sooooooo here i am, in the throes of yet another inquisitive and dark period. like i said before, i've stopped hoping that the last time i thought about it all was the last time i ever would. i remember when it all hit a few years ago that i thought i'd get through that patch, and be fine! and was repeatedly dismayed that it DIDN'T WORK THAT WAY. i still beat myself up over the fact that i can't let go, that i can't sequester that information and those memories to some inner lock-box. because it's not like they do me any damn good as they are, and it's not like i'm ever going to be able to do something definitive about it all. and what, am i supposed to talk about things? to who? who really wants to listen to me dredge up shit that shouldn't be relevant to my everyday life? who wants to hear me whine? because really, that's all i've ever felt like, is like i'm whining. put it this way: imagine an emergency room: i'm a broken finger in a room full of heart attacks and gunshot wounds.

and even the few people i might be able to talk to without judgement, i can't. because i can't let people see just HOW i work and how i feel. so i replay it all in my own head, over and over. lately, almost every day. (though of course, i'm fairly sure this will pass in a few weeks at most.) it doesn't do any good, it just pisses me off. that son of a bitch is never going to pay for what he put me through. (which i think is why i hope for karma, so much.) and what kills me is not KNOWING, knowning whether or not he did the same to another girl, or worse. what if my inaction caused worse actions? i mean, it happens all the time. and really, when someone fixates on another person like that, they're clearly not sane. in all likelihood, he's done it before or he'll do it again, but i'm probably not going to find out either way. maybe it was just me. who knows. i wish i did!

it just irritates me that he manages to stay so damn upfront in my head, or rather, it irritates me that maybe i'm not strong enough to deal with it, that my weakness allows me to perpetuate this stupid circle of weird thinking.

i mean, how long has it been? since it began, about 6 and a half years, and since i left, about 3 and a half. i did the best i could, but i have never felt that it was enough. there's so much grey area. but i can't lie, i want revenge. but i'll probably never get it, and who knows if i'd be strong enough to try.

but lately, i think i've gotten better at ignoring things, for the most part. when some feelings/thoughts arise, i can usually manage to keep them under, even though those are the sort of "breakdown" feelings, like my life is out of control, like i'm one step away from losing total control, that if i let myself feel any of anything fully, i'll go under. and sometimes i still feel like a stranger to my family and old friends, whoever was around me when things were going down. those few years radically changed me, and people didn't seem to notice too much. i can't even remember who i used to be.

but this is definitely bordering on rambling, i am very, very worn out. this has been a ridiculous year, i shouldn't be tired, i barely got out of bed today, shouldn't be tired.

i am praying for a reprieve, i'm waiting for this to lift, waiting for a time when I feel more normal again.
yawwwn.

OKAY.

Wednesday morning, we woke up at 3.30 am, and had a pretty succinct travel day.
Caitlin took us back to her and Jesse's place in the 9th ward, and it was a cute little place, grey with bright blue trimmings.



high high ceilings, wall-length windows and such, a very bohemian pad so to speak. the first day, jesse and caitlin had to go do shelter things, so we slept and relaxed for most of the afternoon, listing to the booty music played by the almost-all-black neighborhood. it's very poor in the 9th ward, and demographically, pretty much all black. the neighborhood kids out playing everywhere, mom cornrowing her son's hair across the street. but what struck me was, all the residents were really polite and kind. no hostility, no reverse rasicm, it was a nice reprieve from the general hostility i've encountered from black people here up north. and i can honestly tell you, that's the truth, wherever i've lived.

though, on seeing a car full of five white girls, we did get called "snow-whiteys" and i got ogled by some random lil-jon wannabee. i mean, grill and all. but it was still pretty funny.

we went out to the bars the next night, had a good time, but it was totally a prepster uptown neighborhood, and one girl's name was legitimately BITSY. which we found hilarious, because we'd been cracking jokes about how muffy, bitsy, coco and james prescott the 14th were sure to be there in khakis and buttondowns. we were RIGHT ON. abercrombie, guess, and ralph lauren, OH MY. it was honestly, THE most heterosexual bar i've ever been in. (but that makes sense, seeing as I go out in fredonia, where indie is in.) i mean, muffy had shorts on that made my underwear look modest. bitsy was the spitting image of blair waldorf from gossip girls, and THEY HAD GOLF ON THE TV.



the NEXT day was the first day of SUPERLOVE at the superdome. VERY cool. lots of co-woman love. it was refreshing, we put our posters on the memory wall, bought shirts and totes, checked out the (somewhat heavy heavy unsettling) artwork and vagina quilts, checked out the fair-trade, independent shops up top, and listened to speakers from the baltics, congo, afghanistan, iraq, (and more) and eve ensler herself, and there was even a panel of men on what it means to be a feminist man. THAT was an interesting point of view that I think more people need to be open to. we went home in the afternoon, saw the shelter jess and cait run, and went to the french quarter, walked around a bit, skipped bourbon street since it's pretty skeevy, and bought dinner for jess and caitlin.

and the neighborhood kiddies came over and played with the cats and on the guitar and violins.

and the next day we woke up and went down the the lower ninth ward, over the bridge. and it was just destroyed, taken over by nature. rubble, empty foundations, debris and broken fences, abandoned schools. three years later, and the new orleans government is hell bent on not rebuilding, but taking over and screwing the black population over. they want to repaint the 9th ward as middle-class non-minority. nice, huh?

and then we made our way to the second day of superlove, where we heard people like jane fonda speak, and listened to some of the cast of the L-word. It was pretty awesome. AND of course, that evening was: the star-studded performance of the VAGINA MONOLOGUES! which was amazing, of course.

after, we all met up with some of jess and cait's other friends who were staying with us and walked home from the superdome. yes. you heard me, from the superdome out to the 9th ward. took us almost 2 hours, and we walked along the Mississippi a bit, and stole beignets from a well-known tourist restaurant. well, not so much stole, since only one of the friends and cait took em, and they were already paid for and discarded. but YUM. deepfried pastry, LOL.

the morning after, allison had to fly out, and we slept in, and relaxed most of the day, until jesse came back and asked us to help move a woman out of the shelter, miss kim. miss kim had never had her own place before, so it was exciting. super sweet lady, it was a good time. then we went back to the shelter, and put the first coat of paint up in the kid's playroom. after THAT, we went and had THE most delicious indian food ever, at a hare krishna temple. this temple always has a free meal on sunday nights, so basically, all the radicals and activists in the area come out. it was delicious, and very interesting. the people were so kind, it was refreshing. apparently, the hare krishna religion dictates that no person withing a ten-mile radius of the temple go hungry, so they do their part by having this free meal. and it WAS DAMN GOOD.

hare krishnas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Society_for_Krishna_Consciousness

and then that evening, we packed up and smoked from a hookah, which was actually not bad, and drank ginger-mint tea.

and then in the morning, we flew home and the trip was over.

i've got pictures!
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2048035&id=44200057
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2048854&id=44200057

it was a good time, full of activism and humanity. i enjoyed myself. it was comfortable.

warning: handle with care, corrosive and prone to explosion when near irritants.

what's it going to take to make me feel happy?

i'm thinking that i'll move away after graduation to a place that has no connection to my family, it's history, or anything or anyone. a brand new start. of course, i'll still be in contact with my dad and friends. it'll just be a new place to discover, with no familial connotations. it's not gonna be paris anymore. i'm holding out for seattle, or spain maybe. we'll see.

on the upside, i finally got to give the pretentous fucking asshole in intaglio shit today. im on a roll this year.

and why hasn't nancy grace died yet?

i'm going to the gym tonight, maybe the endorphins will give me a little help here. i'm pretty miserable, and it's just kicked in recently. I haven't been conintuously low and cut off for this length of time in a while. you can read it in my entries i think, the lack of inflection, etc. that and my itunes is locked on ani difranco.

my fortune on facebook was "call your mom". i wish.

i've read a story about this little girl. adorable, isn't she?

her body washed ashore in a storage container a few weeks ago. her mother and stepfather killed her, beating her with belts, holding her head underwater, and throwing her across a room. how can people do these things? she looked like an absolute sweetheart. tell me, should i go about life, switching on the hills, painting my nails, tivoing the victoria's secret show, or is it alright to give a shit anymore? i can't paint my surroundings in pastels and chick lit.

well i've got my kitten, i guess she's my daily ounce of joy. right now she's being a cuddler, flipping onto her back, batting at my hands, kisses. that's something.

I think that I have lost my self for a little while. I can't reconnect. I walk around in a blur. People drift past me, I drift past everything. Stomping along the death march to classes, work, home. I don't remember how i was before, I think there was a respite there for a while, but I can't reconnect. Today I needed a break from class so I walked out onto the patio in Roc and stood under the roof. I watched the rain, and how the drops fell in a pattern so it seemed like the window panes in the distance were shifting back and forth. I watched people walk under the bridge by Jewett. Their legs were all dark and I couldn't focus. I didn't feel like I was there at all.

Like I said, I was just kind of sad in Spain. It didn't really fix anything. I can't get past the physical. I can't entertain the emotional, the fun. I was there, I did this, I took pictures, I ate places. Did I have a wonderful time? I can't process that anymore.

I feel like I'm far away, there's nothing I can anchor myself to. Because no one gets this. And I don't want to be mean. I just can't be how I was, at least not for a while. Maybe eventually. I don't know anything anymore. All plans, carefully laid plans have been blow out of the water, napalmed, atom bombed. It's just chaos now. Quiet chaos, though. Sneaky, silent, back door.

'How vast was a human being's capacity for sufering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much you could hold, how much you could care.'
-Janet Fitch

this apartment weighs me down. it's full of intensity, baggage. sometimes it feels like a scene out of a movie, a girl with her hands and feet tied, anchored to a cement block under water in a lake. drowning.

i feel out of place wherever i am. although i felt spain was one place i blended in. people looked at me like they couldn't tell if i were native or not. a lot of old men stared at me on the metro too. but that isn't the point.

here i can sit on the chair in the living room, surrounded by my roommates, and feel as if im not even there, i fee all of the baggage surrounding me.

i am tired of trying to make the best of a shit situation. i want to be one of the ones who aren't in a shit situation for once. who am i? how am i defined, if not by my life's events? and what are they? who cares, why does it matter. it doesnt. know one gets it, not even me. i don't understand anything anymore. if things take effort, i can't mentally handle it anymore. i am really burned out, spent. stretched to the limits and i can't give anymore. and i don't feel like "working on it", faking it, going through the motions. putting on a show. where the fuck does that ever get me?

i can't see the sense in my life, the story, the story line. it's so far off the tracks i can't even SEE the tracks anymore. there's no one who gets this, if i talk, it sounds like whining. and every other damaged person around me is so dead set on appearing tough and strong all they preach about is SUCK IT UP.

well i'm fucking tired of that. so i guess im gonna let myself stew in this. swim around in it. dwell. its too hard to apply myself, work through it. im letting it go. i don't have the energy for the effort character changes call for.

this new woman seems to have made her way into my house. pantene shampoo, white wine and smirnoff in the fridge. everything is about "some friends". NO DAD, it's your girlfriend. missy. who you were with as your marriage died and your wife entertained suicidal ideas. slowly made plans, asked questions.

my mom is dead, my dad has a girlfriend. there isn't any need to console him, bake casseroles and drop them by the door. he's got his comfort.

nothing is ever straightforward here. GODDAMMIT.

i just wanted an easy semester.

i've been reading white oleander. it always resonated, reminded me of my relationship with my mom. even more now. its been one of my favorite movies for years.

"The worst always happened. Why did I keep forgetting that? Now I saw this wasn't just a bottle. It was a door. You climbed through the round neck of the bottle and came out somewhere else entirely. You could escape. Cash in your chips. I looked into the jar of pink pills. I knew how to do this. You took them slowly. Not like in movies, where they took them by the handful. You'd just puke them up. The trick was to take one, wait a few minutes, take the next. Have some sherry. One by one. In a couple of hours, you passed out, and it was done."

I'm pretty sure this has screwed me up in a new direction entirely. And everything else around me hasn't changed. The people around me haven't changed. They still sleep fine, can still count on the family dinners with mom and dad. There are no Missys for them. No kalanchoes to plant on their mother's grave. They can entertain ideas of Mom and the grandbabies. They worry about assignments and road rage. And people don't want to see me wounded. They don't want to see me crying. They want me smiling, tough, taking it with a smile. They want to feel like their problems are bigger. Don't we all?

WELLLL fuck you. I don't care anymore. I'll break down in class if I want, I'll call you a cunt to your face. I'll throw things around and skip class. My life doesn't follow norms anymore. I stopped trying to force it a while ago. Have a merry christmas with mom and dad, your brothers kids, nana and the three dogs. I'll be here, decorating my apartment, convincing myself christmas is fine. I'll be here, with or without my dad. why does two seem so much smaller than three?

i guess i'll sleep. fuck homework.

i was in spain yesterday. and did it make me any happier? i think you can figure that out.

well, i wrote a letter to my mom's birth mother. who know's if I'll send it...not sure yet.

i just wanna know a little more about my roots, you know? and now mom's gone and i've lost that chance from her.

an up to date reflection on my trip in europe.

at gramma's, we talked more about mom. she said mom had asked her at one point whether people who committed suicide were still not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground. hello???? hint hint anyone?

and when mom was found, she looked as if she'd fallen asleep sitting up and flopped over, her feet were on the floor but her torso was on the bed. and there were pills ground into the floor, which probably means dad was right, and she smashed her pills up and swallowed them with water or something. orange juice or iced tea, knowing her. she hated water.

gram and gramps are going to do as she asked, and will have her headstone inscribed as she wanted it, but they can't get one yet because "the grave hasn't settled yet". how halloweeny does the word grave sound? i hate "death speak". "dearly beloved, here lies, r.i.p., passed away, lost on this day, celebrate the life of...etc".

ANYHOW.

the morning we left the hostel, we took the tube/walked over to the palace so i could show stacy something of english history, and wouldn't you know it, the queen herself is scheduled to come out and there's a huuuuge crowd. we wait around for a while, lots of cops and security, and eventually, a bunch or roll's royce's full of royals come flying out the gate in a motorcade. we think its the last of them, and flag down a taxi, and have our own ride in a real london taxi. and he takes us off past the palace again, and lo and behold the queen is just about to leave after all. i snapped a pic through the tazi window and you can JUST see her royal highness. haha. then we flew to paris, where security was a joke, just about non existent. there was a man, with a sniffer dog running about the airport.

paris was alright, there was a tranportation strike so the metro was free! and our hotel..well...cheap therefore eh. cigarette burns in the blankets, mildewy shower curtain, but a good location. plus you could see sacre-coeur down the end of the street. for dinner, we had street kiosk crepes with cheese and chicken, and a sugar one to share. filling, authentic, cheap. we perused the grocery down the steet for nibbles, too, and the french have a shitload of chocolatey cereals.

we woke up early to catch our parisvision tour, to discover it had been canceled due to the strike. so we rebooked for then ext day and found our way to the louvre to find it closed, so we wandered around paris shopping for a while. got coffee, lunch, found the discount district hehehe. we also went out looking for a specific restaurant we read about for an authentic french dinner and couldn't find it ANYWHERE. we found a little place instead, called les chant des voyelles or something like that. it was TERRIBLE. SERIOUSLY. middle school cafeteria food was never, EVER that bad. so we wandered back to the tube unsatisfied and $50 poorer to our hotel for a dinner of baguette, etc that we'd picked up the night before at the grocery down the street.

that next morning we went on our tour to versailles, walked around the grounds for an hour, waited in a sardine-can-esque line for half an hour with other tour groups from all over, an asian country and some ex-under the iron fist country. people were generally rude, pushy, and in it all to win it. but the inside of versailles..duh. amazing. stacy loved it. after, we had booked the day-long thing, so we and an older spanish couple went and had a french meal at an irish pub (?). pate, roast chicken and potatoes, mousse. and then we went on the historic paris tour, saw the sights from a bus, which seemed rather rushed and trite, and then we ended at the eiffel tower. stacy and i went to the tip-top, where surprise, people were rude, cut in line, pushed you around, and kind of ruined the experience. in general, people ESPECIALLY italian men, were jerks. rude, gossipy and inhospitable. the shoved, edged you out of lines, and it was a let down from the paris i experienced last time. and the metro- OMG. worse than last time. on one trip, a 13 stop, hour long ride to the bus stop, we were smushed in like you wouldn't believe. i couldnt breathe in normally. which really, was kind of expected, but man. WAIT for the next train, i promise its only five minutes away.

spain was the most enjoable. 50 degree weather, palm trees, gaudi, a smaller, cleaner city with a cleaner simpler metro system. and the people were all more laid back. and the hostel was AWESOME, except for the latenight bar music that blared. it was super clean, had CLEAN SHOWERS, clean new bunks, biiig lockers, personal lights over your bed, and the lounge/kitchen/bar had this paper lantern/morroccan theme. 4 computers with free internet (which were usually full). it was nicer than either hotel or hostel i'd been in. and the location..amazing. perfect. GAUDI'S casa battlo was about 30 seconds down the street! lots of places for food, liquor (YAY absinthe) and a tabacco store where we got ryan a spanish cigar. the first evening, we dumped our stuff at the hostel and went to El Poble Espagnol. It was a lifesized model village built for the 1929 Exposition, and houses over 40 different craft stores where the owners make the stuff themselves, and a bunch of restaurants. we had pizza at a random bar because the owner took pity on us when we came in asking if they served food. they weren't then, but he said he'd throw one in for us. MMMMM delish. Then, we went to drinks and a flamenco show at El Tablao Del Carmen, and had a pitcher of sangria. And then after, wandered home.

The morning after, we "slept in" till about 8 or so, grabbed some free breakfast, showered up, and took on the town. First, we went to casa Battlo, then, we went shopping and wandered up Las Ramblas. Lots of flower vendors, bought Lindsay a cotton palm seed, saw street performers and pet kiosks. After, we got lunch at a place I mistook for another, Stacy had chicken paella and I had spaghetti carbonara (ick) and wandered some more, went back to the hostel area, wandered into the liquor store and tabacco store, and went to lay down at the hostel for a while. Then, we moetroed over to Sagrada Familia and got in about 20 minutes before closing. Walked around, snapped some bad pcitures in the dark, and stood in wonder for a while staring at it. We walked around, bought a couple souvenirs for people, patches for our packs, and then back to passeig de gracia and got dinner at a spanish equivalent to subway. We went to the hostel, packed up, chatted with the nice women from cali, went to sleep after a while despite blaring bar music, and were woken up at 2.30 am by a pack of other americans. they came in, flipped on all the lights, talking and laughing loudly, unloading all their shit without any care in the world for the four other sleeping people in the room. stacy shut the lights off, and they turned them back on, and she turned them off again. after a short verbal spat with the assholes, i fell asleep again, and woke up at 5.30 to begin the trip home. the nice girls got up too, and we all quietly began the day, and we checked out. sadly there was no time to harass the douchebags who came in that night.

our flight to london from barcelona was delayed, so when we got to london, we had to actually run most of the time, at least a few miles all told to get through customs, luggage, security, and made it just in time to get on the plane, after much ado with the late check in, having nwa people jog with us to security, and people were very decent and let us un front of the line because our flight was leaving in ten minutes and we had to run another mile or two to get there. seriously, gatwick, die in a fire. you are too fucking long. anyhow, we arrive at the gate just as we heard our names over the loudspeakers, heaving and gasling for air, red and sweaty MMMM sexy. the flight attendants gave us water, and we had separate seats and the nice man next to me switched so stace could sit with me.

and after a long, 24 hour day, we collapsed at price street and slept. the end.

breakfast and xmas decoration shopping time!