| circuli circuli circuli |
[02 Nov 2009|05:37pm] |
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here come the damn circles again. I thought... well, it was a dumb thing to think. I'll ride these circles until I get dizzy and vomit. I have no illusions about it anymore. I can't break the circles any more than I can stop the tide from going out and coming back in.
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| lacte |
[15 Oct 2009|11:24am] |
Right now I am drinking raw milk, which came from a jersey cow. It is illegal to sell raw milk in many states. That's a shame, because pasteurization is a lie: it does more harm than good, but the big businesses with the resources to pasteurize large quantities of milk are in bed with the government, and quite ready to extinguish small dairies or force them to give their milk to the big businesses wholesale.
Homogenization is even worse. I get really excited when I see the cream float to the top of the milk in the fridge. It means the milk is real. Then, all I have to do is take it out of the fridge and shake it--ta daa! It's homogenized! No weird chemicals or artificiality required!
This milk is off-white, and sweet. It has all its fat, all its color.
I'm never going to drink pasteurized, homogenized, reduced-fat milk again.
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| vita est dura |
[06 Oct 2009|10:30pm] |
Life is hard. If your life isn't hard, you're not really alive. If your life isn't bitter, and harsh, and sharply painful at times, then you're not really alive. You're stuck in a fantasy, or a dream.
Nevertheless--I wish life wasn't hard. Right now I wish I could just be Vulcan, and do the logical thing at the logical time, and take all the stress off my heart. I wish I didn't have to feel. I could still love--I would not "feel" love, but I could love through my actions and my words. Love is not a feeling. Sometimes it is accompanied by feelings, but in its essence love is not a feeling.
So, I wish I couldn't feel. If I couldn't feel, then I wouldn't feel bad about things that I do. I would know that I did the logical thing, the right thing, and I could be content with that. If I, for some reason, did not do the logical thing, then I could comfort myself with knowing that next time, I would know better, and would do better. I would know it is illogical to be preoccupied with the immutable past, and I would not preoccupy myself with it.
Wouldn't it be easier, not to feel? I could still admire beauty. Beauty inspires feelings, but has a concrete reality outside them. All I care about in life are love and beauty--and even without feeling, without emotions, I could still have those things.
It is hard for me to reconcile the fact that emotions are natural and normal with how destructive they can be. How painful they can be.
I want to just exist. I want to exist and love and see beauty in the world and not care about the pain because there is a God, and He loves us--He loves us! Why, I don't know. We don't feel it sometimes. We don't see it sometimes. Maybe we don't see it or feel it ever. But we know it somehow. It is more powerful to know than to feel, which is why I do not want to feel.
If I didn't feel, I could more easily act upon what I know. I know that even if the worst thing possible actually happens, the sun will still rise the next morning, and I would still awaken. Even if broken-hearted. I know that I would eventually pick up the scattered, broken pieces of my heart and set about mending them--and be stronger for it, in the long run. I know that I would still see love and beauty, even through the tears. And I know that life would still be worth it, and I would still go on living.
So why feel, then? If I know all this, what is the point of broken-heartedness in the long run? Feeling now is especially useless, because the worst HASN'T happened, and maybe never will. In fact, maybe the best possible thing will end up happening. Certainly in the past I have been given things that I gave up already, saying they were impossible for me to achieve. When I gave them up, I received them in full. What is the point of the emotional struggle, the wrestling, the questioning, the worry and anxiety and trepidation?
There are some things I do not know which cause pain. The fact I do not know them causes pain, I mean. I'd rather not feel that pain. I would rather live contentedly not knowing, and then when the moment of truth comes and I do know, I can choose the logical response, and continue contentedly on.
I cause myself pain. I wish that I didn't feel it. I wish that I could look at myself objectively, and calmly remove the illogical parts.
But life is not logical! Life is paradoxical, in fact. A brilliant, beautiful, painful paradox. Emotions are necessary because flat logic is lifeless and dull. Emotions exist to show us how irrational and passionate human beings are. There are things that exist outside of logic, in a spiritual, unconscious realm; a metaphysical realm. We cannot apprehend the truth through pure logic alone. Emotions sometimes lie to us, but logic lies to us just as often.
Still. While I accept the necessity of emotion, I would rather I had none right now. I would rather be content and just exist. Content to just exist.
The tears behind my eyes are gone now, at least.
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| groggy |
[05 Oct 2009|12:26am] |
and procrastinating
I feel like I am not doing well in school at all. That probably means that I am doing very well--because I actually care, at least.
when you don't care anymore, that's when you gotta worry.
I have scars all over my arms, torso, and chest. One or two on my legs. I felt sleepy all day. I found out two days ago that I was a jerk to a whole host of people, completely unintentionally. I went to confession yesterday and took communion today. I spent the afternoon in a weird, sticky, half-asleep funk which accomplished absolutely nothing. I have a midterm tomorrow. I have two more midterms at the end of the week. I am going to do well on all of them, but worry just the same. I won't do all the reading I need to by tomorrow. I just watched a movie about zombies.
I think a nightmare would be nice, to break the monotony.
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| Eeyore |
[02 Sep 2009|11:01pm] |
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Don't cry; don't cry! I love you. Perhaps my love is worthless, but it exists just the same.
Then again, it might be worse when you don't cry. [subjunctive of sum, es, est, or is it something else?]
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| overdose |
[04 Aug 2009|06:00pm] |
I just accidentally overdosed on a migraine medication. I took twice as much as you're supposed to take in a 24-hour period because I was treating it like normal tylenol/aspirin/ibuprofen instead of the extra-strength special kind of medicine it is.
I feel very jittery, weak, and nauseated. That could be due to some kind of liver or stomach damage, but it's more likely the caffeine, because the medicine contains a lot of caffeine also and this is exactly how I feel after too many cups of coffee.
If I start vomiting blood or turning yellow I will let you all know.
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| chickadee |
[27 Jun 2009|01:06pm] |
I held a wild chickadee today. It was tiny, and I was afraid to hurt it. Such a beautiful and fragile bird.
It was trapped in our garage, in-between the open garage door and the ceiling. It couldn't figure out how to get out, how to get down. So I climbed up on my mom's car, thinking I would scare it down and then it would be able to fly to freedom. Instead, it allowed me to get within inches of it, without flinching. It even landed on my fingers and my head several times as it flew around, trying to find the way out. I touched it many times and it never seemed afraid; it kept flying back over to me, and calling out its chickadee call. I managed to catch it, after a while, which did scare it, and it started to peck at me--but it's beak was so small, I hardly felt it. I took it outside and let go, and it flew into a tree in our front yard and looked at me and called one more time before I went inside and closed the garage door.
Sarah, if you're reading this, you would have loved it. It made me think of you.
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| and then |
[11 Jun 2009|10:11pm] |
oh
nevermind
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[31 May 2009|12:56am] |
Everything seems so silly and so beautiful at the same time. So fake and so real. So pointless and so meaningful.
Sometimes art feels more real than reality itself: and sometimes it is so flat and false it is worthless.
This emo-babble is just the same. I like it but I hate it. Paradoxes, everything, life is filled with paradoxes, and that's all right. People go crazy when they deny that paradoxes exist. They go crazy trying to understand them as anything other than absurd, yet true. They go crazy trying to reconcile and understand. I went crazy once--it was because I disbelieved in paradox. Instead of believing that two different things could be true at the same time, I preferred to think everything false and hopeless.
But I have hope, now: hope that I will never be hopeless again.
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| viridis |
[27 Apr 2009|12:12am] |
a twirl of color came
like magic, here,
from the garden sky
I see green
glowing
...for me
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| oh well. |
[28 Mar 2009|05:14pm] |
Plans fell through. But it's all right; we're going to go on a road trip to Homer in two weeks instead, and it'll be just as awesome, if not more so.
Workin' full time now. Since I don't pay for food or rent, I am going to be loaded at the end of this semester when I go off to school again. Maybe even enough for my first year of grad school, if I decide to go the librarian route. I'ma keep it for a rainy day. It's good to feel secure financially; it makes my going off to Ohio in August a lot less stressful. I'm really excited to get off there. At the same time, life here in Alaska is amazing and I am enjoying every minute of it.
No more depression, eh. Just life. What a relief. I know some stuff now that I didn't know before. It can never hit me the same way as hard again. Not now that I've learned what I've learned.
Not now that I am who I am.
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| fuu. |
[20 Mar 2009|08:43pm] |
I hate it when plans get derailed at the last minute. I mean, I know that I can learn patience from this: that I can learn by experience how everything that is worth doing is worth working hard for, worth the extra bother and trouble that it will take to level these new obstacles. Nevertheless, it is annoying, and makes me anxious. There is no guarantee that everything will work out, after all. There is no guarantee that everything won't fail even after every attempt to get back on track.
Life is like that. Ho hum.
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| tempus precis |
[14 Mar 2009|08:59pm] |
Yesterday was a very interesting day. I got up and went to work and got my CPR training--I am now certified in child and adult CPR and rescue breathing. Then I went to lunch at the coffee shop in the Russian Orthodox museum downtown and saw two people who I hadn't seen since summertime, and missed a lot. It was really nice to see them both again, even if it was only for a couple hours. Then I went home and took a very long nap, but when I awoke, I wasn't feeling very well at all. It wasn't a physical kind of thing, but more of a mental disturbance I was unable to shake. Last summer, I used to have existential crises before I went to bed at night... it was something along those lines...
so I went for a walk. I had an idea to walk around for a little while, then come back home and drive to the church for compline (night prayer). But I just keep walking, and three miles later I'm halfway to the church, so I just keep walking still. I didn't give myself enough time to walk, so I came in half an hour late, but there was still half an hour or so of liturgy to go. then I was able to hang out with friends of mine and talk to people and the weird feeling went away. I hurt my hip joints walking for some reason, got blisters on the soles of my feet... but it didn't matter, I just wanted to walk. Talk to God a little bit on the way. Sing some Gregorian chant at the top of my voice on an empty road in the woods at the middle of the night. It didn't feel real, when I was about a mile out from the church. I couldn't believe that I was really crazy enough to walk that narrow, highspeed road in the dark. But I'm glad I did it. I learned a lot about myself on the way.
Weird how things like that happen. Weird how beautiful life is when you're cold and alone in the dark, and all the sound around you stops when you turn onto a less traveled road and cars stop going by, and all you can hear are your footsteps and your breath, which hangs in the air. Weird how beautiful life is when you can see the cross on top of a church lit up, the only light in the darkness around you, and you trudge through ankle-deep snow past it and its lit windows and walk inside to warmth and the smell of incense.
And it didn't hurt at all. None of it hurt. I felt at peace the whole time I walked, unlike when I used to walk downtown at night in Texas and freak out all my friends because the neighborhood wasn't all that safe--when I walked then it was because I was trapped and I was trying to escape, but I didn't know how. Eventually I would give up and return to my trap and be worse off. This time I wasn't escaping something bad... I was walking toward something good.
Weird how things like that happen, I say.
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| et nunc! |
[19 Feb 2009|11:09pm] |
I've been well for over a week! yaaaaaaaay!
Now it is off to visit Franciscan... and a certain someone...
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| et tum |
[06 Feb 2009|06:15pm] |
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I'm on my fourth day of diarrhea... ugh, I hate it. I feel like my stomach nasty has contaminated my whole house. I want to scrub everything down with bleach. But! The light at the end of the tunnel: I can eat solid food again! *dance* The nausea is GONE. I feel full after just a little bit of food because my stomach is still not ready for too much, but I don't feel sick when I eat anymore. yaaaaay.
Oh, ha, guess what happened yesterday to top off this whole week of pain!
My PERIOD STARTED.
augh. Now, my period has caused nausea and diarrhea in me before, but I think that five days of pure nausea and four days of horrible, horrible diarrhea is beyond the ability even of the evil creature that is my uterus. However, it definitely could have amplified whatever stomach virus I picked up, and it's a cramp-causer also. I usually get cramps and back pain two to three days before my period even starts, and it continues for the first two days or so of it. There's less blood than usual though. Everything is just wonky now, I guess.
More good news is that the days are getting longer. It is usually dark when I get to work (eight-thirty) and then already dark when I get out (five-thirty) , but today the sun only started to set as I walked out of the daycare. It made the mountains beautiful, and the moon was already bright in the sky above them. I love it when that happens, when I walk out of work all tired and headachy and smelling like bleachwater and I look at the mountains and think, "man, I love living in Alaska." I really do. It's awesome here.
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| sick of being sick |
[04 Feb 2009|11:50am] |
So. Let me tell you how THIS week started.
I wake up on Monday morning with a temperature of 99.7° F (37.6° C). That's not so bad... Monday is my day off, and I figure I can sleep it off. If I just rest up, it'll go down in no time. But as the day progresses, I grow extremely nauseated and find it hard to eat anything, and my temperature just keeps climbing, until it reaches it's peak at 101.7° F (38.7° C). I think all I ate on Monday was ice cream and a cup of chicken broth. Since my temperature kept climbing and I kept feeling worse and worse, I called work to tell them that I wouldn't be coming in tomorrow, just to give them a heads up. They're extremely short-staffed right now, however, so whenever you call in you kinda feel like a traitor. I had a doctor's appointment on Tuesday morning at eight AM, so my boss said, all right, but please call us back tomorrow morning and tell us what the doctor says. I'm cool with that.
I suffer through the rest of the day pretty well. Fevers make my skin extremely sensitive and they make my muscles ache, but the higher the fever the more sleep I can catch in short bursts throughout the day. I watched TV or listened to music most of the day. Watched M*A*S*H off and on with my mama. She kept bringing me water and juice, and blankets, which was awesome of her... She's so good to me when I'm sick. Fevers also make me feel extremely chilled, so I was laying near the fire with three thermal blankets on top of me and switching between shivering and sweating for most of the day.
My fever goes down near the end of the day, and when I wake up on Tuesday morning it's back to a normal one. But the worst is yet to come. When I get up I can hardly stand for the nausea, and I get ready in short little sessions, putting on one article of clothing and then laying on the floor, getting up and putting on another one and laying on the floor, taking a break in my mom's bed while she puts on her makeup... I had one nasty bout of diarrhea that morning, but it didn't seem too bad. My mom drives me to the hospital, and I go in for my appointment. When the tech takes my blood pressure, something is off, so she makes me lay down and she takes it again, and then makes me stand up for a minute to take it again. Standing up makes me feel extremely nauseated, so I politely inform her that I'm going to puke. She hands me a bucket, and I proceed to vomit into it. I hadn't been eating much of late, so it wasn't very substantial stuff, but it was nasty and very painful. She rubs my back while I puke, and then when I'm done she rushes off to get the doctor. Apparently I was moderately to severely dehydrated. They end up taking me into another room and hooking me up to an IV, and dripping a liter of saline solution into me before sending me home with a note saying I don't have to work for the next two days. I called work and told them that, and they seemed disappointed but understanding. I'm gonna bring them the note when I go back to work on Thursday.
I managed to avoid puking any more, but I was plagued with horrible diarrhea for the rest of the day. I actually leaked a little into my panties on the way home, which was embarrassing, but the sphincter is not designed to hold back liquid... I was basically pooping brown water. It was the worst I think I've ever had it in my life. I rubbed my poor backside raw with wiping and eventually had to switch to baby wipes instead of toilet paper, and had to treat myself with Vaseline also. I had to wear a pad to catch all the leaks, too. The bathroom smelled awful all day, and we kept going and burning incense in there to keep the smell from spreading. Let me tell you, I prefer fever to that any day.
And I found it extremely difficult to hydrate as much as the doctor told me to, because every time I tried to eat something (yogurt or broth) or drink something (water or juice) my stomach would protest after just a few sips. So basically I had to keep sipping throughout the day, just a little at a time, then wait until my stomach stopped hurting, then start the whole process all over again. Night was horrible. My fever came back during the night -- 100° F this time (37.8° C) -- and I could hardly sleep. I had gas really bad, too. At first it felt like little BBs or marbles trying to pass through my intestines, but as the night progressed it felt like I had steel balls the size of my fist rolling around in there. I remember kind of groaning for a lot of the night. However, at about six AM I feel asleep good and didn't wake up till ten or so, then I fell back asleep till about noon. Now I have an appetite finally and am about to go eat some eggs. I'm confident that I will be up to working on Thursday and Friday.
Man, though, this week started out so bad. And this is the second Monday in a row that I fell ill with a fever... The doctor thinks that I am just catching things from the kids at the daycare here. So, if any of you who read this ever intend to put your kids in daycare, if they are sick, or even if they were sick yesterday, DON'T BRING 'EM IN. Kids are very unsanitary and no matter how hard we try we can't keep 'em from getting us or the other kids sick.
I wish I had a stronger immune system, but I've always been pretty suseptible to stuff.
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| deliro, delirare, deliravi, deliratus |
[26 Jan 2009|10:41am] |
I just had, last night, what could be termed a psychotic break.
There's a prescription sleep medicine out there called "Ambien," which is notorious for causing hallucinations at the onset of sleep, and even sleepwalking and such weirdnesses in a small segment of the population. I was prescribed five tablets of this medicine for cases of severe insomnia -- such as when it takes me over an hour to fall asleep. Last night I went to bed with a horrible headache, and my whole body felt kind of feverish and strange. My shoulders/neck/back hurt, and I was profoundly hungry and thirsty but too tired to move and eat. I tried to fall asleep, but was unable to, and my whole body just lay there, aching, until I burst into tears and paced the whole house crying in an attempt to tire myself out.
Enter Ambien. Completely at the end of my rope, I went to take one so that I could lie down and actually go under. I usually only take half a pill, but I was too exhausted to find anything to split the pill with so I downed a whole one and crawled back in bed. After about five to ten minutes, all the pain and feverishness got worse and I got up and started pacing again, apparently. My bed started sprouting flowers and the walls strange rock formations, and my house turned into a maze. Knowing that I was hallucinating, I ran into the bathroom to try and snap myself out of it--my face in the mirror had two noses, four eyes, two mouths, then I had three heads, and my face was ugly and growled at me and kept morphing right before my eyes, and I couldn't focus on it. I tried to navigate the house but found it extremely difficult, because everything looked different; felt different. I was still whining and crying I think, and eventually found my way into my parents' room and totally ran into things and then reached their bed, which was a spiky mess of white rock, and felt around it crying, "help me!" My parents had to get up and lead me back into bed and hold me down in it, because I kept trying to get up. They brought me a nightlight, a heating pad, and a mask for my face and kept telling me that I was hallucinating, and if I would just lie down the medicine would work and put me to sleep. I tried to explain to them about the flowers and rock formations, about how extremely scared I was because I couldn't discern what was real and what wasn't, and my mom crawled in bed with me for a while until I calmed down. Shortly after they left I fell asleep.
I can't tell you how frightening that experience was. I knew that it wasn't real, but at the same time was unable to figure out to what extent it wasn't real, and unable to get rid of it all. My body actually still has a headache and feels absolutely feverish right now, nine or ten hours of sleep later. I have no idea what the problem is. I just took my temperature and it is a solid 97.7 degrees F. Nothing strange there.
Kyrie eleison.
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| nix, nivis |
[19 Dec 2008|05:14pm] |
I'm in Alaska now. For good. Or, well, the rest of the semester... no more school. I need to relax.
If you can't tell that from the bent of a whole bunch of entries recently...
here's to good health! *cheers*
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| sanguis |
[01 Dec 2008|02:13pm] |
I thought it was a blood stain the first time I saw it. But it's probably just a coffee stain.
Looks like a blood stain at first, but.
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| caeca |
[27 Nov 2008|05:43pm] |
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I'm somewhat of a black sheep in my family. And that's just a fact. Most of them are very practical Southerners, raised up in a certain way of thinking, faithful Church of Christers and generally just down-to-earth folk. They're kind to everyone, enjoy the simple pleasures in life, and cook some damn good food. My descriptions of them appeal to too many cliches to be fair, but "practical" sums them up pretty well. I love them all.
Thing is, I'm not practical.
It's not so much a source of tension in reality as it is in my head. I'm loved very much, and supported for the most part, but here I am this artistic soul floating about as I see fit, joining the Catholic Church, thinking in poetry. The Catholic Church has such poetry! The good ol' southern Church of Christ can't even come close to producing this same kind of poetry, steeped in history and dozens of different cultures...
I'm not tied down to the ground like they are. They think and they think hard--they're smart, all of them, college-educated and everything, but they think in one dimension and there I go headlong into another where they can't even see me anymore. Not to say that my thinking has surpassed theirs or anything: it's just different.
I think in poetry. This is something that I have recently discovered about myself, and slowly things are starting to make sense in light of it. When I talk to people I find often that I have to translate my thoughts from their poetic form into something more understandable, and sometimes things get lost in translation and then we don't understand each other. If I talk just like I think, everyone gets lost except me. Some people know how to talk in poetry back at me, know how to talk my language with me, but most don't. And there are different types of poetry, too: two poetic people can still talk different kinds of poetry and land on opposite sides of one another.
Even now I'm translating my thoughts to put them here. Sometimes I don't.
I just want to know, and someday I will, whether I'm really on to something or if it's all just rot. If it's all just rot my suffering is meaningless and I do a lot of things I shouldn't and I think a lot of nonsense. If it's all just rot, like I know some people would say about what I think, unfiltered, then all right. I'm blind. Well, then.
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