| CRAIGSLIST |
[Jun. 22nd, 2007|12:22 am] |
I'm feeling really good about life today.
In the past week I've gone from a jobless what-day-is-it limbo to lots of promise.
I posted my apartment and within ten minutes, I had a deluge of calls. The first people to see it fell in love with it and they are PERFECT. They're students, they work nearby, they have experience with DIY, they LOVE the paint colors and don't want us to change it before we leave, and they'll fit in well with the other tenants. We met with my landlord and worked out the contract switch and it seems set!
Then, after MONTHS of searching, we finally found the perfect place for us! It's a townhouse in the upper Fan with stairs and a little patio for Pupple to run around on, two bedrooms, a bigger bathroom and kitchen with GAS stove, washer and dryer of our very own, no carpeting, and LOTS of closet space. The parking is nearby and secure, grocery stores and bus lines are close, and places like Target and Petsmart and Landis' new apartment are closer than we are now. And it's so much cheaper than the smaller places were looking at downtown. Now I just hope the paperwork goes well, and we'll be set! I can't wait to have my own little garden and a separate, dedicated study.
So when we were looking at real estate, the manager of the local ABC called and said he wants to hire me! I'll be making more per hour, with more hours per week, to do less than I do now (I think selling alcohol to people takes a lot less convincing than teaching athletes a foreign language).
AND to top it all off, we've been getting rid of some serious baggage! So far I've found good homes for my old cell phone, half my wardrobe, puppy stuff, half our books, a rug, extra groceries and toiletries, and of course OUR APARTMENT! I also went through two years of unopened junk mail and recycled/shredded it all.
I just feel PURGED.
Anyone want to come over and mix FREE liqeurs together and drink it? We aren't gonna, and we don't want to move all those bottles. Come on. Bloody Mary mix with Campari would be awesome. We'll call it The Bitter End. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 30th, 2007|05:54 am] |
Sometimes I can't sleep and I do weird things instead, almost like sleepwalking.
Tonight I perused craigslist for hours.
I told at least three people that they could have my stuff for free (groceries, pet supplies, a CELL PHONE, maybe more?)
Then I responded to an ad for a housekeeper in lingerie.
He replied.
I just sent pictures.
That would beat the hell out of working at the liquor store. |
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| Happy Mothers' Day |
[May. 14th, 2007|01:50 am] |
On our way back from the beach today, our little caravan stopped at my parents' house for lunch and Wii. I let Pupple run around in the back yard to enjoy the grass he so infrequently gets to see...and he jumped into the slimy pond.
When he came out of the water, he ran back inside and Jenn teased my mom, "He's getting pond scum all over your house." As if on cue, he started rolling on her new area rug.
The best part was that my mom couldn't help but laugh. She's getting soft in her old grandmotherly age. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 1st, 2007|09:41 pm] |
I feel so much better without medication.
I'm dreaming more vividly, waking more easily, and today - this is a milestone - I felt a sense of hope for the first time in a while. I remembered what it felt like to look beyond the present in anticipation. It used to be an elaborate dream about a happy marriage and children...I don't know what it will be now, but at least I can revisit that feeling with my imagination. That's a start.
I think I made a terrible mistake. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 24th, 2007|06:14 pm] |
I think I'm having something of a breakdown - not a shaky degeneration but a deconstruction:
I withdrew from my classes.
Now that I'm not studying, I can't go to the student clinic.
Translation: no more psychiatric care. Sweet.
Meanwhile, I go to a TCM practitioner for acupuncture and herbs that look like colonial bullets.
This week I slept with a stranger while my girlfriend* took the couch.
*Said girlfriend is responsible for the following quote: "You're like three times as fat as me."
I am "blonde." And yes, my professional beauticians, I did it myself. If that's not a sign of my end times, what is? It's orange. Sweethearts will call it strawberry blonde, but it's ORANGE. |
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| Fat, Manic Tuesday |
[Feb. 20th, 2007|07:06 pm] |
November 2006: 5'8". 117 lbs.
February 2007: 5'8". 155 lbs. (ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-FIVE.)
So on this bloated Tuesday I say goodbye to my anti-psychotic. No + antipsychotic = psycho? We'll see. At least I'm jolly and warm. |
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| Chest |
[Feb. 11th, 2007|08:48 pm] |
Depakote ER
Wellbutrin XL
Zoloft
Lamictal
Remeron
Symbyax
Zyprexa
Prozac
Adderall
Provigil
Lithium
At this point, are they symptoms or side effects? |
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| Livejournal becomes white space. |
[Dec. 25th, 2006|12:51 am] |
The Holidays.
When I was little, I wondered what other holidays there were that my parents weren't telling me about. Then I realized that Christmas is the holiday for children, with elaborate magic lies and lots of shiny things, and New Year's is that other holiday, the one reserved for those old enough to stay up past midnight and drink while they're at it. Now that I'm one of them, I'm starting to see why people get so trashed.
The Holidays are an imperative now. When I was little, tradition was something that happened around me, and I was simply included - come bake cookies, help us decorate the tree, etc. Now I realize that someone has to DO it to keep it going, and it's always women. The wives in my neighborhood ask each other about The Holidays and they make their lists: baking, shopping, wrapping, cleaning, cooking, hostessing, etc. Some of them leave town and/or drink to escape it; some mimic those before them, hoping the mocha cakes will come out like his mom's; some relish their matronly responsibility at 3 am in line to get a Wii. But all of them have to do SOMETHING. Women gather in the kitchen to make drinks and the men step in from the garage just long enough to trade their empties. "Well I sent off my cards last week," begins Donna's list, punctuated by the other women's nods (of empathy and/or approval), "and today I finished decorating the front porch." And so Christmas Day becomes the staccato undoing of this to-do list crescendo: food eaten, paper ripped, and remnants of both all over.
It's just not fun anymore. |
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| When your psyche can be summed up in a cacophonous yowl of a song... |
[Aug. 21st, 2006|05:15 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  blank | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Contrast and Compare | ] |
...you shouldn't subject people to even an abbreviated glimpse of it.
But that is why I never update, so fuck it. For the past few hours I've been catching up on all the online haunts I'd been exorcising, starting with bank statements and ending on my friends page after scenic stops at Facebook and Google. My friends page feels like I never left it, but Gretchen's recent entries struck a chord. Yes, lame and tea. Me too.
Gretchen probably forgot who I am, which is appropriate since I did too and I'm worth forgetting. Being neurotic and chronically tardy becomes everyone else's problem - I being the cause. And after waiting on me in the mornings I'm worth writing off. (This goes for the Davids too, and countless others - can I get a 'Fuck you'?)
So, well, the energy that accompanied my frenzied perfectionism has since gone into being a zombie. I read in a clinic waiting room magazine that very few people actually suffer from depression - the great majority of misery being the result of mere* disappointment. *Of course, the severity of disappointment, and its consequent anhedonia, would really depend on the severity of the original expectations. Perfectionism and disappointment - I ain't big enough for the both of them. So I just implode in roughly 900 square feet of pseudodomestica with a substitute baby in my lap, stroking his paws and sipping lemon tea. I have an amphetamine prescription to be able to do this much. I remember eight classes and four jobs and volunteering. I've abandoned them.
But just like those manic days, my mood isn't -my- problem. The problem doesn't happen with wasting my days warming the couch and the puppy. I'm too apathetic to be upset about that - time doesn't feel like a commodity anymore and Pupple is really fucking cuddly. I feel the problem happen when Jenn comes home and says the house feels sad, when my doctors frown and furrow their brows and order more tests, when well-intended inquiries about my wellbeing consistently yield the same monotonous response (I've taken up saying 'better' just to humor us), and when my unenthused countenance is a silent downer in social situations. I don't care about my mood. I care that other people do and I can't deliver.
I'm always a patient. And everyone around me has to shift to buffer and accommodate and hold me, from flippant fluctuations to eerie resolution to lucid and generalized loathing. The selfishly sick and self-absorbed. My self oozes and others absorb it. It's not about me at all, but it's all me. I am not suffering. I am being suffered by everyone else. And the closer they are, the more it hurts us both.
So yes, when the pitifully affected pathos of early Oberst matches a mood (how long does a mood have to last before it becomes a trait?), you shouldn't subject people to a barely-tenable and unabridged glimpse. But I'm a flasher.
Contrast and compare between the busy ones / and the ones who don’t care / until there is no one that you really know - / I drift through these days of appointments and promises made - / they will all end up broken and quickly replaced. / Weeks are slow, days drag on; / even practice and parties seem long. / I look for a corner or a quieter room - / on the stairs she grabs my arm, says 'What's up, where you been, is something wrong?' / and I try to just smile and say everything’s fine. |
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| "I wasn't even supposed to BE here today." |
[Jun. 15th, 2006|07:37 pm] |
I feel like I need to get my Livejournal bearings. I have been so holed up lately - renovating the apartment, still sleeping longer than I should, and insatiably Jenning - that I forgot there are people outside the three on speed dial, two of them being my mother. I called Jarek for his birthday and realized what a dropoff I've been.
I could vow to read my friends' page more often, or to record a running tally of minutiae, but I gotta be honest. Instead I will spend five hours lying on the couch in wait for Jenn. I will play Los Sims and make my characters limpiar their stall showers repeatedly (the never-ending possibility is probably a glitch, but I like to think it's an added touch of cynical realism). I will very neatly organize a zen arrangement of dirty dishes, balacing them on anything but a dishcloth or soap. I will plaster a slight imperfection in the living room wall. I will rinse each of the forty-five filters on my SuperMegaSpoiledMyself vacuum cleaner. But who has time to Livejournal? God, I'm like, so overextended. Who knows how many times I'll have to freshen the high-pile carpet today!
I'm really starting to get that itch to move. I've lived here for barely two years. I like it here a lot, but I'm stagnat ing? no, ed. It's not even in progress. It's a done deal. I've stagnated.
Last night in a fit against banality I admonished my life for never including the keeping of bees.
That sentence is a syntactic representation of everything that's been wrong with my life for so many years. I mean, could you stand it? For lacking the keeping of bees. For omitting beekeeping. For never having kept bees. Or not to have been. Binary branching transformational honey fuckin crucial-ass bees. I am so forward-speaking that I don't even pronounce the apostrophes of omission. Look'ye there. Sometimes I don't even write. I just push buttons and a machine does it for me.
Robots. There's a documentary you should watch alone in the dark while zoning out, and it is called Fast Cheap & Out of Control. Maybe it's not all that incredible but my tiny no-no-technology brain said that indeed it was not credible. The whole film is more interesting than what I can focus on (it involves a topiary gardener, circus trainer, and naked mole rat scientist), but for now: ROBOTS. A guy came on the screen and the screen dubbed his bald head with some sort of official title and he started to lisp his excitement out and I thought well I've had the same cell phone for six years I don't drive a car little kids' handheld gaming devices startle me and I don't even use the low technicality of punctuation sometimes so we'll see how long I can listen to him because when can I see the other guy pare a tree into a partridge?
But he had stories from the future to tell us that didn't feature Dr. Robotnik's triumphant chortle resounding through a Steven Hawking hole in all the dimensions you can't fathom. ["Robots" seem so far removed from the humanities. That's what engineering kids do. That's what lisping fanatics do on weird films.]; [Machines and technology seem so far removed from humanity. Just the word 'machine' and the word 'technology' sound stainless and sharp and smell staticky and a little like new plastic and are cold and sleek and so many other things that completely oppose the characteristics of being alive.] The way he explained the development of robot technology exactly mirrored the evolutionary development of "life," the new necessity of quotation marks being the mind-blowing part. As they built machines that could perform more tasks, they took the shape of animals - without intentionally mimicking nature at all, the necessary pragmatic physics of it required six support beams and central information systems and all kinds of other overtly animal characteristics. To create machines that perform complex tasks, the machines must be amalgamations of tinier, simpler, specified machines. Piling so many together formed so many interactions that some sort of emergent existence began...can you imagine? Can you think of yourself as some unnameable energetic product of a million different tiny machines? To hear something like that in the introductory chapter of a biology textbook is one thing, with 'energetic product' being called life and 'tiny machines' being called molecules or processes. Those terms make everything seem so specific and familiar and tailored to us, as though our 'life' form is a hypernym rather than a subset of energy as a holistic entity, as though our molecules and processes are separate from tiny machines...not even to say you are a robot, but to say that robots are primitive you...
Well, it blew MY mind. I felt like I should start going to robot pride parades to pre-emptively protect them against inevitable misunderstanding and prejudice. Like. - Oh. - My. - God. - Did. - You. - Go. - To. - D. - C. - It. - Was. - So. - Progressive. - There. - Were. - Techanics. - And. - Transconductors.
We. - Are. - Getting. - So. - Far. - From. - Those. - Antiquated. - Misrepresentations. - Of. - Us.
I. - Collect. - Vintage. - Robotic. - Attack. - Media.
We. - Are. - So. - Post-Firewall. |
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paperpoultice's journal
chipper