SugarSkull

SugarSkull

About Me

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I'm in a perpetual phase of transition which doesn't seem to be phasing out.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

A visit with my dear friend Tim.

My pal Tim moved to Massachusetts for grad school but came back to A'ville for his Spring Break.  We boozed it up mid afternoon at this neat dive called "De Soto Lounge"









Well that was a fun afternoon.  I was 2 hefty vodka tonics in and then had to go to my night computer course. gaaah. c'est la vie.

Dreams, Guns, Lies and Brothels.

The other day I was driving around with my friend Barbara.  She’s a lovely middle-aged woman who befriended me in my night course.  She calls me her “gal pal.”  Does that logically make her my gal pal as well?  I guess it doesn’t have to mean that necessarily, however I think I consider her mine too, it’s nice…I have myself a gal pal.  We hang out and talk sometimes at cafes and such.  She’s got a goofy, quirky charm to her on the surface and a deeply maternal, emotionally affectionate core.  She’s also seen a good deal of dark things in her life and has managed to be way more optimistic than my manic depressive self has ever even attempted to be.  As horrible as this sounds, I’ve often seen optimism as a character flaw, as a sort of artificial coping mechanism, or worse, a complete detachment or ignorance of reality.  With Barbara it seems different from that.  She’s seen some crap and consciously chooses to move forward.  She allows her experiences to shape her in a way that only allows for forward movement, not consistent mental regression into the past.   
Anyway, she and I were driving along (Barbara being the passenger in my little falling apart pale blue Honda civic) after we went by her place of residence so that she could change into some more comfortable pants…after all who can stand wearing itchy business pants in the evening? Not me.  We were on our way to get a drink downtown and I noticed a quaint little neighborhood and decided to drive into it and take a gander because my roommate and I are strongly considering renting a house.  We currently live in a basement apartment with very low ceilings and terrible lighting.  Sometimes I feel like the ceiling gets progressively lower and the walls progressively darker each month or week or day, makes me think of Al Gore’s warnings about the ever encroaching oceans onto small human inhabited islands due to our good old friend, Global Warming.  I feel like a sad little, dark-circles-under-my-eyes hobbit in this place when I hang around at home too much.  We’ve been here for nearly two years (hence why I’m always mentioning cafes, because I rarely do work at home).  A change would be nice.   Well Barbara said she didn’t mind at all if we took a tour of this modest little working class neighborhood,  (she, unlike myself, is very relaxed and go with the flow, and doesn’t have that brain take-over thirst for a beverage in the evenings in the same way most folks do, including myself.  As the back of wait staff t-shirts say at this local pizza joint “work is the curse of the drinking class” ha. Oscar Wilde. Had to google that, couldn’t remember who said it. Shameful.)  So I took a random left turn onto a very residential looking little road.  I was hoping it would somehow loop around to a main road, but, alas! It had a dead end (no, reader, I’m not going to go off on a cheesy metaphorical tangent about dead ends, don’t you worry).  I had to make a very awkward 3 point turn and grazed the edge of someone’s yard accordingly.  There were kids outside playing and a mom-looking female.  She looked at my car, but fortunately not in a particularly scrutinizing or concerned way.  I guess she assumed I just made a wrong turn.  Still I really wanted to jet out of there as quickly as possible.  It was kind of out in the country and I said to Barbara “Lord we gotta get out of here quick, country people will come running down their driveway with rifles if they see a stranger encroaching on their property, it’s happened to me before.”  She said “What??? Really???”  And then I thought for a second and responded “Shit, I don’t know if that actually happened now that I think about it.”  If I scrape my brain real hard, I somewhat recall getting lost trying to find a friend’s house in this tiny hick town called Stokesdale, NC.  I think I was with another friend and we pulled into this longgg driveway which was seeemingly identical in the night time to the driveway we were trying to spot, and realized that we were at the wrong place.  It ended up being a double-wide trailer and some man came out yelling…maybe holding a gun…not sure.  Did any of this really happen? well I really think it did, but I can’t make any promises.  It could’ve been a dream or just a completely fabricated recollection.  Barbara started cracking up and said something along the lines of “Oh, so you’re just making things up now, hahahaha.” 
Well that’s far from being the first time that I’ve gotten dreams and memories and past ponderings mixed up, or unknowingly created a surrealist concoction of distorted memories and bizarr-o dreams.  One time when I was probably in elementary school I freaked out because I all of the sudden had a “flashback” to a creepy long haired man trying to kidnap me when I was playing in my front yard some years prior and I managed to run in my house and lock the door and go hang out in the bathroom with my mom while she finished her shower.  I really don’t think that happened, but I was so disturbed, goose bumpy and all. 
It makes me wonder if I have some strange strain of a pathological lying disorder or something.  Or maybe because I spend so much more time in my self-created brain world than in physical reality, I just get confused fairly often.  A lot of nights I wake up (I know most other people deal with this) and I’m aware that I had some very intricate, crazy dreams, but don’t remember them.  Maybe they just all of the sudden come back every now and then when something triggers them to do so, like a partial de ja vue.  Still, I can’t be going around telling lies. Ha. Many times when I’ve told stories related to my past I’ve had to provide the disclaimer “that may or may not have happened, it could’ve been a dream.”  After watching these Youtube videos recently, I feel as though Tom Waits probably has similar social behaviors.  Not that I could ever compare myself to such a god, a legend, a genius, but I do take comfort in his significantly higher levels of eccentricity.
This leads me to a little cultural analysis I’ve had going on in my head for several days now after being struck by a line in a blog post by the economist Paul Krugman.  He was criticizing the Republican party for demanding to have access to the email account of a public university professor who had openly disparaged the governor of Wiscousin’s “power grab.” I’m not particularly concerned with this entry (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/academic-intimidation/) however one particular line really got my brain a cranking. He wrote in a final, standalone, one sentence paragraph that “As usual, the nakedness of the thing is what’s surprising.” As usual is right! However, I took this line completely out of the context from what Krugman intended, aka to note the absurdity of Republicans’ explicit demands in this and other instances and the the now commonplace acceptance by society of these absurdities as not being very absurd. Instead I started thinking about culture, (this is a far leap from Krugman’s article) I thought more about the sort of paradoxical quality of nakedness in American society.  As we move away from being a culture defined by religion and Victorian-esque social conservatism (much to the chagrin of staunch Republicans despite the many, many instances of hypocrisy, naturally), into a more open, somewhat more egalitarian culture with substantially less appreciation for maintaining a reserved nature, we may seem raw, naked, un-mysterious.  However it seems to me that this “nakedness” is simply a more complicated attempt at hiding from ourselves.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d love nothing more than for everyone to just be freaking real, but it’s not the case. People are no longer instantaneously handed down an identity, a social class mold, like in past decades (this is a generalization of course and there are many counter arguments denying that anyone has ever truly been handed down an identity, but roll with me, I'm no sociologist folks).  Contemporary society allows for a lot more self-expression and individualism, a lot more personal decision-making, yet with that comes more confusion, more choices in the consumer world (aka more materialism), obnoxious elitism in being non-main stream (when really a good deal of people are quite similar in their desires to be non-conformist, it’s now trendy), and from what I’ve observed: crazy levels of prescription pill/other drug use and abuse (to deal with the inconsistency of everything, including this god awful economy), outrageous levels of self-absorption and social flakiness, etc.  I know I already had a little Zombie rant in my last post, so I’ll save readers from anymore “I hate my society” ramblings. All I'm trying to say is that we have a paradox of progress going on. This isn't a new idea, social critics during the industrial age used to talk about how America had it's own modern riddle of the Sphinx.  If we didn't figure out the solution to this riddle, we'd all perish.  The riddle dealt with the parallel growth of economic progress and plight of the masses.  Hmmm...maybe it was because the money was only going into the hands of a few...you don't have to be a Marxist see that people weren't reaping the profits of their toil...the problem was a lack of solution, and well to some extent a lack of awareness or acceptance by the upper echelon that there was any issue with corporate capitalism at all. In this day and age the problem has shifted a great deal, especially considering we've outsourced most of our manufacturing jobs, so the labor versus capital issue isn't as obviously stringent nor cut and dry.  Now we've got this problem that with social and economic progress somehow comes prevailing self-absorption, greed and exorbitant amounts of vapidness. I have no solutions so I'm going to shut up about that now.


I’m ending this with one of my favorite segments from Steinbeck’s East of Eden, it's very, very loosely related to the above ramblings, but it’s mainly meant for a new friend that has a love/hate relationship with literary references:

"A new country seems to follow a pattern. First come the openers, strong and brave and rather childlike. They can take care of themselves in a wilderness, but they are naive and helpless against men, and perhaps that is why they went out in the first place. When the rough edges are worn off the new land, businessmen and lawyers come in to help with the development - to solve problems of ownership, usually by removing the temptations to themselves. And finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out of the pain of living. And culture can be on any level, and is.

The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels. The sectarian churches came in swinging, cocky and loud and confident. Ignoring the laws of debt and repayment, they built churches which couldn't be paid for in a hundred years. The sects fought evil, true enough, but they also fought each other with a fine lustiness. They fought at the turn of a doctrine. Each happily believed all the others were bound for hell in a basket. And each for all its bumptiousness brought with it the same thing: the Scripture on which our ethics, our art and poetry and our relationships are built. It took a smart man to know where the difference lay between the sects, but anyone could see what they had in common. And they brought music - maybe not the best, but the form and sense of it. And they brought conscience, or, rather, nudged the dozing conscience. They were not pure, but they had a potential of purity, like a soiled white shirt. And any man could make something pretty fine of it within himself. True enough, the Reverend Billing, when they caught up with him, turned out to be a thief, an adulterer, a libertine, and a zoophilist, but that didn't change the fact that he had communicated some good things to a great number of receptive people. Billing went to jail, but no one ever arrested the good things he had released. And it doesn't matter much that his motive was impure. He used good material and some of it stuck. I use Billing only as an outrageous example. The honest preachers had energy and go. They fought the devil, no holds barred, boots and eye-gouging permitted. You might get the idea that they howled truth and beauty the way a seal bites out the National Anthem on a row of circus horns. But some of the truth and beauty remained, and the anthem was recognizable. The sects did more than this, though. They built the structure of social life in the Salinas Valley. The church supper is the grandfather of the country club, just as the Thursday poetry reading in the basement under the vestry sired the little theatre.

While the churches, bringing the sweet smell of piety for the soul, came in prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock-beer time, the sister evangelism, with release and joy for the body, crept in silently and greyly, with its head bowed and its face covered.

You may have seen the spangled palaces of sin and fancy dancing in the false West of the movies, and maybe some of them existed -- but not in the Salinas Valley. The brothels were quiet, orderly, and circumspect. Indeed, if after hearing the ecstatic shrieks of climactic conversation against the thumping beat of the melodeon you had stood under the window of a whorehouse and listened to the low decorous voices, you would have been likely to confuse the identities of the two ministries. The brothel was accepted while it was not admitted."

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Unemployment.

Well I quit my job for reasons I'd rather not discuss in detail here.  Let's just say I had a traumatizing encounter, and that I left due to unsafe working conditions.  Have I mentioned I worked entirely alone in the laundry room?  And that anyone could just walk back there? yeah, really not safe for a young twenty something female. 


Well my father insisted that I quit.  He's such a good man.  I'm sure I'll find something else soon.  I'd really like to work at this hotel on top of a mountain right off the Blue Ridge Parkway.  The BRP was built by young men during the Great Depression.  One of FDR's many great government sponsored projects.  It's gorgeous, I mean ridiculously beautiful up there. 


It's hard to imagine not living in the mountains.  I've diagnosed myself with T.A.D, not sure if it's a real thing, Topographical Associative Disorder.  I grew up in the piedmont of North Carolina. Gentle rolling hills, what a tease.  Living in the mountains has cured me mentally in a similar fashion that it cured Heidi physically, in some movie I saw as a child entitled "Heidi".  It makes me wonder what living in the Rockies could do for one's soul.  Yeah I think I believe in a soul lately. ha, never thought I would.  Maybe it's because I occasionally come across people with so much life and imagination and beauty to them, hidden amongst the robot zombie masses, that it seems like there must be a soul but that people somehow unconsciously detach themselves from it (God I use a ton of Run-on sentences on this thing, oh well). Or maybe I've just read too many Platonic dialogues.  If you haven't ever read Phaedo, you may want to.  Not to be a book title dropper, bluh, that's gross. 


Has anyone considered how hilarious it is that the masses are obsessed with Zombies? (or is that fad already dead and gone and so 2009 or something? I don't tend to keep up).  I mean I'm pretty sure the corporate/tv/popculture/advertising world has eaten a lot of brains.  Is that what happens? Zombies eat brains and then the person with no brain becomes a zombie? sounds a lot like the American rite of passage to me.  My only knowledge of zombies comes from a time when I was at this really crappy/awesome swimming pool in a blue collar neighborhood in Greensboro...ya know...one of those pools with rust tainted concrete and a sparse supply of falling apart plastic lounge chairs enclosed by a fence with permanently endented crevaces where teenager feet had landed over the years in order to sneak in late at night and go stoned skinny dipping with sweethearts.   I was hanging out with these dreaded hippy chicks with lots arm pit hair.  I didn't really know them, but I didn't really know any of the people I hung out with well in my early college confused/detached/misanthropic/pseudo-intellectual weirdness years.  Anyway these chicks were playing "Zombies" in the pool and chasing each other around with their arms raised in the air and their wrists bent downwards with their fingers spread apart in talon fomation yelling "Me want Brainzzz" or something like that (parenthetical pop culture reference: The word "talon" always makes me think of Napoleon Dynamite at the chicken farm when he asks the farmers "Do the chickens have large talons? and yes reader, you're perfectly allowed to laugh at my weird pardoxes/ hypocrisy, like calling other people zombies and then making a Napoleon Dynamite reference)   I took part in this game to some extent and I remember feeling a little uncomfortable, like it was hard to let loose and act silly with girls I took so seriously.  They were very militantly political and lived in a  commune and rode around town on bikes they built themselves with bumper stickers that said thing like "kill your tv" or "die yuppy scum." Yet they were having fun and acting like kids.  It was like running into someone you normally only see in one confined environment, you know like your barista or bar tender or professor or boss at the grocery store when they're dressed more cozzily and are doing normal human things that everyone does like purchasing bananas or something.  And you just feel weird seeing them outside of the one particular environment so it takes a minute to even recognize them when they say hello.  (Not to mention if they dont say hi first its tricky to determine whether you should say hi at all, even if you see that person every single day.) It just caught me off guard.


Anyhoo, I watched this music video today and it made me cry.  Well it stimulated tears but I'm pretty sure I wasn't crying due to the video. Life is just weird lately.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BKUjnyf8uY
No self-pity here, in fact I laugh at myself every time I start to feel like I'm feeling sorry for myself.  Just weird to be living in the town I went to college in after I've graduated.  Just hanging out in a tourist town with a completely service-industry dominated economy.  so many 20, 30 and 40 somethings just hanging around waiting tables and then smoking weed and drinking like fish in their spare time.  I'm scared to death of complacency.  I need to be more patient, it's as if I want my whole life to happen right now, as if my personal life narrative were one those cartoon flip books, with the doodled character in the corner of the page running as you flip the pages rapidly.  Still I only need to slow down mentally, my reality is actually moving quite slowly.  Maybe that's okay, maybe I should utilize this "in between" time to get to know myself a little better, get to know the world and my surroundings more intimately.


Well time to hit up craigslist for some jobs. wahoo.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Pretty pictures and stuff.

I don't believe that I've mentioned this on my blog, but I was classically trained in visual art from age 11 to 20  ( that sounds all high falutin' and arrogant, but I'm not sure how else to word it, besides "I took classes on how to make perty pictures for the majority of my life").  Then one day I decided  that I despised art, quit producing, and developed weird and silly opinions about the worthlessness of visual art, yeah pretty terrible, I know. I was knee deep in that terrible early adulthood existential angst or at least that's what this lady I worked for called it. I just hated everything for a while I suppose.  Nobody likes a Negative Nancy or a Debbie Downer though so I've been forcing myself to be more positive and happy and crap.


Lately I've just been sort of neutral toward art, but don't make any myself.  I think my neutrality/ general disinterest in the art world is finally fading and I'm back to appreciating art again.  Maybe I'll even pick sup some pen and ink or charcoal one of these days.  Last time I did that I just wasted money and got too frustrated with how out of practice I was and gave up quickly. 


Caleb showed me some really cool work by an artist Jean-Pierre Velly.  It's very intricate stuff.  I googled him again today and came across a gallery website that included his work as well as other artists.  I started looking at the art of this man Miguel Conde.  Realllllly love it. a lot.




those are all works by conde from http://www.galleriadelleone.com/
I feel so out of the loop with art these days.  I feel out of the loop with everything for that matter.  I have been trying to play catch up with what's going on in the world because I've been in robot mode for weeks now.  I streamed Thursdays "Talk of the Nation" which dealt with the realities vs. myth of public sector worker compensation/ unionization and whatnot.  I was felt so ashamed, a huge labor history lover, and I'm totally out of it while Wiscousiners (not sure if thats what's theyre called) are making history!  I really need to spend more time reading the news, have been trying to play catch up through google reader, al-jazeera, npr and the oh so wonderful Paul Krugman economic blogs through the New York times.  Now to find time to get updated on the world of art and culture! geez.   I totally suck at being a Renaissance (whoah) man.  If anyone out there is really good at self-educating despite the hustle and bustle of life, pleasssse give me some pointers!  I'm supposed to be getting some beginner Arabic books in mail soon.  As if I have time to learn some Arabic.  Just thought it'd be fun and useful and would help work on that part of my brain that is very under-developed, if not borderline disabled.  Maybe then my GRE math practice test scores will improve too. who knows!!!!

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Gassy girl at coffee shop.

So the coffee shop I frequent has various types of seating available. They have these long skinny tables that sit up high and have bar stools as seats.   Jammed in pretty close by are small two seater tables with little wooden chairs.  I sat down at one of the small tables this morning and was squeezed between my table and a person sitting on a bar stool.  We were facing away from each other so that the back of my head was right at the level of her behind.  As I was sitting there sipping my coffee and chatting with my friend I turned my head to the side to soak in my environment and do a little people watching as I always do (sometimes I'm a bad listener, eeeek!).  At this point my ear was really close to stool lady's rear end.  All the sudden she released a big 'ol poot.  It probably wasn't all that loud and there was music playing, but to me and my right ear it was like a steam boar roar.  She got off of her stool within three minutes and headed towards the bathroom.  I think we all know what she was going to do in there.  Oh coffee!


That was probably my most immature post yet, but hey you're never too old to appreciate some fine potty humor, and if you are you should lighten up. 

Monday, March 7, 2011

I guess clouds don't really die exactly.

I've never been very fond of clear blue skies.  I prefer when the sky at least has some clouds, especially the  big white fluffy ones, cumulus I think? I even like a nice gray rainy day here and there, but certainly not all of the time.  The skies were often gray in Pittsburgh, but that kinda fit the industrial feel of the place, and being the dorky lover of labor history that I am, it was an interesting feeling to be in that atmosphere and to think about all of the factory workers that lived and died in that grundgy city over the years. (Well not all of Pittsburgh is dirty, it definitely had some up and coming/ artsy hipster "culturally rich" sections that were very attractive).


Anyway! I thought this picture kinda sorta fit with the title of my blog. It was taken during our cemetery stroll today.  RIP Mr. Cloud. My sad face just makes me look a little insane.  I don't have big enough lips to look cute when I do that, just kind of dumb.




Stanley Shelton, Room 402

My dear friend Caleb and I ate a hefty lunch at this awesome Jamaican place today, aka a restaurant run by a bunch of white, dreaded rastas.  I stuffed my face and then wanted to walk around in the historic neighborhood that surrounds the restaurant to de-bloatify my belly.  So we took a nice long walk and found ourselves in this beautiful old cemetery.  Somehow I didn't catch myself feeling somber.  Maybe the nursing home is desensitizing me towards the issues of death and aging.  I'm not quite sure how I feel about that.  I definitely still have sensitivities towards things related to the nursing home environment, an event that occurred at work the other night proved that for sure.  I was getting ready to deliver clothes on 400 hall, the shortest and most ignored hall in the building.  As I started heading down the hall towards the first room, I heard a man cry out "WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME GET UP?" It was the voice of Stanley Shelton, a man I'd never heard utter a word.  I was intrigued by this stoic man.  Sometimes when I came into his room he'd continue to stare blankly in whatever direction he was looking and completely ignore my presence.  Others times he would make soul searching eye contact with me and occasionally even lift his hand in a weak wave if I waved at him first.  I couldn't tell if he was pretty far gone or not, but I was fairly certain he was.  I liked to pretend he was just a man of few words who had wise, insightful thoughts flowing through his mind all day. 


He's tall and fragile and wears overalls and flannel shirts everyday.  He just seems like someone who's seen a lot, his eyes seem like they have lots of burning memories in them. His mouth is always arched downward, not necessarily in a frown, but in just sort of a stoic, detached expression.  I guess I just liked the idea of this man being a completely internal person who had moved beyond concerning himself with other human beings.


It turns out he actually is fairly out of it, has a very weak heart, and is not going to be around much longer.    I found this all out the day after I heard him cry out.  On the night I heard him yell, I rushed into his room and found him lying on the ground with a good bit of chunky drool forming a puddle on the floor below his mouth.  I have no idea how long he had been lying there, probably a while.  I crouched down and got pretty close to him and told him that I was going to get some help.  I rushed to the nurses station and four CNAs and a nurse came to check out the scene.  He told them that he had broken his hip.  They lifted him onto his bed and I left the room to deliver clothes to other rooms. 


From the room next door I could hear one of the CNAs telling Stanley that they had to change his clothes because he had to go to the hospital and the people there would cut his clothes off.  They changed him into an examination gown and every time they repositioned his body I heard him cry out in pain and horror.  I cringed every time and found myself getting pretty distraught feeling inside.


The next day I told my coworkers at my other job about it (I work at a little museum two Saturdays a month). My coworker Tammy was irate. She said she couldn't believe that the nurses would concern themselves with his clothes getting ruined. She had a good point, as much money as nursing homes bring in from residents and their families, it seemed like a pair of overalls and a flannel shirt should be easily replaced.


Anyway, as I was leaving work for the night shortly after finding Stanley, an ambulance passed my car heading towards the home.  I knew that they were coming for Stanley and I immediately burst into tears.  This person that I had idealized as almost beyond life, a sort of higher being within my midsts, was in fact human, and was in fact old and dying. 


I found out the next day that they couldn't operate on his hip because his heart was too weak.  He's back at the home and has just been sleeping a lot,  it won't be long before death comes knocking at his sad little  shared nursing home bedroom door.  I felt pretty depressed about the scene, it all replayed in my head over and over for the past couple of days. Everyone else around here is immune to these kinds of things.  I don't blame them, I mean they don't have a choice, but I just think I'm too emotional to ever go into medicine or geriatrics.


Zanie Rhoden, another resident died last week. Feels a little eerie considering I used her name as my blog pseudonym.  Well her name lives on through my silly little blog! As much as I'd like Stanley to hang on, it's probabl for the best if he just lets go.  No sense in living in misery.  (That's what I'd think when I was a little girl and realized I'd stepped on an insect but didn't quite kill it, and stomped on it again). The quality of life at that facility is terribly grim, it feels wrong to think "poor Stanley Shelton" because in my heart I think it's for the best that he passes fairly quickly into the beyond or the ground or wherever one ends up after all this insanity, and good times, and hardship, and love, and reason, and emotion that we call existence. 



Thursday, March 3, 2011

Insomnia=Bluh.

My Dad once told me that when I was a babe I would sometimes be sitting in my high chair and would just fall asleep and face plant into my food.  I've never really had trouble sleeping.  In fact I've always been somewhat of a sleep lush.  Eight hours used to not even cut it.  I wasn't one of the cool kids that stayed up late and slept in til the mid-afternoon, even at middle school slumber parties I would be the dorky girl who was opposed to pulling an all nighter. Up until my college days I went to bed around 10 usually and was always an early riser.  Even when I became more social in college and did the normal student routine of drinking til late at night Thursday through Saturday  and somehow getting my sh*t together by 3am Monday morning,  I still would naturally wake up no later than 9ish. 


Lately I've had the craziest sleep patterns.  I don't get home from work til 12 or 12:30am.  I don't like to go to bed immediately because it makes me feel like the nursing home has too much control over my identity.  On days that I go to class in the morning and practically straight to work for the rest of my day, I don't really feel alive.  Everything gets so mechanical sometimes.  It's almost better to be in robot mode thiugh, because once I do have some free time I tend to think too much and lose my cool about my current somewhat awkward life situation.  I used to be such a little Asheville socialite, hanging out with some various human being whose personality fit the mood I happened to be in, swimming in rivers, drinking lots of local beer, frequenting a lot of dff't bars and cafes with random groups of people that I got together, having partites, etc.  Now I'm just kind of in my own little world, but I don't even feel like I have ownership over it because it's so blah and I don't consider myself a blah person. 


Not sleeping hasn't helped the situation.  I've recently been caught up in a good deal of drama of which I don't even feel like I have enough time to sort out. My mind just spins at night.  I tried to take a nap the other day and was actually too exhausted to fall asleep.  I didn't even think that was possible.  I got into that tingly trippy state of mind that happens right before you fall alseep and then I'd just kind of jump out of it over and over again as if someone gave me an adrenaline shot, and then I'd start twitiching all over.  I was almost in tears, it was seriously painful, I mean I reallly needed to sleep.  I wish my mind didn't have such a bad habit of creeping into the darkness.  I'm so good at putting on a smile, but when it comes down to it I'm a pretty sinister human being.  Just gotta keep my chin up and get through this current slump in my roller coaster ride of an existence I suppose.  Comedians are usually fairly screwed up people internally. I mean i'm no comedian, but  I like to make people laugh.   I get off on creating humor out of the stupid situations I find myself in.  It's usually somewhat effective because once I joke about my circumstances to other people and they laugh, I realize that even the pretty crappy parts of life can sometimes be amusing from a bystander or more objective perspective.  We all take ourselves and our situations so seriously but it's fairly easy to laugh at other people's life stuff, so shouldn't we just laugh at ourselves too? I guess it's harder.


I got a speeding ticket the other day.  The circumstances surrounding it were sort of funny, but after a half-day of just laughing at myself I totally lost my cool about it.  I'm a natural worry wort and I'm also obsesssssed with my parents' approval (I'm far from independent at this point).  I felt so guilty and stupid and was so tired and upset about other crap that the ticket was just the last straw.  I've been too exhausted to truly freak out like I normally would though, which actually makes me feel worse because I know once I get some legit rest I'm totally going to lose my shiz about everything.


Last night I gave a power point presentation in my web class.  It was a pretty dry topic, "10 internet milestones"  I somehow made mine pretty humorous and my classmates and teacher sincerely laughed pretty freaking hard at a few things that I said and at a ridiculous/ mildly inappropriate video clip I put up.  I realized afterwards that I wasn't a robot, that I have a "big" personality and am pretty damn unique/weird. Sometimes I feel confident that I give off a good energy and  I'm somehow confident  that it will be put to use in a pretty great way somewhere down the road. Other times though, I feel like I try so creepily hard to give off good, fun energy. It disturbs me how much people blindly take me to be a happy human being and someone that they can trust/ like.  Occcasionly a really intuitive person comes along and picks up on my inatuthenticity and understands that I'm only letting people into my world on a very superficial level. That type of person either loves me more deeply than others or hates me a lot, or both.  Sometimes I don't even feel like I'm a good person, it feels forced.  Wickedness masked by obessessive good behavior is the eeriest kind of evil.  Maybe I'm not evil, maybe I'm just really freaking tired, but sometimes I just feel so damn fake. 


Despite my recurring melancholy, I have this gut feeling that everything will be alright, that success in some form or another is in my future.  I wish I could just be a professional orator of super goofy satire related to life's anomalies and day-to-day weirdness.  I guess that's what a stand-up comedian is.  I don't think I can do that though, maybe I'll just keep up writing silly stuff on this blog and use it later somehow, somewhere.