Things I don't like.

Here is a list of things I particularly don't enjoy, in case you were ever curious.

1. Lima beans.

2. The ambiguity of dating someone new (not to be confused with the excitement of dating someone new).

3. This whole Lady Gaga bullshit.

4. Yellow-y light incandescent bulbs.

5. Large or weird-looking bugs.

6. Pit stains.

7. People looking at me when I don't feel like being looked at.

8. When I overcook my bowl of peas in the microwave.

9. Sitcoms where the fat husband has the hot wife. As well as sitcoms, in general.

10. My own complete inability to put my clothing away in a drawer.

11. People who respond to an either/or question with "yes". I.E., Me: "Do you want to go to the store before or after dinner?" My mother: "Yes."

12. Insufficiently sharp pencils.

13. Places that sell women's shoes, but only carry up to size 10.

14. A lot of things about contemporary politics and the state of the world today that would take a very long list indeed to describe in full.

15. Doing the dishes, unless I'm in a great mood and there's music on.

16. The feeling that the future holds many unforeseen and unfortunate events.

17. Finding dirty clothes intermingling with the clean clothes.

18. Moths in the house.

19. People who don't at some point ask "how are you?" after you have asked them that same question.

20. Not knowing when a text message conversation has officially ended.

21. Owning things that are supposed to be dry-cleaned, but not being able to afford dry-cleaning.

22. White people who think Japan is "fascinating," yet hold a slew of very stereotypical views on that same subject. Non-white people are also sometimes guilty of this offense.

23. The incredibly large amount of disorganized papers I possess.

24. Provolone cheese.

25. People who don't like tomatoes.

26. Blisters on the back of the heel.

27. Tripping on the cracks in the sidewalk.

28. Tripping on the cracks in the sidewalk, while someone is watching.

29. Hearing that an actor I liked signed that Roman Polanski petition.

30. Being unemployable.

31. Loneliness.

32. People who are really proud that they're meat eaters.

33. Knowing that my car will inevitably break down in a fantastic manner.

34. All the good shows getting canceled.

35. Losing touch with friends in faraway places.

36. Just about everything that has to do with menstruation.

37. Never, ever seeming to know where my keys are.

38. How in general adulthood seems to be about denying yourself small pleasures in service of a "future" plan or goal that might never come to fruition.

That seems like enough for now.

Failure!

Man. To avoid the continued blues tonight, I asked around five different people (consequently, just about the entire number of people I know in Los Angeles) if they'd like to hang out tonight, and all five were busy or had other plans or didn't get back to me. So now I have a continued version of the blues, going on from earlier today when I went to the ol' doctor's office and found out that my heart is acting weird. Not necessarily acting bad, but acting weird, doing some random thing that normal hearts do not do. I am, understandably, concerned.

This was my second EKG, by the by; the first one came about because a medication I was on raised my heart rate through the roof. Most likely, a different medication is now making my heart add in extra beats where no extra beats are needed. I won't find that out for sure, though, until I see a cardiologist next week. That is a scary person to need to see at 26.

Besides that, I have been presented with a new way to deal with all my myriad stresses and anxieties and bouts of good old-fashioned sadness. That way is to enter a program on campus that takes up 20-some hours of one's week with therapy of different sorts. It is really quite intense to think of going from 1, maybe 2 hours of dealing with one's problems in a clinical setting per week, to over 20 of those same hours. Hours talking with a doctor, with a therapist, in a group of similarly (or differently) mentally messy people. I feel very weird and, of course, apprehensive about going into this program, but at the same time my options feel pretty slim. I'm not "performing" in school, poorly or otherwise; just lately not doing any sort of school thing at all, which of course places me as an ideal candidate to be booted out of the university and onto my ass. Since I don't want that to happen, I have to be able to show the university that I'm making all good faith efforts to get back on my feet. On my brain's feet. Whatever. And this is apparently the best way to do that, to get back to a place where I'm doing work and feeling like a human being and not constantly down on myself.

On second thought, I don't think I have ever fully been to that place. So, you know, the idea of a "healthy" me is quite appealing but at the same time feels like a pipe dream. It's a place I'm in some way totally unfamiliar with. I've been anxious and nervous and self-deprecating as long as I've even had a personality.

So. Who is the Amy who knows what she is capable of, who goes out and does things, who is brave in the face of the world? Who is the Amy who doesn't worry about things that haven't happened yet? How am I going to become that lady?

Stress!

Things I am currently worried about:
1 - Paying rent in July.
2 - Moving for August 1st.
3 - Who will I be living with in this new apartment?
4 - Where will I be living?
5 - How will I possibly pay to move into a new place?
6 - Will I still be in grad school any more at that point?
7 - How will my brain get better if I am spending all my time doing low-paying jobs?
8 - Am I even qualified to do a job that pays more than nothing?
9 - When will the boy I like contact me again?
10 - Am I "trying too hard" to pursue someone when I am not "supposed" to do that?
11 - Am I wasting my brain, or is my brain wasting me?
12 - Why do I keep worrying so much about things?

I suppose this is an incomplete list.

introspective intuitive motherfucker.

I've met two people in the last two days who told me that they were happy with their lives and thus ready and unafraid to die. Makes me feel like a coward, but what sort of omen is this?

One of the same people asked me what my MBTI is, which is INFJ, which suits me so much it kind of freaks me out. He pointed out that less than 1% of the population shared the same personality type, and thus less than half of a percent of women, which made me feel a bit odd. The point being, that in a clinical or statistical sense, great swaths of the population will never be as introspective as I have to endure being every day. He pointed out something about online dating and dating in general, that most people will end up settling with dating the best person they find after a set period of searching. Which is so true for most people, yet so not true for nearly everyone I know personally, that it kind of shocked me. And left me thinking about what other habits I'm burdened with that others might find themselves completely free of. Empathizing with everyone all the time, even people I don't like. Giving my incredibly meager monies to Greenpeace and Children International (the latter, I won't be able to stop until that kid fucking turns 18, or I'll have to loathe myself forever). And especially, especially, seeking out and idealizing the sad and damaged people around me, seeing myself in them, wanting to comfort them and thus comfort myself of our collective existential dread.

What am I supposed to do with this weird package of traits?

Getting rid of the sweet things.

A lot of nonsense has been happening with my brainspace and bodyspace. I have a new psych and a new therapist, as well as some new medicine, which I just started taking two days ago. It's kind of a trip, starting over. I am in search of my brain's reset button, I feel like, as I am getting worse and worse at making myself do things that need doing. For awhile I have been sort of secretly convinced that I will fail out of grad school, for instance, and in a way have been conducting myself as though that were already a foregone conclusion. The new therapist etc is a step in the opposite direction, trying to direct my energies towards staying. Trying to rally my poor little broken brainspace.
In a weird move, while I am trying to do all this, I have focused in a lot on my weight and physical health. Three years of SSRIs have made me a plusher person than I was before, let's say. Maybe more than 20 lbs plusher. I'd like to reverse this trend, but it will be difficult...I've started counting the ol' calories though, and I bought a scale for the first time in many years. Oh what a wretched thing, to own a scale!
My biggest goal here is to stop sweetening my coffees and teas, drinking alcohol as much as I love to drink alcohol, and avoiding any kind of carbonation situation. This is terrible, because I am passionately in love with sugary sweet things...almost as much as I am in love with salty things. But, one step at a time. I want very much to feel like I can grab onto some part of my life that seems uncontrollable and establish some order to it. So this is where I am starting.

Correspondance.

I really miss knowing and talking to people, and I always wish that more people were around for me to know and talk to and befriend, but for some reason in general the people I've liked best in my life are unavailable to me. I feel as if I only know maybe 5 people left in the entire world, which is sort of hurtful and sad, like my existence is being erased. Many times, I've written emails to one friend or another who I cared a lot about and who happened to be particularly poor at responding to emails, begging for details about their life, to have those emails go unanswered. I understand why, but I don't understand why. It's as if I've spent my entire childhood, adolescence, and nascent adulthood trying to convince myself I have friends.

I am particularly lonesome for a lot of things I can't describe. If I were a better, more organized person, I would be reading school books instead of writing this letter to no one. Much, I guess, as my friends read their books or do their work instead of writing letters to me. I am drinking an alcoholic drink from France that is called "pastis". It is a pale delicious yellow color like cloudy lemon juice, but tastes of black licorice.

Silly little things.

Logged into amazon to track a shipment, and found the same 4 things being recommended to me over and over again: Mad Men, diabetic compression socks (bought once as a christmas gift for my aunt), books about Shinto, books about Alain Badiou. Nothing else, just those four things, over and over again. This is what I am, according to consumerism!

Right at this moment in time, I am trying to make myself do the work to complete my MA. This should not be very hard; I have to refine/rewrite three papers, then give these three papers to three professors who seem kindly disposed towards me. Not bad, but I do not seem to want to do it. Instead, I seem to want to sit at my computer all day, laughing at funny things on the internet, taking time out to play videogames on the Wii that a friend has lent me. My startling lack of productivity makes me feel as though I need to live with a real adult, a parental type, who can give me instructions (or orders, really) on when to do things, and how to do them correctly.

Whoops, now I have the hiccups. Anyway.
I think I really miss, on a subconscious level, that feeling of living with someone in a collaborative environment. One in which you do the dishes regardless of who dirtied what, in which you eat meals together, in which you have conversations about how your life is going that last longer than five minutes. That would be nice, yes? Then the person you share your space with would also be someone who looks out for you, and vice versa. Living in the normal roommate situation is not nearly as homelike.
This definitely struck me as I was having trouble falling asleep last night (I have trouble falling asleep every night, as it turns out), and I was looking at the walls in my room and feeling a sort of disgust for them. As though it was so disheartening to still be within those walls. But, after a year and a half living in this apartment, shouldn't that bedroom and those walls feel homelike to me? Shouldn't I be comforted by them? I certainly don't have any ideas about where I'd rather be sleeping.

Maybe it's just that the walls are still a very hideous beige, that I dream of repainting. And that the room is a mess, with my clean clothes still heaped up in either a laundry basket or within/on top of the suitcase I brought home with me from my trip to Florida, nearly a month and half ago. Whoops, again!

Another humorous thing is that within the last month or so, more than one person has told me that I have labored/weird breathing, either while asleep or awake. Now I get to try to go to the doctor and figure out what all that is about, because I don't have any real idea, although it is true that I am easily winded and often sleepy. I already take pills to make my brain chemicals work, to fall asleep at night, to supplement my body with the vitamins I am worried it is not getting from my food, and I even take a pill that is supposed to keep my skin from breaking out so badly that I have to refuse to leave the house. Oh and I spent years in painful orthodontia, have worse vision than a bat and no sonar to augment it, had surgery on my right eye last year and need to have some kind of laser treatment on the left, have kind of a fucked-up spine that needs a chiropractor's touch, and my hair has some unfortunately-placed cowlicks. What else could possibly be wrong with my body! Apparently, even more things.

The sun isn't out today either. Boo to that! Maybe quarter to two is a good time to start drinking?