April 30, 2003

I got the best news I have recieved in a long, long time today. My good friend Lorraine, who has been bulimic for seven years, just got out of inpatient treatment at the Renfrew Center in Philidelphia and is doing very well.

The IM from her was totally unexpected, but so very welcomed. I suddenly went from being tired and lethargic to manic and happy and fast moving/typinc. So I asked her a bunch of questions about her stay, and I'm happy to say that it was a good one and she learned a lot about herself and has everything under control.

God, I am SO relieved! I had these nightmares about my friend stuck in a white/seafoamgreen sterile hospital looking room with people monitoring her all day, and evil creepy people wandering in all the time. I imagined her without any privacy, having someone escorting her to the bathroom at all times and big fat nurses named Helga forcefeeding them baby food.

Lorraine, I am so glad you are doing well. This was the best thing I could possibly hear.

This evening my oldest cat, Zap, was struck and killed by a car on the road in front of my house. I don't know who it was, or what the circumstances were, but I found Zap, still warm, in the middle of the road as I went to the car to go play raquetball. I don't believe he suffered much if any, and thankfully he wasn't too messy. Mom and I wrapped him in an old baby blanket and buried him in the garden under the pine tree that my sister planted as a child.

He was a wonderful pet; he was the most friendly and outgoing kitten when we went to the animal shelter back on May 30, 2001. He never lost the friendliness or the propensity for cuddling, and he was always very talkative. He kept me company for the first long year I lived on my own, being my only companion on the cold nights when my girlfriend was away at school. He like a good wrestle, and he was almost always sleeping at my feet when I woke up in the morning. I will miss him terribly.

Thanks for being there for me, little guy. I'll never forget you.

it's like this.. need to cleanse myself of this tattered spirit i've left inside of me. it feels so worn and abused and useless. and i can't shake it. like it is my skin. like i will bleed to death with all these holes and nothing to fill them with ever.

feel so dispensable. so toss me away. not sure who is doing the throwing.

it's odd to feel so old in such a young self. and it feels odd to want anyone to know what i am thinking just now. as if someone will read it and feel this great sense of anything - anything at all. every time i breathe is like a fire inside me rushing up to my throat and eyes. i don't really know why.

it could be worse though. tell yourself this over and over until you don't believe anything else.

"This may sound like complaining, but it isn't what I intended..."

Came to E2 after a smallish break of not that nice RL existence and noted that the entire Pokedex (excl. Charizard) was nuked. That included 21 writeups from me, or maybe I miscounted.

You know, most rational people who would know what I've gone through to create the writeups would probably expect me to cry for blood. I don't. And that's only because I don't cry blood for anything.

This is far as I go to recount the tale of apparent injustice: I go as far as it was possible for me to write entries from scratch, trying not to repeat the earlier stupid mistakes of earlier Pokedex noders; then the writeups got voted down for many different reasons (that may or may not have have anything to do with the content I've made), and ultimately got nuked.

This is how people do get rewarded for factual noding and trying their best. Fortunately, not in all cases. Most of the time I'm not noticed at all. That's far better. Sometimes I'm even liked. Whoa.

It is just better to get used to it. Our lives are nothing but pain from birth to death and we can expect nothing more than that. I have accepted that. Bad things happen. I cannot understand why most of the bad things happen, but they do.

I can understand why the whole Pokedex was removed - the cut-and-paste nature of most other writeups, as well as the contentlessness of some other comments, was an obvious reason. I usually don't want to whine, but I do ask anyway: Why me? I don't know why my writeups were removed. At least I tried to maintain some level of quality.

Was Pokedex as a concept good enough to be included in E2? In my opinion, yes. The current implementation wasn't nice enough, though.

*sigh* Well, I can't have everything. I've just been wasting my time, that's all. At least I tried.

---

The Management is apparently trying to resurrect my lost writeups. This is acceptable.

Anyway, this stupid daylog of mine reminded me of a movie quote...

"If science teaches us anything, it teaches us to accept our failures as well as our successes, with quiet dignity and grace..."

(and I hope nobody remembers how it continues =)

---

Okay, since we many of my writeups were in fact too horrible to audited, I'll rather repost them once I update them. We'll see. However, we need some document describing How To Node The Pokedex to avoid NFN.

I'm not crazy!
Institution!
You're the one who's crazy!
Institution!
You're driving me crazy!
Institution!

After a year of relatively normal (if depressed) thinking, I'm back on an antidepressant. This time, it's Remeron. The psychiatrist told me, in the tone one might use when breaking the news of the death of a loved one, that she thought it would be in my best interest if I were to start taking an antidepressant (again).

My best interest?! How can you know, how can you say what my best interest is? What are you trying to say? I'm crazy?

Just because I seem unemotional (when inside I'm ultraemotional), and just because it seems that nothing provokes a reaction in me, it's back to that annoying neighbour that just won't leave you alone: antidepressants. I'm apathetic enough to go along with it, for now, but at the first sign of nastiness, I'm stopping it. I was on Paxil last year, for seven months, and hated every hoary effect it gave me, and by goddamn, there were a lot of effects, not least of which was vertigo.

The psychiatrist recommended I start dosing on a weekend, to allow for sedative side effects to run their course while I don't have anything pressing, like work, to worry about. Instead, I threw caution to the wind and started my newest pill regimen yesterday morning. The doctor was right; I was sleepy all night long and couldn't concentrate. I don't think it makes much of a difference anyway, as work is usually pretty slow. The side effects she didn't tell me about are head rushes when you stand up, and pretty extreme irritability. I've been grunting out insults at every illiterate email I've received from customers tonight. That's not too unusual, but my thoughts were more full of anger than when I usually deal with customer emails.

They give you a white shirt with long sleeves
Tied around your back, you're treated like thieves
Drug you up because they're lazy
It's too much work to help a crazy

I'm not crazy!
Institution!
You're the one who's crazy!
Institution!
You're driving me crazy!
Institution!

They stuck me in an institution
Said it was the only solution
To give me the needed professional help
To protect me from the enemy: myself

My mother and my sister are both users of antidepressants, too. I've been holding out the longest among the three of us, against the pills, as they're both bipolar and I'm not, so there's less of a need with me, but... I've still got some issues, I guess. I was just hoping to be able to deal with them myself, or not deal with them, as the case may be, but I'm defeated again. The most inflamed response I can come up with to that line of thinking is "...oh well."

Doesn't matter, I'll probably get hit by a car anyway.

 

Lyrical interludes by Mike Muir/Suicidal Tendencies, originally in 1983.

"Walk me to the gate."

Her voice was insistent, confused. She didn't use my name... did she even know it then? Did she even know her own?

She took my arm and hobbled next to me, down the path outside, lighting a cigarette... funny how she can't remember who she is but she still remembers how to smoke.

We walked to the gate for the twentieth time, and she exclaimed over the flower bed like she was seeing it for the first time. And in a way she was. In a few minutes she wouldn't remember it, and she'd make the same request, again, and again. She drove me nuts, I was so frustrated with her. What happened to the woman who had traveled the world, from China to Egypt, full of stories and memories and life and knowledge.

What happened to my grandmother?

That was the last time I saw her, that Christmas in Florida, the last time we could all be together. That was years ago now.

The next year, she couldn't be in her home. They took her to live in a sterilized home of death, where the aged suffering from Alzheimer's were locked away where they could be kept from both sight and mind, where they couldn't cause the rest of us any more pain.

We never went to visit her. Her caretakers told us it wouldn't do any good... she wouldn't know who we were, and she'd only be scared. They told us she'd degenerated, and sent reports on her condition every few months. My mom and I read them, we kept them from my father... he didn't need to know, didn't need to think of his dear mother like this.

They told us she'd become an animal, that she wandered between rooms not knowing which was hers, that she was destructive and angry... and then, that she was calm, calmer than she'd ever been before...

And now, she's buried under her own bed of flowers. My father called this afternoon, telling me her body had died.

But her soul died years ago, with her memories.

I miss her...

If they only knew. If I could somehow dictate to them my hatred of myself, my hole, my lack of work ethic. My lack of knoweledge of the outside world, the world beyond my computer, and the Internet.

Countless hours spent downloading music, movies, looking at film techniques, learning. Stuff they don't teach in the classroom. Trivia, most of it, but interesting stuff.

Being confronted isn't very facilitating, especially when I am expected to talk. It's a personal reservation of mine, and I cry easily when confronted. I hate crying in front of people. I hate crying period. At least when I do it. Talking isn't easy when your mother is telling you you're going to flunk out of college, completely convinced she's right. Maybe she is. I can't know. I'm not IN college. I'm in high school.

Reading my previous GTKY ridden daylogs, and knowing my grade history, my sliding through doors as a younger teen and preteen, rather than running through them with decent grades, and constant disorganisation, it would seem that I've dug myself a hole. I'm in this hole deep, friends. Of course, I'm trying to get out. I have an easier time of it when I'm not reminded the walls are taller than I am. If you want to discourage me, tell me I'm digging with a spade, or a hoe. Tell me that I'm going to be a failure. Because as long as I'm told that, I'm going to be.

But there's a difference between knowing you're not going to fail, and hoping you're not going to fail.

I would be of the latter persuasion.

I'm disorganised, yes. Procrastination is a good way to describe it. I don't like to do work I can put off until the last minute. I'm so horrible, I can't even finish a letter to my girlfriend, who lives in California, now, after a stupid thing the both of us did caused a chain reaction. I have pieces of paper in my school 5 subject notebook that have headings and dates, and a few lines, and then blank lines the rest of the way down.

My girlfriend, whose name I won't post here, has been a large part of my life for the past 6.3 months. She's been the sole factor I've been happy with, the one part of myself that I believe I've done right, except the times I screw things up, because I'm just LIKE that, God dammit. I made a very stupid choice, and skipped a few periods. We skipped school together. And we're paying for it now. My school in Ohio is now even lonlier and oppressive than before, because I don't see her smiling face each day. And I'm dealing. With her 2000 miles across the country, and me with grades just barely close to passing, and my parents insisiting that I join the Air Force, I am torn.

She is 15. I am 18. My senior year ends in 19 school days. I've barely made it through high school. But I'm here. I will pass, I have no doubt. No flying colours here. But I'm happy. This girl is my light. I'm not making my happiness dependent upon her, but as long as she loves me, I will long to be near her. When she tells me she loves me, I feel it. Her life has not been easy, and our relationship is good enough that I am about the most trusted person in her life. I don't take that for granted. I don't care what people say about age difference, and commitment. I can tell she is committed. I wish she wouldn't, sometimes. I don't think I'm the best person to commit to.

My parents don't know her. They don't know why I am letting this girl, this teenage girl who is now 2000 miles away, have influence on my life. I can't explain why, because anything I say about her is waved off, and I don't feel I deserve defense in some cases. I take love very seriously, and I've found my girlfriend does too. I am going to visit her this summer. Why? Because she lives in California, and I am a budding filmmaker. Every reputable source I've talked to tells me that Cali is the place to be if you want to do film. I want to see my girlfriend again, badly. I plan to visit colleges and find out what I need to do to GET there. Then come back. Why I can't do both at the same time escapes me. But as long as she is involved, my parents are convinced that I'm doing it just for her.

*sigh*

Thus beginning the argument about 15 year olds and commitment all over again.

I don't want to be the one to make a girl feel obligated or committed when she isn't ready, but when we're together, her life seems to make more sense to her, and she smiles. Since we met, she's changed from a truant to a real person. She's come out of her shell. I can't tell you how much she changed from when she came to Ohio sophomore year (August 2002) to March 2003. It's amazing. I love her with all of my being, and I can tell that she loves me no less.

So now I'm torn. Do I choose to go my own way at my parents', and grandparents' expense and loss, and great disappointment, to pursue both my love and my future? Or do I join the Air Force, where I have a sure bet for college, but potentially lose the girl I've spent the past six months with?

I can't tell you how much I wish I could change myself in the past. I'm here because I've put myself here. But what my parents don't understand is I KNOW THAT, and I'm slowly realizing my full potential. Keyword: slowly. I know my limitations. The school I'm at right now is a dark box. I'm slowly carving a door out, so I can run out and feel the sun on my back.

Whether that will wake me up or not, I don't know.

I don't even know myself sometimes. Those are the times I daylog. I apologize to all of the E2 noders that read this. I merely needed to let out what's been in my mind all night as my parents talk to me.