the_bluest_bird

Dear roommates:

Okay. So you're both two of my dearest friends, and I'm fixing to marry one of you come September, but, um... may I make a few friendly suggestions so as to avoid further snarkiness and possible long-term, dormant loathing from me? Ok. Here we go:

1. You. The one who snacks at his computer with a trashcan WITHIN ARM'S LENGTH. When you create trash, would it kill you to throw it out? When you empty out a sleeve of saltines and a little tin of vienna sausages, you can throw away the soulless husks of the gourmet food you've just eaten. Gazing at a tin of three-day-old congealed wiener sauce is a nasty fucking way to start the morning.

2. It's not like using the dishwasher involves some arcane, sacred ritual that only I know. You both can use it too. In fact, it's pretty easy, especially if you rinse your dishes when you're done with them and place them inside the dishwasher. I really don't mind being the one to run it or put away the dishes afterwards, but I'm getting mighty sick of going around the apartment, gathering up y'all's used dishes, rinsing them, and putting them into the dishwasher myself.

3. I accept that you're a sexually open person. Hell, I am too. But there's a difference between having a healthy attitude towards sex and a) walking around the apartment in a bra and underwear in front of tattered blinds and then bitching when the redneck across the way tries to sneak a peek, and b) doing it with your sex buddy and then talking frankly about it afterwards. I mean, I'm grateful I didn't know about it while it was going on--thanks for keeping it quiet--but when you both emerge from your bedroom all tousled and sweaty and telling me in great detail about the sex you've just had? I hope it doesn't make me too much of a Puritan that that makes me a little uncomfortable.

4. You--the bespectacled one with the freckles on your lips and the worship-worthy ass and the cowboy way of speaking (by the way--what the hell is that about? You're from Chicago!) and the steel-blue eyes--you're not actually my roommate. Nevertheless--stop being so damned hot and glowingly, happily married to not-me. You suck.

5. Colin, unpack your shit. It's been almost a week since you've moved in and most of the living room is still occupied by a dishevelled heap of boxes, baskets, books, and half-unpacked stacks of movies and clothes. If you could take some time out of your busy schedule of sleeping, PC gaming, and snacking long enough to put your shit where it has to go, I would be so thrilled.

6. The toilet runs. All it takes is a little jiggle of the handle to stop this. Why am I the only one who seems to understand this?

7. Ok, baby, I love you. I love the way you run to greet me when I get home and sit on the bathroom counter and purr while I'm using the bathroom--creepy, but endearing. I love how delightfully plump you are. I love that you're litter-box trained--oh, wait. Now that there are two more cats in the apartment and we've cut down on your feed rations because you're turning into a fur blimp, you're no longer litterbox trained. Listen, asshole. My backpack is full of important things. Piss on it one more time and I'm going to have to confine you to one room while I'm gone for the day.

My dad and I are both adorable in the exact same way. I owed him some money, so I wrote him a check and mailed it off today, wrapped in a piece of notebook paper that had scrawled in the corner, accompanied by a smiley face, "Don't spend it all in one place." Today, I come home to receive my government check mailed by him from his house (long story), folded in a piece of notebook paper, with "At Last!" written on it, accompanied by a smiley face.

Sigh.

Hey, guess what--I now have Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" as my ring tone. I wish my phone would ring so people could hear what great taste in music I have.

You know you're ready to marry someone when, drunk off your ass at two in the morning, you coax them, practically already passed out, along the twenty-minute, ten-yard post-puking crawl into the bed. Yet he's not hungover and I am. Ugh. That sucked. He was whimpering in misery and I had to piss in the bathtub. I was sort of freaked out--when I stepped to the front porch to have a cigarette with Kerri's friend Lawrence, Colin had fixed himself a rum-and-coke only moderately stiff; returning five minutes later he had finished it and taken several swigs of Bacardi straight from the bottle. Good times.

Hovering over the toilet, between pleas for me to just let him sleep there, he kept saying, "why, why, why, why?" And he kept repeating things. "Do you want some water?" He'd nod. I'd hand him the bottle with the lid still on. "No lid, no lid, no lid, no lid, no lid," he'd say. And then, at one point, as he lay on the bedroom floor, my cat came in and was meowing loudly at him. "Shut up, fat fuck, fat fuck, fat fuck, fucker," Colin said in response. ("Fat fuck" is actually Colin's affectionate nickname for my cat; he calls Odin that so often that Odin looks around any time someone utters the words "fat fuck". Which happens a lot in this house, as much as we all love profanity.)

Anyway, this morning he was cuddly and apologized profusely for making me take care of him. But I really didn't mind. I was just scared, you know? I've never seen anyone in so much pain after drinking, but I've also never seen someone go through half a large bottle of bacardi in fifteen minutes. I wanted to just fix him, which is not really something you can do once someone's reached a certain point of intoxication. They're just going to feel like shit until they go to sleep, and feel like shit when they wake up. You just have to make sure they get to bed and on their side, if you can.

So, whatever. I like Kerri's friend Lawrence. I guess they used to be together and now they're just best friends; Kerri describes it as being a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship without the sex. They nuzzle, flirt, tease, take care of each other, sleep side by side. On the one hand, it seems wonderful; on the other hand, it makes Kerri feel sometimes more lonely than she would have without him around at all. Anyway, he seems like a good enough guy--opinionated, quick-witted, a little bit of an asshole. Very frank and funny, and pulls no punches, but not quite cruel. Just--a funny, likable, mild meanness.

Colin and I were looking at the pictures this morning that I took last night. I've taken so many pictures this weekend that we had to scroll down a considerable amount before we got to the ones of everyone drinking. "There," Colin said, "there's a picture of Lawrence's hand reaching for Kerri's ass. And there's Lawrence trying to lick his own nipple." So, yeah. It was one of those kinds of nights. Just the four of us--well, no, not Kerri, although she I did fix for her a very gentle cocoa & Kahlua, hardly any liquor at all, but she drank it and starting giggling and talking about her lady parts. Hard drinking, an intimate setting. Several hours gone in a bobbing stream, life and light like a funnel. But ending badly, as drinking always seems to do. This morning my eyes are frightened of light, head throbbing, stomach unwilling to take down anything except a little water, a little coffee, some saltines.

Lab ugggggggh went good today aaaaand I think we did good, we were fucking with pliers and pretending they were finches. Matt has freckles on his arm, and a fine, pale dusting of hair. Fuuuuuuck lab. Getting helplessly googly over my TA's freckles and blue eyes doesn't change the fact that biology can blow me.

I could theoretically correct the grammar in my first sentence, but I don't feel like it.

My psych has me on Wellbutrin now and it makes me feel like I've had too much coffee. Tough in the mornings, all that hard energy in my wrists and throat, but a nice afterglow in the evenings. I'm trying to clean my apartment but it's so much of a mess I don't know where to begin. I did pick at the kitchen a little, knowing that ALREADY (before she's even moved in) having a roommate is going to annoy me. Small things--she stacked her dirty dishes from earlier in the week in a neat stack on the counter, very near the dishwasher. She might have just put them IN the dishwasher but she didn't. Most definitely not deliberate. More like me being angry when someone coughs. (That happens, you know. I get angry when I hear people cough or sneeze. I know that makes me a heinous dickhead, but I can't help it. Like, sometimes my dad will start sneezing and I'll be like OMG DON'T SNEEZE ANYMORE PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD NO MORE SNEEZING. And I hear my neighbor coughing the next room over all the time. It's stupid.

Umm. I don't feel like focusing enough to write a real entry, plus I've got laundry finished in the laundry room and a shitload of homework to do. Colin's coming up to spend Friday evening here before we go back to Bartlesville and get Kerri and her stuff. I'd better get laid Friday night or Saturday morning, or there will be trouble. Nothing traumatic. But I'll definitely start getting cranky.

Colin overdrew his bank account because the paycheck he put into his account on Friday morning apparently didn't credit by Saturday. To be fair, he really should have checked his account balance sometime before being told this afternoon at Wal-Mart that his card had to be declined, but I also suspect that banks should post checks faster. So then there was a Colin panic attack, followed by a Johanna panic attack, followed by a Kerri panic attack, not because she's concerned about money but because Colin and I were really upset and she reacts to that without necessarily having any reason to.

So, whatever. I'm pissed. Mostly sleepy--it's 10:30 and I feel like crap; I haven't NOT felt like crap for a few weeks now--but also pissed. Not at any one in particular (maybe a little at Colin for not keeping a closer eye on his bank account, and maybe at his bank for not posting his check when they should have--but really, I'm more angry about the situation. Specifically, I'm angry about not being able to buy more groceries; at the moment I have about twelve cans of chicken noodle soup, several bottles of water, and a veggie drawer full of navel oranges. And my own bank account empty. Fuck. I think what bothers me about this setback is that we didn't see it coming. No one likes something they don't see coming.

You know what else I don't like? The fact that I'm beginning to think the veterinarian thing was another childish Johanna phase. Not the working-with-animals thing, because I'm totally serious about that, but there's no way I'm going to veterinary school. It's not a matter of capability so much as the fact that I just don't... want to do that with my life, you know? I don't know what I want to do instead, except that it should involve animals and/or literature, and as little contact with my fellow humans as possible, but beyond that? I just... don't care. My school is so stressful right now I can't see past it; I feel like it's killing me, or like alien forces--alien SCIENCE forces--have invaded my literary brain and are planting the wrong crops in the terrain. Or some other simile that doesn't make sense. I think in a foggy, floating, drunken way when I'm sleepy. I guess I just kind of wish I weren't twenty-three and in a bunch of freshmen science classes with a bunch of rednecks and sorority bitches who aren't even old enough to drink yet, and have no idea who, say, John Updike is, Anne Sexton, or Neil Young, or Akira Kurosawa.

So I arbitrarily stopped taking Klonopin, mainly because... uh... I can't be arsed into calling up Dr. Ercum and telling her I've misplaced my prescription slip. She does scold me for such things. Not verbally, but with her eyeballs. I suppose I appreciate her frankness, but there's something icy in her demeanor that scares the shit out of me, and a streak of social conservatism apparent in her beliefs that I'm wary of. But point is: I stopped taking the medicine that was helping me sleep through the early part of the night without crazy dreams...

...so.... I had this Valentine's Day dream about Colin that was really tragic and melodramatic but ended well, kind of like the novel I read last night, "The American", which I consumed over a period of several hours because I've got a paper due on it today and goddamn you wouldn't believe how much I've been slacking, but anyway--I have this dream that's very Victorian and melodramatic in tone, but takes place in the present. In the dream, Colin and I have met up with this couple we went to high school with (although really, they're just people my mind made up) and they somehow help Colin to be a little less indulgent towards me when I'm childish. In the dream, I can't deal with this--I resort to completely adolescent/childish behavior; I stomp away screaming and crying, I guilt-trip, I plead, I threaten to kill myself, just to get him to even acknowledge me or tells me he loves me.

And then he's smoking a joint and I want him to share it with me, but he won't, and I'm ANGRY, because, hell, we're getting married so we should share our weed, but the male of the couple we're hanging with explains to me it's some sort of vision quest weed and that Colin is going to be very dangerous for the next few hours, and that he had made the weed especially for him to help him find his inner-man. So this young couple, they're these hipster/shaman/rednecks; it's hard to describe. But anyway, while Colin is on his vision/trip, I tell him I'm going to leave him and go to sleep next to him. When he wakes the next morning, I pretend I am dead to see if he really cares about me and he does; he weeps all over me. I sit up and we forgive each other and everything's okay, with us.

But then we're at a grocery store and the female of the couple we're friends with has disappeared into the stock room with a younger man. The man tries to pretend to us that he's not upset by the fact that they have an open relationship, but at some point he becomes angry and starts yelling about what a whore she is, and how he can't understand how she can't just love him and no one else. We're the only people in the grocery store, and it's night, and we're all camped out in the dairy aisle in little sleeping bags. She returns and they have a talk about their relationship and I wake up.

HAHA. God it was a shitty dream. And there's more snow on the ground his morning. No worries, I guess, except that my cat peed on my only warm coat last night. Anyway, I'm running behind this morning and I've missed my ag econ class about a trillion times, so I'd better get going.

Still sick. Explain this: my ass muscles hurt, and my throat feels like I just power-smoked a carton of unfiltered Lucky Strikes. And when I eat, my stomach has to think mighty hard before keeping it down. But it's the pain in my ass muscles that confuses me the most--what the hell is that? Last night I wanted to get some water but it hurt so bad getting out of bed that I ended up CRAWLING to the case of bottled water across the room. And falling asleep halfway back, before waking up four hours later because the alarm was going off and I was like, "hahaha, I'm totally not going to class today."

And Kerri's coming tomorrow. I moved Odin's dishes and litterbox out of the second bedroom and gave him his canned food a little early, but instead of being grateful, he meowed like, "what the fuck is this? I didn't tell you to move my food bowl." She's not moving in just yet, but she's dropping off some stuff, getting cleared with the landlord, scoping out her room, and staying the night. The big moving-in should actually be happening this weekend.

I keep noticing (guiltily) how much I enjoy my privacy. I'll be sitting here, feeling like shit and everything, and I'll be like, "boy, I'm glad no one's here." Kerri's incoming presence--as much as I adore her as a friend--is like that feeling you get when you know there's something unpleasant you have to do later, but you've taken your dessert before your vegetables. Or something. My brain's moving at snail-speed at the moment.

But Kerri and I DID have a wonderful conversation this afternoon on the phone. She told me of her frustration with her parents' attitudes towards her chosen faith: that is, they're devout Methodists, and she's an atheist with a Buddhist world-view. She was like, "Yeah. My mom just doesn't GET that lacking God isn't the same as lacking faith. She views me as this really negative person just because I don't go to church anymore." And Kerri is one of the most positive people on earth, seriously. A few minutes later, she was like, "I mean, I still think people are innately good and the glass is half full." And I'm like, "haha. One day, when you TRULY reach adulthood--" But that's just the kind of thing I think when I'm feeling particularly bitter and bleak myself. If someone else wants to be positive, that's great. If I could, I would.

Or maybe I just shouldn't be listening to The Decemberists' "Picaresque" on repeat. It's not even a very good album, for fuck's sake. Except for "Eli The Barrowboy". I love that song more than anything. When I'm a famous folk singer, after I learn to sing and write music, I'll put out a cover album, kinda like Tori Amos' "Strange Little Girls" except less deliberately strange, and I'll cover "Eli The Barrowboy." And "Wildwood Flower." And "Mad World." Probably some other stuff too. First I'd have to learn to sing, though.

I think I'm gonna go do some homework. I've been studiously avoiding it all day in favor of World of Warcraft and reading crap that has nothing to do with schoolwork.

...as we used to say at Marlboro. But today I don't get to skip because I spent all my free absences on, like, feeling too depressed to get out of bed. Now I'm not only almost too depressed to get out of bed, but it feels like a hand grenade blew up on my throat and I can't actually talk. Like, I CAN, but I sound like Marge Simpson. Days like this, I always end up kicking myself in the ass for how easily I'm willing to just... not to go to class because I don't feel like it. Because now I'm all out of absences in my American Lit class and I'm going to go in there, and I'm going to feel like shit, and I'm probably going to get the people around me sick, but if I DON'T I lose 5% off my final grade.

It also feels like my ears are full of worms. This is hard to describe but it happens to me when I get sick. Or maybe like someone has stuck a q-tip in there and is wiggling it around for hours, and then days, on end. And I can't smoke right now, which I guess is okay; it was time for me to take another shot at quitting anyway, seeing as I have a roommate coming in this week who gets seriously grossed out by the smell of smoke and a fiance who actively gets sick when people smoke too much around him. I said to Colin yesterday, "well, if I can't do it for myself, I'll at least try to do it for you guys." "Ok," he says, "but that's not why you should be doing it. It won't stick if that's why you're doing it." And I'm like, "whatever, dude," because I'm notoriously touchy about the fact that I'm a nicotine addict. I'm sick of people giving me shit about it, especially considering that most of the people who give me shit about it the most are people who themselves smoked for a lot longer than I have so far.

At least the coffee is soothing for me. And I'm going to grab a handfull of cough drops for the road. I'm going to my lit class, but heading home again straight after. If I'm out all day today, that will tack another day or so onto my sickness as a whole so I need to just do what is required and not a whole lot more.

Haha. I dreamed last night that I was wetting my bed and I was really really freaked out but then I woke up and I hadn't wet my bed. It was really weird. I even got up, half-asleep, and grabbed a towel from the linen closet and was laying it down on the mattress when I fully woke up and was like, "wait, I DIDN'T wet the bed. What the fuck?"

Yeah. So anyway.

Maybe one day I'll make an entry where I talk about important shit.

The Boxer and The Angel

once there were roads, he says, roads without light,
and far off lamps lit in undulant hills--starshine too, maybe,
and lady--lady, my dreams tell me I was a boxer.

her breath sifts down through the threads of his pants,
high, white cheek resting featherweight against his cock.
Lady, no, in the time before there were roads

and I was a boxer but it's too late now: he is
vasodilation, he is shame, his fists
coming undone in her dark hair, there,

there, in the etherous after, where it rains
all morning long and all his good is given back
in silence, and a light with no road to raise.

---------

I have a headache but am listening to music loudly anyway. I also wish I knew what this poem I've written meant. I also think it's a really bad idea that I have a camera phone now because I suspect I'm going to spend the rest of the semester trying to find subtle ways to take pictures of the Hot TA. Which is really creepy.

I bought some biscotti yesterday, too. When Kerri moves in, we're going to have to discuss how my biscotti is off-limits. Forever, to everybody except me.

I really have nothing cool to say.

Hey, interpret my poem. I don't know what it means--I just sort of rambled it out. Be a psychoanalyst and tell me what's on my mind.

She's moving in.

What the hell am I going to do with a roommate?

Seriously, though, I'm so proud of her. She's so scared but she's going through with it anyway. She's packing up her things and getting ready, and isn't going to tell her parents until a few days before she leaves. They have 2000 dollars of hers, which she'll ask for, but when she asks she's going to make it clear that she's leaving whether or not they give it to her.

Her more long-term plan involves getting a teacher's-aid certificate (she already has over a year's experience in the classroom) and/or studying to be an LPN. If she likes Stillwater, she'll stay here to do this, but her first goal will be establishing herself financially so she can get a place of her own.

We talked on the phone for a long time last night. I told her I was proud of her, which is hard for me to say--but what she's doing is so terrifying for her, you know? It's hard for me to appreciate the difficulty of it, having been away from home and back about a trillion times by now. But I'm going to try as hard as I can to be supportive.

In other news, I walked a really long way today and feel really happy now. I got mud on my shoes and on my pants, and whistled the whole time. 57 degrees and bright sun, deep blue sky, lazy wind. Beautiful. There are going to be some trying times ahead but for now I feel like I'm starting to be happy again. Classes are marginally interesting again--I don't just get out of bed because it means I get to have a cup of coffee and a cigarette. I'm especially digging my biology class--a hot TA + a teacher who seriously, seriously cares whether or not his students succeed is really awesome.

(The whole lab part, where I have to work with three people as clueless as I am in a fast-paced, terrifying environment with live animals, where we have to come up with our own experiments and I started crying last week? I'm not so excited about that, especially now that I think two of my three group mates have dropped the class. But the rest of it sure is nice. I have a test this evening and I even think I'll do all right with that.)

Anyway. I've gotta go take a few more practice exercises before my test, and we'll see how I do.

(I always hate feeling this optimistic. Some major part of my life always goes down the shitter soon after.)

So, yeah. Yesterday Colin and I invited Kerri to come live with us because she has just now realized that her father is more than controlling--he's abusive. He controls her finances--he pays her bills and holds onto her debit card; in return she turns over part of each paycheck to him. He controls her access to medical services. Kerri is Buddhist, but her father has insisted (until yesterday) that she go to Dr. Stewart, who incorporates Christianity into his counseling; from what I've gathered he just throws medication at his patients and his "therapy" sessions consist of him praying with his patient. He also, at some point in the past, denied her access to birth control in order to prevent her from having sex with her boyfriend of two years.

But here's the straw that broke the camel's back--she's sixty percent deaf, right? And last week he confiscated her hearing aids because her apartment wasn't clean. Like, that's--that's really sick. We realized that he wasn't allowing her to inch out from under his control--even though he believes he's trying to make her become a responsible adult--and she finally realized this too; but it's so hard for her to acknowledge this. I mean, she's been emotionally abused by him all her life to the point where, as an adult, she has assumed up until now that his behavior is normal.

Secondly, she's never been outside Washington County, except for vacations with her parents or one time she was sent up there to "straighten up" by her family because she *gasp* was having sex with her boyfriend. That's sort of what seventeen year-olds do. Also, her parents were concerned that she was getting "heavily involved in chemical abuse" because they discovered a pack of cigarettes in her room. The cigarettes weren't even hers; she had put them in her purse to hold for a friend. And other than having a few sips of a wine cooler once and taking a puff or two off a cigarette, she has never touched anything illicit in her life. Nevertheless, her parents went into panic mode and sent her off to Colorado, to live with her super-strict, super-Christian uncle.

So the prospect of moving even two hours away from home is terrifying to her. We're trying to make this opportunity available to her so she can have a little bit of a buffer--she'll have at least two friends her in Stillwater, and given her extremely outgoing nature, will probably make more quickly, and won't be demanding rent money/grocery money until she has a job she's happy with. This is not something we're doing so Kerri and I can have fun roommate-bff-slumber-party time (in fact, us living together may do some serious damage to our friendship; we have a tendency to get on each other's nerves after a couple of days together) but rather so Kerri can take a stab at living life as an autonomous adult, without her father's influence over every aspect of her life. Colin and I will try to advise her on certain things, and will be there for her, but we aren't going to be telling her what to do. We're just trying to provide a safe place for her to be so she can get out from under her father's influence before it's too late.

Listen: I look at Kerri's mother and am terrified. Kerri's mother is obese, emotionally fragile, codependent, manic-depressive; she wouldn't breathe if her husband didn't tell her it was okay. She's dissatisfied with her life so she eats instead of trying to lead a life she finds fulfilling. Her husband controls everything about her and they're both completely miserable. Yet he's a control freak and he's going through the same steps of emotional abuse and control with Kerri that he went through with her mother to, I honestly believe, try to make her as dependent on him as her mother is. He wants her to be just like her mother--miserable, sure, but completely owned by him.

Yesterday, on the phone, she was like, "I didn't realize this was a problem until a couple of weeks ago, you know? And since then, I've been looking for a way out. I love my mother--I love her so much--but if anyone tells me I'm acting like her, that's like--that's like comparing me to Satan. I'm not my mother. I'm not going to be my mother." And she was crying and I was crying and it was a mess. She hasn't made up her mind yet; when last we spoke she seemed to be leaning in favor of doing it, but if her father gets wind of her plan he'll break it all apart. She is also very fearful--though she's very intelligent, perceptive, and inquisitive, she's never been permitted to really lead an adult life. She's viewing this as being thrown into the water to see if she'll sink or swim. I'm trying to tell her it won't be like that. She'll have Colin and I here, and she won't have to worry about money for a month or two. We're hoping maybe she can get some of her shit a little more together and learn what it's like to live as an adult.

What will happen on down the road, we don't know. We're not viewing this is an end-plan. We don't want--and we've told her this--to move her from being dependent on her father to being dependent on us. But there's so much work to do; there are so many parts of her life she has to realize are hers to make choices about. I guess we just want to help her with that as much as we can. We'll see what happens after that. No one, not even her, know yet what kind of woman she'll grow up to be.

And I'm scared too, you know? This is going to be difficult. Kerri is extroverted, moody, delicate. She'll make friends quickly and soon there will people in and out of my apartment that I may or may not like. She keeps odd hours, so I'm going to have to get used to her still being awake when I go to bed or her waking up late. Plus, she's hesitant to part with her cats--she has two; Nivea is female, and Odin doesn't generally seem to notice females one way or another, but her other cat, P-chan, is a very territorial male, just as Odin is. She's told me that she's willing to give up P-chan if she has to, as long as she knows he'll go to a good home; there's no way, she says, that she can part with Nivea. Nivea is her savior, pretty much. While recovering from a series of abusive relationships, Nivea was there for her when her friends weren't. Taking care of Nivea got her through the hardest parts of her life. So accepting Nivea is pretty much a mandatory aspect of allowing Kerri into our lives.

There are other difficulties--until Kerri can make new friends, I (the grumbling introvert who fiercely guards my alone-time) will have to provide her with most of her social stimulation. Kerri's going to be upset when she first comes; she's going to be scared and lonely and feel guilty for what she'll perceive as "betraying" her father. Not only that, but I anticipate that she may make a few questionable choices with her newfound freedom and I won't be able to say, "no, you can't do that," because the goal of this is to have no-one--not even a well-meaning friend--telling her what to do.

Hell, if she decides to come it's going to be a life-changing experience for all three of us. I believe it will be for the best in the end, but it won't be easy. But for fuck's sake--he CONFISCATED HER HEARING AIDS because her apartment wasn't clean. She really needs to get away from that, you know?

1: The TA crush is going to be out of control. I already know it. It's like a CRUSH crush, not a random, "yeah, I'd hit it ten times." In fact, I wouldn't hit it. He's not that sexy. He's NICE. When the fuck have I been like, "Oh, yes. I like men who look like good husbands and providers, and are handsome in a mild, normal, youthful way."

2: If you realize you're doing the wrong thing with your life--I mean, SERIOUSLY the wrong thing, are you supposed to back off and try something else? What if you're 23 fucking years old and everyone's getting tired of your shit and you've spent your entire life backing off and trying something else and your classmates aren't even old enough to drink and all your classes make you feel stupid--no, rephrase, you ARE stupid in your classes and you're going to go through all the veterinary pre-reqs only to fail to get into vet school and YOU KNOW THAT'S WHAT'S COMING and you're going to keep with it, and smile, smile, smile, and act surprised when you fuck up and THEN WHAT?

3: Seriously. I'm really sad that I'm the least hot chick in my lab group. Which is really pathetic and childish. Alex is all skinny and dark-haired and tan and nicely dressed and Liz is slenderly curvy, natural blonde, ready smile. And I'm... blob. Even the boy in my group is better-looking than me, a broad-shouldered, brown-haired redneck with green eyes and a sarcastic grin. He says he's aspiring to a life of alcoholism. He's enthusiastic about it. He's good-looking too. Next to them, I'm so--blah. And I want to be NOT BLAH when The TA is around even though he's married and I'm his student. I don't give a fuck. I'm never the hot one to the right ones.

4: Iron & Wine. Oh, my fucking good. A few days ago I scrounged up on soulseex this bootleg of him at Bonaroo in 05 and OMG I'M GOING TO FUCKING MARRY HIM. He digs me, man. And he's never even met me. But he digs what I'm about. His lyrics speak to me with unparalleled immediacy and beauty. Like, I listen to his words and I'm just like... no words for it. He says what I want to say in my poems except music and a fantastic beard come with it.

5: This weather pisses me off. Seriously. Colin and I have shit to do this weekend. We have sports bars to get to and sex to have. If this weather strands me here, I'm going to be mighty pissed.

6: What am I doing with my life???????? No, seriously--what? WHAT THE FUCK CAN I DO? Like, I know I'm rad, but rad doesn't pay the bills.

7: I've gotta buck up, people. I've gotta man up about my life and go for whatever I'm going to go for, or just give up and--recede. Wash away. But right now I feel like my shit's so scattered that I'll never get it together again.

8: Chuck Norris once ordered a steak at a restaurant. And that steak did what it was told.

I was trying to delete everything before this, but livejournal doesn't allow that to be done all at once and... uh... do you know how lazy I am? I am exquisitely lazy. For me, sloth is an art.

My biggest current concern is that the internet is piteously bereft of pictures of Clancy Brown in which he looks like the sexy beast he is. My second biggest concern is the fact that no one reads this journal, so I could go on and on about the inappropriate thoughts I have about Clancy Brown and no one would say a damned thing. That worries me, because someone really must occasionally slap me and say, "Johanna, you're too old for celebrity crushes. Even if Clancy Brown DOES give off a vibe like he's into kinky shit."

This entry sucks, too.

I'll delete it later.

(PS: Clancy Brown actually seems like quite a nice man, in interviews I've seen. I think I'm getting Clancy Brown and Brother Justin confused again. Evil priests are hot.)

oh my goddddddd I have two papers due tomorrow and I've written neither one. I don't think I will. I think I will mysteriously disappear for the rest of the semester only to re-emerge in August claiming to have been kidnapped by crazy hill-people who needed a teacher of grammar for their tiny, religiously backwards village. I'll explain that I would have returned earlier, but everything was going so well--you see, in a village nearby there lived a blind dude named Rochester. He was married to this homely little hussy named Jane--used to be the governess of his love-child, I hear--but, you know, once he saw me, everything went downhill for him and Jane. It was an absolute soap opera. And I won't even go into how during this time I found myself inside this fucked-up wardrobe that looked like it was full of fur coats, but stepping into it I found it was much more like dropping acid than--well--walking into a wardrobe. Ah, well.

--I don't think my teachers will buy it. I should just write the damned papers. One will be simple but boring; the other will be a hell of a challenge. I don't want to write either paper. I want to drop out of school and sit in bed all day playing gemdrop on a laptop and eating Pringles while watching MASH reruns. But that sounds like it would lead to obesity and bedsores so, again, I'd better just write the papers.

See, here's the thing: ok, so, according to various teachers I've had, I'm a genius. I'm brilliant. I have a fine mind, a keen eye, and a "delicious" turn-of-phrase. I could, I suspect, write an A paper without a single source, and without having read the text in question, provided I've sat in on at least one intense class discussion about it. If I wanted to, I could blow through these papers I've got to write easily, giving, maybe, half an hour to each. But I don't want to. I figure if I'm going to do it at all, I'd better do it well, which I will. I know that writing these papers will be an all-or-nothing matter; I guess writing papers is the only thing I'm unwilling to do half-assedly. Trouble is, as skilled as I apparently am, I honestly hate writing papers. I never derive even one minute prick of pleasure from it. It's the dullest and most agonizing process I can think of.

Well. I suppose I had better finish my tea and head to class, so I can come home and get started. (Why am I an English major? Why am I even a student? For fuck's sake.)

I was musing this morning over the fact that I'm a cheating whore. Well, no, that's a bit of an exaggeration. In one case, Colin and I were trying hard to end things between each other so I was actually in a relationship with someone else I cared for. In two other cases, Colin and I were, again, broken up with each other. In another case, Colin was out of town and gave me his blessing to do it. But once--once it happened right behind Colin's back, and more than once with the same guy, a friend of mine, and I will probably never tell Colin about it. I sometimes want to, badly. And Colin wouldn't respond too negatively--he and I have a very strange sense of fidelity; faithfulness has little to do with the body and much more to do with the mind and heart. But I'm determined to keep it a secret anyway, just for the hell of it.

My sexuality has given me a lot of trouble over the years. Only half the people I've slept with--that's only three out of six, in case you can't do the mathematics yourself--I've liked as people, and only two of them I've had any earnest romantic feelings toward. The other three were carried out with the knowledge that it was all about sex. One happened in a hotel room in the middle of the day with a much, much older man. Another happened after an awkward wait--for one reason or another, this fellow and I kept not being able to have sex, so until we could we had to hang out frequently and pretend we liked each other. Well, no. It wasn't like I disliked him, or he disliked me, but we saw a lot more of each other than we would have had we just been friends. So we had about three weeks of seeing each other every day or every other day until finally we were able to just get it done with, and it went badly. He was a--what's the term? A pillow princess? Someone who just lies there and expects the other party to do all the work? And the last was at a party with a guy that, had I been sober, I wouldn't have looked twice at. Let's have a round of applause for my skill in picking partners.

Now sometimes I walk around in day to day life and get flirted with or hit on, and I occasionally miss the sexual freedom I once granted myself. To be fair, not many of the men who hit on me provide much temptation--I seem to be a favorite of middle-aged men with bad hygiene and smell kinda like booze. But very occasionally I'll find myself in conversation with someone with whom there's a real chemistry, and I know that, in some alternate universe, I'd be able to get something going with them. And, despite being engaged, my crushes (my real life ones) don't take on the feel of impossibility. I feel like they should, you know? I wish that being engaged, and having a resolve to be faithful, could keep me from looking around with an evaluative, searching eye, but it really doesn't. And sometimes it really does deeply upset me that I've made such a severe choice so early in my life.

I'm not just talking about sex anymore. I sometimes marvel at the variations in structure, tone, hue human relationships can take. I love several people in this world, but for each of them my love takes a different form, a different set of behaviors. And even when I add them all together, and consider each person side by side, I cannot find anywhere an ultimate sense of belonging and comfort anywhere in this network of people I care about. And I wish there were some friend of mine or some relation whom I could show all parts of myself. Colin is the closest to this, but when I sit down to try to discuss poetry with him--the reading and writing of which is pretty much my primary interest--he responds sometimes with apathy and sometimes with cynicism. Meanwhile, my father and I can discuss poetry until the sun comes up but I must hide so many things from him also. He's not, for example, privy to my vulgarity, which is often a major feature of my conversation. There is some major part of myself I hide from everyone, you know? And I keep looking, I think, for that person in any crowd who will ultimately be able to understand love every part of me.

Wow, so, I overdrew my bank account. I checked my account balance before I went grocery shopping a week ago, right? And I had, like, 46 dollars in it. So I go and I buy 43 dollars worth of groceries, thinking, "well, good, I'm damned near broke but I'm in the clear." And then yesterday I get a little slip of paper from the bank saying, "yo, bitch, you owe us for your groceries." I don't really know what happened, unless some other charge from earlier took several days to get through and I bought my groceries with some other charge pending. But I'm not that upset about it. The difference between overdrawn and three dollars doesn't feel like much to me right now, although I'm certainly not pleased about the fact that when I do get money, almost eighty dollars of it (%$#@ing banking fees) is going--nowhere, is just patching things up. Plus, the last time I overdrew my bank account it was by, like, 300 dollars. So, you know. It's been worse.

It's all been worse before--my relationship with Colin has been worse, I've had tougher semesters, my finances have been waaaaaaay worse. I've been a lot heavier and a lot less attractive and a lot more socially awkward. I've been lonelier and I've been a lot less satisfied than I am now with my intellectual life. And all those things were bad at pretty much the same time--that is, around this time last year. Around this time last year Colin and I had been evicted from our old apartment and I was seriously considering sending his worthless ass back to Oklahoma. I was having a splendidly shitty semester in addition. The year between then and now has brought a (relative) increase in prosperity, as well as an improvement in my relationship with Colin. Out of the six classes I'm taking right now, I find at least four of them to be intellectually exciting, and I am getting published in a literary journal in April. I should, theoretically, be happy. But I'm not. I'm nervous and afraid.

Although this is not to say that I haven't had moments of happiness these last few weeks. It's like I lead two lives, but control neither of them, and slide without meaning to between the two: I am, half the time, friendly and witty and do a decent job of appearing cheerful. I am an articulate student and a good-natured friend. I smile at people I meet, and when I come home at night I come home to a relationship in which I am generally sweet and considerate. But there is, beneath all of this, an undertow of dread, sadness, anxiety. When I get pulled under, as I do randomly, I (listen, I know how self-indulgent all this sounds. Maybe none of this has to be important to anyone else) become, at best, uncommunicative and distant and, at worse, actively antagonistic and cruel. And it's like, right now, I have only minimal control from hour to hour over which person I am going to be. But I get the feeling, maybe, like I'm preaching to the choir--there is no one, I think, of the few of you who read my diary, who have not suffered issues with depression, anger, and self-confidence, which means, ah, I can probably just shut up now and drink my coffee.

After I finish this entry I intend to look at pornography, though I never find any I like anymore. I am very particuliar, I think, about women, inasmuch as my tastes encompass an incredibly broad variety. Paradoxical? Sure, but I'm too lazy to explain it further. And later, when I'm done with that, I will probably go curl up with my headphones and listen to the saddest songs I've got. Because--well--I don't walk the walk, and don't talk the talk, but, frankly? I'm too fucking emo to live. And beyond that? Well, I don't know. There are things to do with this life, this day. I just... don't know what, yet.

...how to describe it?

Well, I lost my ring today--left it somewhere--and I just don't care because something so much greater is wrong. At times it feels like drowning, like the mind and heart are drowning, and at other times it simply feels like each bone in the body is useless. At yet other times it's like a prolonged, throat-cracking scream that stays just behind the collarbone, quaking there. I want to communicate with it. I want to pin it down. I want to understand it, as though by understanding it I can cure it--but I think, each time it comes around, I think more and more that I cannot assume that this is possible. No longer.

And I'm ready now to seek out antidepressants; I'm just too poor. I feel like I'd be a little happier with money, sure, but that's also not what's ultimately wrong. I want that to be clear. I am not simply frustrated because I'm broke; I've been poor and happy before. Hell, I've been poor and happy since the last time it came around. I've been coping. I've been doing fine. And I am so so so so sick of, each time I surface from it, finding that my life is getting better and better there in the functional world, just before I get sucked back down again.

So, whatever. I'll get through it. I just--listen, I don't want this to be my goddamned life, you know? The grim knowledge it's coming--the dread, the arrival, the getting through, just getting through. There's gotta be more than dread and then scraping by.

So I've got black hair and new sunglasses and my big ass, blood-red leather trench coat and I'm walking around campus and suddenly I become hideously aware of how fucking disaffected I must look. Then I went home and changed my coat, because if there's anything I don't want to be it's disaffected. Well, I mean. Shit, I am. But I don't want to look disaffected.

Look, just so's you don't think of me as alienated and starched with angst: Colin and I spent the afternoon dragging each other around the apartment in giant laundry baskets. I was supposed to be reading Charlotte Bronte, but fuck 'er.

I'm not particularly interested in today. I didn't care for waking up this morning and I don't care what I eat for dinner.

These facts worry me because they mean It is back--It like that thing that happens to me arbitrarily. It like the thing I don't want to give name to because too many people give name to it already, too many point and say, "look, it's not my fault I'm unhappy, it's that, it's that" and even though I'm at the mercy of It I don't particularly want to admit that. I think I want to keep thinking that there's some way I can experience a full and happy life without taking antidepressants but seeing as It's coming back after I've been so happy for so long I think maybe I need to rethink a few things.

It's possible I'm supposed to be in class right now.

It's all well and good that I love Colin. And it's all well and good that I am done with all my philandering, all my pointless & superficial sex with other people. It's even well and good that I am on my period and so am momentarily unfit for sex. But I still want to know why I can't... just... have sex with certain people. There is a list of people--mostly men, although there are a few women on the list also--who are so blisteringly attractive to me that, when I sit down and contemplate the fact that I will NEVER do it with them, I feel something akin to genuine heartbreak.

You know who currently tops that list? (Aside from Vincent D'Onofrio, who has really topped it for years and whoever I say is #1 aside from him is really #2, placed rather distantly behind him)? Nathan Fillion. I had a dirty dream about him a few nights back. Except it wasn't sex. It was this dream where he was, like, an assassin who was going to torture me for days before killing me, but deep down inside it felt like a sex dream. Interesting, that: for the purposes of my subconscious, the concept of sex and the concept of torture are interrelated. I should probably be concerned.

But anyway. I love his lips and I love his hair and I love his ass and I love his eyes. But mainly his lips and his ass. When it comes to male celebrities, particularly whichever one I'm obsessed with at the moment, I revert to early adolescence. I get on the internet and save every single picture of them I can find. I've also decided, unrelatedly, that I shouldn't be allowed to look up pictures of hot men whilst on my laptop in the library, because I have these overwhelming urges to squeal loudly every time I see one I like.

I think it's partially because I don't have any real crush right now; and my life, frankly, feels hollow without one. There are a few options, of course: mentioned before, the boy in my honors class or my statistics teacher, but neither of them have quite what it takes to make me seriously and troublingly obsessed with them. I have moments of crush-like giddiness concerning my history teacher, but--brace yourself--he's just too old and unattractive for me. There's another boy in my honors class whom I'm certain I could develop it bad for, if he did not have acne. I--wow. I really do need a fucking life, don't I?

We find ourselves speaking of our future like it is ours to have, like one two three, easy, there, you're both adults now. But I want you to know and I want him to know that in the mornings I still wake in a slow, simmering panic. I think about how little money there is. I think about how useless I feel even when--no, especially when--I am happy. I think about how hope alone is worthless without action. I consider action, but then try to sleep again, and usually I do: and dream sordid, action-packed dreams that leave me when the alarm finally goes off. This morning, I remember, I dreamed of hearing two men fuck one another in the bathroom stall next to me and, in the dream, I was terrified of hearing men behave as men toward each other instead of toward women. And I dream so much that the dreams come back in vivid, absurd bits during the day. They slice in, seconds at a time, during class or at suppertime, and with them comes, always, a slick little flutter of fear.

Our neighbors keep moving away. Across the way until today there was a girl with three children and two men who would come and go. Colin and the children had formed a strange and formal sort of friendship; they would speak at him in Spanish he couldn't understand and, when their mother was not looking, he would give them candy bars or freeze pops--never a common word between them. They were the last ones here we knew except for Linda and Mary Ann--Linda in the first apartment downstairs, and Mary Ann at the far end of the building across the way. And Linda means to move soon; when she is gone we will be the veterans of this place. It makes me nervous: Robert gone, Sherrie gone, Tony & Zoe gone (I liked them--Saturday mornings I could hear the music Zoe played, Janis Joplin often, as she cleaned the place with front door flung wide open), Robina gone. Others too, their names gone.

It worries me, this idea of people simply--going away. It worries me, too, how other events of danger can bite through the ordinary and present itself, there side-by-side with the ordinary and comforting, as immensely grotesque. Ambulances come to the apartments across the street twice, sometimes three times a month, screaming to a stop on our street to carry people away. Colin and I laugh about it; we joke that the hospital sends the paramedics to pick up medical marijuana and morphine from our neighborhood. But I'm worried about the people the ambulance takes away; I'm worried for them.

This world worries me. The more ordered I perceive it to be, the more its terrors and flaws fall into the light. The older I get, the less I want to bring children into it. This government worries me. Death worries me. There is a man from across the way who comes sometimes late at night to beg money from us; Colin always throws him a few dollars. He worries me. His knock wakes me from sleep and in my half-consciousness I mistake it for the knock of the government or the knock of death.

The other night Colin accused me of not having a proper coping mechanism. He's right. I bet if my heart were made human every bone in the body would break with each shift of wind. I'm looking forward to the day I discover that I'm tougher than I've ever given myself credit for; maybe my realization that that day will never come must in itself become my coping method--to learn to cope with coping. I think I am tired of this city. I think my primary goal has become to finish school and get out of here. Sometimes I feel safe--in the mornings when I am reading or in the afternoons when Colin will stop me in a doorway and take me into a hard hug, or when I am sitting still in class and listening carefully as good students do. But swinging between these stable moments, I am sometimes terrified. I'm terrified. But to speak of terror, for me, is not necessarily to speak of unhappiness. Because even in the moments of greatest worry I know that before the fear and past the fear lies a happiness simpler and sturdier than any I've ever known.