bloodygranuaile

Taking a short break from movie reviews and dithering about YA fantasy to get out some IRL stuff. Sometimes real life manages to be heavy enough that I'd feel bad posting reviews for Mamma Mia or Breaking Dawn (that one might never get done, btw; it's seven pages already and I'm just not sure I can finish it). Often, I review things, sometimes at unnecessarily great length, because I have other things on my mind, and writing something long and opinionated has the cathartic effect of making me feel like I'm expressing myself, combined with the escapist effect of reading the book in the first place by focusing on something else, and also I don't feel like a whiny emo bitch since most of the shit I get upset about is the same stuff I'd been upset about the day/week/month before.

And then some days, your mother comes home from work and tells you that one of her co-workers, who she was supposed to hang out with that evening, is unavailable because her house burned down, her husband was killed, and she and her daughter are in the hospital for smoke inhalation, and in critical condition. And then you feel very guilty that the most important thing on your mind for that day was whether or not you'd have a big enough block of free time to watch Godfather II.

Oh, and if you're me, you also feel a little worried because the Ocho doesn't have working smoke detectors. Which I think is illegal. AND THIS WOULD BE WHY.

My little brother is off to UConn on Friday, and since he'd been kind of avoiding dealing with it, it is now crunch time. Today was go-out-and-buy-bedsheets-and-shit-day, which, being the day you finally have all sorts of tangible, concrete signs you're actually leaving for college that aren't paperwork, tends to be one of those times when it really hits you that you're actually leaving. I was mostly impatient to get the hell out when it was my turn, but I still remember getting very nervous when it was time to go buy all my shit, and I did it several weeks in advance. Tim has had a much better time in high school than I did, likes Madison a lot more than I do, and most importantly, has a much more fulfilling social life here than I ever did. He's very upset about leaving his friends. He's even more upset about leaving the kids he works with at Kirby. Mom is very upset about him leaving, and about him being upset. I feel kind of out-of-place for mostly just being impatient to get my ass back to Worcester and have the school year start again.

In the neverending battle between me and my brain (you knew this section would be coming), we have the following recent developments: 1. I have been running around like crazy lately and yesterday crashed, sleeping 13 hours last night and taking a really long nap this afternoon, 2. I skipped my dried frog pills yesterday and woke up this morning in a lovely bout of emo, 3. sometime in the past couple months I seem to have turned into a complete sap and music can now sometimes make me cry, which I'm rather embarrassed about, and 4. I've been having increasingly frequent problems with lucid dreams/sleep paralysis/general epic failure in the waking up department. Tuesday morning I woke up, went back into dreaming without falling into a normal sleep first, and spent what felt like hours in a series of very stressful attempts to will myself awake. I kept putting my dream-self through all sorts of tests to check if I was awake or asleep, and when I realized I was asleep, I kept making my dream-self do all sorts of things that ought to wake me up (like splashing cold water on myself, &c). I thought I was managing to do them in real life, because moving my dream-self was almost as difficult as moving when you're not completely out of muscle atonia, so I thought I'd managed to physically get out of bed and just hadn't shaken the hallucinations yet. I got very scared when I couldn't wake myself up even with the cold water, and despairing when I realized I was dreaming the cold water too and was actually still in bed. Then I tried to wake my real self up with sheer force of will, which took a bit of doing--first I managed to dispell most of the dreams and wake my consciousness up, but I still couldn't move and I felt like I kept starting to fall into the dreams again (actual falling sensation, btw). Then I managed to get one eye half open, but it was several minutes (or perhaps it felt like several minutes because I was panicking) before I could get it to *stay* half open, or move any other part of my body. I woke up literally gasping and shaking; feeling stressed, exhausted, and my muscles were stiff and sore like I'd really been straining them. I spent most of the day feeling similar to having tried an overambitious bout of weightlifting, except without feeling like it was good for me.

I should probably stop burying myself in Discworld books and craptacular vampire novels and just give my bloody doctor a call. I'm going to need more dried frog pills soon, anyway.

To end on a higher note (laaaaaa!) (sorry...), I got switched into the seminar I wanted (British Romanticism instead of Chaucer), and I'm writing, probably not as much as I should be, but there is definitely (non-LJ) writery activity going on. My car needs a new transmission, which will be expensive, but I still get to take it up on Saturday (!). Car is probably being named Rincewind until transmission is replaced, at which point there may be reconsideration. (Suggestions are welcome.) Also, this weekend I got to see my Jersey lovelies, and bought shiny things at Ren Faire. And tomorrow, I get to do nothing all day, which is very much needed.

And now to bed, and hoping I will wake up normally, and hoping everyone else will feel better by then.

I've been thinking lately and I think that being bipolar has given me a very valuable perspective on sanity, insanity, and the intricacies of percieving reality. This has been hightened due to my own stupidity, where I've played around with it far too much and have not only been insane and then sane, but have repeatedly gone in and out and in in-between states over the past few years. I've learned a lot of nasty lessons.

Most of what I've observed--both with my own behavior and other people's--is ugly. In hindsight I can trace how easy it is for problems to just create more and more problems, how easy it is to be narrowminded, how easy it is to do unthinkable things if you don't think about them (and that's unthinkable in terms of "WTF were you thinking, people just don't DO that" sense, not like... genocide unthinkable).

I want to break out of this, and I don't just want to sit and wait until the end of August to do so, even though that seems the only option. The people at MHS aren't quite as uniformly horrendous a group of "ew, normal people" as it's been so easy to write them off as these past few years. Maybe I don't have much in the way of perfectly kindred spirits there as I'd like, but I never did even among the people I did hang out with, and honestly, what can you expect? It's no crime for people to not be perfectly complementary to me. Those people are rare. Other people aren't necessarily wastes of time. And God, I've already wasted enough time with people who are. And so my brain goes in circles.

I know what I want; I don't know how to get it.

I'm sick of spending all my time in corners. I want people who realize that other people are real people. I don't necessarily want to be "understood"--nobody "understands" anybody else, get over it--but I want people who will allow when they don't understand something instead of suggesting I talk to my therapist over every instance in which I have a different point of view than they do. I want people that will take responsibility for having done something wrong to someone else instead of turning everything into "Well I don't know what his/her problem is!". I don't want people who assume that just because they're a geek/a Goth/generally hated by everybody, no matter what they say or do or think they cannot POSSIBLY be being judgmental because only those stupid normal people are judgmental; their particular group is ENLIGHTENED. I want older people that won't talk down to me and younger people that I'll probably have to learn not to talk down to and people my own age just because I don't have a lot of people my own age.

I don't think I have the time nor the social skills to make this happen. But at least I know what to watch out for at college?

I think about this way too much but I keep not coming to any useful conclusions. Maybe I should stop thinking. >.>

So Rum and Onions was a lot of fun, and I got to see lots of awesome people I don't see very often, which was quite fortunate as (a) I started crashing that afternoon and (b) it's the last contra I'm going to, ever, so I'm glad it went well.

This afternoon I turned down a ride home on the basis that as it's a bitch to get home, it'll be a bitch to get wherever else I need to go this afternoon from home. Went downtown for lunch, then realized that I no longer can actually stand any of my usual haunts around town, and so I had to go home or I'd drive myself crazy and I don't want to crash on Halloween again like I've done these past two years, which is going to take some actual work today as I've been coming down these past two days from being pretty freaking manic.

But tonight I am actually going to go out with friends like for some idiotic reason I haven't been doing these past few years.

Bah. Knew this was going to happen.

Have been in exceedingly good mood these past two weeks, up until a little bit into contra dancing tonight. What probably caused this crash was probably mostly just random-evil-mood-swing-ness, although I can definitely pinpoint two occurrences that I specifically overreacted at. The first being the fact that, with Erin occupying Dan, and Pat and Moody absent, there were only two guys I knew to dance with... and about twelve girls in our 'group' tonight, for some reason. I don't dislike dancing with people I don't know, but I do dislike not being able to dance with people I do know. Got more sullen upon realization that this was not a case of being "not able" to do something, but due almost exclusively to the fact that I am not forthright enough to overcome such a slanted sex ratio that I don't just 'end up' with people I'm already friends with.

Second occurrence that I flipped out at was rest of world's poking fun at Dan and Erin, which I realize was probably meant all in good fun, but is only 'all in good fun' if it is not present through the ENTIRETY of one's relationship. It's bad enough that they can only see each other when the rest of us loons are around; the least we can do is leave them alone about it. Ended up insulting Ella and scolding Elyse Geibel about it, then leaving the kitchen and sitting apart in one of the folding chairs until five of ten. Sat outside in the cold with Dan and Erin for fifteen minutes (*hugs both muchly for keeing her company*) until Pat showed up to bring me home. And am now here, decompressing with peppermint tea and Victor Hugo.

The next two days are for homework and chilling. I am not doing anything 'fun', and I am not spending money.

Part of me is tempted to start fasting again, but that would be a really shitty idea.