"...Fear found me, really found me, for the first time.
I'd felt it before, the Fear, but only the fringes, the least edge. Now it was vast, the very hollow of night, an emptiness cold and implacable. It was last words, deep space, every long goodbye in the history of our species. It made me cringe, whining. I was shaking, groveling, crying... no explanation has ever even come close.
It's the Fear. It's the long finger of Big Night, the darkness that feeds the muttering damned to the gentle white maw of Wards."
-William Gibson

I am afraid. I am truly afraid that the Fear has found me. I wonder if the Fear is like other fears, which can be faced, which can be managed, which can be laughed at.
I'm not afraid of dying. Not at all. I'm afraid of living with the Fear.

I have always placed my fears in front of me, appraised them, found them wanting, and discarded them... but this is like a deity which has been slowing incubating inside of me since I was a child, a fledgling deity which now has had its apotheosis. Maybe it's the monster created out of all the fear I thought I was surmounting, but was, in fact, just suppressing.

I hold my hands in front of me, hoping to find the silver sliver of diluted happiness and kindness, but I only see my own human hands. And I wonder what I have ever done with these hands.
I wanted to become a speech pathologist to do something good. I've always loved language, always been talented that way, so I thought I could redeem myself by taking my talent and helping others. Nobody questions you if you lose yourself to help others. I thought I could hide that there was no "me" by devoting my physiology to others.

But I wonder. I wonder if that Fear was put inside me when I was 5, I wonder if walking so many years with that kind of ghost... can you even try to put it aside? Who are you without your pain? I thought I had ended that pain, I thought I had moved beyond it, yet here it is in total control of my life. I have been smiling, I have been laughing, but it's a careful chemical equation... remind myself not to smile too wide, remind myself to stop laughing, remind myself not to start screaming and crying. I don't want to hurt the people I live with, so I smile. But I catch myself smiling past when I should... because I was never really smiling in the first place.

Today while I sat on the swings, nothing felt real at all. The sunshine looked like stage-lights, the people seemed stilted and two dimensional. I had to close my eyes and focus on the bandanna I wear to remind myself of true reality, of that pressure that keeps my feet on the floor now a days. I'll be starting partial patient next week. We'll see what happens.

"The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed."
-G.K Chesterton

Sometimes we all need to be reminded of that.

"I'm a broken hearted man... if I could change my way of livin', it would mean so much to me..."

Sometimes the blues are all you can relate to. Today's one of those days.
But I know tomorrow's going to be a better day, so I'm alright with aching my heart along to these records for a few hours.

Tomorrow's a 10 fucking hour work-day. Yikes. I'm going to bed early tonight.

The day is calling.

Out of work early and it's off to wander... *heeheehee*

I'm reading Freud's Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria and it's infuriating. I know Freud contributed a lot of modern psychology in terms of methodology and terms, but it seems like he just decided at the beginning of this girl's treatment what was going on and then shamelessly twisted everything she said until it fit his desired outcome. I feel awful for her as I read through it. Depending on how bad I was, I might just have killed myself if I was his patient.

I can't believe it's only Monday. This is going to be one long week. But at least this Saturday I will finally have a paycheck and I can stop feeling like I'm just working with no reward. The entire thing probably has to go to rent anyway, but hey, at least then that will finally be taken care of.

OK, back to tearing my hair out over Freud.

I wish this didn't describe as many relationships of mine as it seems to, but... what can you do?

"And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing." -Haruki Murakami

Today's been low-key. Started reading Sputnik Sweetheart by Murakami and it's quite good so far. Went down to Starbucks a little while ago and saw Tariq and Kyna; also scored some free pastries... yay, breakfast!

Besides seeming to have acquired whatever this awful stomach bug thing is that's going around our house, all is well.

Just ignore the one handler who looks something like an ogre and this is almost unbearably adorable.

Things are going well on my end of the world. I like my job and I really like the people I work with... I also like having a daily schedule again- it goes a considerable way to helping me think straight.
I just finished reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was incredible, but really depressing. Think I'll hold off on watching the movie for a few days.
Umm... yep. That's about it. Definitely looking forward to the weekend, though ^_^

One of the best Onion articles I've seen this year.

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=94305095473&h=Fujm-&u=p9UWM&ref=nf

We all know one (or ten) of these girls.

Sometimes people are assholes.

Tomorrow should be a good day, though. *knock on wood*
I'd murder at least two hobos for a cigarette right now, though, I tell you what. Ugh. Sometimes people make me so disgusted.

That is all.

DialAmerica called this morning and they already have hours again, so I have a job again starting on Monday!
I'm still all fucked up in my head, but this makes me feel quite a bit better.

Yesterday I Stumbled upon a book which is basically a Linguistics 101 textbook, so I've been reading through that, firstly because I find it interesting, but secondly because I'm sure at least some of it is things I'm going to learn at Nazareth. Might as well have a jump start in familiarity with concepts.
Right now I'm listening to "The Politics and Technology of DNA Databases", which is a streaming lecture that the ACLU put up on FB. It's very informative. But even cooler is something I'm saving for later... NPR put up a video of the Decemberists performing The Hazards of Love in concert. Awesome.

I sort of feel human again. This is good.

I really hope that Obama starts making good on some of the promises he made to the LGBT community... I know it's "only" been 6 months, but that's enough time to at least make some headway.
At least he officially recognized June as LGBT month, but at this point that's just butter and we don't have any bread.

Come on, Mr. President! I still have faith in you!

This has got to be the closest thing to words of pure wisdom ever to come off of 4chan.
In response to a girl who was complaining about her body shape and weight and being really depressed over how she'll never be able to look the way she wants to, some inspired anon wrote:

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Seriously. Stop.
So your body doesn't allow you to be thin and shit. Boo-fucking-hoo. Guess who cares? You care. That's who. Just you.
If you're not happy with the way you are and can't change it, stop being unhappy about it or be an hero.
Now; tits or gtfo."

For those of you who don't know, to "be an hero" means to kill yourself. Normally asking for advice on /b/ is one of the stupider things you could ever do, but I really enjoy that response.

Otherwise, my life is not going well in any respect. I'm failing miserably on all fronts and I'm beginning to lose my faith that life can be worthwhile. Very emo of me, I know, but that's how I feel.

I have a gouged/slashed finger, which is slowly healing.
I have no job because they "unexpectedly had to downsize" and cut all the trainees.
My bedroom looks alot nicer now because I did some intense cleaning/decorating for a few hours last night.
Today is day three without a cigarette. Nothing is dead yet, so I'll concede that the nicotine patches work much better than I imagined they would.

Those of you who know me well know that I am terrified of sharks in swimming pools. This is actually progress from being afraid of them in swimming pools, mud puddles and bath tubs. Though I'm still also afraid of them in freshwater ponds, especially when I can't see through the water.
Because this is a phobia, it is, by definition, irrational. Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that I can swim in the ocean without a problem, and enjoy going to aquariums with glass tunnels where sharks swim over you.
Needless to say, as I encounter far more swimming pools, ponds, and lakes than oceans and aquariums, a fair portion of my life is spent being terrified of sharks. As I was reading Harlan Ellison's Strange Wine, I came across what might be, to date, the best job of gathering up my nebulous, unnamed terror and putting it into succinctly practical sentences. It reads as follows:

"Take the film they made of Jaws. That is a terrifying film. It collapses entire audiences, and not merely because of cinematic tricks. People in the middle of Kansas, people who've never seen an ocean or a shark, go into cardiac arrest. Why should that be? There are terrors much closer to us- muggers on the streets, a positive biopsy report, being smashed to pudding in a freeway accident- terrors that can reach us. Why should we be so petrified by that shark? I reject abstractions: the vagina dentatus, that paranoid hobgoblin of Freudian shadow-myth; the simplicity of our recoiling from something filled with teeth, an eating machine. I have another theory.
The shark is one of the few life forms that has come down to the present virtually unchanged from the Devonian. So few: the cockroach, the horseshoe crab, the nautilus, the coelecanth- probably older than the dinosaurs.
The shark.
When we were still aquatic creatures... there was the shark. And even today, in the blood that boils through us, the blood whose constituency is the same as sea water, in the blood and somewhere deep in our racial memory, there is still the remembrance of the shark. Of swimming away from that inexorable eating machine, of crawling up onto land to be safe from it, of vowing never to return to the warm seas where the teeth can reach us.
When we see the shark, we understand that that is one of the dreadful furies that drove us to become human beings. Natural enemy from beyond the curtain of time, from beneath the killing darkness. Natural enemies."

I'll end on a light note with a comic strip that makes me either want to be a scientist or else form a group of people with lasers to patrol the sky and look for falling sharks. Land-sharks, that's allll we need.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/outreach.png

They have a review of Eminem's new CD, and while they didn't have much praise for it, they did give a few lyric samples. I found this one personally relevant, especially since I'd kill someone for a case of beer right now:

"Maybe just a nice cold brew, what's a beer?/ That's the devil in my ear I been sober a fuckin' year/ And that fucker still talks to me, he's all I can fuckin' hear/ Marshall, come on, we'll watch the game, it's the Cowboys and the Buccaneers'/ And maybe if I just drink half, I'll be half buzzed for half of the time/ Who's the mastermind behind that little line?"

It makes me think of something Camus said: "Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."

One day, one hour, one minute at a time. Tick, tick, tick.

All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now.
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenter's wives.
Don't know how it all got started,
I don't know what they're doin' with their lives.
But me, I'm still on the road
Headin' for another joint
We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point of view,
Tangled up in blue.
-Bob Dylan

I got new shoes today and they are adorable. In a minute here I'm going to walk down and get my hair cut, which will be wonderful now that it's getting so damned hot.
I've been having a lot of trouble writing lately. I leave out entire words on a regular basis, and frequently switch tense in the middle of a sentence without realizing it. Backus has pointed out that this is probably because I'm re-adjusting to having my lithium again, and he's probably right. The first time I went on it, I was like that but with speaking. It was very hard to get a train of thoughts to formulate properly in my head. So hopefully this will be a temporary thing.

Love is all you need <3