Self-Involvement.

People are all so self-involved. Everyone thinks that they're totally misunderstood and tragic.
Take my parents, for example. They're fighting, loudly, and not caring that my little brother is crying himself to sleep, because they're too busy proving that they're the martyr. It's maddening.
I had to go tuck him in and get his reading light and close his door so he can't hear them, and his blinds so that he doesn't wake up with the sun. And my dad's just banging on about how he brings in the money and we're a bunch of ungrateful little shits, and he made my mum cry. And I'm angry.
Most people, when they get angry, it's hot, like a fire. Instead, I get an icy coldness filling me. I know it's bad when I can't feel my face, like now.
I hate it here. I envy my sister; she gets to leave in a week.

Habits

It's funny, the little things you get used to , and don't even realize it. I had a hat sitting on top of my TV, a funny, floppy paper one that I made myself. I'm quite proud of it, and I quite like it sitting there. But the sun was getting in my eyes when I was out in it today, so I came and got my hat to ward it off. And then my TV looked weirdly empty. Strange.
It's the same with my library card. I had the same one since I was a little kid, and I'd memorized the number. But my old card cracked, so I had to get a new one, and it has a different number, and it really threw me off.
It's the same when I get a new notebook, or I move around a piece of furniture in my house, or reorganize the dish cupboard to throw off my family, and I end up throwing myself off.
I guess it's the same with habits. I tap the ledge in my stairwell on the way down it every time I come down. If I slip and go rolling down the stairs, which happens upon occasion, I have to get up and walk back up the stairs and tap the ledge. It's just one of those things.
I wonder if that transfers to the way you act. Like, if you're always a little bit sarcastically evil, are you always truly like that? Is it just a way to cover what you're actually thinking?? A way to make people laugh? Maybe give yourself some inside-my-own-head time when you're in public. And can you stop it? Can you break yourself of that habit?

Insanity??

I've been thinking a lot lately about what exactly constitutes insanity. Is it when you're walking to the bus stop carrying your shoes and talking to yourself?? Or is it when you waltz alone in your living room to Doug and the Slugs?? Or is it that little voice that you hear late and night, saying 'Is there room in your head for one more?? Or perhaps it's forgetting to eat for three days, or maybe realizing that when you sync it up right, Dark Side of the Moon seems like it's narrating The Wizard of Oz. Or perhaps it's talking on the phone while sitting on top of the washing machine. Or maybe it's when the person on the other end hangs up and you still sit there, listening to the dial tone for half an hour, thinking of nothing.
And who gets to say, really?? I mean, sometimes you have the more definable types of insane, like schizophrenia, but even that can be iffy sometimes. What if someone just seems schizo, but really they're just lonely?? Or maybe trying to get attention?? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that schizophrenia isn't an actual condition, because it is. I'm just saying that things aren't always set in stone.
So, what do you think?? What's your definition of crazy??

Poetry

I don't know if I've mentioned it, but I'm a total poetry nut. Points go out to whoever can tell me the author of the poem below.

since feeling is first
who pays attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
-the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for lifes not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis

What I Want

A while ago, a friend asked me what I really wanted. People are always saying what they don't want, but who really knows what they want. What they want to happen, who they want, how they want things to turn out. And I realized that I don't really know everything that I want. People are confusing, and the only thing I want is to figure them out. It's all very confusing, it feels like everything is twisting and swirling and changing around me, and I'm standing still. It's like when you're in the car and it looks like all the houses and mailboxes and what have you are moving, and you're standing still. Except that they keep twisting 360 degrees instead of just in a line on either side, and I don't know which ones I want and which can just leave, and which are gone and I want back, and I just...don't know.

Leaving

I'm listening to: Vindicated by Dashboard Confessional.

My sister is at her grad banquet right now, the last grad thing she has, before she leaves the school for good. I was taking pictures when she left, and the only thing I could think was 'God, she's so beautiful.'
Since we were little kids, my sister has been my role model, my favorite person in the world, the way I cope with living with my father. She makes me laugh when I'm sad, and dance when I'm exhausted.
My sister is everything that I want to be; confident and beautiful and talented and self-assured, and she knows who she is and where she's going. And where she's going is away. I'm so proud of her, but at the same time, I'm sad, because she's leaving. And I'm not. And I'm really going to miss her.

So, I'm supremely confused. And tired. And having guitar issues. But mostly confused. My friends have got me all twisted around. I've decided that it is the fault of males. Maybe we should just kill all the guys. And then, slowly, all the women will die, and in a hundred and seven years, we will have killed off all the humans, and only half the deaths will be murders. It's the perfect solution!! We'd be gone, and we could leave the world to another race, maybe one that wouldn't fuck it up the way we have.

Shame

You know how theres things about you that embarrass you, they make your cheeks burn with shame, and you don't want anyone to know? And then somehow, awfully, they're accidentally brought up, someone asks whats wrong and you can't explain, and suddenly you have a terrible web of non-lies, things you wish were lies, and you don't want to say them.
Ashley Jenn, if you're reading this, stop NOW. Or I'll want to know why. You know who you are. If you read this, I will know, and you will die the worst death I can invent. And you know how creative I can be.
I have a panic disorder. I get anxiety attacks, where I can't breathe, and it's like the most intense fear you've ever had, beyond that, gripping you and filling you until the fear is the only thing in the world. It's the scariest thing that has ever happened to you. And it happens reasonably often. It often happens when I worry about people I know, or I get stuck, or I lie, which, let me tell you, has made me very honest indeed. But it also happens sometimes for no reason, or, as stupid as this is, when I have to do band testing.
I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's true. Whenever testing time rolls round, I can feel the beginning of an attack, sitting there on my chest. Sometimes, I know that it's coming, and I can excuse myself, and go somewhere private, and take deep breaths and remind myself that I'm okay. And I'm glad for that, because that fear, that out-of-control terror, that's private. That's something too raw, to close, for anyone to see, or know about. I feel them coming on, a heavy weight like a steel ball in my chest, I start breathing shallower, I get dizzy, sometimes I start to cry a little, and I have to get out of there.
It's one of those things, one of those evoutionary glitches, that makes my life harder, like anaemia (a lack of iron in the blood, makes you tired all the time, and sluggish, and you have to take icky meds). And it's the scariest thing that will ever happen.
I started getting the attacks when I was eleven, when my sister was in the hospital with brain damage. I don't know if I've mentioned that before, I'll explain it later. Anyways, I was taking on a lot of responsibility for the family; cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, looking after my little brother, on top of my everyday life stuff; school, Guides, choir, friends. And there was one day, when I'd gone and picked up grocerys after school, and I was making dinner. I was the only one home so far, my brother was at his friend's, my father was at work, and my mum was at the hospital with my sister. I was making pasta with homemade white sauce, and the phone rang, and then the pot was boiling over, and my friend on the phone was yattering on about her current 'crisis', whatever it was, and then I burned myself quite badly on the stove, and I was running it under cold water and trying to stir the pasta, which was sticking to the pot, and then the sauce was burning, and I realized that I'd forgotten to pick up the french bread, and then suddenly I couldn't breathe. I thought I was having a heart attack. I thought this must be death. I'm dying. It felt like there were barrel rungs around my chest, pulling tighter and tighter, squeezing the air from my lungs, and my mind was full of nothing but absolute fear. I lay on the floor, with the tap running and the pot boiling over and the sauce burning, trying to get air into my lungs. After a minute , or maybe an hour, time seemed unimportant, pushed aside by more important things, it subsided, and I could think again. I sat up shakily, and then stood. I remember leaning on the counter for a full five minutes before I snapped back, realizing that I had basically mutilated dinner, and the burn on my wrist was stinging. I thought that I was going mad, but I never mentioned it, probably for that reason. I might be cracking up, but I had to be strong for my family.
It was a long time before I realized what these attacks were. I was thirteen, and I read a book called The Nature of Jade, by Deb Caletti. Now, I know what they are, but I haven't told anyone, not even my mum, because they'd send my to psychiatrists, and psychologists, and all sorts of people who'll ask me questions and try to psychoanalyze me. When you have something like that, people treat you different. They treat you like glass, like you might collapse at and time. And I don't want to be The Sick Girl, or Tradgedy of the Week. I am not my disease. So don't pity me, and if a friend reads this, please treat me like you always have. And if an enemy reads this, still be a bitch to me. Cuz I deserve it.

Changes and Futures and Confusion and Wishes

Everything is changing so fast that I can't keep up. Life's not passing me by; it's trying to run me over. My sister is leaving for college in three weeks, to live on her own in a different city, on a different piece of land, with her own life, and it makes me think. It's not long until I go, and time passes so fast. Me and some of my best friends were talking about that, after this stepping up thing we had a couple of weeks ago. It's kind of like a rite of passage, that ceremony, even though its stupid and little. And the four of us were all talking about where we were going after we graduated, and what we were going to do with our lives, and it was weird and scary and exciting and happy all at once. I do know what I really want to do: I want to be a creative writing teacher. Not in schools, where you need a teaching degree, but extracurricular classes, or working with Gifted kids. I know that there's nowhere near the amount of stuff that Gifted kids should have, especially in high school. You only really get Gifted stuff from Gr.4-6, and thats it. I wish that I'd had that opportunity, to have writing classes.
But to be a creative writing teacher, you need to have written something, something published and relatively impressive, or any time you try for a job, you get laughed at. And I do want to write. I want to write more than anything in the world; writing is a default state for me, and it is the thing I love most in the world, but I just don't see how that could really happen.

Friends

I'm kind of confused right now. There's one of my friends that I'm worried about. She's just kind of coming into her own right now, and she's hanging out with some girls that treat her really badly, and shes really self-conscious, not that she needs to be, shes gorgeous, and she's just kind of awkward sometimes, and I feel bad about it. I know that it's her journey, and she has to face it, but sometimes I wish that I could tuck her away and protect her from the world. We've been friends for years, and I feel like we're growing apart. She's kind of weird about my friends, I guess. I think that it might be because we're all so loud and weird and outgoing, and she doesn't know them, and I can kind of see how we might scare other people. But the people I hang with, there such a great group of people, I think they'd really make her more confident. I don't know, maybe I'm just stupid. Whatever.