Heating season is oooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnn!!!

Really, I'm very excited about that last comment. I don't pay for heat. It can be on from the day it turns an eensy bit cold to the day it hits 90 and stays there. So, like, 10 months of the year.

One thing I've learned in the last year and a half is that it is okay to cry and be upset when there are real things to be upset about and friends around to make things better. It's much better to be up front and get things out when they're fresh, instead of bottling them in and letting them build and having them blow up at weird and confusing times and still not really go away. It's hard because in some ways that means letting the situation determine how I feel instead of putting an iron grip on my feelings and how they are expressed, but it actually means more refined control in the long run.

It's also nice to be taken care of once in a while. Especially just in a nice, normal, uncomplicated, straightforward way.

Sundays are great because I can be completely wasteful with my time. For example, getting home this morning. It would have been pretty quick to walk home, but instead I waited ten minutes for the bus to Davis, got off, got coffee, and waited like fifteen minutes for the bus to the top of the hill. It took like an hour and a half total. But I didn't have to walk up the hill! So, what am I going o do his afternoon? Probably head back to exactly where I picked up that first bus, between Harvard and Porter. Except I think I'll walk since it's all downhill. I suppose I just could have stayed in the area, but I think it's well worth the trip back to wash off the fooball game/bar/party/sleeping in my clothes grime from yesterday.

One interesting thing that happened to me yesterday was that I got stung by a bee for the first time ever. I was just standing around talking to Nat and Courtenay, when all of the sudden, I felt this prick on the underside of my arm. I must have trapped the bee between by boob and arm, and it stung me through my shirt. Turns out I'm not allergic, though it did get a little poofy for about half an hour. It still itches a little, but I'll take that over respiratory failure any day.

Sometimes I can just tell. And it worries me.

So, my little friend Leo is back bugging me for a date. Oh geez... I dunno, it wigs me on so many levels. The first one is the Groucho Marx level: I don't know if would want to date anyone who would want to date me. Especially on the looks-only count. I mean, really, I'm the kind of girl who "has an interesting personality" and that's why anyone would even think of dating me. Anyone who is just attracted to me without further basis is just mentally disturbed in some way. The second thing is that I suspect we have nothing in common. I guess this may be a good thing. We can maybe hang out, and if it turns out to be brutally awful, I can just drop the H-bomb and turn into Ivy Snob Bitch and send him running. But geez, I'd hate to pull that crap. Maybe I'm being a classist bitch for even assuming that would work. Yeargh.

I'm not supposed to want. I'm supposed to be afraid. I'm supposed to be pragmatic. But I find myself daydreaming, about all the wrong things.

Oh my God, after three weeks, the internet finally works!

I'm so excited. INTERNET!

Bleh. Ended up with a massive headache once I got home, so I couldn't go to the movies with Am. I suck. My body hates me and doesn't want me to have any fun.

Most people, they talk to me to tell me things, to maybe even spill what they're thinking, but you... you tell me things, but you keep everything that's really happening just behind all the things you say. It's the fucking mindreading that gets me in trouble all the time.

Home opener today. Woo!

I'm sure Billy didn't enjoy it, but I'm glad he went into rehab. The whole Withers clan was set to go to the concert seven months ago, but Billy went to rehab, and then the parental half couldn't make it last night so I got to go. It ruled! The seats were awesome: floor, slightly left, I could have hit the back of the stage by throwing something. Awesome. I've always only been like half a fan of both Elton John and Billy Joel, liking their stuff but never seeking out CDs or anything, but they were both really great, and it was cool when they sang stuff together at the beginning and end. The only kind of sad thing is that Elton John no longer has any high range, though he does still have flaming pants. I was very happy during "I'm Still Standing," which is seriously one of the first songs I remember ever... I think I was like 4 when it came out. And the shiny colorful video. Anyway.

I forget I'm more excited about football than most of my Harvard friends.

No one loves me.

After a ridiculously productive Wednesday night (laundry and grocery shopping), last night I returned home, poked at some asparagus, and went to bed around 7pm. Maybe carrying heavy laundry and groceries the night before did me in.

My brain was so sad about missing Real World that I dreamt I was on it. Except we lived in a really shitty old house instead of a cool MTV house. And it started out with the usual seven people, but after the first week you voted two off, and the remaining five spent the rest of the time together.

I hope Jon doesn't mind me quoting him, but today he wrote, "Anger and aggression are two of the hardest things to exorcise, and when certain memories are bonded to anger, it's so hard to prevent wishing for different, impossible decisions, because that alternate universe is so much more appealing than anger's constant memento of mistakes." This sums up my feelings of the last few weeks so amazingly that I just had to repost it here.

Still no internet. Verizon phone guy came and fixed the line, but the activation date is still not changed. But I'm a sucker for nice tech support dudes; I'm pretty short with crappy billing or customer service folks, but tech support guys are never at fault for any crappiness that is happening. This guy told me he was escalating everything up to Provisioning Services so they would check with the phone guy to make sure he fixed it and then open up activation and then call me. Yay. So, maybe tomorrow I will have more than dial-up.

I'm so lazy. I thought maybe I would go to The House of Card for Real World, but I am sleepy.

I also planned to do laundry, but I realized on the way home that I don't have a jillion dollars in quarters. I may have to visit my friendly Citizens branch tomorrow for a roll or two. It's $3 total per load for wash/dry! I have two loads that definitely need doing. And in the meantime, nothing to wear for tomorrow. Naked Wednesday!

I also need to go grocery shopping and throw things out of my room. This was all supposed to happen this weekend. Saturday turned into social fun. I went to see The Good Girl with Matt in the afternoon, and then I went to dinner and ice cream with Lisa. We headed to the Kong at the request of Kinnebrew, and we met Damon and Jasmina and her friend who fled and later Rachel, and then we went to D and Rachel's. They live, like, three minutes walking distance from me. At the Kong I had more Scorpion Bowl than I typically do; usually I get into these macho slurping contests and after one my stomach feels like wretched death. I find if you drink at a normal pace, however, they are fairly pleasant. And, of course, there is always whisky where D and R live. Yikes. I got home by 4am. There went Saturday. Sunday was spent mostly horizontal and muchly asleep. Bye bye weekend. And it's just so hard to get stuff done at night. I discovered a convenience store at the top of the hill yesterday, for my milk needs. I just get too lazy to deal with the hill, and it gets chilly at night. All very tiring. But I have been feeling more focused this week. Maybe adding another cup of coffee to each day helped. :-) I finished this project I'd been crawling through forever, and now it looks like the next wave of busyness is coming in.

Next weekend promises to be really busy also. I'm going to see Billy Joel and Elton John with poohead on Friday, and then Saturday is the big opener. That will finally motivate me to get to the grocery store for tailgate food. If I behave myself well enough on Saturday night, maybe I can actually get something done on Sunday.

It's weird to feel simultaneously old and yet right at home at the same time.

I thought crushes were supposed to GO AWAY.

Fridays are the slowest days ever. Mondays, while sucky because they are Mondays, but at least they go by wicked fast.

I don't know how people who are less pushy than me survive in this world. I called Sprint this morning, and of course the first person I talk to can't do anything except tell me she can look into other existing plans and see if any of them work for me (though she did explain parts of my bill, which was nice). I'm like, I refuse to pay any more than I am now. Rar. So she transfers me over to business to see if they can help me, since they gave me the plan in the first place. The guy I talk to realizes I mean business and says that while he doesn't have the code access to make it all better, if he couldn't get a workable solution, he would transfer me to Customer Retention and Cancellations. Muahaha! So, he can't do much, so he transfers me. The woman at cancellation just looked at it and said, oh yeah, they just messed up entereing the second phone. And voila, no charge for the second phone. But it's sort of wack that I had to get transferred to Fix-This-Or-Screw-You-Guys land before someone could fix things. People who aren't persistent must get screwed.

I have been useless at work lately. Mybae it's the effect of a huge boom of work followed by a lull. Maybe it's that Holly isn't here to make me feel like working should happen (though I think this started last week). Maybe the internet has become too exciting. But the lack of focus is concerning.

Of course, it doesn't help when everyone has gone home, and it's not even four yet. Maybe I'll go too and make it up later.

Rar. Nothing is ever easy. I finally got a look at my first Sprint bill, and it's almost completely wrong in every way except my name. I'm sure I'll be spending many hours on the phone to resolve this one.

Tonight I went for a walk down Highland St, to see what's there, and to see how easy it is to get to Porter that way. I'm really more interested in the other direction, but hey. Turns out if I take the street that the cube is on, it's not such a bad hill and I can tkae the bus up the rest of the hill. This still doesn't do anything about the weekend problem, but I think taxis are just going to have to be budgeted into party weekends. Or definite crash space.

I also went to Davis, which is lovely. I wished I had other folks to hang out with there.

Lesson #1 in dealing with customer service folks: if someone gives you an answer you don't like and that you suspect is possibly incorrect, call back or find another person and ask the same question. Today's dealings with Verizon first yielded total non-helfulness, but then I tried again, and the dude actually did something to help me fix things earlier!

I think the Longwood area ia good place to be today. People aren't over-the-top about things, not hysterical, not glued to TVs, not exploitative. But they're not spitefully anti-patriotic or anti-remembering either. Just low key and appropriate.

Bleargh. It's not like today affects me in and of itself. It just makes all the crap swirl around in my head. Round and round... I should find people to hang out with tonight, so I won't be alone. But really, why bother, I was alone through my own personal hell, and I lived through that, so why find people to hang out with when this doesn't even affect me that much. And like that. But it's been like that for a while, so I shouldn't blame it on today.

These are tough times for an atheist and a cynic.

Maybe LC is right and I just need time. I keep hoping to find myself feeling happy, forgiving, forgetting, and back to normal. But I don't find as much of that as I'd like. I find resentment and anger and vengefulness and indignation and even little bits of hate. And those feelings don't hurt anyone but me, but still I can't let them go. Time, I just gotta give it time.

I ended up spending a jillion hours in the bed. I was lying there with my big headache, then my mother called and I talked to her for a while in the dark in the bed. Then I went and found the super-Motrin I have and took one of those, and went to sleep at like 9. Twelve hours later I finally dragged myself up, though I am now laying on the bed with my laptop. I suppose I should start unpacking instead of crashing here.

I had the worst time getting to sleep last night... more of the feeling bleh leading into just over-emotionalness. Which I think may have contributed to general headacheyness today. Yech. But Matt and I went to Target and got the shelves I wanted and a mirror and bins, even though he said if I bought any bins, soon it would become an obsession and I would want to put everything in bins. I fear he is right. I got all the stuff I needed from Microcenter for the soon-to-be-great internet. And I ordered a desk chair which leans back a lot so I can fall asleep in it. This was good. When I got home I set up the shelves, and I was about to chill on the porch when the bed arrived. Ah, sweet bed. I got an upgrade even! They apparently didn't go get the other mattress from the store, so I got a better one. No matter to me... I just wanted to use it. I just took a small nap, but since the headache is still here, another one may be in order. I may never leave the bed.

I hung out with my roommates tonight. Lisa made us dinner, and we just sat around talking for hours. Poor J even called me and I ditched him completely by not calling me back. But I think it's going to be really cool living here.

Erg, except now it's so late! I need to sleep! I have been taking cold meds before bed, which is great for sleep but awful for getting up in the morning. And I totally was nodding off on the bus this morning... I even dropped my bag on the floor. Maybe I will not take them now and just sleep. I can't wait until my bed comes... I will sleep all the time!

I feel bleh today. Just tired and grumpy and depressed. I can't deal with a whole Friday at work... I've decided that I've worked through enough of lunch this week to get out of here by 3:30. I have a lot of crap that needs to be done, but at this point, I don't care and I just want to go home and sit on my porch and lay in my not-bed. And not think about the things that are bumming me out. Bleh. I really should try to go out tonight and be social and feel like I have friends.

Rar. Why bother with geographical proximity anyway, when it can be so meaningless.

I left early, came home and moped around for a while, then took a nap. I woke up after a dream that I was in this weird pantry looking for a big cookie sheet, but it was dark and there were plants and I had to be very still while waiting for a snake to leave. The snake was kind of wrapped around me, and I had to hold out my stomach so that when it constricted I would still have room to breathe. It was sort of uncomfortable. I blame the Wright St snake discovery and the New England Journal of Medicine for this snake dream.

I am so lame on this Friday night... so what else is new. I put my pajamas on as soon as I came home... it's hard to be motivated to go out knowing that I have to come home fairly early anyway or crash somewhere... which I can't do because of bed delivery (which will be GREAT). I hadn't realized the 86 bus from H square is so lame. There are other ways to get home, but all of them more difficult. I guess if I go to any football parties this year, I have to make crash plans ahead of time.

I am all moved, except for my chairs. My mom and I went grocery shopping, and then I got a bed, which is great. I still need shelving. Internet and phone are on their way.

Walking back from getting the mail I think it finally hit me. And now I'm trying to swallow it back up into de nile. I can pretend to be as noble as I want, I can ignore it because it is a long way off yet, but in the end... I don't know what I have to do. Bleh.

Erg... Pro, look, sure happiness does not have to be the final goal, and therapies that take pretty well-functioning people and try to turn them into bubble-headed zombies is sucky and irresponsible. But to write off the entire world of mental healthcare and research is also really irresponsible. Ask someone who hasn't left the house for days because of extreme depression or social anxiety, and they will not tell you they're feeling like their life should be that way. Unless you are a sociopath, if you are functioning well and you are not actively desiring to feel differently, then no one is going to grab you off the street and shove meds down your throat. Kids... yes, kids are a different story and we overmedicate them too much. But seriously, most people on meds actively sought them out because they wanted to feel better. Why can we fix any other fucking problem in the world with medication except for mental health problems? I think that therapy of the non-medicated sort is the best also, but talk to a schizophrenic and ask them how therapy went for them. Some folks just need drugs. There are people with depression who have gone through every therapy there is and who finally find relief in medication. EVERY PERSON IS DIFFERENT.

Furthermore, scientists are not the borg. The media may portray it as such, but anyone who has read half a dozen journal articles on any subject in psychology (or pretty much any medical topic) knows that researchers struggle with these very issues, issues of what really constitutes a 'disorder' and what constitutes functioning and how people feel about their feelings and how they feel about treatments and how gender biases crop up in diagnoses and on and on and on. Clinical psychology has nearly as much meta research as research into the content of 'disorders.' I hate this crap about Psychology Thinks This and They're So Wrong. Frankly, dude, stop talking out of your ass and dig into the actual work being done instead of relying on anything the media tells you about work in any scientific field.

I mean, in the end, there are many ways to lack compassion, and just because you've trashed one way doesn't mean the way you promote is any better. In science it's all about making general claims by looking at lots of people, but in the clinician's office it's all about the one person in front of you and what that person needs. *That* is the real problem underlying all the problems in clinical psychology: not drugs, not bad diagnostic categories, not anything else, but the unwillingness to really listen to and focus on the individual.

Oh, and another real problem: people don't know anything about therapy. It's not just talking, or, it shouldn't be. There are a lot of shitty therapists out there, and more mediocre ones. But the basis of therapy *is* thought, particularly thinking in constructive and not destructive ways. I feel like I have avoided bigger problems in my life thanks to knowing what therapy is supposed to accomplish and trying to get there myself. But less informed people are more likely to reach for the prescription when it is presented. But I'm also the person who thinks psych should be required for everyone to take at least once... or at least in the framework of a more general medical consumer's class, which would be too ridiculously practical for any education.

Uh, not to keep rambling, but on the flip side, I think some of the most exciting medical research looks at how physical symptoms might be treated through the mind instead of through drugs. Back pain is one I've heard about previously. But again, a variety of treatment options for a variety of people. Nothing works for everyone no matter how great it tends to work. It's all about not being lazy and paying attention to each person's needs. And as a consumer it's about not being lazy and figuring out what might work best for ourselves.

I feel a million times better now. To understand, to make myself understood.

Bleh, moving day. My nose is wicked runny today. I hope the Tylenol COld kicks in before my mother and sister get here.