monday i met with lady psychologist. tuesday i met with two-headed monster psychiatrist(s). wednesday i met with the honda mechanic. lady psychologist, i've found, is very good at getting the story out of me so the one single thing i did not realize is made clear by the simple stating of the case and i see the connections and the reason behind every action, the cause of this misery and that heartache and all the confusion. she is taking away the headaches with my own hands. or at least i'm understanding more fully why they're there.

double-headed asian psychiatrist(s) said i don't need drugs now, but to come to them again when i'm upset. ha! in their white lab coats and hot breath, telling me who i might be, how alcohol affects my brain, then they order blood tests to rule out eating disorders and premenstrual depression, even though i've told them i eat properly and that my sadness doesn't work that way. so i see how useful the interview process really is. they don't want my emotional history, they want my genetic history - they want to know what ways my blood flows - how it enters and exits the brain - and medicate accordingly. those fuckers. i might as well hit up my local ghetto rooster. it's rather fucked up - i fuck myself up (good for them, like happy little pimps), so i can get medicated (even better for them, happy little pushers).

very effeminate honda mechanic-manager-man says to put electrical tape over my check engine light so it doesn't bother me any more. interesting recommendation. i might heed this advice. i might take some drugs and dig up all my problems then commit suicide by ramming my honda into a light pole in the woods at night staring at the sky like some sick, independently-directed vw commercial, listening to pink moon, star-struck and dewy, then after, still staring skyward, only a little blue and moist-looking. then everyone can come to my funeral in halter tops and chokers, smoking cigarettes in the former heroin chic of the nineties. right.

my friends are amazing. my friends fuck shit up beautifully and create brilliant interludes between the conversation and the touch and the hug and the wall and the word and the soul crushed to brick. my friends are making the hairs on my arms stand up. my friends make my life more perfect, come close, feel heaven in their eyes, envision me as i'd like to see me, make music, make art, create a world for me that is comfortable and beautiful, stark, random, glistening in the sunlight, perfect blue skies, comprised of water sculptures in air (the kiss, each lip) again - my friends are fucking amazing.

i didn't want to wake up this morning. i didn't want to come to work. i wanted to sleep in. i'd been up too late tickling jon. he makes the funniest sounds like a child. he squirms and squeals, giggles like a girl. it's the best thing that i could possibly do with him at any given moment. my husband is very ticklish. my husband is a skinny white boy. my husband does most of the cooking but never ever does laundry. my husband is cynical and very intelligent. my husband is working on a history degree and a novel about his youth. he's still very young. my husband is at work at the coffee shop right now, swatting flies, reading the newspaper, and sweating to death. you'd think that he'd lose weight locked up tight in there with all the brewing machines and exhaust from the coolers and freezers and still no air conditioning. then he'd disappear because he's such a skinny white boy. my husband makes up songs about the cats and sings to them as he walks around the house. he sings words about the cats to the tunes of huge pop hits that he's never heard more than a couple of seconds of while flipping through channels on the television. my husband thinks i'm the prettiest girl on the planet. but he still thinks the bagel girl is hot. which i don't mind. last night we saw an ad for a movie with "the cute guy" in it and i went ga-ga, so we're even.

so someone made me blog of the day for 08.26.01.

the man in the cubicle next to me is talking about music in japanese on the phone.

my friends are troubled, my friends are far away. my friends have death and heart murmurs and loss on their minds. my friends are as confused as i - they are theorizing why it is that everyone they know feels so shitty everyday - like there is some purpose behind it and we are all being put to tests by things outside ourselves and we are trying like mad just to make it through to tomorrow and tomorrow and the day after that. everyone is confused and they are trying to make it through their lives intact, but it is all getting harder allthetime - it is getting harder, it is getting darker and our definitions of ourselves are blurring, they are distorted, we have distorted visions of ourselves - now and in the future - still, we will be always trying to make sense of everything and failing miserably. we feel so pathetic - our attempts so languid, like in dreams when your fist feels disconnected from your body and when it lands punches soft as child arms and lighter than the masseuse folding his fingers into flesh. our minds have gone flaccid from too much struggle, our hearts are slowing and sleep is touching our imaginations. i would like very much to see my planner with each day marked off by "stay in bed" or "lay down in the grass". i watch the sky changing - autumn is coming; autumn is here, the smell is in the air and i keep thinking that it is still summer and that september should be green, yet dry leaves are already licking at my doorstep. i cannot imagine that the cold weather will do any of us any good. i am afraid that it will try to consume us, the lines of our brains taken over with a willingness to hibernate. i am afraid for myself and my friends. will we survive ourselves, our minds, our apathy and our urges to surrender? can we avoid the snow covering over us? can we keep moving enough to not be buried? the clouds have shrouded the sky - as though it were winter - and the heat has diminished by degrees, five and seven, mercury slipping. in the office, the air conditioning has remained, making it necessary to wear thick clothes and making it wonderful to get in the car at the end of the day when it has been in the parking lot, on the asphalt, soaking up what warmth it could.

i was thinking too much yesterday surfing zha's site, watching how his brain moves, the way his actions are directly related to my dreams. my throat swelled up at work, tears bulging ducts, yet the dam not breaking for i was swallowing hard. i went home just after for lunch and took this out on my husband, being pissed off at him, swelling with anger about everything not right in our life, everything he does or doesn't do. my whole day was thrown off by an hour's worth of reading. i did nothing successfully. i went to class and rolled my eyes at the other students, the way their mouths never stop flapping and how their answers are never clear, how their words are inarticulate and inaccurate, flopping on the linoleum, landing there like rocks in a troubled stomach. i went to the bar and we sat in half-silence for hours, my head bobbing, sleep wanting to consume me there at the table, instead singing along to the pixies and dancing like some sea-going communist ballerina hopped up on no-doze. and i laughed. and i had a good time. trying not to think about myself and being miserable all the time and my chemistry overcoming my catharsis. i tried to think about reaching out of darkness, grasping at hairs of wisdom that say, "there is nothing better in the world than the world." strings of hope that tell me that i am of the world and that i must not be complacent inside myself, stuck here, turning over and over all the things that are the smallest versions of a definition of my outlook; my self. i must admit that i have poetry coursing through my veins and that i am worthy of it. i must fully accept that which i am and challenge those parts of me that i know somehow do not belong. i must fully be who i am allthetime. everyday.

everything just got dark. i always dream of being other people, of being like other people though i am typically narcissistic. i suppose the narcissism goes along with the sadness and the longing to be other people really, because it's an incredibly selfish thing to hate yourself. to spend so much time hating yourself and thinking about yourself and all the things in your life that are wrong or could be wrong or will be wrong and how everyone else's stories come back to you and your story. i am so very self-absorbed. the fact of my self-absorption spoken aloud merely reinforces its existence because it manipulates me into thinking about how i hate myself. when i start to hate myself i begin to think that being sad is my natural state and that usually i'm just passing time trying not to be sad, so that i'm faking all emotion and i begin to believe truly and honestly that i never have fun doing anything and that everything everyone does pisses me off, which just makes me think that i jump to conclusions and make harsh judgments, which makes me hate myself some more. and yet i swear that i don't want to be medicated by my stupid doctors. i don't need chemical interference. what i need is to train myself not to think this way and there must be a point where it all started that i can emotionally go back to somehow and understand what went wrong and changed everything to shit. but clarity does not necessarily come. what comes is confusion pounding and anger because there are all these things to do, that i have to do, that need to be done and take away from my focusing on not thinking bad thoughts because the whole time that all this has to be done, all i want to do is go to sleep and take hot baths and starve to death. i told my psychologist that if i were to kill myself i would use pills, but i'm beginning to think that i would just stop eating and wallow in complete self-pity until i was so sick that i could hurt myself for real. or until i melted away. i spend so much time trying to get other people to notice me and all i really want sometimes is to be completely alone because then i wouldn't have to see people around me to convince myself they didn't like me, i could just be all alone and the matter of people liking me or not or me liking people or not would be settled because there wouldn't be any people. i don't want to feel this way. i want to feel some other way. i want to feel whole instead of hallow.

the craziness of my environment just now is suffocating because i have no occasion to rise to, no duty to uphold, no basic responsibility. i am hidden in my cubicle trying desperately to think of something interesting to think, to type here. there is nothing coming. this weekend i went home again and saw my family and talked to the eccentric man at the organic booth at the farmer's market and i had little sleep and i went canoeing and i drank a mocha with skim milk, which i usually don't do, and it all made me feel apart of something and made me want again, some more, to have my own children to take to the farmer's market and pick out funny looking eggplants with. there is something lovely about it really. picking out eggplants. they are purple, deeply so, and some of the ones we looked at were deformed like fruit is in the wild, and they were doubly egged, like siamese eggs, only purple and fruity and glistening in the sprinkling rain, seemingly dew-soaked, only with no dew. we started to load up our organic lettuce and our inorganic, though mutated, eggplants, and bread and such when my mom decided we needed cider and an organic wildflower bouquet. so my step-father and i jumped back out of the car to buy these aesthetic necessities. he bought the cider, which took seconds, and i got in line for the bouquet, which did not. the eccentric man was giving a woman a hard time for having never seen seinfeld because she owns no tvs, just organic vegetables. he invited her over for dinner and seinfeld. i suppose the fact of her unseeing is interesting as most americans who are caucasian and live in cities, i'm sure, have seen seinfeld at some time or another, perhaps even watched it repeatedly or religiously. it was indeed a cultural phenomenon of sorts - an integral part of our popular culture and thus our american identity. most everyone has seinfeld quotes that run in their heads periodically, or perhaps i am speaking from a specific group identity. i suppose these statements are full of huge generalizations, but this web format stuff is not about truth, it's about speculation and opinion reaching for truth, and perhaps, occasionally, however rarely, touching on it.

working and it is monotonous and there is little work to be done and i am busy not being pissed off and not spending my time, not spending my youth wisely, and it is raining outside while the ferris wheel continues its climb and descent and the *nsync stage is tumbling heavenward in the rain and the workers are crawling all over it and i am wondering who exactly pays them to put the monolith together, piece by piece and climbing and cranes are knocking the air and threatening the ants crawling like workers in hardhats like exoskeletons with tool belts like crime-fighters while the crime-fighters, the criminal-catchers, are busy out front directing fair traffic like their lives depended on it and are busy tormenting the fair traffic-goers, will later probably torment the concert-goers, and all this time i am contemplating the nature of my life, how much time is wasted how much good skin and nice outfits are wasted being at work and i don't even need the job and i don't even need to be here, but i need the money, so i sit and wait for the phone to ring and don't know what to do when it does and i am wishing i were sitting outside in the rain and i am wishing i had a cigarette though i quit smoking supposedly and though i am tired and nauseated, all the while i am hoping that the sun loves me and i am hoping that my energy will return to me and i am hoping that my body will let me do the things that my mind is wanting to do - all the while i am returning to myself years ago and sitting atop roofs during school hours all the while i am returning to myself in childhood what thoughts i had and how they formed me and all the while i am returning to myself days before this when the thought caught my soul on fire and it illuminated me and i felt illuminated and visible and real and all the while i am returning to myself, i am finding that my past has not only heartache and illusion, but insight and all the while i am returning to myself and i am unable to put into words that which i have felt and that which i will feel and that which i am feeling and all the while i am returning to myself as i was, i am returning to myself as i am typing and not finding answers and i am returning to myself finding answers in sunbeams, hidden in raindrops, conveyed in the corpses of the unfamiliar and all the while and all the while i am returning to myself on television as i have not seen me, i am returning to myself in dreams, and while i am sleeping i am returning to myself, i am grounding myself in me, in my thoughts as they dance me and make me and punish and conform me to shapes and i am returning to myself to find myself.

visited the family this past weekend. i looked at photos of growing up and being small. i noticed a distinct lack of my presence in many of those containing my sisters as wee ones, which is slightly disturbing as it merely reaffirms my distinction among siblings, as i fit into neither the group with the older two who are my step-mother's children, nor the group with the younger two who are my mother and step-father's children. i am a misfit. a bastard. whatnot. i cannot be sure that nostalgia is a good thing. in fact, i can say with some certainty based upon the expertise of my own experience, that nostalgia is a stupid thing, an annoying thing. we look on and fondly and desirously remember things that happened before - and then we are left with holes in our heart when we cannot for the life of us find that same smile we are wearing in photographs in our present lives and adventures. we do not picture ourselves on mountains anymore with our families alongside us - we are no longer feverishly composing nonsense in books beside ponds or on bedsides beside pillows. we are now in front of televisions pictured - on couches with popcorn and cold feet. we are now feverishly working in corporate dress alongside the miserable or the mundane. we are the mundane, our lives have succumbed to the mundane. and all this time i am saying "we" whilst intending "i" and i can only assume that you caught on.

last night over alcohol and truth-telling in the bar, in the booth, confronted with freshly heartbroken girl, somehow the table turned and she started screaming at me about picking myself up by my bootstraps and getting through my head by force of will. she told me that people love me and will love me and think i am a wonderful person regardless of how i deny it, regardless of the stages of self-loathing and self-pity i go through. she reminded me that i have a support system and that i must learn how to utilize it, as we must all do because i firmly believe that we are not intended for this life all by ourselves though we die alone and are stuck alone in our heads at all hours of the night and day at everysecond. we are all here together, our bodies fit together like puzzles, because we are intended to lift one another up when we have fallen down and are intended to grab one another at the last second before danger when we see what is to happen. when i was in boston in march my friend told me a story about someone falling on the tracks of the T before the train was coming and some stranger jumping down trying to pull them off again to life in time. my friend found this story amazing - that in this day and age strangers would help one another out. i, on the other hand, was not impressed. i told him that i would not expect less of the world; that if everyone just stood there yelling for help, it would have been disgusting and insulting. somehow i always new that sharon the heartbroken girl was right - that we are of this world for one another and that we must be there to save each other in avalanches, despite some of our friend's determination to be standing there when the avalanche comes - it is our duty, as loved ones to save one another.

so ten thirty this morning phone ringing... friend and friend broke up last night and girlfriend is terribly upset must rush, help her, comfort her, get her out of the house. end up talking to both parties individually which results in me questioning my own relationship, which i'd do anyway because that happens sometimes. told husband. husband doesn't seem to think there is anything to worry about and neither do i really, but it has been such a drain with all this thinking and sorting through of emotions and the nature of relationships. how do i do? i have not spent this much time trying to sort through the reasoning behind breakups and the language of emotion and reaction since i last suffered my own heartbreak years ago. how do we go on when everything we bank on is diminished? love is terrible, feels terrible, creates terrible things. and the worst of it is that even when we find that ideal one, that one who sticks by us and has family/friends/children with us, who kicks us while sleeping and steals the covers and argues over the remote and loves us terribly beyond their own flesh and knowledge - even then it is painful and long and diminishes by years and is forgotten and lost and hopefully found again; even then it is difficult and there is yelling and there is hurt flung against walls and then love made on kitchen floors or not and there are days or weeks without talking, years without really saying anything and there at the end we still die alone. fuck.

first day of new therapist. i talked about my history. she wanted my history. how do you say that in words big enough or exact enough to fit it all in fifty minutes and two hundred breaths? how does anything ever turn out all right? how can i fill you in on what it is that i've been doing and all the things that i am always thinking and all the nothing that fills me up and lets me down? it turns me over and over in its hands, my history, and i spin over it and over it in my head and say things to my husband like, "i wish i'd never slept with anyone before you." i was thinking today how nice it would have been to stave off the losing of virginity for marriage not because of religion but because of the sacredness of the act... mightn't it have been more beautiful? might it have been less of all the things it was, more of the things it wasn't? would we be now more passionate if we had waited for love to come? maybe love would not have come in the forms it has, and maybe i always thought that i loved them. and how do i tell that to the stranger i am paying the university to pay and get it out right without typing it out and fretting over the syntax? and the history itself is not all love and heartbreak or school & work and headaches... it is so much more. twelve sessions could never be enough. why do i bother? lady psychologist wants me to be evaluated by random psychiatrist for medicative purposes; tells me i could not drink if i were on drugs; tells me to warn them about any problems that already exist. psychology is a crock of shit really. lady psychologist warns me that if it's chemical no amount of therapy will do me any good... in other words, you may always be this way, you may always need medication, you might never function without fits of hysteria and sadness at every turn. though i've done all right for myself. i've made do with what i've got. i've faced the past and the present and the problems and i do it all the time and it gets old and then things get new again. ah, life - this thing which we are living - how it changes and morphs and becomes real and not real and things disappear and come back again. we may never hold truth in our hands, but we might touch on it when we are least expecting to.

this is me teaching myself html.

saturday i hosted a photographic scavenger hunt potluck. we teamed up to photo things. the list had eleven things:
a monument
something illegal
something vintage
something in a residential yard that does not belong there
something ideal
something oversized
cracked glass
something beautiful
outdoor art
something made for a child
something ugly

you only had to find ten of them, but most everyone found them all. two of the teams went drinking during the hunt and while their photos were developing.
i was on a team with leslie who was late for bill's when we were done. so i dropped her off and went home. i prepared potato wedges for baking for the potluck. then i fed scott's cats. binion had shat on the floor so i had to clean that up. all of this made me feel lonely. although i was hosting this event that i had developed the idea for and that everyone enjoyed doing, i just found myself playing hostess the whole time. my husband just acted like another guest. there's something about this... it's starting to really bother me. at my birthday party, i felt shitty all night. i had made up special fliers and cleaned a house that wasn't mine and blown up balloons and hung streamers, but the party didn't feel like it was mine to have fun at. it was all about me and that sort of made the attention forced. the next day i cried all day and thought that everyone hated me. they didn't, but i didn't go out for a while. i also felt weird at my wedding. i had spent four months planning it and then the day came and everyone took over and started doing preparations and little things were left out and i forgot stuff and it didn't look like it had looked in my head. and it felt weird. i guess that's supposed to be the nature of weddings and in particular for the bride, but it seems as though you should have fun at the thing for you. maybe other people should plan our weddings. i think other people should throw me birthday parties and maybe i shouldn't host things at all. i've always worried that no one would throw me a birthday party, so i've been throwing them for myself for three years now. probably longer. shouldn't my husband be in charge of things like that?

at the end of the night, everyone went home. but jon and i stayed up 'til dawn:

i was up 'til dawn.
my husband and i sang weezer like christina aguliera then scaled the hill of the train tracks, trekking through the weedy wall to the top to see the cows in their stalls at the ohio state fair. i wore my anna may wong getup with flip-flops and waved and whistled through the fence at the cows. jon threw rocks at me while sitting on the tracks feeling for nearby trains. i picked up a round plain gray stone as we were leaving, trying to not step on the glass in the weeds and attempting to avoid the poison ivy. we walked back to the apartment in the middle of the street, the world already filled with light. i fell asleep as the cowhands were waking up and waitresses were getting off third shift.
i had not seen the sun rise in years.

Tonight I've decided to start my very own blog. I don't know what to put in it yet, but here it is.