I Doubt I'm Really Here
March kicked my ass. I spent a good 2/3 of the month in one kind of funk or another. Many, many different things contributed to it.
First off, March has long not been my favorite month of the year. Ever since my mother died in 2000, March 19 (her birthday) has been a day for remembrance, and I get melancholy. During March, I miss her more than usual.
This year, my brain decided that I needed to remember/mourn two other people who have passed. I learned... I think a year and a half ago?... that my father had died in 2010. He died March 10, which happens to be the birthday of my best friend from Junior High who was killed by a drunk driver in 1992. I don't think of John very often these days, but when I do... I was dreaming about him for nearly a week straight before the 10th, and when it dawned on me that his birthday was coming up, I cursed my subconscious.
I spent a lot of time last month deep in the past, remembering people I loved and miss to this day. True, I didn't have a good relationship with my father, but we did love each other in our own peculiar ways.
Everything seemed to make me cry. Someone on a TV show was saying good-bye to a dear friend for whatever reason... waterworks. Someone said something syrupy and sappy... waterworks. A sad song came up on my Pandora station... waterworks. Think of mom... waterworks. Think of John... waterworks.
If not for the fact that I drink so much water, I would have dehydrated myself.
Even events that weren't particularly emotional still managed to elicit some blurred vision, just because they reminded me of something or another. Team all of that up with the fact that I still don't have a job and all of my friends and family are a couple thousand miles away... I've been a miserable flickguy.
Not that I'm a blameless victim on that front. I don't leave my apartment unless I need to go to the grocery store or Subway. (I force myself to go check my mail at least twice a week.) My entire social interaction is through the internet, via Facebook, Plurk, and Skype. (I talk to Rachel on Wednesdays and Tanya most Thursdays, plus Evil Twin via EQ2's voice chat.)
Point is, I haven't even tried to meet new people in my new place of residence. That will (hopefully) be changing this month.
I signed up for the April session Camp NaNoWriMo this year. (There will be another in July, but I haven't decided on that one yet.) While there's no official ML for Camp, the Long Beach ML has put some Camp events on the calendar, including the April 13 marathon that's supposed to be happening world-wide.
Camp has been restructured slightly to incorporate the canceled Script Frenzy. It's what they call "rebel-friendly" -- to include variable goals. My goal is 15,000 words, because I know I'd never be able to devote myself to a full 50k novel. I'm planning to continue / finish (whichever it ends up being) one of the story ideas I talked about in last month's entry. I'm calling it Fear the Reapers. As I re-read what I had attempted in 2011 for ROW80, I figured out how the seemingly useless character would fit in to the narrative. It also gives me a way to let the characters (and through them the alleged reader) in on the plot. I should get started, though. It's already the 6th, and I haven't written a single word. (It's okay... if I write 3,000 words today, I'll be caught up. That's the beauty of the lower goal.)
Suffice it to say, with my mind in a terrible funk, I've spent a lot of time at that karaoke site trying to get the feelings out. Most of the songs got deleted unsaved... some got hidden away, never to be heard by another human (and prolly deleted down the road), and all but one of the rest are available to registered members. The last was made public, because I wanted to share it via Facebook.
Do you ever hear a song and think, "That's it. That's exactly how I feel right now."? Even if 95% of the lyrics themselves don't fit you? Just the mood... and the 5% of lyrics that do fit have it pegged to a T? The day before Mom's birthday was a really bad day inside my head, so I performed a Keith Urban song.
I share it here for posterity:
I'm still looking for that elusive job thing. Over the next week I intend to get in touch with a couple of temp agencies to see what they can offer as far as assignments that will pay my rent. I'm also still daydreaming about the day that someone offers me a recurring role on a sitcom just out of the blue -- but since I don't leave my apartment much, that's even less likely to happen than it sounds.
I have issues.