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.

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"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)

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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...?

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;hadfhhio;adfhfhio;dgahio;adfh;hiadfhh;idagjiodga;hiarg;hzdbbh;gad



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

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Well, things these past few days have been going in a very different direction than I expected. I'm having fun, I'm feeling good. No appetite, but I'm generally satisfied with my weight and such. Kind of had to force myself to eat today, but at least I ate more than pure junk. Yesterday I kinda just had junk and a Clif bar. Hopefully we can go grocery shopping soon so I have things to eat. There's so much food in this house and so little I ever want to eat. Just feel like having some fruit... that seems really nice.

I have a dentist appointment tomorrow! Hopefully everything checks out okay. Hopefully they don't tell me that the freckle on my lip looks weird and I should get checked out for cancer. They seem to tell me that every other time I go.

My best memory of going to the dentist was during my senior year of high school, after we had a presentation in Physio about the horrifying things that can happen if you don't maintain good oral hygiene. It freaked me out so much that I religiously flossed for months after that, and when I went to the dentist, they told me I had "textbook healthy gums." Every time I have a dentist appointment I secretly hope they'll be proud of me for doing a good job keeping my mouth in shape, but it's never happened again. T_T

Ahhh, Jens Lekman, always so great.

"Your Arms Around Me" by Jens Lekman.


I miss my dad. He's on a bike tour and I don't know when he's getting back. His goal is to bike to Florida from California, and I don't think he's even halfway through Texas right now... In one of our last sessions, I was telling my therapist about how I was worried about my dad and how I didn't want anything bad to happen to him on his tour, and she just said "You love your dad." And I mean, yeah, I don't think I've said it since I was little, but yeah. It feels weird to say, but yeah.

It feels kind of weird to say I love people, and it has felt weird since I was a kid, but I'm opening up to it and I feel like I love my friends and stuff. I remember being 18 and feeling super distraught because I wasn't sure what love was and none of the definitions I found seemed to make any sense to me. Like, I remember something that said you know you love someone when you care about them more than you care about yourself, and I was like, "but I care about everyone more than myself, I don't like myself. Does that mean I love everyone? That doesn't seem right." Unsatisfying definition because it fluctuates based on your level of self-esteem and self-regard.

I don't really have any more to say about that at the moment, I'm just going off on tangents because it's late and I should be going to bed but for some reason I'm still up gah.

_{I like a boy and it's got me all flustered aaah}

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