Monday morning, late, stressed, but not really caring

Finally I got something to keep me happy and something to keep me busy. Yet I seem to have slipped into a vacations sort of blargh before it really being vacations. You know what? I shouldn’t be writing, I should be leaving my house.

 

Friday night, slipping into vice.

I slip into strange vices when I don’t have my primary source of stash available to me. I am a bit crazy, I suppose, and nights like this, cigarette in one hand, wine glass in another, make me realize I need a way to escape this torment of simply existing. I don’t understand how others can just be. I guess they can’t, they find other ways of escaping.

 

Thursday before the morning light, laying on my bed, sad

Reinvention is almost a sick thing to think about. Today my Historia de Pensamiento teacher talked about something that, I now notice, hit close to home. He said that modernity was all about out with the old, in with the new, so humanity moved to destroy what was outdated, and built over it. But in post modernity, up to today, we fear getting rid of the old. We not only refuse to destroy it, we choose to resurface that which was destroyed in the modern age. We can’t believe anyone would choose to destroy what we now consider “history”. But progress requires destruction of the old, so we lie in a complicated shaky ground as to what should be preserved and what should be thrown away.

Personal reinvention works in a similar fashion. I can’t move on to something new because I fear letting go of the old person. But if I don’t reinvent, if I don’t change and adapt, I will forever be miserable, searching for things that don’t exist anymore.

I hate these moments in my life where I reach inconclusive sadness, realizing everything is worthless, and I’m imagining a life that doesn’t exist. I think of the future with the knowledge that what I’m thinking of will never come to pass. It’s that simple. I am often happy, cheerful, hopeful of my life. But at these moments, my insurmountable loathing of what my life versus what I imagine my life to be surpasses my ability to cope. I break down. I long for a change I know I will not make, I wonder if I have the strength to pursue reality and not my dreams.

What is it with insomnia that makes me think of really bad crazy shit?

 

Tuesday afternoon, waiting for my history of fashion class to begin

Although if it were up to me I would have it start an hour earlier, even if that means it would last 3 hours instead of 2. I love that class. Sometimes it can be boring as shit, and when it’s over at 6pm, I breathe a sigh of relief, feeling ready to go home. But if there was a 15 minute break in the middle, I would take it for 3 hours. The subject matter is just that interesting.

I finally managed to sleep last night, in an uninterrupted “dreamless” sleep. I use quotation marks there since I’m sure I dreamt of something or other; I remember feeling the last wavering memories fade away as I left bed this morning. But it was a pleasant night’s sleep with a pleasant awakening. A pleasant walk to school, a pleasant sound class, and a pleasant screening of Land of the Dead later, I sit waiting for my next class, wondering how to murder the 30 minutes left. What better way than to talk to myself?

Land of the Dead left me uneasy. I wasn’t really scared, maybe slightly jumpy due to the little scares here and there, but not scared. In fact, my relationship with the idea of zombies is one that doesn’t really scare me. I seem to dream about them often, in one way or another, and sometimes those dreams scare me more than any movie could. Not really the creepy gorey “holy-crap-I’m-going-to-die-and-get-eaten-by-living-dead” type of frightening, I get more scared of the feeling of desolace zombies in my dreams always seem to create. Often in my dreams, I’m with someone that I have never seen before in my life, who I have nothing in common with except the fact that he’s with me and I’m with him. But most of the time I’m either alone, or this one person leaves and/or gets killed. It’s a frightening thing to be left alone.

My friend Juan is of the idea that our dreams always mean something. He always finds the subconscious reason for having a specific dream. I sometimes find some meaning behind my dreams because they usually reveal something I was already conscious of. However, I started having zombie dreams four or five years ago as a very reoccurring thing, and I initially discarded them as fun jokes. I say fun jokes because they never really scared me, they just made me feel alone in a world full of feeding dead. But after a while, when they’re occurrence became just another regular thing, I began to look for reasons for them. I never figured it out until now.

Land of the Dead features a magnitude of people living in a secluded city, organizing themselves in order to survive with the creatures. I can’t remember a dream like that. In fact, lesser characters in my dreams are usually killed off quickly, without much importance. Another passing life, leaving for good. I was always being left alone, to fend for myself, not a soul who could tell me what to do.

Last night, I lay in my bed. I like to open the curtain and look at the lights outside my window. There’s a large building with many entertainment rooms for people who live in the adjacent residential building. It’s huge, and there are often a few people playing pool late at night or working out at the gym. I like to look at them, or at passing cars far away, or at pedestrians walking the dark streets (you don’t see much of the latter). It somehow soothes me, but not in the way one may think. It soothes me because it makes me feel insignificant. In this city alone there are 30 million people who could be me. No one is an individual in this planet. We’re people. People, a collective noun, not a plural, because a plural implies there are many of us, instead of what we are, which is one entity trying to get all our parts straight so that we can function.

But from the corner of my eye I spot a man, almost 11 in the morning, and he goes to the bottom garden in the building in front of me. He thinks he’s invisible. He sets down his can, whether beer or soda I do not know, and lights a cigarette. He stands there for 10 minutes, smoking, looking at the sky. And just as he was down there, he leaves. What was he thinking of? Was he looking for an escape next to the children games that late? A small amount of peace before he returns to a cruel life he doesn’t want to live anymore? Was he smoking in secret? Or maybe he just needed a cigarette and his wife won’t let him smoke in the apartment because he stinks it up. I don’t know any of this, but I do know that at that moment, with me looking straight at him, he was alone. He felt completely alone, not only physically but emotionally. No one was there to talk to, to listen to the reason he was there, to bitch about his tight ass wife or about how he wants to quit but can’t. He felt alone. I felt alone. I was alone at that moment, too.

What frightens me about my dreams isn’t the feeling of abandonment, of having no one, of fending for myself, of eventually dieing. It’s the reality that we’re all already like that. We all live in our own little zombie apocalypse, we all feel so alone all the time, surrounded by scavengers. We can never get inside the other’s head. It drives us crazy, so crazy that we gather up in the biggest groups we can muster, hoping that if we surround ourselves with zombies we’ll start to feel like they are human. My fright doesn’t stem from the dreams themselves, in fact I hesitate to call them nightmares, I don’t wake up sweating in the middle of the night, rushing to turn on the light. No, the fear comes afterwards. Because afterwards, when I’ve been awake and I think back, I realize just that: that I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t afraid because I’m already living it.

 

Monday night, sitting on my bed, wondering how I will ever sleep

As if some higher being is laughing down on me, I am exhausted but unable to sleep. The fact that I am beginning to read Fight Club, a book where the entire plot line begins and develops due to one man’s struggle with insomnia, is just the touch of irony a cruel god like creature would find amusing. I fail to see the humor.

I have been tired the whole day. Last night I stayed up until almost 4 am talking to my lost buddy in Boston, and had to wake up at 8 the next morning. I ended up oversleeping until 8:50, which led to a hurried exit, with a special K strawberry bar in one hand, almost forgetting important documents for my 9 am class. But overall, it was the start of a regular day, and I felt cheery. Until I got to class and felt bored.

My day ended early, so I played some Metroid Prime until I was fed up with it, then fed myself and watched some TV while I goofed off on the computer. By the time my mother got home, my lack of a good night’s sleep was beginning to show, and her tiredness extended onto me. I wasn’t exhausted like you feel after a long day’s work, but rather sleepy; my eyes were closing and my nose, the top of it where it reaches my eyes and forehead, was aching like it does when I can’t take being awake any longer.

I tried to nap, but began thinking of other things.

Tell me, what does one do when one just wants to sleep but one’s body just wants to have sex? I tried distracting myself with a book, tried tiring myself out with the computer, I even defied everything I stand for and went down to the gym for 30 minutes. I took two showers. I blow dried my hair. I played snake on my cell phone. And still, I lay my head down to rest, and I can’t stop thinking of sex long enough to drift off. It’s annoying and I want it to stop. I feel like a 15 year old horny teenager.

Please, just stop… I’m tired and I really don’t have the means to have sex right now (and by means I mean a man), so what’s even the point? Leave me alone hormones.

 

Sunday night, wondering where the weekend went.

A rare affliction has taken over my life, a sense of individuality that somehow overwhelms me. It is strange to think of oneself as alone in a world with billions of people, and often that thought can overtake you, making you feel insignificant, unimportant, lost, one of the many ants that crawls around happily. But sometimes it does happen. An individual life experience, a reality crashing into you, making you feel thrilled yet lonely at the same time, dawns upon you like it did to me today. I am a human being that is most obviously alone. My life isn’t particularly interesting, my friends hardly plentiful, my long distance relationship on a stand still where neither of us knows what we want or what to do, dull and pointless. And yet I have the desire to write about it, to tell, to express the mind numbing reality of my failed attempt at a life.

How useless all this is going to be when my life ends without a single achievement to my name. The amount of people who make it, who end their lives satisfied at everything, must be minimal. My only hope is that when I’m older I regret nothing, which is my primary reason for opting to off myself if I haven’t reached something worth living for by the age of 34. When you are 34 you should know what you have done in your life. Older than that and you are simply waiting for the end, hoping to get a few last minute thrills in the event.

I have been losing weight, and feeling so good about it, I don’t want to stop. I wonder if my face is really nice, or if I’m fooling myself and my uglyness goes beyond just a little bit of extra belly fat. I don’t know what I want from this; feeling better about myself? Gaining confidence? or do I simply want to attract someone that will give me a spin before I move on and settle down with Andrew? Andrew is my settle down guy, but do I want to be with him, I’m just scared I’ll never be loved with the passion an artist with no life plan, no children in the future, looks for. I want something from him that I’m still scared he can’t allow himself to give me, and that strains my confidence in what I’m doing with him. I want a fling so I can understand it, and maybe by getting ready to move forward with a life that makes more sense.

I hate not knowing what I want. It isn’t the fact that I don’t have ambition, it’s that I don’t know what I want to focus it on. This is grounds for a long, whispered, sigh.

 

Thursday afternoon, at home, smoking a pineapple hooka

I stumbled upon a little site today with a series of strange images paired with quotes all about Mary Jane a few minutes ago and started leafing through it. Surprisingly, it has been a pot filled day today, watching Adventureland (where they spend have the movie high) and having a new shipment for personal consumption due tomorrow. I began thinking about how I feel about my life, about where I’m going, where I want to be in 5 years, as well as how I feel about weed.

I read a short essay (only a few paragraphs long) written by Carl Sagan for a book on pot under the pseudonym Mr. X. I don’t know whether or not Carl Sagan actually wrote it, even if the article said he did. I just enjoy taking things people tell me skeptically; I think it gives me a wider range of possibilities when it comes to understanding the world. However, that’s not the point. Point is, he seemed to describe being high perfectly, which is why I am inspired to write this down now.

Some of the strongest supporters of weed are either pro-medical MJ or pro-hemp farming for industrial purposes. Okay, I’m into that, but quite simply I support marijuana legalization for recreational purposes because right now I feel that discovering marijuana as more than a “sometimes with friends” has saved my life. Will I regret it? I leave that possibility open. But I can’t deny that at this point I consider myself a responsible stoner, one that lives with the drug, not because of the drug.

When I was 11 or 12 I had one friend, one very good, very best, very crazy, but at the same time very awesome friend. But I fucked it up. I have felt scarred and torn my entire life because of it, but I finally realize why. For an entire year I subjugated myself, I held myself back, I ruined my entire personality, and all because I knew I had made a horrible choice based on horrible causes. I am of the idea that I am bipolar, but seeking help for this is impossible for me. To ruin people’s lives further because I can’t get a hold on my emotions, to make my parents spend money on psychiatrists and drugs that might not even help, or that I might not even need, seems useless. I’m already making them sacrifice enough for me. I left my best and only friend behind because I couldn’t be faced with the idea that something was wrong with me so I swerved and hit the closest person to me. If I couldn’t find a reason to be fucked up I was going to create one.

We used to frequent a bowling alley, and one day we went to play some pool with some older kids. Much older kids. One of them happened to have weed on him and he showed it to us. I was fascinated but scared. It seemed like such a strange thing to have, this little packet of green stuff. He let us smell it, but I can’t remember what it smelled like. The first time I do remember the smell of pot was much later, when, deep in my depression, I went to a red hot chili peppers concert with my brother and his friends, and they told me “damn it smells of weed here”. To think I was only 13 at the time seems unreal. To think I know the drug so well right now is even more unreal.

I never thought I would use it like I’m using it now. In fact, the first time I tried it, with my friend Karina, a major pot head at the time, I barely felt anything. The second time I tried it was for my then somewhat good friend and current “it’s complicated” boyfriend, and felt the thrill of a crazy high. From then on I would try it a few times, mostly through edibles, and mostly on special occasions, months apart. Through reasons that have made me believe in karma and fate, my friend and I became closer, and he, a avid supported of weed, became a most definitive stoner. I suppose you could blame him for everything, but I thank him. I made new friends my first semester at college, new friends who loved weed, and one day we went out to get some. And we got some. We got a lot for a very cheap price. I kept it. and I started smoking it.

Being high felt great, but it was not until this summer that I got to a point beyond feeling great. I noticed changes in my perception of myself and my life. I came to a series of conclusions that have left me to decide that weed is such an issue with everyone because they do not understand it. Each person has their own way of being high, some more similar than others, and if one person condemns it, it is because they a) haven’t tried it or b)did not enjoy the experience and want to save others the trouble of having to go through the same. Both of these reason are, in one word, bullshit. A) Someone who condemns something without understanding it fully can not be taken seriously. and B) Cannabis fails in being consistent. Although by now I pretty much know what to expect, even I find myself having different highs. Similar, but still every trip has its… thing. I am also aware that one of my friends can go off and be high off his rockets to the point where he believes Gandalf is God (albeit out of misuse of the drug) and another can take the subway without a hitch.

I accept that people don’t want to get high, and I applaud them for not derailing from a decision they have made. I have made it my decision to not sink into more extreme drugs. I leave the possibility of trying shrooms at one point in my life open, under carefully regulated conditions, but, after this summer when I thought about that, I’ve decided not to go looking for that possibility. LSD, coke, crack, heroin… those are all spirally circles that I’m afraid to fall into. I don’t believe myself to be strong enough to come back out or to keep clean once I’ve tried it, but weed for me is in an entirely different category. Weed for me is a medical drug.

Like I said before, I am almost certain I am, if not fully, at least partially bipolar. I have mood swings that are unrelated to my time of the month. I am often very accelerated, my body temperature getting higher, my entire self with excess energy without a suitable output. Often, the very next day I wake up exhausted, lonely, unable to find any joy in life. The switches are so intense, I feel like I can’t breathe, I feel like throwing myself out the window, like locking myself in the shower, drowning, slashing my wrists, bleeding. These downers would usually be followed by slashing my arms with a blade of any sort, scissors, cutters, what have you, bleeding loudly tearing in the shower, as scalding water burned my skin. My arms still sport scars of those moments, which would release me, not just for that moment, but for many ones afterwards, when I would push upon my arms and feel the pain of the cuts still there. It was wrong, I knew it was wrong, I hated it, and I hate the scars on my arms, telling a history I don’t want to have.

I haven’t cut since I started smoking, even through a lot of stressful situations that would lead me to that point. I have felt useless, I feel useless right now, seeing my future as a whore in the harsh areas of this harsh city, selling my body after discovering I’m untalented and have made all the wrong choices with what I have been given. But THC, in all its glory, has allowed me to see clearly, to feel sane for those few moments, so that I know what feeling insane is like, and when I can recognize I’m being irrational, I can pull back, relax, and chill. It has made me sane.

These days, without any in my arsenal, I have started getting in more fights with my mother, I have been getting behind on school work when I used to be ahead, I have been feeling tired and overworked. I have thought of cutting again. I have become unsure, uninspired, wrong in everything I thought was right. I have felt great too, but the great I used to feel before. Not the pleasant great, the passing great, excited and thrilled, accelerated, only to be brought down soon afterwards. The bipolar great I knew my entire teenage life.

I’m self medicating, not a wise decision, but one I’ve chosen. Up to this point, I feel like this could be the answer, but it remains untested. Under controlled rules I set myself, I keep it in control, and despite feeling bipolar these past couple of weeks, I can’t say I’m unable to live without it. I just CHOOSE to live with it for my own personal benefit, as well as the lives of others. Can the drug be used in a controlled fashion? Can I stay myself, stay true to the laws I’ve set myself? It’s a scary thought to lose myself in this, to become a picture for a D.A.R.E. lecture, or a lecturer myself, warning of the dangers, of feeling like one can control it. Or I might become Carl Sagan…

That’s the thing with weed, you never know. You can test the water before you throw yourself in the water, but you will eventually have to dive in or go home. But saying that when you dive you’re going to hit the bottom of the pool and die is simply bullshit. Could it happen? Sure, people have before. But it’s much more likely you’re going to adjust to the water temperature and have a great time playing water polo.

 

Tuesday at the terrace, upset about sounds

It is very noisy today, as it happens to be sometimes here. I was awoken very early after going to sleep very late with a detailed plan of all my activities for the following day. However, my awakening wasted this beautiful plan, since my mother asked me to go to the bank to perform a “very quick” function. A supposedly “get in get out” affair turned out to be much more complicated, lasting over half an hour and without any positive consequence. That was the beginning of the waste of time today is.

I arrived late to a group who had already finished editing without me since I was most extensively late. Which is only a small problem, since if I hadn’t had this plan to meet them I would have been late to class. Oh but wait, that’s just a decision between bad and worse, since I was delayed so much I had no time to read or watch a movie for my sound class. This teacher has the audacity to show up 30 minutes late for class but demands we know everything about his class to the extent that simple birth defects already keep you from getting a 10, or even a 9. I would be satisfied with a 9. So now I have to go into this class and he’s going to quiz us, as he tends to do when we have to watch a film or read something. We had to do both and I did neither.

It’s just not a good day, and it’s looking to be worse.

 

Monday afternoon in my bedroom

Despite my tendency to find the glass half empty side to most things, I tend to find a certain passionate love for many small details of regular life. One of which I feel right now: the lovely way I tend to set everything up to work on my most recent artistic creation. Now, what I’m doing may not be any good, and my time might be better spent doing that project I have due tomorrow which I haven’t even started on, but that’s not what life is about. Life is about this moment, when despite everything, I simply organize my desk, set my computer up in a comfortable position, put my tablet firmly on the table in front of me, plug in the headphones and start up my most recent playlist, and get ready to stroke. I really do live for this.

Caterpillar

 

Monday waiting at the school terrace

What utter pain I feel when I have to wait indefinitely for something to occur. Sitting down and waiting is my least favorite activity. You end up wasting more time than you would if you were actually trying to waste time. Unfortunetly, we all do a lot of this. If the human race advances fast today, imagine what we could do if we all stopped waiting and started doing. But that’s not how the world works. We need to get together, we need to do it later, do it on wednesday, do it this afternoon. Live to wait for others. Waiting to die.

What spurred such depressing thioughts this illustrious morning? Nothing in particular, just the feeling that I’m wasting time and I don’t yet know why. Or when this will end. I’m looking at my surroundings with curiosity. Some guy I know who is named like my brother is wearing a shirt that says “EPIC WIN !!!” in big letters, with a hoodie that carries a skeleton illustration as if we could see his innards. I wouldn’t have noticed this marvelous combo had I not had this extensive waiting period ahead of me. Still, I have yet to determine if it’s worth it.

The worst part about waiting is being subjected to my own thoughts. The inside of my head scares me sometimes. Other times, I believe that is how it’s supposed to be. We’re all supposed to be a little scared of ourselves in one way or another, because what we think is in eternal conflict with what we feel. Often times, it’s nature vs. nurture, all occuring in a single brain. I often try to determine which on is winning in my case, but I can’t.

Today my life is a mess, yet I can’t help but feel happy. I have a large project due tomorrow and I still don’t know what I’m going to do. I have a large project due on wednesday, and I still don’t know what I’m going to do. I have to cast various actors, but have no idea who to cast or when. The only thig I have on my side is the fact that I know exactly what I want, how I want it, and how I’m going to figure it out. I’m almost done with the creative process of my end of the year project. But besides all this, which has been causing me some despair to say the least, I’m happy.

It’s been a while since I have been… happy. The scars on my arms testify to that. But today I am. My mother woke me up at 6:30 as usual, I slept in until 7:45 as usual, and I struggled out of bed, not a thought in my head besides “bjkshoijifjwhhfkdk bed now ugh i can’t fuck”. Eventually, my body made it’s way to the bathroom and performed my daily morning routine. At this point, my mind begins to gain conciousness. Even now, still in the morning, I can not remember what I did this morning. I had breakfast and coffee with my father, watching Fox News, something I have not done for months. Eventually, I got changed and headed out the door.

Waiting for the elevator, I looked at myself in the mirror. I saw myself, having woken up only a tentative 30 minutes ago. There were my usual circles beneath my eyes. My cracked, dry and messy hair. My clothes hanging on loosely, as if they were put on in the dark and never really adjusted. My hair clip was leaning to the right, hanging on my just a few hairs. I looked the same as always. But I saw something there that I have never seen before. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t look like I used to. My only guess is that I’m happy.

My life seems to be working itself out slowly. Step by step I’m fixing problems that have been aching me since I graduated high school. My career doubts are dwindling, I’m zoning in on what I want to do. I’m furthering my drawing skills to perhaps develop a fully fledged animation career in the future. This friday I’m set to ask my animation teacher the best way to go about developing this particular road. I know I might be going about it the wrong way, that I perhaps film and television isn’t the best idea for what I want, but I’m willing to work it out. People have more fucked up lives than me, and that sucks for them, but it makes me feel pretty good.