well shoot.

this all just went from bad to worse.

i need to learn how to not give a shit about what people say or think about me.

I'm about 30 seconds away from a meltdown.

So excuse my frustrations. I'm so much less alone when I'm home from school, but I feel more lonely. Maybe I'm just tired and that's what's causing all this pent up emotion. Maybe it's the lack of people that really "get" me. Maybe it's even just the thought of having to spend all day tomorrow at a preservice meeting for work with a whole bunch of people I don't really know/can't really relate to. Maybe it's this feeling that I'm just used and needed when it's convenient. Maybe it's an accumulation of all the times I've blamed myself when I really have the right to get mad at someone else.

But I miss my roomie and my friends at school. I miss my best friend a whole lot and I don't even know when I'm going to see him again. I feel a teensy bit broken. And I'm all out of tape.

Eyes on the Future

I think sometimes, I forget that there is no rush on living. My perception between today and two months from now is easily skewed. The way I do something new now most likely will not be the same two months from now; the way I feel now may not be how I feel two months from now. If something's hard now, and I just give up and only think about how hard it is...well in that case, it will be the same in two months. Make sense? Maybe not. Let me try an example.

I just got my first car - a super cute 2001 red Honda Civic EX...manual. I don't know how to drive stick shift yet. But my thinking was, "Whatever, everyone says it's not too hard and I really want to learn anyway!" So I got in that car the first day and had SUPER high expectations...but I couldn't drive it. And I was soooo frustrated. I kept thinking, "I'm never going to be able to drive this thing. I can't even get it to go forward 50% of the time, and when I do it takes me forever. How am I supposed to drive this in traffic with other cars around and keep up to speed with everyone else? It's so jerky and I'm so slow at it and this seems pretty much impossible." Cue those sort of thoughts on repeat, over and over...

I sat down after a venting of my frustrations with my mother and she pointed out that this was my first time ever behind the wheel of a stick-shift. It wasn't supposed to be a piece of pie. But just because it sucked now didn't mean it couldn't get better. Not everything is just going to come to me like a gift, but if I keep practicing and don't give up after one crappy time, I'm never going to get better and I won't ever be able to drive out in the real world. But if I get back behind the wheel every day and practice, it's going to start getting easier and easier. Of course right now I couldn't imagine driving in typical traffic, but two months is a long time to improve. I'm already better - it's still frustrating as hell, and I still have a hard time getting started, but today was better than yesterday, and yesterday was better than the day before that.

I can't rush it. I just have to experience it. I think I can apply that in other aspects of my life too. I may feel one way about something, but if I acknowledge that it has to change, and continue to acknowledge it daily, it will change. But I'm no miracle worker, things like driving a stick shift or becoming less dependent don't happen over night. I have to remember that there is no rush. It will happen when it's meant to happen. And sometimes, I may not even notice the improvements until I look back and see how far I've come. Patience has never been one of my greater virtues, but maybe it's about time I learn some to save myself some of the frustration.

Dumb Girls and Stick Shifts

I dated a boy. He was broken up with his girlfriend. When we were done with our thing, they ended up getting back together. She doesn't like me. They both work at the pool now. I rotated next to her at work and was a little bit less than pleasant because I don't particularly like the way she treats him, and I also hate it when girls say to their boyfriends, "well you can't be friends with this girl anymore because I don't like her." Today she decides to send me a text to make sure we're "cool" and that what's happened in the past won't "interfere with work or anything." I simply said back "No, nothing will interfere with work," because that's true, at least on my part. I usually try not to let anything from my personal life work it's way into my employment if I can help it. Anyway, she says "Alright, thanks. You're not mad or anything right?" and I just didn't respond. What reason do I have to be mad? I don't think I'm entitled to be mad about anything in this situation.

But I also don't believe I owe her any type of communication. I come to work, I do my job, I pay as little attention as possible to my coworkers while I'm there. I'm not there to make friends or be friends with the people I work with. I don't need to be on great terms with everyone, I'm fine just where I am. And I'm a little bit ticked that she used our work-based website to get my phone number to text me about something like this. Really? Stop being insecure, don't be a bitch to your boyfriend, and maybe you wouldn't feel like you had to get fake-close to someone you don't even like so that you can try and have more of an "in" to check up on him. Reality check - I don't do the whole "fake person" thing. Leave me alone and I'll leave you alone. But don't kid yourself and expect me to stop being friends with him. I'm not a pushover and I'm most definitely not afraid of you.

Also today I got my beautiful car. It's a stick shift. Needless to say, I can't drive it yet. But people kept telling me, "Oh it's not that hard, you'll get the hang of it real fast." I know it's only been one day, but I can tell you already those people obviously don't remember the first day of driving a stick or are super-human. I was absolutely mortified, my expectations were too high, I was frustrated, embarrassed, anxious, and all around just pissed. And driving with my mother obviously just enhanced all of that. But now that I know what to expect, maybe I can go into it with a different set of expectations tomorrow - and by a different set of expectations, I mean no expectations whatsoever. I love that car, and I will learn to drive it.

But, I ran away from all that poop and had a good night with a good friend, for the second night in a row. I might be treading on some dangerous waters...but I think that's a risk I'm just going to have to take. Plus, I could be misinterpreting the vibes I'm getting anyway, I'm real bad at that.

Hopeless

Every once in a while, I just get completely overwhelmed with the state of the world and I realize how hopeless it can seem. With all these people going hungry every night, all these natural disasters robbing people of everything that means anything to them, all these criminals, all this pain and hurt and misfortune in the world...it really hits me that it would take some sort of crazy, huge miracle for all of that to just go away. It really does seem hopeless. It's very discouraging. All I can ask is why? Why do these natural disasters have to rip through countries, destroying homes, communities, families, lives? Why do people have to cheat, steal, lie, murder? That part mostly just disgusts me. It makes me ashamed to be a human.

And I can't make that all go away. Sure, I can change a couple lives, and I hope that I do. But in the grand scheme of things...? I can't change the world. As much as I try, I can't. Sometimes I even feel like changing the life of one person is so far out of my reach.

I never used to see the world's problems as my own, or even really acknowledge that they were there. I never used to feel like this. It feels real heavy.

human = bush...?

Flying over Arizona in one of the many flights and means of travel I've taken part in over the last week, I was struck by how small I am compared to the rest of the world. I mean, I've never been one of those people who thinks the world consists of just their city (well at least not for the past few years), but wow. We flew over all of this completely uninhabited land where I realized I was about the same size of that one little teeny dry bush I could see down in the sand. In the grand scheme of the whole WORLD, that's my size. That expanse of land, without housing, visible animals, people, or structures of any sort, was bigger and seemed to stretch farther than anything I could mentally wrap my brain around. And that was just a few miles of Arizona; just a few miles of natural desert.

Isn't that a little bit discouraging? Not necessarily that I'm so small. But that there is so much of the world that I'm probably never going to get to see. I want to see so much, I want to do so many things, I want to read so many books...but all of those possibilities are endless. There's no way I'm going to accomplish all of that in just one lifetime. That's the discouraging part. Sure I do feel small, but I don't feel insignificant.

I think I'm just itching to do something different. Something interesting, something new. It's sad to me when I travel to another state, or even just another city in California, and I'm amazed at how much that thrills me, how new it all seems. I've never even left the country. And that is becoming increasingly irritating for me. It's like I have this unquenchable thirst to learn more, about everything in the whole world, by traveling, reading, writing, listening...and traveling to a big city or another state only satiates that thirst temporarily. But each time that thirst returns with a vengeance, stronger and more demanding than before. I just feel stuck.

Early Morning Thoughts

You know what's scary? Letting people into your life. And I mean really letting them in, not just telling them that you do, or letting them into certain parts...I mean letting them in on the whole thing.

Number one, you're trusting them with so much information that they could easily turn around and back stab you and make your life a living hell with if they wanted too. That alone makes it so hard for me to do this with people. These are the people that you tell everything to. I have two people like this in my life. But even with them...as much trust and love I have invested in them, it's still a little bit terrifying to think about how much power they could have over me. It's hard to have that trust, when the first instinct is to push everyone away. Sometimes it feels like every day there's some sort of battle over trusting or mistrusting, even with those who have never done anything to be worthy of mistrust.

Number two, how frightening to have some people that mean that much to you in a world that is terribly unpredictable? I don't think like this all the time, I rarely do, which is why the idea always catches me off guard. But when you're so close with people...to the point that you feel as if they are an extension of yourself, you gotta know it's going to hurt if they were suddenly not there. I have a hard time feeling that dependent on someone else, or knowing that if they left or if they weren't there, that it would hurt me that bad. That's what I have a hard time with...worrying that somebody I've invested this much is is going to find me replaceable and then I'll just be shoved aside. But I guess even thinking someone would do that goes back to the mistrust I said in number one.

This is a little bit of a ramble. Forgive me, it is 1:30 in the morning. It's this new theory I have: if I don't want to have a dream, or I'm afraid one I had the night before will come back the following night, I keep myself up as late as I possibly can. So that way, I'm so exhausted when I go to sleep that I'm out like a light and I don't dream. Or at least I don't remember them, and I'm okay with not remembering some of them.