and which flavor of sad are you?

Almost everyone I know makes me just a little bit sad.

Actually, every single person I know makes me a little bit sad.

One day, when I find the person who doesn’t ever make me sad, not even a little itty bitty bit sad, I am going to lasso them and haul them home with me and keep them forever in my closet or basement or somewhere else handy.

But that may make them sad.

Which would make me sad.

God damn it.

Here is an awesome new pair of boots that I have ordered.

They do not make me sad. So far.

For now, I am neutral about these boots. Fairly anticipatory, even, but prepared for disappointment.

The Possible Return of Meaning

I’ve been going through a weird phase with music for the last few months. None of it has meant anything, I haven’t been able to relate to it. For someone like me, that’s excessively strange. Normally I am finding meaning in every song lyric, relating it all to my life, relating it all to my experience. And for the last few months I’ve been wearing out the skip button on my iPod, not feeling anything about anything I heard. And I think it’s been a symptom of a larger disconnect in my life, a sort of emotional time-out from everything. There’s been so much going on, so many things to process, that I don’t think I’ve let myself feel most of it, just because there’s not enough computational power in my emotionally stunted introvert’s brain. Sometimes I can either do or feel – and I’ve been doing a lot of doing.

I’ve almost been afraid to be alone, to sit down and think, to stop doing and digest for a minute. I don’t think I wanted to know what I’d discover. But my brain – despite copious amounts of denial and overprocessing and rationalizing and frenetic activity and drinking and running around and never shutting up and refusing to be alone and refusing to stop stimulating it – seems to be finally sorting things out without my help. And as I reach some sort of understanding, things are starting to mean things again. Music is speaking to me again. Emotions are slipping through again. And that is painful and shitty and sucktastic, and it’s also pretty fabulous.

There’s a line in a Laura Veirs song called “Cast a Hook in Me” (see – I told you I relate all my own experiences to music)

And at night a fractured star fell
And pierced right through the thick of me
I cried out in pain and joy, yes
I’m not dead, not numb, not withering

and I love it because yeah, sometimes pain is all you feel, but the pain means you can at least feel something. And if you can feel something, sometimes you’re going to feel joy. Sometimes you’re going to feel contentment and happiness. Maybe not right now – but eventually it’s got to be joy’s time to come around.

At times I wish that it wasn’t so hard for me to deal with everything. That it didn’t take me so long, and it wasn’t so painful and confusing while I do it. But then I think that I am feeling it harder than most people, that I take more away, that I learn more and then I use it to understand the world better and understand myself better. I wouldn’t trade any of my experiences because I do learn so much, and I don’t want to give up anything I’ve ever learned. Not really. And no, my way of being is far from perfect, but it’s far from the worst I’ve seen either. So anyway, here’s to the possible return of meaning in my life, let’s see if it sticks around.

Can we be absent anymore?

Once more Cary Tennis’s advice resonates with me. Not only because this guy is a whiny dipshit (I am hoping he’s young, and hasn’t figured this stuff out yet because he’s young, and not because he’s always going to be this whiny of a bitch.) who violated his wife’s privacy, but because Cary takes such a mundane event and strip mines it for the one true thing it really addresses: the fact that it’s almost impossible to be gone in this world. And while I like that my people cannot often be gone from me, I do sometimes wish to be gone from them. So it’s a conundrum.

My wife doesn’t miss me! | Salon Life

…the very definitions of presence and absence have changed; absence has become contingent; presence has become inescapable. No matter where we are, our virtual selves remain under surveillance.

Until recently, one could actually achieve absence. One could go somewhere and be gone. The traveler would send postcards. The postcards would have pictures of beaches or statues. They would be eagerly awaited and gratefully received. Absence was simple. It was an absolute condition, soon relieved by presence. Presence was also an absolute condition.

No more.

Now absence and presence are contingent and variable, matters of degree and form. A person may cease responding to e-mail and achieve a sort of absence although he or she remains in place. Or a person may go to India and yet be as present as always.

A version of us is always present. We are over-connected. We spy on each other from afar.

The quality of our absence is thus degraded. Absenceness is a precious resource we are fast running out of. Soon there will be nothing but presence. We will wish we could go away but will not be able to. The pain of constant presence will be too much for some to bear; it will be a torture like that of sleep deprivation. There will be a rash of virtual suicides, in which people disconnect themselves and appear to be dead. We will have virtual funerals for them. This will all come in time.

via My wife doesn’t miss me! | Salon Life.

Holy fuck, I hate parties.

Went to a party last night, which reminded me most painfully how I hate fucking parties. A bunch of uncontrolled drunken shirtless strangers, shooting fireworks out of their mouths and cavorting homo-erotically around a stripper pole… excuse me for not seeing the fun there. It probably didn’t help that I only knew about 10% of the people there, less and less as the night went on. And then I am in the corner having a political discussion with a stranger at 4 a.m. and thinking it’s the first interesting conversation I’ve had in the last hour. Everyone else is just rubbing up against each other sweatily and talking about how drunk they are and what a great party it is, and I do not get it at all. I suppose I should have just gone home – but since I have such an strange way of perceiving social events I am never sure if I should force myself to do these horrible-seeming things or not. Most things seem horrible and strange and upsetting to me at first, and then sometimes they get better. In retrospect, this particular thing was never going to become superbadgirl-friendly, and I should have cut my losses and run at 1:30 or 2:00 when most of the people I knew left. But I stuck it out, and learned a lesson.

In other news, I think I am going to have a party for my birthday. Surely I can’t hate a party at my own house, where I control the guest list, like I hate other parties – can I? Stay tuned.

She did not wear lemon

Lemon drops:

# 1/2 shot Absolut® Citron vodka

# 1/2 shot sweet and sour mix

They make me feel pretty happy, and it’s possible that they help me act pretty badly. They also make me a bit wobbly on my feet, apparently, but no tumbles were taken. Anyway, despite temporarily lifting the ban on shots at the bar (it all had to do with a bet with Jessica on the name of that Lord of the Dance guy, which I totally knew but she didn’t believe me and then we bought each other shots so we each had two, so I guess no one won. Or we both did?) last night wasn’t an epic fail. I felt it when I totally started to go around the bend, and switched to water.

And I am finally coming to accept that I should and do and will make my own choices, independent of the opinions of those around me, as I am a grown woman. And I may be hurting myself, and I may be making wrong choices, but at least they’re based on how I honestly feel and what I honestly want, rather than an amalgamated, group-think decision on how I should live my life. I just have to stop talking to people about my shit and asking their opinions, because their opinions confuse me, and I am going to do what I damn well please anyway.

Why is so much of being an adult isolating yourself in these ways? I wish I was the kind of person who could be open and sharing and trusting and tell people things and hear their thoughts in response and then take those in and in a reasoned manner assess them and use them to help me form my own opinion.

Instead I am a sorry, confused, distracted kind of person, who takes in the opinions of others, gives them all equal weight with my own, throws them in the Cuisinart that is my mental process, and then gets a hot mess of disordered irrationality out the other end. It’s no wonder I so often find the things that I am forcing myself to do are in direct conflict with how I feel and what I want. And that’s my own fault too I guess.

Anyway, fuckit, I guess that’s what alcohol is for. Letting us give ourselves permission to do what we want, giving us something to blame after when it doesn’t work out.

And oh lord, how this is not going to work out.

Protected: The Depersonalization Disordered Thinking Feeling Related Anxiety Syndrome, Chronic Rapid Onset Variety Show

This Just In

I think I can officially say that there’s pretty much nothing on the earth that I can’t make myself feel guilty about and/or responsible for. Everyone’s everything? My responsibility. Somehow in my head it’s all under my control, and I am meant to make it all feel better, make it perfect, make it right. Can’t turn my brain off, because it’s always searching for ways to make everything OK for everyone. Either that or it’s seeking ways and means to flee all these people and their voracious undemanded demands.

It’s the most horrific combination of narcissism and martyrhood. The better I know you, the worse it is for me. The more the things you want are in conflict with the things my other people want, the worse it is for me. The more the things you want are in conflict with what’s good for me, the worse it is for me. The more unscrupulous and/or oblivious type of person you are, the worse it is for me.

This is my brain on people

It’s just not safe for me to interact with people, seriously. Any day now I am going to accidentally spontaneously invert my brain, trying to make so many simultaneous things work out for so many people. It’s gonna be messy.

I think I am going to go sit in the bathroom and stare at the wall for awhile.

PS: Whatever it is you need or want from me—especially if it’s for me to STFU and chill out already—I just don’t think I am going to be able to deliver.

You really couldn’t have it more wrong.

So this is two weeks in a row that my Friday experience has very negatively impacted my Saturday experience. Which makes me think that there are some changes needing to be made.

To be fair, I was pissed as all hell going into Friday, so it’s not surprising that I didn’t enjoy myself, but still I might have if everyone I ran into wasn’t such a total douchebag. I was edgy and irritable, I know, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was insulted in about 397 ways, and had to deal with some major fucktwats.

Seriously, when you’re talking to someone and they keep telling you that maybe you should shut up before you hurt their feelings, and then they are forced to say, “OK stop. Just stop talking now.” but you keep talking… then don’t be acting surprised when they have a negative reaction to the rest of what you’re saying, and possibly try to run you over with their car later in the evening.

And don’t get that shocked look on your face like “Why is this girl trying to run me over with her car?” Because you should intuit that shit way before I am forced to mow you down.What am I, made of some kind of non-feelings-having substance? Is it seriously OK to say anything to me, and expect me not to care? I am so tired of being polite, I am so tired of being nice, I am so tired of peacekeeping and making allowances for things people say to me – I am so, so tired of it. There is only so much a girl can take, OK? I know I am smiling on the outside, but on the inside I am six inches from stabbing you. Continue reading »

Today I am grateful for

My head has been all over the place lately, and today it seems to have settled back somewhere near my shoulders. Despite the way it must sometimes appear, I actually prefer feeling somewhat sane and unlike I am about to have a freakout any minute.

My head is resting firmly back on/near my shoulders. I can't say the same for this poor unfortunate Nordstrom model from another planet. (via Photoshop Disasters)

So that means today I am grateful for:

• Good friends who will listen to you rehash the same event three times in one day, and still pick up the phone when you call the fourth time.
• People who don’t always agree with my negative observations of myself and others, and tell me so.
• Being told twice by two different people that sometimes women have the right to play the douche card for no reason, and that it’s not the end of the world when I get jackassy.
• People who are laid-back, roll with the punches and can take things without falling down/apart. I have  a lot to learn by observing, since I don’t feel like I can absorb things with the equanimity I desire.
• Drugs that let me sleep through the night
• That February, that bitch ass month, can suck it and die in LESS THAN A WEEK. Fuck your cocksucking ways, you horrible, horrible death-month of disaster.
• Hot water
• Warm blankets
• Dog kennels

That’s all!

F**k a bunch of insomnia

Out until 2:30 last night, in bed by 3:00, up by 7:00 – not tired. Fuck that. How can I fail at something as fucking FAIL as sloth, for fuck’s sake? I would have liked to stay in bed all day – wake up all surprised at 4pm like “OMG how did it get to be so late?” and then wander around in my PJs eating cereal and watching TV. I am attempting to lead a dissolute kind of lifestyle up in here, people. Instead I am up at the asscrack of Saturday dawn, freezing and aggravated. And this is on the back of getting pretty much no sleep at all this week, and not being able to nap yesterday afternoon.

I had a shitty night last night – completely of my own design – and plan to have an even shittier day today, resenting Mardi Gras parades and the drunken, teeming throngs of fuckwits they represent, resenting MyTodd™ going to that stupid party I don’t want to go to and making it so I have nothing to do tonight, resenting myself for not wanting to go, resenting this stupid-ass holiday for existing in the first place and basically feeling like the wrong sort of person in the wrong sort of world.

Because I can take my own happy ass out and do whatever the fuck I want without a security blanket – I know I can. But I don’t know if I will, even though it would make me happy to do it. And I hate my whole everything for that even being my god-damned dilemma. I am too old and too smart for this bullshitty way of being. So I resent me and the world and life too. And I know that sucks and is a shitty attitude and I should be a different, shiny happy kind of person. But at the same time I am sick to fucking death of people asking me why I am not a different, happy-shiny kind of person.

I am JUST NOT.

BECAUSE, that’s why.

Sometimes people throw away happiness with both hands because that’s really all they can think to do with it. Maybe happiness is heavy, I don’t fucking know.

Edit: After talking to a friend of mine, apparently things are not as much my fault as I thought they were, and other people are also much to blame. This soothes my savage insomnia beast a little. I don’t know if it’s harder to assume everything’s my fault, or harder to realize some things can’t be my fault because they’re out of my control.

Damien Rice – Woman Like a Man (listen at blip.fm)

You wanna get boned,
You wanna get stoned,
You wanna get a room like no one else.
You wanna be rich,
You wanna be kitsch,
You wanna be the bastard of yourself.
You wanna get burned,
You wanna get turned,
You wanna get fucked inside out.
You wanna be ruled,
You wanna be fooled,
You wanna be a woman like a man,
Like a woman like a man.

Protected: You are totally jealous of my wicked-awesome action plan

Cary Tennis is talking to me. Again.

In response to a letter-writer who complains that he’s losing it in public in response to relatively minor, everyday annoyances, Cary writes the following:

I do not see how anyone with a critical intelligence could go through one day on this planet without being appalled and outraged at the world’s failures to live up to our expectations — and to its own potential! But the world ignores our memos pointing out its manifest sluggishness to correct deficiencies, its shortsightedness in planning freeway exits, its seeming indifference to quality control and continuous improvement, and the lack of proper signage in public transit stations. The world stares back at us like a sullen teen, reveling in its own incompetence.

and after some other commentary that I found annoying because it’s true about how we have to suck it up and deal with incompetence and inconvenience without losing our shit because that’s what grownups do, and fit-throwing belongs purely in the realm of the childish and mentally unstable, he continues:

Such is life. You encounter resistance and setbacks and howlingly insane incompetence and covert resentment from service personnel and all manner of cultural revenge and subterfuge and psychological sabotage and you have to take the hits and pick yourself up and keep moving toward that hill. You have to recover and keep going, with a smile. It’s never going to stop. It’s not going to get any easier. We have to surrender, shake it off, remember what we’re here for, and get the job done.

via I’m losing it in public, a Since You Asked column by Cary Tennis | Salon Life.

And my whole question is: What job that we have to get done is worth all this noise and bullshit? What of any import could any of us possibly have to do which could make up for all this crap? I don’t think there’s anything worth it. I am all for smiling and putting on a brave face when there’s a monumental task to be accomplished, and sucking it up and soldiering on in service to some great cause. But what about when it’s not in service of anything? What about when it’s just plain old regular boring life? And the only reward to “soldiering on” is getting to go the grocery store to buy food we don’t want to prepare or eat?

What if the only reward for our patient navigation of the highways and the car-repair place and the gas company’s shenanigans and our neighbor’s insanity is… getting to take a hot shower and then go to work? What then? What happens when the “reward” is in no way worth the effort? What happens when you realize the return on the investment you’re making in your life is just about the same as the net value of your home now that the housing market has tanked?

There’s sucking it up and soldiering on for a cause – which I understand. But what if there’s no cause? Then what do you do?

I remember talking to my therapist once about something my boyfriend at the time was torturing me with. Something he expected of me that I didn’t feel like doing. Going out to some work dinner, or something involving being around people, if I recall correctly. I was angry, and overwhelmed and I didn’t want to do it and I didn’t want him to guilt me into having to do it.

I said something to the effect of “…and I just can’t do it, not on top of everything else!” to which she replied “On top of what else?”

That took me by surprise. I mean obviously there’s a giant “everything else” involved in my negotiations with the world that she should have understood about. So I thought about what “everything else” meant. And then I told her “On top of being awake and alive.”

It was one of those crystallizing moments that make therapy so worthwhile, when some truth you didn’t know was so self-evident steps blinking into the clear, clean light of day. For some of us, the strain of being awake and alive and navigating the world is already so overwhelming that any additional unexpected event is just too much. Some of us wake up at the end of our ropes.

So yeah, maybe losing your shit in public is childish and unhelpful and damaging to children and a bad way to be. And maybe we should all just shut up and soldier on and remember the mission or whatever the fuck. But for some of us, there’s no mission. And for some of us, leaving the house this morning was already sucking it up and soldiering on. So I while I endeavor to lose my shit as infrequently as possible, and usually confine my shit-losing to private forums, I am just not going to be that hard on myself when I do lose it.  My grasp on it was already fucking tenuous.

Whatever it is, it’s impending

One of the main reasons I have a blog is so I can keep track of all those things that seem so intensely important on any given day, but then rapidly slip away into the cavernous past, never to be thought of again. Because those things are shaping me, in ways I don’t realize and won’t remember.

I know that the things that happen to me, combined with how I react to them, make me who I am, and that refusing to examine them imperils my (admittedly already anemic) growth as a person.

However looking at the past me – the one who doesn’t know what’s coming me – is sometimes sad and scary. This time last year I had doom barreling down on me like a freight train.  A world of hurt and misery and despair. And I was just bumbling along, miserably oblivious to it.

I know that we’re not allowed to know what’s going to happen because if we knew the future we’d probably all just give up and stay drunk 24/7.  But reading back on the musings of that person who couldn’t sense serious bad getting ready to happen—it makes me terrified of what else is coming my way that I can’t see. I have no idea what I am counting down to right now. What I will look back on later and think “Oh wow – that was only three days before… three weeks before… a month before…”

I don’t want anything else to happen. I don’t want tomorrow. I want to go sleep in the closet with a baseball bat and a book of spells and wallop anyone who comes near me.

Somewhere there’s sun
and you don’t need a reason.

- The Weepies, Little Bird

Antisocial Networking

People baffle me. Particularly the way that they use social media/networking, and how they conflate the various sections of their lives online. Don’t get it, can’t understand it, possibly never will. I suppose I can be considered as keeping kosher with my personality – the different areas of the life I lead (work, family, friends) must be kept from touching and mingling with the other parts, on pain of my feeling nauseated,vaguely sinful and ashamed.

I don’t want to go out for dinner and drinks with my colleagues. I don’t want to run into my employees while out at the bar. I don’t want my family to meet my friends, I don’t want my online friends to know my offline friends. No political and religious conversations with my coworkers. No family at work, no coworkers in my online social network – no crossover is what we aim for.

That’s why Facebook befuddles me so hard. All of you people using your real name and real picture and posting links and comments on each other’s walls whilst joyfully commingling the dairy and meat of your social circles… just eww!

For one thing, that content is never going to go away – so how can you possibly be yourself? The real me and the work me and the casual friend me and the good friend me aren’t the same me! I don’t talk about the same things and in the same way to any of those audiences.  And I really don’t want future employers (or my mother) finding my online crazy foulmouthed ramblings. And if you think Facebook’s privacy/security is actually secure – well you’re wrong. They’re in the business of monetizing your personal data. Hackers and employees’ lost laptops aside, that vast stash of raw data they’ve accumulated is going to be mined. Believe it.

Nonetheless, I am not immune to the pleasures of finding old HS friends online and laughing about how you always hated them, and how dumb their family photos are. I have old colleagues I’d like to stay in touch with, but not share my intimate life with. I am interested in a purely voyeuristic way in linking up with old college buddies to see what they’re doing now. So for that you have to use your real identity, so they can find you and spill all their crazy at your feet.

But I also want to interact authentically with my actual monkeysphere. And to do that I can’t be the “real” me, because all the old colleagues and HS idiots and college buddies are not privy to the real me. Eyeballs off.

So it’s a conundrum, sort of. Which I’ve solved this way:

If I’ve ever worked with or for you, or gone to school with you (HS or college)  – if you’re my sorority sister or someone I met at a seminar, you’re friended under my real name acct. and chances are you have no idea who superBadGirl is. (which means you’re not reading this, so fuck off anyway.)

If I’ve ever gotten drunk with you and/or sent you filthy text messages, if I met you online, if we talk/chat on a regular basis, if I’ve ever cried on your shoulder, or made you look at LOLcats, you’re connected to my superBadGirl account.

They’re both real, they’re just two halves of the whole real.  Of course, some of you poor saps know both halves of me, and I had to choose one for you. So if I had you connected under my real name and unfriended you today, it’s because I have you on my other account, and those two cannot commingle without me having to call a rabbi.

The rest of you, who mash everything up together into a big old squishy life-burrito and then happily munch it all down… just eww. It makes my brain itch just thinking about it! Don’t come crying to me when those pole-dancing photos of yours come up in your job interview 10 years from now.

and shut up about it already.

OK, seriously? For the last time? People at the social places I go? I am NOT SAD. I am NOT DEPRESSED. Stop asking me what’s wrong, there’s nothing wrong, my FACE JUST LOOKS LIKE THAT.

My neutral expression = frown/sad face. If I am thinking about something and not talking/drinking, I am going to be frowning. My mouth naturally turns down at the corners, it’s doing it right now. Consider it a birth defect, whatever. I also tend to like to lurk in dark corners, people watching. Unless you see the razor out, I am not planning to sit over there in the dark using my wrists for cutting boards.

Here is an actual sad face, for reference

I accept that you think I ought to be sad. But I’m actually not. Sometimes I just want to sit on my own and watch what’s happening, rather than participate. It’s called introversion, and i know it makes you uncomfortable. Get over it.

Introversion isn’t always the same as anti-socialism. Introverts are social in a different way. It’s not a wrong way, it’s just a different way.

And really, stop asking me why I am sad, because you’re making me paranoid.

In any case, even if there WERE something wrong with me, “Hey girl, you need to come play some darts with me and my strange group of shady looking friends you never met before, won’t that be fun?” Isn’t going to be the solution. I don’t even like darts.

In other news, I actually had a pretty good time last night, everyone was relatively nice and the whole place felt gezellig. I didn’t realize that everybody in the world had a birthday in December, but it seemed like everyone at the bar was celebrating their b-day last night. I was able to get there early enough to buy a round for the whole bar in celebration of my raise without bankrupting myself (although I skipped buying one for that pinball playing guy who was there in the corner because I can tell he doesn’t want to talk to anyone. So there. See how it’s done?) I was pleasant to all my secret nemeses, and ignored completely my non-secret nemesis, because I really wish he would fall into a vat of mixed petrochemicals, and I refuse to pretend otherwise.

Today = errand running with MyTodd™ and maybe the craft show at Mad Art? Then this crazy bacon party tonight, and I still don’t know what to bring.

I think I might just paint a big fucking joker smile across my face though, so people will stop asking me what’s wrong with me. They’ll be too scared.