Someone needs to start an ad campaign for compassion.

Normally, the fact that it seems the planet is populated by no one other than self-centred, bitchy people who think they're funny would make me sad. Today it's just making me angry. Really, really angry. Who do people think they are? Do they seriously think their nasty, sarcastic comments come close to passing as witty? They seem to think so, they inevitably give a little snorty laugh after their oh-so-clever retort and generally seem pleased with themselves.

The part that makes me angry enough to have to grind my teeth and clench my fists to keep from hitting them is the idea that something justifies it. "I'm having a bad day, I just can't be bother with formatlities." I'm sorry? Where do you get off thinking that your meagre problems justify your throwing empathy to the wind? I can understand someone who is stressed enough that, even though they're trying to be decent, just has a moment where they snap and something nasty comes out. That I can justify, but the idea that just because your life isn't perfect you have any right to make another human being feel bad is so egotistical I'm actually disgusted by the arrogance. People's entire families die horrible, painful deaths in front of them, and then they lose their job and their house and their boyfriend runs off with their best friend and still you find them with a strained smile on their face and a sense of humor. I don't care what's happening in your life, there is never any excuse to treat someone badly. I'm furious with the people I see every day who seem to think they have an excuse. I haven't got the bitterness in me quite yet which would allow me to just tear a strip off of them so I've decided to wage my campaign in my own little way, I recommend you all do the same.

My strategy involves that moment when they stare over at you, so pleased with themselves with that "Oh I'm so funny" look on their face. When they glance over (and they will, what ego doesn't need stroking), looking for you to confirm that, indeed, they are hilariously funny, don't respond. More than that, glare icily at them but with a semi-grin on your face. It's just enough of a stony response that their smug, amused smile will fade uncomfortably but they won't be certain enough of your anger to bother remembering it. It works like a charm. Sort of.

The only problem with this strategy is that it lacks the major detail of positive/negative reinforcement...a clear outline of what the person is doing right or wrong. If this person is an asshole they are not going to recognize that the short, insulting replies they give in an effort to be funny are really just disgusting in their cruelty. And there really are very few ways to get this message across to them without actually saying it. I'd be all for saying it but the chances that the person would actually take anything you say seriously are 0. Plus you'd have that nasty defensiveness stance on their part and if you get a spiteful, sarcastic person on the defensive you have an experience similar to trying to hug a porcupine.

There is, unfortunatly, no way to change these people. Maybe, on their deathbed, they will think, "gee, I wish I'd been nicer to my mother," or father or that kid next to them in science or their siblings or that stranger who asked them for directions. Most likely though they won't. But at least, through stony silence you're nor becoming complicit in the decay of mankind.

My possibly new favourite passage ever:

"Then that same afternoon it was Florentino Ariza who saw the face of death when he recieved an envelope containing a strip of paper, torn from the margin of a school notebook, on which a one-line answer was written in pencil: Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant."

From Love in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Marquez

I'm developing something of what the victorians would have called a temperment. Lately, all I can seem to stomach are mangoes. Anything else just makes me nauseated and I cannot swallow any more than a few bites without feeling genuinely ill. It seems like a very snooty thing to do on my part though, refuse to eat anything but mangoes, so I'm eating other things. But I'm not enjoying it.

I'm not sure why mangoes though...maybe because I'm sad and mangoes always struck me as the happiest of fruits. I've always thought that, if you ever asked a mango how he felt, he would tell you he was very happy with his life indeed. Grapes always seemed like the saddest fruits to me, something about the short timespan they have before they start to go wrinkly in the sun, and that the poor things end up as raisins eventually. Raisins are very ugly.

Wrote my stoiche final this morning. I'm willing to put money on the fact that I failed. I am not happy with this fact, I've never failed an exam in my life. I'm trying very determinedly to convince myself that I won't need to know the volume of sulphur dioxide at 880kPa and 34 degrees Celsius at any point in my life. I'm right, aren't I? This isn't something I'm going to need, is it?

Strange things have been happening to me.

First, my body and emotions, who I contentedly ignore unless forced to do otherwise, have forced me to do otherwise. I went to go write a test this morning, only to discover I had the wrong date. The test, in fact, is to be written tommorow morning. Woohoo! right? An extra 24 hours to study? Right on! No, apparently not. I apologized for my mistake, walked very calmly around the corner and then spent 45 minutes trying to keep myself from bursting into hysterical sobs. I composed myself but it begs the obvious question of why? Why did I feel like crying? Why didn't I cry? Why didn't I just read the test slip better and figure out what day the test was actually on so I could avoid the whole mess?

Outside of my psyche's desperate attempts to inform me that I need some TLC, other strange things have been happening. Like I've been discovering that I have power over people. I don't like this. It's scary and annoying to take responsibility for your affect on someone else's life. I quite preferred the notion I held where I did whatever I wanted and no one really cared. That is no more. Now I know what cards I hold with my parents, for example. I know how to get under their skin and how to do it well...so do I? I don't know...it's tempting...but now that I know that X+Y=Z I feel so much more guilty adding Y and complaining about Z is so much less satisfying.

It's annoying but more than that, it's eerie...life and relationships have suddenly been reduced to a set of very less-than-romantic set of equations. If X exists and I add Y we inevitably find ourselves looking at Z. How boring. And sad...the spice seems to be gone. But the lack of spice in my life is a whole other story...

Maybe it's just finals that have me feeling like an alien in my own body...maybe, when they're over I'll discover that life is fun and nothing sad is any more permanent than anything happy. Perhaps I'll feel spontaneous and suprised by things again. Logic won't seem so damned appealing and the impossible gaps I'm standing in front of now will be bridged somehow, in some excitingly novel manner. But, in the meantime, life seems very sad indeed.

I want you to want me, I need you to need me. I'm begging you to beg me and I'd love for you to love me...

You know the song, right? It came up in conversation last night with my friend J*. We were talking about high maintanance vs. low maintanance people. I'm low maintanance, I know that right now. I need someone who will see bad things happen to me and rush to reassure me that I didn't deserve it, the other person is a jerk and that I'm still wonderful but that's about it. I don't generally need to be healed. Comforted, held, and loved, yes. J* functions about the same way. (We figure we should date because we'd only have to see each other once a week. We could validate each other over coffee and be on our way.) And, while we don't need to be healed by the one we love, we both immensely enjoy So we started talking about people who don't work that way...the people who want to be needed simply for the sake of being needed. The ones who need to confirm their existance by forcing someone to chase them down, wasting away with the grief of their unrequited love.

I would like to be needed by the one I need. (I'm not saying that there is someone in particular that I need at this moment, who doesn't need me and so is making me sad; this is more of a general life statement). If I adore someone enough to need to see them, I would like to be adored in some at least slightly similar fashion by them. This, I believe, is different than needing someone to need you simply to feel good. You hear women say, "I wish he loved me!" No one ever asks if it's because she loves him...more often than not this isn't the reason. Most frequently, women simply desire the sense of glee they seem to derive from having a man chase them around, tongue hanging out. We're likely not teases simply because the teasing itself is fun, we're teases because their frantic pursuing is fun. We refuse to call him unless he calls us, but rarely are we not calling him because we've simply moved on to other important tasks in our lives. No, far more often we are sitting, sulkily, by the phone - hating him for neglecting us like this.

It's no wonder men think we're confusing. Men are inherently more logical than women are. (I know that sounds like some anti-feminist slur but it's not, it's simply a fact. Men function using logic, their directional skills are better than women's because of it. Stop looking at me like that! Sigh, I give up trying to explain that comment away now...) If women used logic in their day to day affairs more often I have a feeling that sense of confusion would soon evaporate. We love him, and so we want him to love us. This is not something imcomprehensible...and I don't think that men are incapable of understanding it, but so often we don't want him to love us for this reason. We want him to love us because then we will feel loved. Personally, I don't understand it...For me there is no greater joy than discovering someone I care about (especially in that way) is feeling the same way I am. It's bliss. Or when you start to move in synchronicity with them, use the same phrases and respond the same way. That, for me, is the best possible feeling. But if I'm not interested it does nothing for me..the guy could read my mind and speak every word simultaneously but I really wouldn't care. Having someone be interested in me simply for the sake of feeling wanted is just a concept I can't understand.

Actually, I more than can't understand it. There's a vicious, potentially hurtful quality to it that disgusts me. If you can make someone want you simply because you were in the mood to, what do you do when that person's heart is broken? It's one thing to accidently have someone fall in love with you...unrequited love is an eternal theme for a reason: it happens. But how dare you deliberately coax the person into wanting you, only to dump them on the floor when you decided someone else would be more fun! Human beings have the capacity for mercy and for empathy and that is quite possibly our greatest gift. Any living thing can find pleasure, they seek it out in fact...but the ability to forgo pleasure in the event that it will cause pain to someone else is the mark of true intelligence. If you haven't got the self-denial to do it, in my books you belong way down there with the dandilions on the food chain.

I believe disillusionment is totally avoidable. More importantly, I think that it's a myth.

Those movie scenes where the girl looks angrily and teary-eyed into the face of her man and says something like, "you are so not who I thought you were," always made me angry. I didn't know why. Now I do. I am pissed off by all of the people who wandered into a relationship believing they were dating Christ-Incarnate and then have the audacity to blame the other person for being who they were all along. I have nothing but anger for these people and their 'hurt' and 'betrayal'. Unless the guy you're seeing has fallen into the arms of Satan during your time together, you have nothing but your own pathetic desperation to blame for your sudden feelings.

So I have no sympathy for those of you who, upon discovering who your partner really is, run screaming off into singlehood crying bloody murder. I think they key to learning to avoid being disillusioned is to practice patience. I have a list of things I meant to blog about in the last few days, so I don't forget them. Right below "Disillusionment is bullshit" is "I promise I will be patient, even when...". You're probably wondering what that means. I realised just now that these two ideas are so tied together that they need to be written together.

I am not a dispassionate person. I am excitable and enthusiastic and spontaneous. I do, however, view love as something of a character sketch. The chances that I'm going to leap into a relationship with someone I've just met are slim to none. As strange as it sounds, I'm going to watch them. Listen to their stories, their opinions...read things they write and see things they make. Form in my head a 3-D image of who they are before I decide if I'm interested. By the time I get around to it, I have at least a general idea of the evils this person is prone to committing. I know their weaknesses, their habitual sins...and, if I'm interested, I'm interested anyway.

I don't want to change people. This strategy of mine lets me see into the person and decide if their soft spots are things I can live with. And what is the key to living with someone who habitually commits the same transgressions? Patience. Patience is what allows you to see past the action, into the person and read their desire to change. And, if it's present, you wait until they can. No matter how long. As bizarre as it sounds, by the time I've decided I'm seriously interested in someone, I've already thought long and hard about whether or not I can handle their constant getting caught in traps. So far, in the people I've studied before approaching, I've been 100% on in my summary of their faults. I went in anyway, and I stayed in.

It is because I've been so accurate that I believe that anyone who wakes up one morning to find that the person they're sleeping next to is "So not who they thought they were," is probably brain dead. Believe what you want to believe, but don't you dare get angry when someone wakes you up from your daydream, Princess.

Time for a blog on a subject I've been meaning to blog about for a while now.....Love. Hey, I saw that. I'm very aware that it's quite likely no one wants to hear the thoughts of this 17 year old girl on love. Whatever, you probably shouldn't have come to adore me with the stalkerish admiration that you have now, should you.

I've never been one for girlish romantic fantasies. For a long time, my idea of the perfect marriage involved marrying your gay best friend and enjoying tax benefits and the joys of being single for all of eternity. I eventually realized that my disbelief in love probably resulted from the fact that I had the same high standards for it that I have for everything else on the planet. True love, for me, had to be perfect love, and nothing on this planet is perfect. Therefore, true love did not exist, and the sooner the world realized this the sooner we could all go back to being productive and things.

It took me a bloody long time to realize that the idea that love had to be requited and unconditional to be perfect was total bullshit. Hey, if you're the one cast in the Disney movie who gets to pretend it happened to you, congratulations, enjoy it because you're not going to come across it at any other time while you're on this planet. Gradually, I replaced my disbelief in fairy tale love with a belief in the possibility for true love. The belief though, included an acknowledgment that love is inevitably tragic. It isn’t love, however that will break your heart. Attachment and insecurity will destroy you. The First Noble Truth: life is suffering essentially captures the sentiment. The Second Noble Truth: the root of all suffering is desire captures the cause.

Before I say anything else, I want to make it clear that I in no way know what I’m doing. I have my goals and ideals but if at any point I sound like I know exactly how to execute them please don’t believe me.

I got asked yesterday if had any goals for this year (for those of you who are unaware, it was my birthday recently). I answered, without hesitation, that I would like to learn to understand unconditional love. I don’t seriously think I’ll be finished that in a year, but I’d like to make a dent. The times in my life when I’ve been hurt didn’t result from my trusting people but, rather, from my expecting things from them. Secret to avoiding pain: stop expecting things from people. On the surface that sounds like your typical fucked up kid philosophy. If you don’t need, you can’t be denied but that’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is, I want to learn how to be able to love someone, appreciate someone, support someone without ever needing them to do the same for me. I think true love is present most in the person who watches the one they love fall in love with someone else and smiles, pleased that they’ve found happiness. I can’t do that. No one, really, can do that but I’m really far from being able to do it. I’m jealous, I’m possessive, I’m catty...but I’m working on it. I’m really trying to work on it.

I think I’ve discovered the reason for my perennial depression too: all my life I’ve been waiting for someone who will love me the way I want to be able to love. Finally, I’m realizing that this may or may not happen, but either way it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to derive true happiness from someone else needing and wanting me, but from learning to be pleased for others and their successes, even if they threaten me. I’m afraid though, that it may take me more than a year.

I am going downhill, fast. I did my usual Saturday night thing which includes box office for a local theatre company, did splits and paid the actors. Intermission ended and I decided to scrap my original plan which was to go across the street and make a serious attempt to get really drunk (ask me about my my freakish alcohol tolerance some other time..). Instead I went into the office to file the sheets from the show, sat down and did not get up for 45 minutes. I just sat there, in the dark and wanted to cry. It would have made sense if I had cried but no, I just sat and felt like crying.

I do not know where my sudden, suffocating sense of grief has come from either. Melancholy has been lingering in me recently, but that is nothing new, I am always melancholic. No, this is something entirely different, and I can not explain it and so I can not fix it.

I am just so horrified by the choices I have made lately. Pursuing things with no thought of the consequences for me or anyone else involved, with a sense of frenzied spite I was not even aware I was capable of. And now that the consequences have hit, or seem like they might be soon enough, it is beginning to dawn on me that I have made a serious mistake, and it is far too late to fix it. And so people, people I care very much about, are going to be hurt.

I'm so guilty..so ashamed of myself but the one I hurt doesn't realize it yet, perhaps will never realize it. While this person suffers and deplores what they're done, I'm forced to hold my peace and know that they didn't do anything. the truth won't help them, coming clean can't fix a damned thing at this point. I'm responsible for their guilt...providing the opportunity, pushing it and pressing at something I shouldn't have been doing in the first place. All the while doing it so underhandedly that they now believe I am completely innocent. I should be proud, right? Anyone who knows the situation invariably reacts with, Good job! Wow, I'm so impressed by how you did that! How did you do that. I tell them I don't know, it just sort of happened. It's bullshit, I know exactly how it happened. I knew exactly what I was doing and I knew I shouldn't have been doing it. But I did it anyway, and look at the mess I've made.

There's an Ellen Reid song which goes, "Before I open my eyes/before I let morning in/before I can realize/I know./Oh I know, I did a bad thing./I did a bad, bad thing...I wonder if I'll ever learn/I hate this feeling every time/soon it will be my turn/I know/Oh I know, I did a bad thing.�EAnd it's true...so many times while I was making this mess I knew I could stop, should stop but I didn't. I pressed on, I forced it, I made it happen and I loved every minute of it. But somewhere along the way, in my fun, I forgot that on the other side of this equation there is another human being. This is someone's life. There is a person out there who is hurting, and blaming and hating themselves and it's my fault. And it's too late to fix it now..and I cannot apologize because they don't even know what I did.

On top of that is the situation at home, which is, essentially, that I cannot be here for very much longer without spiraling into madness. I need to get out but fate doesn't seem to agree. It doesn't matter how many job applications I fill out, how many interviews I request...no one wants to hire me. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to pay rent. And I'm at the point now where I'm willing to move into the rented suite of some slimy stranger and pay him in sexual favors, so long as I'm not living here anymore. Personal dignity is so far out of the equation it's laughable.

All of this sounds so despicably dramatic too, I know. And it's not like that..it's not as if I'm struggling to lift my head as I walk down the street. The friends who read this are going to wonder what the hell I'm talking about, because I'm functioning. I appear to be functioning just fine. And then they're going to want to help, for me to stop pretending I'm alright when I'm not...but that's just the problem. I'm not pretending. I'm not faking smiles and laughter simply to make them think I'm okay...this deep sense of sadness isn't something I'm trying to hide. It simply comes suddenly and without warning, and always when I'm alone and so I can't talk about it. Even if I was able I would not be willing, and there isn't anything to say. It was just in the dark last night, in the office, that I realized I'm carrying it...finally some sense of description materialized for this vague, peripheral dark cloud I've taken to wearing. And by simply recognizing that I am wearing it, I felt better...It's so much easier to exist, knowing that you're sad, even if you discover it is for no reason, than it is to have some undescribed, shadowy sense of malcontent on the fringes of your mind.

Maybe, eventually, it will give itself borders. Then I can banish it entirely.

When is it too late to change? How long is too long to carry the guilt for a mistake you've made and cannot fix?

It's so easy to sit and say "forgive yourself," "forgive the one who acts against you," but in practice it's so impossibly difficult. Which isn't to say that it's impossible...but knowing how to do it, and when to do it is so hard. When are you legitimate in forgiving yourself and when are you simply letting yourself off the hook because it's easy?

I have a friend struggling with this question right now, but watching it made me realise that I have my own share of open sores I won't let heal. I wanted to say the things that would just make this friend feel better but I couldn't...they just seemed to make everything too simple and I felt like such a raging hypocrite. How can you tell someone to do something you can't do yourself and expect them to take you seriously, or to be able to say it with the least bit of conviction?

But I tried anyway..because as much as I know I can't do it, I know it's the right thing. There are times in life when, in our confusion, terror and lonliness, we make mistakes...and these mistakes inevitably hurt people. It doesn't make us bad people but the fact that we didn't mean to hurt anyone is of so little importance it fails to comfort us at all. So what do you do when you find yourself here, invariably full of guilt and seething at your own inability to protect the ones you care for from yourself?

First reaction is to just sit and hate yourself for what you did, more and more...grow to fear and loathe yourself and your potential to harm anyone you come close to. Wish you were different, had been different..could become different. But fear and loathing don't lead to productive change...possibly you aren't hurting anyone at that moment but it's not because you've become someone you have more respect for..there just isn't anyone close enough to hurt. Either way though, you've accomplished your goal-no one else you care for has been hurt by you.

Or have you? It took me such a long time to realise that people didn't want to have to be protected from me, they wanted me to be able to be the person I wanted to be, so that I could be with them and not be so afraid or guilty or miserable. But how do you change? How can you change a lifelong pattern of choices and behaviours..especially when it's a pattern you've spent a long time deeply engraining? And how do you break yourself out of the guilt long enough to begin something as constructive as positive change? It would be easy if you could just erase everything that came before this and start fresh, but there are still those people out there that you hurt, this guilt isn't just something you're carrying around out of some masochistic tendency.

I wish I had a simple answer for this friend. Or for me..it's so easy to tell someone to look at the situations in their life right now and try and figure out what choices will lead to a repetition of the same problems...but objectivity and emotion are not two concepts who live happily together. It's fine to say that A+B=bad and A+C=good but if C is more difficult and unpleasant and B seems to make everyone happier right now, how do you convince yourself to choose right?

And yet, that's the only advice I can offer...look at what you've done, feel guilty if you need to..do your best to express your regrets and your self-reproach. You can't fix it but you can try and make amends. That's all you can do at this point..and if it's not enough, it's not enough...there's no remedy for that. And then move on and look at what's facing you now. Who you have the potential to hurt, to decieve, to mislead and look at what you're hiding. Do your best to be frank and honest...it's harder to try and change your style of communication with someone who knows you as different, but it's the only way to avoid digging yourself your own grave over and over. Write down the things that make you hate yourself..the designs you trace over and over and then write down what they would mean if you applied them to your life right now. If you have a tendency to hold back facts, what facts are you tempted to hold back right now? How many of them are you willing to reveal? And try and do it.

I don't even know if this friend reads this, but if you do..that's all I've got for you darling, I'm sorry it's not much help.

I'm sitting here being amused by the hilarious human tendancy to assume everyone in the room is stupid except you. I was waiting for a computer earlier today. There were two in the bank that were open, yet I was just standing there. Why? Well because one was turned off, and one was broken.

I can understand someone who just goes straight for the computer, figuring that I haven't seen it. That makes sense to me, but about 12 people came up to me and each, in turn, asked me if those two computers were available. I said no, because they weren't, at which point these people made a beeline for the first computer. Suprise, suprise..it's turned off.

I suppose it's possible that I'm just too stupid to understand that if a computer is asleep you need to move the mouse to wake it up. This is an insulting, but still plausible idea...so these people moved the mouse around. The computer is definitely turned off. So what do they do? Head straight for the second computer, the broken one, and try to log in. Because I haven't tried this, it never occured to me that this available, turned on computer might be working. I didn't go log in, no no, I only assumed it was broken because no one was using it.

By this point I'm trying not to laugh at the people who need to test out my ability to detect the obvious. The guy sitting at the end of the row is laughing, really hard, and if he weren't sharing looks with me I'd just think it was a funny email. These people try to log in, discover it's broken and...come stand right next to me.

I'm not even insulted that I apparently appear to be that stupid...I just think it's hilarious. It's like when you're waiting outside in the cold for something and the guy who comes up behind you tries to open the door. Does he think that you just enjoy standing outside and freezing your ass off? Maybe that's it, maybe these people just figured I like to stand and watch other people be amused by their email. Or maybe we're all just secret egotists. The idea that you have a new, innovative solution to whatever problem is facing your little section of humanity is so enticing, you need to find out if it's true. You and you alone can rescue these people with your amazing powers of common sense.

Or maybe, and quite likely this is the answer, these people just didn't think about it at all. Whatever it is, it's fun to watch.

Someone needs to get to work, right away. I'm getting madder and madder that no one has gotten around to writing a life dictionary. This is a major problem for me..why create so many vague concepts if you're not going to give me a reference manual? And, for all those of you who've gone before me and failed to write it down, why????

I was talking with my friend C* about the definition of maturity. When it hits..how it hits..how it shows..generally what the fuck it is. And I couldn't tell you. All I had was that a person's methods of dealing with conflict probably fit in there somewhere, but C* quite intelligently pointed out that maturity has to be something other than being able to take shit from people calmly. Good point. So what then? The passage from childhood to adolescence is helpfully marked by breasts and sex drive, but that one isn't even that complicated. There are no markers for the entrance of adulthood. Society puts them up, university, apartments..but there are 12 year olds in university and 45 year olds living with their parents so that's not very helpful.

People use phrases like "mature for his age." I get told I'm precocious, advanced or beyond my years. Fine, great..probably explains my collection of friends who are 6 or 7 years older than me, and romantic soft spot for those even older...but what does that actually mean?? When someone says that a child grew up quickly, how do they know? What makes them feel that way? It is the child's intellectual capacity? Is being highly literate the key to being mature? Or is it the inherent maturity which draws a child to books his peers will read 3 or 4 years down the road? Is it emotional? Does the way a person deals with their emotions determine their maturity level?

And what causes a person to become mature? I'm tempted to think that it's hardship. Early maturity is inevitably somewhat linked to children who have faced messy, difficult upbringings. Average assumed age of maturity is somewhere around 24 or 25, after life has handed you more than a few problems. So is that maturity? The natural accumulation of cynicism in a human being? When a person becomes jaded, does that person also become mature? And, if that's true, are naive people intrinsicly immature?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions. I don't figure anybody does, but this is why I'm so frustrated by the lack of reference materials that came along with this body of mine. I don't even need to know the answers to solve any particular life problems right now...it's just one of those things I would like to be able to figure out.

I had an enlightening dream last night.

I was on my way home from somewhere with my dad. We were downtown but were prevented from getting home because all the roads were blocked. We discovered it was because there was a massive fire in an already devastated building. We watched for a while (interesting to note that this building does not actually exist in my city, nor does anything like it. In fact, the whole neighbourhood was made up). Eventually, the flame-ravaged building collapsed, roads were re-opened and we headed home. We were home for a while when a friend of mine came to the door. X* is someone I can't seem to get to know better, no matter how much I'd like to. There are so many things I want to say, all the time but...don't. Can't. Nothing. In the dream X* came upstairs to my room and surprised me. We talked for hours and hours and for the first time that strange distance I seem intent on maintaining was gone. Completely. It was 100% comfortable and totally perfect.

When I woke up I was smiling. I just lay there for a moment to savour the tenderness of the last few moments of the dream. "Nice," you're thinking, "but not my idea of enlightening." Well fine, but it wasn't your dream. It wasn't *supposed* to enlighten you.

I have a tendancy to stay very guarded around people. Never mind, it's not a tendancy, I am guarded around people. The degree of guardedness rises proportionally to how much I like the person; in essense, the closer I would like to be to you the less I will tell you about anything. If I like you a lot I will probably have difficulty carrying on conversations about the weather. I don't know why this is exactly, but I think it has something to do with protecting myself from my own instincts. If I like you I'm going to be more inclined to trust you, and the more I trust you the more vulnerable I become and the more likely I get hurt. And, thus far, when given the opportunity to hurt me, people have. So I stay quiet and eventually the person gets understandably fed up with the awkward silences and leaves. Then the temptation to become vulnerable is gone and everything is fine again. Except I'm sad and lonely and miss whoever it was that went away. Because, the entire time I'm driving them away I'm completely aware that I'm doing it. I'll sit there, trying so hard to think of something to say but it isn't even a matter of willing myself to say it, my mind is blank. I'm not nervous, I'm not afraid, I'm just devoid of any amount of personality.

This is, I fear, exactly what I am doing with X*. I want to be closer. To get rid of this ackward tension I insist on maintaining but I can't And I can't fix it. I was vaguely aware of this fact but the dream, where that awkwardness was gone and it was wonderful kind of crystallized it for me. And I think the part where that building fell down, the one that was preventing me from getting home (where eventual closeness was) had everything to do with my obsessive desire for a lack of any emotional dependency and nothing to do with the news item I watched on a large fire.

So..great! the dream made me realize something! Great. But it made me realise something bad, told me what would fix it (letting down my barriers) and gave me absolutly no idea of how I might go about this. And I have no ideas. I'm willing to try just about anything but can't think of a single bloody thing to try. So really, am I any better off than I was?mmmfuck

I was reading one of our local weeklies this morning. I always check the classifieds for anything of interest at all. Usually, by that, I mean jobs, auditions, free puppies....but this morning I found probably the most interesting ad I'll ever find:

"San Francisco based performance artist will vacuum your living room for free!!! Vacuuming services are available from May 23-29, please call 4__-____ for bookings.

My living room is dirty. I'm tempted to call. I tried to think of the possible weird things this person could be using the free vacuum opportunity for but could come up with nothing. What possible evil deed could follow an offer to vacuum your living room for free??

My mother just picked me up from a workshop (which, if anyone cares to know, went way better than last time. I'm not better, but I felt way more comfortable) and forced me to listen to quite possibly the most incoherent radio special ever made.

Our national radio station, the CBC, felt a need to do a 4-part special on child psychopaths, and how our labelling them as thus leads them into a vicious self-fufilling prophecy of a life. This theory is all fine and good except that, the last time I checked, you couldn't diagnose a psychopath or a sociopath before age 18.

So you now have a four part special devoted to halting and condemning a clinical practice which doesn't exist. Add to this the fact that the special has been spliced together by someone with some horrifying form of epilepsy. Reach for the button...oh crap, grand mal...oh and I hit the button anyway! Oh well! The specials are pieced together from interviews with various people. Among them, a woman who could compete quite successfully for the title of Least Eloquent Person On God's Green Earth. She is joined by a young boy who, for the most part, seems very introspective and intelligent. I say for the most part because whoever put this thing together does a damned good job of making him sound like a raving, incoherent lunatic. The fragments of his sentences they've pieced together don't even form sentences on their own...weird clauses clash with his statements and just create the general feeling that his remarkable return from violent offender is probably due to the elephantine dose of Valium he appears to be on.

You're probably wondering why I bothered to listen for as long as I did..My mother. I have this feeling she'll be hitting menopause any day now. Her strange emotional outbursts have just become routine weirdness and when I got into the van she was staring at the radio, tears in her eyes. Throughout the broadcast she would greet the clichéed statements of Ms. Ineloquent (Kids only become what we make them, every child is a diamond but sometimes they just haven't been polished properly etc.) with a very tearful "Yes!" or "Mmhmm!" I was sort of awaiting a gospelesque "testify!" but it never came.

Please, please take this thing off the air before we have to hear more of that moronic woman. Also, if you have any tips on how I can hint at hormone replacement for my dear mother, I would appreciate it...

I don't care what biologists say, the human body was a bad idea.

Even semi-trailers have warning signals for the driver and anyone else around the vehicle. That irritatingly high pitched "Beep" lets us all know that something's happening.

There's the option that I'm just a freak of nature, but I'm really not up for entertaining that thought so I've just decided that I must be like everybody else in that I have absolutly no warning system that I can find.

I woke up this morning and life was good. It wasn't a tomato-pesto-pasta-chain-letter day, and I knew it. Absolutly nothing happened. It was fine. I left my house to catch the bus and discovered I'd missed it. I was fine. Since it's Sunday and busses only run hourly, I headed home for the time in between. I got to my house, went in, climbed up the stairs to my room, turned on the radio and burst into hysterical tears for absolutly no reason at all. And I couldn't stop crying.

Now this in itself is fine. Odd, I'm not the type of person who cries, but fine. Crying helps the body rid itslf of toxins it otherwise wouldn't be able to expell and tear ducts were created for a reason. The only un-fine part about this is that I have no clue why it happened. None. This is where that warning signal policy would be a good idea.

Since it happened the way it did, I see no reason why that sobbing fit couldn't have happened on the bus if I'd caught it. Or while I was buying shampoo yesterday afternoon. Or on Tuesday, in the middle of an exam in a room full of people. This is not a good thing. I am not entirely comfortable with the fact that my body finds it fun to break the routine at random points and potentially humiliate me. I would even be happy if it would give me a tiny warning. Say, when I missed the bus, if I could have been aware of any feeling of sadness, disproportionate as it may have been. Then I could have thought "hmm, that's odd...I guess I should start doing happy things." Or something. Chances are I wouldn't have done anything, but at least when I was hit by the flood I would be able to comfort myself with the knowledge that I had been forwarned of its coming.

I was reading the paper this morning and (since it's Sunday) was privy to an entire section of miscellaneous, unpolitically-relevant articles. The one that particularly interested me discussed the history of mental health treatment policies in this area.

People think in black and white. As much as they're convinced society has moved past the mindset of imperial racism, its basic themes (good vs bad, light vs dark etc.), and the feeling that there is only one correct opinion remain as prevalent as ever.

The author of this article was reviewing a recently released book. The book claims that blind fear and ignorance are responsible for what he feels is a "lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key" attitude that now exists.

A short distance from this city is a huge, long term pshychatric care facility. For the most part, those who go in don't come out. The author of this book discusses this facility and points to it as a glaring example of the intolerance we have for differences and our immense disbelief in the potential for rehabilitation. The only options available to the world, apparently, are to A)Rehabilitate everyone, teach them to live on their own and place them back in the community or, B)Lock them up in our arcane and squalid prisons of hospitals and let them rot. He seems to feel we've made our choice.

His assumption that the institutions of today are just giant pseudo-torture facilities is so incorrect I could scream. If you listen to him you'll get the distinct impression that we're locking these people up and preforming dangerous, unauthorized and painful experiments on them. The worst part though, is that he fails to realise that, as sad as it is, there are those who are mentally ill and cannot be rehabilitated. You cannot teach someone to live on their own if they are incapable of learning. His blatant ignorance and malicious accusations made me livid. Once again I come across someone who is unshakably convinced that this way is good, therefore any other way is bad. Oh but I forget that it is, of course, impossble to even consider that two equally good but different options could exist at the same time. Silly Vole, things are only found in black and white, good or bad.

And this guy's going to get royalties from this book too.