushed aside like this. She says that she still wants to be friends, but some of the things that she said went along with being in her "inner circle," like me being able to read her poetry and longer works or the like, she's shying away from. She hardly answers my email (when she does it's very brief), and seems much less interested in checking my journal. I feel like I'm being closed off.

I'm not good with being closed off.

Therefore, I've been doing what I need to do to save my feelings - I've been closing myself off, too. It's easier for me to handle if I just distance myself from the situation completely, much as she has been doing. It hurts me to think that everything was so good not so long ago and now it's in this sorry state, but the fact remains that much of what is going on between her and myself is out of my hands (the problems in her life that she has to work through), or it just comes as a part of me and she would rather not have to deal with those things (I can hardly remember not being depressed - it's just a part of me. Getting well again is very important to me, but for the time being, it's something that people in my life will have to cope with, or not and thus pull away from me).

I guess it's just not meant to be.

She told me something not long after we met - she said that if I left her life that day, my presence in her life had been a gift to her because it was proof to her that there were still people out there that she could connect with.

I guess I am trying to look at it the same way.


Friday morning, after all the things that had happened between the people in my life and myself, I decided that I really needed to do something about this. Most of my motivation was that I didn't want Trinity to go, basically, so I thought if I fixed myself maybe she'd stay. (I am known for fighting for lost causes (I'm a libertarian, after all, and have never voted for a winning candidate for much of anything).)

"Hi. I'm a patient there, and I'd like to talk to a member of the nursing staff about my medication."

"Okay. Hmmm? Okay... oh, okay! Hold on a minute, okay?" Yeah, okay.

I was phoning up the clinic because Celexa just wasn't going to cut it. I've been cranky lately, probably because I haven't been getting any sleep. I wake up every couple hours, and can't fall asleep until very late in the morning, a couple hours after I'd taken the Celexa. Also, since I've started taking it I've been progressively sleeping less and less every night; I'm down to about five hours a night, with at least two interruptions a night.

This isn't to even mention the terrible taste in my mouth since I started taking it (even repeated mouthwashings and brushings of my teeth don't counteract this awful taste) and the constant, dull headache that I have had since about two days after starting taking it. These are the sorts of problems and side-effects that I used to fear hearing others talk about them in depression support chats.

They were relatively quick to return to the phone, which was something I wasn't really expecting. "This is Betty, how can I help you?"

I sighed and did my best to gather my thoughts. "Yeah. I am a patient there, and I was recently put on Celexa and..."

"What's your name?" she cut in. She sounded busy, I feel bad calling and whining about my medication, but I give it to her and she asks me to hold.

After a couple minutes another voice comes on the phone and says, "Okay, I have your chart. What's the problem?"

So I began to describe side effects and lowered mood that I was having on the Celexa versus the Remeron, to which she responded, "let me try to page the doctor and see what he can do... when is your next appointment?"

I dug around on my desk for the card, and fortunately it was near the top because I'm looking for my watch, too, which I seem to have lost. "March second, actually." I said it with a voice devoid of conviction that I'd make it until then.

"Oh, yeah, that's a while," she said, like she was weighing in her mind the whole situation, because she was reluctant to call the doctor. I hate being a nuisance to people.

"You know, really, the Remeron was working, I just want to go back on..." I'm desperate here. My life seems to be becoming a wreck around me, and I need my medication back.

"Okay, tell you what. I have a cancellation next Thursday. Can you make 8:15 AM?"

A whole week? my mind was screaming, but I was still in whipped puppy mode from the night before. "Yes, thank you."

"Okay," she said; I could hear her scribbling into her book. "If the Celexa is making you hyper, then just quit taking it."

"Okay. Thanks. B'bye." I sighed and hung up.

So then I was medication-free. Sure, I still have Celexa in my system slowly counting down to nil (although I understand it has a long half-life), but I feel like I'm becoming a gibbering idiot waiting for my appointment.

I still had a couple Remeron left, so I took one last night, and I will take another one tonight before my appointment tomorrow, because I really, really, really hope that they'll put me back on Remeron. In fact, if he wants to put me on a third drug, I think I may refuse.

I mean, really, the first time I went in he suggested that if the sedative effect of Remeron was intolerable, then he could put me on Remeron and Wellbutrin. Fair enough. The second time, he wanted to try Celexa instead, and if that didn't work, he said we could try Remeron and Wellbutrin since I responded so well to Remeron.

So... I feel like it's time to go back to Remeron. I'm not willing to play Guinea pig when they know something that works well for me.


"I'll Be Alright Without You"
Journey, "Raised on Radio"

I've been thinking 'bout the times
You walked out on me
There were moments I'd believe
You were there
Do I miss you, or
Am I lying to myself again
I do these things
(It's all because of you)
I keep holding on, but I'll try
(Try not to think of you)
Love don't leave me lonely

I'll be alright without you
There'll be someone else
I keep tellin' myself
I'll be alright without you
Oh, love's an empty face
I can't replace

(You don't need it)
People wonder why we broke apart
The great pretender here I go again
These things I do
(It's all because of you)
I'll keep holdin' on but I'll try
(Try not to think of you)
All I wanted was to hold you

I'll be alright without you
There'll be someone else,
I keep tellin' myself
I'll be alright without you
Love's an empty face
Oh, I've got to replace

I'll be alright without you
There'll be someone else,
I keep tellin' myself
I'll be alright without you
Oh, love's an empty place,
I can still see your face
(I'll be alright)

I think part of what perplexes everyone about my feelings in this situation is this: I'm not 100% broken up about the way things have happened with Gurugrrl. I was upset here and there about bits and pieces, and I have tried to contact her time and time again to get her to talk to me. The thing is this, though: if she can throw away what we had going, then more power to her.

I am upset by strange things to do with her, though. Like, this last weekend I heard a story on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday about "The Sound of Music" (Gurugrrl's favorite musical), and while I listened as I walked about in the kitchen fixing some waffles and drying my eyes, but I know it wasn't because I missed her, but because I missed the idea of her, the closeness. But not her so much. She knew it would come to this eventually, anyway, if she didn't make changes that needed to be made.

I think I always knew it to. It was time to let go, regardless.


On the other hand, I'm really having a hard time with the whole idea of the way things are with Trinity.

She sent me a couple emails today, and I answered them, and everything seemed civil enough, but she seems like she got a little miffed with me regarding something I'd written to my notify list which was entirely critical of the world around me. Sometimes, like everyone else, I feel things and I just have to let them out.

I'm not entirely sure if it was just the couple things I said that referenced her directly or indirectly (such as I decided that I shouldn't send her something in the mail as I had planned because I imagined that it wouldn't be received very appreciatively, and my talking about dysfunctional relationships of all types that I seem to keep finding myself in and how they make me feel because of the screwed-up feelings I have regarding them) or if she seriously thinks that the whole content of the letter was directed at her, as though my whole world revolves around what I think about her. Or just that I had a negative tone at all, even though that's how I feel right now.

She makes me feel guilty. I don't need that right now. The more time I spend feeling as though I'm doing something wrong to somebody else, or alternately, not doing for somebody else, the less time I spend focusing on improving my situation.

At the same time, I can't help but wonder how we got to here from there, when there was so promising. I have to wonder what it is that I do to people, or what I show to people, or do I show too much too soon, scaring them away?


Feeling (Thursday):
I took a Remeron night before last night and it really knocked me on my ass again (I slept about twelve hours). Also, I still feel a little woozy like I did before when I was adapting to the medication. At least I know this feeling only lasts a couple weeks.

Also, I'm feeling down because I've come to a conclusion about the relationships with Gurugrrl and Trinity, and it's not the conclusion that I wanted to come to, but I feel like it's the one that is right for me, no matter how much I wish that it weren't.

I'm a browser traitor - I just made IE 5.01 my default browser. I hope Mozilla is ready soon. Sigh.

Have I ever mentioned that I don't believe in coincidences? Hmmm. I have no idea if I have or not. My memory and concentration isn't quite what it usually is when I'm down.

Well, anyway, I don't.

Thus, when something happens that seems entirely contrived I tend to start wondering what message there is there that the universe is trying to give me, or what secret meaning is trying to make itself known to me.

The first one was I lost my watch. This isn't so abnormal, because I've been so absent-minded lately. I lose lots of things (I can't find my CD "A Cheap and Evil Girl" to save myself).

In a way, this was awful. The hair on the back of my neck stood up because I knew I'd never hear the end of it. My grandfather gave me that watch, although my father picked it out. It was so my father.

It was gold, all gold. And tacky and flashy. And tight, even if I ran the adjustments on the fastener all the way out. My father to a "tee." He was trying to make me his father's son. (He always hated that I was independent in the extreme, even at a very young age. He's the classic extrovert obsessive-compulsive, knows everybody, likes everybody. He liked to fix things, but not do anything new. However, I was a bookworm. I didn't talk much, and spent most of my time in my room, both because I was better off alone and I got tired of being dragged into the squabbles between my parents. I liked to create new works, not maintain something somebody else did.)

I think it's more me.  I think the next one I get will just be black plastic, because that's how I feel most of the time anyway.
Well, I went for a few days without a watch while I looked, to no avail, and finally I dug in the drawer under my television to pull out a watch I'd bought myself a while back when the battery in the other ran out and I didn't have time to go to the jewelry shop to get a new battery in it (for some reason they never had one at Wal*Mart or K-Mart).

It's silver (stainless steel, got to have that technological look) with gold highlights. It's understated and tasteful. It fits comfortably, if not just a little loose. It's so me. What's weirder is that a couple people at work commented that it looks more like me, too. They don't know me, but they can tell it's me.

It sucks that I lost this watch that my grandfather had given me, but I think I took it as a good omen once I realized it was part of a larger pattern.


I was sitting at work last Saturday evening at my station in my lonely corner (I refuse to sit with everybody else because I actually want a computer with some memory and the ability to display in 32-bit color, not to mention have a sharp monitor, disk space and some software I need installed) eating dinner and talking to Babylon-5 Ranger Clone's girlfriend (the one I wasn't especially nice to).

Anyway, we were talking about all the places she'd lived, since she was an Air Force brat. She couldn't believe I've lived in Houston my whole life, or at least as much as I can remember.

"You don't like mountains?" she asked me with incredulity.

"Well, I've seen them, but no, I'm not enamored of them. They're just lumpy spots in the ground to me."

She looked at me like I have no soul. "Well, I love the mountains."

Like I care, I thought.

Then one of the other techs comes up. "Man, you should really get out of Houston. There's more out there than Houston."

Well, I know that. It's not like I hadn't thought about it a million times before. I always bitch about Houston, the weather that just gets perfect and then six hours later it changes, the constant humidity, the oppressive heat in the summers, the traffic, the terrible air, the soullessness of the community, and worst, the memories that lay at everyplace I could go, every corner, every restaurant, every shopping center, that bring me down.

Further, one of my big gripes with Houston is that it retains a lot of its big oil heritage. It's a corporate town, meaning that you need to be the round peg so you can fit into the holes that are defined by large corporations. You can't be a generalist, like me, and expect to get a great job. Instead of looking elsewhere, I've always just shook my fist at the sky and complained.

But I can't leave. You see, I'm weighed down with all this stuff. I've always worried about my stuff. I have an immense collection of books, a huge cache of office supplies, old computers and peripherals, a filing cabinet filled with technical reports, clothes going back to probably 1990 (some further, for sentimental reasons), all manner of knick-knacks, junk, old personal electronics, brochures, roleplaying game materials... I have collected a lot of crap.

Of course, I hardly use any of it. Nonetheless, I never wanted to part with it.

It seems that despite my early independence I am becoming my parents. My father is a packrat, he can never let anything go because he might need it someday. My mother never lets anything go that had a potential worth (there are coupons everywhere all over the house) because she was brought up in a very frugal household run by children of the Great Depression. These sensibilities rubbed off on me regardless.

All this is running through my head, knowing I have this boat anchor of my collected stuff keeping me here. "What am I supposed to do with all my belongings?" I asked the tech.

"Lose it. Sell it. It's just things, you'll never miss them."

Enlightenment (no, not the window manager) hit me, just like I'd experienced a Zen or AI koan firsthand.


Sunday I was sitting at home chatting with various people here and yon and mentally processing the really bizarre "Cops" crossover episode of "The X-Files" when Tabitha came around.

She's been telling me forever that if I really applied myself I'd make a fortune. Of course, I end up telling her that she's insane, I could never make a fortune because of the general morass of suckage I'm mired in here in Houston.

Of course, my mind was already open to new possibilities when she started telling me about all the jobs she turns down out there in southern California. Computer jobs, website designs, graphic work, all for ridiculous amounts of money.

I remembered the job I did for a company in southern California. They paid a ridiculous amount of money. Apparently, that's the normal course of things out there.

Not to mention that she keeps telling me that she may need a roommate sooner or later, because the one she has never pays rent on time.

I've thought about moving to California a lot, really - northern California, though. But shoot, even my bud living in Silicon Valley is commuting to Orange County every week and going home on the weekends. Enlightenment rapped me on the skull fully this time.

You could really make a decent life out there, couldn't you?


I don't know why all this wasn't always obvious to me. I guess I never considered the possibilities.

Everybody tells me that if I got away from my family then I'd probably be happier, even if life was a struggle for a while until I got things worked out. Even my therapist at the university used to tell me that. Bert used to tell me that if I would come to Arizona, too, he'd use his contacts around town to get me a job like his doing webmastering/development, they can't get enough people out there. My bud in SiliValley keeps asking me if I need some work, and says if I would just grab a couple books on Java, get the SDK from Sun and learn it really quickly then he'd keep me so busy on $80/hour contracts that I'd never come up for air.

Everybody sees the potential in me, except me.

However, generally when I thought about moving, it was moving to Austin. Austin isn't far enough away. There isn't enough barrier of land there to keep members of my family from showing up on my doorstep to spend the day or the weekend, and given the nature of my family it's naturally expected that you don't turn them away, after all, they're family, and they drove all this way to see you.

So I just put the idea out of my mind. Of course, the family can't just get up and go to California easily. I don't even have to see them anymore, if I don't want to.

I think this is really a direction to consider. I can actually picture myself driving across the country with Gillian, associated peripherals, storage media and a few chunks of personal electronics (VC and a boombox, really; I can get a new TV wherever I end up, my TV is pretty old anyway) stuffed in the back seat, maybe a selection of books, bookcases (got to love Ikea furnishings that are easy to disassemble) and clothing stored in a U-Haul trailer (a two or three hundred, maybe, plus a few that can't be replaced; the rest I could part with) and some cash to get furniture and put a deposit down on an apartment wherever I end up.


I am trying to be more positive. Constant negative thoughts and berating myself is a closed feedback loop that acts as a trap leading only to more self-loathing. What's worse, it's passive-aggressive and drives away the people that are important to me.

Thus, I need to set forth on a new program of self-change, since it appears that I will be having a fresh start, people-wise. First, if I say bad things about myself, I want you (the collective you) to thwack me. Or point it out when I do it. Or something. But don't let me get away with it. I really need to change my internal discussions (that, of course, spill out into this journal since I keep it as a journal) to a more positive experience.

Second, I've been thinking about something Trinity said: "you will get the job that you feel like you deserve." I really want to get out there, get a better job than this so I can have more choices. (I've always thought of money as stored choices.)

Lastly, I need to create. One of the things I've been yearning to do is make something, do something. I write this journal, but that's about it, and it doesn't feel like enough. I want to express myself and build.

When I was a kid I used to write software compulsively, and sure, only a few people at school and some folks in the BBS scene saw my work, but it was enough. I wrote systems and simulations and a multiuser game for the minicomputer and star cluster of Trash-80s at school, and the BBS software I used to code (not to mention bits and pieces for other peoples' BBSes, since the code base we were working with, "The Keep," was a popular Commodore Apple*Net-a-like system).

But since then? I gave it up. I don't know why, for certain. Maybe I was burnt out, or perhaps it didn't seem like it was worth the hassle, or I was too distracted to do it, or I just fell out of the habit and never could pick it up again. Regardless, I need to undo that change and get back to being a creative person again.


Ahhh, Remeron.  They had to scratch out Wellbutrin because they already had some samples there to give me, I didn't have to actually get it filled.  I have this recurring nightmare that someday they actually make me pay for this stuff.  Eeek!
I went to my appointment this morning. Of course, my 8:15 AM appointment didn't actually mean anything, my doctor didn't come in until 9:00 AM.

The most eccentric thing happened when he came in, though. Another person in the lobby got up, approached him and served him with a subpoena.

"What's this for?" he asked the guy, obviously more than a little uncomfortable.

"I don't know, all I know is that you are supposed to appear as directed on February 29th at 9:00 AM," the man said, and left.

I wonder if this means I'm going to have a new doctor next month?

restlessmind


Ancient history:
2013-03-01"You'll be stone dead in a moment!"
2007-08-07I covet fuck you money
2007-07-16My own long, dark tea-time of the soul
2007-07-11My internet experience is lacking
2007-07-10Coincidence



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