Talking gibberish and twitching

I find myself at a loss, again, to figure out what the hell is going on. Most of the time, I feel like I'm either talking to a wall or that I'm a stranger in a strange land who doesn't speak the language.

Half the time, I try to express what's bothering me and it ends up going off the deep end into something I never intended. I attempt to vent some frustration, maybe gain a little clarity through that, but it's always misunderstood. It ends up the receiving end is offended and hurt, destined to take what I said as a very loud "I hate you."

Then there's the other half of the time where what I say has absolutely no effect. I'm not taken seriously at all and people make jokes at my displayed level of irritation. There's the refusal to acknowledge that there's any weight to my arguments or observations.

And I don't get why. Am I prone to too much hyperbole to the point people think I must really hate them if I use such lively words? Is my point lost because I can't offer a solution that's immediately recognizable as a better method?

I'm either on mute or the amp is set to 11.

Someone help me get off this thing because I don't know how. You try to be calm and flexible, able to make changes and go with the flow for the good of the group. Then it ends up coming back to bite you on the ass because everybody wants a chance to stretch the rubber band the direction they want it to go. I snap because they found the breaking point, and the reaction is always the same. I somehow strike a nerve that leaves them feeling hurt and me feeling like a jerk for hitting it.

The conclusion to that being: they're just human and I shouldn't react so strongly to them doing what they think is the right course of action. And I always feel like my "just human" tendencies are shunned. I'm not allowed that argument.

Then you know you reach that point where you're going to blow unless someone gives you a padded cell in which to scream and beat the walls. But venting only gets you so far. No one cares. The more I remind myself of that the more I wish someone did.

In my mind, I keep coming to the phrase "I can understand to some extent that ..." ending in something more or less akin to the philosophy that people are people and they will never be anything but their own self-absorbed, limited selves barely able to comprehend past their own noses. This misanthropic hypocrisy stares back at me in the mirror, I'm well aware.

But I'm so sick of acting like everything should be shoved down and ignored because "people are people are people." If you don't say anything, no one will know, right?

So I say something ... half the time to a wall. The wall neither comprehends nor feels any compunction toward empathy. Conversations with walls end with phrases stating sympathy but not showing it. And there's always that "but" at the end that makes my blood boil. "I know, but what do you want me to do?" "I know it's irritating, but I can't do anything about it." The invalidating "but" that makes any show of understanding before it into nothing more than a defensive tactic to keep the situation from escalating.

Sometimes life feels so very very false.

Don't fret, precious. I'm here.

Sorry to quote Maynard in an APC song, but sometimes I really want to step away from the window into my subconscious and go back to sleep. I don't want to know if there's a deeper meaning to the weird dream I just had. I'm freaked out by my own mind!

It feels like a conflict of interest sometimes to analyze dreams. On the one hand, you want to know what it means to dream of asking people to please let you have one of their Orthotricyclen pills (yes, very weird), but on the other hand, I'd really like to believe that it was simply my brain doing exercises in "how would you handle this fuck-up?" and that it has no deeper significance.

The annoying part about it is that I've started remembering more of my dreams. Most of the time, it's fragments. I don't remember enough to give context. So I end up with these vignettes that don't make any sense.

It's a short post this time, but I really can't shake this shitty dream I had last night. I'd love to pull the covers over my head and dream something else to push that one out. It wasn't a nightmare insomuch as I felt in control of myself, but I really did not like what was happening.

*sigh*

Recursion

I wondered aloud with a co-worker about the ridiculous degree to which events, phrases, circumstances or any number of things seem to happen over again and to what extent. It was one of those moments where we were thinking the same thing. One person voiced it and the conversation began.

It's so bizarre how life can spin out in circles like that, though. And I wonder a lot at who or what is to blame.

Is it possible that we are not fully aware of the power our minds possess? Could we be inadvertently venting out into the ether all these thoughts and feelings that settle on another person in any given period of time?

Why not? Stranger things have happened. I'd argue that there's got to be something to that theory for a number of reasons. One example would be married couples sounding more and more like each other as the years go by. They synch to the same wavelength. You might argue that each is just picking up on the behavioral and thought patters of the other, but that would be arguing that thought is a learned behavior.

Sure, you have to learn to think deeper than just superficial action/reaction, but if you argue that these couples have learned to agree with the thought patterns of the other, then you're acknowledging the very level of thought that would suggest they're fully aware of what they're doing. I think most would tell you ... they're not.

Then again, what if it's simply that we're all too stupid to recognize a mistake the first time it happens and this recursion is nothing more than the same lesson over again?

It's possible, too. I would certainly argue that people are stupid and can't recognize when they've fucked up. Plus, if the same things happen to other people, then it's easily arguable that we all have the same shortcomings. We all don't want to admit we were wrong.

I think that covers only a fraction of the recursion we experience, though. Life isn't all punishment. We're not all working our way through the same maze that has just one solution. If that were the case, conformity would be much more rampant. School would be about "learning the cheat codes" rather than ideally learning to think for yourself.

It would be boiling life down to a series of "problems" that we apparently haven't solved because they keep recurring. How would you account for the entire bell curve of the population encountering the same thing? Are we really more the same than we think?

This is my Pandora's Box of circles and tangents. Similarities are all-too rampant. Disparaties are strikingly unique to the individual. For me, there's always another side to this argument, another facet I'm not sure connects to any previous arguments at all. That ruins the possibility it's a combination of both.

I still hate considering each quasi-déjà vú event within it's own separate box. My life isn't a jumble of unique events, it's chronological. It's bound by rules of cause and effect. But it's not systematic either. There's no tracing every event in a concise pattern.

Until I figure it out, I think I'm going to go slug someone in the arm.

Jinx.

Kiss me, kill me

It's that wonderful time of year when everyone plans to get together with family. They start thinking of all the good food they'll be having and the time they'll be spending away from work with the people that matter most.

I am not one of those people.

Family is great. Family is where you'll find people willing to be honest with you, willing to stick by and defend you, willing to help you out when no one in their right mind would jump in that mess. I love my family and I hope they have a wonderful time over the season.

I, however, will not be spending it with them. And what is really starting to get on my nerves is people acting like this is some sort of terrible thing. They ask if I'm going to be "all alone" on the holidays with this sad look in their eyes like I'm the child living in poverty in a third world country.

It's fine, I explain. This is the first year I won't have to deal with tons of hoopla over the span of about a month. I finally get to enjoy the days for what they are. I finally get to really sit back and look over the year instead of stressing about the next event/party/gift exchange/blather coming up. That's what I want, too. I don't like the production it turns into whether it's big or small.

Then I had the stupid curious twitch to go read a story about "being the odd duck at Thanksgiving." It was typically vapid as most "I, too, was once like you" articles tend to be. The woman's point was that she somehow became an adult in the eyes of everyone else as soon as she had a child and a significant other.

How terrible to be recognized as having arrived in adulthood because you spawned. Plenty of people do that who still don't act like adults and probably should have thought the better of procreation in the first place. Social soapbox aside, the woman was trying to argue that it's not a holiday unless it was with family.

I'm sorry, but I disagree.

You can celebrate with your family whenever. Turkeys are ridiculously cheap per pound in June and July. You'll find plenty of great toys for good prices in March. Chocolate tastes the same whether it's shaped like Santa or the Easter Bunny or wrapped in foil with a cheerful copyrighted flag. Friends and far-away family will still enjoy receiving a personal note wishing them well. There's more than one kind of pie. And for the love of all that is good and holy, stop spending so much money on stupid little "festive" decorations that do nothing but gather dust the rest of the year.

"You should still go hang out with people during the holidays," a well-meaning friend says to me. Why? That's great that you're thinking about other people so much, but I promise I'm not going to become a suicide statistic.

I'm going to call my family and wish them well. Then, I'm going to work (because there's a newspaper every day whether you read it or not). Then, I'm going to call my boyfriend who lives in another state and talk to him for a good 2 hours or so before I go to bed. And that sounds pretty well close to greatness to me. The only thing that could make it better is having Josh nearby. That will happen some day. I'm not worried.

So please, eat the zucchini bread I'll be bringing, enjoy time with friends and family, but stop harassing me about my holiday plans.

One addendum: I will accept any invitation to try some wassel. I've never had it and I've heard it's quite tasty. Plus, it's too fun to say.

Wassel.

Insomnia

It's 5 in the morning and I can't sleep. This happened last night, too. I already cleaned my apartment so now I have nothing to do. My mind won't shut up.

I'm leery of getting too personal on this blog. There are too many stories of professional suicide and blogging being the culprit. Not that I have anything to say anyway. My job is ... fine. My apartment is ... fine. My life is generally OK.

Ugh.

Stir crazy

Every once in a while I get in this rut, this low point, this frustrating doldrums where I want something to change. I feel like if I do the same old routine one more time, I'm going to lose my tenuous grip on reality.

I end up fighting with myself about it, too. There are plenty of normal, mundane things I've neglected to do or outside-my-circle adventures I've either postponed or suspended.

I had an itch a few months ago to create some paintings I was going to use in my rather bare apartment. I had great ideas that I wanted to put on the canvas. I got through one painting. There should have been at least two, but I haven't made a single move of brush to canvas to create that second one. The supplies and the painting are in the closet.

And I don't know how to hang on to that crazy tangent moment. I go off and start something that makes me happy, then work and daily living get in the way ... and it ends up shoved into a corner somewhere until I finally take it out again or dispose of it. It's a blip on the radar that inexplicably and sometimes irretrievably disappears.

I'm frustrated by lack of follow-through, yet I don't know how to keep the circle from absorbing the tangent. Maybe I'm stretching to make that analogy a running theme, but it really feels like these lightning moments in which I actually produce something original get stifled by the typical me. There's no time for cultivation save for these random outbursts.

That goes for so much more than just how I spend my time. I do it in social interactions, too. The real me strikes without warning and then gets put back in her cage of propriety and insecurity once I see the reaction on people's faces. I must seem so manic.

I can play it safe only so long until the vitriol starts to stir up. Then I scare myself and retreat for a while. I'll stay calm and content for a time until the comfortable becomes banal. I break out for a while until I feel too unstable. Then I duck back into safe mode. I don't know what my problem is.

It's probably just angst.

Am I a friend or a jerk?

What a stupid question; but here's why I asked: *

I went over to a friend's apartment recently to have a little alcohol, a little food and a lot of conversation. I ended up having a lot of conversation, a little bit of food ... and quite a lot of booze.

Really. Stupid. Move.

I can't shut up or get over myself when I have too much to drink. I think everything I say has weight and I can't think clearly enough to at least attempt to stay on point. It's a rambling mess of discognitive ASSonance.

To make a long story short, after passing out for a while on said friend's couch, I awoke to forcefully interject my painfully stupid last-ditch effort to make two people care more about themselves. I stood up proudly on my soap box and declared them utter fools ... for doing exactly what I do all the time.

And it's a stupid game. It's more of the same trip around the circle. I'm able to assess from any number of vectors except the one that drives inward. They shoot off in an ego-increasing array of sharp criticism and maniacal insistence. My hopes of becoming an advice columnist are dashed.

(That's a joke. I don't want to do that.)

But the point still remains that any and every one of us are keenly aware of how insignificant everyone else's insecurities are, but we have an all-consuming and crippling inability to look past our own.

I'm not advocating some goofy form of self-love where we stare in the mirror every morning and tell ourselves we're worth it. But for fuck's sake, why do we have to keep learning this over and over and over?

You know it's been true at some point that you struggled to look past an insecurity. You better damn well know it won't be the last time.

Why? Why can't we move past ourselves? It's so conceited at the core and ... well, I'm downright boring. Why bore myself even more being consumed with all that's wrong with me?

It's late and I've got nuthin.

Nada.


*correcto on the semicolon? anyone?