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

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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.

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

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

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I went to Becka's husband's birthday party last night. It was... exhausting. I made a chocolate cake for it, but it was only one layer because there were going to be other desserts there.


And a not very good picture of the interior...

They were using a plastic knife to cut it, so it was kinda messy. >_>

The cake was decent, I guess. Usually I don't like frosting, but I made a different kind this time (it's only yellow because of food coloring-- it's just vanilla flavored), and it was significantly better than normal buttercream frosting. Definitely going to save that recipe.

The party itself was... eh... I didn't really know anybody but Fro, Mike (Fro's boyfriend), Becka, and Joel (Becka's husband). And everybody except Fro was significantly taller than me. -__- So... it was a really draining experience. Very loud and kind of uncomfortable. I spent mostly the entire time I was there just talking to Fro and Mike. Maybe I don't have the energy to do social events right now. I ended up skipping the 50th anniversary jubilee at my high school yesterday too because I just didn't feel up to it. Fro and Mike had to leave around 11 PM, so I just left at the same time. I think I ended up feeling pretty sad at the party, and it continued into the rest of the night.

On the plus(?) side, I think I've been eating more. Yesterday I ate... I'm guessing more than 1000 calories, which I probably haven't been making most days for awhile. I know I should be getting more than that, around 1100 or 1200 at least, but I don't really feel hungry or that interested in food most of the time. I did experiment with making fish cakes today though, and I ate like... three of them. And an apple. So I'm doing better? Maybe? I don't really know. At the very least, I've been eating every day, even if it's not much some days. And I haven't had to force myself to eat...

Here are my fishcakes:

They tasted like... fish and mashed potatoes, as one might expect from the ingredients. Not bad. I didn't really use a recipe, just made some mashed potatoes and flaked leftover fish from last night (I didn't eat dinner, just asked my mom to save my portion) and mixed them together with a beaten egg, some cheese, and some spices. Maybe I'll try it again in the future.

I've had a sore throat and sometimes a cough for like... over a week now. I don't really know if it's allergies or if I'm sick or what. Maybe I'm just dying. For some reason the thought of that is kind of amusing to me. Dying would solve all my problems! In completely the wrong way, but still. I think it would be similar to playing checkers and just chucking the board off the table so you can't lose.

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The IRC channel I go to has like... a lot of people with issues. I PM some of them sometimes or offer to listen if anybody needs to talk, so now I sort of have a reputation for being a nice person/caring etc.

Last night this one guy was feeling pretty down, saying he wasn't a nice person, that there wasn't much good about him at all. I asked why he thought he wasn't a nice person, and he said that he had bullied someone years ago and regrets it all the time. Usually I try not to share my personal experience too much when I'm asking someone about their problems (don't want to redirect the focus onto myself), but I mentioned that I had bullied people in the past, and while it was something I regret, I try to be a better person now and make up for my mistakes. Some of the people in the chat had a hard time believing that I had been... a different person in the past, but one person said they could see it, because there's a "fire" that shows up in me occasionally. I feel like I have the capacity to be a really horrible person, and I could do terrible things to people, but I'm always trying to avoid being that way. Maybe that's part of why doing drugs and drinking don't appeal to me. I don't really like the idea of purposely lowering my inhibitions for fun, because I worry sometimes that I would end up doing something bad.

I haven't gotten the impression that many other people think about this kind of thing much. Or at least, nobody's told me that they think about their capacity for evil on any sort of regular basis. I wonder if anything would be different if people did.

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Thinking about some basic beliefs I have about people and connections.

This xkcd comic (I Could Care Less) got me thinking about it.

I feel like connection is something you have to work to achieve, and it will never be consistent or constant. The sixth panel of the comic resonated with me a lot. There are no certainties with language, with connection. There's no way to know that what you mean is what is being received by the other person. Sometimes it seems like a horrendously overwhelming task to even try to establish something like a connection. It feels like trying to fire an arrow into space and hoping you hit a planet with life on it. Still.... there's that need for connection, so there's nothing to do but keep firing arrows, I guess.

To some extent I have a tendency to try to get people to adhere to strict, dictionary definitions of words, to reduce ambiguity and uncertainty, but that's kind of an inflexible policy and I should probably get rid of it. It's hard though, because people come from all different circles and they approach language and the words they use with certain assumptions that you don't necessarily share or become aware of until after some time. That doesn't have to be horrible in itself, but it gets frustrating when the other person reacts negatively to you not sharing the same assumptions as them when you communicate. I don't even mean things like worldviews or actual opinions on things, just connotations of words and the like. I feel like it's unrealistic to expect that people will actually understand you with more than like... I don't know, maybe 60-70% accuracy if you haven't known each other for a long time or come from similar backgrounds. And you can't trust your instincts on this... Just because you "feel" like they understand doesn't mean they do... It's the whole Chinese Room thing I guess.

For all we know, maybe nobody ever actually understands anybody else and we're all living in subjective realities that are wildly different from each other, but we think we have things in common because of these symbols we've assigned to them. Maybe an orange in your world is an apple in mine, but we'll never know that because we have no reason to question why we're both calling the object in question a banana. Does that even make sense? I'm not totally sure, to be honest. It's like 2:30 AM and I'm kind of out of it.

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