Sometimes A Girl Just Has To Eat Chocolate

Sometimes a girl just has to eat a lot of chocolate in a short space of time.  Specifically, I ate half a bag of peanut butter M&Ms on my way home from Smith's today (Smith's is 4 blocks from my house. Seriously).  I'm stressed.  It's bad.  I feel like I did las summer- like I'm careening toward a gaping, grasping, fiery chasm, trying desperately to cling to anything familiar in the hopes that it'll stop the madness.


I've been shaking lately.  The tiniest hint of a nervous situation makes me tremble like a bad case of the Parkinson's.  And today I couldn't sit still.  It took every ounce of my not inconsiderable self-control to stay in class.  All of them.  All of my classes.


The thing is, I don't even have a legitimate excuse.  I mean, I had a run-in with the UVU administrative process, but my pile of good things is definitely taller than my pile of bad things right now (did I mention I bought the paisley soup bowls? Did I mention I eat out of them every day?).


So why can't I breathe?


Rough start to the semester.  I hope I get a grip, and soon, or this is gonna be a long 14 weeks.

~~~

Recorded 9/12/11

Where Are Those Cement Shoes?

The parking services dudes at UVU are notoriously angry and they give tickets for breathing in the wrong parking stall if you're not careful. I am, therefore, always suspicious when I've parked illegally and managed to get away without a ticket.

Yesterday. I was running late for Practicum cause I had to get gas on the way. I parked in a faculty parking space in the lot south of the annex. When class was over 25 minutes later, I approached my vehicle cautiously. There was no yellow paper on the window- a good sign (my brother has an unpaid ticket from before this car was mine). There was no strip of white paper under the windshield wiper. I was safe? So I climbed in my car, put the keys in the ignition and hesitated... WHAT IF.

And, really, these thoughts went through my head in a mostly serious way.

WHAT IF the parking services, tired of people getting away with the parking equivalent of murder, upgraded from BOOTS



to CAR BOMBS?!

They certainly wouldn't leave a nasty note on the window telling you that your car would blow up if you turned the key. They'd do it mob style.

They didn't catch me in the annex parking lot, or even at the library an hour later. But I'm on to you, parking service mob dudes. I am hiring someone to start my car for me starting the next time I don't have the right sticker in my window.

Everyone else, don't be surprised if you see something like this on the news:

You've been warned.
o.O

Harumph

I am not in class right now. I should be. I should be in Movement for the Actor by John Grahm. I should be stretching and viewpointing and creating shapes and contributing to the energy of the class. But I'm not. I couldn't make myself go, even after John told me I'm not going to fail.

I have a paper due in Philosophy. I couldn't write it when I sat down to it last night. I probably won't go to that class today, either.

I thought I had come so far. I felt better about school this semester. I took easy classes, ones that are exciting and fun and about things that I love. I haven't had more than two panic attacks a month since January. So why is it too much all of the sudden?

I am not yet strong enough to do this on my own. And I feel so alone. I feel so overwhelmed and helpless and so very alone.

I don't know what to do.

The Girl With Four Names and Fair Self Esteem

I'm in this brilliant creative writing class this semester, and our first exercise was a character sketch. I think I should probably explain that several years ago, I saw a documentary about rats. I learned that an adult female rat, on average, has sex 27 times a day. So I pictured this prostitute who looked like a rat. And I finally got around to writing about her because I was working on my character sketch last night while watching Hoarders on A&E. One of the hoarders hoarded rats, and they said something about rat babies, and my brain went on this five hundred thoughts per second sequence and I remembered that prostitute from so many years ago. So.. I wrote a character sketch about her. Here it is!

She has four names. She’s twenty-six, five-foot-four, thin, shrewd, with short, listlessly brown curly hair and bulgy pale blue eyes. When she stands in the harsh gleam of the lights near the river in Manchester, New Hampshire, she looks sallow and wan. Most people don’t realize she’s just as colorless in the middle of the day. When she’s upset she rubs her lips together- sucks them in over her teeth and slides the bottom one slowly from side to side- and her eyebrows point upward. But she doesn’t let herself get upset too often.

She was raised in a strict Catholic home. She served a brief sentence in a boarding school. After just one year, her parents decided they didn’t want her so far out of range of their careful, watchful eye...s.

Most people who grow up in New England suburbia move away from home the second they come of age. She stuck around. Here’s the thing about the prostitution: it wasn’t about rebellion, or poor self image, or drugs. She just found that she liked sex and figured she’d make a career out of it.

She likes the color pink, can’t stand the smell of oranges, wears a size six shoe, has had twelve boyfriends, and wants to name one of her kids Arthur. She likes sushi. Her favorite article of clothing is this brown fur coat that she wears everywhere. It’s probably the source of all communicable diseases on the East coast, but she won’t let it go for anything. Somewhere between its matted, coarse exterior and the worn so long it’s soft again lining was the source (or maybe the store room) of all her confidence.

So anyway. It isn't much, but I think it's a good character sketch.

I Didn't Want to be Left Out of the Blog Party

It seems like every single blog I follow has put something up in the last six hours, which means that I should do so, too.

So.



Yeah.



Yup.


This is what I'm doing instead of securing my college degree:
http://www.addictinggames.com/homeruninberzerkland.html .


You'll see why.

A Financial Update

August 25: "A correction was sent to CPS on your behalf. Check back."
"Free Application for Federal Student Aid Waiting for correction."

I did check back, and you told me just to wait it out.

August 30: "A correction was sent to CPS on your behalf. Check back."

And I thought, 'Well, at least the FAFSA has finished processing.'

August 31: "A correction was sent to CPS on your behalf. Check back."
"Free Application for Federal Student Aid Waiting for correction 04."


Eff my liiiiiiife.

We've un-progressed. We've regressed.

I might never get my money.

They're going to give it away to some awful person whose parents cut them off because they've been going to school for twelve years now and have accomplished nothing.

They're going to run out of money and the $2,750 I was expecting is going to be $65.38.

I'm going to end up living in a cardboard box on the road behind the GT.

I'm going to eat worms and bird eggs and flies. I'm going to make my clothes out of leaves and grass and pine needles. I'll make friends with rabbits and bears so they can cuddle with me and keep me warm at night. I'll sell my soul to the Theatre department to pay for tuition. I'll sneak up behind people who are studying in the library, render them unconscious with the forest ninja skills I'll learn from the bears and the rabbits, use their book for my home work, and then put it back so when they wake up it'll be like some awesome yet terrible dream that may or may never have happened. They'll write articles about me in the UVU newspaper. Three years from now, I'll be a Lifetime Original Movie. Tourists will flock to the road behind to GT to get a glimpse of me, to take their picture with BearRabbitSoullessTheatreGirl (which will be the title of the film). And after all of that, I'll still be paisley soup bowl-free. Because my loan money will never come.

I am destined to die, feeble and despondent, in the arms of my best bear friend, having never found true love because people will be repulsed by my stench.







These might all be legitimate concerns.




Homeless at Library Square - Salt Lake City, originally uploaded by inneri.

Watch for me.

Jeff Winger?! What Are YOU Doing Here?

I was reading someone's Facebook status today, and it read something like, "We choose our own happiness" and so on. This gave me pause.In my patriarchal blessing, it says that I have a naturally cheerful disposition. this is a statement with which I have struggled because sometimesI'm just sad. It's completely overwhelming, it's out of my control, and it just happens. So this is what I think:

I think that to some degree, because of our agency, we can decide upon happiness. This is not a blanket statement- depression and sadness and anger are a pat of being human. We should not deny our emotions, negative or otherwise. I believe that when all is said and done, we can look back on our day or our year or our life and then we can decide whether we will be happy, whether we are proud of the decisions we've made and whether we can move forward with hope and optimism.

I have chosen to pursue happiness, which well may be

the same thing.

Maybe wanting to be happy coupled with righteous desires and a pure bit of faith is all we need.

Maybe it's more like a habit, a skill developed in trying times.

Maybe it's even less definable than that.

Maybe, and I think this is true, we have glimpses of happiness here and won't really know it until the eternities.

I think I got off track. Choosing happiness is a selective thing, as it were. That's all I had to say on the matter.

Change of tack!

But I do want to talk about the utter ridiculousness of my school, before I forget again.

Sometimes, not for the quality of the education but for the administrative process, I feel like I attend Greendale Community College, Joel McHale-style.

This feeling was affirmed by the first week of school run-around, the presence of the Human Being,

and the millions of fliers the school printed out to announce its impending paperlessness (see Community Season 1, episode 10: "Environmental Science"). Also, I seem to be the only person in my Math 950 class who didn't flunk out of the third grade.

I never know how to end these things.

~~~

Recorded 8/26/10