No dreams about John, which is good because he's apparently back with Lyla. And I'm ready to let that go.

I think I may have dreamed about Mike. Was I thinking about him before bed? It seems like I've been thinking about him, it must have been a dream. I have a lot of weird dreams.

I had a dream that Shannon kissed my neck. I felt violated when I woke up. That dream also had Kristen and John in it. It was a day or two ago.

What am I going to do today? The afternoon does not seem inviting. I can't wait until it's nighttime. I hope I don't go to bed early.

I do feel lonely. I want to interact with people. I want them in my life. Maybe I'm just ready. Ready to be tested. Because I've had so much trouble with it before, and then I stepped away to grow, and now I'm ready to get back in the game, so to speak.

James and John both weren't my boyfriend. But they were there for me to talk to. That's important as well, Dan is absolutely never there for me to talk to. My journal is a little stale. I can't ever talk to Kristen because she always interrupts me suddenly to leave. James and John were sort of stable forces. That is, until they left me.

And I liked having them come over. James more than John, and yet, I liked kissing John, which I didn't do with James. Plus I liked that James had an interest with Isis.

I need to find somebody satisfying. I told John that he loves Lyla and I love Dan, but neither of us are completely satisfied with our relationship to them, and that's why we've had an interest in each other. I'm not satisfied with Dan.

He's not enough for me. And although I love him, I'm not attached to him. I'm not willing to fight for him. Even if he were here or I was there, it still wouldn't be enough, I think.

I need to find someone to distract me or satisfy me. I can't let John do that to me again. It's been one too many times. But the reason I gave into John is not that I wanted to, it's that I didn't have a good enough reason not to. Because what else am I going to get?

I have nothing. I'm not close to anybody. I despair that I'll never be close to anyway. My mom says I have no karma with anyone in NY. That doesn't mean I can't find people to bond with, it just means that the initial attraction won't be present. Because people are attracted to whom they have karma with, so that they can balance their karma and move on. They'll never get anywhere if they only concentrate on everybody they've never had a lifetime with. They magnetize those they've already known in past lives.

I magnetized Dan, who was my mother in a past life. And he lives in Michigan! But of all the people I IMed that day, he was the only one who had an interest in responding back, who had an attraction to the situation, something that kept him and I, too, there long enough to click.

I just don't want to wait another year. I'll surely be in NY for that long. I'm becoming eager.

Why do you build me up, buttercup baby just to let me down and mess me around.

*sigh*

The work is piling up. I have two midterms next week. I have to read like 400 pages from a philosophy book. I've kept up with the reading for Western Civilization but I still have to study. I probably shouldn't have skipped class today... but I was cold. And tired. And uncomfortable.

I also have a report due next week on... The Lost Generation? I don't know, something to do with Modern Fiction. I haven't researched it yet.

And I have a poem to do for Creative Writing. I'd already written it but I didn't like the voice and now I've written two more but I still don't like the voice. So I'm going to try to write a fourth and get what I want.

Meanwhile, I keep dreaming about John. Three nights in a row. Two of them had Lyla in it. Not my favorite thing to wake up to. He informed me last night that when we got close during the summer, his feelings for me were pretty much just passion and lust, and he was objectifying me.

Yeah, thanks, I knew that. I told him he was using me for sex, but he denied it. And I also suspected that it had something to do with my beauty. You know how it's fascinating to be with a beautiful woman, just once. Just because beauty is so fantastic and alluring? You don't care who, you only care what they look like.

I think a lot of people want to experience such near perfection. Like sleeping with a god, and beauty is definitely revered in our culture.

I didn't say anything back then because this would be implying that I'm a beautiful woman, in a generic way. Which, I'm probably not. I'm pretty and cute, and people like my looks. But I don't have that general gorgeousness. Too many quirks, in my opinion.

However, for John, I'm thin, blonde and beautiful and until last summer I was out of his reach. He didn't think he could ever get with me. So I think he wanted to get with me for just that reason. And he did. He didn't want to date me or love me, he kept choosing Lyla, but he took the opportunity to kiss me and touch me regardless.

The second awful thing he said last night was that he's smoking weed. And that disappoints me. It disappoints me because it's a handicap. People who depend on escapes from reality are emotionally handicap. They can't stand on their own two feet. And I can.

As soon as he told me, I said I was going to bed.

It's dysfunctional... to be suppressed by unhappiness. To have the incapability to be satisfied with life. I simply told him, "am I the only happy teenager?"

And I think of Isis. Sweet Isis. She is enormously happy. Not to say that she won't succumb to unhappiness when she grows older, just as other people sometimes do. But I can see now why I enjoy Isis so much. Because she is the only one who can become equally happy, equally enthusiastic and satisfied with life. It's a simple quality, it's an extraordinary quality.

I don't want to be held back by others. It goes against my being. I'm a problem-solver. I work forward. I progress. I grow. It's my passion, my sustenance. How am I to be with someone who can't ever experience the joy of that with me?

Originally, I didn't want anything from John. But that's because the manic quality that I experienced last summer was gone. I was very emotional about him. Not this time. It was calmer. Slower. More boring, really. And yet, as the evening went on, when he held my hand while I was driving, the way he asks for a kiss, and tells me he misses me. It was tender and endearing.

So, again, in a less emotionally charged attitude, I felt comfortable with the idea of being involved with him. Not dating him, because him and I are not ready to be exclusive with each other, but to keep each other company, to talk, to kiss... to have a dependability.

He can't do it. He can't have stability. Perhaps it has something to do with all his relatives randomly dying on him, he's always on ice, waiting for it to crack beneath him. I'm not like that, I don't wait for tragedy to strike, I know it won't strike. Because, of course, tragedy is a mindset.

We all know that there are general things that are considered tragedies, loss, death, accidents, health issues - ways that we're hindered. But I don't think that those are akin to my fate. I'm not dependent on very many things, you see. In Oedipus, his mother/wife found out what she had done and she killed herself for it. He tore our his eyes... It's like, they were nothing, once these things went awry. Romeo and Juliet did not care for life without each other.

How can all of these people be so dependent on one small thing? Why do they magnify it so? I don't have those things. I have me. My spirit. Not a very definable spirit in any case. Because descriptions are limited, and can never truly represent the essence of you. So you can't hold on to those descriptions, because they are not infinite and positively accurate. They can only serve a small purpose.

So, I hang on to the abstract, the faith in things that I believe in, but do not know. Things that I can't grasp in a satisfactory way, (based on human satisfaction) but can still be sustained on the faith that it is true. What? I don't know, that's the thing. My human mind doesn't know, can't quite know at this time.

But to know something is to try to dominate something. Scientists can't leave well enough alone, they can't live in this world, content to be subordinate to nature, they have to figure it out, rule it by knowing how the system works (or at least think that they know how the system works) and then they can manipulate it.

For that which I have faith, I have the humility to not try to dominate. I don't make demands, as some do, to God. People who demand that God give them what they want on Earth, keep them healthy - from themselves, and give them salvation. Neither am I a servant of God. I think when you align yourself with the God essence, as you have the ability to do, you are not inferior to Him because you Are him.

It's only when you deviate from God qualities, that you become inferior. I like to associate myself with the former, even if I am not completely so.

In any case, John is not stable and he doesn't want anything stable with me, nor with Lyla. Although he has been dating her, he's been complaining and jerking her around for a long time now. He refuses to be content with anything. He is not looking to be content with me, one must remember that.

Sooo... let's go play with that happy baby already!

Am I paranoid? I feel like Kristen is ashamed of me. Which is why I've been ignoring her. Because we kissed in December and a few days after she took a survey that asked where her last kiss took place and she said she couldn't remember. So then in my surveys I said I wouldn't kiss the last person I kissed again. And she sent me a text asking me who that was, and when I said her, she asked about my survey. And I told her about her survey and she said that she'd forgotten.

But even before that when she slept over at my house and the snow kept her here a second day, she said "snowed in" on her update thing, but she didn't say at my house. And when we went to NYC, she left me out of all of her stuff except that time that she said she was going around NYC with me and umm what's his name? I forget. Anyway, the guy she likes. And I thinks he only included me because she wanted to say that she'd be with him, and it would be too obvious to leave me out.

I could be totally wrong about this, but she's said point blank that none of her friends like me. And every time she and I take a picture of us together, she puts it up for a couple days and then she takes it off. I know she changes her pictures a lot and there may be other friends that she takes off after a few days as well, but there are some that stay on there forever.

Plus, every time we hang out she moves me up on her top friends, like I ask her to, but I don't. And then as soon as she gets back home, she moves me back down the list. Sometimes I'm not even on at all. If it means nothing, there's no reason to move everybody ALL THE TIME. And if it means something, then it's like she's saying "you're important today" "you're not important today" "you're important today" etc etc. She's mentioned that it's hard to please everybody, because there are so many friends and they probably all get offended if they're not at the very top. But that's not what offends me. What offends me is that I keep moving.

It's like she's at my house and we're having fun and she rewards me by putting me in like spot eight. And then the next day she's putting two or three people ahead of me, like saying, they mean more to her than me. And as I said, that would be alright. If it was constant. If I knew where I stood with her, instead of feeling like she's rejecting me at random. Like I didn't do enough to earn her friendship.

In fact, last time we had a fight, the one that lasted for a few months, that was one of the reasons why it happened, on my side. Because I was sick of feeling like I had to suck up, like I had to compete for her affection by doing all those myspace tricks for her: sending her comments, picture comments etc.

I know I'm insecure and picky about friends. I want them to be a certain way, and because I know they won't be the way I want them to be, I usually say to hell with it and don't have any friends at all. This is why I haven't said anything to her. But it's hard, everybody wants a friend who will fight for them, instead of nod along.

Like when she had been bitching over and over again about how she hates everybody around town here, all her friends are in Potsdam, where she goes to college. And everybody around her is overdramatic and stupid. She said, except for two. Me and Chris. She meant also Ashley though, cause she bitches about Ashley all the time but her and Ashley are close and btw, that's one of the pictures she always has up; her and Ashley. The other day she even put her and Kyle up.

In any case, when she said that nobody liked me, I reminded her that nobody in this town likes me, and since she doesn't like them anyway, it shouldn't matter. All her important friends have never met me.

The reason I bring this up now is because yesterday I hung out with John. And his away message said that he was going to Mike's. Which was true, he was going to Mike's and then I was going to pick him up from Mike's house. And then I was going to drop him off at Mike's house. Originally, I didn't know that he was at Mike's house from the start, so I was offended that he didn't mention me because I know that he's not mentioning me because of Lyla.

Even though all of his friends also hate me, like way back when, when he told Hannah he wouldn't talk to me anymore cause she hates me and didn't want him to talk to me. He planned to still talk to me, but he agreed not to, to her face. But otherwise, I don't really feel like he's ashamed of me.

But he has always tried to keep me a secret from Lyla. Either because he doesn't want to hurt her or because he's also agreeing to her that he won't talk to me anymore and won't hang out with me - but still doing it. So he knows if he's honest, he'll have to listen to her cry and bitch.

He's not dating her right now though. But it still seems sensible not to mention me. So he's not. I'm not in his away message or on any single question in his bulletin. Last hug? Mike. Person hung out with last night? Mike. Which is fair because on mine, I said that the person I hung out with last night was Amelia, even though I also hung out with John last night before Amelia. Last kiss? He said something like "that one time." Perfectly evasive.

And I mean, who really likes to be hidden? It seems like everybody has one reason or another to hide me. Even in 3rd grade, I became friends with a girl named Amanda and she was friends with Blanca, who didn't like me. And Blanca told her that she couldn't be friends with me anymore, if she wanted to stay friends with Blanca. So she told Blanca she wasn't friends with me but she would still play with me during recess, only we'd hide from Blanca.

I mean, alright, I could look at it as, none of these people actually stopped talking to me or hanging out with me even though they were given that ultimatum. They all lied so they could have their cake and eat it too. Which is alright in this case, because it's only the other stupid people who are so insecure they have to try to control everybody by giving out these types of ultimatums in the first place.

Maybe if I tried to force other people to give ultimatums they might try to hide someone else for me too. But 1. I'm so insecure I surpass that, I'm not secure enough to believe anybody would do something like that for me, so I'm too afraid to try to get them to do it. Too afraid they'll say no, or pick the other person.

and 2. at this point in my life, I could care less. If I can handle being the hidden person, being essentially, non existent, a dirty little secret. Then I can obviously handle the other person being the main focus of their lives, like their girlfriend. And wouldn't even need to try to keep them out of these people's lives.

Did that make sense? I explained it funny.

Anyway... To be fair, I'm very cold and distant. I already told John I didn't have feelings for him and when he asked if he could come back to my house I said maybe. I kept saying things like that. I didn't reject him in any way, but I was careful not to be overly enthusiastic. Because that's not how I feel. And in not being enthusiastic, he still felt a little rejected anyway.

So, maybe I deserve the same treatment. Same with Kristen, I didn't say in my update that I was going to NYC with her. I can't remember what I said, something like "melissa is gone!" Maybe she notices that and feels hurt by it. I will say that she took note of the fact that she was number one on my top friends, so there's no bitching about that. John won't even put me in his top friends because of Lyla.

I don't know, like I said... perhaps I can take it offensively, perhaps it can even be a compliment because people put in ultimatums are put in tough positions and I'm just glad I'm not on a power-trip, trying to force other people to please me, because it's not a respectable quality. And I'm proud to know that I can handle not always getting my way with people, even though I normally just tell myself to not be their friend at all.... not the best way to handle these situations.

But also, as I said, it's simply nice to be fought for. When John came over one time, can't remember which time, but obviously we messed around... and he left and, well, more or less each time, he left and went back to Lyla and told me he couldn't be friends with me anymore. He definitely didn't fight for me.

Kristen doesn't stick up for me when people say bad things about me. I know that. She doesn't stick up for her other friends when I bitch about them. She mostly agrees and talks shit about them. I've mostly gotten along well with Kristen, so I don't know what she could bitch about behind my back. But it's her way.

I guess it's my test. Usually I try to punish them, or get revenge by not talking to them at all. Or I'll say in my head, WELL FINE IF SHE'S ASHAMED OF KISSING ME THEN I JUST WON'T KISS HER AT ALL! But I'm not good at keeping that up.

My other choice is to just communicate with them. About how I feel. I just don't like to. I don't like to tell people I'm hurt. If I'm hurt about something they do, I'll try to make them feel guilty about it by accusing them of being "wrong" about something.

Like, if Amelia doesn't pick up after herself around the house. And I want her to, for personal reasons. Like maybe I just cleaned the entire house and I want to keep it clean for a day, otherwise the work was useless. (Alright, Buddhism, I know everything is impermanent) But hypothetically speaking.. I will not ask her, personally, if she will please not make a mess in the area I just cleaned up. I can't ask her for a favor. In fact, I can't ask people questions at all. 1. because of fear that I'll be rejected because I have a seemingly inherent self-loathing and tell myself I don't deserve it.

And 2. because of pride. Same thing as admitting I'm wrong. Perhaps the self-loathing is what makes me prideful. Because if you believe you deserve to be loved, all the time, any time, you won't try to earn love with prideful achievements. You'd win an award or have a talent and you'd not be worth anymore love than before because you were already worth all the love in the world before you had earned some achievement. So if I'm afraid to be have humility, afraid to say sorry, admit I'm wrong, or lose face in anyway, it's because I feel like if I lose face, I won't deserve love. Thus, I have to do everything I can to always be right, to never be submissive etc etc. Then I'll still deserve to be loved. (in this way of logic)

So I don't ask questions. I never say "will you ..." I always say it sarcastically or something. Like, "gosh, what a clean house we'd have if you'd only pick up after yourself." And that's my way of asking. But usually I do it in such an offensive manner, that they get all defensive and we get in a huge argument. Happens all the time. And sometimes I mean to say it very offensively, because that's what I do. Instead of making it seem like I, personally, need something. I make it seem like, it would be better for the entire universe if they would do this.

Like, the RIGHT thing (as in, just plain "right and wrong") to do is, whatever I want them to do. And they're definitely WRONG to do it their way. And because I have that lawyer complex, I can sit there and list a million reasons why they're just plain wrong to do what they're doing. I never get what I want, all I do is make enemies. But c'est la vie.

I'm terrible at putting my feelings into another's hands. I can't emotionally communicate on the same level with very many people, hardly any... because I'm trying to be on a ledge just out of their reach, so that I'm protected. I'm never on the same level as them, because then I risk contact, and I risk violent or negative emotional contact. And that's my fear, I fear getting hurt.

I fear what I told myself was inevitable - that I would be rejected in every way, shape or form, because I believed I didn't deserve anything more.


It seems like the one constant mission I have in life, is to merely learn to love myself. The first time I asked my mom how much I loved myself it was 30%. I know it's more than that, by this point. But I probably still have a long way to go. Underlying all my motivation, it seems all the bad choices I make originate from the wrong belief that I'm unlovable.

I know it's a wrong belief. But I haven't undone all the branches that have grown from that belief. It's almost like, I can't get myself to emotionally believe that I deserve love, because there are too many small but basic assumptions which form my perception of myself, that have been born out of the belief that I'm unlovable. To just kick out that belief that I'm unlovable, would be to tear away my entire view of reality. It would be too drastic, it would just harm me.

And that's why I start small. I search for all the small branches that are infused with this wrong belief, and I set them straight. I seek the bad logic and I replace it with good logic. And little by little I undo this reality I've given myself, where I'm unlovable.

And maybe by my early 20's I'll be near 100%. Because at the rate I'm going, it shouldn't take more than a few years. It's only been about 3, and I must have gained 30-50%. I know I deserve to be loved, I just have to start practicing it. I have to put it into action. I have to start acting like it's true for me. Because I don't act like it's true for me right now. I act just the opposite. The way I communicate - or don't communicate, the fear I have of getting close to people, my defensiveness, my fighting, my protective walls...

I'm at the point where I can say: I deserve love, because... But this is conditional love. Every time I have a flaw, I tell myself that I still deserve love because I can change my flaws. Or I say, I still deserve love because I'm better than I used to be.

And the intent is good, because that's my goal, to shed away the course skin, the flaws that don't need to be there because they're not the real me. But if I truly loved myself, I would be able to admit that no matter how many flaws I'm currently wearing, I'm still lovable.

Like someone who naturally doesn't have any zits, but some days one or two pop up. And on a normal day they're beautiful, without the zits. But they need to still recognize that despite the fact that they're sporting a zit, they're still beautiful. It's not like, "well, I'm still beautiful because tomorrow the zit will go away." It's supposed to be, "I'm still beautiful, and no matter how flawed this little zit is, it doesn't matter that I'm wearing it. It doesn't take away from the truth, that I'm beautiful."

I've grown a lot. Made progress. Because I've learned to be alone and pretty much okay with it, I've begun to be introspective. Instead of wasting my time concentrating on the external world, or friends or relationships... I've spent a lot of time concentrating on myself. I still get distracted, usually when someone sparks my very crazy defensiveness. I can go on for hours defending myself if it's set off just the tiniest bit. And I forget, that it's not about them, it's about me. I forget that it's useless trying to change them, I have to change me.

Yet, when I'm not distracted I am making progress. And it's an ongoing process, that's what life essentially is, an ongoing process. But I like it. It may have been nice to be born with 100% love for myself. but I enjoy the sense of purpose. And I also struggle with my compassion for humanity. For the people who stuck on lower levels. Who don't love themselves and torture themselves in so many ways.

And maybe that's why I wanted to be born with so little love for myself. Because I had to help bridge the gap. You can't jump from 0% to 100%. It's not likely that anybody at 0% would have enough motivation to try. You have to take it one step at a time, I think.

I would hate to sit there at 100% and look down, so far down, at those stranded at the bottom, at 0% or around there. It's hard, to see them so far away from 100% and be optimistic that they'll ever get anywhere. It distresses me. But now I know, first-hand, that it can be done. For each person, the HOW is going to be different. I can't tell someone how. But I can believe that it CAN be done. I can know that it Can be done. I can prove that it Can be done. I can teach and show that it Can be. I can encourage others to do it, because I now believe that it can be done. I can have hope that it can be done.

So my short story about Isis is going well. Everybody liked it. Of course, everybody likes everybody's stories. John-Paul, I sometimes sit next to him, he likes my stuff. Last time when I read my poem he said it was brilliant repeatedly and he was very enthusiastic about it and then again when I read my short story today he said it was his favorite out of all the other stories, which he could easily say because mine was the last to be read. He's a bit odd but I like him. I like his receptiveness and even though we are nothing alike, I feel like as a writer we're probably closest. Not in our style, but in our method of approaching writing.

So Loren is pretty annoying to me. He acts like a big brother. But that gets old very quickly. And considering we have good, mature conversations sometimes, and no fights or anything to make him hate me, I don't understand why he has to revert back to that big brother/little sister mode. He doesn't do it with Amelia. He's nice to her. I keep telling him that it's because he cares about me but he doesn't know how to show it. But, in theory, if that were true, his transparency would be gone, and since that's the point, avoiding blatant affection in the first place, wouldn't he stop teasing me if his motivation was unmasked? Or maybe he does it all the more because he now knows that I know what he's really trying to say.

Otherwise, I really can't figure out what he's doing. It's not like he dislikes me. We get along fine. He just feels the need to make fun of me or tease me or whatnot and like I said, it gets old quick.

But he says he's going to North Carolina where a friend of his is going to get him a job. And then he may come back in a month. So maybe I won't have to deal with that problem very much anymore.

I think I want to connect again. Like in the moment that I was reading the story out loud, I want to savor that. Perhaps savor an audience. Savor the attention, someone listening, trying to understand, appreciating my perspective. Or rather, Isis's perspective.

I get extremely nervous. I shake and I sweat. I thought it was about energy and the sweat I assumed to be nervousness. But now I realize just how nervous it all is. I shake violently. When I read my poems, I told myself in my head that Tim, next to me, probably thought me to be a drug addict or something because I was just uncontrollably shaking. And that was AFTER I'd read the poem and we'd moved on.

So I was thinking about it in the car. I was thinking about what it means. It means fear. How can I be that afraid? THAT afraid. Of course, the idea is that I'm not feeling the fear in this life. I'm not really afraid. But my subconscious feels fear and the nervous symptoms express that. Why does my subconscious feel afraid? Probably something it remembers that I don't.

Probably something from a past life. And that makes me sad. It makes me sad that I'm trembling in fear because I was condemned in a past life. Like, how traumatized could I have been? So I decided that I wouldn't shake today. Nor would I sweat, cause I mean, who really wants to ever do that?

So as I read the other stories, and it got closer to my time, I wasn't apprehensive, but my body started reacting. In fact, I was eager to share my story, but my body told me I was nervous. But I told myself over and over in my head, every time I began shaking or sweating or something, that I wouldn't be condemned. I told myself that I had nothing to worry about, that I had nothing to fear, that I would seriously not be condemned.

Because I'm not. I know that. My class is small and really supportive. People are really friendly and receptive to others because they, themselves, are being exposed to judgment and they don't want it either. And even so, I mean, I've been judged all my life and I've gotten over it. I don't feel crappy about myself just because of some nonsense judgment someone gives me.

I know that I am extremely, quickly defensive. I still jump to the conclusion that I'm being condemned. I don't shake and sweat because I fight in a heartbeat. Which reminds me that it worked. I didn't sweat or shake, at least not after I told myself not to worry. I just calmly decided that I had nothing to fear and I wasn't going to allow myself to be afraid of what simply wasn't going to happen. And it worked.

But my heart beat really fast while I read my story. Perhaps just another nervous symptom. I was reading sort of messy at first cause my voice was weak and crappy since I had been recently choking on my Dr. Pepper. I couldn't articulate very well, or at least, I didn't bother to try, I just let myself stumble. But then I remember how good my story was, so as I read more and more I began to want to articulate because that's just what the story deserved.

And that's when my heart began to speed up. I know that people were laughing at the funny parts. Maybe as they began to react, the fear that their reactions would suddenly turn to extreme condemnation came back. I've never pitied myself so much. I'm not extremely emotional about it, I honestly don't remember how I was condemned, nor do I really care because I've learned to live without the attachment to what people think. I do things for myself, and if people can enjoy what I do, so much the better for them. And if they don't, it's not like I'm begging for their attention, so they can move on and ignore what they don't like.

Truthfully, I know they probably won't. I think that people become fixated on the mistakes of others, instead of ignoring it all, because they're displacing their own earnest eagerness to fix flaws, their own flaws really. But they don't realize that. And they're not concentrating on their own flaws so they obsess over somebody else's flaws.

Yeah, I still do it too. I'm better than I used to be but I still bitch about people. It's usually out of defensiveness. To cope with them not liking something about me I put them down. But the trick is to love them. To concentrate on their positive aspects and adore them for it. Because you're only really worried about what they think because you don't have enough of your own security. We depend on other people because we feel that they can complete us in where we lack. So if our security is faulty, we want them to complete it, so that we can feel whole.

And then we do a number of things, we try to control them so that our reality is what we want it to be, as I did with Mike. Or our ups and downs coincide with what they do for us, positive or negative. So we are putting our fate in other people's hands.

The point is, if you have your own stable security, it can't be destabilized by someone else's opinion. Because realities and perceptions are individual. It doesn't matter how someone sees you or something you do unless you feel that your perceptions are connected in a dependent relationship. Unless you feel that they need to agree with each other to be right or whole.

If you see them as separate views and you accept it, you'll allow people their own view and you'll mostly definitely know that you have your own view, and the disagreement between the two doesn't matter. There isn't one solid, correct reality, so we can all see things in a different light and let it be.

So if you accept this, you won't care that someone has a problem with you. When you love them, you're saying to yourself, this is what I do in this kind of situation. I accept differences. And then you won't feel insecure when you find that you have differences with other people, you won't be paranoid that you might be wrong because you'll accept that your "rightness" isn't dependent on agreement between someone else's view. They can be completely different and still be right themselves, as well as you still being right yourself.

Was that a tangent? I liked it. Back to me telling myself that they can move on. As I've just explained, when they don't, they're really only beating themselves up. The positive choice would be to move on. Fixing me will never satisfy themselves, it will never complete them. We try to control others because we want to control ourselves, we want to make decisions for ourselves. I'm not to be who someone else decides. So they can struggle all they want trying to make me be who they want me to be but it's only going to make them more and more dissatisfied, more and more angry. They'll probably hate me more, but so be it. It wouldn't benefit either of us to give in and change myself for them.

It would only temporarily please them, if even that.

So why was my heart beating? I don't know. I mean I do know. But I won't let it happen again. This fear is nonsensical. There's no reason for it, not in this life. Perhaps in another life I was condemned. But things have changed. And I'm not afraid to be who I am or see things the way I do, or do the things I do. Someone can disagree with it all they want and life goes on.

I just feel like the trauma was physical. Like I was burned at the stake or hanged or guillotined or just severely beaten over and over again for being who I am or perhaps believing what I believed. That's why I get fearful when I'm expressing myself, pretty much just with large groups. Just like it would have been if I'd publicly been killed. The only time I feel safe is when I'm within a fight. Actually, I still sweat and shake when I fight. So I don't feel safe.

I should say that, in this life, I can emotionally feel nervous for expressing myself to a large group. But, in this life, I sometimes feel safer in the midst of a fight, because I've learned that fighting can protect myself. I can't always get what I want, but this is, simply put, my defense. I seem not to have defended myself in a past life and I came into this life, especially, kicking and screaming, way before there was anything to kick and scream about.

Nobody likes it, my harshness, my defensiveness, my loud yelling, the way I come on too strong all the time. But this is my habit. It shouldn't go on like this, it doesn't need to. But to move on I need to understand why I wanted to fight so damn hard in the first place. Why did I feel that I needed to fight?

Well, we know already, I just told you. I'm still aggressive but I'm only really sensitive to my mom. Because she's always condemned me. She says that she has only ever condemned that which wasn't God in me. I'll give her that. I believe her. But I'm still attached to what wasn't God in me because I'm defensive of the choice that the God in me made. It's not that all the choices were good, but they were productive, in essence. I wanted to make progress, I wanted to grow, change, learn.

My mom offends me by assuming that this evil essence took me over and made me do a bunch of terrible things. That's not how it happened. I was always making decisions. And I have to defend my decisions. I don't want her to think that I'm a mess of mistakes. I'm not. I'm not a faulty product. There are unsound choices that resonate to this day, but that's what my progress is all about. Moving on from these unsound choices, moving on to sound choices, good choices. God choices.

Maybe this stuff with my mom is already resolved inside. But I'm still in the pattern, the habit. I'm still doing what I did yesterday, merely because I did it yesterday. That's what we do. On the first day we make a decision to brush our teeth each morning and night. Once we remind ourselves a few times we learn to accept that this is the way things go. Each new day, we don't ask ourselves why we brush our teeth, we don't ask ourselves IF we should brush our teeth. Because that's what a habit strives to avoid.

It's like spell check, when it thinks you've spelled something wrong and you say "ignore all" or something. To "ignore once" is to say, I've got good reason to do this once but tomorrow I'll have to ask myself again if I've got good reason. But to ignore that process, we can get into the unconscious automatic mode of doing something without the process, because we know that we'll always have the same outcome. We know that tomorrow if we ask and the next day and the next, we'll come up with the same answer, Do it, it's reasonable.

Sometimes bad habits are put into play and suddenly we're on "ignore all" and this bad action keeps repeating over and over again.

I know it's unreasonable, I just have to get out of the unconscious automatic mode and act the way I feel.

It's kind of out of the blue. Ever since he told me while I was in NYC that it was pointless to care if I liked Dan because he can't see us in a relationship anyway... I think I was a bit insulted by his pessimism. Because if we both wanted to make it work, I think it could work. But he was obviously unwilling to make it work, like always. And since it wasn't so much that I actually wanted to be in a relationship with him, I wasn't about to waste my time trying to convince him to believe that we could work. So I just let it go.

I was feeling particularly fond of Dan at that time too. And whenever I talked to John after that it wasn't very exciting, because it's only exciting when I get flattered and he'd already taken away the ultimate flattery. So I've talked to him a little bit, mostly I just wait until he talks to me and then I answer his questions or respond to what he says but with little enthusiasm. I don't dislike him, I'm just kind of bored with him.

19:45] BizZyTheKiD1030: me and lyla are broke up btw
[19:45] IAMSpartacus117: for how long?
[19:46] BizZyTheKiD1030: i told her that we need a break and time to be ourselves
[19:46] BizZyTheKiD1030: everytime ive tried to do this shes guilted me into just saying something like, lets just not talk for a few days
[19:46] BizZyTheKiD1030: but nothing has worked
[19:46] BizZyTheKiD1030: all we do is argue
[19:46] BizZyTheKiD1030: so i think it will be a while


[19:49] BizZyTheKiD1030: have you seen billy madison
[19:49] IAMSpartacus117: no.
[19:50] BizZyTheKiD1030: do you want to watch it sometime
[19:50] IAMSpartacus117: do I??
[19:50] BizZyTheKiD1030: do you want to watch it with me* sometime?
[19:50] IAMSpartacus117: sure.


[20:01] BizZyTheKiD1030: are you still staying pretty?
[20:01] IAMSpartacus117: as in my face? good looking?
[20:01] BizZyTheKiD1030: yep
[20:02] IAMSpartacus117: haven't gotten any compliments in the past couple of months but I'd like to think I'm still pretty.
[20:02] BizZyTheKiD1030: always:-)
[20:02] BizZyTheKiD1030: Dan doesnt compliment you?
[20:03] IAMSpartacus117: he calls me beautiful and sexy a lot but it's usually random and considering he says it when he's not looking at me I have to be suspicious. my pictures aren't always accurate anyway.
[20:04] BizZyTheKiD1030: nah your still very pretty
[20:04] BizZyTheKiD1030: regardless
[20:04] BizZyTheKiD1030: ive seen you in the morning lol
[20:04] BizZyTheKiD1030: cant complain
[20:04] IAMSpartacus117: ha.


[20:05] IAMSpartacus117: so did you break up with lyla on valentines day?
[20:05] BizZyTheKiD1030: um, yea that night
[20:05] IAMSpartacus117: that was sweet of you.


[20:23] BizZyTheKiD1030: ide hang out with you anytime
[20:23] IAMSpartacus117: right. that's a lie.
[20:23] BizZyTheKiD1030: oh yea? why?
[20:24] IAMSpartacus117: because you have not hung out with me in many months.
[20:24] BizZyTheKiD1030: i wanted to though
[20:24] IAMSpartacus117: but you wouldn't have.
[20:28] BizZyTheKiD1030: idk, because i always want to give you kisses
[20:28] IAMSpartacus117: ...
[20:28] BizZyTheKiD1030: yea well thats the reason
[20:29] BizZyTheKiD1030: laying next to you and watching tv, like, how am i supposed to not want that
[20:29] IAMSpartacus117: meh.


[20:32] BizZyTheKiD1030: you dont like me like that anymore right
[20:32] IAMSpartacus117: not really.
[20:33] BizZyTheKiD1030: hm


[20:37] BizZyTheKiD1030: oh lmao, before i go, my cousin is sitting here, and wanted to know, if i kissed you, how hard you smack me across my face.
[20:38] IAMSpartacus117: I'm not going to smack you.
[20:38] IAMSpartacus117: either I'm going to pull away because I don't want to. or I'm going to kiss you back because I want to.
[20:38] BizZyTheKiD1030: he said to hope its the second one, hes so gay



So, those are the unexpected highlights. And now I've been thinking about kissing John lately. I mean, I didn't want to get involved with him. I still don't. I don't want to date him and I don't love him. Nor am I really in a lustful mood. But it still seems hard to pass up the idea of being kissed, on the neck. Especially since he's soooo good at it. So I've been giving it some consideration.

However, I've kind of had a lot to think about. After writing that entry last night about Mike, I added James and John. Well I added John because he had only kept me off because of Lyla and I figured if we were friends enough to hang out and kiss we're friends enough to be on each other's myspace. And I added James because he doesn't care and I don't care and that's fine. He never didn't want me on his myspace, but I had to make the statement that I wasn't attached to him. And now that I have, I don't really have a reason to talk with him. Sort of like with Mike. Pretty much a like situation. Let bygones be bygones keeps repeating in my head.

But I feel so fondly for James. Not love or anything. He's just always made me feel really good, really happy. And I miss our friendship. I've had a couple dreams in the past few months about him and it always made me feel nostalgic. But I'm good at excepting that things are of the past. James and I were close in the past, but we aren't now and we hadn't been before so it only makes sense. It was kind of a fluke that made us hang out so often. Even though it was sooo nice.

And then of course there's the Mike situation. I've had two dreams in the past week about getting back together with him. Can't quite remember the first, how did it go? Oh I just remembered either a third dream or the first dream except we didn't get back together. This must have been a third dream. It took place in school and Biology class particularly, in which Mike sat in front of me during high school.

Anyway, last night I had a dream about us getting back together. It sort of took place in a hotel/dorm. I remember making out on the elevator. And I specifically thought about it as if it was tomorrow that we got back together because I remember thinking the same thoughts I think in real life when I wonder at the idea of us ever getting back together. I guess I think about how weird it would be after all this time, how hypocritical it would be after all the things I've said about our sex life, but also how he would actually be better in bed since he's slept with every girl he possibly could and how I'm the one who would be nothing because I haven't improved at all. And I'm still as shy.

Things like that, that flickered through my mind in the dream. But I guess we liked kissing, didn't we always? And then there was this whole thing about me trying to get back down to the van where his mom was waiting. His mom seemed to be my professor because I was going to turn in my short story about Isis to her to be graded. And he had gone back down the elevator but it seemed to be taking forever to get the elevator to come back up. And then I went to go look on the balcony to see where she was parked cause if she was parked with the engine running right by the doors then I needed to hurry.

It sort of took a life of its own at that point. I think I eventually left my bag up there and I think there was something about swimming... like Amelia was there or somebody asked me if I wanted to go swimming and I said yes. Who knows.

I also had a crazy dream about Kristen. It was cool. I was sleeping over at her house and there seemed to be a ghost there. We didn't see the ghost the way we would have if it had been Scooby-Doo but we were still freaked out. I remember lots of cuddling cause that made us less scared. I decided to figure out what the ghost was all about and I did some detecting. I don't know who I was, someone in an Agatha Christie novel? Veronica Mars? Scooby-Doo? Or just a look into the future at my own way of detecting.... like it's ever going to happen...

But in any case, I figured out that it was her step mom and her step sister. I can't quite describe the clues. Mostly I figured it was them but I had to find proof and I think they ended up admitting it in the end. I think it was the sister, I mean with the mom but I think the sister admitted it because I called her out on something she was involved with. Like she had recently bought something or been somewhere that was directly related to the ghost issue. I think they were trying to scare Kristen out of her inheritance or something. :) It was fun. But the ghost really did scare us. We were obsessively cuddling. All over each other.

So, I mean, I'm not sure who to think about. Between this almost nostalgia for Mike. The lust for John. The fond feelings for James and of course my ever-in-love with Dan. But I like it this way. I like that I can't concentrate on any of them too hard because I have so many things to think about and feelings to feel. I don't want to get too fixated on any one of them.

To me, it's about closure. Closure is like forgiving but not forgetting. When you get in a fight and stop talking to someone, your silence is an action. It's not nothingness, because silence is a statement. At least it can be. There are obviously two silences. The one that happens when two people are not involved in each other's lives. They don't know, they don't care. And there isn't a thing wrong with that. There are plenty of people I come across that I don't speak to.

But I like closure on those silences that make statements about how there's some conflict standing in between me and another person. It isn't lack of anything, the way it would be with two people who don't have any interest in each other. It's something. And I like it resolved and out of the way. It doesn't mean that I have to mend things with that someone. Like Shannon. We had a huge conflict between us. We weren't talking, we weren't looking at each other but we were hating each other. And I needed that to stop. I didn't want to be friends with her but I needed to resolve the fact that we were enemies, I no longer wanted that presence in my life. That black cloud hanging over me.

So we became friends again. That is to say, we became civil and even polite and nice to each other. We weren't friendly and loving. We didn't hang out or talk on aim the way we used to. We definitely weren't lovers. But the conflict dissipated and then we quietly went our separate ways. I don't talk to her. I took her off my myspace a long time ago and neither of us write on LJ anymore. But this silence honestly says nothing. It doesn't say I hate you. It basically says, if anything, I have no interest in you. Or rather, I have a lack of interest in you, and that's why I don't bother to talk to you.

Same thing with Nicole. I needed the big black ugly cloud to be released, and then I quietly moved on. Now I don't talk to her either. Because she's a thing of my past. If you hate someone, as long as you hate them they will still be a thing of your present. The only way to truly make them a thing of the past is to let go of love and hate. I let go of love with Shannon and with Nicole, but I also had to let go of the hate too.

It's the same with Mike. We both let go of the love ages ago. And we had a lot of conflict between us and he wouldn't add me on myspace half a dozen times because of blah blah blah. I won't presume that Mike thought about me in a hateful way so that I was part of his present. I know in this past year I haven't thought about him with either love or hate. Only in memory, perhaps. But I felt that he hated me. And when he added me on myspace it felt like I was neutral again. Once upon a time I was neutral. And then I was positive. And then I seemed to be the worst person in the world to him. And I just wanted to be like all his other girlfriends. The ones he has on his myspace because they don't make his blood boil when he sees their little icon and name.

And he wouldn't give me that. More than a year after we broke up he still wouldn't give me that. And now it's nearly two and a half years later and I want to have that neutral position. I don't need to be loved, I just don't want to be hated. I want things to be healed.

I think it has felt especially significant lately because of those journal entries I read. Thinking back on a time when he was as dear to me as myself, in fact, loving him is what taught me to love myself, it opened up the door to who I am now. And although who he is at the moment means nothing to me. I still feel like that intensely intimate time that I had with him, our relationship, our feelings for each other, our significance to each other, doesn't deserve to be survived with hate.

We can move on. I'm happy to show him that he means nothing to me and that I mean nothing to him. Nothing isn't negative unless you want it to be love and then zero is lower than what you hoped and you feel sad. But if neither of us hope for more than zero, let's at least try to stay away from the negative area as well.

I still don't know what he was thinking, if there was something he was particular curious about, like seeing my photos or bulletins and he had to add me to get that, or if jeezus, I don't know. If it was an act of shaking hands, I guess. A sign of peace.

I just already feel like my reality is changed. I used to be aware that he hated me. If I talked about him with anyone I would repeatedly say, my ex who hates me now. etc. And just having him on my myspace has made me think, no longer am I conspicuous to him. No longer do I strike a negative chord with him or push his buttons, just at the thought of me. And I feel like that's my reality. I don't know how he feels, I haven't really since we broke up, if even then.

But I still feel like I no longer have to say, my ex who hates me now. I can just simply say, my ex, of the past. There's nothing between us now, we haven't said a word. There's no present. There's no friendship or how are yous. But him adding me and I guess me accepting it is like saying there's also nothing left from the past. Nothing negative that is still lingering in the present, still tainting our apathy and poisoning our neutrality.

And I honestly hope that that is what it means to him. That's closure for me. Having Mareena on my myspace, knowing that she still chats with him every once in a while. Every time it asks who her last text was she pretty much always says Mike and I can only assume it's him. They aren't involved but they still chat like that? It's always been a reminder of how there was still something unresolved between Mike and I. Although I have obviously stopped trying, perhaps that was best for both of us.

I always wanted Mike to play by my rules and I always tried to force or manipulate him to play by my rules. When we broke up, he started rebelling. Probably before then, and that's one of the essential things that came between us. Over the summer he was mine and by the fall he no longer wanted to be mine and he began resenting being mine, especially because so many other people disliked me and told him what a horrible thing it was to be mine, and since he was ready to break free, they probably just fueled each other.

Yet still after we broke up, because I was going through so much emotional shit, I had to try to control things, control my reality, control his influence over me. It was way too hard to change my insides, so I tried to change my outsides. I knew there was no way I could really make my outsides as peaceful as my insides wanted to be, because the outside was already way too chaotic. My world was shattered, my lifestyle was shattered, who I was was shattered and I felt a lot of embarrassment. It seems everything went down badly and there was so much hatred and conflict between Mike and I and everybody he dragged with him, essentially, the whole gang, who suddenly either was able to outwardly hate me like they always had, or had to go along with it because Mike was their friend.

There was a lot of turmoil and I had to try to fix it in a sneaky way that Mike never fell for. He never gave me what I wanted or needed. If I had never gone through the ordeal with Mike, I would never have left high school. Honestly, I didn't like school, never did, but the way things were was eh, pretty calm. Except for the baggage that I had with Shannon, I didn't really have a lot of chaos. I didn't have a lot of enemies or fights and things. The volcano erupted after Mike and I broke up, no longer could I be in that school with peace.

Dating Mike pretty much tore me away from the friends I'd previously had, like Jon, Maegan, Kyle. And I think I felt that they were Shannon's friends now, and that since her and I weren't friends, that she was closer to them than I was. Although after Mike and I broke up Maegan was dear to me and Jon and I were absolutely best friends, Kyle was also valuable - especially since whenever I went out it was in his car, since he was the one to drive us all.

But in any case, I was sort of stranded in an awkward phase, limbo of sorts, emotionally I didn't know who to be without Mike, I didn't know who to love, except Dave Dingman who wasn't interested in me. I didn't know who to be close to, and there was still a lot of latent turmoil. Still people I had to avoid in the halls, people I couldn't look in the eye. And Mike that I had to pretend I didn't care about. Except when we were bickering over something stupid.

When the social part of high school goes to hell, and the education is already a complete waste, what else can you do but leave? I couldn't go back to that neutrality I had before Mike. I couldn't go back to the calm. I had pretty much opened a pandora's box and I saw no peace and comfortability in high school from that point on. So I hung out in limbo for the rest of the school year and then I left.

Everything has managed to be about Mike though. While I was dating Mike, except for my furious hate for Shannon, I didn't give a damn about anybody. He was the only person I cared about. And afterwards, conflicts still resonated him. If I was fighting with Nicole, Kayla, Shannon - to me, the conflict wasn't purely and simply about them. It's not so much that we were fighting over him, or even about him, just that it mattered to me because it resonated him. Even when I had good relationships with Nicole or Shannon or Joe or Lyla... it still resonated him.

I think he was so much my whole positive reality while I was dating him, and then when we broke up, he was so much my whole negative reality - and everybody was so involved in the break up, that afterwards, those people couldn't mean much else besides Mike. Almost, I guess you could say, that they became important to me purely because they were involved with the Mike issue, and that after I left high school or near the end, if I wanted to mend the conflict, it was important to me only because it resonated Mike. Mareena has only ever been a symbol or reminder of Mike. For some of these people on myspace, I felt that they were looking at me through Mike's eyes. I didn't care what THEY thought of me, only that perhaps what they thought of me reflected what Mike thought of me in some way - negative or positive.

Even if I wanted them to be envious of me, or look up to me cause I'm smart or feel like I was beautiful or be jealous that I'd traveled the world, it was only because I wanted the resonance of Mike to be all those things. I wanted Mike to acknowledge me, not them. And perhaps that's why I knew it would never end. That they would always be something that could not be resolved. Even after our fights had ended and we made peace, I was still vain about them, I was still obsessed with what they thought of me because I was still attached to what Mike thought of me.

I say all this, but it was subconscious, it was subtext. I didn't consciously feel it or know it or plan it. I just sort of feel like having Mike on myspace isn't such a change because I've always sort of had Mike on my myspace, because I've always been dealing with the latent issue of Mike. He refused to be part of my life, but something was still active - and I was dealing with those issues through other people that had access to him. People that I eventually left and was glad to leave because I knew that they were only skin, that they could never lead me to the direct issue, which was Mike.

I think that I've made a lot of progress, moving away from Mike. I've found people who mean something to me, despite the fact that it's difficult to find something that compares to the relationship I had with Mike. I've let go of the hate, and I think the fact that I've stopped trying to control my outer circumstances (arguing with other people and making Mike do what I want him to do so that I can find peace) means that I've started making internal peace. I know I've made internal peace.

Well, if I had a Valentine, it would be nice timing that my period just ended...

Speaking of which, this was the easiest week to survive because I was already so miserably out of my mind when it began and for the few days afterwards that I could not even tell the difference between not being on my period and being on my period.

I mean, what makes it miserable every month is the contrast between before and after. But there was no contrast this time. And before I knew it it was Wed again.

Isis cries a lot in the morning when she spends time with Mommy. She doesn't want her to leave and Amelia doesn't, apparently, know how to comfort her because she cried a lot today. It's annoying to wake up to... over and over again. In one day.

So I finally got up and I sympathetically told Isis that I know she misses mommy and that she had fun playing with mommy yesterday because school was canceled. And that she wants to play with mommy today but mommy needs to go to school and then she WILL be back. After she started hearing it (cause how much can you really hear when you're crying awfully loud?) she calmed down a bit.

She needs sympathy. Firm sympathy though. You can't encourage crying, but you can acknowledge her feelings. Seriously, it helps her. She's only one and some but this is what helps.

Well, short but sweet. I think I'm going to shower and get breakfast. AT 8:08!!!!!! Ugh. This is not what I like to be doing at this time. But truth be told I went to sleep kind of early and that helped. And my alarm clock was set for 7:45 anyway. Although I don't leave until 10:30, so I don't know what I expect to be doing for nearly three hours.

I should start reading again. Now that I'm not sick anymore, I remember what it feels like to be comfortable and happy. I just went out into the living room (cause I just woke up) and my mom is playing ew chorus music. I don't know what you would call it, chorale music? Like the stuff that church choirs sing. Hate it. I love classical music, I even like opera, but I cannot stand church choir music. This one was a particularly horrible piece.

Loren is... negative. And I knew I had to get out of there. Even if the fire is out there and it's a bit cold in here.

I miss those nights when I watch TV alone in my room and I read my stories. Haven't had that because I was too miserable and my skin was very sensitive, being miserable in a cold room was ten times worse.

Melissa needs her alone time. Where she can devise her own habitat, with her own vibration, ambiance, mood. Yes, I'm in control. It's too difficult being me and being with other people. There are too many variables that are usually interrupted with something that will irritate me and if enough variables are pushed or I'm in the right mood to be egged on, I'll be very miserable.

I guess that's why I go to the movies with my friends [to see Saw] but then instead I watch Chicken Little while they are in the other movie theater. The variables suck ten times worse if I know I don't want to be there. Like if I go to a movie just to be with friends, but they picked the movie. The irritation would have been too much.

It strikes me how independent I am. Should I be worried? Glad? All I want to do is kill those two spiders on my wall. Ugh.

Bah. I still have my cough and my runny nose. And I have a lot of obnoxious blackheads. Gosh, annoying..

But otherwise, I'm feeling lots better. I was feeling pretty sluggish all day, even though the worst had left, like the sore throat and the fever.

But then eventually I got my energy back.

And everybody went to sleep and I stayed up. I decided to watch Veronica Mars because she's like, who I would be if I could be anyone other than myself. Or if I wanted to be anyone other than myself. She's pretty, smart, witty, isolated sometimes, but also somebody who does her civic duty, for a fee. Detective work! And it's never too dangerous. I couldn't make it as a P.I. or a secret agent or something, if it was dangerous. Which it probably would be. But it's not usually for her.

So yeah, I like watching her. It did lift my spirits a bit. Took my mind off the crap that's been on it these past three days.

but I guess maybe I should sleep now.

Well, the quickest update is that my brother Loren lives here officially. Well, okay, I mean to say that if he has any home, it's here. Because he no longer lives in Utah, but is here until he begins traveling, or wants to move somewhere else.

Umm Stephanie, my sister, is getting married. But she said something about it being in Mexico. And Loren says she's going to keep stripping.

I bought Scooby-Doo Where Are You, third season. I haven't watched any of it yet, but the titles look unfamiliar and I'm ignoring the first episode now, but I haven't watched it before.

Umm, Mike sent me a friend's request on myspace. Which is interesting, since I've taken a trip down memory lane this week. I wanted it to be Mike form my sociology class. Or possibly Mike from my English class. I said yes, because I don't hate him at this point. I don't resent him for hating me either. I don't want to find out what possessed him to try to add me though. Perhaps he couldn't recognize the photograph and thought I was someone else.

And I found out recently that my pictures look terrible on this computer screen. Great. They were so lovely on the other computer screen and I wonder if I should bother to edit them so that they look good on this screen or if that will make them look bad on my old screen. I can't really know what kind of screens anybody has, you know? I've always had that problem with myspace because internet explorer and firefox make things look different and the contrast and brightness makes it look different. Not only pictures, but html. I guess I can only try to please myself. But not that I have this screen...

Oh yeah, and I wrote an amazing poem for my class. Okay, it's not that the poem is amazing, it's amazing that I said what I needed to say. For a long time it didn't come out that way. And then Alexander spent an hour or so teaching me about the meaning of life, and I was just ready to break that mental box down and suddenly I could understand and expand on the philosophies.

I think I figured out what it was all about.

It's about emotion. Emotion that I've let go. I was nostalgic for it, nostalgic and sad for what I was missing out on. That may seem like an obvious analysis. Yes, I was sad because I was missing out on love.

But no, it's significant because I no longer believe in these excessive emotions. Perhaps I've witnessed too much of it. I was excessively, exhaustively emotional at the time of Mike. And even though that movie was actually disturbingly unemotional, at least quizzically emotional, Rachel is truly Borderline Personality Disorder Head Case emotional and I forgot that this isn't me.

My despair for the future is true. Because my future will not have these emotions that I'm nostalgic about. I have already let them go, and I won't take them back. If I do take them back, they won't be reality. I know this.

But a part of me was sad over it.

And now I remember my reality. I remember my comfort. I remember how it feels to be healthy. Because that's how I see it. I see it as making healthy, productive choices that aren't bogged down by disastrous emotions. That does not mean I don't care for people. Not at all. I do care for people. But it isn't an emotionally driven, and what I mean by that is that it isn't a wild, explosive, uninhibited emotion. It isn't a child. It's an adult.

I care for Dan in a more mature way. Not an uninhibited, wild, emotional way. Not the way I loved Mike. I feel more comfortable separated from the emotional driver. Because that's the thing. To live a life without emotion, is to live an empty life. We need to feel. But we don't need to be driven by emotions. Emotions don't know how to have self-control. They don't know how to have caution, rationality, maturity, safety. They are reckless to a T. We can't allow them to be in the driver's seat. That does not bring us a healthy life.

I feel for Dan. But I'm not emotionally obsessed with him. I do still miss his attention. I do feel abandoned by him. But I realize now that the despair was intensified, magnified by the melodrama of the emotional body, realizing how things have changed. Thinking back nostalgically to the times when it was front and center, or I should say front and left side (of a car). It's not there anymore and it misses it. But I don't.

Oh well, what can you do?

I don't feel loved. I don't feel that there is someone to give my love to. And I don't feel like if either of those were fulfilled, it would be anything other than an illusion.

I have a particular sadness about it. Is that a consequence of reading over the journal entries about Mike? It took me a while to shake that reality. It was still familiar to me in a way that blocked my ability to feel the reality I'm currently in. Like feeling a tenderness for Mike was more comfortable than feeling a tenderness for Dan.

And I feel so distanced from Dan. And resentful, so that I actually want the distance to continue, at the same time that I want things to be otherwise. At the same time that resentment blooms.

So there was that Mike thing. And then that relationship between psycho and wildchild. (that movie I was watching) and now there's this relationship between Justin and Agnes. And I'm unsettled by it all. I'm unsettled, I think, because I feel all of these relationships more than I feel any semblance of my own relationship.

I don't feel anything of my own. I have nothing. And it makes me sad.

I don't feel close to Dan at all. And there's this attachment that is essentially default. Like an unquestioning affection for him. And yet, now when I try to feel it, all I feel is the memory of when I had that sort of default affection for Mike. I'm detached from it, more or less as much as I am from the fictional relationships I've experienced today.

But my affection for Dan reminds me of that affection for Mike and all the sudden that's all I can experience. I can't make anything for Dan a reality.

And I have that hopelessness, that pessimism, which says that not only are things unreal now, but they'll never be otherwise. Even if the circumstances changed, the reality would be unaffected.

There's nothing that can be done to soothe me. This seems to just be the cold, hard truth. I feel so sad.

The mood will probably be drained from me while I sleep. And things will resume in the morning. Except, I'll still have that lust. That's another unreal relationship that I'm forced to experience. The way my imagination tries to satisfy my lust. It's horrible. While I'm in it, I don't notice anything amiss. But once I pull out of it I realize how taken into another reality I was.

I'm sick of desire. I don't want love, cause right now I feel like love isn't real.

Tomorrow morning I'll go through that incredible lust. I'll be sorry that's all I can experience. Instead of something charming and real. Something I can believe in.

I do think that this is a negative consequence of re-experiencing the Mike-reality. Because now I have something to directly compare it to. What I once had. What I now have. Two extremes. I feel lonely in this extreme. I don't want just anybody. I want somebody in particular. But I feel hopeless on getting any somebody in particular.

I miss feeling that things were right, with John. Feeling that assurance that things were right. Even if things were glaringly wrong sometimes in contrast.

And I miss how it feels to be convinced by Dan. He's so convincing, the way he woos me. He doesn't do it anymore and I'm suffering for it.

What am I to do about this despair of being alone? There's no consolation.

Wow, what a reality I had when I was with Mike. So different from today. I like being close to people. I like that feeling. It's soothing.

Damn, was I close to Mike.. Joined at the hip. I'm far more reserved than I seemed to be. My lack of reserve when I was younger used to make me very uncomfortable.

I think what astounds me is that I had so much interaction with his family as well. That being a part of his life was to be present in their lives. I guess that makes sense because him and I were always together so if they wanted to be with him they had to be with me. And likewise, if I wanted to be with him, sometimes I had to be with them.

There was a lot of fighting though. Between Mike and I. A lot of childish fighting. Always.

And there was a lot of anger. I felt negatively towards everybody, back then. From Shannon, to Mike (during those childish fights), to my mom, to his family... Everything made me angry. I felt like everybody was ridiculous and I couldn't bear it.

There's a danger in being so attached to someone. I was pretty possessive of Mike. He no longer had his own world. He was part of me, part of my life, part of my reality. I was possessive of that.

And the funny thing is, that instead of him imposing on my life, I imposed on his life. We never had that dynamic around my family. I know that when my parents would go somewhere, I always wanted to bring Mike with me. I never wanted to go anywhere without him. But Mike didn't really want to go with me. My parents were not the type of people you could be yourself around. Too conservative and judgmental. Exactly opposite of his mom and his sister.

I had a semi-relationship with his family. But he didn't have anything at all with my family. He hardly even talked to them.

I was far too aggressive, wasn't I. So dominant and selfish. Always eager to get my way, always feisty enough to fight for my way.

That may be what has changed. It's not that I don't still want my way, it's only that I used to try to get my way by changing the world. In order for my reality to please me I had to try to dominate everyone else. These days I've grown distant from people, so that my reality has broken away from them all. It's a separate thing, it's a private thing. I can retreat into my reality any time I have a problem with someone.

I no longer have any bonds with people. If I think back to all the people that I conversed with. All the people that I wasn't so much close to, as I was involved with. Now I'm involved with nobody.

It scares me, to think that the next person I'm in a relationship with could be as close as Mike and I were. Actually, I know that I'll never be as close with anyone again. Mike and I hardly had separate skins. I know that this was the first time I was happy, comfortable, loved, in love. Even though there were still a lot of conflicts, with myself and with others, it was a turning point. Essentially, who we were together, pushed who I was in a new direction. I'll never need that again.

Well, I get less dependent each time. Dan was also a turning point. Because the person that had been growing inside of me since Mike and I had parted, was - well, I don't know that I had learned to be as comfortable in such a reality. And then Dan accepted who I was and complimented it with his own personality and it stabilized me.

I've only gotten more stable since then. And I'll probably only become more stable in the future. Perhaps the anger was displacement. I was frustrated that I couldn't change myself and I badly wanted to. I felt that I wanted to change everybody else, and it frustrated me when I couldn't influence them or force them to be who I wanted them to be. That's where I was while I was with Mike. Partly because of not having a separate skin. Each time I wanted to change me, I tried to change us, and therefore I was really trying to change him.

He needed to break away from me just as I needed to break away from him. But the anger dissipates the more I realize that I can change myself. Because that's who I wanted to change all along, I just displaced that and concentrated on the people around me, becoming angry that I couldn't change them, even though it was myself that I really couldn't, but wanted to change.

I get very... far away, from my current reality, when I read my old journal entries. I get pulled into these distant memories, into this oddly familiar reality that is so very different from the reality I now have. And the thing is, because I'm reading into the mind of who I was at that time, I'm hearing the interpretation of what I experienced at that time... I allow myself to get pulled into the mind that I used to have. And I can't make sense of it. Not the way I would at this time in my life.

I couldn't see the bigger picture back then. My journal entries are so entirely consumed with the smaller details. It's hard for me to recall that time, and be able to pull away from that and find some separate sight of the bigger picture.

At least I could read them without getting consumed with emotion. That always seems to happen, I get pulled into that more emotional time and I become sad, nostalgic, dependent, upset, angry or what have you. This time it only made me smile and laugh. Cause we had such a crazy cute relationship. So wonderful, and yet, so wild and unrealistic. Nothing I ever want to have again, but an amazing experience.

So you want an idea of how overwhelmed I am with my book? I have to edit through 2,800 pages of microsoft word, at 9pt font. It's not necessarily that my book is encompassed by all that, but I do know that in order to get an idea of what direction my book is taking, I have to read through what I've already written. And I have to sift through the mundane, and search for what themes I want in my book. Do you realize how much that is? If it was at 12pt font, it would be at least 4,000, possible 5,000 microsoft word pages. And those are full pages. A book is double that amount because the pages are smaller.

I have written a lot, in the past three and a half years. Yes, a lot of mundane things. But my book has the word Thoughts in it, and so these are, exactly that. My thoughts.

I wanted to print it out so that I could work with the words away from my computer, but, there are just simply too many pages. So now I have to read it like an ebook. Yuck.

I just had the best dream. It felt really good. Instead of the dream being realistic, I think it was catered by my imagination. Meaning, everything suited me. It was how it would be if I created it, which, in this case, I did.

So it was about Michigan, I went to visit Dan. And now that I think about it this part is kind of weird. I came with a friend, she was going to go her own way once we got there, we only traveled together. I think we came on a train, but it might have been a plane. I only remember the station. And then we went to the store to get some food, I think I remember a bag of chips, but this is with Dan. I wanted to buy my bag of chips but I put it with his stuff because I only had a couple five dollar bills, and I couldn't figure out why I'd traveled with only this much money!

But you see, in real life, that's how much is in my wallet at the moment, so it was almost like if I woke up today at a Michigan train station with my purse that's how it would be. And there were also a couple more annoying things... I had forgotten my razor and I wanted to shave. And I had forgotten my makeup. Although I had make up on at the moment, it would come off within a day and I didn't have anything to reapply it. Razors are easy to get. And I suppose, now that I think about it, I could buy some cheap make up. But usually make up is expensive-ish. Because there are so many pieces and they all cost $5-10 each. But I was just going to cross that bridge once it came. I was mostly thinking about buying a razor.

Something weird happened on the way to his apartment. I don't quite remember. It was like we were up on a hill and the cars went by. It reminds me of the dream I had earlier but I can't remember what it was about anyway. I met one of Dan's friends. She was a girl, so it was one of those, should I be jealous? moments. My friend was still with us and I said something stupid about the cars driving by or the people or something that was going on. It seemed like a paranoid-ish statement. I only vaguely remember that part.

Gosh, now that I think about it, this reminds me of my NYC trip!!! Only I brought money that time. And my razor and make up. :) But the apartment, since I think Dan is in a house not an apartment. And the shopping reminded me of being with hmm that 40 yr old black guy who Kristen is crushing on. He is the one who took us to Chinatown. It reminded me of being with him. And even though I don't always say dumb things, something I feel a little self-conscious about what I've said. With particular people I always manage to say something dumb, but with Kristen's aunt and her friends I think it's mostly that I felt that my statements were lacking any dazzling quality. Although I did make what'shisface laugh.

Anyway, we went to his apartment and there were lots of random people outside. Almost like relatives but I felt like they were Spanish so they probably weren't Dan's relatives. I met his mom. She looked very familiar but I don't know why. And now that I think about it there were no kids. Hmm. Not a one. Not even a mention of where they were. That would only be my dream fantasy. I know that Jen was mentioned, if only in my head. His mom said something to me and him, in a bit of a warning about jumping into things too fast, and I wondered if she thought of Jen and him jumping into things too fast and it not working out.

The apartment was beautiful. A bit elegant and the windows let a lot of light in. It was a couple stories up and there was a small balcony. It was small, when you think about it, but that wasn't in my first impression, because small doesn't matter as long as it's comfortable and beautiful. Which it was. The Christmas tree was still up and it was on a stand with wheels, I thought that was interesting. I didn't see the kitchen or the bedroom, yet. I think his mom was asking me something about advertisements and using it as a metaphor. Essentially, she was giving advice but I'm not sure I quite understood it in the dream so I definitely don't understand it now, I don't even remember it.

Dan told everybody they had to leave or at least go outside because he needed to ask me something. It took a few minutes to get everybody out. His mom especially. She seemed to come back in and dawdle. It's not that she didn't like me, she was kind, she just managed to get herself involved and be kind of nosy as mother's kind of can be. She was harmless. Seemingly, the only one-on-one experience between Dan and I was at the moment before his mom left. When we were sitting pretty close and we looked at each other in the face and I wondered what it would be like to kiss him for the first time.

Then he disappeared, and I was waiting for him. And thinking about my razor and makeup situation. And I went to the balcony and don't ask me how this happened but I flew away on some firewood. (On my balcony there's firewood so this made sense even though there didn't seem to be a fireplace in the house, although that would have suited me, to make it more comfortable and cozy.) So I traveled in the valley and I realized that the terrain was pretty wild, that the people who had built the buildings were pretty brave. This wasn't so much a city as a city squished inside a narrow valley. The mountains weren't sharp like the rockies, they were more like the andes mountains, more on the round side at the top and covered with trees, although they seemed to be the kind of trees covering the rockies. The rockies are often snow-capped though and these weren't even though there was a little bit of snow on the ground.

When I first looked out the window I remarked that it was nice, but not as beautiful as New York. And then as I flew, I realized it was pretty, but not as pretty as Columbia, even though it reminded me a bit of Bogota. Bogota is a lot more amazing. But I was paying Michigan a compliment here, even though I'm betting it does not look like it did in my dream. It's hard to explain, cause I had a bird's eye view. I walked back though, cause now that it came to flying I wasn't so sure I could make it happen. Dan had come out but he didn't say anything to me until after he'd passed and then he shouted back "firewood."

I climbed up a rickety ladder to the balcony. And then I guess I sat and thought about what I'd say once he proposed. And I wondered if it would be a "will you marry me?" simply... or if it would be a "will you wear my ring?" type of thing. Because Dan seems like the former. But in this dream Dan did not seem like Dan at all. He was quiet. Some people would call it dark and brooding, but it wasn't so much a negative quality as it was merely a mysterious quality. Like I said, we had no contact the whole dream, it was kind of weird.

I also wondered what I was going to say to it. I think that I planned to say yes, but even though I was very sure that I loved him, it's hard to settle into having a fiance when you're not even really able to get married. I feel so young still, not independent. I thought of Shannon and Nick. Even though I really thought of it as Shannon and Jon, but it was Nick who gave her a ring and proposed to her, when she was 16. People in America who do that, do not work out. You propose when you're ready and able, otherwise time does weird things to you. There would be less divorces if couples gave each other time, instead of rushing into a marriage that will break apart in a couple years. Nick and Shannon broke up too. It may have surprised them, but they were the only ones it surprised.

So I planned to let Dan know that even though that was the direction I was heading towards, specifically because he was asking. As in, Now that you've brought the topic up I have to say something positive instead of just ignoring the idea because it didn't yet fit into my dependent-on-my-parents reality. So I was going to tell him that if it didn't work out, we wouldn't dwell on it. It wouldn't be like HE LEFT ME FIVE MINUTES BEFORE THE CEREMONY. We would just accept that it didn't work out.

But I didn't get to tell him that cause I woke up.

And now I've remembered one of my other dreams. It was about my house, and I suppose I was having a party because lots of people were crawling all over my house, only they were really walking and standing. So I should say that my house was crawling with young strangers. Actually I knew a couple from high school. Dave what'shislastname..... I know it begins with an L. C'mon! I had a crush on this guy for two obsessive years! Larkin. lol. I know it had an La in it. Anyway, he was there and he'd left his phone on the counter so I opened it up and snooped. Nothing fun there.

And then Mike turned up. It wasn't hostile but it wasn't friendly. He merely asked for his stuff back. As if when we broke up we silently kept each other's stuff and didn't say anything. Except, in real life I think the only thing I kept was his harry potter book. And he kept my roller blades. I don't think there was anything else. :p but in the dream there was a bunch of stuff at the bottom of my closet. We didn't ask for it back because we hadn't wanted to talk so that's why him asking now was unhostile.

I wondered if we would get physically close. It's like, when your body is so comfortable with someone else's body you fall back into that groove because it's so easy and it feels so good. I can imagine that that's one of the reasons why old couples sometimes randomly have sex. Even though they're not emotionally at a place where they can get together again, it's just so easy to do something that's so familiar to them, instead of try to form that bond anew, with a stranger.

So actually we did press ourselves against each other. I don't think we were kissing, maybe we were hugging. And he became hard, because that's just what it was like while we were dating. Always molded together with him always hard. Good times, actually.

And I remember telling him something specific about his stuff. Because he seemed to ask for "our" stuff. Almost like when you're married and you buy stuff together. I said that there was no "our" stuff, only his stuff and my stuff.

And I think that's about the end of the dream.

So lots of dreams about exes. I'm still kind of in a daze over the one about Dan. I still kind of feel like I'm there, as far as the setting is concerned. I don't feel like I'm in my own house. But I'm going back to sleep. I've slept since 8pm last night, but for some reason college is exhausting me this year. Not the work, just something about the two days that I spend there, it's making me very exhausted and all I wanted to do is sleep for a long time.


Ring around the suuuun, we're having lots of fuuuun, laaughing, plaaying, we all jump doooown.

Okay, that's what my mom made up to replace ring around the posie, because that song is morbid. So it's the same concept, holding hands and going around in a circle and then falling down.