fleef

! Look at this! I just read it in an article for Counseling (the course):

Thus, it helps to begin sessions with children by sharing

something fun and interesting. Games, clay, and toys in the counseling room are

useful when dealing with children. You will find that children generally like to do

something with their hands while they talk; having a child draw a picture during

rhe conversation can often be useful to the child and to the interviewer. And the

drawings often reveal what is going on in the child’s life.

It appears that I’ve retained this… The older I get, the more I notice people sort of peer at me when I pull out the composition book and start drawing while we speak… It’s not something I want to give up to adult custom, so I ignore how it might be different.

 

Kudos to Steven for the new banner inspiration! I was talking to him about how I feel I’ve given up alot of my freedom to be baffling to others for the sake of being easily understood by others, I suppose, and Steven said, “It saddens me that you’ve circumscribed the kook for others…. The kook! The kook!” The murder dreams and the pervading sadness over time grieve this… and won’t let me settle peacably into a slightly-dead-inside adult routine. I know at least three people in my life who have inadvertently discouraged my originality by saying something like, “You always have to be different”, as if I’m purposefully trying to show up the people around me. It just so happens that, in order to be authentic, the difference just happens so. But if we’re all being authentic, not one of us needs to feel less special!

The font is sticking with me from now on, I guess (in this entry).

I saw The Uninvited with Annie and her friend Kendall for $1.50 at Golden Triangle Mall last night. hahahah. I spent half the time hiding my face behind a popcorn bag and waiting for the suspenseful music jolt to be over. I’m glad Annie and Kendall were – and even all eight other people in the theatre seemed – open to aloud banter. Some memorable mome’s:

when dead-mom’s-nurse-turned-dad’s-girlfriend Rachel was trying to make friends with daughter Anna, she said, “I became someone that no one fucked with.” It seems like a writer forgot how most White upper-middle class families speak.

Anna knocked a roast off the counter. Rachel shrieked, “What did you do!”, and in one motion swooped down, stabbed it with a cutlery knife, and slammed it on the counter like a Viking.

In reference to the roast she said, “You know the secret to a roast? Let it sit for ten minutes before carving it. It lets the blood soak in.”

Also, “Some of those people I nursed treated me like dirt, but I knew they would be dead very. very. soon.”

So many bold-faced “I’M A MURDERER” leads.

and yeah I understand what the filmmakers are meaning to convey. I just laugh at obvious speech or the contrast between what most people in real life would do and what people in movays do. I guess Anna was ‘psycho’ in the end, so the world would have seemed like a scarier place from her eyes anyway. Why am I analyzing this.

They were out of large popcorn bags, too, so we paid for a medium and got a free refill! It was delicious. Small, run-down theatres might have better popcorn.

 Annie wore a dress and a plastic crown she’d donned at her flat, and I thought of how INFPs are the princess (or prince) of their own fairytales.

 

 

I saw Allison!

( :

More later, want to get in some thought pinball with my bro!

popcorn

I’m not shy enough to ruin my life. I can still attend classes, make okay grades, and talk to people with a nervous, timid, sometimes friendly energy.

I’m just shy enough to keep happiness out of it.

Sleep dep high is gone… Rehearsal sucked. I don’t feel flexible. I fear the stigma of mental illness and fall toward claiming it. Like being ashamed of a deformed little brother, so he runs up to you on the playground and calls out, “Hey, Sis!”

One thing that was neat tonight was Morgan’s house. He immediately showed me his giant cat Master Jones or “Massey”, an orange Norwegian something, who really is bigger than Waffle. Then he introduced me to Hershey the poodle. I enjoyed his house, because there was no pretense of not living in it. Food was on all the counters and in racks like a feast permanently laid out, and good food, I almost nipped a ginger slice. There was a conglomeration of couches and tables around a big-screen tv and people coming and going. I walked out of my parents’ mindset into the freefalling atmosphere of his house… I wish I could have absorbed it more. His initial friendliness made me hopeful, but then I got this sinking feeling that he thought I was bad in the scene, and I was bad. actually. I was bad. I was bad.

It’s sort of freeing to say though. I was bad. I was bad. I was soooooooooooooooo bad. I freakin didn’t change my intonation appropriately, I moved stiffly, I got distracted mid-sentence, I glanced at the director [turtle] more than ever according to her[turtle]… I was so baaaad hahahahaha a I was so bad hahahaahahahahahaah

And I’m still alive!  That’s the thing. Doing a bad job at something becomes less frightening when you are allowed to live after doing so. Not like those other times when they……

It’s about time I sucked at something anyway. Right? Am I right?

But seriously I’ll use spring break to tune myself up and destroy the reverence of those lines so they can live.

a ringa ringa ringa a ringa ringa ringa a ringa ringa ring a ring a ring <–Slumdog Millionaire song stuck in head

I do want to be more friends with turtle and Morgan. They’re intelligent but not swollen.

Note: I originally made this Private, but it turned out not that personal.

Other note: Because I gave up Facebook, I may be coming here more. But I wonder if this is a better place, encouraging me to be generative rather than lose myself in other people? Yes. I’ll decide that now. Yep.

And love others – so repeated and so in need of repetition

I saw The Reader with Sara and her mom today. Sara’s mom is a rare kind of person. She seems to genuinely enjoy her daughter and even me. You feel funny and entertaining around her, and I realized it’s probably a good deal of her being an avid appreciator of others. Both Sara and her mom speak in a more hushed way than the rest of the world. Sara’s mom possesses the gifts of being both practical and a detailed, softly-emitting storyteller. It’s so nice.
We ate at (ha, at first I just typed “at”, like “Eh, that covers ‘ate at’. ‘At’. Yeah.”) Sweet Basil thai after the movie… The popcorn, basil fried rice, and tofu are simultaneously expanding in my stomach at this moment.

My friend turtle is doing a student-directed scene for her directing class. She asked around for people to be in it, and I responded “I would! But I’m in class at the performance time.” Oddly, spatially enough, my housemate Ashleigh was going to be in it but became incommunicado. So then turtle asked her teacher if the scene could be performed at a different time, and the answer was yes, so… I’m going to be Joan of Arc opposite a tall guy named Morgan as Charles le Dauphin in a scene from G.B.S.’s play St. Joan ! We’re performing it in two weeks. My first step is to memorize the words, so that they come welling out of my heart automatically… turtle recorded us reading through it and burned CDs to aid memorization. I listened to it in the car. Previous to doing that, I experienced a brief spasm of freak-out that I would be hearing my own voice, open to all sorts of expressive criticism… But then I became calm. After all, I want to improve, and I can move so much farther if I don’t get neurotically self-involved.

So I listened to it, and I noted discrepancies between my perception while speaking and the reality of how it sounded, and I was kind to my recorded self, and it went by as a smooth, small event. Not a neurotic freak-out. I was even happy with some of the choices I made.

As Twiggy said on America’s Next Top Model that was playing at the gym today, “Your job is to be focusing on what you’re doing… You have a fault, don’t even think about it…” Something like that. It’s interesting to see the translation and transition from ancient religious texts –> agnostic messages –> motivational speaking –> pop psychology. They all end up dancing around this thing that challenges you to play larger than the set-up of human games.

Journaling On Through

My soul keeps getting mussed. Around people who could be friends/are friends. I think it has to do with being unable to compromise an ideal of interaction for the reality of interaction, and the scariness that something wrong could come out of me if I don’t totally monitor myself all the time. Which turns into the wrongest thing possible. It’s actually the ingredients for narcissism: not depending on others, ever, so that it’s no longer relationships but pawns around you, because there ain’t no give and take. I feel like I’m becoming a hypermoral, legalistic mother superior nun running a Catholic school.

In the larger picture, my actions recently aren’t horrifically manipulative or condescending. Like if there’s a spectrum of behavior, mine still falls into the category of “Oh, she’s having a bad day” and not “Mommie, Dearest”. My mind still drifts back to antidepressants. Sometimes I can restore the color in my world, but sometimes I just feel so bad. Like this gurgling swamp steeps my vision, and I can’t get a breath out of it to correct my path. But I think I can’t move out of it, because these pictures wedge themselves in and take up all my mental capacity: they’re the supposed critical, fixed, zoom-in of others’ eyes on me, so that any movement constitutes a huge risk of shame and embarrassment. Yep.

Soooo…. If I could develop the habit of dissolving these breadth-consuming, self-conscious images, it would free up my mind to grapple with all the regular human stuff of emotions and things coming at me throughout the day. : )

Addendum: I talk about humans like I’m not one.
I cut my bangs asymmetrically. Sara was afraid to mention it in case I’d meant to cut them straight. haha. I think the asymmetry is to stick it to the mother superior growth, maybe, I just thought of that.

Smile, breathe warm breath into me

I’ve made a decision. about my life.

TO ENJOY EVERYTHING AT EVERY MOMENT AND NOT APOLOGIZE! which is going to be very difficult since in the past I have hyperbolized shaving my femurs to represent how much I accomodate others. But there are some things that can’t be accomodated. I write so vaguely. Let’s be specific.

Today, I met my friend Elise from Seeds of Change at Art Six. She was real happy and bubbling about everything around us, how good her bagel was, a band she liked, the gift from God of writing a song… And she was sincere. As we sat and conversed, I found myself being drawn out. The image of my body as a case that I had to power into every movement, to form each word and express each tone, began to dissolve… Which is good, to get rest from those pins of existence that have (seemed to) fix me into place starting every morning, freshness drained downward (realistically, this feeling would be called anxiety, but it becomes an entire world when pervasive enough).

I felt deeply, knew as we sat there more than a cursory abstract know, that knowledge of the world can be endlessly complex, but my choice to joy is very simply accessible at all times.

“The very fact that a thought can occur,” Elise said, “And the fact that people can have the same thoughts across everything… I think that is God.” When she said those words, my heart leapt, that someone who would be identified as orthodox could think the same things as me, who feels like a leper in a Christian colony sometimes. 

And this part of my life has been put to bed for so long, but it’s inseparable.  

So what I’m putting to bed instead is the call to be an aesthete, a hipster, this forever searching nancy. Nancy, nancy, nancy. I’ve been having way too many dreams with murder in them for years, and the signs are clear. A PART OF YOURSELF IS DYING. A PART OF YOURSELF IS DYING. In the waking hours this morning, I had a dream where I was on an Arabic cruiseline with Cara. We were enjoying ourselves but had to be furtive about our identities. Then it cut to me in a car with a young woman who looked Filipino maybe. The car was moving us through a dangerous world. A man who was much larger than us stood near an overpass as we traveled, and he swung a rapier and decapitated the girl. Then the car wrecked, flames, smoke. A young man who had been the woman’s lover lurched up to the wreckage and huddled over her corpse, screaming and breathing fire onto her… She dissolved and hardened into a small piece of Venetian glass (I got the sense of the hardness as one can sense things one doesn’t immediately experience in dreams). She was a flower-like scintilla with wavy edges, a small red dash at the center with alternating blue and white waves radiating from it. I watched the lover’s outstrung grief and my face glowered down at the small, shining trinket in the soil… My visage became like a cliff cracking and falling red and my scorched voice wrung out ahhhhhhhhhhhhh… which is when I started feeling the second level of consciousness in waking that was both me in dream and me in bed contorting with empathic grief. I kept myself in dream but with growing consciousness for awhile, because I wanted to keep expressing that much emotion without inhibition, but eventually I woke up. I cuddled Waffle warmly next to me as he whimpered in his simple neediness. Another dream with murder, I noted.

I thought I could dilute myself into someone less controversial. Turns out it kills me, and that death won’t go unmarked or for that matter unstopped.

And Dash Away

Done with Defensive Driving!

 

Getting into graphic novels!

 

Going to Houston for a week to do nothing but see the fam and SWIM!  all RIGHT!

 

 

I’m sitting at Opening Bell and a regular customer guy just sat next to me and asked, “Do you mind if I sit here for awhile?”.  I had to take off my huge headphones to hear what he said after asking him to repeat. 

I was like, “No, I don’t mind”, and I put my headphones back on and went back to this entry.  As soon as my gaze had settled here, he moved away to the couch. 

That’s an instance where I wonder if I should have done something different.  Was I supposed to take off my headphones fer permanent and talk to him?  I didn’t want to.  I was very content in my world of music.  So I guess what I did was fine, if socially unorthodox. 

Middle-aged men talking to me make me really nervous.  I know he’s a regular and he probably has friendly intentions, but I just, I dunno, maybe I shouldn’t sit the way I do with one knee up so I can rest my chin on it. Is that too revealing?  But I don’t like crossing my legs.  And I really don’t feel like I’m twenty, so when adults talk to me I wonder why they’re doing so.

“INFPs can be hard to get to know.”  I don’t try to be that way!  But it’s true.  Well, maybe that means I do try. Not consciously!  Well, why should everyone get to know Angela?  I just have to be cautious.

 

I feel all like Jell-O legged.  WeeEEee eEeE eEEE Ee

Maybe I mean Jell-O headed.  Yeaheh.

 

I’d heard Uncle Paul and Pascale mention a barista who used to work at Opening Bell named Rusty.  Uncle Paul had said of him, “He’s really cool.”  WIth the recent wave of people leaving, Pascale asked him to pick up a few morning shifts, so I met him today after Uncle Paul and I walked the dogs and got breakfast at Oprening Bell.  And he was really cool.  We had an instant rapport, like an immediately flowing conversation.  He reminds me of Kalen in the way he talks and presents ideas, and I get to let the refreshing waters of his intelligence spill over me. 

Remember Kalen?

Guess what?

He LOOKS almost EXACTLY like Kalen. 

My seventeen year old heart glowed in its ribcage somewhere in time. 

A clone!  Only Rusty’s a youth pastor at a Baptist church in Denton, not a pot-smokin’, partyin’, wasted-potential disappointment.  The good parts of Kalen without the bad parts.  That was my assessment in the few hours I spent at Opening Bell intermittently talking to him betwixt sessions of the stupid Defensive Driving course. 

Anyway, I guess the main conclusion I have from that is he was cool.  I really have to pee and I’m trying to think of a way to tie this up.

New person on the friendscape.  There we go.

Atomic Happiness

I had an idea to make a movee about how your happiness is in your own hands.  Cause usually in movies the protagonist ends up getting what they want so that they’re happy at the end.  Well, maybe not totally usually.  I just thought of a lot of counterexamples.  This always happens when I make a point… 

well, anyway,

I guess mostly I’m thinking of the scores of mediocrities that are produced…

now I sound really elitist

 

If I could ever get out of my way, I would maybe elaborate the idea that I had.

I got the idea when I was petting my dog sitting on a mattress in the middle of my Uncle Paul’s loft.  The space of his place can make you feel very alone sometimes, especially when you’re not taking up much of it curled up on a mattress stroking your darling Waffle.  His little brown eyes blink every time I pet his head… awwww… getting distracted…. Tahoe likes to lay nearby to protect Waffle ‘n’ me and also to get in on the belly-rub action.  I got an image in my head similar to my current situation, only around it were painted worse circumstances than mine.  The girl didn’t just feel alone even though her uncle was in the next room.  She was alone, and I imagined other things that had happened to her.  She didn’t get the guy.  She didn’t achieve her dreams.  Her family was fragmented, and her friends were all far away living their own lives.  She was alone in a room in an old warehouse, sitting on a mattress, petting her dog as he blinked his little brown eyes.  I was thinking the whole movie would follow her through her pursuits and how they all failed.  But then she would be happy at the end, even though absolutely nothing worked out.  She would simply decide, “I’m tired of being sad about all of this.  I choose happiness.”  It would take an excellent actress to actually convey that to the audience without words… otherwise the end would be baffling. 

 

Alot of things that I write seem to be psychologically based, probably because the battles of my life have almost always been internal.  Especially the decision to exude happiness/joy/peace from my very atoms even if it came from nowhere else.

 

 

Still craving popcorn.  I was going to go see The Dark Knight again today and get the $5 first matinee price at 10:30 am, but at 9:30 Waffle was laying so sweetly and warmly next to me that I couldn’t move.  Also, I’m not sure if I can subject myself to that intensity again… even though I enjoyed it…  Maybe I could make more observations if I see it again, though, because the first time I was definitely wrapped up in the emotions and suspense.  I mean, I know what’s going to happen now.  Hum.  I could still get the $6.50 matinee price if I went right now.  I have to work at 5:30.  I could still make it.

 

Mayyybe.

I could read Yeong’s copy of Watchmen for free, though.  But that involves no popcorn.  I wish I could just walk in and buy popcorn and leave.  Oh my gosh, is that what this comes down to? 

All other food pales in comparison…

 

I could turn this “nothing works out” story into a Paint comic at least.  Since Steven and I aren’t talking, I feel weird continuing my Angela’s Friends comic right now. 

Why can’t Steven and I decide to be friends again?  That’s how it worked before when we disagreed.  Maybe I felt like I compromised too much.  Maybe I was too idealistic, though (which is very very very very possible).  Then again, I have to separate us in my mind, which space will help me do.  For awhile I think we were just becoming melded together.  Bad news.  We’re really not the same person.  Which is fine.  I know we’ve enjoyed each other’s differences before.  It could happen again.  I think of my friends in places in my life, like “emotional twin”, “pop culture connection”, “intellectual challenge”, “partner in art”… I guess according to what they do for me.  Steven had seemed displaced for awhile up until our official separation.

Make People Uncomfortable

Thoughts, recently.  This is going to be disorganized.

–Mackenzie told me about troubles that she’d had in high school.  She sounds like Holden Caulfield.  “I was just having a real hard time in school.”  She said she didn’t have any friends, and she wrote some really dark poems about rape that scared her teachers.  They kicked her out of school and told her not to come back unless medicated.  She started taking Ephexor– a LOT.  750 milligrams in sample pills.  She said she almost killed her family by turning on a carbon monoxide-leaking air conditioner and leaving the house.  Antidepressants affect people differently, and for some it amplifies feelings of emptiness, apathy, and sadness–what you’re trying to escape or better yet cope with–to a totally dangerous extreme… Case in point.  There’s really alot more to her story, I’m not sure how much I should write here, but… left and right, I saw through her words people handling the situation horribly.  And it just made me realize how much, in general, people really don’t understand depression, or anxiety, or mental illness.  Like I thought maybe teachers or at least school officials would’ve been trained in a little bit.  I thought counselors at least might be able to get over themselves and try to help a person in conjuction with her free will and a realistic view of her circumstnaces, instead of forcing convenient theories on her or deciding on their own what they were going to fix.  … Not that they can.  No one can fix you but yourself.   But the thoughts people inject into suffering others~!  The way they’re treated!  I’m starting to believe from secondhand experience that institutions exist to protect the sane people.

Because this is my journal and because you’re willingly subjecting yourself to its words, I’m writing what I would want to say while pointing a finger into your chest.  Buddy.

 

–Don’t freak out.  They’re a fellow human being experiencing more negative emotion than you can imagine or handle and you would act the same way to try to get out of it.  You would do all the same things that seem crazy.  Actions that seem crazy usually have a real source within the person that’s indiscernible but could be found by talking to them.

–Don’t utter these familiar words: “You have a good life.  You have no reason to be depressed.”

That’s why it’s a problem.  You could have a perfectly good life (like me) but have incongruous extreme quantities of negative emotion.  What a problem!  Defined.

I realize that I sound pretty condescending, but I was aghast that so many people in Mackenzie’s life had reacted in the absolute worst ways possible.  She just kept slipping further and further downhill, and those freaking out around her rolled her down that hill when they were trying to push her up.  To be honest, my family wasn’t too hot either, but they did try and they did gain patience after a few years.  And really I’m pretty much convinced that almost no one would know how to act.  If I built a time machine, and I wrote a note to people of the past who encountered me at my worst, they would find on a folded-up piece of notebook paper tucked in their sock drawer one day:

 

 

IF YOU WANT TO HELP ANGELA:  Be calm and patient (really calm).  She gets really scared when she thinks you’re all going to leave her behind, and it makes her draw in more, and that makes everything worse.  The problems will never get talked about if she feels like she has to hide everything to keep you all safe and comfortable.   She has to find a good professional counselor whom she trusts (maybe she’ll meet one in Chicago… whoops! I let that future event slip, didn’t I?), because a neutral party will be less prone to freak out, and the counselor will have tools to help Angela learn to sort through her own criss-crossed bullet-like thoughts.  Most importantly, know that she has every reason to get better, especially if you’re reading this when you would be putting on socks, because then it means she has people in her life, like you, who care about her.

Fear, Quake

Last night I hung out (hanged out? mm… nah) with Mackenzie and Yeong and a crowd of people they meet regularly for sushi on Wednesday nights.  They also have a tradition of playing pool at a bar next door while they wait for a table; according to MackenzieYeong, the same terrible band plays Beatles covers there every Wednesday.  I can definitely back up that part.  Their cover of “Yesterday” consisted of one guy strumming the chords on an acoustic guitar with another shouting “WHY DID YOU HAVE TO MOTHERFUCKIN’ GO?”

The food was deelicious.  The bar part is what made me most nervous.  I made myself go as part of my “Angela, stop avoiding social contact” agenda.   At Sushiyama, I got to listen to alot of people talk at the table.  I really put forth effort into listening to people and then trying to generate some thoughts and speak them, rather than waiting for it to be over in silence.  It’s not that I don’t like Mackenzie and her friends or that I don’t like people in general; I just get really afraid of revealing my opinions or anything indicative of inner substance.

 

My concentration right now is learning how to do things in front of people.

 

When we left Sushiyama, though, Yeong’s friend/roommate Jen whom I’d met that night gave me a hug and said, “You get a hug, because I like you.”  I sort of gasped on the inside and thought, “I showed myself and someone liked me!”  It was a small immediate affirmation. 

The fear is a patch of weeds, and I’m slowly uprooting it one by one.  Every myth that I confront is another tangle of roots loosened.

 

As for the problem of existence… Problem?  Only philosophers are screwy enough to refer to existence as a problem.  Heh.  As for the question of existence, I have a collection of ideas swirling around me as to why I’m here.  That’s not the brick-like ontological security of a holy roller, but I realize now that I would be horrified if I ever arrived at that much certainty.  This happened in junior high.  I spent seventh grade in a sort of turmoil of fragmentation… and then in eighth grade I decided that even if I couldn’t absolutely know everything and why, I was here after all and, well, I liked it, for whatever reason it was given to me.  And I decided to be.