fuck everything

im tired and have way too much work to do and everything in my life is creating stress for me

Is it possible to still care about someone you can't stand?

Food for thought
food for feeling

remembering the namesake of this blog

She makes a lot of abstract art
She haggles for the cheapest price
She never orders take out food before ten o'clock at night
She's really into snowmobiles
She owns a lot of nice flashlights
She cares for all the stupid cats that never found their way home
She shaves her legs with Ginsu knives
She quotes a lot of Annie Hall
She misplaced her virginity back in 1995
She's what's keeping me alive
She's the pizza of my eye
Without her near me I would not survive

It gets cold when she's not around
I float until I sink and I'm swallowed up
It's so cold when she's not around
I wait for her to come home and tell me I'll be fine

She's always eating Captain Crunch
She sings a lot of Ben Folds Five
She's scared to death of cobra snakes
Just like Indiana Jones
She tells the dumbest knock-knock jokes
She drinks a lot of Chardonnay
She hates the way I comb my hair
But she married me last June
She was the bride, I was the groom
I cried a lot and then we spooned
Without her in my life I would be doomed

It gets cold when she's not around
I float until I sink and I'm swallowed up
It's so cold when she's not around
I wait for her to come home and tell me I'll be fine
Tell me I'll be fine

She loves the smell of Christmas trees
She sneezes when she sees bright lights
She fainted on the kitchen floor
When her father passed away
Our baby girl is due this May
And when the little lady grows up
I hope that she will be just like her mother

blogging for no reason in particular

i'm just happy lately, i guess.

i spent the last few days in a fever-induced blur, literally doing nothing but sleeping and eating crackers. i have tomorrow off school and no classes tuesday and am feeling well enough to sit up at my computer, so tomorrow and tuesday will be spent catching up on work for classes and for amy, as well as catching up on breaking bad (a recent studio background tv favorite.)

things are good. i'm a little strapped for cash, but i've got paychecks in the wings. i've got homework up to my neck, but i'm excited to do most of it (exception: art history critical response paper), as they're all book projects that i'm invested in (a book about my mom's blood clot, a book about daniil kharms' "blue notebook no 15," a book for dustin and ivy about our ihop nights and how they helped save my sanity this summer). i'm happy to be working, happy to have things to occupy me when i don't have work (tj and i are working on some super cool collaborations), happy to have friends like tj and blake, and a roommate who will take care of me when i'm sick and not give me shit for not being able to help clean.

on top of all that, my blog is public again and i feel a little freedom with that. i really don't care to block my ex from my life anymore--i just don't care enough about any of it anymore, and that's freeing. i also deleted a lot of his friends who were still friends with me/following me on social network sites, and i think that will help keep him out of my life. that and the fact that i finally get to return to one of my last remaining communities at home--the salon--and know that he won't be there. my mom told me that everyone was so happy that he was leaving that they had a party without him, and i guess that lifted my spirits a little; i was so worried i was going to come home and everyone would be all about him, but that's not the case. amy came up to chicago last week and sent me lots of love from the salon and reassured me that everyone was as happy as i was that my ex was no longer working there. i think it's good for him, too...maybe he can get back to his band stuff without having to juggle 2 jobs. and hopefully he's still planning on moving out of evansville, i think he'd do much better starting new somewhere. i saw his name the other day and didn't see the cool brown tones i used to associate with his name. it was just a name, its normal colors, no different from any other. that felt really good.

i also deleted my okcupid about a month ago, not disabled, deleted. fully gone. and although i get a little lonely without it, it's good. i told myself that, if i still want it back, i can recreate my account when i move back to chicago at the end of january. but for now it's nice to just be.

anyways, i just felt like writing so i did. nothing super important here. just feeling some good vibes lately and wanted to remember them.

this is what my voice sounds like. i don't need to be talking to someone else to hear it.

i am relaxing on my couch with an MIA roommate for the first time in all too long (read: ever. daniella likes to hang about the house a lot, and tonight is really the first time i've been able to just chill alone & it's nice.) gitsy is snoozing on the other side of the couch and i'm blaring some death cab for cutie while procrastinating homework.

i always loved "i can't do better than you" but i never let myself sing it, especially when dylan and i were dating, because i knew it wasn't true. because i can--and will--do better than dylan, but he can't do better than me. maybe that's vain or one-sided but i don't really give a fuck and that feels pretty damn amazing.

tonight was needed.

things

i spent the better part of this evening reviewing past posts on my tumblr and blogger, searching for something--anything--to use in a book project for my letterpress bookworks class. and i think it's so funny how i talk about finding closure and finally being over my ex in almost every post for the past 9 months or so, as though every time i'm saying "this time it's real and i won't have to do it again." and sometimes it really did feel like that. and i guess it still does a little, either that or i'm still coming off of a good few days of being unfalteringly happy without a lover.

but i think, in some respects, i'm coming to terms with the fact that being over my relationship with dylan doesn't mean i don't have memories with him that i think about often. and of course i've created new memories with new friends and think about those, too. but i spent so long with him, and during such a pivotal time of growth, that it would be impossible to look back and not think of him.

i don't want to forget how amazing my senior prom was, or the fact that i drove to six flags on 4 hours of sleep with someone i loved on a total whim. i was going through my text posts on tumblr and it just smacked me in the face that loving him helped me define me. and of course i knew that, but looking back through things i'd forgotten i had written literally illustrated that for me. through loving dylan, i opened up the doors in my heart that i assumed at age 13 i'd never open.

things became so messy this summer and loneliness has got me yearning for any sort of contact with someone i used to share so much with, be it dylan or family i haven't seen in a while or childhood friends who fell out of my life, that i let myself re-think the decisions i began making this time last year. which is always dangerous. i saw that 4 days before dylan and i broke up for real, i posted at 3 am about waking up crying because i missed him so much. and i didn't remember that, not at all. it scared me a little. because of course my posts are heavy with fighting words from almost constant dilemmas he and i had, but i remember thinking that i could marry him last november. for the first time, feeling like you wanted to walk down the aisle with someone, and then essentially barring them from your life a month later. i just sometimes wish i could go back and replay it all again in slow motion.

not saying things would change. but maybe i wouldn't feel like such a bad person right now if i could see it all again.

i'm shaky right now from coming across a status he posted on facebook about a week ago, in response to the photo of my colophon for "what a bitch!," which apparently a friend of his had shown him. i just honestly didn't expect him to see it, or for so many people who i thought understood my side to back him up on facebook. the way people act in situations like that scares me a little, and i feel defenseless. of course his mom takes his side; my mom takes mine. but for people to become so rooted into drama that has absolutely nothing to do with them is ridiculous.

i just really felt like i was in a good place with all of this earlier tonight, and to come across this sends me reeling back for a while. i hate it that the idea of him still has so much control over me (and this might sound stupid, but i'm taking it back to sex and love: i was not dylan's first--of either of those things--and he was mine for both.) they say you always love your first, but that isn't it. it's that i distanced myself because i needed space and room to grow, and he turned me into a monster for it. that's what hurts. that's what makes me shake and cry and not be able to even say hi when i stop by the salon on visits home. it's that i always extended a loving hand (even after he told me to lose contact with him and his family after he tried to kill himself) and it has constantly been met with a slap.

some good (chicago, round 2)

although i've yet to move into my apartment (that comes this weekend--ahh!) i've officially been back in chicago since sunday. i've been crashing on an air mattress in the sunroom of my six friends' large and creaky apartment, and despite the fact that they have no internet and no air conditioning, which gives me the overwhelmingly stressful feeling that camping also gives me, i've been exponentially more happy than i was in evansville. and that's good. i'm so proud of myself for all of the closure i brought into my life--it was the perfect way to wrap up my sometimes childish view of the world, forgive others (and, more importantly, myself) for the hatefulness projected onto me over the past few years, and start my new life in chicago with no guilt and nothing tying me to that tiny, backwards town but the love for my family and the memories i've made there. which brings me to today: my 9-4 class let out at 2, which gave me enough time to get my bike out of storage. i'd had a pretty tired and homesick morning, and the stress of taking my bike with TWO FLAT TIRES not only on a bus but also on two elevated tracks and an underground train made the already bad start to my day worse. so i took my bike over to uptown bikes and got my chain oiled and my tires pumped for only $3, and my day completely turned around. i can't express how good it felt to get back on my bike after so long. forget conditioning myself like i planned; i biked the two miles home as quickly as i could and then took laps around edgewater until i got too hungry to keep going. and now i'm at the 24/7 starbucks in belmont, having just finished a lot of design work. i've still got a little bit more to do before i go home, but i took a break to tumble and came across a quote that inspired this post: “I am a lover without a lover. I am lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself.” —Warsan Shire i just can't express how much i love this quote, because it really describes how i'm feeling of late. i'm a lover. that was the difference between dylan and i...even though i was the one who broke up with him, it was because i loved more and for longer, until his inability to love me back the same way got to be too much for me to handle. and i'm lonely, yeah, sometimes. sometimes it's the hardest thing; i'm swept up with the overwhelming need to call someone baby, to pull someone's arms around me, to play with someone else's hair. but i don't want a relationship right now. i don't want someone else knowing things about me that only i know, i don't want to learn things about someone else. i don't want to give my time to anything that doesn't involve my happiness, and that's a first for me. i feel like i finally understand those crazy people who try to marry themselves. that's how i feel, like i am primo #1, most deserving of love and time and care. and it's a really fucking good place to be.