Self-Loathing and a Bottle

I can't stand it anymore. How weak some women get. It drives me insane that a society could force women to place all their happiness on any one man's approval. What an absurd concept: seeking purpose by constantly trying to please someone that isn't yourself.

And now I've lost it. It being the respect I had for so many women I used to care about. But it is hard to care about someone who can't care about themselves... about someone who would rather drive drunk and die than be alone for any amount of time and attempt to understand who they are without the deconstructive lens of another person's personality.

It makes me sick and what's worse is I don't find myself hating men for this. I hate the women. So now I hate myself for becoming so twisted up in this... whatever this is... a sick societal game where half the population is forced into eventual suffering.

Although, before I become all high and mighty... It is true that I am not perfect.... In the past I would have gladly changed myself if it could garner the attention and/or affection of someone I was attracted to. Countless examples of me floundering to get what I wanted spring to mind. Now, honestly, I am enraged that I was like that at all, and even more enraged that there are women I once respected--women who are older than me (so much older)--that haven't yet realized this for themselves.

Men will die before you (statistically true). Men will cheat (statistically true). Men will disregard you if it conveniences them even a little (not statistically true but it feels accurate). More importantly, men will physically and emotionally abuse you (also, statistically likely). Why then, would you invest in them? Invest in them so much that your life means nothing if you were to lose them? Why, then, would you, upon finding your relationship falling apart, let yourself immediately transform into an alcoholic?

Escapism into a world where the minutes you spend alone fly by as if they never happened.

Because to be left alone would be...

Terrible since you...

You... yourself... are so...

Unsustainable.

Alone.

What I Know About Love

It's the morning after Valentine's Day and I'm drunk on champagne, so let me ramble.

Have you ever fallen in love with someone so desperately--so intensely--that it no longer feels like you are just friends? Ha. Really just acquaintances. What do I know of friendships? No, but someone who you know you could love in the most amicable of ways for years, even decades?

But it's impossible. Not only is this love unrequited, it is impossible, for any dumb old reason: they live two thousand miles away; your sexualities don't align; they don't technically exist; they died; they're locked into a "serious" relationship--fuck, they are married. It's impossible. The kind of unavoidable conclusion whose sureness is only outmatched by the truth that you will die some day and that nothing will come after that.

I don't like that level of impossibility. So I don't let my mind wander on the topic for very long. Or at all. But the dreams. Oh, how I dream. Everything I want that is so very wrong, I get as soon as my consciousness taps out. I don't understand it. I don't understand this. Shouldn't I dream of things that happened to me? Shouldn't I dream of the big stressors in my life?

Or is this just telling me what I've already known? The greatest fear in my life is that I will spend it not alone, but perpetually lonely.

Because there are people--there are these days, there is this person--that I am intractably in love with, and I will never be able to be with them in any shade of reality.

I know I will not feel like this for much longer--I will fall out of love because that is the only option given to me--but it pains me to know that at one time I could see so clearly my own happiness wound so well around another's.

So I will say a short prayer before every bedtime: let me let this feeling go. Let me know that there is no great romance in this life. Or any other. Tell me what I need to do to have you. Let me forget all of this. 

Please. Let me forget.

[future elora, do you remember who you wrote this for? it will be an obscure reference from november 2012. but at this very moment, it troubles you incessantly.]

Fishing

My fish tank is a disaster. I moved it to the window sill, and then it got decked out in algae. Imagine just sitting around on a couch and then suddenly, without warning, everything is covered in Nickelodeon-quality slime. You can't just scrub it away because it comes back. You have to actively kill it with commercial chemicals. But even this solution poses problems, because now instead of algae clinging to the glass walls and every centimeter of sunlit surface on the aquatic plants, its a series of large clumps of kelly green... stuff... being pushed aside every time a fish swims past it. It looks like snow, even though it actually is more like autumnal leaves, dead and useless and lying around, waiting to decompose. [Fish, I'm enriching your environment by giving you seasons. You are welcome. And I am sorry.] 

The filter is working at max capacity and it's still not clearing away all of the algae. I already changed the water once, and the five gallons I pulled out were straight green. I let the bucket sit over night and all the algae precipitated to the bottom. There was a lot of it. There is still more in the tank. I can't stand that there is still more in the tank. I've spent my entire three day weekend beautifying my apartment and yet my fish tank demands to look like a sewer outside a manure production plant? No. I will not watch my fish dart around in a biological war torn bowl.

So I grabbed my fish net and began scraping algae away from the filter, then decided to swirl the net around to shovel and lift the algae up and out of the glow in the dark gravel on the tank bed. The fish freaked out. 

Over the summer I became so distraught watching the largest of the fish chasing the littler ones whenever I added food to the tank, that for an entire week I captured the big kahuna first, then, keeping the net and the kahuna (her name is Peggy) sequestered in the corner, added food so that the other ones could eat without fear. I did this for a week, and by the end it was actually driving me insane. I don't like terrorizing anything ever. I am that type of person who walks slower when they see a squirrel nearby. I hate frightening squirrels. It makes me sad. Frightening groundhogs makes me want to cry for days. [As a consequence of this, I often get into staring matches with squirrels. And occasionally I talk to them. I swear this does not make me weird, I just operate in a world where everything, no matter how sentient or how alive, has character.] 

I had to eventually stop capturing Kahuna Peggy because the two medium sized fish would also freak out. I had hoped the fish would see a pattern and recognize that they were safe, but Dart and Arrow are kind of idiotic. They are both diamond tetras, and Arrow may or may not have a weird fungal infection that makes it race back and forth in the tank around twilight, bumping into the glass walls and scaring the bejesus out of me. Seriously Arrow, clearly I can't know exactly what you need (you're a fish, apparently I'm a human), but I personally think you need to calm the f*** down. So because I can't inflict confusion or pain on even fish, I stopped the Kahuna Fishing experiment. 

But everyone is still afraid of the net. So by the time I was whirling algae around my net, Peggy, Dart, and Arrow were all in a corner, huddled together underneath aquatic fronds. I added some fish food to appease them, but no one budged. Of course, Fry, the smallest of the fish (he is a fourth the size of Arrow, who is the smaller of the two diamond tetras) was in the clearing, just chilling out. It's easy to lose sight of him, and most of the time I panic when cleaning the tank because he could easily fit into the tube used in such endeavors, but here he was: swimming underneath clumps of algae. I found his behavior peculiar, and even more so when he began eating food. I have maybe seen him eat 6 or 7 times. I've had these fish for almost a year and a half now. I assumed he snuck little crumbs that passed him by while hiding somewhere. But here he was, with the orange dash above his small eyes matching the center of the Tetra Tropical Freshwater Fish Food wafer, openly enjoying a nice dinner. 

Fry is brave--maybe the most fearless fish in the group. I guess when you've spent your entire life being the little guy, a flurry of algae and a giant net don't bother you as much. You are stronger for having suffered and eventually surviving. You now know what you want and you have a pretty good idea of how to get it. There are inherent risks in getting out there, but you've already been through enough hardships to realize that it will probably be worth it. The ends justify the means, even if the means are terrifying, exhausting, and not always meaningful. "Ah yes, why do I have to memorize all this minutiae in school again?" Because one day you will be doing something you love and you will be good at it. Fry knows this. Fry knows that he loves eating and Fry knows that the best way to secure eating is to get out there and nibble. 

Of course, I may be reading entirely way too much into this. 

Fundamental Attribution Error

So interesting. I vaguely remember hearing about fundamental attribution error in under-undergrad--most likely AP Psych or perhaps I randomly read about it in some pop psych book, but I spend an unnatural time thinking about the context of others people's lives. I don't think this makes me a better person, because I still strongly dislike some people, but I do think it's made me better at defending someone else's life choices when asked to think about them critically.

Now if only there was a way to stop hating people all together. That would be very pleasant.


http://lifehacker.com/5946530/fix-the-machine-not-the-person?popular=true

Everything's Going to be Alright

Once in a while, and I don't know how, things just seem to brighten up. And I'm not even exactly sure what's getting brighter. My mood is so precarious that even though I have tricks and trade secrets to make sure I never sink into an unimpressionable melancholy, any given stranger on any given day can ruin my entire week.

And even though that is accurate--a flawless statement--it is dangerous to think that way. I realize that now. Every once in a while, even if it's just for a few moments, even if it's a complete daydream and you've actually been spending your entire day sloshing through the blandest of assignments that you're sure will never get you to what you actually want to do, it's harmful to be hyper aware of you're every action and not see that it is just as possible to fail as it is to succeed.

I suck at sewing. Sometimes my sewing machine will jump into a setting that I can't get it out of. I've thrown away so many strips of cloth because I've scavenged and re-arranged them until they no longer consist of anything of value. I never use patterns, and I often curse to myself as I'm pinning something straight onto my body--that life would be so much easier if I could just follow rules and set everything out as it is meant to be. But then every once in a while I make a dress that actually makes me look beautiful. Fuck. I own a ton of dresses. But only the things I make actually fit me in a way that is pure transcendentalism. It's not that I have weird proportions. I have weird everything. My arms are too big, but I have nice shoulders. I'm not the color of the people companies traditionally tailor to. And although that is changing, I still have to guard myself against buying disgusting "colors" that would look disgusting on me. Yea. Beige? You were so IN last year! But you are totally a white person's problem. I have curves, but in a way that is not normal... for example, I love pencil skirts, but if they're made of an unstretchable material, they end up leaving way too much space around my waist which is... a waste and obnoxious and hardly as professional as pencil skirts should be. But I've made three dresses now that I absolutely love. Only one of them is actually suitable for wear outside of my apartment, but I don't even care. Because just having a mental image of me looking spectacular in something I spent at least five hours on is enough to make me believe that all the vagabond strands of thread that get stuck in my vacuum cleaner are worth it.

Little things like that make it so much easier to believe that you're going to make it. I don't know what I'm trying to make it to. I'm intuitive, but I have no idea what's going to happen to me after this. I spend a lot of time worrying about my future, but in the moment of a hundred little things, just as easy as it is to forget that such things ever happened, it is plausible to take such moments to piece together a more hopeful narrative of everyday events.

Determining that you're really good at landscaping just because you play the sims. Promising yourself to keep using a catchphrase until the end of time (sparingly) just because your friend thought it was tearfully hilarious. Developing a new accent. Learning you look good in orange. Remembering a childhood dream that you've fully realized. Life can be incredibly plain, and this often makes things feel much more depressing. Being alone isn't depressing if you're not bored, just as failing isn't depressing if you're doing other things of merit. Being overweight isn't depressing if you live an active life. Hell, I'm an incredibly vain person, but I would be half as attractive if I could have twice as many adventures.

How dull days can be when you've planned them out to be as successful as possible. How tiresome it is to continue guessing whether or not you're truly fucked, if maybe this time you've messed up so much no one will ever take you back.

How much time do I spend gauging whether or not I'll survive my next set of trials? Instead of actually... preparing myself for my next set of trials? How much more fun could life be if I just stopped thinking and started... actually doing something? I love being stuck inside my own mind--this is not sarcasm--but after days of it, anything, even things of little value, seem more enjoyable than being alone with myself... thinking. Perhaps this is why I like drinking? Perhaps this is why I like hurting other people? Perhaps this is why I watch so much television and read so many useless blogs? Perhaps this is why I write in a blog? Perhaps this is why I play video games that actually suck? And all of this could be avoided if I just told myself, or if I just spent ten minutes arguing with myself, that "everything's going to be alright."

I used to think saying that was like a ridiculous form of escapism with little practicality. But I realize now just how useful saying that, hearing it, thinking it... how useful that phrase is.

All my fears seem more easily dealt with. I may be a crappy writer. I may be a crappy friend. I may be a crappy doctor. I may not be intelligent. But I am a writer, I am a friend, and one day I will be a doctor. My intelligence is rarely explicitly questioned, and at that time, my ability to lie will surely help if my own intelligence is not sufficient. I already know I'm in love with myself. And sometimes, even if you doubt how many people in your life actually care about you, being able to respect yourself to deal with your own insufficiencies for a bit longer is all you need to get yourself through anything.

Literally.... anything. Everything's going to be alright. Literally. Everything. You'll forget about the little insignificant failures along the way. You vaguely know what you want. You know who you are. You know your options. You have your thread. Everything's going to be alright.