"Sunshine" by Jonathan Coulton.

The color of a sky, the shape of a kiss
Everything I have and not what I miss
All this time the world was waiting for this

All the rest have slipped away
Just me and the wall
I won't last another day
And here where I fall
Marks the end of a great big beautiful thing

And who will see (such a short ride)
There's no one left who can remember me (down a steep slide)
But today is mine (on the outside)
Here in the sunshine

---

Me: I don't feel... much of anything
Me: Maybe slightly dissociated
RD: Ha, didnt think so..
Me: I get a feeling kind of a lot like I'm just not really here
RD: I wanna be there in whatever way i can for stuff like this but im so far...
RD: Yea youve mentioned this before
RD: Whos been in my head for so many weeks then
RD: Youre here
Me: At times like this I often scroll through my unnecessarily large collection of selfies in an attempt to connect with the pictures
Me: It's weird, haha
Me: As if I could stay in my body if I just memorized how it looked well enough
RD: Do you think people can usually connect with pics of themselves?
Me: I don't know
Me: Nobody really talks about it to me
Me: I don't know what it's like for other people when they look in mirrors
RD: I dont think i do
RD: Do you try to connect with your reflection too?
Me: Yeah
Me: I just look at it a lot
RD: Is it a feeling of missing something?
Me: It's...
Me: A... lack of familiarity?
RD: Does this feel like clarity?
Me: Does what feel like clarity
RD: How you feel
RD: Like youve been swept up in the fiction
RD: And suddey you jolt back to clarity
Me: No
Me: This is like floating inside a cloud where I can't really see anything
Me: But not having a body
Me: I'm looking at my hands and they're typing to you but they seem so far away
RD: Huh...
RD: Im trying to get that feel too
RD: Now im... a little somber
Me: I don't think I'm much fun tonight, haha
RD: I dont mind if youre not 'fun'
RD: This is part of you
RD: And i want to experie ce it

Me: Yeah I just... sometimes I kind of float away and I need to anchor myself to my body
RD: It sounds like you get yanked into a kind of ethereal state.
Me: It's a sort of being-out-of-the-world
---

I briefly felt dissociated earlier tonight, but I did some stuff to ground myself and I ended up feeling better. Focused on how my body was feeling in the present moment and danced around to music and took my vitamins and drank some water and watched some videos of my friend that made me smile. I'm not sure, but I think it only lasted for an hour and a half or so.

Being like that, it was like the color drained out of everything and I was tired and nothing was funny or pleasant anymore and I wasn't there, I wasn't anywhere, there wasn't a me. Just some slowly spreading silent cloud of static eating everything around me. I could see my arms and my legs and my body but it wasn't really my body, it was just a body and it was there, and whatever it was doing was just incidental and had nothing to do with me, because there was no me. Just observing without existing. I managed to snap myself out of it very quickly this time, though. Sometimes it's harder.

Sometimes I get that way and I don't have the motivation to try to get out of it. And then I don't feel anything for people and I just kind of operate in accordance with the values that I've stacked up for myself over the years, even though they don't mean anything to me in that state. Just going through the motions of trying to be a good person. And nothing matters, but I do it anyway because the alternative would be doing nothing or doing something bad and I guess I do have some slight feeling of obligation to the future self who's going to come into this body and is going to feel things and want things again at some point. We really do feel like different people. The nothing self is just a steward for the body, waiting for the self with substance to come back and do things and make things work.

It's all about the waiting and the maintenance in the meantime. Can't let things fall into disrepair. I'm lucky that I have a solid autopilot setting. This state is the state I can't trust my instincts in, because everything I feel is whispering the worst things to me about how people are going to turn on me and betray me and nobody actually cares about me and Bad Things Are Going To Happen, Just You Wait. I have to repeat what I know factually, technically, back to myself, and it doesn't feel real but I know I have to take it seriously, more seriously than those malicious feelings. And even though there's the problem of induction and I can't really know for certain that things in the future will follow the patterns of the past, I have to remind myself that the people I know have never shown any indicators of doing the things I'm suddenly afraid of them doing, and that the fears don't have much to stand on. I have to force myself to stop conflating "they're capable of this" with "they will do this." For this situation I hesitantly place my faith in the uniformity of nature, if you can call it that.

I have a silly habit of taking concepts from natural sciences and applying them to social sciences. People aren't atoms bound to certain behaviors and patterns. We do fall into habits and routines, but they're flexible. There's always some degree of choice in what we do. I guess importing these concepts just helps me organize the framework of my understanding. Not everything translates perfectly, but nothing is ever perfectly analogous anyway. I definitely disregard the uniformity concept when it's convenient, such as when I'm pushing myself to try despite past failures. I frequently have feelings of "I'm never going to have a healthy relationship, all my past relationships were bad and it's only going to stay that way or get worse, and I'll probably end up with someone who beats me to death." That train of thought is always there, but I keep trying and keep pushing forward anyway because I don't want to close off my heart to protect myself from getting hurt. Need to be vulnerable and open to connect with people, and at least for now, I still care more about connecting than I do about getting hurt. I'm sure I've written about his before, but I don't know when the last post was.

It's hard, but I'm really trying to just keep my world from closing in on itself. I don't want to live within a maze of self-imposed limitations. Always trying to keep things open and expand my opportunities in the future. (Not in the sense that I'd have one foot out the door in a relationship, though... just trying to maintain options to be a better self)

I started doing laundry halfway through this entry and I never write an outline for any of these, I just write whatever comes to mind and don't edit and then post it, so I don't remember if I was originally trying to make a point here. Maybe I just wanted to talk about what was going on and then conclude it with something more productive and determined. That seems about right.

Comment! (1) | Recommend!

Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

If you know it, enter it; or, ask me for it.

Comment! (0) | Recommend!

It's that quiet time of night when I end up thinking a lot because nobody else is up. Just me and my thoughts. This is the time of night when I'm most likely to get depressed, but I don't feel particularly down tonight.

I feel like it might be about time to make the rounds and ask my various friends and people who know me for feedback on how I'm doing and what they think I could be doing better. It's tricky though, since I haven't had much contact with people here since I haven't been home for awhile... Maybe I should wait a bit? I feel really like, settled and stable and grounded and like I'm moving in a positive direction, but that doesn't mean I should stop trying to be better... Where I'm at is good, but I still want to move in a constructive direction. Can always improve.

Trying to organize things within the urgent/important priority framework. I'm not sure if I've talked about that on my blog before, but I learned it in the Understanding and Managing Stress class I took in my first quarter of community college. Man, that class taught me a lot. When I registered for it I was honestly just picking things kinda at random based on the title and time, but that was one of the luckiest things I ended up in. Anyway, it's pretty simple; you just have urgent/not urgent on one axis and important/unimportant on the other. You end up with four squares: urgent and important, urgent but unimportant, important but not urgent, and not urgent nor important. I feel like they're fairly self-explanatory categories. Maybe not always self-evident prior to explication, though. Learning this framework made me realize that my mom doesn't differentiate between urgent and important, and that her scheme of prioritization increases her stress level (and as a byproduct, the stress levels of those around her).

Anyway, regarding what I think are probably flaws/things to work on within myself, there are some I've kind of left on the back burner because they don't seem particularly urgent or important. Insecurity is one of them. I'm still kind of insecure, yeah, but not to the point where it's detrimental to my life, I think. It got really bad in my fourth relationship for various reasons, but I've been slowly recovering from that. Ironically, part of what I think is becoming less insecure has been loosening my obsessive grip on that drive for self-improvement. Like... not in the sense of not trying as hard, but like... deciding it's okay to leave some things alone. (At least, I hope it's that, and not just laziness) The first example that comes to mind is jealousy. I've honestly had a jealousy issue as far back as I can remember. Not sure where it came from, but as a kid I was really clingy and worried about other people stealing my friends. While I've definitely relaxed about that a lot, I still feel it here and there. My fourth ex seemed to have a real problem with my getting jealous, and he didn't engage in the relationship maintenance tactics I implicitly expected... I remember sending this excerpt from one of my textbooks to him...

I loved this textbook so much for putting things into words for me. Derogation of tempting alternatives was something I was used to doing (frequently) for my third ex, though I wasn't explicitly aware of that. Just had that mindset of "he's worried about the competition, gotta make sure he knows that they're not appealing for specific reasons." I guess I assumed that I would receive a similar course of action from my fourth ex. No dice, though.

[Haaaaaaaa, it's so late/early now that f.lux switched off for the sunrise. >_>]

It's possible that I was just thinking of jealousy because I got jealous recently of a friend of the guy I like, and we ended up talking about it a little.

Maybe this falls under the header of "reframing something I thought was negative about myself as an acceptable or even positive thing"?

Some of the other things I've considered trying to improve but haven't really bothered with...
-Eating healthier (this just fluctuates, but I definitely am not as good about it as I was when I was younger, oops)
-Taking better care of my skin (e.g. wearing sunscreen, using facial masks, etc.... not having acne makes me feel better about myself, but having an extensive facial care routine is really tiring)
-Figuring out how to dress nicer/style myself better
-Setting specific fitness goals to work towards (try as I might, I just can't seem to care about this one that much)
-Working on creative skills (e.g. getting back into making comics, writing more)
-Developing hobbies I can actually share with people more easily
-Being more physically graceful (how does one even go about this???)

I dunno why I wrote out this list of things. It's almost 6 AM now and I just felt like writing another blog entry because I'm awake for some ungodly reason.

Here's another Magnetic Fields song for the heck of it.

"You and Me and the Moon" by The Magnetic Fields.

Comment! (0) | Recommend!

"Desert Island" by The Magnetic Fields.

I'll be the madness that carries you away
I'll be the sadness to light your darkest day
I'll be the desert island where you can be free
I'll be the vulture you can catch and eat

This is one of my absolute favorite Magnetic Fields songs. I just wanna dance around to it.

Unpacking is going slowly. I think I need to get rid of a lot of my stuff... I don't have room for all of it. :C Especially books... maybe I can figure out a way to cram a few more on my shelves, but it's gonna be tough.

It's so warm today that I kinda don't feel like doing anything... just sitting around in shorts and a tank top with the fan running. I'd like to start reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus, but I'm not sure where I put my copy. >_< Now that I'm not obligated to read like 300 pages a week for school, the idea of reading for fun seems more appealing.

So... I guess my "productive" stuff for the day was transferring my music from my iPod to my desktop using iRepo... didn't want to buy the full version, so I had to do it one track at a time. I wish my external HD hadn't died. Hopefully I can figure out a way to get back my pictures. :\ There are some other files I'd like to recover as well, but the pictures are probably what I care about most at the moment. I feel kind of dumb for not being better about backing things up to multiple destinations, but oh well...

My appetite was kinda messed up for the past week and a half or so, but I think it's kinda going back to normal...? Actually maybe it was longer, but I don't remember. I think all the stress from finals was kinda putting me in a state where I couldn't eat or sleep. It's just starting to wear off now that I don't have so many papers to write. I ate more than 1000 calories yesterday, probably! And I don't know if I did today but I'm going to guess that I got somewhere up in that range.

---

Kinda feel gross from sitting around all day and eating food. I think I'm going to go for a run. (It took me like all day to flesh out this entry, haha)

Comment! (0) | Recommend!

Facebook won't load right for me in either Chrome or Firefox and it's kind of annoying. I'm not sure if something is like... wrong with my connection on my desktop, or what. Skype wasn't really working for me either, earlier. :\

I met up with a new person today. His name is Jesse and he was alright. We talked about various things and walked around and sat in the shade of a tree at a park while he looked through my iPod. At some point we started talking about how different people can look with makeup on, and I told him that when I was an obnoxious teenager I used to jokingly refer to makeup as lie paint. He thought that was really funny and asked if he could steal it. He also said he did feel like makeup was pretty deceptive and I got the general sense that he thought it was better to go without.

Now, I have mixed opinions on this subject. On the one hand, yeah, I think it's deceptive to significantly distort your appearance with makeup, but on the other hand, society has certain parameters for what constitutes an attractive/acceptable face, and if you don't fit into those, you might have to use makeup just to appear "normal" to other people. I'm specifically thinking of girls who get told that they look sick if they're not wearing makeup.

Luckily for me I don't have this problem, although I do look kinda sick if I get too pale. Just thinking about that though, and about how little effort I really put into my appearance most of the time (outside of skincare, which I really can't avoid because my skin SUCKS, but even then I'm not doing all I could), I guess I'm really lucky in general that my natural/default appearance is within the bounds of what is considered conventionally attractive in this day and age... Sometimes I've wondered why people put so much effort into stuff, but maybe that's just what they have to do to keep up and be considered within that nice middle of the bell curve of attractiveness? I'm not trying to brag, I'm just trying to appreciate the ways in which I haven't had to struggle in my life, and which I therefore haven't put much thought into.

I think I forget a lot of the time that the pictures I see of other girls are often made up/retouched/edited in some way to look better, and I just assume they naturally look like that. Every now and then I look through before/after makeup pictures and am amazed at how different people look. I have to do the same thing with bodies and look at MyBodyGallery to remind myself what realistic standards are. It's so easy to forget that there's a lot of variation in facial features and body proportions, and I get sucked into comparing myself to what I see from the media. As one example, I end up looking at, say, Yolandi Visser from Die Antwoord and thinking that she's super attractive and I don't have that kind of body.

"Baby's on Fire" by Die Antwoord.


Like... well, probably just about any girl, really, I've had a lot of body insecurities in my life. Weight is a pretty big one. I almost always feel like I weigh more/have more fat than I want. At some point within the past few years I realized that I actually can't "fix" some parts of my appearance by losing fat, because my frame is just built a particular way. For example, I feel like my rib cage is too big, and that factors into me feeling "fat" a lot. I know it doesn't make any sense... Knowing that doesn't help, though.

There are so many things I don't like about how I look on a daily basis. I'll wish my waist was smaller, or my shoulders were slimmer, or I didn't have so many freckles on my lips, or my boobs were bigger, or my legs were longer, or my calves were slimmer... you get the idea. Just so many things seem wrong or unattractive. But I try not to talk about this much if at all because I know it annoys people. The default reaction is to be incredulous and tell me I'm attractive. I don't think that's quite... what I need, though? I'm not sure. I feel kind of... ashamed to talk about this because I know that relatively speaking I'm attractive to other people. I don't want reassurance or compliments exactly, but... I don't know what I need.

I guess I did used to feel alright about myself when one of my exes used to look at me with a certain expression, even though I didn't think he was attractive and didn't take his opinion on attractiveness super seriously.

Blah, I kinda want to apologize for writing a dumb entry, but then it's like, hey, this is my blog, I can write whatever I want, right...?

Comment! (0) | Recommend!

Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

If you know it, enter it; or, ask me for it.

Comment! (0) | Recommend!

Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

If you know it, enter it; or, ask me for it.

Comment! (0) | Recommend!

aheehaewatwuhdvanjsdfahkl;waethoqtghoadsfbgamhgahweathi haxhhargrsghioawetu'agh;dbha;hdfhafh;iodgahio;adghh;aeghdga
;hadfhhio;adfhfhio;dgahio;adfh;hiadfhh;idagjiodga;hiarg;hzdbbh;gad



_{MY BODY WAS NOT BUILT TO WITHSTAND SUCH FLUSTER}

Comment! (0) | Recommend!