I don’t write very often anymore. I don’t know what my problem is. It’s a vicious cycle of grumpiness, caused by apathy, perhaps. I become grumpy when I do not make time for writing or reflection. I hate when I see the piles of blank books I have lying around. And I should also be writing letters to my friends who live far away. I am a firm believer in perpetuating the practice of snail mail, but lately I’ve found it hard to bother.

Enough bitching.

I want to recall the mundane things, and so I will.

Right now I am obsessed with the Tarkio version (as opposed to The Decemberists’ version) of  “My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist.” There is an interesting electric guitar part that accompanies Colin Meloy’s haunting vocals and peculiar lyrics that I don’t think is found on The Decemberists’ version, and I think it adds volumes to the eerie wonder of the piece.

I just bought Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box. I read about thirty pages on my break today, and though I swore off buying any more books, even inexpensive mass markets, I think that I broke my vow for a good purchase, and refuse to feel any guilt.

I want to write a story about ghosts. Not necessarily a ghost story, but a story about ghosts. Or magic, I guess.
I’ve been thinking about writing something to do with falling in love with someone who you shouldn’t have. The whole Harker thing is back in partial swing (not full, I promise), and I’m wondering if the only way to sublimate is to use it as fictional fodder.

(The selfish part of me wants to just seduce him and make him mine. I’ve taken to trying to tie up that part of me and hide her in closets. Sometimes I put her in the attic or the basement for a change of scenery, though.)

Ironically, in the midst of all this Harker coveting, I’ve been considering joining a church. Returning to the Catholics is out, but I was thinking of looking into the Episcopalian church, or perhaps a Unitarian congregation. I don’t know.

I wish I knew from whence that particular desire stems.

Igor’s birthday is on Thursday, and it’s a big one: thirty.
I’m thinking of buying him thirty Sharpie markers, because he loves Sharpie markers. I wonder how much that would run me, though. We’re good friends, but not good enough to spend piles of money on what would wind up being a good novelty gift. (He would love the Sharpies, though, and would put them to good use.)

As a final note, I have to say that I’m putting a lot of creative energy into thinking of how I will deck my fellow café staff for the Breaking Dawn party on August 1. Sid asked me to find some make-up for the staff to  make us look like proper vampires.

I think we need to be authentic to the book’s characters, not to our traditional concept of the vamps. I’m going to explain to Sid that being properly authentic means being pale, not necessarily too gothed out, and having purple shadows beneath our eyes. I’m thinking it might be a good idea to add some glitter into the white make-up as well, as the lights in the store are bright enough that proper Meyer vampires would possibly glitter a wee bit. Maybe.

I’m possibly going to use the party as an excuse to dye my hair. I need a good trim, and it might be nice to get some semi-permanent color in my hair. It doesn’t need to be black (see above about the not gothing out), but I think that mousy brown is not vampire-like at all. We’ll see. I tend to be lazy and cheap when it comes to anything cosmetic.

I like to be natural and hippy-esque, on the outside. I save the drama and goth for the inside, generally.

And now I’ve updated, and feel all the better for it.
Time to go read some Joe Hill and call it a night.

Today has been pretty excellent.
I didn't expect it to be so lovely, but sometimes life hands you one of those unexpectedly good days.

Igor and I were supposed to go to the movies today, but he ended up being too busy. I sort of saw that coming, as when you have a small child, life can get a little crazy. He and his Ph.D-candidate wife kind of amaze me, what with the baby and all.

So, that plan scrapped, I had to find something to do.
I ended up cleaning out my entire store of old magazines, which I hadn't read in months, or even at all.
I also went to the bank, paid my credit card bill, mailed back my Netflix, wrote a thank you note, stopped at B&N for a coffee, and bought two new pair of shoes.

Now, in between all of that is where the magic and excellence lie.

So, Ty (which is the nickname I will give to Red's friend who threw the BBQ last week) did not come to open mic last night, despite my underlying irrational hopes.
I decided to be brave and send him a thank you note for having a great party to send off Red, and to tell him that it was nice to finally have met him, and that I had meant to give him my phone number, but had forgotten.

This was either really brave or really stupid.
Or, maybe it was neither. Maybe it will be perceived as just being really "sweet," which is the adjective that people have been attaching to me and my actions a lot lately.

Well, it's out in the mail and nothing can be done about it now. I hope it was the right decision, and I really hope that Ty will call me.

(P.S. "Ty" comes from my deciding to misspell "tiger," because every time I look at Ty I can't help but think he looks a bit cat-like.)

Stopping at the B&N yielded a good little chat with Stacie (who I give no nickname at the moment. It's cool.) and my acquisition of seasons 4 and 5 of Buffy. Stacie will be on vacation next week and wanted to make sure that I was thoroughly set as far as my addiction goes. (sigh)

Then, I zipped over the river to the REI to look for a pair of KEEN shoes I had seen a couple of months ago. I knew they were a bit pricey, but if they would still be there, they would fit my shoe needs perfectly. I need something with support, comfortable, and cute for any bookfloor hours I might acquire in the coming months. I didn't really expect them to be there, those shoes, as I hadn't been to REI since the end of March.

Not only were the shoes there, but they were on sale.
I adore them; they are perfect.
Oh, and I finally bought a new pair of Teva flip-flops to phase into my wardrobe. I hope that they will eventually replace my five or six-year old pair. They have served well, those old ones, but it's time to retire them.

So, now I'm home, sitting in front of a fan, listening to some tunes, writing this entry, and ready to watch some Buffy. I'm going to try not to worry too much about what will happen with that incredibly feminine-looking note that I sent to Ty, and I'm going to enjoy the fact that the air is considerably less humid today.

::sigh::

Ah, contentment.

I haven't written a proper entry in a really long time, and unfortunately, my only true excuse is that my brain has been severely retarded by watching the first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer over the course of only two weeks. To attempt a mending of the brain cells, I have not acquired season 4 either from Stacie or the public library. I've been reading and playing my guitar and napping these past two days instead.

Plenty of "write-worthy" things have happened in the past couple of weeks.
We passed our CREMA at work, that big ol' corporate evaluation. I have managed to be the most reliable, friendly, and versatile employee at my particular Barnes and Noble, still being cheerful through the dry wit, sarcasm, and annoying coffee-related physical injuries.

Of course, I don't trust this, but I seem to be well on the good side of everyone at work, despite the fact that everyone at work is not necessarily on my good side. Even the Queen, she who heads all the managers, seems to adore me. It's almost terrifying, as less than a year ago I'd purposely avoid her if I saw her coming. Now, we are nearly friends, through some mixture of the strange circumstances of her growing more laid back, and my just growing up.

In news completely unrelated to work, Red and Diana hit the road to Nashville sometime yesterday. I spent most of last week's evenings with them, either in bars where Red played his music, or on a deck somewhere across the river. It was a good week.  I ended the seven-day feeling as though nothing could fracture my friendship with Red, and that Diana will officially be my sister once she and Red tie the knot.

Regardless of how we were born, Red and Mack really are my brothers, and I should just stop questioning it. Sometimes life just drops new family members into your lap, and when they are the ones that you get to choose, well, that makes it all the better.

I spent time with Danger this weekend. I think that he wants things to be more like they were before our great schism, before our friendship crumbled under the pressure we both put on that fragile structure. It's been a year, and there are still things for which I haven't yet forgiven him. I'm not usually a grudge holder, but my trust has been broken. And he never was willing to talk about what happened.
I think the only thing I can't forgive him now is how he never called to find out if I was okay after I quit school. It still hurts that he couldn't check in on someone he was supposed to care about to make sure that the demise of her original career path hadn't completely flattened her.

His other transgressions were probably worse, in retrospect, but I can forgive the rest gladly.

We'll see what happens. It's hard to remember my anger and irritation when we're actually together.

Another interesting thing that happened this week is that I met one of Red's friends. He held a barbecue for Red and Diana, to say good-bye. I didn't get to talk to him much at the barbecue, as he was busy hosting, but I did talk to him long enough to learn that we have similar tastes in music. He is also a music junkie, like I am. Perhaps worse, come to think.

Saturday was Red's last gig, and I got incredibly lost driving there. However, if I hadn't gotten lost, I would not have walked in with this friend of Red's. (Nickname forthcoming.) He arrived the same time that I did, and I somehow ended up spending the first half of the evening talking with him. He gives me that strange butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling that has been missing from my life. I found myself looking down shyly a lot, and flipping my hair, and just wanting to talk to him more. Awkward pauses were suddenly just out of shyness, and not out of anything bad.

He's an "only on occasion" smoker, like I'm supposed to be, and when I realized that it was too late in the night for me to stay any longer, he was on his way in from the parking lot. I think he was a little surprised to see me leaving, like it took him off guard. I was too shy to suggest swapping phone numbers, though I should have. He did say that he would have to come out to open mic soon, as he used to do that all the time. (Supposedly, that is. I don't recall ever having seen him, and I've been doing this for four years.) 

I have no hope of him coming out tonight, though, because Mack is on vacation in Maine and two of our other friends are running open mic tonight. I can't see this friend of Red's coming if Mack won't be around. I can't see him liking me enough to take a risk and drive all that way without Mack or Red to talk to as a back-up.

And maybe I read him wrong. I'm terrible at this sort of thing.

Anyway, excuse me as I revert to adolescence. (I really hope he comes tonight, despite the lack of hope...)

Lastly, my final little gush... I just downloaded the Vampire Weekend album and I absolutely adore it. I'm on my second listening (it's short--just over a half hour), and it's absolutely amazing.

The Big Read estimates that the average adult has only read 6 of the 100 top books they've printed.

Go through the list and bold the ones you've read.
Italicise the ones you WANT to read
Two books removed because they were repeat entries.


1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare I've read a large chunk, but there are still gaps.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden Hated it
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

1. I don't eat meat because I feel better when I don't, and because I have read the information and viewed the information available, and find that I do not agree with the way cows and pigs and chickens are treated.
I still eat fish, eggs, and dairy because I only have so much willpower. Also, I enjoy these foods, and my body seems to digest them well in moderation.

2. I am uncomfortable in my skin. I always feel fat or ugly or both. It has been getting worse, and I don't know why. I haven't gotten any larger, and have probably gotten smaller.
It is a cross that I bear, and I have come to terms with its existence.
I do not blame men as a gender for my body image issues. If I blame anything, I blame my upbringing, my childhood, and the media.
I have unrealistic expectations for my appearance, and I put undue value on my appearance, especially for someone who usually looks beyond other people's appearance.
Usually, once I know and truly like someone, I don't see what they look like anymore. I just see my beautiful friends who I love.

3. I am a girl. I know that the long hair, long eyelashes, feminine laugh, and feminine mannerisms tell everyone this. However, I can't help but feel like the men around me don't see me as anything but one of the guys. I know that I do this to myself, but I don't know how.
I wonder how to change this perception; I wonder if I actually want to change this perception.

4. For all my having been single for years (with only brief, intermittent periods of dating), I am lost if I have no one upon whom to have a crush.
I presently have no one upon whom to have a crush.

5. I let other people's opinions dictate too heavily what sorts of pop culture I gravitate towards. I am often ashamed if I think I've made the wrong choice in music, books, or movies. I sometimes wonder what I actually do like. I used to know, but I became too concerned about it about ten years ago when I was in my only long-term relationship. My boyfriend at the time had very strong opinions about his music, and his friends had strong opinions about everything. I was younger and malleable.
I've never really recovered, and I take full blame for this.

6. I am tired of letting my life be dictated by the people around me, whether I am imagining their judgments or not. I want to be who I want to be.

7. I do not like Family Guy. I think that it is pretentious. I'm tired of pretending that I care about Stewie and Peter.

8. I like to look at tattoos and piercings on other people. I don't care if I get another tattoo, and figure that I'd regret any of the more interesting piercings I'd consider getting.

9. I like to smoke cigarettes. I know that they are disgusting, and I can't smoke too many in any brief period of time, but I like them every so often. Every so often, I want more than just one or two. Eventually, I stop wanting more than just one or two, out of disgust, but I do like them. I know this isn't socially acceptable, but I'm tired of being judged, and tired of judging myself.
I don't get a lot of joy out of drinking alcohol. If I'm going to hurt my body, I'd rather smoke a cigarette.

10.  I don't know what I want to do for a career. I like my job at the bookstore too much to let the low pay and the little annoyances get me down. What gets me down is how it is a dead-end job, and how I was supposed to have this great "potential." I don't know what I'm supposed to do with my life, and I don't know how to figure it out, and I'm tired of worrying about it and getting nowhere.
I think I'm just not ready to figure it out right now, but so many things around me seem to be changing.

11. I'm dissatisfied with my life, in general, despite my many blessings. I feel like a fraud when I talk to anyone, these days.

I think that's it for now. I think I've gotten some things out of my system, and maybe figured out some of the root causes of all my discontent.
Maybe.

I've been a little off these past few weeks, I think.
I could say that it has to do with the lack of yoga, or perhaps the strangeness of my work schedule, or just the weather.

Maybe it has nothing to do with the fact that I am in a dead-end job, have no boyfriend, no idea of what I want to do with my life, and never get to see half of my friends. Perhaps it has nothing to do with Red and Diana moving to Tennessee and the fact that the core of my own little personal musical world is about to just diverge and explode.

Maybe.

I don't know.

I need some direction. I need some help.
I at least need some sort of sign that things are going to get better.

Instead, I have a list of thirty books to read and an intention to start writing more fiction, eventually.
It's that whole eventually that is the problem.

When would that be?

I should probably be doing that now, but I want to finish the copy of George Saunders' Pastoralia that Sparrow loaned me.
(See? Always an excuse.)

There are so many worse things going on in the world right now, and this is what plagues me right now.
How ridiculous?

Oh, and I'm starting to loathe Harker's very existence, by the way.
He's still pretty great, but to be around him makes my insides twist.

I'm uncomfortable everywhere that I go, and I don't know if there's any way out of that right now.

Alas.

No matter who you are and how much you think she loves you, she will never love you as much as she loves  him.

However she smiles for you, that smile will never be as pure as the smile she smiles even at the thought of another, that one who stole her heart and keeps it where no one else can find it.
(Probably in the flatbed of his pickup, in a cardboard box, among all the other cardboard boxes.)

She will love you; don't you fear.

Yet, you will never be who he is.
(In truth, he will never be she thinks he is.)

(Sigh)

It's not important, I assure you.

This goes back to being safer in dreams than reality.

That, and the fact that Grey did not pick up the phone tonight and has not called back, and insecurity, as irrational as it may seem, creeps in.

And all the issues that could arise if we were to try to be more than friends...they haunt me.

It's safer to dream of another who is just as special to every other human he knows as he is to me.

It's safer when they belong to everyone else, somehow.

In the past few days, my brain has somewhat taken over.
I know that doesn't make sense. I fully understand that most of what will come out onto the screen right now will make very little sense.
I don't care.

It's the writing, the stories. They are taking over.
It's like they are living creatures, waiting to infest all the paper and screen space they can find, and in lieu of those options, will simply take up my brain space.

The other day I wrote a treatment for a story about making ice cubes. It needs a strange twist, I think, and I need to go back and actually put it into full story format, but there it is.
Ice cubes.
(It's nifty, I swear!)

I also wrote one of those lovely and fun 50wordstory pieces about a girl watching a young man busking inside a cemetery gate. I don't know where I think that one will go (because I like it very much and want it to go somewhere), but I think I'll have to play around with it.
Ghost or human...Ghost or human...

The conversation that I just had with myself went a little something like this:

It isn’t too late to get up at 8:30, you know.

I know.

I know that you think that at 8:30 the whole day is already shot and there is no point and that really you should just spend the entire day in bed, reading a book, or watching a movie, or putzing around the house, but that’s not even remotely true.

I know.

8:30 is actually rather early, and if you get up now, you can go get a fruit and yogurt cup at Whole Foods, and a cup of coffee, and do your grocery shopping, on this, this gorgeous sunny day. And then maybe you can go to the mall and look for some new clothes, too. Or come home and play your guitar and prepare for open mic night.

I know. I know.

And you have to go to Whole Foods anyway, because you are out of that yogurt you like, and the hummus, and soymilk. So you cannot eat your cereal here, and unless you want to skip breakfast entirely, or eat peanut butter on toast (which I know you don’t like half as well as you like cereal), you have to just get up!

And to this, I rolled over, grunted, and stumbled off into the bathroom.

Days off are lovely, but they’re hard to motivate myself into.

I read and read and read yesterday, which was lovely.
I finished No One Belongs Here More Than You., and now I can return it to Sparrow next time I see her.
I went to see Sex and the City (which I loved) with Nashville, and we had a good time hanging out and talking, so she and I had Chinese food afterwards. (And I still seem to be the last person in the world who is absolutley never, hungry after Chinese food, even the next morning.)

She had recommended I read Kevin Smith’s My Boring-Ass Life, which I had been intending to read since it came out, so I stopped in at work before going home, and picked it up.

I fully intend to avoid stopping in at work until I have to go in and actually work on Thursday morning.
I stopped in yesterday to meet up with Nashville, but I will not step foot in the bookstore today.

Naturally, I am rambling. I have been awake for fifteen minutes, and all I can do is ramble.

I’ll be off the computer by nine, or so I’ve sworn to myself, because after all, the part of me that wishes to leave is correct: I cannot stay in with all my words today. Cannot.

I feel strange.
Something is slightly off in the Evenscry Universe.

Everything is changing, I guess, and that makes me feel incredibly strange.

I'm starting to come to terms with Red and Diana leaving. I did finally stop crying after about two days of intermittent sobbing.
I think that I finally realized that I was mourning a way of life, rather than a personal loss.
Everything must change.

I don't have anything to focus on now, though.
(As pathetic as this sounds...)
There are no men for me to be interested in, and I don't know what to do with that part of my mind.
I'm used to caring about my lack of romance.
Now I'm just fed up with things as they are, I guess. I don't really know what to do with that.

I've always talked a lot about wanting to just enjoy being single, and I even feigned that enjoyment for a while. I feigned it so well that I even believed myself sometimes.
Now, I think, that I will truly have to figure it out. I have no men to think about, even, and I'm not really in the mood to go through the trouble of dating, or getting attached, or caring in the least.

As I said when I started, I feel incredibly strange.

So, what I do now, I find, is read, and read, and read.
Sparrow loaned me a copy of Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More than You. and I've read a good half of it in the past couple of days, along with about fifty pages of a slow and savory re-read of Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

Red leaves for Tennessee on July 1.
I suspect that every time that I seem him between now and then will result in a long crying fit.
I had a great time seeing him and Mack play last night at the BT, and I had some interesting film-related conversations with him.
I also  heard all about his trip to Nashville last week and how he and Diana signed a lease, and how it is a huge house, and how I am welcome to visit anytime, and should. We talked about how many more gigs he and Mack have before he leaves. I mentioned how I had fleetingly thought about moving to Nashville when I quit school last fall, mostly because I work with a woman who is from there and misses it because she loves it so much. He told me that I should go, definitely. I told him that I was too chicken.

I am too chicken.
That, and most of my family is here in New England, both the blood and adopted.
I mean, Mina and her family are here, and despite a bit of wanderlust and opportunity from her husband's job, I doubt that they will take Grace anywhere anytime soon. Especially if they are trying for a second child.

And I don't see Blondie leaving the area either. She and I are quite alike, and though we like to travel, we are hardly wanderers.

I can't leave these people.

Yet, I am miserable at the thought of Red leaving us all. It will put a huge dent in our musical community, of course, what with his amazing vocals and mandolin skills being absent.  What is worse for me, though, is that  I still see him as my big brother. He and Mack are my family. It started out as a half-joke when I started calling each of them "big brother", but two years after the fact, it's become a truth.

Those drawn out chats that Red and I have during open mic, even just the silly ones, are really a highlight for me. His big sweeping hugs into his huge, freckled arms are something I can't get from over the telephone. He is the person I look to the most for musical advice, and we both understand each other's creative process really well.

(And honestly, who else is going to come up and play on "Wanted Dead or Alive" with me?
No one else ever thought to learn the Richie Sambora guitar solos, and I don't want anyone else to do that again.)

I cried on my way home last night, thought I had gotten it out of my system, and then cried for another thirty minutes before I finally went to sleep. And even just writing this entry is bringing on the tears as well.

It's horrible to say, but it will probably be better once Red actually leaves. Now it's just anticipation of his leaving that gets me down so badly. I've had close friends move away before, and it's always worked out, one way or another.

Red and Diana will be back in October for Mack's wedding, too, and that's hardly any time at all.

Until they leave, though I will try to see Red as often as I can.
I'll just have to stock up on Kleenex and be ready to have some incredibly puffy eyes.

Too tired to make it flow, but here are some fiction ideas I'm trying to lay out:

Not a leading lady sort of girl.
Maybe a twist on the film noir detective---not a "Girl Friday," but the lead woman.
Or, maybe she imagines herself as thus, and is really just Don Quixote in a new era and gender?

I don't know.

It seemed a lot better in my head, less cliche. Now it seems a bit trite, to be honest, but it's all right. Maybe she'll be my next protagonist, and maybe not.

In other news, went to Newport with Mom today. I was a big ol' crankypants for most of the day, definitely deriving from the fact that I stopped taking my vitamins, doing yoga, and drinking enough water about a week ago. I've been super on-edge and uptight and stupid. Just horrible to be around, I'm sure.
(I never thought about getting withdrawal symptoms from vitamins. I never got them from quitting cigarettes, and don't feel it when I've gone a while without caffeine.)

So, I finally replenished the vitamin supply, chugged some water, and ate a bunch of fruit and vegetables.

I'm starting to feel better, but have too much of a headache and a bit of a sunburn to be doing any yoga tonight. I'll have to do at least a little before I go to see Mina tomorrow.

And now, I'm going to crash in front of the TV for a bit, but then, I will sleep.

Sleep, sleep, sleep.

I definitely have been writing too often. I know that this will peter out eventually; I will grow bored with my own ideas and have to take a break. For the moment, the writing has a novelty value that I cannot seem to ignore. Plus, I just have too many thoughts going through my head to ignore them right now.

I have been very on edge and uptight lately, quite possibly due to a change in the weather from frigid dry climate to warm and swampy. Work, of course has been driving me bonkers, but that seems like it will fix itself in time. Yet, everything seems a bit of a struggle these past two weeks, and it's time to take stock and figure out from where all the distemper derives.

I'm going to skip my open mic night tonight.
That's a good place to start.
It's an extra stressor.
Plus, Horatio is far too interested in me.
While I should be pleased to have some male attention that isn't fraternal in nature, Horatio is really not my type whatsoever.
I attract older men like nobody's business, and now that I am 29, older often means...too old.

I don't feel like I've spent enough time being young: too much time in books and in front of computer screens (like now), and no time with any peer group.

Maybe I'm rationalizing, or maybe I'm afraid. Or maybe I just don't feel like dating Horatio.
(We have rather little in common.)

I also don't feel like performing.

I'll go see Red and Mack out in Coventry this Thursday. I want to see Red as often as I can before he moves to Tennessee with his lady fair, but tonight would be a bad scene all around for me. I'm far too worn out from all this psychological struggle.

And then there is the ridiculous over-focus on Harker.
I was thinking about it as I tried to fall asleep last night, and frankly, this is all in my head.
My entire friendship with Harker has been based on gut feelings and intellectual stimulation, all briefly shared between us, and then taken away into the dark recesses of my cracked mind.

It's easier to fall in love with a figment of imagination than a real human being. You can divorce yourself from the situation with far less financial and emotional turmoil than from a real human encounter.

At least that is what I am telling myself.

There. There it is.

I have to start building a wall between myself and my emotions for Harker...perhaps channel them into some other source, like writing. Not this kind of writing, mind, but fiction or songs or something.

So, I think I'll rent a movie tonight, do a little yoga, and have some quiet time alone, away from thoughts of Harker, and away from the strangely boring madness that has become my open mic night.

And now I must fly off to work and serve some people coffee.

I'm trying to write every day.
I wish that I had anything fascinating about which to write tonight, but I don't.

I did see my family today, and while it was great to see my cousins, there isn't much to actually say about them.

Tony and Jess seem well. As the people in my family closest to me in age, I was of course thrilled to see them. I still adore that Tony has grown into this enormous human being in his adulthood. It's amazing to be enfolded into his arms and to know that he most certainly could pick me up off the ground without a problem.

I did notice today that as we young ones grow older (and as the even younger ones grow closer to adulthood) that there is a definite changing of the guard at our family gatherings. Perhaps it has something to do with being so close to Uncle Clarence's death last month, or perhaps it is just as it would naturally become, but I feel like suddenly our generation is gaining some dominance.

No longer do we gather together and skulk outside, or into a corner. No longer does the room get divided by age or gender. Instead, we all sit together, talk about books and movies and politics, as we eat far too many munchies and wait for the Red Sox game to begin.

It was a good time, perhaps one of the best that I've had with my family, in spite of Uncle Clarence's absence.

Of course, now I am incredibly full from overeating and definitely thrown off in my sense of time from falling asleep on the car ride home. I'm unenthusiastic about going into work tomorrow, and unready to deal with unruly customers. I think that I'm even less ready to see Harker, who I believe I saw on the schedule for the holiday. I'm tired of my own yo-yo of emotion, and would just like very much to avoid him for a few days.

Actually, looking at my calendar, I realize I may get my wish.
There is a good chance that I will not seem him for three days in a row, thanks to our varying schedules.

Excellent.

And now, to go read some more of The Maltese Falcon.

I woke this morning abominably early.
I had been dreaming about acquiring cable television, almost with the sole purpose of being able to watch Red Sox games. In the dream, I had gone to a Best Buy or a Circuit City to buy cable television. I suppose that I had purchased a plan and a particular kind of equipment to hook up the cable myself. When I woke up, I was trying to affix some wire to a USB-type port and finding that in the last moments of hook-up, I was failing miserably.

I am certain that if I had continued to sleep, the dream would not have gotten better or more interesting. Inevitably, I would have failed to get the cable tv to work, and I probably would have just ignored the whole situation.

After waking at 6:45, despite having no real reason to be awake until 9:00, I simply could not get back to sleep. My mind was moving at incredible speed for the time of day, and in directions that I did not enjoy.

And that is why I am posting again, less than 8 hours after my last post.
(I am appalled at how little sleep I have gotten on a Friday night/Saturday morning, and further annoyed that I've just brought my own attention to this fact yet again.)

Somehow, I began to go through my disparate and sparse love life, beginning with the fellow I dated in college. Billy, after all, was my first and only long-term boyfriend. I started to think how it might be an interesting place to start a new piece of fiction. After all, it was quite some time ago that we were together, he and I. At the time, I had wanted to write about Billy and his friends, who briefly became my friends, and were infinitely interesting for young men in their early twenties.

Yet, after some consideration, I began to recall how Billy and I actually became a couple. I remembered that we had begun as very close friends, but that I had been attracted to him for quite some time even before our friendship. I recalled how he was reluctant to date me, how something was always holding him back. And lastly, I remembered, vividly, the late night in June, two months after our friendship began to lean towards the romantic, when I told him that he had to admit that I was his girlfriend or stop coming around.

Billy and I were together for a year and-a-half, all told. We were nominally friends for longer, but I eventually learned that after he stopped being my boyfriend, Billy started seeing one of my "friends" behind my back. They were together without my knowledge for over a year, and would have succeeded in hiding it from me further if one of my guy friends hadn't spotted Billy coming out of Violet's dorm room early one morning. Billy hadn't graduated yet, but was no longer enrolled. He was living in Boston at the time, so it all became very clear what was going on.

Yes, I could probably make something from those memories, but I don't think that I want to.

The same can be said for every failed romantic endeavor I've had in the past decade.
They are all variations on a theme, and you know what? On some level, my attraction to Harker somehow falls into the appropriate categories to be filed away with the rest.

This is a depressing way to greet the morning.
I have long suspected that I am doomed to walk this earth alone, but I have never so closely examined the evidence.

I think I could use some coffee.

Oh darkling creature of the night, come walk beside me in the waning moonlight. Pleasure among pleasures is he who I love, who knows me not, by heav'n above. I wallow deeply in my pain, for he can ne'er be mine. Alas, but he belongs to another for all eternity, by blood and rite so bound.
And so I create these flowering vines, linked together by deepest sorrow, passionate pain, the roses' thorns, and the most o'erwrought cliches.

I think that I generally avoid falling in love in order to prevent myself from falling into the trap of both looking and being the fool. When my heart has other plans for me, though, I can't help but fight violently against the strange rising and falling actions within the pit of my belly. All creative visions are of romance and pining and adoration. Yet my heart chooses the most hopeless people for me to love, and I quash each artistic creation in their very cradles.

His name is Harker.
On the surface, he is peculiar at best. When first we met, all I felt was disdain. He wore his hair slicked back, like a greaser. He was wan, sickly looking. And worse yet, he was most certainly a Dork (with a capital "D").

Harker practically sneered each time we crossed paths. I thought that he was serious in his arrogance, that this was who he truly was. It took months to see through the carefully placed chinks in his armor. Those months bred fascination, and I came up with new ways to lure him into conversation. It all started with talk of our respective unique graduate studies and continued into various nerdy passions. (He isn't impressed much with Gaiman, however, and thus has hovered a little lower in my estimations than I would have hoped.)

I rail against the memories I have collected over the past year. I am certain that they indicate some strange and terrible obsession and neurosis. I have built a foundation for a friendship, and now that I have attained even that much, I feel myself shudder with fear and anxiety.

(How could I have spent so much time even bothering with Harker?
What fates even triggered this amount of regard?
How do I let it go?)

So much better if he had never realized my presence, if he had truly been as cruel and pretentious as I had initially believed.
So much better if he had not a particular liking for comics and history, Sherlock Holmes and Gothic literature.
How I long to go back to the day when he likened me to a specific comics character.
If only he had never showed such interest in who I am, who I was, and who I might be.

I might have made it out of this friendship with barely a tug of a heartstring.

My rationality reminds me regularly that indeed, were I to attain the kind of relationship with Harker that I so deeply desire, I would inevitably be disappointed.
While his taste in literature, film, and television are impeccable, his musical tastes border on appalling. Though I share personal inner truths with Harker on a regular basis, though I feel almost as though I could tell him anything, we primarily communicate in sardonic quips.
Yes, even if he were free, he and I might not complement each other as well as my dreamier side longs to believe.

The problem, however, does not lie in pining after the unattainable.
My larger problem is the creative block my feelings for him have placed upon me.
If I could allow myself the freedom to mold him into the character or the quests that would feed my starving fictions, well then this pining would not all be in vain.
Perhaps my feelings could even be properly sublimated.
I could pour all my desire into a separate vessel from our day-to-day interaction, and thus doing, perhaps give our friendship room to grow in its platonic glory.

If only I could do that, I could perhaps give our friendship at least a chance at being long-lasting.
I do not think I could bear losing another friend to the hysteria of my own passions.

I promise, I will find a way.
(And tomorrow's entry will be written in less arcane prose, regardless of what strange reincarnations may die inside my mind!!)