Part One

I just got back from San Diego about two hours ago. On the way back up I got caught up with a sudden stoppage of traffic. Thinking that I was in for the long haul I slouched back in my seat and started to daydream a little about how nice it would be to be home already when suddenly this huge black pick-up in front of me swerves out of the way. Next thing I see is a smaller pickup fishtailing wildly out of control on the other side of the road. It had a trailer with a bunch of construction equipment in it, which was, at one point perpendicular, and another point side to side with the truck, the truck began to rear around to face the opposite direction it had been going, but I turned my attention back to the driving to see another pickup on the other side of the road, this one fully stopped, with a man halfway out the window, arm outraised in the air, not paying attention to what was going on right in front of him with the runaway truck and yelling, just yelling, I don't know what he was yelling with the window rolled up I couldn't hear, but he was yelling at someone on the other side of the road. I turned to see, as I'm slowly vearing out of the way of the out of control truck, to see a cop standing by his car with the lights already on. At first I wondered how he got there so fast but then I saw that there was a dusty old black pontiac wrapped around a telephone pole a few yards away and a long haired kid with the look of someone who had just caught the break of a lifetime standing by. I would have given anything to have that moment in my life caught on film.

Other than that my trip was mostly uneventful. My sister and I clash really bad, I have noticed. I think I understand a little bit better now why, but it still is hard for us to get along with one another. We seem to get along alright with all sorts of other people but never each other. She is so much like my dad sometimes its unreal. Well, my dad isn't like that as much anymore, but she is. What I mean is my dad was the type of guy who would get really pissed off at me for small mistakes and infractions and then when I really screwed up have no idea how to handle it and mostly just ignore it after telling me he didn't approve. Its hard to deal with someone like that, thats just how my sister is. I got berated many times for being somewhat clumsy in her small apartment with shit everywhere (I was there to help her move in, everything was everywhere the whole time) but then I screwed up something on her computer, something that was fixable and didn't cause any real damage, but pretty damn annoying to her and she just kind of shut down and couldn't even deal with me. Maybe its just a symptom of not being able to express herself that well, I think thats how my dad was, but he's been getting theropy for a while now and its really helped him to deal with me a lot more productively. My sister can't do that yet, but she is started school monday to become a Psychologist and will have to get a lot of theropy herself and so she should be able to deal with me in a few years. I realize I am not the easiest person to get along with sometimes, but I like to think that I am fairly transparent in my feelings towards people. If I don't like you you probably know it and if I do like you you probably know it and if I'm mad or happy or whatever you can tell. I don't verbalize it that well, but I try to make it clear, and I think I do a decent job at it for the most part, so one should at least be able to deal with me based on such critera as listed above. Maybe I'm not that great at getting these feelings across, but I do really try to make sure that I am getting these ideas across. I just try not to let shit build up and explode out of me. I think I used to do that, I also used to let a lot more crap get to me which I've been able to avoid for a little while now by simply dealing only with what is happening at the moment and never remembering the bad times. There have been times when JJ and I have gone at it a bit, nothing approaching violence or anything but just yelled at each other for a few minutes and then kind of got through the moment and in the end we came to some sort of agreement or we stopped caring about whatever it was we were arguing about. Later sometimes JJ will apologize or want to talk to me about the argument and what it meant or whatever, not in a bad way, thats just how he does things which works well for him, I think, but by the time he'll bring it up not only will I not be angry anymore I will have sometimes completely forgotten we even argued. That was a long way of illustrating how I have moved more into the moment of emotions and trying not to let them build up. That is something I don't think most people in my family can do, which is why I think I have so much trouble getting along with my sister and why I used to have trouble dealing with my dad. My mom is kind of bad about it but she seems to be forward moving more often than not, just more passionate in the heat of the moment about things. She can let things go sometimes, and not other times. So thats probably why I can only get along with her part of the time.

Sometimes I'll stop when I'm writing one of these long entries that deals a lot with my family because I think that it is rude to air personal business in a place that anyone could perhaps come across it, but then I figure, hell, my family is a big part of my life, I have a right to talk about it wherever the hell I want to talk about my life. So, that being said, I have a hard time getting along with anyone in my family. I told Mike tonight that I thought "That's it, no more family stuff for me!" when I was leaving my sisters and he asked "What? Like quitting or like you've put in all your time and you're all caught up?" And I said, "Both. Like I just paid off my credit card and now I'm cutting it up and throwing it away." Maybe not a perfect analysis, but I'm having a hell of a time dealing with my family anymore, and I'd like to be able to get along with them, but I think I need to be away from them for a while. We're all changing a lot in now, and in the last year or so, and there is just too much going on with them and I have no idea where I stand anymore and I've come to the conclusion that, at current, I am fucking incapable of dealing with these ideas with the people they pertain to so I am just going to go off to my own little world for a while and just try to figure out where I actually stand and bulk myself up, so to speak, so I am ready to deal with them when the time comes. Sometimes I want to join an order of Buddist and live in isolation and meditate and just fucking focus myself. I don't count myself Buddist or zen or anything, I just like the idea of nice, quiet, personal reflection. Every once in a while I will jump out of my head and try to picture how other people see me and I will see something that isn't quite what I was going for, but I don't know if I'm disappointed or not. It's a little weird, I just don't know where I stand. (by the way, this is not a cry for help to a religious person, this is just an honest interpretation of myself, if I want to get religious all of a sudden I will make it clear. I bring this up because I have said such statements in the pressence of religious people in the past (I don't think anyone here, but some people I used to work with jump to mind) and they instantly tried to convert me, and I said I didn't want to be converted and they said "i think you do." but I didn't/don't)

I'm not quite done with this diatribe, but I probably won't get back to it tonight so we can just call this part one.

All Is Well In Hell

Last night I had been asleep for maybe half an hour when, for some reason, my body must of thought something was going wrong. According to this episode of House I saw, sometimes when your falling asleep your body misinterprets the slowing down of all those fun vital organs and what not as your body dying, so it sends something, like a bolt of energy or something, I don't know, maybe its like adrenaline or something, but anyway, it send this crap to wake the body up to keep it from slipping under. It's a nice little feature of our bodies, I guess, keeps us surviving longer if something really is wrong. But yeah, nothing was wrong last night, and yet I was jolted out of bed a little while after I had dozed off with such a huge fucking shock. My whole body shook when I woke. My heart was beating like I had just run a fucking marathon. It literally hurt my chest it shocked my so fucking hard. I woke up and I could feel my pulse without putting fingers to it, my whole body was beating to rhytem of my speeding heart. It was scary to wake up with that much of a push, also because right when I woke I heard footsteps in the gravel right outside my window. Anyway, it was a really fucking intense situation. My body was so thouroughly awoke by this that I couldn't get back to sleep for almost two hours. I just lay there waiting for my body to get tired again. finally I got some milk and slowly drifted back to sleep again. I always have weird sleeping problems. Sleeping problems suck.

I mentioned to Paul last night that he should read John Nichols "The Milagro Beanfield War." I think most people would like it, it's a pretty sweet book. It's about this dusty little town that's being held down by this huge corporation, and this tiny little symbolic Beanfield gets planted, and it starts this whole book in motion. The book has been held to heart by revolutionaries the world over. I'm not saying that you need to read it in order to 'take the power' back or anything like that, but it is rare for a book to have such strong political power, so I think its just one of those things that people should read because of its importance to others. Also, its really fucking entertaining.

We went to the drive-in last night, saw a double feature. It's cool going to drive ins because there so different from other movie going experiance, but at the same time it really sucked because the second movie (which was Clerks II) was blurry the entire way through and the radio station that you needed to turn into to hear the movie was getting interferrance, so we had to listen to this spread out speakers all around the place and it made a lot of weird echos. The shitty part was that the first movie (Pulse) was clear and the radio worked. Also, Pulse sucked, which I think we all knew it would. It got a few good wise cracks in though, and a lot of bad wise cracks in, so it worked out in the end.

Now I am off to work on homework or take a nap, whichever comes first.

Swing from the shoulder of your soul

I finally saw Ong-Bak last night, something I've been meaning to watch for a long time. It was good, that guy was really liked throwing elbows. I also saw The Big Lebowskie all the way through for the first time. I've seen most of the movie before, but never all at once, so that was also plesant. I don't really have a whole lot to blog about right now, I'm just trying to kickstart my brain because I have a lot of homework I havn't gotten around too this weekend and it is time to do that shit. I woke up this morning after having a dream that WWIII had started in Iraq and that this model chick I have a bunch of pictures of on my computer was the mascot for it and I got jealous because I wanted to keep her all to myself. Even though I knew she wasn't ever mine, but still. Its weird to get jealous of shit in your dreams, especially when its something that you have no right to be jealous about. When I woke up I had a Common Rider song going through my head and that is what I listen to know. They are really, really good. I heard them first on one of those punk compilation albums that I used to buy from hot topic. You should check them out if you havn't heard them before.
I was working on a short story and I got right up to the end and realized that I had no idea what the fuck I was thinking when I started that story. There's a whole page of the story devoted to one of the characters talking about zombies and I was reading it over and thinking "why the fuck did I put this in this story?" I wrote something insane recently, I called it experimental literature. I sort of thought it worked, but I guess it didn't, at least according to my professor. He sort of went on this weird tirade in class before he handed back the story. He kept bringing up other peoples stories and talking about them, then he'd look over at me and without mentioning me by name would say something like "And then there are those of you that I still think have talent and I'm not giving up on, even though they copped out for this assignment." No one in there probably knew he was talking about me except for him and me. I've had that professor before, he's read my stories before, worked on them with me, thats how I know he was talking about me. but whatever, i wasn't that upset, a little embarresed, but not too bad. Whenever I freewrite shit it always gets super insane, its really weird, even to me, but I just let the freewriting go and I end up with something kind of funny but that I can't really turn into anything else. I tried to turn one of those into something else, something better, and I ended up with something decidedly bad. Oh well, I'm not going to get better unless I try new things.
Whenever classes are in session I always think that, this time, I'm going to meet a nice girl in one of those classes and we are going to hit it off and maybe I'll get even more than one date out of the deal. But then everytime I end up not meeting someone, or screwing it up, or not asking out the girl, or at least the right girl. Or I'll spend time working on one of them only to realize that they are wearing a wedding ring. This time in classes I havn't even bothered, I've pretty much given up all hope of actually being able to forge an actual human connection with a girl anymore. I used to try, really I did, but I'm just so crapy at getting to know people and keeping in touch with them. I don't really think that I am designed for relationships anymore. maybe i never was. sometimes I'll think about how it would be really easy for me if I wanted to become a monk or a priest or someone that had to swear off inter-gendered relations. I mean, I'm so bad at starting those relationships up that if I said "i can't do that because of god or buddah or batman or whoever" it'd kind of be good for me in a way. its like, no longer am i bad at it I just can't do it. which plays to my weakness, turning it to a strength. of course, don't misread this, i'm not planning on doing anything like that. i just think that giving up on the concept of relationships would be the easiest part of any transfer to a life like that.
speaking of monks, when we watched Ong-Bak last night I made the comment that the monks that learn all the martial arts are the best (coolest) types of monks. but then I got to thinking that I like the ones that brew a lot of beer too. Its really a toss up between those two groups which is the coolest. because even the ones that learn to fight aren't really supposed to fight anyway, so its not like they're all running around like in the movies fighting and looking cool. the beer making ones would be the group I would have to go to if I were to go to a group, mostly because I don't think I could make it as a kick-ass monk, but I could definatly make it as a beer drinking monk.
I guess I should get started on my homework now. Only two more weeks of school, which sounds cool but it means that I have a lot of shit to do before that time is up. I have four books to read, one big paper to write, one presentation, and a couple of tests to think about, not to mention that I have reading responses due back tommorow for one class. Summer classes go by crazy fast.