New Years?

Yes. Yes, please.

It's been a good week :D

Here's to hoping that lasts the rest of the year!

Here are some little piggies from el Mangu, a town in the rural northern mountains of the Dominican Republic. Gosh, I wish I could go back.

Better day.

Excited for the boy to come home tomorrow night and to only have two more days of work left! I can get out of this house and maybe even be able to sleep...so excited.

Is it time to go back to school yet?

Well, madam therapist lady says I need to start writing more as it will help to disperse the anxiety and stress I encounter on a daily basis. As the only person who reads this is someone who deserves a better understanding of this shit, I may as well do it here. I will preface the following with a warning: these are merely my ramblings on my own perceptions of life...

So, a large portion of this nation clamors constantly for a woman's right to control what happens with her own body; I am in completely agreement with this. I believe, though, that it should apply to everything. If I want to employ a razor to calm me down that should be my choice, right? You disagree? Let's consider what is currently 'socially acceptable': piercings, tattoos, circumcisions, nip/tucks, etc. So it's okay for someone to cut holes in their skin so long as some form of jewelry is placed in it. It's okay for someone to penetrate their skin thousands of times so long as ink is injected permanently. It's okay for skin to be severed permanently as long as it is for spiritual purposes. It's okay for skin to be sliced, removed, and stitched back together as long as it's for beauty purposes. But no, it's not okay for me to drag a blade across my own skin to calm down and get rid of stress and anxiety. 

Self-mutilaton has been called disgusting, mysterious, incomprehensable, and a host of other negative adjectives. Most people who do not self-mutilate abhor the thought of pain, and cannot imagine purposefully hurting oneself. While there are exceptions, the majority of our society sees self-mutilation as a very deviant behavior. Part of this negativity stems from the fact that self-mutilation is poorly understood. Human beings fear what they do not understand, be it homosexuality, mental illness, or self-mutilation. Therefore, most self-injurers feel very alone and unable to share their pain with others. Many wear long sleeves and pants at all times and are careful to cover their scars while in public. If they reveal the scars or explain the behavior, they risk rejection and social ostracism. Most self-mutilators share the same goals as the rest of society. The methods they employ are upsetting to those of us who try to achieve our goals in a more tranquil manner, but self mutilators seek what we all seek: an ordered life, spiritual peace, and a healthy mind in a healthy body.

Oh well...

"Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like."  --Lemony Snicket

‎"Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only god’s echoes and god is Narcissus"

 - House of Leaves

Christmas Eve

Our tree [with gifts for dad & I]

Left my new journal at mom's, so this will have to do for now...This Christmas Eve has, of course, ended up just like every other one. Dad has passed out in his chair after smoking a pack of cigarettes, drinking half a keg, and downing his pain meds. I'm stealing internet from the neighbors and decorating the tree. I already went out and bought us some food as I refuse to eat the crap he has in the freezer. I'm glad he didn't forget, though! Tomorrow morning should be better; mornings are always the best. Then it will be off to the mother's for her side of the family's Christmas. That is always interesting. I'm hoping to get my scarf done so I can wear it soon :D

Yes. Just collecting them. That's all. #sarcasm #idiots

A few days of mindless gaming have done me well. :]

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”

—	Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.

“You’ll likely notice that the real world does have this interesting mix of, like, crushing monotony and paralyzing terror. There’s the crushing monotony of waking up at the same time, sitting in the same traffic, going to the same job, and then coming home to pay the same bills with your only distractions being, like, television and video games and YouTube. But there’s also the constant paralyzing terror of knowing that if you somehow screw up sitting in traffic or working at your job or paying your rent, you will be homeless and hungry and alone.”

—	John Green

My thoughts about my upcoming History and Structure final:

Beyond that...it's now well over a week past my birthday. My father has officially forgot. Again. I know this isn't a surprise to me anymore, but it's still a little disappointing. I had a professor ask me today if I would've preferred to have brothers/sisters and I almost selfishly said yes. Then I sort of thought about it and decided I would never want anyone else to have had to go through the shit I did. And of course, then I said that. Meh.

Come home soon, Tessa? Now?

Language describes, but description tends to emerge precisely when nomenclature falters or when the names assigned to objects fail to render them adequately. The world almost never resembles its linguistic mugshot. Exposing the inadequacy of the world to compass the thing, description is allotted the thankless task of representing the misfit things that cannot be immediately assimilated to the world as we already know it. It thus serves as a heuristic device, as a virtual perspective that reveals something about out relationship to objects, or about the relationship between words and objects, that we cannot perceive in our everyday experience of them.

Monkey: me.

Finals Week: Elephant.

 

Why is it that if some dude walked up to me on the subway platform
and said these things, I’d think he was a mentally ill asshole,
but if the vampire inside my head says it,
It’s the voice of reason.

Later today.

Is going to suck.

Whelp.

This backfired a bit. Hi best friend. 

Anxiety.

Words cannot express how much I am freaking out right now. I hate going to see a new therapist for the first time. I get so anxious. What do you say first? Hi, my name is Nicole. I find that self-injury is the most effective coping mechanism for my incredibly crappy hand in life but I can't do it for fear of my boyfriend breaking up with me and the only people I can come close to calling 'family' would be beyond disappointed with me. This causes my body to release stress every night in the form of night-terrors. These simply perpetuate and extend exponentially my daily stress levels and lack of sleep. What to do? This will be the third person I've seen...so far it's just been a waste of my time, but every one I've spoken to continues to encourage me to see someone....as if it's going to make anything any better. I can't just say this to an entire stranger. They'll think that I'm entirely crazy. But I can't just sit there and say nothing...it'd be a waste of both our time. So what do I say? (I realize this is a redundant question as no one reads this, felt the need to ask it anyway.) Not continuing therapy is also not an option, I can't be having a repeat of last year. Even scheduling appointments raises my anxiety levels...how counterproductive. 

Ayudame

“Here then

-

the after

-

math

-

of meaning.

-

A life

-

time

-

finished between

-

the space of

-

two frames.

-

The dark line where the

-

eye persists in seeing

-

something that was never there

-to begin with”

Blankets...

Amazing graphic novel by Craig Thompson

"It's inspiring to see children struggling so hard to climb that hill all for the very brief pleasure of going back down. Us adults are always on the uphill climb. Up, up, up and it doesn't get anywhere."

"I'm not flailing now, as my muscles are rigid with the tension of holding myself together. The pain over my heart returns, and from it I imagine tiny fissures spreading out into my body. Through my torso, down my arms and legs, over my face, leaving it crisscrossed with cracks. One good jolt...and I could shatter into strange, razor-sharp shards."

-Mockingjay

Apathy Unveiled

“It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

The light at the end of the tunnel has been shut off due to lack of funds.

“We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we’d learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did.”

—	John Green, Looking for Alaska

Had a conversation with a former teacher today. We were talking about an ex-boyfriend of hers from when she studied abroad in England. She told me about her original plans to move there permanently, find a job, and have a life with him. All this changed when she went home and met her future [and current] husband. This got me thinking....there are so many paths that people can take, if any number of people chose a different path, there's a high likelihood that I would not be here today. If my former teacher would have moved to England and stayed...I wouldn't have moved in with her during high school and I doubt I'd have reached out to anyone. Though, who knows what could have happened and what might yet happen...

In the Bookstore

I went down to the bookstore this evening
and found myself in the poetry section.
But for every thin book of poems
there was a thick biography of the poet
and an even thicker book
by someone who’s supposed to know
explaining what the poet
is supposed to’ve said and why he didn’t.
So you don’t have to waste your time
on the best the writer could do,
the words he fought the darkness and himself for,
the unequal battle with beauty.
Instead you can read comfortably
about the worst the writer could do:
the mess he made of his life,
how he fought with his family,
cheated on his lovers, didn’t pay his debts
and not only drank too much
but all the stupid things
he ever said to the bartender
just before getting 86′d will be printed for you
and they’re just as stupid
as the things everyone says just before getting 86′d.
The books explaining the poet
are themselves inexplicable.
The students who have to read them
cheat.
I left the poetry section
thinking about burning the bookstore down.
Some of the poet’s work comes from his life, ok.
But most of the poet’s work comes
in spite of his life, in spite of everything,
even in spite of the bookstores.
So I went to the next section
and bought a murder mystery but I haven’t read it yet.
I find I don’t want to know who done it
and why;
I want to do it myself.

Julia Vinograd

"Pain or not, I would most likely walk around in a suicidal reverie the rest of my life, never actually doing anything about it. Was there a psychological term for that? Was there a disease that involved an intense desire to die, but no will to go through with it? Couldn’t talk and thoughts of suicide be considered a whole malady of their own, a special subcategory of depression in which the loss of a will to live has not quite been displaced by a determination to die?"

–Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

"It didn’t occur to me that there was something decidedly odd in finding a box of razor blades aesthetically appealing. I wonder if a heroin addict loves the elegant simplicity of the needle, if a drinker romances the curve and shape of the bottle." 

 –Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

In idle moments, I still slide my fingers under the sleeves of my shirt and trace the raised white nubs of scars that track my arms from years and years of cutting. How did I learn to stop cutting and collapsing, and can I somehow transmit this ability to others?

NaNoWriMo

So...my NaNoWriMo novel is not progressing as well as I would like. But with how busy the last week has been, I understand. Still, a little disappointed in myself. Though, that's been the theme for the last month or so and I don't foresee it changing one bit. Despite working three jobs, I still can hardly pay my bills; I definitely don't have enough money to pay for next semester. I'll be taking a trip to financial aid next week for sure. That and Pam's on me again to go see a doctor. I hate doctors...with a passion. Beyond that, the very last thing I want to do is have someone looking me over. That will inevitably lead to questions I do not want to answer. Well, I do want to answer them....but that brings us full-circle back to NaNoWriMo and my inability to find the time to write. So today, I will be firmly planted in front of the computer, struggling to finish my homework in time to hang out with the boyfriend. Or at least game a bit with him... Maybe I'll pull an all-nighter and work on my novel some as well. I'm always torn between wanting to tell my story to everyone and let them know exactly what is in my head or keeping it to myself. The problem is being outwardly unhappy and consistently so it pushes people away, no matter if they say they're always there to listen, there is only so much your best friends can listen to. On the other hand, to pretend that everything is fine is to poison yourself from the inside out; is to ignore who you are and lose yourself. Because sometimes people actually do feel that way. Sometimes your life feels like it is caving in on you. Sometimes people really do feel like they don't want to exist, like they just want to curl up in a ball, and go into that place between life and death. Saying "I don't want to exist" isn't saying "I want to go die". It's saying that "I wish that for the time being, I could go somewhere and not have to feel". I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and if you don't know what it's like to feel this way, then you have no place to judge anyone who does. So which is better? To have friends that think you are melodramatic, seeking attention, and pessimistic, or to drown in your own mind? I'll just have to write it out and decide later if anyone will read it. 


"I'm not saying that everything is survivable, just everything except that last thing is."  
    John Green


“It’s hard for everyone. It always seems like it’s hardest for you, but your success and your happiness has much more to do with understanding other people around you than it does with understanding yourself. And, guess what, the homecoming queen probably has crippling phobias too. It sounds cliche, but you have to think about everyone like they’re people, and suddenly you realize that 90% of teenagers have moments where they want to cut themselves, pull out their hair, punch their best friend and sit crying in the shower. And EVERYONE was once a teenager…that goes for your teachers, parents, rock idols, and grand parents…and those people all made it through.”

Hank Green

TFioS

"There will come a time when all of us are dead, all of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything; there will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is billions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does."

-Hazel Grace Lancaster

“Every day our bodies separate,


exploded torn and dazed.

Not understanding what we celebrate

we grope through languages and hesitate

and touch each other, speechless and amazed;

and every day our bodies separate

us farther from our planned, deliberate
ironic lives. I am afraid, disphased,

not understanding what we celebrate

when our fused limbs and lips communicate
the unlettered power we have raised.

Every day our bodies’ separate

routines are harder to perpetuate.
In wordless darkness we learn wordless praise,

not understanding what we celebrate;

wake to ourselves, exhausted, in the late

morning as the wind tears off the haze,

not understanding how we celebrate

our bodies. Every day we separate.

”

—	“Villanelle for D.G.B.” - Marilyn Hacker

To New York!

“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”

-David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Day 55:

When you first slice there’s a sting, and soon, when you catch sight of the blood, your heart starts racing and pounding because you’ve gotten away with something you know you shouldn’t be doing. Then you go into a sort of hypnotic state, because you’re in total awe watching that bright red line puddle up on your skin, watching it run down your arm like a waterfall. And then comes the sweet release, although it only lasts for a few moments. That sweet release comes with the second and third cut, before you start to try to hold off as long as you can before you draw the razor again across your skin. It doesn’t even hurt anymore by the fourth; it has merely become a chance to finally let go. Or maybe it does hurt a little, but you don’t notice the pain because it hurts way less than everything else, and besides, it’s the only thing you can manage to do right.

Oh literature...

“It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap dug during which the symbols were unraveled. You saw the word ‘castle’, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away in the green shade…”

—	Ian McEwan, Atonement, Page 35

Everything whimsical has left.

I live at the end of a 5 and 1/2 minute hallway
But as far as I can see you are still miles from me
In your doorway

And oh by the way
When the landlord came today
He measured everything
I knew he'd get it wrong
But I just played along
Cause I was hoping that he would fix it all

Inside your door
But there's more to this story
Than I've been letting on
There are words made of letters
Unwritten
And yes I forgive you
For leading me on

You can think of it like this
When you can't resist
I'm in your hallway standing on a cliff
And just when I think I've found the trick
I'm tumbling
Like an echo

'Cause there's only so far I can go
When you're living in a hallway that keeps growing
I think to myself
30 seconds and I'll be there 

Black Widow

“There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.”

—	Tennessee Williams

“I thought about all the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it’s in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.”

—	Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I've discovered Tumblr....may the Gods be merciful.

“I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.”

—	Virginia Woolf (The Mark on the Wall)

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t rest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

—	Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

“There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.”

—	Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic

An optimist? A pessimist? Neither. A fool.

Like driving along a bumpy road and losing control of the steering wheel, tossing you -- just a tad -- off the road. The wheels kick up some dirt, but you're able to pull it back. Yet no matter how tightly you grip the wheel, no matter how hard you try to drive straight, something keeps jerking you to the side. You have so little control over anything anymore. And at some point, the struggle becomes too much -- too tiring -- and you consider letting go. Allowing tragedy...or whatever...to happen.

The Fault In Our Stars

There will come a time when all of us are dead, all of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything there will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you, everything that we did, built, wrote, or thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon or maybe its millions of years away…but even if we survive the collapse of our sun we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness and there will be time after and if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, you should ignore it. Because god knows that’s what everyone else does.

Pottermore & California.....

...What more could one want?

“Mari,” said Jonna, “sometimes you’re really a little too obvious.”

“Do you think? But once in a while a person just needs to say what doesn’t need to be said. Don’t you think?”

And they went back to their reading.

CALIFORNIA! I will see you tomorrow!!

I want to be possessed and know blinding joys.

Most human lives are usually lived in a state of functional nihilism. Very few of us believe that human life is devoid of all meaning and that all we should do is answer to our base urges and fulfill our basic desires and try to distract ourselves from pain or fear or unpleasantness. But almost all of us act as if we believe that. So what are we going to do about consciousness and how are we going to balance our urge to be more than nihilists with our need to blunt the sharp edges of consciousness? 

There are things one reads that make you aware that you have lived nothing, felt nothing, experienced nothing up to that time. I was reading one of the blogs I followed fairly regularly and she summed up two of the impressions I get most often during/after reading a John Green book:

1. "Reading John Green has the uncanny ability to make me feel really, really young and just a little bit dorky. It also makes me go all giggly and squeal-y, and occasionally groan-y because of the mathematics. I love you, John Green, in a non-creep way."

2. :Ya know, reading John Green, you wish you were one of the people he wrote about. That you're life's all good, if a little better, when you find yourself a character in a John Green novel."

I've recently decided to compile a book list of what I would consider *must reads*. This will be completed prior to my departure for California. Speaking of, the west coast and I need to be reunited asap. I'm incredibly sick of the east coast, particularly. Until the next time!

Ilunga

A Balrog of Moria! What did he say?

I'd just like to vehemently express my love for the Vlogbrothers, John and Hank Green. At this moment, particularly for John. In his most recent vlog, John was expressing his distaste for the unedited rap songs playing in stores where he was shopping. Rather than barrage our young, innocent ears with monstrous curses, he substituted each expletive with the names of British romanic poets:

"I'm a William Blake gangster so of course you want my Samuel Taylor Coleridge you're gonna want to be all up in this William Wordsworth like OH Percy Shelley, OH OH Percy Shelly. I'm the Lord Byron in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, WILLIAM BLAKE!"  

It is love. I'm fairly sure I've watched every vlog ever made by the two of them...and all of Hank's gaming videos. The Portal ones are especially entertaining, though I would never look down on the equally awesome Lego Harry Potter ones :D

Anyway, I've been incredibly tired this week. Here's to hoping I sleep straight through the night. Maybe overflowing my nerd quota for the day will help :D

Also! These are my new bed sheets! I am EXCITED! http://www.thinkgeek.com/geek-kids/3-7-years/e566/