relapse

Longest string of neglect on this bad boy yet but I guess I finally have something worthy enough to record. I was thinking about what neglecting to write in a journal one has promised oneself to keep when I was on the bus to class the other day. It essentially means that the days that you don't write in it are so filled with banality and triviality that they aren't worth remembering. In fact, they're worth purposefully obscuring and forgetting. But enough thinking about that, because today is worth remembering.

It's worth mentioning that the econ exam that I crammed for went well and I ended up getting and A- on it. I'll take that any day considering the exam only had 25 questions, missing two is fine in my book. And today, out of the blue, both Romelie and Monisha decided it would be a good idea to try and hang out with me.

I don't understand what it is about me or my persona or whatever that makes other people have epiphanies on the same day causing them to try and reach out to me. It seems to always happen that I'll go on a streak of not having any human contact whatsoever before arriving at a crescendo where everyone wants to spend some time with me. It's a strange phenomenon, but oh well.

Time with Romelie was surprisingly refreshing, and I finally sampled the sandwiches of the Bistro, something I've wanted to do for a very long time. I don't think I'm completely crazy when I say that Romelie may have had some feelings for me at some point. If not now, at least during the brief period that we talked all the time at the beginning of the year. After I asked her about her boyfriend a bit at dinner, I ended up telling her my story about the near hook up with Anitha several weeks ago, putting some humor into it. She replied by telling me a story about a guy who she made out with only weeks ago, when her and her boyfriend have been together for months at least.

Was she trying to tell me something? I was surprised that she would be so cavalier about telling me about things she did with guys other than her boyfriend. Life confusing I suppose, but I really liked having a friend here and I think there was a good connection there. I came back and considered cruising some porn sites to kill time before I went to bed, but decided that I really didn't have a desire. The stuff on the internet really can't beat the thrill of relating with women in person, and the girls are never as beautiful and enticing as real life is. Once the illusion has been broken, there's really no appeal anymore I guess. At least tonight there's not.

Got sick again, feeling pretty under the weather but I'm excited that Jake will be coming down tomorrow. Hopefully I can rest up enough tonight so that I can go hard with him and Chris tomorrow for his birthday. I'm also dreading dinner a little bit because I'm not sure Chris' dad knows about my transferring. He'll probably try to throw some money at me after dinner if the conversation comes up, at which point I don't know what I'll do. My life is usually full of these kind of ridiculous entanglements. We'll just have to see what happens I guess. Still crossing my fingers and praying that I get into Michigan. Also looking forward to spring break up in Maine, a great idea that my mom had, of all people.

I'm glad I have one parent who is in my corner, even if I can't relate to her on some levels. Family is extremely important, but it's hard to still feel those connections after you have something as earth shattering as a divorce. I still feel those connections with my dad's side, and that's something to really be cherished I think. I feel selfish for not sharing the same kind of feelings with my mom's side, but even God preferred Abel I guess the saying goes. Today was noteworthy, and I hope my days continue to be so.

perseverence

Nothing on my mind tonight except the big one: econ exam tomorrow. After staying up for hours and hours, I think I have a grasp on economics. Hopefully it won't leave me in what's left of the night, I'm going to need to sleep now to cut my losses and give my brain some rest. Tomorrow I will continue to review, and I'm half confident that I'll dominate this bad boy.

In other ongoing news, still itching to hear back from Michigan, but only if the results are positive for me. I think I may call my mom and have her ask Dennis to pull some strings for me. Best to cross that bridge when I come to it; one battle per day is all I can limit myself to.

tired, stressed

Michigan is getting close enough to taste and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I get in. I had a great conversation with Vu today at the expense of studying seriously for my Econ exam tomorrow. I guess Peter Olson might call that my opportunity cost- HILARIOUS.

Reading about auteur theory for film class, something I educated myself about a long time ago and a theory I hold close to my own heart. Everything here feels so recycled lately and my heart is just rushing at the possibility of release or a way out of here. The thrill is gone now, and I need to resituate myself.

I know there's a higher power up there, call it God or whatever you want to. What I don't know is how much influence he or she has on my life directly, but I'm willing that power with every fiber of my spiritual being to open some doors for me. Every part of my life is vibrating pretty violently right now and I need things to clamp down into place, at least some number of them.

I used to be such an old hand and picking up starting over but I lost the skill. I'm not so sure I want to keep doing that anymore. I've got friends at Michigan, a wide network of people who I like and have truly grown to care about. All of those people have friends who I'm sure I'd be able to make friends with. I've been there and done that when it comes to scrapping years of relationships and starting over clean. I was finally in a groove in high school and it was time to move again. Maybe if I can get back in that groove I can find myself again.

I'm not supposed to get my hopes up, but I am. I'm hoping with everything in me that something or somebody can feel how bad I want this. I'm rehashing but that's the pattern of my life it seems- everything is a rehash to some degree or another anyway.

sedation

I've noticed that when your mind is under the influence of drugs, it's hard to think about the big picture. All I can do is think about the here and now. I'll start by saying I went out to a party with Scott tonight.

On the way there we talked a bit about Indiana, school, and life in general. I never thought I'd have as much in common with someone so different from me. We got to the party and started drinking some extremely flat beer. Max from our floor came up to us and told us there was a better mix we should be drinking: Kool Aid and Xanax. I had a few cups and now I'm feeling appropriately bludgeoned down by the synergy of the alcohol and pharmaceuticals.

I left Scott at the party because I wasn't feeling the scene. I find that whenever I approach the edge of the social cliff with drugs and or alcohol I end up retreating. One solution is more drugs/ alcohol, but I don't think all the psychoactive chemicals in the world could take me out of my own mind. What I really need is some therapy.

More and more I'm beginning to question whether the partying scene is for me. After a while I start to see my self-laceration more clearly; I've been theorizing about self-laceration lately. It's a pretty natural human action, but I think it's a way of coping with the dark corner of ourselves that we can see plainly in the dark but never in the light of day. I can drown my fears with booze or whatever else, but nothing can mask the deep roots that create the need to drown them.

I'm moving in a slow-motion train of consciousness right now where I can't remember what I've written before, but the underlying theme is staying with me. I'm sleepy now, so I'll stop this soon. I'm listening to Radiohead right now, and it's absolutely transcendent.

More and more I'm beginning to feel as though transferring into Michigan is my only hope for redemption. I want to be surrounded by real things, real people and smart people with ideas. Here everyone is cold and distant and more often than not I feel alone. I feel warm and sleepy right now but these things never last.

I want to meet girls, sure, but I want to do it on my own terms, not in a fleeting moment of heightened awareness (or lowered, depending on the drug). I would like to be able to walk up to women I found attractive and engage them in conversation. I know I have something worth giving, but then again I don't find anything in myself worth liking. There are people at Michigan who love and care about me though, and maybe having some real human relationships would do me good.

There's not much worse than feeling like you're fading out. I feel like that's something I've been doing since I emerged from the womb.

dead horses

It's Friday night and I should be doing something but instead I'm sitting up late again. My feelings haven't changed too much and I feel weird chronicling my every waking moment and thought even though I guess one of these days something interesting is bound to happen to me. The law of averages would say so at least.

Finally saw "The Wrestler" today. I'm not sure what to make of it so far which is an open-minded way of saying I was a little disappointed. I think depression comes from dullness and lackluster experience. So I'm not depressed yet officially but it's definitely in the mail. This is an ongoing process- I'm tracing my feelings back in my mind and I'm starting to see the cyclical pattern going on here.

The movie didn't offer much in the way of a ray of light at the end. Rourke's character was condemned by Aronofsky as fuck up with no hope of redemption, and so he decides to go out in a blaze of glory by returning to the ring for one more match where he's doomed to have a heart attack. At the end he does what he wanted to do, but only because he can't survive in the real world, so in essence his whole life is compromised.

Lately when I look back at who I was as a kid I like myself a lot more than I do now. Somewhere along the line I lost myself. Now I feel like I'm just holding the steering wheel while I wait for the real driver to get situated and take the wheel again. It's like I'm occupying my body in place of an essence or spirit that has other things to do and needs me to take care of its body while it's gone. Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe that's where depression comes from- you realize that you do have a purpose, but it's not an important one. I guess we're supposed to create our own purpose, but I can't think of anything that's worth doing lately.

aliens at night

Night is a strange time because I feel like I belong in it while still staying alienated from everyone else who's asleep already. My enthusiasm has completely dampened from just yesterday; I tried to bring up screenplays to Chris today in a text but he didn't catch my drift and I didn't feel like pushing it at the time because I confronted myself with all the logistic issues.

My body doesn't feel good lately. My eating routine has become horrendous, a pound of reheated hot pockets a day and maybe a bagel, maybe some other junk food all eaten at strange times throughout the day. Right now drinking more pop, probably forming kidney stones in me as we speak.

I'm at the crest of the hill right now but I'm not enjoying the sights from the top; it's like I've been on this ride for as long as I can remember and I want to explore the rest of the park. The sun is hiding behind clouds now, but I can tell it's about to set anyway since the night has twilight about it. I'm weary of what I know, and I need a change.

It's weird that every story about alien abduction happens at night- or rather, I guess it's weird that I've never thought about it in such explicit terms before. Night is an alienating time, I need to do something. After everything that's already happened though, how does anyone start to do anything anymore?

surge of enthusiasm

I can't believe I watched a four hour documentary about Kevin Smith today, and was actually fairly entertained by it. The more I think about my misgivings about the future, the more I become inspired by indie filmmakers. Smith made a movie for 28,000 by maxing out a bunch of credit cards.

Men like this got into filmmaking because they wanted to sit around behind a camera with their friends. I for one have never been happier or more excited than when I was sitting around with my friends in our houses, shooting short movies and having crappy special gore effects and terrible story lines.

I think this could be real. I have an interest in English, definitely- a pronounced interest even, but I think I really might have a passion for filmmaking. It's frustrating and time-consuming, and it's against my anti-social nature, but I think it's a passion that needs to be reawakened. Right now I'm just rocking in my excitement.

weariness, renewed

I'm exhausted- I probably shouldn't keep staying up so late to write these. The blogger clock is way off too, because its 3:14 in the morning right now even though it will say I posted at 11 or something.

I've been batting around the idea of calling Chris and asking him if he wants to help me work on a screenplay, make a real effort at it this time. He would never admit it but I made Chris love movies the way he does, and I think there could be good creative synergy there. We used to just go out with a camera and wing it. We're used to writing our screenplays visually, shoot a shot, figure it out as we go and edit it up later but I'd like to take a stab at doing it right.

But I'm also weary. The weight of such a task is pretty daunting and who knows if he'd even want to do it, or if we could get it started. That's half the battle- plus who knows when he'll be around. I'll probably think it over for another day, while I keep thinking about a way to make some cash.

My best thoughts come at night right before I drift into unconsciousness. It's a shame that I sleep on the top bunk because it makes it hard to jot things down up there, plus I'd wake Phil up if I turned a light on. I've been good about consistency here so that has to count for something, maybe I can channel my waking and drifting thoughts if I adjust my sleep schedule. Maybe I should start drinking coffee like it's methadone in the mornings, bet that would help get my brain flowing.

What my mind needs now is some rest, but my spirit needs some kind of release. My body also needs rest. Lastly, my head needs a haircut and I need to get to sleep to amount some motivation.

wish fulfillment, woes

What do you do when you don't want to do anything? Is it every teenager's natural inclination to sit on their ass and waste away? That's what it's all about lately, all I'm good for is for writing good enough for assignment and dreaming big, but my dreams are like the rainbows you see when light hits an oil spill.

I'm frustrated. I started trying to write a screenplay the other day to start to develop a knack for it, but these first few steps have been pretty shaky. The thing I'm most passionate about is movies, nothing else in my life can hold a candle to that. I have encyclopedic knowledge of them so maybe that's a good sign of what I should do with my future.

I like writing too, but I've never been a "writer." How can I compare to even the artistic kids from my high school who've been stitching chapbooks together since they were in diapers? I sometimes wish my parents beat me as a child, or held a gun to my head and classically conditioned me to be talented at things.

There's nothing more terrifying than a completely blank canvas and no creative restrictions. It's worse when you don't put anything on the canvas and then someone starts taking brushes and colors away.

I'm 18 and I have my whole life ahead of me, but I feel like I'm 35 and still living with my parents or something. There are no women in my life nor any strong possibilities on the horizon. I have no desire to pursue or hone my abilities to pick up women, or to do much else with my life.

It's important to note that I'm not depressed- this is me revving my wheels in the mud and not getting anywhere, sinking deeper. It's like walking slowly into a brick wall over and over everyday- there's no pain there, I just can't get around this wall.

The first scene of this screenplay I was trying to write wrote itself, but it's ripped completely from my memory. Plus I reread it, and it sucks. It doesn't sound like a movie, it sounds like real life which I discovered today isn't even that interesting. Life becomes interesting when it's filtered through a lens- that's why storytelling works, its through a mental lens.

I can't caricature my life, but I need to. And I'm bad at writing about things that I don't know, and all I know is what I've lived, so I'm at an impasse here.

I'm looking at my classes and trying to peek into my future. I'm trying to stare down my fucked-up family life and poor social skills. I'm staring into the abyss, as Nietzsche once said. My circumstances have changed, and I'm currently experiencing an upturn of expectation. In literature this is called irony, but I can't see the humor.

Not all kids my age feel aimless and ambitionless, so why do I? Does everybody go through this aimless, Dustin-Hoffman-in-the-Graduate philosophical wandering or is it just me? Am I a pessimist, a cynic? Do I need therapy or just a kick in the ass? I have no idea.

end of the line; human drama

I didn't keep to my system as expected and dropped the ball for a couple days but it's time to put my two cents in again.

Today all the financial issues came to a head and I stopped avoiding asking my dad about college payments- as expected no help was received. He seems to forget that he promised to put me through school. But, somehow he liquidated an 80 grand fund that had been put away for me so we wouldn't be at such a juncture- such is life.

Somehow though the verbal sparring with dad was quite a relief. I'm not sad or mad that he peddled away practically a million dollar fortune, and I'm focused on what I need to do now. I think it's time I started take my writing to the next level, because if I plan on spending money and having free time I'll need more than just a 9-to-5 grind where I make nothing an hour and piss my whole summer away.

As for next year, at this point I'm not even sure I'll be able to afford Michigan or State, regardless where I get in. I'll still fill out the FAFSA and do as many Fastweb essay scholarship contests as I can, so hopefully I can get a Big Ten education rather than waste away at WCC for God knows how long until I can save enough money up to transfer. I'm staying pretty positive though, and hopefully I can use this to beat some ambition into myself.

I've got my back against the wall right now, but in the past I've always performed best under the greatest amounts of stress. I only really become aggressive when I have a reason to be, so hopefully my brain can serve me well enough to start brainstorming some ways to make some cash. I'm going to get a Big Ten education and save enough money to do graduate school. Hopefully I'm going to look back at this as a turning point rather than a downhill spiral. Time will tell, but right now I want to hit the ground running.