Three days of being grateful

As sent to M&D on Sunday:

1. My new bangles and getting a pedicure tomorrow with my new chanel nail polish.
2. Getting the contents of my closet off my bedroom floor and back into my closet.
3. Making pasta sauce from scratch and having leftovers for tomorrow.
4. 37 degree weather today - no gloves necessary!
5. Not having to get up for work tomorrow.
6. Talking to Lizzie on her birthday and having her sound happy.
7. Getting into my new book - "The Elegance and the Hedgehog"
8. Emailing a list of EIGHT things that make me happy to my parents.

For Monday:

1. Seeing Micah and Nicole et al. Such great people!
2. Going to Whole Foods and buying mostly non-processed foods.
3. Getting my new spice tins up on the fridge.
4. Making beef stew and having it turn out pretty well.
5. Discovering Band of Brothers and having the whole mini-series to look forward to on demand (and hopefully having the willpower to space it out so I have something to look forward to throughout the week).
6. Feeling at rest in the apt.
7. Being able to get internet in my apt again

Today:

1. Dreaming about Brian.
2. Calm tea at the lunch meeting.
3. Ordering Band of Brothers and Blackhawk Down from amazon so I can look forward to reading them when I finish my current book.
(And because I'm trying to be positive, I won't make any comments about how depressing it is that I can only think of three things to be gratful for today because its antithetical to the exercise).
4. I guess I'm grateful that this experience has cemented for me how to spell grateful (not greatful).

Several hours later...

5. Ebene Quartet + two glasses of wine on a nearly empty stomach = relaxation and the perfect buzz.
6. Another episode of Band of Brothers.
7. Talking to Shirley for the perfect amount of time.
8. Seeing 127 on the scale at the end of the day (which means I have hope for a 125 tomorrow morning).

I think my counter is broken. It says that 11900 people have viewed my blog. Unlikely given the total lack of comments. But just in case. Knock, knock. Anyone out there?

So my mom says that I should write the things that I am grateful for so that I can better appreciate what I have. I know she is right. After the success of 2008 as the year of not being a bitch to people I didn't know, I feel I have backslid back to a more negative place. She has decided to focus on the positive this year, so I will give it a try as well. So today, February 12, 2010, I am grateful for the following things:



1. Freshdirect delivering more diet coke and Amy's burritos.

2. Being able to cross Lizzie's presents off my list.

3. The sun shining through my window making it feel warmer than it probably is outside.



Not a super splashy start, but a start none the less.

PS

I'm super not excited to go home to my not so clean apartment. I hope I have good things DVR-ed so I can continue the healthy cycle of going to bed late and not being able to get up for work in the morning.

Welcome to the Realization that You are Everyone Else

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the unhappiest of them all? Why is it that work is making me so unhappy? Is it because I have found other things that do make me happy that I want to spent time doing, that in some ways I feel that I have returned to myself and now work Sarah doesn't fit in any more? The job clearly provides no internal satisfaction and it is sappy any energy that I had to do other things with my time. Its 10:03 and I'm still at the office, too mentally exhausted to talk about why today was so shitty (basically, stupid pro bono case, feeling like I gave bad advice, feeling like people think I'm too insecure about my job, being here at 10:03, not quite knowing what tomorrow is going to bring but knowing that it is going to be another week and a half of 11 pm nights in the office). And I can't turn it off. There are so many responsibilities (as opposed to assignments, now they are my responsibilities, not just things that I have to do for other people) that I can't turn it off at night or I work until I need to sleep, and I fall asleep thinking about what I have to still do and what I will spend the whole next day doing. I have been having this sensation when I fall asleep that I have lost the day - that I don't remember what happened during the day, but that I know that I missed it. Its new and different from the sensation that is just normal "wow, I'm half asleep" and I really do feel like I am losing time. It like that poem that Brian wrote about the phone ringing and waking you up and you are 30. I know that isn't going to happen to me (well, it almost has - I turn 29 this year and feel like I have regressed emotionally and I am no closer to being the adult self that I want to be), because I think and worry about not being that person every minute of every day, which just makes it worse since I worry about being that person and about my job, so I don't have a break. I can't just dissolve into the work, because then, at least I would wake up at 30 or 35 and not have spend that last three to seven years worrying about waking up. Maybe I should write a romance novel. I've got to be a better writer than half the people out there who are publishing and then I would be able to make my own schedule and it would be like pretend working. Probably not, real life doesn't allow you to pretend work, but that's what I really want to do. Have a job that lets me relax and take lots of vacations and read and cook. But its a fantasy that every working person probably entertains and no one really actually gets to live out. So clearly I'm not special at all - I'm not unique in my escape fantasies. Okay, back to reading all these cases so I can go home and maybe go for a run so I stop the mad rush of fat to my stomach, thighs and hips. Jeez, you might as well call me any middle aged woman living in America. Message to Sarah: you are not special, nothing you are experiencing makes you unique. Welcome to normal. Le sigh.

Work

I wish that I had something more interesting to do at work then passively read internet stuff when I want a break.

Thursday

Today is Thursday. The weather started out very nice today, in the mid 60s. I did not wear a coat to work. Despite the nice weather, I took the subway, I was 60 pages away from finishing Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, and, since I planned to finish last night, I wanted to get as much done as possible. Work has been calm lately and not too busy, but I didn't want to take any chances. One never knows when the phone call will come and I will lose my free time. Today, I did not do much work. I ate lunch out, Blue Fin, and went to the gym to see Emilie from 2-3. Then I called Samar to arrange the itinerary for South Africa. By about 5, I had only billed 3.75 hours. I did get another assignment today, but nothing that is going to be time sensitive, so I left around 7:15 and took the subway home -- again, more time for reading. With a slight detour on the subway and the broken elevator, it took almost an hour to get home. At home, I finished Mandela's autobiography.

It was an interesting read. Sorry, that's a bit of an understatement and the dry tone in my head doesn't really translate. Mandela is a good, clear writer, but not creative or inventive. One can see the methodical planning that made him such an effective political leader and innovator, but as the author of a 625 page book, his style is a little stiff. The first half of the book is about his upbringing and path into politics. The problem I was having was that there was no way to tell from his formative years how or why he stood apart. Indeed, I would say that as a literary figure, he does not become a leader until after he has been imprisoned for several years, past when he was considered a leader by members of his organization and constituency. Almost as if he needed to be a leader in the eyes of others before he considered himself to be one or truly acted as one. Maybe it is the reality that one cannot lead until after there are people who will follow that lead. I am interested in how he became such a leader in the eyes of the people. What is it about someone that turns them from an ordinary person to a freedom fighter or revolutionary to a true leader, born up by the masses. To compare him to a politician in America is an interesting enterprise, since he did not have any of the modern American political machinery to announce his name and his politics. In addition, he was imprisoned for so long, yet again, from literary interpretation, his stature only seemed to grow. It was in prison that he distinguished himself from the other revolutionary leaders who were his compatriots.

I was also comparing the regime of South Africa to those in South America. The ANC and other groups in South Africa had certain advantages which made their form of protest -- the slow-downs, the rallies -- successful and possible, and ironically, the advantages stemmed from the control exercised by the colonial rulers and the legacy of British Imperialism. Mandela could, at times, invoke certain rules of law, and demand that the protesters were treated fairly under the laws. Whatever the laws at the time were (except the very last years where it seems the government learned that if they wanted to get serious about suppressing the people, they could not be hampered by the rule of law), the government would obey them. In contrast, in the South American dictatorships, headed not by imperial forces, there was no rule of law. People simply disappeared. The revolutionaries could not appeal to the court system for justice because the government did not have laws that even nominally protected dissenting voices. Those governments were brutal and paid no lip service to protecting the rights of those who disagreed with them. One thing Mandela said over and over again was the oppressing party dictated the terms of the struggle. Those who were challenging the government's policies had to respond in the manner in which they were treated. In India, the government allowed protest and dissent, which in turn meant that Ghandi could demonstrate by walking though the country and preaching nonviolence as a means of rejecting colonial rule. Similarly, MLK Jr. could practice the same non-violence because in America, his right to protest freely was recognized, if not always accepted. In contrast, in South America, a protester could not more begin to speak against the government before being shot, imprisoned or tortured, with no chance of appealing to a higher power for protection. Maybe that is why there were more rebels in countries trying to overturn the dictatorships than there were revolutionaries in the Western understanding of the term. Of course, I am showing my ignorance in not remembering which countries had dictatorships where people were disappeared.

At the end of the book, when the power was really going to shift and Mandela, in his 80s, was elected president, I actually became more agitated. At what price was his freedom, and what would the people who fought so hard, who died, paying the ultimate price, think? Those who died, would they think their sacrifices worth while, especially because in the end it was through peaceful negotiation and compromise. With the transition away from apartheid being so moderate and their sacrifice being so extreme. Maybe it was the disconnect that struck me so forcefully. Their deaths were unnecessary, clearly, but the fact that their deaths did not lead to unilateral victory that I guess makes it hard for me to reconcile. Or maybe the fact that Mandela himself never talks about being tortured or injured in the struggle. Throughout he remains the great statesmen who is untouched by the violence. Those who were tortured, hanged, beaten, or shot, by contrast seem like a corollary, unrelated to the final pressures that forced the government's position to the negotiation table. I know that this was not the message that I was supposed to receive, and that Mandela, if he read this, would strenuously disagree with what I took away.

A long lead up to my personal experience with death and probably what caused my internal struggle at the end of the book. Brian's death for me was very personal. He was mine. He didn't belong to a group, not in the sense of membership, but in the sense of ownership. Mandela spends parts of the book discussing how a freedom fighter cannot also really be a family man. He has chosen as his family the people that he represents. Mandela struggles with this, wondering if his choices were based on selfishness in that he put the struggle to end apartheid above the needs of his family to have a father and a more stable life. Brian never made that kind of decision and would never make that decision. He was a person of the world, but the natural world rather than the civilized world. He was not motivated by politics or interpersonal interactions, but with interactions between man and the natural world. Unlike many of the enlightenment philosophers, Brian would not agree that politics was necessary for the development of humankind or that civilization was a necessary engine for personal development. The connection that his teacher made at his funeral with Emerson was very appropriate. Maybe she grasped instinctively what I have been struggling to say for the past ten minutes. Democratic government, going back to the ancient Greeks is based on the principle that not only must the government be based on popular opinion, but that such a form of government is vital to the growth and development of the human spirit. We are not humans unless we are participating in decisions that create the structure under which we exist. I think Brain, if pushed, would ultimately think that civilization, instead of revealing our true identities, stifled our natural creativity. That it made us lie to ourselves and to others about what we really wanted and about what made us happy. In fact, that as long as we ascribed to the rules of society, we could not be happy. Discourse, instead of leading to enlightenment, caused confusion and distortion of what was really important. All this made him all the more mine (and Amy's and Susan's and Jim's).

All this is to say is that the public nature of the deaths of those who fought apartheid in South Africa brought home how personal Brian's death was for me, and how now, over two years later, I still am struggling to find some peace with it. Did Mandela have this same struggle. He lost two of his children, one close after his birth, the other to a car accident when he was in his 20s. Did those deaths completely change his world view? Neither were connected to the apartheid regime, did the fact that death could happen randomly shape his personal philosophy? I have always fought the idea when people ask me if I am okay, if I have my closure, if I am over it. But in a sense, I know I need something. Or maybe I just want something, an ability to say, okay, Brian is dead, but I have made my peace with it. I want to be able to have a normal relationship without constantly thinking of him. I am obsessed with his approval. Would he be proud of me, would Brain think this is a valuable use of my time. What would he think to know that I spend my evening reading a book and then writing on a blog that no one read? Some evenings he didn't mind doing things like this. A lot of our evenings were very quite -- we often bored ourselves. But in death, I let the idea of him judge all of my actions. Brian would be taking advantage of living in this city. Brian wouldn't be doing a job that he didn't love; Brian wouldn't wait to decorate his apartment and would keep it clean. Would Brian, in his death, think that I was making the most of the fact that I had been given life? On these matters, I want to both break Brian's hold of me and to please him. Fundamentally, I think we differed on our world views. For all that he was an extrovert, he both defined himself and was defined by nature -- an individual in the broadest sense of the world, formed by his interactions with himself and his own soul, for lack of a better description. When I try to think of a way to explain this, all I can think of is Brian, on the top of a mountain, valleys, forests, and rolling hills to one side, shrouded in fog, and maybe on the other cliffs and the ocean -- much like the hike we took in the week after we died in Carmel -- with his hands thrown up over his head, taking in the vastness of sky. He defined himself in relation to the indefiniteness of nature, mountains, sky, the ocean. Human existence, in relation to all of this would just be a blink, destroyed as quickly as it was created. For all that I am an introvert, I am a creature of society and am formed my interactions with others, my history is not the billion year old creation of Earth, but the much shorter history of man and his struggle to find a way to life with other men, to communicate and to form structures within which interactions are possible. To see those interactions become more and more complicated, to see man become more complicated in turn.

I started this post so I could explore my recent feelings about Brain, but it didn't turn out that way. Probably because I don't have the words to describe the changes he and his death have caused in me and what I am feeling right now, other than confused and uncomfortable; recognizing that it has been too long for me to still be at such a stage of emotional and personal turmoil, that is not "healthy" -- ahh, that word I hate -- and that I don't seem to be "progressing" or "healing" but instead seem to be irrevocably caught in this net of uncertainly and insecurity and bad alliteration. Anyway, I have been at this an hour and a half. Its probably time to stop.

to you, totally unrestrained

Here we are, writing as the words move like worms across the page, coming in and out ans thicker and thinner. the altered world of the drug that makes me so sad right now. sad because my vision is blurred because my head isn't stable. the ambien mixes with the sad period mess and produc-es a new world like out of a rahl dalh book, something where threes are people and can dance and come together in their own way to create a great children's program where the kids are taught that the wordd is interesting and worth of living for.

so alex started this all because we were trying to remember who katherine was. she had been in ny and i had dinner with her and chris, her boyfriend who broke his neck and the same part that Brian died. in his many surgeries, his esophagus was ruptured and now he has an intravenous feeding tube. after dinner, i went to a party at alex's and i was trying to remind alex who she was, because when everyone came to ca for the funeral, she had been one and she had stayed with alex's parents and cooked dinner one night. and alex said that was that other girl that kept saying that her and brian were in love. alex was like yeah right, you have only been seeing each other for a month. i had forgotten about her, Rebecca., when telling the story that my boyfriend was killed. but he wasn't really mine. he wouldn't have considered himself mine. and i have drams where i force him to choose between the two. a few night ago he choose me. he just wanted to see me. its like we were at UVa, but really it was like a summer camp (all safe places where i was at peace) and he said what we had was real, and that what he had after wasn't real and didn't count at all. i wish i believed that these were Brian coming down and telling me the truth, what his preferences would have been. i had been so mad at time, for making me feel the way i feel about him, knowing how i feel about him, then treating me and my feelings in a caviler attitude. then he comes and give me this great dream. but what does it mean, and does it cancel out the other dreams i have where he chooses to not be with me so he can do other things. i am so mad at myself for allowing this jerk of a boy to control so many of my emotions. I loved him. I never loved anyone before, and the way this is going, i will never love anyone afterward. i want to feel that spark and for the other person to feel the spark and for us to make it work without the drama and games of modern dating in New York. but i don't know if i can, because right now, i can't see beyond this drama that a two-year-dead boy is wreaking on my life. you left me behind, confused, insecure. if you didn't love me, who will.

this is what the inside of my head feels like. an evil tumble house, exaggerations and creatures and textures all collected. none of it makes any sense. i don't think i can have a normal relationship again because first, so much of its bullshit, second, i don't like who i am, how can someone like me while i am looking at them, certain that they can do better. for this i am so mad at you brian -- why didn't you love me? why couldn't you have left me with that. i remember spooning in bed, i never used to have problems sleeping when you were in the room. when i could just be me relaxed before i got to be too lazy. you like me then, when i was willing to go along and try anything. but with you i didn't really try anything, its almost like neither of use wanted me to. you wanted to have your own things, and i was content because it was enough for me that you were doing it. I want that dream to be you choosing me or at least choosing to love me. Two nights ago you came back from the dead for me and it was just what i wanted, why didn't that help? why did it just make me look at my life and wonder. why do i go home when i could be going out exploring NYC. when we were here together, all we did was sleep in and wander the shopping districts. i think we saw the met, we ate cheap food, went to the mediocre play. we wasted that vacation too, unless you count the great sex on the couch that came after the deep conversation. i got a little carried away and you stopped to make sure i was okay. what did you really think of me? you made me so happy for so long, and then you made me feel like i was holding you back because i wasn't as adventurous as you were and because i loved you more than you loved me so you were choosing between me and doing cool things that you though you had to do at your age. so we broke up. you quoted ben folds "there once was an old man who lived to his 90s, then one day passed away in his sleep" then you said "see you soon" and we were broken up so we could figure things out and get back together. maybe. or maybe just continue to drift apart. i continued to hate law school, but that first summer we were apart wasn't so bad, the work was interesting, it was a quite summer, not many of my friends were in Nashville, but the work was good and the summer class, such as it was, was fun. then you came back and got the stuff you had been storing at my place. and we had sex, because i couldn't help it, you were so tanned and your shoulders were so broad from the summer of surfing and kayaking. i made you sleep on the couch, the bed wasn't an option. but i got up early and wanted to be able to see you and be close to you, so i got my books and started reading on the chair. you saw me when you woke up and opened up your arms as said: "cuddle?" and i almost started crying right then. it was so comfortable being back in your arms, i couldn't stop touching you and i though you were having the same problem. i guess i kissed your chest and off we went. afterwards you ruined it by saying you had to stop giving me your sperm. of all the jerky things to say. then you said it was my fault because i started kissing your chest. i didn't want to get back together, but it was so nice to fall into each other again, and i was sad and hurt that you would put it like that. then you went back to uva, and had the time of your life as far as i can tell. talking to you that semester, it didn't feel like you. you broke your arm and i offered to come help you unpack. i think you were grateful at the time and i was so worried about cramping your style, but i couldn't tell what you wanted from me. i slept on the floor, drove you around, helped you buy and decorate your apartment, but i was never good enough. when i did you laundry, i lost one of your shirts and you later found it discolored in the heap. i couldn't cut the matting boards straight for the photos. i went out to get you medicine late at night when you had an allergenic reaction, and i kept trying to remind myself it wasn't about me, it was about you, but you didn't seem to appreciate me, you gave me a hard time when i couldn't carry the boxes by myself. i know you were in pain and were frustrated that you couldn't do what you wanted to do and were bummed that you would have a steal rod in your arm for life. but i was so sad the final night. i had cleared my schedule for a full week if you needed me to stay, and hinted as much to you. but either i was being too subtle or you wanted me to go. and that hurt, i was crying the last night but didn't want you to know. when i got back to nashville, you had sent me that cute card as a thanks. and then a few weeks later you asked if lizzie was going to come back from italy looking as hot as she did when she got back from france and didn't understand why i was upset. why couldn't you just admit that it was insensitive, instead of apologizing because it had upset me. i decided that you weren't worth it any more, that i didn't need you in my life. and for three weeks, i didn't talk to you. apparently at this time, you were busy being the big man on campus, getting lots of ladies and attention, drinking, something you refused to do with me unless it was a bottle of wine with dinner. i am glad that you got to do all the stuff that you couldn't do when you were with me, i just wish we could have done some of that together or that i didn't feel like i was holding you back so much. i had an inculing that you were finding your place at the time, but after you died, when i looked back at pictures, and really saw you coming out of your shell, it hurt so much more to know that you were greater, bigger, better than i was, and that i would always be playing catch up. i started to wonder if you really loved me or just told yourself that you did. if, by the time of your death, you had come to the same conclusion that you came to with Suzanne, that you didn't really love me, you just thought you did. And then you left me that message on new years eve. and i knew you were thinking of me then. i was still not talking to you because i was done. but hearing your voice, hey ... its me ... im in san francisco. you didn't know what to say but you wanted to be in connection with me. like when i would get mad at you, i would wouldn't be ready to move on, but still i had to be in the same room as you. then my love for you just all came flooding back and i started wondering, seriously for the first time, if we could give it another go. but of course, by then it was probably too late. We talked a week later and i had to tell you i still loved you. but the way i did it was totally face saving, i said this is not to put any pressure on you, i just want you to know that i still love you. i wish i listened better to what you said next. it was something like of course you do. we were together for a long time, that doesn't just go away. then i said when will it. but i don't remember what you said. what i was too scared to say was that i don't want it to. i like loving you. then we went on to talk about other things. how happy you were in your place right now, how scared you were for change. i said that for some college is just a passage way, so the things that they do and the friends that they make are transient. but i told you that you were not like that, you would continue to make the same kinds of friends and the same lifestyle choices so that there won't be a huge disconnect between who you are now and who you will be after college. then you told me about rebecca, but i didn't know her name then. you said that there was something and you didn't know where it was going. i tried to joke it off and show you that i was okay with it by saying, so you hooked up with someone and now you don't know what to do about it. I think you let my definition stand, not because it was right or wrong, but because though you though i should know, you didn't really want to talk to me about it, especially if you really liked her. I heard you made secret valentines day plans. they better have been original from the ones you used on me! i am sorry i didn't celebrate occasions as much as you did. and then you died. and here i am over two years later. unhappy with my choices in life. lost, cast adrift. i don't have a purpose or direction or a hope that i can find one. i want to go back to san diego, when we thought we could do anything and that we would be happy and satisfied in that. i want to go back to when i would get stressed because i cared and you could always calm me down. How can i do that? i have a mortgage. i can't just leave the firm, and if i did, what would i do? so maybe you could come to me again tonight. i could use some cheering up.

10 Minutes

So I gave myself ten minutes to write before I am sending myself to bed. Well, 8 now. Midnight. I will go to bed by midnight. The problem is I lost the second ambein that Caroline gave me and I am scared that I am not going to be able to sleep. After a whole weekend of sleep, and after the second anniversary passed, I thought I would be over this. I thought I would be able to go to bed. But here I am, in the same undecorated apartment, no furniture, but lots of dust bunnies, so not feeling at home, and at the same job that I am absolutely petrified that I don't like. I keep vacillating between two poles, on the one hand I want to be happy, have a home, find fulfillment in what I do. But on the other hand, I am an "adult" now, with a HUGE mortgage and a job that lets me not worry about how much money I am spending. And I still manage to spend just to the limit of what I have. The thing is, I don't think that moving to a smaller city, getting a bigger, more homey place will make any difference. If I have a job that doesn't require as much time, what would I spend the extra time doing? Reading trash novels, watching cable that I won't be able to afford because I spent all of my less than half of what it is now salary on crap food that makes me fat while ignoring my gym membership that I paid too much for because I wanted to be a member of the tony gym instead of the basic stripped down one that would have been better for my budget and better as a dust catcher in my wallet. But sometimes I think that if I could just get out of the city, and have a place where I could be closer to nature, I could be at peace. I have a great time in Charlottesville, being in a car again, seeing nature, feeling like there is space. But most of me is convinced that it is just the grass is always greener syndrome. So I dismiss it, and call the dream of me in a house on a river a fantasy disconnected from the realities of my personality. I mean, I lived in a smaller town with its bad food and lack of options on the weekend. I sat around and hated my life as much then as I do now. I am jealous of people who know what makes them happy. I don't know what makes me happy. I know what makes me happy for short periods of time; being with my friends, doing new things, being alone; exercising -- but only when I am actually exercising or right after I finish, reading trashing books when I am stealing 30 minutes away from something else. But anytime I do any of those things for a long period of time, I start to resent them for keeping me away from the other things that I like to do. Sometimes, I even resent them from keeping me away from the order of office (or school) life. Apparently, balance is the name of the game, but I don't know how to do it. That multi-tasking thing again. I can only do one thing at a time. Okay, that was 13 minutes. 12:03. Going to bed and sleeping. I did a lot of crying tonight, maybe it will make me exhausted enough and relaxed enough to fall asleep. 12:04. Night.

Oh just go to bed

Its late and I am exhausted. I think I could close my eyes and be asleep. And yet I am fighting the need to sleep. I really want to be able to get caught up on my sleep and the one thing about being a working stiff is that I can't sleep past 10 am anymore. They (the magical they who make pronouncements about sleep) say its good to go to bed and get up at the same time every day. Well, my body has the whole getting up at the same time thing down, now if only I could manage the going to bed at the same time thing.

Also, I would really like to have an entry where I am in a good mood. But much like my early journals, I only write when there are things weighing on my mind. Most people who know me would have a hard time recognizing the person they know in this blog. Is it that I am a careful guardian of my public image and this blog is a representation of the real me or is it that this blog creates in me the desire to be dark and mysterious.

Attention Whore

Goodness my posts are depressing. Or at least that is what I would assume by reading their titles. Such a blatant attempt to sound psychologically compelling and mysterious. As if to say, "read this blog, the author is interesting and different, you will be fascinated by what she has to say." Such an obvious cry for attention. The blog is about something so insanely private, yet from the titles of my blogs I desperately want someone to read it and ... what ... find it better than fiction. Kinda pathetic, no?

Friday Night Lights

Its been a long time since my last blog. I don't know if that means that I have dealt with the final issues surrounding his death. The 1st is the second anniversary. I don't know how I feel about it, and I guess I don't really want to talk about it now, tonight is one of the good nights, none of the hopeless sadness that has been dogging me in the recent evenings. Probably because of the 8 hours of sleep that I got last night. I like sleep, but for the past month, I haven't wanted to go to bed. I usually have good dreams so its not like I was afraid to go to sleep, so I wonder if its because I have no reason to wake up on the morning. Now that sounds depressing. I don't feel that bad most of the time, only at night and only sometimes when I am really lonely and alone.

So now I am half watching Law and Order, its really lame, even if you have no legal training, this episode is about murder, but not really. They turned the whole trial into a battle over reality TV, which doesn't sense. The situation is murder, but, as is typical in L&O, they have turned it into a jury nullification issue, the defendant's attorney is arguing that if you like reality TV, you should let the producer who might or might not have staged the scene innocent. But of course, she will be found guilty, they are all found guilty, but there is always a twist in the last dialogue where it is shown that thought McCoy won the battle, he might have lost the war. Is this show really an intelligent commentary or an an accurate depiction of our cultural debates or dilemmas?

It appears that everyone is into blogging these days. I have jumped on a very large bandwagon. What is it that drives us to share our intimate feels and emotions with any potential stranger? Some, like me, do it anonymously, others don't care who recognizes their work. Why do we want to share with everyone information that before the blog we would not share with our closest friends. I think for some, it represents a desire to validate those emotions that are being expressed. If I put out my feelings, someone might read them, recognize them self, or just be impressed by my turn or phrase or insight, and tell others. Soon everyone will be reading my blog. My blog (not me, since I have hidden my identity) will become famous, and my thoughts and opinions, which usually just rattle in my own head, will be validated and carry weight. When it comes down to it, I guess we all just want to feel important. We feel that the only reason we are not now recognized as special is because we do not yet have any exposure or any way to be exposed. The blog is the answer to this. The chance to be recognized for whatever it is people think that they should be recognized for.

It might just be that I am the only one who blogs for the aforementioned reasons and want to make my actions seem less particular by extending my reasoning to others. I am not narcissistic if other do the same thing. Maybe people are just exhibitionists. I don't think I am, and exhibitionist, that is, but maybe people just think that what they do and think are interesting and see no why that opinion wouldn't be shared by a wider audience. I heard about this web site where all people do is list their possessions. Maybe we feel that what happens to us (events, feelings, possessions) doesn't have meaning unless we share it with others. Which in a certain way is a very primitive concept, needing someone to share your life with, a way to verify that you indeed do exist. In the movie, "Shall We Dance," the American remake of the Japanese film, which was otherwise forgettable, the Susan Sarandon character said something like the reason we love, or the reason we marry is so that there is someone to bear witness to our lives (here is the actual quote: "We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'.") Of course, I saw the movie on the day after I found out that he was dead, so I was in a very interesting mood. I remember most of the movie (or as much as I would if I had seen the movie in a normal frame of mind), and watched it in a relatively detached frame of mind. I remember hearing that line. I knew that I could cry, but I wasn't alone, and for some reason hearing the news that the man I loved died the day before was not enough to prevent my embarrassment or allow me to relax enough to cry in front of the two people I actually trusted enough to tell.

please let me dream of you tonight

I should be doing one of three or four things right now: working on my paper, running, sleeping, or trying to find a place to live in new york this summer. i am in my running clothes, but its probably too late to go running, 11:30pm is pushing it, even for me. my paper is open on the computer, and i am on the seventh page, but the law review article i need can't be found on lexis, i have to wait until tomorrow to get the hard copy from the law library. no one returns my emails on criag's list and its probably still too soon to start booking appointments for the end of the week. i am too wide awake to sleep.

actually, i don't know why i did all that build up, i really want to talk about the dream i had last night about Brian -- its had me on pins and nettles all day. i haven't been able to get anything done, which stresses me out and keeps my focus on it. okay, so here is what happened, to the best of my memory. brian didn't die, but he was gone for about 8 months. i knew he didn't die, i had known it for a long time. we were in charlottesville and some how there was kayaking involved, but kayaking along something that seemed like a really long water slide (much like a similar dream i had about brian, where i was on a really long water slide -- we are talking at least a 45 minute ride here -- but there were too many people on it and they were slowing it down, and i really wanted to get down the slide because i knew brian was waiting for me at the bottom. i think in that dream, i finally got down the slide and to brian, but i am not sure). but anyway, brain was alive, and in the dream, i had learned at an earlier point that he was alive but lost for several months. we were in charlottesville and together, but only kind of. he was giving me all kinds of mixed signals, sometimes holding my hand, sometimes telling me about the girl he was seeing before he went away. not rebecca, but some other girl, an heiress of some kind, who was now in a bad situation. i wanted to hold him but at the same time tell him he could go to her if he felt he owed her an explanation. which seemed to be his reason for telling me about her. he didn't seem to want to be with her, but he felt he had left her and something bad had happened to her, so he felt bad. but he was also very happy go lucky and really wanted to do everything and spend time with everyone. sometimes he would make me feel like i was cramping his style, other times he would grab my hand and hold on, or grab me in a hug so he could relieve his emotions. i didn't want to let him out of my sight, and my actions toward him were almost maternal. not in an oedipal way, but i wanted to make sure that he was taken care of. i was trying to figure out what he wanted, did he want to be with me or did he want to be free of me so he could enjoy being alive and take advantage of the freedom of being alive. right at the end of the dream, right before i woke up, and when i knew i was coming out of the dream, i said something to the effect that if you want to be free of me, you are going to have to be explicit about it. to which he replied, okay, thats what i am doing now. then he walked away. it was very important that i not cry at this point, which i didn't, but i walked away and went back to my kayak and got back on the rapid/water slide and continued down.

so i am freaking out because brian rejected me in my dream. i can't just shrug it off as a dream because i think (1) my dreams help me clarify what i am thinking and (2) since brian died, my dreams are the only interactions i still get with them, and i rely on my dreams to be able to spend time with him and suspend the reality that he is gone forever. plus, in my dreams, he is so real, his personality is just as i remembered, and the dream brian always acts consistent with the real brian, so even if it is my subconscious just making up what i need, it does a damn good job of reflecting his personality in a way that brain can't do when i am awake and trying to pull up a clear picture in my head. when i am awake, i can bring up the movie of his past actions, but i can't take brian out of that context and have him act independently. i rely on my dreams to take brian out of the restrictions of my memories and to give him an independence and reality that allows me to forget that he is dead.

i know i have been lucky to have some amazing dreams with him, where we could just be together or hang out, when it felt that he was telling me something. like that amazing dream this past summer when i was in new york where it was as if he realized that i wasn't ready to say goodbye, so in my dream i was given 24 hours to spend with him. all we did was hang out and do normal things, like go to the doctor and sleep. whenever i started crying because he was dead, he would stop me and say, don't cry, we are together right now, lets make the most of it. if that dream had a message, it was I love you. This was real. You will always carry with you these feelings of peace from when we are together. it also gave me a chance to say goodbye.

Him sending me a message seems to be the theme of most of my dreams with him. Like the ones that i had right after he died, when he was there, shirtless, and god knows why he was shirtless, but it would have been totally typical of brian to walk around shirtless as if it were the most normal thing in the world. i was so exicted in my dream because he was alive and i thought he was going to be okay. but he said, no sarah, the doctor's told me i am going to die. its my pulmonary artery. to which i responded, but you are alive now, maybe that means that you are going to be okay. no sarah, he kept repeating, very gently, i am going to die. but i couldn't give up on my hope that because he was alive, he was going to stay that way. the message of that dream was clearly: brian is dead. you have to realize the reality of the situation.

what, then, is the message of this dream? that i can't romanticize what we had. well, no shit. i know everything wasn't sunshine lollipops and rainbows. i don't need a dream to remind me of that. i know he could be thoughtlessly inconsiderate of my feelings, but i also know i doubted and continue to doubt his feelings for me. and now, if i could ask him one more question, it would be what he felt towards me. if this dream gave me the chance to ask that one last questions, then the answer was clear: brian, i really love you and want to be with you, do you want to be with me? no, and i am really sorry, but i want to live and i can't do that and be with you. i probably do love you, but i want to be free because you smother me. the answer that i feared the most. maybe it is just my subconscious giving voice to my deepest fear. but if that is the case, why did it have to do it so convincingly? Why did i have to hear brian, dead, and therefore in a final form that can't be changed as he experiences more, tell me that i had to stop trying to keep him all to myself, as i was in the dream, and why did he have to tell me that he wasn't mine anymore? if i can't even have him in my dreams, then i have nothing of him left.

maybe its my subconscious telling me that i am using brian in my dreams as a crutch and i have to stop. but i don't want to. i don't want to go thru the rest never feeling again the way i felt when i was with him. why can't i have that in my dreams, i sure as hell don't have those feelings in reality. why can't i have my dreams, i have enough reality to deal with when i am awake. i wonder if someone will read this and think that i have an unhealthy attachment to brian, one that predated his death. i wonder if they think i am a needy person and it is better that we broke up and that if they were him, they would want their freedom too. to those people, i don't know what i would say. i guess i would try to convince them that i am not as needy and clingy as i sound but that i always worried that i was and analyzed my actions within that context. if i was afraid that brian was in a relationship with me that he didn't really want, i worried that by staying in the relationship with him i was becoming too dependent on him. but we did love each other. i don't know if i can explain the feelings of peace i felt when i was with him, the contentment. i might already have said this, but i used to always fall asleep on his bed when we were studying at night. i would get so relaxed that i would fall asleep. from someone who is a habitual insomniac, that is quite a feat. so maybe i craved that feeling of contentment. even when we were broken up, i knew i could call him, anticipating hearing his voice, the voice that i know he reserved for me, he always answered the phone the same when he knew i was calling, it was always, "hey" or "hey you" drawing out the word, as if there was nothing else that he would rather be doing than answering my call. I still need that. the knowing that i was loved, the knowing that we were happy.

none of this makes any sense. there is definitely no thesis or topic sentence, and it is probably completely lacking in clarity. maybe the point is that i need to believe that he loved me and my dream last night robbed me of that security, which, now that brian i dead and i can't call him up and hear him answer the phone or get a hug in which i feel enveloped and surrounded by his love, is all i have. the dreams of him are all i have left to keep reminding me that he loved me, and now that too was taken away. god baby. do you see what you have done to me. i need you, i need you with me in some way. im not ready to say goodbye. please. please stay with me. i can't survive without you.

very emotional

The weather in nashville is just about perfect right now. yesterday, i went to my morning class and then my afternoon class, then came home perfectly relaxed. well, for the most part. satisfied with my life is probably a better way to put it. the weather is certainly part of that, so is the fact the the apt is clean and has to stay that way. so, i guess, is the fact that there are not any immediate deadlines (although there is a paper due next friday and my last law school final the wednesday after that). but there was a definite feeling of satisfaction. one that i haven't felt since leaving san diego, or maybe since i left ucsd. thinking of brian, i wonder if this is a goodbye. a it brought up feelings of nostalgia, the remembrance of how happy we were together. i was also reading some emails that his dad forwarded to me. emails brian had sent to his dad. i guess i know he loved me, but he didn't always show it in a way that i understood, so reading what he wrote to his dad, even though i have read it numerous times before, or reading the last email he sent to me, about hiking and outdoors, maybe i felt like the self that i was when those emails were sent for the first time since he died. and clearly that will make me sad, makes me cry, because i can go back to being the person he loved, the person who was happy and secure and confident and hopeful. a person who could be loved by someone like brian, the person who is going to lead a happy and satisfied life. thats all i want really. in the deepest place that i never talk about, the one that brian recognized and that scared him, i really have very little personal ambition apart from my desire to be satisfied. i want things because of what i think they will bring me -- money will let me create the home that i want in a location that i want and will let me provide for the family i want to create. brian knew that i would chuck everything i am working for if we could find the right situation, and i think it scared him. because his happiness was tied to what he did and he loved what he did, he didn't really understand that my happiness could be tied to us and building a life for us. he didn't like the pressure, he didn't want the responsibility for my happiness.

since yesterday the picture of him has been fuzzy in my head. the emotional aftermath of his death is still with me, but he isn't clear. sometimes that is okay, because in some way to me he was feelings. he was the person who made me feel comfortable and at peace. his presence, as much as the facial expressions and the activities we did together.

i have such a hard time believing that death is forever, that this will never end, that he will never be back. i keep expecting it to be over at some point. everything has a natural ending, so when will he be done being dead and come back in some way. you know when you have your favorite book and the characters become your friends, and you can pick it up and read it whenever you want to live in the world of the characters with the characters? i want to have something like that with brian, i want there to be something i can pick up and read or watch, some way to relive my experience and re-experience those feelings, to live in the world where we were young and in love and know i can escape to that world whenever i want. i guess its my fault. i kept all the 'meaningful' emails where we were discussing our 'feelings' and all our love letters, but not the normal ones. i guess we didn't email all that much, i wish i had the phone messages we left for each other, because they would have defined our relationship, the normal every day 'what-are-you-doing-i'm-thinking-of-you-i-want-to-be-with-you' stuff. when each of us were the true essence of ourselves.

this is the last email he sent me. very normal, so maybe that's why i like it:

Yes, don't take a trip with outward bound, do one with NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School). Outward bound has a reputation of being more for personal growth and less focused on the outdoor technical experience. So lots of kids that need "help" are forced to go on the outward bound trips. Sarah tyler said she had some suicidal girls on hers! I have heard nothing but great things about NOLS however. Check into that. I'm jealous, I want to go.-Beej

and here are the things he said about me to his dad:


Well, I'm engaged. That's probably the biggest bit of news worth sharing. Okay, that's a lie, but I thought I would get your attention first. Did I get you?

So I'm not engaged, but I did visit Sarah this weekend in Nashville. Lots of driving, but well worth it. Within moments of seeing her again, our relationship just slipped back into the comfort that it has always been. Those moments make it feel like the relationship isn't long-distance, simply "relationship on temporary hold until we are together." So needless, it was great to spend time with her this weekend.

Anyway. I guess this is a departure from my usual post. i am sick of being cynical and jaded. i just want to exist and experience things. i am tired of living in the intellectual realm where you have to be aware that you are being judged on what you say and do. i just want to act and react without an analytical buffer. maybe i am just sick of feeling like i am being judged and sick of myself for caring. its like that stupid savage garden song "the animal song" -- "When superstars and cannonballs are running through your head A television freak show cops and robbers everywhere Subway makes me nervous, people pushing me too far I've got to break away So take my hand now 'Cause I want to live like animals Careless and free like animals I want to live I want to run through the jungle The wind in my hair and the sand at my feet".

i guess i remember back to san diego and that is what i remember, i didn't need anyone else, i didn't care what they said, i had brian and he made me feel free. now i feel like i am dependent on other people which makes me vulnerable to what they think of me.

my mental health day

its been a long time, i don't know if that means that i am doing well or not. i am in the doll drums right now. but i guess that gave me the freedom to take a 'mental health day'. thanks to caroline for the idea for it. i actually told the nazi attendance professor that i was taking one and her response was positive. i was pretty surprised. but so here i am at home, playing hooky 4 minutes before fed courts is supposed to start. it should be a good feeling, right? i mean, the reason i took today was so i could be left alone and regroup before having to get things done. of course, there are things that i have to do today, the dumpster diving assignment and the clinic meeting. maybe by the time those things roll around i will have had enough of the being lazy and will want to go into supercharge mode. i am interested in this phenomenon. since brian died (and yes folks, the secret, if you ever had any doubt, is out of the bag. i was going to build up to it, make you understand who brian was so you would be properly tied up in the story, but in reality, i will probably never get the whole story up here and i don't think i will write often enough to allow this to be anything else but an occasional rant) i have had dual urges. the first is one that i have seen and heard documented before by people who lose loved ones - the desire to sit and do nothing for long periods of time. i heard of a mother her lost her son (i might be projecting about the son part, it was a mother for sure though) who stayed in the house for three years and did nothing. after the three years, she came out and began to retake her life. there was also a story that my mom heard on npr about a woman who lived in alaska. maybe i can find it and cut and paste, just a sec.

Okay, here is what they say about her: Mary Cook works on the ground crew for an air taxi company in Gustavus, Alaska, a community of 450 surrounded by Glacier Bay National Park. She also handles the mail, tends the town's only coffee house and serves as a hospice volunteer.

This is what she has to say:

Morning
Edition, January 30,
2006 · The day my fiancé fell to his death, it started
to snow, just like any November day, just like the bottom hadn't fallen out

(so that is what i get for trying to run the spell check -- the loss of probably 45 min of typing. oh well, too much to re-create, the world just might be able to continue functioning without my lost insights, but it will be close. i will re-add the npr piece and then maybe try to summarize the key points).

Morning Edition, January 30, 2006 · The day my fiancé fell to his death, it started to snow, just like any November day, just like the bottom hadn't fallen out of my world when he freefell off the roof. His body, when I found it, was lightly covered with snow. It snowed almost every day for the next four months, while I sat on the couch and watched it pile up.
One morning, I shuffled downstairs and was startled to see a snowplow clearing my driveway and the bent back of a woman shoveling my walk. I dropped to my knees, crawled through the living room, and back upstairs so those good Samaritans would not see me. I was mortified. My first thought was, how would I ever repay them? I didn't have the strength to brush my hair let alone shovel someone's walk.
Before Jon's death, I took pride in the fact that I rarely asked for help or favors. I defined myself by my competence and independence. So who was I if I was no longer capable and busy? How could I respect myself if all I did was sit on the couch everyday and watch the snow fall?
Learning how to receive the love and support that came my way wasn't easy. Friends cooked for me and I cried because I couldn't even help them set the table. "I'm not usually this lazy," I wailed. Finally, my friend Kathy sat down with me and said, "Mary, cooking for you is not a chore. I love you and I want to do it. It makes me feel good to be able to do something for you."
Over and over, I heard similar sentiments from the people who supported me during those dark days. One very wise man told me, "You are not doing nothing. Being fully open to your grief may be the hardest work you will ever do."
I am not the person I once was, but in many ways I have changed for the better. The fabric of my life is now woven with gratitude and humility. I have been surprised to learn that there is incredible freedom that comes from facing one's worst fear and walking away whole. I believe there is strength in surrender.

Then i talked about how I hated programmingming because i might as well be dead when i watch it for all that it doesn't add to my life, but that i watch anyway and feel like i am wasting my life. so there was dichotomyomoy between wanting to do nothing and heal and hating myself when i am not taking advantage of being alive. then i talked about how i needed to feel like i was in control of my life and i needed to do that by actually making decisions and following through instead of allowing myself to fall into things. about how i didn't want to follow the path of least resistance and allow my life to be dictated by things that happened to me and what i was able to do with them (not like brian's death, because i know i can't control that, but my job, my activities, generally the way my life will unfold). will i spend my life dealing with the circumstances that are dealt to me (e.g. i was involved with ASUCSD because Jenn talked me into it, not necessarily because i had any interests in my college's student government -- not that i didn't enjoy that experience, the beinvolvedvled, having my finger on the pulse of the school, enjoying camaraderieerie of the people and knowing that i was learning valuable skills, but i didn't choose it, it chosenosen for me) or will i decide what it is that will make me happy and pursue it?

it was all very deep and philosophical -- what is it that we humans are supposed to do when we are on this earth? what are we supposed to have accomplished by the end of our lives? how are we supposed to life? when i get to the end of my life and look back am i going to be happy? am i going to worry that i spent too much time doing things that were not value adding (too much tv, too much shopping, too much time spent on my couch in gross clothes watching life pass me by?) okay. anyway. i think i am going to go now. maybe i will try to spell check this again, but making sure i save it first. i think i am also going to give you the lyrics of a dixie chicks song that kinda makes this point. although my interests are different, so i don't necessarily want to do the same things as the person in this song, but it is about a person who has died and is looking back on his life wishing he could make certain changes. i guess its what i really don't want to do.

eh, the lyrics don't really stand on their own without the music going with it. so NO LYRICS FOR YOU

Part of Day 2

So the second day of knowing brian, we went up to the mountain. he was very excited and right when we got there, he, who already had everything he needed, headed up a ski lift. armin and i had to rent all of our gear with most of the other kids on the trip. after we got our stuff, i think we saw brian briefly at the bottom of the mountain, he had taken a few runs already and was probably more excited for us to be going up the mountain than we were for ourselves. We left him soon after that and headed for the bunny slopes. armin was on a snowboard and i was on skis. armin was just learning to snowboard and couldn't yet connect his turns, so he spent the whole day on his heels, back facing up and he slipped and slidded down the mountain. i was alright on ski. i knew how to do the side stop thing and could get up some okay speed. sometime around midmorning, we ran into brian again.

its strange, i have told this story so many times. especially that first week of february 2005, i felt like i told this story so many times that it became one dimensional, like i was reciting the plot of a tv show. and it almost sounds like it could be the such a plot. brian loved that kind of thing, the story afterward, especially if it were a cool story. and i think he would love how this one sounded, especially since it reveals each of our personalities as if it were a parable. It also has the benefit of having a lesson and a punchline. it was so damn self-contained that i couldn't help re-telling it over and over, even when it lost its originality and spunk and any organic meaning. i could feel myself telling the story in the same way, over and over, pausing in the same parts, saying brian's lines in a brian voice that did not resemble his voice at all, saying my lines in a voice similarly distant from a tone i would ever take. anyway, here is what happened. the moment that i could look back on, almost exactly three years after it happened, and say, yep, it was that moment, that moment when he fully caught my interest, when i knew him impact on my life would be huge.

So, armin and i ran into brian at the bottom of a run, where the bunny slope and a harder run emptied out. Brian asked us if we were having a good time, and we said yes. he then asked me if i had fallen a lot. his expression was the joking one he wore often, as if he wasn't really asking a serious question. but he was always serious about the question. they were never retorical or time or space fillers. i responded, probably haughtily, that i never fell. my tone was intended to convay to him that i was a good athlete, i picked sports up quickly, i was probably a natural on skies, and if he had seen me, he would probably know that. his response, however, was typical brian. he refused to be intimiated and responded in the same jovial tone, that i must not have been pushing myself hard enough. this, of course, stopped me short, because, like i said, i was supposed to be a natural. no one had ever questioned my athletic talents before.

so here is the punchline, because really, i have told this story so much and tried to infuse so much meaning into it that it really has lost all meaning for me, was that brian talked me into going down a green, the next level up from the bunny slope. he ended up taking me down a black diamond, a fact that he didn't tell me until i got to the bottom, and the he said, "congratulations, you just did your first black diamond." neadless to say, we spend the rest of the day on the slopes together. poor armin said he felt like a third wheel. by the end of the day, brian had me going off jumps. not that i got crazy, mind you, i didn't get that much air, i am not by nature a risk taker, but i had to impress this kid and show him that i could keep up.

i still wasn't sure what i wanted to do about him. and really, i know this is crucial to the story, but i just don't have the energy to tell it right now. so you (whoever you are, if you are indeed anyone) will just have to wait to hear how our day came to an end. i suppose i am tired, and have a bit of a headache. the same one i have had for a week and a half. i also just finished a little bit of a cry. i sent andrew an email, and he always does the auto response thing. this time it included a link of some plays that he had written. so i thought i would check a few out. he writes very well, but for some reason i was devistated that brian wasn't in any of the plays and that none were about him. he had evan, ryan and alex as characters. and it made me so sad to see that their names could all be together without brian. i have always wanted there to be a whole in that group, his whole, the whole that brian's absence left. but i never saw one. they all just re-coalesced. i don't know why i need them to be as messed up as i am about it all. and maybe they are, i didn't know them very well before (and still don't know them well) but it drives me crazy that it doesn't seem that their foundation has been destroyed. even more than me, i thought that their lives should have been torn apart. maybe because they are boys. maybe because they are younger than i. maybe because you have a different relationship with your friends than you do with intimate partners (intimate partern, eh, well, its a better discriptive phrase than lovers, or whatever other gender neutral phrase can be used to describe boyfriends and girlfriends, which is also sounds like a very juvenile term). maybe they just don't show me their feelings (except alex, sometimes). whatever it is, i feel like we should have a bond because we shared this together, and i would consider them family, if only they would let me. they were brian's brothers, and he was my family, so by extension, they should be my family now.

okay, now im really going to stop, and send my good night into the black hole. good night, sweet.

Ambien haze between the 12th and 13th

So i've just taken the second half of my ambien, the first second half that i have ever taken. apparently i am well on my way to drug addiction. actually, i did, for the first time ever, understand the desire to take a lot of pills. not because i wanted to commit suicide, but to see what would happen, to be taken to the hospital where maybe someone could figure out what is wrong with me. I know that there are chemical changes going on inside me -- the erratic weight gain and loss, the pimples that i missed in high school have re-asserted themselves with a vengence, the strange sleeping habits. I want someone to tell me what is wrong with me and what i have to do to fix it. i don't think its that easy, though. I know what's wrong with me, kinda. i mean, my whole world has been turned inside out. my mental world, that is. the way i believed that the world was structured has been changed. irrevocably. unless you have personal experience, you don't know what its like to be going on, as you had been every day before, and then get a call, that causes your world to tilt on its axix. and the funny thing, at least for me, is that the impact is delayed. i knew my world was going to change, but right after susan called, i think i went into instant shock and stayed there for months. in fact, i think i am still coming out of that shock, and its like alice, coming out of the rabbit hole and seeing this new world. only its not the nice 'shroom filed haze where the flowers talk and the evil queen is the worst you have to deal with. my sense of self is completly changed, my perception of my world, from the smallest things like the mountains that were always to the north of my parents house to the biggest where i am wondering if i am loveable or if i will ever be loved in a meanful way ever again, or if i ever was.
Knowing that there are no answers, knowing that the intellect which got me through life until feb. 2, 2005, wouldn't work anymore. i just read this quote: "the grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for." and well, i just about strike out. i don't really have something to do, well not something that inspires me or provides meaning such that i can say, i do something. law school. going to new york. i want to be excited, i want that to inspire me and fill me with hope of the oppertunities and possibilities. but all i can think of is what am i doing. i can't find a home in a city that rents 400sq. ft. apts for $2000. all i think i want is to move back to california, and what? what would i do? the idea always stops there, maybe because i was to go back to the california and the sarah who used to live in california. where it was the place that represented infinite possibilities and i was the person who could do anything, who was happy and secure where she was, so happy and secure that she was willing to leave the security to strike out and try something new. well that was a shit idea. i wonder if i hadn't left california, would brian have? and if he hadn't left california.... well, who knows.
wow, 20 minutes after taking a whole ambien, and nothing. maybe i just don't want to go to bed. i don't want to sleep, i don't know why not. brian something comes to my dreams. although my dream two nights ago totally sucked. i had been worrying about rebecca and brain. something i thought i had layed to rest. i thought i was finally at the who cares what it was stage and able to focus on who he was to me. but i was thinking about her and him on my run, and wondering if he did really love me. or if, it was her, and i was just a part of his past, like suzanna. Had he already put me in a box and moved on. if he had been hurt, would he have asked to see me. would he have wanted me there if i had come? so anyway, i had this dream, probably a reflection of all of that, two nights ago. We were hanging out with Caroline, and brian and i were talking about getting back together, but there were other things going on, like he wanted to be doing different things or didn't want to spend time with me. So i actually got up the courrage to ask if he wanted to be in this relationship, to ask him if he liked me. He responded by asking me why i was confusing the two things -- what was going on between the two of us, and the other external things. he asked why i assumed they were connected. so i guess i never got an answer to my question. if, as some do, beleive that this was a message, then i guess brian was telling me that i let other stuff get in the way of what we had when i was insecure. that what i took as problems were always my need to unify every emotion and apply it to our relationship. which i probably did. but, the irony, is that he never answered my question. so i still don't know what he really thougth of me. or maybe, the failure to asnwer implies that he is not really there, and the only help my unconscious can give is to point my search inward, to force me to ask if the insecurity comes from me. I still don't have an answer to the question of what brian felt about me. the last time i told him i loved him was in a phone conversation about three weeks before. and i had this huge ephinay around new years. brian had really pissed me off, and then refused to apoligize for being a jerk, so i decided to cut it off, i mean, i didn't need to continue to talking to him, right. so i didn't talk to him for about two weeks, the longest we had gone at that point. so he called me at midnight. and i didn't hear the call, which i think is good, because i would have wanted to talk to him. so his message was, "Hey. Its Brian. Im in San Fransicso." And that was all, but it was his tone, holding the "e" in hey, and the slight uncomfortable, i really didn't think what i wanted to say before called tone. and all the love i had for him just came pouring back. i loved this guy. and i didn't know what i wanted to do with it. i didn't think i wanted to get back gother, all the problems that existed before hadn't changed, but i loved him. what was i supposed to do with that. so we conneced by phone a few day later, i was in san luis obispo visiting emily and he was in carmel, getting ready to go back to virginia. I was with Emily in Solvang, feeling guilty, because i should be focused on my friend, but i just wanted to talk to brian on the phone. he finally suggested i come up and see him. I countered by inviting him down to see us. his response was classic, "well, i've got, ah, stuff to do." jerk. actually, he did, he was leaving in a few days and had to pack, but really, could the guy have ever stuck his neck out for me? Ever done something that would have made his life harder to make mine better? Okay, totally a gross overgeneralization, but its what i felt at the time. if he wasn't willing to come down and see me, i couldn't see why i should spend an additional 4 hours in the car to spend maybe a half hour with him. but i really wanted to. i was so tempted to, especially after meeting some guys and seeing how scuzzy they could really be. I wonder what would have happened if i had made the trip up. probably nothing, we would have had coffee, talked, he would have given me a hug and i would have gone my separate way. but part of me wonders if we might have given it another chance. I think i was sufficiently aware of how much i loved him and also sufficiently aware of how GREAT he looked in comparison to the other guys i had been meeting lately, that i might have been sufficienlty vulnerable to allow myself to fall back into a something with him. But i didn't so i will never know what would have happened. instead, about a week later, i was back in nashville, and he was back in charlottesville, i was having a great phone conversation with him. he was telling me that he was scared because his life was just about how he wanted it right now, and he was afraid that when he graduated, everything was going to change. I laughted at him, knowing that the reason life was as he liked it was because he had surrounded himself with like-minded people who saw the world the same as he did. Who would always be ready for a new expereince, a new outlook on life, those type of people would follow him as he traveled to new zeland or the phillipeanes, and would staff the labs when he went to grad school. I told him that he would make choices that would allow him to be surrounded by the same type of people he had found in Virginia. Also in the conversation, i told him that i still loved him. it was the first time that i told him since we broke up, and i premised it by saying that it was just something that i wanted to say, and something i wanted him to know, but that there were no strings attached and it didn't requrie him to do anything. i will always wish i had listened to his response better. i was so concerned about what i was saying that i didn't pay enough attention to his response. i think it was something like, of course we still love each other, six months isn't that long of a time. if that was indeed what he said, was he implying that i there would be a period in time where i wouldn't love him, and that he still loved me, but didn't plan to maintain those feelings. did he think that love was temporary, that when feelings exist despite the destruction of the relationship, that those feelings go eventaully to the wind. Of course, he could have said something completly different, but i am pretty sure that he somehow said he still loved me. Which i guess, in the great scheme of things only matters when i am feeling insecure. i guess the most important thing is that he knew i loved him, despite not telling him for six months, in the end, he knew.

After Fed Courts and Before Methods of Information Gathering

The great thing about a blog is that i get to go into as much detail as i want, and it feels like there is something listenting. As much as i loved my therapist (and i did, he was wonderful, there is no better feeling than getting to talk about yourself for an hour a week without worrying about having to listen to another's feelings or worry that you are dominating the conversation, especially when that people not only listens to you talk about whatever you want but validates your feelings and tells you "of course its normal to feel that way"), you couldn't to into the level of detail that each subject could bring up in your mind. For example, i was thinking today that i might like to include the list of songs that brian put on the first valantines day cd that he made for me. then i would would want to include what what of his friends wrote about his taste in music. That would be way too much information, and no one (not even Ari) would care what songs brian put on a cd for me. as i caved to the need to give voice the thoughts in my head, i would notice that the person on whom i choose to bestow this honor was not interested or was uncomfortable, so i would stop telling them, or tell them anyway but feel bad and weak for giving into my emtions. then the telling would not have the cathartic effect that i needed it to and i would have freaked out yet another friend, and would worry that i had freaded out another friend, and vow to keep the emotional disaster that is my inner reality to myself from that point forward, which would make me feel alone and out of control. So even if no one reads the post, which might never be created since it would require me to actually figure out the names of all the songs on that cd, i feel like i am telling someone all the details that i desperately need to share without actually boring someone to death with the resitation and causing myself untold emotional stress. yeah for blogs.

Sometime between February 7th and 8th

There is something comforting about being able to post my thoughts and send them out into the universe of the internet. Much more comforting than sharing them with friends who try to care or try to say the right thing. Its also better than announcing them to the AIM universe, because then people assume that you are depressed all the time. Which i very well might be. Who knows. Its easier to keep happy things to yourself, to hug them in and not need to announce them to the world. But for some reason, it is harder when the news is sad. You want to share the saddness, as if by discussing it, it will dissipate. But of course it doesn't, because you are always worrying about how people are reacting and how they are judging you. The blog is the perfect solution to the problem since no will will probably read this but me but i can be content to know that my thoughts are flying out into the cosmos and are not simply cooped up inside me, churning and festering.

I guess i will have to start telling the saga of Brian. Of what has happened to me over the past year and why my world has spun out of control. Its a long story and this past year has made me incapable of linear thought, so dear reader, I ask your patience as this story will probably take several days to tell.

I met Brian in late January of my junior year in college. 2002, to be exact. I was 20, he had recently turned 19. A baby, if you will, one who looked like the freshman he was. it was a ski trip organized by my college, and a friend had talked me into going the wednesday before the trip. $50 for lift tickets, ski rentals, meals and a place to stay. I didn't ski well, I had only been a few times previously, my childhood and adolescence was spent playing soccer and there wasn't much time for extra activities, plus my dad had a bad knee. I remember that i had just taken my second yoga class and went straight to meet the group after, i also remember idly wondering if there would be a guy for me on the trip. when i arrived in the erc rec room and scanned the assembed group, which was much smaller than i had thought, with only about 10 people, my first thought was, no, no one for me on this trip. of course, brian was in the room, but he looked so young that it never crossed my mind that he could be for me. i had to go to the atm, and so did brian, so we walked there together. i remember talking about all the activities i was involved with, magnanamously offering him any assistance if he felt inclined to get invovled. he later told me that he was moderately intimidated by the big woman on campus image. of course, he didn't know at the time that the image was deliberate on my part. not an intentional mask, but an aspect of my personality that i put to the front when i was meeting new people. we left on a friday night (i don't remember the time, but i remember that it was dark when we boarded the school van and headed toward the local mountains). at first, brian was sitting by me in the back of the van, and we were talking about random things, i was again playing the part of the cool, collected, more experienced upper classman, making statements which were designed for him to realize my superiority. what i remember sticking out was a look he gave me, a "are you for real" look. usually, people were impressed by my image and the pedigre that i could bring to bear. but brian questioned it, both in look and in statment. i remember being surprised by it, at the feeling that he was seeing through the image. i don't know if cognitive dissonance affects my memory of that moment, but i remember stumbling over what i was saying, a little self doubt added to my personna. We stopped for dinner at a wendy's or a jack in the box, i don't remember much of that. I was on the trip with a friend, and we were both friends with Darlene, my college student activities coordinator, so we felt superior to the mostly freshman that made up the trip. after stopping for dinner, armin, my friend suggested that we sit up front, so we could gossip with darlene about our friends and the drama that surrounded our lives. I would occasionally hear what was going on in the back of the van, they were playing seven degrees of kevin bacon, and other car games, brian, of course instigating them, making friends. i didn't know that this was typical of his personality yet. that he would talk to and engage anyone around him, even the nerdy female asians who i would have been nice to, but would have assumed that i had nothing in common with and therefore never fully engaged. i don't remember if i was jealous of the games that they were playing, i think i was surprised that they (meaning that freshman who i had met so briefly, because at that time, i was having trouble keeping his name straight, a problem i would have for the first two weeks i knew him, i would be pretty sure that it was brian, but then i would second guess myself, maybe it was something else that started with a b, brad, ben, something like that) would appear to be so content doing something i considered beneath myself, but they seemed to be having fun. i have aways been suprised when people find contentment doing what i would consider to be beneath them (actually i go back and forth, knowing that i sometimes fall into full geek mode and fall into geeky activities as a refuge or safe haven). When we got to the cabin it was something out of a horror novel, with one big room with several beds. i think that we were actually short of beds when we got there and had to go steal beds from other rooms. but the one big room had the scary pictures of jesus on the wall, the ones that are done in heavy oils when he is very obviously suffering. the clerk had probably previously worked at the bates motel and had an erie resemblance to the pictures of jesus on the wall. after we got all settled (i remember lots of snacks, junk food, candy, and all kinds of other things, but no alcohol, because it was a school trip after all) we got into a game of taboo. now, let me just tell you, i suck at most board games. for the most part, i lack the sufficient interest to pay sufficient attention to get all the details. brian was very good at board games. probably something to do with the fact that he is brillant in a problem solving way. he used to be able to predict the answers that professors were going to ask on tests and then study for all his tests by preparing answers for those questions and learning the answers. he was probably the most efficient studier that i knew. a good trait for him since i liked a lot of his time and he had so many other things that he liked to do. but, his intelligence was also manifested in his ability to play board games, cranium was one of his favorites, and he was always looking for an oppertunity and people who were interested in playing. when we were playing taboo that first night i met him, he managed to figure out ginko baloba from clues that included; "it grows on a tree" and maybe "it helps with memory". i didn't know what ginko baloba was at that point, so i was very impressed that he could guess the words based on the few general clues that he was given. needless to say, his team destroyed mind that night at taboo. after that, we all went to sleep, my bed was on the far wall, pushed into a corner, my head on the same wall as was jesus's.

I think i am going to pause the story for now. morning classes and all tomorrow. But that was my first memory of brian. but at that time, he was really just some freshman who i had spoken to for a few minutes on the van ride. the next morning, when i reluctantly opened my eyes when there was no way i could pretent to be asleep anymore as everyone else was out and moving around, the first thing that i saw was brian, naked but for his boxers, strolling around the room. this also did little to endear him to me, as his physique was that of a young active person who clearly wasn't a gym rat. don't get me wrong, there was no flab, but i was a snob, and he wasn't very cut. i later learned that cut is different than defined, which he was, and that he had trouble keeping weight on when he wasn't around his mother's cooking. bastard. but with his naturally skinny build and his lack of desire to work on his body (he would rather be outside, being active, which kept him in VERY good shape, but the results of which were not obvious to the superior eye, which i very clearly possessed at the time). so there was brian, strolling around in his boxers, saying that he had been up since about 6 (i think it was about 8:30 0r 9 when i finally dragged myself out of bed that morning) so excited about getting up to the slopes, and talking about a walk that he took to watch the sunrise. you know, its funny, if i wasn't there to attest to the authentic nature of his statement, i don't think i would believe that such a person existed, who did things like this spontanously and without seeming like he was putting on a persona. In fact, it was only as i was writting this that i realized how, kooky is the wrong word, but you get the idea, that some 19 year old woke up and took a walk to see the sunrise, all because he couldn't wait to get a start on the day.