damnit, Jim, I'm a blogger, not a clock.

so, it's been how many weeks? sorry, future self. weeks of memories are going to be forgotten because we are so goddamn inconsistent in everything we undertake. If my life is ever made into a movie about me losing my memory and relying solely on this blog to put the pieces back together (gods, let it not be true), then the following paragraph is a 30-second fast-forward screech/montage with hectic voiceover and lots of blurry bits and it goes like this:

spend too much time out of the house at the hookah bar and meeting new yet young and possibly moronic people who you prefer all of a sudden to spend time with. join a punk band and drum like your futile life depends on it. question purpose of nearly complete degree in light of seemingly utter apathy about everything except feeling alive. become disenchanted with academia, let grades suffer preposterously but because of aforementioned apathy care very very little in a quite uncharacteristic manner. upset everybody. get through exams, get Bs and Cs and thank the gods you even passed. keep up with new Doctor Who episodes more religiously than you've ever done anything in your life. Decide to buy a hookah bar with husband. fast forward to learning what phrases like "limited liability" and "Z report" mean. Worry slightly about commitment issues, and especially about continued apathy in the academic department. Drink too much, try to learn how booking schedules and sound equipment and alcohol licenses work. Still spend too much time away from home, but be happy about it because husband is just as invested in this new toy as you are. Revel, but with apprehension. Play first live show of your life, quickly and frantically, and in a dress with make-up and done-up hair. Try to figure out how to be a personable small business owner in a town in which you seem to have accidentally and very suddenly put down roots. End.

That brings us to tonight, and husband and I rolling through silent films and anything else in the public domain that we can get our hands on in anticipation of B-movie night at the new hookah spot, and noticing together how well and how creepily the silent film version of The Wizard of Oz goes with Aphex Twins.

Good Night.

There is an end to all things

And hallelujah, by god, sweet monkey ancestors, i'm almost to the end of this semester. Sitting at the tea house, both exams done and behind me, for better or for worse, and 2 piddly assignments to go before i can call scene and throw this whole four months of memories away in one sweet drunken blaze.

i've felt a lot like a little kid the last month or so, sitting in the middle of all of the shit that i was supposed to be doing, just squeezing my eyes shut and wishing the future would fast-forward to get here. the adult me, when not drinking, would tell kid-me to stop sweating and it would be over soon and stop fucking whining. kid-me did not stop whining, except maybe a little. now kid-me's got through it and is jumping up and down about the end of the semester like not since high school.

summer is here. we're about to ring it in with the traditional geology end of semester blow-out, and then it's a stretch of field work and travel and sleeping in straight through to august.

honestly, i'm already starting to feel a bit preemptively guilty about how lazy i'm going to be. i'm gonna go home, dye my hair, and clean the fuck out of the house.

all hail summer.

this is how much we use the guest bedroom.

so i'm in a panic because i just remembered that tomorrow is liz's birthday, on top of everything else. i did what i normally do in these situations, which is to go up to the neglected and somewhat smelly guest bedroom that gets used maybe 3 times a year, but which is where i keep all of my treasures that i don't like to think about very much because i like to be surprised sometimes when i wander up there. it's also the room with the inappropriately dubbed "crafts closet" which is where fabric and remnants and yarn tangles and thread and all the associated pointy instruments go to die. maybe twice a year someone worth cleaning up for comes to stay, and i try to shove/organize/destroy the amorphous pointy mass that it has become, the result of countless drunken or hurried frenzies of inspiration and related rummaging. "i know it's here somewhere -- i just saw it last year" type diggings occur on a fairly regular basis and it just gets worse and worse and the pile spreads out until it looks like an art installation about mass wasting and the slope stability of the mind.

so i go up there, and i'm looking around, half thinking of liz, half thumbing through boxes of old art and being nostalgic and trying to remember who painted what, when i look at the closet.

there, on the top shelf, it appears that something has been growing. a cloddy mass of moss is protruding from a tangle of white cotton remnants that haven't been touched since halloween. i edge over to it, half driven by that lovely what-the-fuck? flavor of curiosity, half worried that my slovenliness has given some horrifying swamp moss creature the perfect environment to evolve in. i reach up and tug at the cotton, which has been swirled around and seems to be holding the mossy clump in the vortex of its folds, and as i swing it around a bit more, it hits me.

birds have been nesting in the crafts closet.

i guess bo opened all the windows in the house at some point without me knowing, probably when the weather had that weird nice streak somewhere in january. i've been a little confused about the fact that the air conditioning hasn't been penetrating the upstairs, but i figured it was just another one of those things that sucks about this house. nope. open window. happy little bird family, safe in the comfort of jesus-costume-castoff cotton, building the coolest damn nest i've seen in a long time. i don't know if they've gone -- there're no eggshell bits in there. probably just some little avian bachelor pad that had a resident until i started keeping the door open in there and the dogs scared it off.

maybe liz's present is a birds nest.

pretty little time suck

hair, meet the future. future, hair.

i'm off to the earth day celebration at the tea house. probably no prizes for best fucking hair, but who knows. today i'm feeling spiky and optimistic.

and frankly, kind of bad-ass.

Later that night....


The show was great. awesome to see the tea house blossoming into this regular venue... awesome to be a regular somewhere again. hair was met with much enthusiasm and delight, and it was fun to play the "no, we've met" game with a few people who i'd only seen once or twice before.

feeling like a colorful, whole person. it's amazing what a radical cut and dye job can do, sometimes. i had forgotten this feeling, though i don't think i ever embraced it with so much gusto when i was a kid. i feel unexpected again, changeable, intense. in a word, spiky.

i also feel like my stomach's about to implode. bo decided to come out, but at the last minute, and on the condition that he be allowed to get shitty instead of me. that was cool, except that i drank about a dozen coffees and didn't really eat much of anything. driving wired and shaky on a saturday night is almost as bad as driving with a slight buzz. the paranoia has a different tone, but it's definitely there. DDing fucking sucks.

now bo's passed out, and i'm completely wired. ran through all of Coupling yesterday, and I keep falling asleep halfway through Buffy episodes and I'm in the last season so instead of missing something I keep rewatching the same episodes over and over. I'm about to go watch half of "Never Leave Me" for the third time.

the coffee tension in my neck is giving me the weird sensation that my head is going to fall off.

it's definitely time for bed.

right before head falls off and stomach implodes
friends don't let friends DD.

and yet later...


okay. i went 6 hours without thinking about all of the work on my plate. fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. combination coffee stomach plus bedtime epiphany anxiety means that despite snagging the late shift at the WATR table at the street fair tomorrow, i'm probably not getting any fucking sleep tonight. i can't keep doing this. the lack of decent sleep on a regular basis is probably going to drive me completely insane soon. this is not hyperbole.

god, why did i drink so much coffee? why do i wait until i'm finally falling asleep to start thinking about how badly i'm failing at doing school properly this semester? why in fucking fuck do i volunteer to do things for the department on my weekends?

why aren't there any fucking sleeping pills in this house?

ugh.


WELL into the next day at this point:


exhaustion, jitteriness, irritability and lopsided body pain are all jockeying for loudest fucking sensation ever at the same time, all in the fuck-you-world sensory area of my brain. this is the most crowded, cacophonous, annoying bed on earth (and i'm not even referring to bo snoring and/or farting here).

i think my ankles are taking turns being broken, i'm having sympathy pains from some poor unknown bastard who is somewhere being stabbed in the kidney right now, and i might have invisible lice. all of these things are extremely unlikely, but i haven't really convinced myself that they're impossible and not all happening to me right now.

apparently i am a very weird bird when i am this tired and stressed out and cannot cannot cannot fall asleep. i told you that going completely insane soon thing wasn't hyperbole.

i hope to god that this has been an entertaining read.
also i hope to god that i'm done writing it.

likely not.


last time.


i am batshit fucking insane. that is all.

this is how it goes.

feel like life may be returning to normal. this is a good thing, except that it comes just in time for me to freak out in earnest about the amount of work that i have to do to finish up this semester. right now, that involves writing a paper and studying for a test in geophysics, both tuesday deadlines, both probably going to have the residual suck. at least it's cheryl's class, and she seems to have some understanding of how close to the edge i've been lately. not that she's going to view that as an excuse, but i definitely have daddy issues in the don't-let-down-your-academic-superiors camp... "disappointing" is probably the worst word in the world to me... especially in light of/in the aftermath of receiving a pretty damned impressive award this week.

i don't know. it feels like the light is starting to shine again. i spent hours cleaning the house today, something that i haven't done in months (literally). i'm cooking dinner, i'm talking to bo about normal logistical things that wouldn't have been possible for me to talk about even yesterday. i've lost the acute yearning to be any place but here.

this all probably seems a little sudden, and it is, and because yesterday was the first time that i really vocalized any of this in a post, it probably seems like i've just been overreacting to something finite and insignificant, but this last month has been a real struggle for me. i've been waiting for the clouds to part, and i guess it did get darkest before the sun started to rise. so fuck you, audience, if you think that this was minor, and fuck me, future self, if you read this years from now and you've forgotten. march and april sucked. most of this semester sucked. this is the closest i've ever been to the edge, and i hope to god that it's followed by a period of feeling lighter and happier than i've ever been in my life.

if not, i'm sure we'll all be hearing about it soon.

Edit: fucking fuck fuck fuck. burned dinner. i guess this is normalcy, after all. luckily there were porkchops in the freezer. luckily bo rallied and made dinner. lucky lucky girl that i am. dinner was fucking delicious.

all of that grey matter

it might be because i was raised by hippies, but i've never really bought the idea that depression could solely be linked to chemical imbalances in the brain. stress? yes. generally being unsatisfied with your life? sure. could these things cause chemical imbalances in the brain? fuck, i'm not a neurologist, but it seems like it would make sense. so when i finally realized this morning that i'm depressed, i didn't go straight for the "drug me up and knock me out of my misery" approach. i am closer than i ever have been to considering getting therapy and taking drugs, but i really, really don't trust doctors and medicine, and the thing is, i know that i've been depressed before. i know that i was depressed because shit sucked, and when things eventually changed, i got better. this has happened over, and over, and over in my life. it usually doesn't last this long, but it always feels this bad.

the problem is that i can't really change anything right now without changing everything. the problem is that it's not just depression caused by stress -- it's that the depression is preventing me from conquering the things that are stressing me out. if i make it to the end of this semester, and somehow finish all of the work that's before me, things will start to feel better. but part of me isn't really convinced that it's just the stress.

depression is a damned tricky beast, because you can't tell what's a symptom and what's a cause. it's all just one crushing block of fear and anxiety, and you can't tell which demons came before you were feeling trapped, and which ones are just shadows. they all feel real, and the fear just builds.


my mom has borderline personality disorder. her solution to feeling shitty was always to upend everything that she had and start over from scratch in a sad, manic manner that ruined everything for her and eventually left her without any real connections. this week, this month, i've been feeling like burning bridges and running away, because that's how i've seen this coped with before -- it's the only example i have. but today, after i broke down to cheryl and excused myself from what's probably shaping up to be an amazing petrology field trip, i came home and i did some research and i started to feel better. i don't have to run away, i just have to fix the things that i want to run away from. if i get sane and i still want to jet, then so be it -- that was a real monster. getting out from under this mountain of sadness is going to take a lot of epiphanies like that, and they may be slow in coming, and i may miss the point, and i may fuck up a lot more stuff before i accomplish what i need to.

that's just the way it has to be. all these smarts i was gifted with aren't doing me much good right now -- in fact, i'm pretty sure that it's their fault that i feel this way at all.

alone.

do it again, and again, and again,

and never, ever stop.

last night before raleigh. i don't care. it falls somewhere between a chore and a homework assignment, and i haven't been much motivated about either of those things since somewhere around thanksgiving. 

is this all it is? working my ass off, getting pretty, traveling, explaining things to people who don't understand and probably wouldn't do anything different if they did? and am i supposed to like it? i can't tell; no one seems to be able to explain what the whole point is. everyone can't possibly feel like this all of the time, this isn't alaska.

i don't know if this is senioritis, or wanderlust, or SADD, or what. i wish the house were clean. i wish i still lived out of a backpack. i wish that tonight there was another concert to go to. i wish my new boots were broken in. i wish i lived in a city walled in by water, steeped in the filth of the centuries, sweltering, freezing, all cold grey edges and breathing brick. i wish i could walk forever on these feet. i wish i could live on air.

some day soon, i'm gonna cut all my hair off.