crash

any time i spend not singing sad pop punk ballads in the shower or compulsively ordering & devouring $10 pizza boxes is spent sleeping. literally. i've gone to bed at 8pm the past three nights, and today is the first day i didn't sleep all the way until 8am (i slept until 4am, which is still ridiculous)

all i can think about is my mom and how much i hate being in chicago right now. i don't want to do anything. my arm is mega fucked up from my bike crash, i can't even hold anything heavier than my phone in my left hand for a few minutes before my whole arm aches. i'm pretty sure my thyroid is completely messed up again.

this just hasn't been a good week, and the fact that it's following a few really amazing weeks just makes it that much worse.

Crushers anonymous

Hi my name is Cassie & I might actually be interested enough in backup boy for this to become a real thing??

3rd call in the past two weeks that was over an hour long, I get to meet him Friday & I absolutely cannot wait

ugh

i woke up early today, feeling well-rested & ready to face this freezing day, and the gitsy peed on my bed right in front of me, 5 minutes after i woke up. when i changed the sheets, i realized she had also peed at the foot of the bed (last night i'm assuming?)

so of course after changing my sheets and sanitizing as much as i could, i went to go check on the couch, and voila! there's pee. i went and picked gitsy up from her bed to take her outside, only to find out that she had also peed in HER bed.

so instead of spending the day at the field museum, i'm patiently waiting until 9am when i can call the vet & trying not to look at all the google articles telling me that either my dog has a UTI, is so depressed and stressed out that the only comfort she can find is masking her scent in mine, or she's dying. so positive thoughts are appreciated.

casual, pt 2

damn. i'm sitting and just thinking about what a whirlwind the past couple weeks has been while i wait to hear back from a client, and damn.

everything with chris happened last weekend, i had my design show, i've been contacted about two different internships, one letterpress and one at an ad agency, i fooled around with another cute boy, i went to parties with my friends, i had a girl's night, came up with a concept for my next letterpress piece, and my client (who i was afraid i wasn't making good work for) just called back and was highly appreciative and open to changing up his style because he liked my work so much.

things have just been good. the design show on friday was absolutely amazing; we set up the show that day and had at the very least 500 people come through. i found my work on instagram, i saw hordes of people walking around with my work, and got to watch people stand in awe of my piece, looking at the tiny bits of lead all glues together. it was amazing. i got more drunk than i should have, but so did everyone else, so it was good. i ended up alone at a bar with a girl in my dept who made me feel like total shit about the whole chris thing ("you shouldn't fuck him, he's too nice, he's slept with xxxx and xxxxx and xxxxx in the department & it never ends up well") but then actually made me feel a lit better about the situation when i told her that i felt like he was way above my level (in terms of design & just in general) and she told me he absolutely doesn't feel that way about me & was super flattered. so that's good.

we ended up texting and agreeing it's probably best not to keep pursuing whatever it was that happened, and i was feeling iffy about it until we ended up at the same party later that night & he gave me a really good, tight hug. it just made everything feel ok again, and im actually hoping we can become closer as friends because of this whole thing.

it's weird, i hadn't watched my tv shows in a couple of weeks & i sat down to watch parenthood today, and one of the characters is having trouble with her husband (they're separated) and she sleeps with some guy she works with, and she doesn't want it to keep going, she goes and talks to him and just tells him thanks for "releasing" her, that she was so tied down & caught up in shit with her absent husband that she needed to let go a little bit, and while she doesn't want to sleep with him again, she is grateful that he was the person who helped her do that. and that's how i feel right now, i guess. because i would never have had the balls to sleep with someone i had just met after my first. it just felt still too sacred, like it needed to matter enough to not be some arbitrary thing. (not that i think it's not sacred anymore, but there was a certain hurdle to jump over first, i think.) so it was good because of that.

and now i'm more open to the fact that this loren guy wants to date me, and i was ok bringing a boy home from a bar just to mess around a bit. and it's freeing. it's like the first time i drank or smoked weed, i feel like i'm now living outside of some weird set of restrictions i had put on myself needlessly. and it has me in a good place to evaluate myself and the choices i want to make when i graduate. like i never thought i would be ok living in a studio/one-bedroom apartment by myself, and now i crave it. i feel more grown up, i feel like i'm capable of making my own Big Decisions when the only thing keeping me back before was myself.

casual

this weekend was wonderful; i got the balls to tell the guy i've been crushing on that i'm into him, and it went surprisingly really well. he's looking for something more casual & right now i really don't think i can deal with anything other than casual, so it's good. i spent the night at his house saturday night after a literally perfect day & i have no complaints about anything except that sometimes i hate having a girl brain that is going to freak out about the whole thing until i see him again & can judge how he feels about everything & how he acts around me at school.

you know me best, i'm like a fucking suckerfish i get so attached, but i don't want to be that way anymore; it's actually amazing that after just having had sex with someone else, i literally have no emotion about dylan anymore. the last few resentful & hurt bits of me that were clinging for dear life have (seemingly) vanished. so i'm hoping this thing with chris will be good for me. he's really a sweet person & i would be happy taking this further someday if he wants to, after school is over & my thyroid isn't fucked up anymore, but if he doesn't, i've actually also been talking to another guy from okcupid who seems nice & is interested in me. and maybe that situation shouldn't feel different than any of the other guys i've talked to on okcupid, but i don't know. something about this guy feels safe, and i like that he's there in case i get in over my head with chris and need to take a step back to guard myself from getting hurt.

i don't know. i haven't been the most emotionally stable person lately (thanks, thyroid) but i'm proud of myself. i feel like all of this good/new has stemmed from stopping myself from feeling sorry for myself anymore. i have nothing to apologize for. i'm no different than any other human being on this planet; people find me attractive and interesting. i am a creative and beautiful person, and i need to stop looking at myself like that doesn't show. having my physical self esteem in the shitter lately was no good for me, and i didn't realize how scary, almost body dysmorphic i had become about my body image. shit is so much easier when i feel sexy and confident & am not spending every god damn second self-monitoring my appearance in class, and if fooling around with a sweet beardy boy helps me realize that i am physically desirable (because i know my personality is fuckin rad, i don't need help with that ;) ) then i'm perfectly ok with that.

Dreamland

I had a dream the other night & Dylan's mom was in it, and I'm getting chills writing about it now. The night of the winter formal when we didn't stop by their house for photos beforehand & dylan got beaten for it has been on my mind lately. Or the time his parents came home when we were upstairs & he hid under the dining room table and held his finger to his lips, his mom popped a blood vessel in her eye when she yelled at us.

I'm not sure why I've been thinking about all this out of nowhere, but it's just strange how real my dreams have seemed lately

STL

i've been putting off writing this because i was having a pretty decent day so far & didn't want to risk tanking my mood, but i started searching for apartments & ended up getting frustrated anyway, so here goes. for spring break (thursday through today) alea, leah, sam, & i all went to st louis to go to the city museum. alea is from there, so her mom let us stay at her house on thursday & friday night, and we traveled via bus & train on thursday and saturday. it was only around $40 round trip, and it was a nice break from school & responsibilities; we smoked on thursday night & played at the museum almost all day friday.

but the social aspect of the trip was really unpleasant for me, and i very much felt like i was back in middle school at a sleepover that i just wanted my mom to come pick me up from. i'm sure some of it had to do with the fact that my thyroid is messed up & i'm running on very high anxiety levels & spend the time i'm not panicking in bed or wishing i was in bed not having to deal with anything. i'm sure another big part of it was that sam and leah were both on their periods. but none of that excuses what was, in my opinion, incredibly rude behavior from both leah & sam.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
this is way long & you don't have to read it, i just need to vent somehow. tldr; my friends are dicks.

all weekend, sam dominated conversation to the point that it was incredibly hard to get a word in edgewise. like, constantly told stories about how she had been through things other people hadn't, and loudly on buses and trains, and wouldn't lower her voice even when i tried to tell her she was being loud. when i was talking about tj (who they didn't like, apparently?) i mentioned that for a while tj was coming over every weekend, and sam went, "yeah, we noticed." little comments like this were common all weekend.

leah kept asking to eat my food or borrow my phone, and she literally always has to be in control of the music (like when i took a shower and played music, she sat in the next room over and played her music so i could hear hers too.) same for tv; she only wanted to watch weeds & then when she did, she just kept saying how much she hated these different characters & any time i tried to defend them, she would just shake her head at me. she was also rushing me places--asking me how soon i'd be out of the bathroom as soon as i went in, telling me we really needed to leave when i was getting ready (after i'd spent the morning cutting her hair and cleaning the kitchen while everyone else showered), and even asking me at one point if i would be willing to go upstairs to a different bathroom at the city museum on the offchance it would have a shorter line when i was next in line to pee--AFTER she, alea, and sam had all waited in line and were done going to the bathroom.

plus the both of them wouldn't stop bitching about my friend kelsey in line at the arch because she's still friends with juan. and i get it, i do. it seems like she's betraying them. but the thing is, they never liked her anyway & they're using this as a reason to think she's a bad person--and they CONSTANTLY do it around me and alea, who are friends with her! it's so inappropriate. and the thing is, i highly doubt that kelsey knows what is going on. she knows juan was kicked out of the lease, but that's it, and for all we know, juan (the sociopath in this situation) probably made up some bullshit lie so he doesn't have to tell her what really happened. and leah and sam don't want to tell kelsey what is going on (rightfully) but then they're upset that she doesn't know, saying "she should have figured something out by now." really?! and kelsey is in a really horrible living situation that she is constantly trying to get out of, so she asked leah if they were looking for a roommate to fill the extra space. maybe stepping on boundaries, but she's desperate not to have to live with her domineering roommate anymore, & if she doesn't know what's going on with the juan situation, innocent in my opinion. after i told them i didn't like the kelsey hate, sam kept going on about it until leah shut her up by saying that they could talk about it later, not in front of me.

and then there was a point at which we were talking about living together and sam just kept going on about how she didn't know if she'd be able to get an apartment with me and leah because she didn't know how much she could pay per month & would likely have to pay less per month than everyone else. when leah and i were trying to figure out what a happy medium would be (leah was thinking $500 per person per month) sam got really upset, saying she was already at the end of her rope and couldn't be expected to pay more than she's paying now ($350 per month--in an apartment with 5 people), and could do $400 at most. i said that was fine, but that i needed my own room with a door & wanted to find an apartment with good spatial balance & closer to the ground than my current apartment, maybe with a yard or park nearby for gitsy. at that point, sam and leah both chimed in, sam saying that the only reason my apartment is well-balanced is because there are only 2 people (it's possible to find the same with 3 rooms, i've looked) and leah saying she wants to live in the top floor of a building, and saying she would take gitsy out, like i was being lazy about it. but neither of them live with a dog who sometimes has to go out 6 times a day, nor do they have to haul a bike up and down 3 flights, plus sam has a support system to help her move her queen size bed up a bunch of flights of stairs, but i'm going to have to hire people or make my parents come up to chicago and help, which i don't want to do.

and then sam brought up the idea of living with dan, too, which is fine with me so long as we find a bigger apartment, but it also requires finding an apartment with 2 bathrooms, which is hard. when i said i really didn't want to end up in an apartment like theirs (in which 2 sets of 2 people share rooms & 3 people don't have doors, sam started listing all of her monetary problems. leah told her she knew her situation, and before i could get in that i understood, sam yelled "i'm saying this for cassie's benefit, because my parents don't help me pay for my rent every month" at which point i couldn't even take the conversation anymore. i'm privileged enough to have the support of my parents, i know that and am the most grateful person in the world that they are able to do so. but i don't need anyone to talk down to me about being privileged. it's not like they pay for everything i do. i have student loans in my name and will be helping my parents pay mine off when i'm done with school. and yeah, they help with my rent, but i work hard for a paycheck too, and i have to make financial decisions, too; lately all of the money i've saved up from work has gone to doctor bills and new prescriptions, and it sucks & is hard. and sam acts like i just get everything handed to me. i bought nothing on vacation except a mug for daniella (she couldn't come and was sad about it) and food, because i don't have a lot of money right now. it just pisses me off. i'm not about to get in a rent situation where she's paying $350 and i'm paying $600 for a slightly larger room, because that's not fair to me, and that's what she wants to happen. especially because i won't have an unlimited CTA pass through the school next year, so i'll have to pay my way for transit. when i told leah and sam that i wouldn't live at their current apartment because i don't want to live that far from the loop (i live 7 miles away from the loop now & it's really hard to bike, & they live over 10 miles away), they argued that "rent would be cheaper so you could afford to get a card" but that's not the point either. i want to be able to ride my bike to work, that's part of the lifestyle i want to have, and i can't do that if i live 10+ miles from downtown. and i don't want to move into juan's old room! i don't want 5 roommates, i wanted 2 or 3, at the most.

on top of all of that, i volunteered to shower last on friday night (after literally climbing through caves and running around all day at city museum), and everyone else smoked way more than me so they were really high when i was just buzzed, and each took a 30-minute+ shower, so there was no hot water for me when i wanted to shower. AND when i did get to shower the next morning, i went to find my clean laundry from washing it the night before only to find that, because i told alea that my clothes needed to be dried on low heat, that she just dried everyone else's clothes on hot & forgot to put mine in the dryer after, so my clothes were in a wet pile on the washer & i had to change back into my dirty pjs.

so at this point i have no idea what's going to happen next year. nothing happens quite by chance i guess, but if i want to stay in chicago i have to find a roommate. maybe this means i should move to NC or california or something (or at least put feelers out to see if i could get a job either of those places) but i just really wish this could be easy.