Process

That’s it. New blog. In Steven’s blog-a-list it says “frollicking [sic] ponies”. TOO INTERRUPTED.

I’m on a rising wave of transformation anyway. I can still feel terrified of everything, but I’m gathering, incubating, and learning. I spread orange-white Mexican cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, cilantro, and feta cheese on tacos today at the Denton Arts & Jazz Festival (Fuzzy’s Taco Shop booth!) I got there feeling relaxed. Then the anxiety scrunched up around me. Then I concentrated on what my hands were doing. I felt what it was like to talk to other people and feel safe in yourself; it’s like throwing a rope out and they choose to catch it, most likely they will (optimism). After the first conversation I had with a pre-nursing major from Orange, Texas… what was her name. Aw man. Well, as we were talking about majors, hometowns, and Denton panic started. What if a new conversation topic didn’t come up? What if she became really attached to me and wanted to be friends and hang out after this? It seemed like I would have to keep being polite and try to be amusing for the years of our mismatched friendship… What? What is this, Angela? Not all relationships are either BFF! or Nighthawks stranger. Such strong black-and-white thinking presides in me. I can see it and reside in it simultaneously…

Later at home today, I looked at Joe’s Facebook page, and then I looked at his intriguing hipster?/anti-hipster?/beyond-hipster? friend Tess’s page and found this website called adbusters.org. Oh lemme do that linky thing. This site. This site hosts the kind of thought that is blanket wrapped around me.

Waffle sends sad eyes my way to be petted. New blog coming!

Thanks for Dept. of Eagles!

Today. Okay. Positive. Okay. I went to a Bible study and good things came of that.

I don’t want to be a rational architect.

Wishful thinking is symptomatic of anxiety. okay. I think I’m ruining everyone’s life. No. Stop generalizing just so that you don’t have to make any particular person feel any particular way. I might have ruined my family. No. More specific. Today I called my mom, because a woman at the Bible study talked about her daughter who had Aspergers’ Syndrome (high-functioning autism–trouble reading social cues or understanding social behavior), and I had thought, when I met this woman’s daughter… She reminds me of my mom and my mom’s family! Probably more along the lines of.. Aunt Annette? And sometimes my mom, I dunno, she gets so fixated on houses, building things, productivity… And I got inspired that maybe if my mom figured out that she needed help with social things… or that maybe I wouldn’t feel like I was the crazy one for thinking people’s behavior abrupt/rude/abrasive… So I called her, but I chickened out in saying that I thought she might have it, so I said “your family” and she said, “No.” And I kept prodding around, mentioning Aunt Theresa and Aunt Annette, and she said, “No, you don’t get to find diseases.” Then I was like, “What do you mean by that?” And she was like, “I don’t know” kind of coyly. Then I was confused and halted, and I felt like she’s got this thing built up around me that I’m a hypochondriac. Her and Russ: it’s in your head! Well, you know what I thought of saying after I had hung up and my altruisitc attempt had failed:

Hey Mom, remember that time I thought I had lice and you kept saying “No, you don’t. You’re just imagining it. You’re a hypochondriac.” And then you finally believed me when my entire head was itching and you saw a bug run across my hairbrush???

That’s because I was RIGHT. I was good at deciphering what was happening to me. I’m not a hypochondriac. And admitting that something is a problem is not DEFEAT. Such tight denial.

 

I sat on a builder on the premises of The Yoga Hut and some thoughts breezily unfurled.

Acknowledge that her words led to me feel hurt, manipulated, and misunderstood. The misunderstanding of my intentions perhaps hurts the most, being treated like my curiosity needs to be extinguished.

Don’t suppress the feelings, but now… the most freedom comes from knowing my own freedom of choice, that I don’t have to let pain ripple through my cells and out into my actions against others.

 

I dunno how I feel about blogs and the internet now. It seems like the maximum in social scrutiny. Maybe I could check out of all of this. Maybe that’s avoidant. Hey!

 

But I think my big push away from people is because I’m not setting identity boundaries. Meaning: whoever I’m around, I feel at their mercy, whatever they believe, whatever they’re doing, whatever their opinion about a CD or a shirt we passed in a window, well, disagreeing can’t be as important as our relationship, so I don’t need voice it! Or I chatter incessantly, I say things outside the realm of my good discretion, projecting other people’s opinions because mine aren’t sharply and quickly formulated. and Silence is not. allowed.

BLECHG so much garbage in my mind. Who’s operating the gas grill beneath me? Maybe this is what they mean by Hell. Oh yeah! My theory of God. The kingdom of God is within you. The Bible is a metaphor for the entire inner, emotional/spiritual journey of a single person, and each of us can use it to exquisitely calibrate our inner lives with the richness of wisdom. The infinity stretching out before us is within us. Right now.

roommate: Ashleigh Abbott

I like saying people’s names specifically on here, because I wouldn’t write anything that I wouldn’t tell them to their face. So if she Google searches her own name and finds it, I don’t care.

The passive-aggressive note-leaving has begun. I almost texted her “We are not going to begin passive-aggressive notes. Talk to people.” But that would be like another note. It’s true that we mainly see each other in passing. Still, it seems to me like talking face-to-face is much healthier; it’s a dialogue, then, and not someone taking presumed command of what needs to be done then getting angry when others don’t comply. She pretty much threw a Helen Keller fit on Monday. Only at that point did I get any inkling that Waffle’s chewing old, moldy loaves of bread from the compost really bothered her. And that was a guess at what was behind it. Because she never said anything. And still hasn’t. And yeah putting Waffle’s bread bones into words does sound disgusting, but it honestly hadn’t crossed my mind and obviously didn’t bother me (and still doesn’t). And it’s not up to me to troll the waters of every roommate and deduce how she feels, even though I try to do that anyway. But ultimately, if she’s not going to bring something up, what do I do? Suggest, “Hey, some of my actions seem to be bothering you. What can I do to modify them to please you?” Already that seems unequal. There’s no opening left to decide whether it’s something I change, she changes, or both of us, or someone else in the house, you know.

I developed tolerance from interactions early in my life, well, like from twelve years old onward… I realize  that when I see roommates go through this anguish because not everything in the house goes their way. I’ve already passed through the shock and seeming violation that other people live in different ways from mine. !

Spa

To dream that you are at a spa, suggests that you need to take time out and pamper yourself. Perhaps you need to come clean and wash away old secrets, pains, or guilt. It is time to let your emotions out and begin the healing process.  Start fresh. 

from http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/s3.htm

I had a dream. Various guys who I think have liked me in the past were sort of around me at a manor/beach house/reality tv show house? where groups of people milled around. My dream attention centered its fuzzy viewfinder around the spa. The guys were around me, fully clothed but sort of slicing through the spa like paper dolls stuck through slits in space. For each of them, a golden, curling, sparkling line wafted toward me like the most inviting part of fresh baked cookies, and I cast my eyes down and reflected on what could be the golden part of each of these relationships.  I paused at each but followed none, because the steam was the sweetest part, the concentrated dimension where we connected, confined.

 

I prayed “What should I do with my life? What should I DO?” Yesterday, Waffle galloped gaily between two school dumpsters. On the side of one, in the middle of Jackson Pollack bird crap, there was a circular school sticker that said:

BREAK OUT OF YOUR SHELL!

YOU’LL FEEL GREAT AND OTHER PEOPLE WILL FEEL GREAT, TOO!

 

Can I not feel bad about wanting to do that anymore? I think this is permission. releasing me from. the rule. made by no one. from God himheritself.

Waffle mrrrmphs

Congrats! You get to read my most intimate, on-the-verge-of-tears realizations! If you make fun of me, you’re a douche.

Oh my god, she does want me to be happy… She does…. I thought she hated my fancifulness… But all she wants to do is help me put ideas into actions… Ah what have I done… I’ve believed for so long that she hated me but she doesn’t…… ah Mom               She loves me

She looks so tired and worn sometimes but she helps me in any way that she can, I never saw her actions for what they were, she just didn’t say the words I wanted, she’s a regular Clint Eastwood……. I can love her, I can.

When I was four, I drew a comic of me hugging her saying “I love you Mommy” and her saying “I hate you Angela”, not because she did or does, but because she isn’t emotionally “effusive” as the personalitypage.com ISTJ description said. I had a talk with myself after I drew that comic.

“Hey, Angela.”

“Yea?”

“I don’t think she hates you.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” I thought through her actions toward me in images in my four year old mind. “She doesn’t hate me.”

It’s valuable, it’s inextricable to living truthfully and interacting truthfully and not as a snapping funhousemirror, to remember this.

The re-realization started while we were in the car traveling to Houston today. Initially, it was talkless rainfall as I looked out the window and felt collapsed resgination to get the evening over with. The popcorn shouting match lingered between us.

Then not every ounce was resigned… I repeated to myself what Russell had told me, and I doubted it: “She wants me to be happy, she hates that our relationship is bad as much as I do.”

Mom said aloud, “So how’s school?”

I gave an answer about it being fine and research projects.

Thoughts: “Try.”

“How’s your work?” The first time I mumbled and she said what, so I repeated it.

She gave a real answer, analyzing the current state at Shell of tolerating incompetent contractors. As she spoke, I noticed the gleaming areas of her expertise: impersonal, practical analysis; the simple formation of sentences, each word chosen in a string from her working mind, necessary but not florid; behind it, her earnest desire to serve the asker with her answer without glorifying herself. And nervousness that toughens into an exterior what-can-be-misconstrued-as arrogance.

“Work is… kind of weird. They’ve gotten into this habit of… Well. They bring on these contractors, but they aren’t what we need. But instead of getting rid of them, they just… Work with them. And I guess they haven’t officially started lay-offs. But.” Each word measured with staid knowledge and conservativism. Her sense of humor is where she can cast off prudence.

Like after the whole evening, when we had “warmed up” as I put forth conscious if sometimes weary effort to really interact and not just recline in my shell, we stopped at McDonald’s to try their cheaper espresso drinks. Cheap is the new cool. And we were waiting at the window for caramel and hazelnut lattes when she looked over at a white thing in the backseat of a parked car and said, “Doesn’t that look like a headless person?”

I was like hahahah that’s weird. a little uncomfortable. haha.

Fyi: People of the primary function Introverted Sensing (ISTJs and ISFJs) can be very idiosyncratic without realizing it. They want to do necessary things for society, which makes them solid SJs (the pillars of society, a major chunk of the population, hard workers who uphold the status quo)(not me, and probably not you if you’re reading this). But they do this by aligning the outer, concrete world with their inner conceptions of what elements of the concrete world “should” be like… Which may lead to peculiar expressions, depending on what they’ve internalized as their standards. Their troubles can occur when they sacrifice everything to their inner conceptions, like rejecting a child who violates a standard… To balance, they need to learn that there is another way to do the right thing, relationally. I say this, because I realized today while wandering around the house that Mom is underdeveloped in this area. She still grits her teeth to Chance, whose choices she cannot grasp. I also realized that I learned this inner-sticking-toughness from her and can recoil from things that seem out of my immediate values, missing the dimensions of real life… Especially with my values, which are people-centered, rejecting relationships too quickly because they seem violating is just bogus. 

Relationships are where it’s at.

My mind was full. I wrote it out. M83 seeps into it.

 

Love from

Angela

Frangy and Roossey

I got into about a 2 1/2 hour conversation with brother tonight. It just ended. Mom and I had gotten into a fight over her eating some of my popcorn without asking. Hmm, summing it up like that, it sounds pretty silly. What made me mad was that I brought up that it bothered me if she didn’t ask, and she dismissed that, so I didn’t drop it, so she took it all the way to “Well, I pay for everything so I own your life”. Russell, with his larger perspective, helped me to see how confused Mom was by my snapping… She didn’t see that it was about me wanting her to acknowledge my viewpoint, even IF she thought it was silly… I don’t think I have the energy right now to relay everything Russ and I threshed through; he worked with me thought by thought and, unlike me, he can acknowledge restrictions without needing to push them. So he helped me see what I can do within the set-up of our family and my life. He listened. I want to thank him, but I want to do it with genuine energy later… These heady emotional conversations literally physically wear me out. I think that’s a reason fueling avoidance. But it’s like cardiovascular training. It’s like what my roommate Crystal said last year about her family, “We talk everything out. It doesn’t matter if we have to go into a room for hours, cry, scream, we fight things out and we don’t let things go unresolved.” Her family seems to have developed endurance in this. It was good to have Russ meet me in words, for me to tussle and be weak. To write down the major points of clarity that were reached:

1. If I want to have real relationships with my parents (and I do), I need to be independent of them first. They won’t treat me like an equal until I am. This means graduating, getting a job, and getting out of here.

To this, Russ exclaimed gleefully, “So there! You have a plan!” Aw he likes plannin.

2. Mom and I are essentially mismatched in our natural desires and inclinations. Russ drove home that she just wants me to be happy (which surprised part of me, yeah), and she expresses this by doing things like making a ramp for my dog, setting up washer machines, buying me pants, and folding clothes. While I receive these actions with, “Oh, that’s convenient, thanks”, I emotionally need words of affirmation, which is exactly what she deems unnecessary or finds too difficult to dispense. Meanwhile, what I want from people I care about is emotional accessibility, being informed of their inner state so that I can help them achieve some peace (of course I can’t be wholly responsible). And Mom does not inform! I can often infer, but there’s no discussing it or reaching it in any way where I can use my strength.

3. All that established, we could go to counseling together, and it would most likely be beneficial. Mom has respect for authority figures if not for me, so a counselor would help keep the lines open instead of the shut-down that often happens “I OWN YOUR LIFE”. I’m gonna talk to her about doing this. It could help clear the air for a reset, help us learn what the other wants and expects, and help us create better communication habits.

4. Russ and I got to a point where I admitted: I want to please my parents, and so it’s so…difficult…for me to… disregard their standards even when I don’t own those standards. Like I brought up how Dad thrives in keeping pressure on himself, so it’s difficult for me to relax without feeling guilt.

I said, “If I love someone, I want to do what they want me to do” and “I don’t want to constantly argue with my parents, but if I am myself, I will argue with them, because we are different.”

Russ replied, “Okay. You don’t have to please them in everything… You please Dad in that you don’t kill people, you don’t sleep around–”

I brought up our differing political views and Russ said, “Well, you believe in owning guns, don’t you?” We all laughed. I nodded. So he kept on, “You won’t be a murderer, you won’t end up killed, he doesn’t have to worry about you in school, and you won’t take away his right to bear arms. That’s pretty much it. He’s happy. And Mom, well, hers is even simpler… She just wants you to be happy. They might try to influence you, but…” He brought things down to the basics. He laid out the parameters in such a clear way that I glimpsed safety and boundaries again instead of feeling pulled apart.

5. I need a base of happiness that is my own. My own central happiness alleviates periphery irritation. I haven’t been establishing this, but I have before and I know I can.

 

Fyi: Russ is an ENTJ. The neat thing about NTs, Rationalists, is that they can see life built from the ground up (Idealists or NFs see life as falling down from an idealized vision). So that makes Rationalists excellent at explaining how mental/emotional processes take place… A book I read compared them to Prometheus, who starts anew each day and must rebuild each day. His liver and that giant boulder, you know? This allows for an explicit knowledge of the contruction process, be it concrete or abstract. Like turtle, at the bad rehearsal, explained exactly how the characterization and projection parts of acting fit together. It was delicious to witness. It’s something I can do sometimes, but my greater (I originally typed “greather”) strength comes from faith and not knowledge… which is more difficult to quantify, but. Here I am! Existing like that.

PS – See if you can get my title!

Still, I might get a new url

It seems that I have a curse. An internet titles curse.

lasfraises@yahoo.com <– before I knew French, including its articles

saites_vous_el_greco@hotmail.com <– was pretty sure “savoir” had an irregular vous conjugation

l_ucello_della_luna <– thought back to picture of swan in Rosetta Stone software and got switched around about Italian rule that makes “c” sound like “ch”… It’s “l’uccello” for loochello, bird; “l’ucello” for loosello, not a bird, I think not a word.

frollickingponies <– I sent my housemate whose birthday is today a text message that said “You wannna frolic any cuz of your bday?” I used the plain verb form, and the gerund form in my WordPress name tugged up into my consideration. One L.

Faced with a tinge of uncertainty about how to spell things, I consistently choose to go by my memory rather than – not and – look it up.  First I felt stupid, but now I’m delighted! THERE’s my humanity. BAM.

It also answers a sort of worry/prayer I’d had floating out there, that I’d gotten into the habit of choosing knowledge over faith. But cleeeearrrrly not! I recall feeling the leap o’ faith when I typed in those various names, and I preferred that feeling to just knowing.

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.

MSG Is Addictive

Ingredients: Corn, Water, Lime, MonoSodium Glutamate (Flavor Enhancer), Salt, Black Papper, Garlic, Paprika, Comino and Corn oil.

 

These chips. I keep trying to stop eating them…..

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.