Been a While

It's been a while since I last posted a blog. I've been pretty busy with getting back to school in the states, adjusting to the apartment, moving two of the cats here, dealing with a whole bunch of shenanigans which I will get to in a minute, and just living my life, basically. I mean to come back to blogging, but it's hard when you feel like you don't really have anything constructive to say. It's been an incredibly rough 2010, and I put on a brave face but mostly I am becoming increasingly aware that everything is not okay, and for all I know right now things may never be okay again. But I'm hanging on to the hope that things will get better soon.

So as anyone who has read this knows, my rabbit Buns died at the beginning of January. He was the best rabbit ever, but not only that he was a good friend too. I relate better to animals than to people, because animals just listen. They don't give you their advice or choose sides. Buns was like that in many ways, I could just talk to him and stroke his long golden-red ears and he would just sit quietly twitching his nose and staring up at me. The thing I miss the most about him, I think, is that whenever my mom and I would argue and raise our voices Buns would stamp his feet as if to say "enough!" I realize that he was probably very sensitive to loud noises and shouting, but I like to think that he was the voice of reason in an unreasonable environment. The voice of reason is gone now. In a lot of ways it just feels like everything is falling apart.

We went to Disney World as a family a few days after Buns died. It was my mom, me, my aunt, my other aunt and my uncle, her two daughters, their husbands, their total of five children, and my mom's friend Naveen and his wife. Naveen was the cause of the drama at my birthday (the reason why I wish I could forget that I even have a birthday), and he managed to cause drama at Disney too. There was a huge fight in the Magic Kingdom between my mom and my aunt, causing my other aunt to come outside brandishing her cane at the two of them. It was really very funny, but on a deeper level it was disturbing. My mom is willing to be cruel and violent (she pushed my aunt, her older sister, in the Magic Kingdom of all places) to the people she proportedly loves over this person whom she has known for all of four years. I don't want to spend time with Naveen, and I particularly don't want to spend time with my mother and Naveen because I will always lose when it comes to him.

My Pastor retired on Valentine's Day. It was one of the most pathetically sad days of my life. Pastor could barely get the sermon out without crying, and I was practically sobbing in the back of the church. I got some really good pictures with him but no picture can capture what he truly means to me. As far as I am concerned, Pastor is the person who saved me from myself when I was a lost 15 year old girl, struggling with a whole slew of issues that no person, much less a 15 year old, should have to deal with. He sat and talked with me once a week for a year before I was ready to be Baptised and confirmed, but sitting and talking with me and listening to me and giving me his undivided attention was exactly what I needed then. He never felt sorry for me, and in truth I never told him half of the things that were on my mind, but he gave me a new life, which is something I can never thank him enough for. And now he is out of my religious life and I am so afraid that he is going to be out of my life for good, in that I no longer live in my hometown and I can barely keep in touch with my best friends.

We sold my car, Rhonda, the girl of my dreams on Saturday. She's such a beauty that car, and I love her with every ounce of my being, but I have a new car now that is reliable and won't blow the radiator for no reason. We sold her to a father and son, the father wants to fix her up so that the son can use her to drive to college next year. Nothing would make me happier than to know that someone is driving her and loving her, but I will miss my first car, just like I miss my first rabbit and my first Pastor.

So it's been a pretty rough 2010 so far. I'm hoping things start to look up soon, but I'm not terribly optimistic. Well I take that back, I am optimistic that things will start to improve, I just know that things can always get worse, and knowing that just makes this shitty year that much shittier.

So happy March everyone, I hope your year has been better than mine thus far. May we all see vast improvements in the outlook of our 2010's.

Running

I don't like to run very much (which makes me wonder why I love lacrosse so much, you never stop running in that sport), but I like to work out, ride the bike for half an hour, do the rowing machine, leg presses and lifting. I get very stressed out when I'm home because I don't have a gym readily accessible, I have nowhere to just escape to. Sure I escape in my music, but it's so much easier to be physically active and release your energy that way than to release it through music. (I'm on a sort of... creative hiatus, so to speak. It hurts to be creative, more than helps. I have been in a funk when it comes to music ever since George died almost two years ago. Just something not right about the feel of the bow on those strings or the low cries of the violin these days). So I run up and down the stairs, do leg lifts and crunches and push ups until I can't do any more. The gym is a place where I can escape for an hour or so a day at school. There's no school work, no distractions, just sweat and my ipod and breathing in and out.

I feel like I've been running a lot lately, and I'm pretty exhausted from it all. I'm running from how afraid I am of the future, of even what tomorrow will bring. I had this, this really weird epiphany. I'm so close to the future that I've always wanted. Maybe not so close, but close none the less. Closer than I was a year ago, two years ago, a decade ago. I didn't even know where I was going with my life a year ago, and I might not still, but I have a better idea now and I'm so on the right track and I'm going to get there and it just feels so... scary. I'm scared because it's all going to happen, it has to happen and I believe in it.

I run from responsibility a lot, as much as I might like to deny that, I do. Sure, I take responsibility for my actions, but if I don't have to act, I won't. There has never been a driving force in my life before telling me that I have to do something or else my dreams won't come true (never might be too strong of a word there, after all there is always that driving force telling you to inhale and exhale or else your dreams will certainly not come true).

It's not just running from responsibility. It's running to keep going, to get to the next square. Going through the motions and then some, only resting when fatigue sets in and then running more. It gets exhausting after a while. Hours of classes, hours of work and papers, meals only when readily available and next to free, tea and cheap wine, lacrosse, work for five or six hours every week, volunteering when they need me, running clubs, giving giving giving and never receiving. It's why I love Hillary so much, I think, because finally after all these years of giving to my education, to my friends, to my family, to work and music and sports and life in general, there is another human being out there who doesn't need to be in my life, but who chooses to be there, and who loves me and wants my happiness and has a vested interest in my being sane at the end of each day. I don't feel like I have to run when I'm with her, I feel safe from the past, present and future. The grade police aren't going to get me, my coach isn't going to hunt me down and make me run suicides, I won't have to play my violin in a concert that truly doesn't need me, I don't need to do anything or be anyone who I'm not. I can just be me.

The future is such a scary place sometimes. But I'm so looking forward to getting there, and being able to stop running from all the things that have forced me on this treadmill all my life. Someday, I'm going to graduate from college, go to graduate school, get my masters in clinical psychology, get into a doctoral program and get my PhD, and until then I am work and live and be happy and healthy and keep running because I can almost taste the sweetness of accomplishment. I'm at the edge of something big here, and some day all of my dreams are going to come true and maybe then I can finally stop running and rest.

Another Weird Dream

I think something may be wrong with my sleeping habits, or maybe it's because my diet is weird since it's summer and I'm not eating the crap they serve us in the cafeteria that drains us of our souls. I have been having such weird dreams lately. Inexplicable weird dreams. They make very little sense and have next to nothing to do with the things that are on my mind at this point in time.

So I'll tell ya about what I dreamt of last night/this morning. I only ever remember the dreams I have in the few hours before I wake up, but I'm pretty sure I dream the entire night.

So the dream I had was just too weird for words. Really. There were a bunch of people somewhere, I assume it was earth but I could be completely incorrect. The people included me, my family, several of my friends from college, their families, their significant others (people whom I've never met and who I am relatively certain don't exist...), and a bunch of other people who I most likely made up.

In any event, wherever we were was being invaded by creatures from another world. If you've seen the Narnia movies they looked a lot like the goblins and witches/hags whatever. At one point in my dream, the most vivid point, we were all hauled up in a room, hiding out from the invaders. One of them knocked on the door, and of course being the polite person I am, the door opened for them (no different in dream land than in real life) and they stood in the doorway. It was like some deformed old hag with a creepy voice and all that jazz. She stood there, and very explicity asked for one of my friends, by name. I immediately stood up and said absolutely not, get out of here, started screaming at her and throwing her out. So she left, and everyone went back to doing whatever it was that they were doing. No one cared that I had just saved my friend's life, not even my friend. She was too busy doting over her much older boyfriend, who was old enough to be her father. I remember being very confused, and then waking up and being extremely confused.

I think it has something to do with the fact that this particular friend is thinking seriously about transferring. It would break my heart and many other hearts at school if she did. Someone needs to convince me that I can't save everybody, maybe then I can have normal dreams about puppies and kittens and clouds.

Weird Dream

I had a weird dream last night/this morning. It was one of those wake-up dreams that you remember all about.

Well we, as in my mother and I, were in the Norway ride in Epcot in Disney. I don't really like the Norway ride, but I'll go on it if I'm forced to.

So we're on the ride, and it's really late at night so we're the only ones on our particular boat.

We get to one spot in the ride and all of a sudden the ceiling is A LOT closer to my head than it should be. Like my head is scraping against the ceiling, and the ceiling is only getting lower and lower. So I'm like "uh uh, no way, not going any further."

So then this chick hops out of her boat, wades through the water and pennies and shit to get to my boat. She pulls it along and I guess she magically makes the ceiling recede. So then my mom hops out of the boat and strikes up a conversation with this girl. She's really cute, she has blonde hair and she's well dressed. She said she just dropped out of seminary (uhm... weird) and wasn't sure where she was going from there.

I was still on the boat so I just floated merrily along. The mother and this girl were still talking and talking and talking. Finally I got to the end of the ride where there is this little movie type thing. The chick showed up, with my mother. This girl had, in the time since I had seen her, dyed her hair black and turned into a goth. My mom was not surprised at all, but apparently they became fast friends.

All I really remember from the end of my dream was taking the girl to the hospital because she was having a child, I assume it was our child because I kept calling her "honey." That's what married people do, right?

The weirdest thing was that the girl, my wife, whatever she was wanted to put trash in the car to take with us to the hospital. Like she was emptying the trash can into the car. I was just like "no, we can get the trash later" and she was like "no, we need it now."

I don't know what it means, but I think I'm having some internal psychological struggle that I am consciously unaware of.