The way I feel called to live

I was talking to my friends turtle and Annie today, and I found the following words coming out of my mouth:

“Plus, I probably shouldn’t have started dating anyone.  I’m not… I have problems…I just starting dying…”

“Wait, what do you do?” said turtle.  Her name is exists in an uncapitalized state, by the way.

“Relationships are like death to me.  The longer I’m in one, the more I start feeling like a shell.  They’re a funeral to me.”

I think I know this belief has been sitting in me for a long time, but I had never fully acknowledged it before… really, really how important my freedom is.  It was difficult to admit, I think, because it goes so against the common flow of the mindset of my age.  People seem to date and scout out potential boyfriends or girlfriends without even knowing why.  They’re just churning along on a track of biological drive-reduction.  Did you ever step back and ask, Why am I doing this?  Because it’s been taught to me by movies that this is what I need to pursue?  Because I don’t know what else to do?  Loneliness doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to me.  That’s more like filling a hole, breaking even.

And I guess some people have asked themselves, and it is what they want to do, and that’s fine.  But you have to look at the real answer… Or I guess I mean, I have to look at the real answer and separate my voice from the chorus.

Through junior high and high school, I always maintained that I probably wouldn’t start that whole “dating” thing till college, because it was pointless before then.  I pretty much did that besides one short-lived teenage infatuation.  I thought the waiting would be over in college.

Well, I have to wait more.  It’s still pointless at this age.  People have told me, not till twenty-five, twenty-six, and I think people have a good point.  I just have to dispel certain myths for myself… The clock isn’t ticking any faster.  I’m not missing out.

I fear that I’ll die without having experienced that thing of rosy fame, you know, love, but, yeah, that’s why death is bad thing.  It does cut your experiences short.  If I died now, I wouldn’t have gone through all the stages of living.  It’s a fact.  That’s why people would murmur, “Tragedy.”  But the fear that I’m going to die isn’t a good enough reason to put me on the prowl.

The Semester of Suckitude

So basically this semester has been a lot of screwing up. 

I think I’m learning from all of this.

I suddenly want to apply myself in college.  If I only concentrate on what I have to do at this moment, it’s quite feasible.  I can do well in classes.  Not just pass, make the Dean’s List!  Yeah.  Let’s do that. 

You figure out what to do with all the learning at the end of the road.  I’m hardly to the middle.  Barely anyone my age has an explicitly outlined plan, yet we can’t all massively fail in the years to come.  Right?  Somewhere you must grab onto the next rung and move into… life.  Or maybe I’ve always been there, in life.  But somehow I move out of the only constant structure I’ve known so far in my life, school, into some new area which seems to involve work.  I don’t really like that.  I think I’d like it to be church, community, something more purposeful than just my day determined by a schedule.

Angela 3000, new and improved.

It’s more like Angela 2008, learning to live with my limitations. ly ly ly

 

I was straightforward with my anger today in a new effort to be truthful and open.  Michelle accidentally snapped at me when I had come to visit her specifically at the computer lab.  I had picked up a stapler and clicked it in her ear to get her attention, which happened to annoy her tremendously at that moment in her frazzled mood.  Her and her friend jumped on me.

“That is not cool.  Way not cool.  That really hurt my ears.”

I just blinked confusedly.

Robin, the friend, said, “Yeah, stapler.  Not a good noise.”

Michelle grabbed my arm suddenly when my bewildered look continued and said, “Sorry!  I just snapped at you!  I’m just trying to think of how I’ll get all these things done.  BLAH.  So busy.  It’s good to see you!” in this panicked, unhinged sort of way that really reminded me of my old insanely stretched-thin choir teacher whom I hated.  So that was not a good entrance for either of us. 

“I just thought I’d make a noise to get your attention,” I said.

“Yeah, it was just–”

“Staplers.  Bad noise.”

“Yeah.  Bad noise.”  Robin and Michelle finished me off, and I silently walked away to sit at the computer I had checked out.  Gazing at the monitor, I wondered why I was there if the person I had just come to see had made me feel like shit over something entirely insignificant and then blown me off.  I checked various accounts, mail, Facebook, whatever, heard Michelle leave to give her sick boyfriend some food, and then left as silently as I had come, save that fatal click of stapler and save whispering, “I was at number thirteen” to the lab attendant. 

On the way home, I consolidated my anger into the above phrase, “making me feel like shit over something insignificant.”  I decided that, however stressed and overexpended a person was, that still didn’t excuse hurtful behavior.  I also reasoned that if I had behaved in such a way, I would want a friend of mine to take her stand so that I would make amends… standards for each other, you see… because I’m pretty sure my friends and I hold the common value that the way you treat others is more important than anything else in life.  And I also realized that I had been hurt, not gravely but still hurt, and why were my feelings less important than theirs? 

So when I got home and Michelle, who was departing, said “Hey”, I sort of ignored her.  Naturally, she got the picture very quickly.

“Are you mad at me?”

“Yes.”  I think this may be the second time I’ve directly told a friend that.  If I remember correctly.  That doesn’t mean I never got mad at friends in the past.  It means I kept it in.

Then we talked briefly, got it all squared away, had a hug, and….

I love it, developing these good habits.  Much of my childhood and adolescence were spent in the shadow and pressure of restrained emotions and opinions, but I find that outside of my family (with people to whom I feel more akin), it is possible to have things like anger, disagreements, sadness… it is possible to acknowledge and deal with them and keep going!  Wow!

Now if only I had done that with someone else… Would there be more conversation budding and less mystery?  I feel a little numb right now, as if someone has put that anesthesiological liquid that they use when cutting off moles all over me, inside and out, emotionally, mentally, physically.  I was just thinking of times when I could watch myself touch my skin but not feel it.  Likewise I watch myself get up, go to work, chew blueberry waffles, bathe dogs, shovel shit, defiantly talk to my theatre teacher when annoyed, but I don’t know how much I feel.  I definitely recollected with the anger incident.  Interesting, the lift that came from working through that decline.  I feel as though Michelle and I have both gained a little strength.  How cool.

You have to admit…

It’s getting better.

Talking to my professor dispelled the sense of impending doom.   I have a chance at staying in both classes IF I can get a doctor’s note explaining the antidepressant dance of accumulation that is oversleeping.

I had a dream with Ryan in it last night, in which he smiled with cloy and said, “Hey, whaddaya say, me and you just screwing around…” and I said, “Uh. No.  No.”  This is the second dream I’ve had where he tries to get me back but does not conceal his shallow intentions, and, in my dream head, a desperate iota of me briefly considers that hypothetical fling… then I dig my heels in and reject him.  I feel a sense of winning when I awake.  Also, after rejecting him in my dream, I had the dream thought, “Hey, he still has my Hyperspace!”  Which, in waking life, is also true.

I see why earrings are cheap and sold by the zillions now in accessory stores.  I just lost another one today.

I haven’t gotten very much sleep this week at all.  Last night, barely six hours, the night before like five…

Yesterday I ate my weight in garlic.  I came home starving from ballet, asked my roommate if I could have a bite of her meatloaf… went crazy with desire for meatloaf after that… went on a shopping escapade at the grocer to get ingredients for My Little Meatloaf.  Michelle kneaded the meat while I seasoned, and then she shaped it like a stegosaurus.  It’s now missing one spike, its head, and a bit of the front torso (torso? on a dinosaur? I dunno, his front) and front leg.  Oh yeah, that diverged from garlic.  While I was starvedly waiting for the meatloaf to bake, I baked garlic breadsticks and ate four.  Then the meatloaf.  Then 80s Dance Night at Hailey’s! ahahah

ahah but I’m not even kidding, I strapped on my high tops and basically wore leotard tights ballet skirt with an off-the-shoulders Magical Mystery Tour shirt and went dancing like fifteen minutes after ingestion.  I borrowed five dollars from Brittany’s boyfriend to do so, but it was worth it… the place was teeming with magical energy that propelled me as if on moonwalk to find my friends Annie and Sasha.  (And I think the bouncer approved of how I carried my keys on me… I tied them septuple-knotted into my shoelaces.  He looked down and nodded when I passed as if to say, “Innovative, sucka!”)  80s music is bizarrely endearing to me and, it appears, many of my generation who heard it while toddling around and learning shapes.  I try to let the music move me and not be mummified in a few safe moves… I feel like I caught some people’s attention.  My dance moves definitely gravitate towards odd rather than sensual.  But I wonder if there were a few people thinking, “Innovative, Magical Mystery Girl!”?

Thoughts like that make me think that I have good self-esteem habits set up almost innately.  Not manic and overconfident, just confident that in some way I’m special.  Life has handed me a permanent glittery star sticker for being.

Maybe it’s the sleep-deprivation talking.  Heheh

I feel so good!  I talked to my friends a lot yesterday, and almost every conversation, at some point, became a sort of psychological exploration where I feel like I helped people to define themselves, their problems, and what they can do for themselves.  I love the feeling.  I love listening and pulling apart and clarifying and articulating and setting things out organizationally like a chess board of life so far.

(But I hate actual chess.)