(warning: particularly old content) I don't ask for it to make sense 
(flopping back) WHEW.
Still love you, no matter your faults or mine. Is that not what friends are for?
And now, omg sleep.
I am watching the Oscars by myself. I wish I could say that I'm unused to it, but in truth, it's been at least a year or two since I watched the Oscars with company. Last year, I curled up, alone, on Nate's bed to watch the tape my mother had made for me while the boys did something downstairs. Two years ago, my grandmother floated in and out intermittently as I watched on the kitchen TV in Colorado. Three years ago, I remember watching but nothing about watching them with anyone... blah.
But Patrick came home between that paragraph and this, and so there was company for the last hour or so. Making fun of people's clothing and thank-you addresses is so much more fun with friends!
A meditation on my pathology of late:
I am being especially needy. No matter what the issue, I find myself wanting to withdraw and let the other person (plural... man, do I wish for Japanese at the moment, with its singular/plural ambiguity) reach out to me on it, rather than stepping forth myself. This has always been a tendency of mine, of course, but lately I've been indulging it to such a ridiculous degree that it's growing to interfere with my relationships with my friends. I fear that I'm overly reacting to the ending of my relationship with Jim, perhaps. For so long I felt as if I had to push everything in that relationship, to reach out to him if I wanted to get anything (to be fair, he rarely didn't respond, if not necessarily often to the extent I wanted). I worry that somewhere in my mind I've decided that, in return for taking the painful, if necessary, step of finally ending the stasis of things, I "deserve" to be universally and completely indulged. As if my ending things with a man who refused to or was unable to be proactive towards me should cause everyone else in my life to shift to reaching out to me! It's utterly ridiculous, but I suspect it has more truth to it than reasonable. And so I'm trapped, logically knowing that it's ridiculous to suddenly require everyone to take care of me and reach out to me in general, but emotionally wanting them to anyway and hurting when they don't.
I also feel as if the worst of my moving past five years is so not yet to come. It brews behind my brain constantly, leaking out in a tear here or a bad mood there... perhaps I'm just containing it until after finals, waiting for a day or two in which I can lock myself somewhere and scream and scream and scream. It hurts so bad, to still love him so and to want him happy and to not know how he's doing and to know that I don't want to be dating him anymore despite all that. I'm ripped apart, as I have been twice before, yet with a different side winning... It's a side that hurts a lot more to have win, I've discovered; when I was hopelessly trying to put things back together the last times, hoping against hope that we'd fix things, railing against the universe for making him not want me, I was afforded the luxury of being on the side of romance and emotion. This time, I look at myself and what I see inside seems so very cold and pragmatic and heartless.
For some reason, I feel as if the fault in my writing lately has been a lack of subordinating conjunctions.
Exhausted and irresponsible. But really, all I need this quarter and next are passing grades. That's my excuse, as lame as it is.
My best phrase of the day: "It's just the sadness of the internet on unintentional display."
I'm lying in the dark and fucking around online because I can't sleep. I tried. I laid in bed and closed my eyes and tried as hard as I could to sleep, but I couldn't. I tried concentrating, on things for Beth, but couldn't quite; I suppose that'll have to wait until the afternoon. I tried concentrating, on things for Jan, but couldn't quite; I suppose that'll have to wait until Sunday. I tried concentrating, on things for Greg, but couldn't quite; I suppose that'll have to wait until Monday. And so I sprawl, listening to speakerhum and faint breathing noises, trawling for something, anything, to amuse me.
The heaters creak.
I hate being sick with a passion that I can't muster right now because I've got no energy. Trust me, if I weren't sick, I'd hate it. As is, I'm left with barely enough energy to be awake at all.
Blah.
Augh.
(implode)
At least I got 1.5 out of 2 things done tonight and think I can wing the other .5 before 1:30. I think. I think I said augh, did I not?
Much research site stuff done today. Much tiredness. This weekend has been not quite as far from awesome as I may have feared, but it's still been pretty much for the suck. I'm cranky and what normally might have made me feel better just hasn't cut it. No, I needed extraordinary measures this weekend, measures which sadly, people either couldn't undertake for reasons of their own or didn't know to take (both were represented). I feel like my life is muzzled by an ugly and cold grey blanket, covered in just enough of Lars and Liam's hairs to send me into tears for the third night in a row.
Didn't realize I'd slacked for so many days. I'm feeling pretty damn blah; being persona non grata is wearying. Here's hoping that a day spent with sunlight and fireplace and music will make me feel better.
Hooray for nerd days. Accomplished: fixing Patrick's Airport Express so that it'll join the network and let us stream music to the stereo without losing network connectivity on the streaming machine, making Takako remote desktop to Atsuko correctly so that I can play music on Atsuko's iTunes and control it from Takako, and rewriting my what's playing scripts so that they check to see which music data file has been updated most recently (iTunes from which machine, Winamp, or XMMS?) and display data accordingly. Good work for the last hour or two, especially considering that the poor Airport Express was in a horrible state when I started on it today.
And now back to doing Things That I Should Do.
(irritation) I have become an earring-loser extraordinaire. I minded losing the one last Wednesday, but not so much; I may have liked it but it was relatively new (bought in the last six months). The one today, however, will quite upset me if I can't find it (thankfully, it's absolutely in the living room... somewhere). The day that Brian bought me those tiny, delicate maple leaves was a gorgeous and sunny one, and I'll never forget the suprise and delight on my face when he handed them to me.
Man, looking at the last bit I wrote last night, I think I can safely say that Murakami's affected me. Hello, staccato writing that appears to have never met a complex sentence structure.
In deference to my interviewer's wishes, I'm not posting anything quite yet about the interview. I will once the season is over, as it were. I think it went okay (?) but I'm pretty sure it's just going to come down to whether they need someone with techy skills or whether they want a international business student with sorority volunteer experience (shrug). I have things to investigate doing in Seattle, should Japan fall through, and it's whoosh all out of my hands now! I theoretically will find out in the first week of April if I get the job, get placed on an alternate list, or get outright rejected. Yes, there is still the possibility of it being a "maybe." Hah!
In other news, I was so unable to think about anything else this last week other than interviewinterviewinterview that I've somehow managed to get remarkably behind on shit. Whoops. Less than awesome. And I'm exhausted. And I've got lots of shit in my head that I don't want to write down because I'll get depressed. Sigh.
Oh, but to no avail. Tears are running down behind my ear, dripping on my pillow, burning my eyes. I still don't really want to write, but it was the only thing I could do to keep myself from picking up the phone. What would I say if I called? "I miss you, I love you, I'm not getting back together with you. Will you ever not be angry with me? Will we ever talk again?"? There's nothing I could say that he'd not respond to without either anger or that stony calmness, and even if he did reach out, I can't reach back the way he'd want me to.
I want to have my cake and eat it too... to have my wonderful Jim of the last five years, but to not have the unhappinesses alongside. I still believe that there was no fixing of things that could be done, that I would have stayed in the unhappy state I was in until the end of time, had I not ended things. And yet there was so much in the past five years that was good, that I've thrown away, so much that was the reason I stuck with things despite the swelling dissatisfactions.
I miss my friend and he'll never be my friend again and it's my fault and it burns a hole through my heart.
And so: a distraction.
Darkness. A green light, small, glows dimly in a sea of black to the upper right. Occasionally an orange blink interrupts its steady illumination. The blackness in that corner of the room is absolute, a contrast to the light filtering in past the blinds to the left. Slatted blinds have twisted over several days and several movements of air about the room; they are irregularly arranged, showing only thin strips of light in some places and in others allowing much more through. A glance might trick one into thinking there is a house outside the window, beyond the fence, but in truth it is an enormous earthmover. The earthmover looks yellow in the nighttime. It is actually a deep orange. The blinds sway gently as the bedspread jutting up against them shifts and the earthmover ripples accordingly. In the foreground, a bright screen casts shadows on the walls and silhouettes fingers tapping on a lit-up keyboard. A large bookcase looms out of the darkness to the right, more shadow than object. The pillow on that side is damp, and my eyes droop with that particular heaviness that only crying myself out can induce.
Well, today is the Day of Reckoning, as it were. At least getting absolutely furious at incompetence at work this morning has distracted me from interview stress, hah! I intend to write something later about the interview itself, to add to the scanty store of Internet Understanding of the JET CIR interview process. One of those times when I'm actually hoping that Google will nail me, for the good of the planet!
Hrm. Moody. Stressed. Had a good time out and about last night until approximately midnight. Dreams full of details and ominous overtones. At least after tomorrow, everything Japan-related will be out of my hands completely for a few months.
And so we enter the crying portion of the program. All upset and worried about a million things, none of which I can control yet over half of which I feel totally responsible for and guilty about. When I said, once upon a time, that I collect guilt like lint, I wasn't kidding. I know that I'm able to keep the world on my shoulders... but it's still heavy, damnit.
Flogging Molly rocked my socks off tonight. The happy end.
Well, suck. Someone saw fit tonight to heave a rock the size of my head through Craig's driver side window. People are lame.
I went out for a lovely lovely dinner with Dave and Eric tonight. It was a shame that I had to take off to retrieve the parental units from the airport. They treated me to some uberdelicious Japanese food (I had kabucha tempura for the first time in forever, the suzuki sushi was divine, and they actually had Asahi for me to indulge my ghetto Japanese beer fetish with) and a nice bit of amusing conversation. I'm terrible with them; I've known Eric for oh, about seven years at least, and corresponded with Dave for what, three or four years? Five? More? Yet I never see them... thankfully, they're in that wonderful class of friend that doesn't mind my horrible keeping-in-touch habits. Although I suppose that really, that just enables my bad behavior, heh. And we were mocking other people we know for being co-dependent! Anyway, talking to Dave, however briefly, about the whole interview thing helped me calm down a bit, chatting with Eric about life past and present pleased me anew at how my narrative arc of the last decade has developed, and thanking the chef in Japanese for the food causing him to drop his jaw in surprise was perfectly what I needed.
They're good people.
Everything that I might want to say just really isn't appropriate to say, so I'll enryo and not. I'm in a good mood, if somewhat stressed about the management of my time over the coming week. Too many things to do and my god, the interview, the interview! But for now, I'll purr contentedly with my lot and snuggle up in my blankets in my ice cave of a temporary home, and sleep. I hear it's good for me.
I thought a lot obout Nancy Drew tonight, spurred by a Salon article on the shifts in her character over her 75 year stint in girl's fiction. These two parts (non-consecutive in the article), in particular, struck me:
This Nancy might be easier to live up to, but it's hard to imagine that she'll ever stand for something in the lives of the girls reading her now. As Meghan O'Rourke pointed out in a New Yorker essay last November, "children's-book publishing has become more sensitive to psychological 'issues,' and Nancy's quick-footed efficiency is now thought to be intimidating for young readers." But the fact that she has lasted in the hearts of women for so long poses the question of why that should be. Maybe we can't be everything -- a well-dressed professional, master cook, ultimate girlfriend, independent woman -- but do we really want to give up trying?
It's perfectly fine that other children's characters offer us the chance to empathize and feel that we're not alone in our childhood traumas, but that was never Nancy's function, and it shouldn't be now. She doesn't say, "It's OK you're a mess"; she says, "You can be better."
I find that can't quite articulate the full extent to which Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden had to do with the development of my personality, really. There's a lot of them in me, transplanted and pruned and grown into my vision of what it is to be an independent girl in a world that would probably prefer me to just shut up and float along, all things considered. My mother passed them on to me and if I have girls I'll pass them on in turn.
And I know that every time I'm upset in the shower and find myself washing my hair twice because I'm so distracted, I have to smile, and think of a book I read long, long ago that made me happy.
Lazy Sunday after lovely Saturday, and my weekend has been decent and good. Kelly and Colleen and I went out to ridiculous girly movie and did some shopping last night, followed by Kelly tying me down and making me watch Bridget Jones's Diary. Maybe not exactly tying me down, but I still struggled. Heh. I spent more time around women yesterday than I'd spent in days, and it didn't make me angry. Hooray!
I'm frantically working on research stuff, and my brain, despite its break yesterday, is still all extra full. Here's to calming waves continuing to penetrate my head and push all the crap out.
And Rob, I probably won't be out studying today, but if I do head out, I'll let you know.
(yawn) I am SO TIRED. But I got everything done today that I needed to for school and personal life, and that's a bonus for me. I'm horribly behind on the other two major areas (one of which is a subset of school, I suppose), but I'll take something over the nothing of the past few days, thank you very much. And now with the omgsleepytimes afore I die.
I sit, comfortable, in a fresh-made bed... I am surrounded by a faint smell of bleach. The washing of my sheets wasn't quite as effective as I had wanted (nearly two years of storage were unkind to residual biologicals), but a double bleaching of DOOM at least A) made me feel better and B) lightened up the one bad stain to the level where I can almost hope that another few bleaches would fade it out completely. I rather think I should start up my Japan-habit of once weekly cleaning while I'm here. My hair doesn't hide well on the hardwood, you see. I just caught myself considering putting posters or something up in here... I feel so domestic. I even (theoretically) figured out the coffeemaker and thus should have coffee when I drag myself out of bed too early to watch the Japanese news.
To those that have been worried, I apologize for my spottiness. Life's been hectic, what else can I say? I've been quite the wreck the last few days, but I think I'm starting to climb out of the hole after a dark forty eight hours. My worries are like that stain... still there, but lightened. I'll take it. All it took was two days of mental bleach, I guess. Anyway, as part of that bleaching process, I spent a lot of today concentrating very very very hard on the whole JET CIR interview thing. I found nearly jackola online (it's all ALT, all the time, in Internet land!) until quite late, and I'm not sure if what I found comforted me or not, but it certainly was distracting. And I needed the distraction. And the blackberry milkshake.
Caught as I was in my self-absorbed pain of the beginning of this week, I didn't publicly wish Craig a happy birthday, as is my wont with friends o' mine. So a day late, spreading the birthdayness out over a full three, happy birthday to him, and many more, preferably filled with televisions that show colors correctly.