who knows?

Gaev: You'll die, all the same.
Trofimov: Who knows? And what does it mean--you'll die? Perhaps a man has a hundred senses, and when he dies only the five known to us are destroyed and the remaining ninety-five are left alive.
Chekhov- "The Cherry Orchard"

hip as fuck

Ann:but yeah, you're pretty much a hipster
as defined by clothes, haircut, and music
i think
Me:hahhahaa obviously
I guess. I like indie bands and I have bangs
Ann:YES
Me:clothes might be questionable
Ann:HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
i am lolling
Me:hahahaha
Ann:YES YES
Me:I have thrift store dresses

motivational speaker

R: so i got really depressed last night. "we make our own gravity to give weight to things, and then things fall and then they break and gravity sings" showed up in my feed as one of ___ statuses

i googled it and realized it was an ani song that you listened to a lot while we were breaking up
hour follows hour or something

me: yeah
I'm sorry

R: it's ok
not your fault or anything

me: I will say, it was a song I listened to because it made me feel better about the breakup

R: just an association

me: its one of those "no one's fault" songs

R: that's what songs are for

me: yeah

R: it's a pretty song

(...)
me: I liked the line "the most we can do is see each other through it"
you know, not to be...callous? but it's weird for me to hear that you were depressed
not that I don't think the breakup didn't affect you

(...)

me: but you're a lot more stoic than me and I'm not used to the idea of you getting depressed
and it kind of surprised me for a second, the idea that you might still get sad about it even though I still do and that's kind of obvious

I never really realized how much that song resonated for me until I just listened to it again.

Hour Follows Hour
Hour follows hour like water follows water
Everything is governed by the rule that one thing leads to another
You can't really place blame, 'cause blame is much too messy
Someone was bound to get it on you while you were trying to put it on me.

And don't fool yourself into thinking things are simple
Nobody's lying, still the stories don't line up
Why do you try to hold on to what you'll never get a hold on
You wouldn't try and put the ocean in a paper cup

'Cause I have had something to prove
As long as I know there's something that needs improvement
And you know that every time I move
I make a woman's movement

And first you decide what you've gotta do
and then you go out and do it
And maybe the most that we can do
is to see each other through it

Hour follows hour like water in a river
And from one to the next, we don't know what each hour will deliver
We just call it like we see it, call out loud as we can
And then afterwards we call it all water over the dam

Maybe the moral high ground isn't as high as it seems
Maybe we are both good people whove done some bad things
I just hope it was okay, I know it wasn't perfect
I just hope in the end we can laugh and say it was all worth it

'Cause I have had something to prove

As long as I know there's something that needs improvement
And you know that every time I move
I make a woman's movement

And first you decide what you've gotta do
and then you go out and do it
And maybe the most that we can do
is to see each other through it

We make our own gravity to give weight to things
Then things fall and they break and gravity sings
We can only hold so much, is what I figure
We try and keep our eye on the big picture
And the picture keeps getting bigger

And too much is how I love you but too well is how I know you
And I've got nothing to prove this time, just something to show you
I guess I just wanted you to see
That it was all worth it to me

do dates

 Skip this entry. I just need to lay this stuff out so I can see it in a list.

Read:

A book for November

Chekhov- "The Cherry Orchard"- Nov 16

Cicero- Book 2 On the Ideal Orator- Nov 17

Eagleton, Said and Armstrong articles- Nov 18

Hurston- Their Eyes Were Watching God- Nov 23 (I'm totally not going to read this, even though I keep telling myself I will. I've already read it twice.)

Cicero- Book 3 On the Ideal Orator- Dec 1

5 articles for Annotated Biblio
     Regina Barreca, “Sex and the Feminine Text in Wuthering Heights”
     Stevie Davies, “Baby-Work: The Myth of Rebirth in Wuthering Heights”

     Margaret Homans, “The Name of the Mother in Wuthering Heights”
     Beth Newman, “‘The Situation of the Looker-On: Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights
     Patricia Yaeger, “Violence in the Sitting Room: Wuthering Heights and the Woman’s Novel”
A book for December

Write:

Assessment- Cicero (Book 2)- Nov 17

Good Nola Article- Nov 22

Assessment- Cicero (Book 3)- Dec 1

English Final- Dec 2

Good Nola Article- Dec 4

Bullshit Class Final- Dec 7

Rhetoric Final- Dec 8

Annotated Biblio- Dec 10

dizzy dizzy bright and busy

In some sense, right now, I am well and royally fucked. I get paid once a month and this past check was spent making up debts from my months of unemployment. Plus spent drinking a bit too much. So now, I have about $120 to last me until November 30th and I still have 3 bills due. I'm hoping for a bit of birthday money to tide me over and I'm going to break out a fancy new credit card to toss some debt around until I get my tax refund in January and I can pay everything off. Financial responsibility, ya'll.

What this means right now is that I am on none of my medication. No birth control, no Byetta, no Metformin, no Spironolactone. Complicating this is the fact that the prescriptions on the metformin and the spironolactone have run out, meaning I need to go see a doctor again. And when I go see a doctor, they're going to want to run bloodwork to see what's going on and I'm willing to bet they'll want to run a glucose test.  In short, this will be expensive. So, I'm not sure what to do here. I'm looking at different doctors I can see and there's a possibility that I can have the bloodwork drawn and run at my old job (where it would be free), but that would mean driving to Baton Rouge. I'm worrying a lot about this, because not being on my medication is having some really noticible effects. My skin is flaking and breaking out (this is not just due to colder weather. My skin has never done this before.), which is very sexy, as you might imagine. When I eat any sugar, I feel awful. It literally hurts. My co workers bought me a birthday cake today and I had one small piece. I've spent the hour and a half since, shivering, aching and blinking to try and erase the bluriness. I don't know how to describe your blood hurting but that's what it feels like. It burns and aches deep in my veins. This, in turn, makes me incredibly anxious. I'm a fucking bag of laughs to be around right now. A few weeks ago, I went out drinking with J and I had 2 whiskey sours on an empty stomach. 20 minutes later, I very nearly passed out at the bar. Even when I DO eat right (and I'm trying very hard to do that), I still feel awful. I've been sleeping a lot lately and I'm still constantly exhausted and sick feeling. Coffee almost makes it worse. So I've been taking vitamins and drinking tons of water. It's the best I can do right now.

So anyway, I don't know what I'm going to do right now. I've started drawing up a budget, a vert strict budget and I HAVE to make myself stick to it. I've budgeted the cost of the medications after insurance (which won't be accurate soon anyway, FUCK.) and if I can't get them filled again, I'll throw that money into savings (no money is currently budgeted for savings. I have to pay shit off first.). Christmas gifts are probably not happening this year, except maybe the parents, and even then they're going to be cheap. I might just bake for everyone. That depresses me though, because I really enjoy giving gifts to people. I'd had this whole plan to make preserves for people and give them out but, as cheap as that might be, I don't think it's in the budget.

Even with all that though, life isn't terrible. My mom is taking me to dinner for my birthday (which is Saturday). Christie is coming to visit for the weekend and we're going to write and walk and drink wine (great idea, right?) and I might make some chana masala and roasted cauliflower because I have the ingredients and it is cheap and delicious. I was invited to a party on Sunday by a classmate (the same one who offered to let me shower at her place when my hot water went out) and she's coming over, with another classmate, on Tuesday to hang out, so I'm excited about that. Genuinely excited because both of them are people I've wanted to get to know better for most of the semester. Also because, hey ma! I done made some friends in this here big city! I'm writing, both publically for goodnola and privately. As in poems. As in, wow, I have written nothing new in almost two years but this is happening. I don't have much time between school and work and homework, but, despite everything, things are good. I just hope I don't pass out.

I forgot to publish this post when I first wrote it. It's now dated, but I like it.

I really enjoy the little routine I have set up for myself in the last couple of months. Oh man, I've lived here for multiple months! Of all my routines, I like my nighttime one best of all--I turn off the window unit in the living room and wake Marla on the couch. "Come on, bearcat! Time for bed!" Marla wakes and stands, waiting as I go to the bathroom to take my birth control. Once I gather my things to bring to the bedroom (normally a book and my phone, sometimes the laptop), she jumps off the couch and trots to the bedroom. If I'm going straight to sleep, I'll get comfortable and prepare a pillow lengthways beside me for her to lie on. She's a great companion. Lately, I've had a semi-irrational fear that she will pass away (she is approx. 9 years old, so my fears aren't totally unfounded), so I've taken extra care to snuggle her. I want to bring her to the vet soon, just to assuage my worries.

"i just want to be me/when I can, I will"

Christie and I were talking earlier and I told her that so many parts of my life are converging right now that it makes me think I'll look back on this time of my life and see it was an important one.

I've had a lot going on lately, not just in the here and now. In terms of the smaller things, I went out with my neighbors and made friends with them. I've been busy with school and work and I'm broke only 8 days into the month, which only drives it home that I need to draw up a strict budget and stick to it (though, in my defense, much of the money I've spent has been catching up bills that I was overdue on from unemployment times). But there's also the bigger stuff. I suppose what's of the most interest to anyone reading is that I've started seeing someone. Ravi knows about it and approves (not that he'd ever act as though that was his right) and the guy, J, is a good guy. It is, admittedly, a bit of a struggle  to adapt to the idea of dating again. Not just "getting back in the dating world" but the finality it implies for Ravi and I. I haven't held on to any ideas we'd be getting back together (in fact, we've both been encouraging each other to see other people), but it's still hard to move on from that relationship and finalize that end by moving on. That said, it's been very very fun to start seeing J and maybe that's a story I'll tell on here when I'm a little more comfortable with opening up about him in this forum. 

But there are other changes happening and those are a little quieter. I spent a big part of this past summer weeding out people in my life who I felt were not good for me. The next part of that is weeding out the parts of myself that aren't good for me. I've felt very good, mentally and emotionally, these past months, despite a breakup, move, and stint of unemployment that would have been devastating to me a few years ago. But I've also been carefully monitoring myself to try and keep those old negativities at bay. I've worked very hard to be frank about anything I need to say, instead of passive-aggressively goading people into getting me to say what I need to say to them. I've learned (and will learn over and over again) how to keep my mouth shut when what I have to say isn't beneficial and I've self-censored when there's something I want to say that will hurt someone else (unless the benefit is worth more). I've tried to mend some broken bridges, but also tried to keep toxic people away. I mean, obviously I'm not perfect and these behaviors will still occur but I'm working to curb them. 

Fall and winter always push me inside myself. In the past, I think that's why it was always so easy to get down, because I was so in my head and what was there was not happy. It's probably also why I started romances at those times, because I needed someone else to be there for me when I couldn't be there for myself (for the record, I've considered that might be where this thing with J is coming from, but I'm pretty sure its not). But it's also always the time I feel most alive, most myself. And right now, I feel that in a really pure way, almost raw. Like some sort of barebones structure of myself. I almost revel sometimes, in the idea that I am DOING THIS, I am broke and alone and HAPPY. And even though I'm not completely alone, I'm here alone and I'm not sad about it. In fact, in a recent conversation about the benefits of moving back to Baton Rouge, I firmly stated my intention to be here for "awhile." It's just something I have to do for myself and something that I may not ever have the chance to do again--to live for myself only. There's something huge in that, almost overwhelming when I consider it too much. There is this profound joy in very small things, like yesterday morning, I woke up early, leaving J sleeping, and made coffee in the french press and sat reading Chekhov in my office (what will one day be my dining room) and listening to Simon and Garfunkel while Marla sat in my lap. 

I'm half considering deleting this whole entry because I feel like I can't quite express what I want to say, but I think I'll leave it here for my own reference right now. 

Also, I've been reminded that, no matter what's going on in life, I still want to listen to Smashing Pumpkins when it's cold outside.