Fifteen minutes

(11:52:15 PM):
i'll try to keep it short.
i guess i've just been really depressed or frustrated or irritated or upset or angry or whatever and i haven't been able to really just bitch to anyone other than my cat or a couple pages in a notebook that i rip up afterwards

"hmm. Yeah the cat just kinda pokes you and wants to be pet."

okay. i love facebook. i enjoy being able to catch up with my friends and family members who are far away or busy or whatever.
but at the same time...

    ...it depresses me.

Slightly concerned

I'm afraid that I'm going crazy.

There's a part of me that started to panic when I realized what my last entry revealed to, essentially, the whole world.

But there's another part of me, a strong, overwhelming part, that doesn't understand what the big deal is. Who gives a fuck? It's not like my blogs get visitors beyond the handful of people I've led directly to it. It's not like I can fake being okay for much longer. They call it "major depressive disorder" (MDD), "clinical depression," or, as I like to refer to it, "being fucked up in the head." Inability to experience pleasure from most aspects of life. Severe insomnia, and sometimes hypersomnia. Delusions, social withdrawal, an overwhelming feeling of apathy towards anything and everything. "Chemical imbalance in the brain," they said. "Not your fault," they said through the pills in the tiny paper cup beside the plastic cup of water beside the meal brought up to the psychiatric ward in the hospital. But that was over a decade ago.

I'm fairly certain that I'm just losing it.

What's my motivation?

Thomas came home from work the other day particularly upset instead of exhausted as usual. He didn't return my greeting when he walked in the door or look at me while I stood and watched him remove his shoes. I remembered the status he posted on Facebook a few hours prior – something about disgust at having to "pay for other people's sins." For a moment I thought that the church across the street must be projecting too much Catholic onto our apartment, but the thought passed and I asked him how work had been.

Some noise, a mixture of resignation and fury whose portion sizes I couldn't determine, escaped his lips. I listened to him, agreed that the manager—I never quite understood what went wrong—was stupid and that this was the final straw. I offered to get him something to eat or drink. He declined.

"What now?" I asked.

Spotify = MY NEW OBSESSION

@cheldoll and here I go following Chel like a lemming to spotify too.. /facepalm :P

I was right on board with Pandora even on my Wii console, bought a car with a Sirius satellite radio, and hit up Last.fm's community. Went through free trials of Rhapsody, eMusic, etc. Made my own custom Winamp skins for years, married and divorced iTunes, had an affair with Media Monkey... I'm running out of metaphors here. Needless to say, I've messed with enough music players to know what I want. And I want Spotify.

I've got a clean, simple player with an adorable name and icon. Social media's already integrated for me -- I don't even have to abandon Last.fm completely, since it's even got a fucking scrobbling option right off the bat. Device syncing?? Yes please. $10 a month is over three times Last.fm's subscription price, but it's better than the $15 a month I pay for Sirius (+$2.99 for internet radio) and is just so much cuter.

I haven't been listening to much, but now? Music binge.

You won't find this anyway

I sometimes wonder if I've made a mistake.

For months these thoughts have haunted me, yet the fear of the consequences for voicing them has kept me silent.

(but now that i know you dont read my writing any longer i speak i cry i scream i create something from the nothing; now i take refuge from neglect in words that you have interrupted)

oh god

I need help.

bite your lip

and fake that smile, honey.

Tiny Thursday post

Picked Thomas up from the airport Tuesday night, and of course they have him working a full shift like twelve hours later. His birthday's tomorrow, though, and they actually let him have the day off. I have no idea what to get him or what we're doing to celebrate. I'm a pretty shitty girlfriend.

We will never forget.

To me, 9/11 was never about politics.

It was about innocent lives lost during an attempt to strike terror into the hearts of people whose beliefs are different. You want to argue some conspiracy theory that it was our own government that orchestrated the whole thing? Fine, whatever. That doesn't change the fact that people who did not deserve to die met their end on that day. That doesn't make those flames less real.

The most important thing that arose from the mess that cold morning in September is the purity of the human spirit. I was and still am in awe of the bravery of rescuers, the unity with which the country collected itself, the respect with which the survivors honor the lost, the passion and empathy from those who were not directly affected. We took some hard hits, but we did not go down. We rose, together, and continue to rise every year in anniversary on this day.

I am never more proud to be an American than on September 11th.

The Bell Jar

The last book I read was Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar." It hit a little too close to home for me to be able to finish it in one sitting, despite how short it was compared to the 900-some page monster that is "2666" I read before it.

An excerpt:

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. "

I suppose, keeping consistent with the contents of the three personal blogs I maintain, I should've posted this under "listen." But there's just too much here that screams my name that I can hardly tell I wasn't the author.


I've always wanted to be everything -- I wanted to be pretty, popular, loved, well-known. I wanted to be brilliant, clever, funny, generous. I wanted to change the world.

At this point in my life it feels as though I've stopped at a fork in the road and I just can't choose. I just don't want to choose. What if I choose wrong? What if I get lost on that path? What if it takes me away from the people I love most?

And while I am paralyzed here, fear, cold and wet, falls onto the doubt I stand on. From the corner of my eye I can glimpse solid ground. The land is dry there, lit by the sun. But the distance between this respite and I deepens with every shallow breath that teases the tightened mass that is my lungs. Drenched, I hardly notice the fear falling harder around me. It seeps into the uncertainty and turns into mud under my feet.

I feel myself sinking, but still I cannot choose.

Web Design (or lack thereof)

So I've been plotting (planning is actually more accurate, but it sounds less entertaining) another section of le website de Chel to archive the last year or so's worth of my poetry and prose. The problem is that I can't get it to look right. I've always had to work around not having SSH for my navigation, but what I've been envisioning for this webby just doesn't seem to turn out right.

Worst-case scenario I'll just slap up some ugly page. Actually, I might just not upload anything at all. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, you know.