and the beginning of more troubles...
So, lately, I've been pushing uphill slightly in the battle of work ethic. But every time I'm done saying "hahahaha! I've done work! I'm back to being responsible!" It's like I wake up with a game in my hands, something like a drunkard waking up in a dark alley, but I've got a GBA in my hands... and I stumble into Gametraders, muscles atrophied, and I ask the barkeep for another game, to which he replies "I think you've had enough games for today." I swagger back and pronounce "I'll tell you when I've had enough!!" and promptly fall unconcious.
or something like that >.>
Yeah, so self-destructive = bad.
This 3000-word paper is killing me, and it's just so hard to bring myself to work on it. Part of me knows that I need to do the work in order to get grades worthy of grad.school and keeping the scholarship. The 3.0GPA-dependent scholarship is what keeps me at LVC, and therefore with Jess. Obviously, the quick solution is to do work to be with Jess. But sometimes, i just get so frustrated that I don't see things immediately, that I quit before I start. Now, take a class like probability, where EACH exam draws on the last, and each LESSON draws on the one before it, and you've got a recipe for disaster. I'm pulling a ROCK SOLID C- in that class. Then, quantum, i screw up a few HW's, and get B's on the exams, and I'm headin' for a C- in that as well. Add to that the fact that I'm not acing Calc III like I wanted to - I'll be getting a B+ or A-, I hope. Plus, Creation & Cosmos has that paper, and that's putting my grade around a C, after super-screwing up that second "reading quiz" (read: difficult TEST on placing obscure quotes within a few hundred pages of reading, with 10 questions, worth 15% of the course grade). Yeah, so that pretty much screwed my course grade a bit, but i still could get a B or a C depending on my paper being great or good. I hate my current paper topic, but it's the second one I picked, and it's terribly boring. I don't think the kind of thing I want to write would be considered a paper, and I'm half-tempted to write that thing too, in my spare time.
But what's worse is I can't get much help from the people around me. Jess inspires me to work, but sometimes I just feel so drained emotionally by the end of the day, for one reason or another. After telling mike and julia to screw off, they haven't bothered me much at all. They keep themselves away from us, and might even think they're teaching us a lesson, but the only lesson I learned was that if someone's pissing you off, constantly saying that the one you love has bad judgement in being with you, you can tell them to go fuck themselves, and they will. That's an awesome lesson for me.
Jenn's fun to hang around with now. Since Jess isn't required by the "BUT WE'RE FRIENDS, YOU HAVE TO NEGLECT ALL OTHERS FOR ONLY US TWO" rule to spend time with a certain pair, she can spend time with me AND with Jenn. It's a nice concept. Spending time with friends and loved ones. Amazing. So, we've been watching movies and anime and such, and I'm getting to know Amy as more than "that girl that's sitting at the computer in the room that Jenn lives in." So, that's nice too.
Plus, recently, I've been having a great time with Andy and Dan watching "Scrapped Princess" and the rest of "Rah Xephon" and we might even start some other series too. It's great just to sit down and chill out for a bit. I know I should work more often, but this isn't one of the things I want to get rid of. Nightly anime sprees are good. Even if it's just two episodes, it's a nice break.
So, I'm happy with Jess, I've got friends at LVC, I've got friends outside of LVC, family problems have all but dissolved completely, and I'm moving into some really elegant and nice math. I should be completely content. Bliss. I really can't ask for things to be better. And I risk all of this by not working enough. I don't understand it in the least. Now, if you don't have one of these mental problems, you're really absolutely no help in an issue like this. Telling someone that's depressed to just be happy doesn't work. So, for the most part, people just don't understand this, and interpret all these actions as laziness. But how can I be *just* lazy when there's so much I go beyond the requirements to do?
So, I think of the one person who I know think can understand what I'm going through. But he's too busy absorbed in the same SHIT that's stopping me dead in my own tracks. Plus, on either side, there are times when there's so much self-hatred that neither of us can comfort each other at all. It just becomes another competition to who can teach the other one the BIG lesson to make them grow up. Seriously, it's both of us banging our heads together, locking horns over the same shit. I notice that he's not doing his work, so I tell him to do it, which just gives him more reason not to do it. Repeat for him towards me. Personally, I think it's because we see so much of the things we HATE about ourselves in each other, that it's easier to lash out verbally and give the cold shoulder to them, than it is to do to yourself. So, as it stands, I always feel like he's treating me like a child. I'm just some whiny little brat who always did his work before and I should just buckle down like I used to, so I can be the good little student again and get the right grades, so I can quit my bitching. Mix in a little hypocricy from before, when I would tell him to work, not knowing the fuller joys(pains?) of Greater Procrastination, Full Diversion, and Grand Unified Videogaming Theory. And yeah, in many ways I'm a child; when pushed too far by two insignificant fignuts, I dumped rage on them, instead of calmly taking it, or fixing it another way. I sometimes whine when requirements for a project don't fit what I think they are. What he doesn't hear are the countless self-beating comments about my lack of intuition, my previous failures, and my impending mathematical doom somewhere before getting a graduate degree of some kind. That's mainly because comments that provide a check for the ego don't come off as anything but "PITY ME!" statements in public.
But today I'm realizing that even though he's mature sometimes, he can be a real kid too. He's upset that he can't find a book. More precisely, a book that he hasn't read, from a list of specific authors, at our school's library. Even the Inter-library-loan is limited so that he still can't find the right books. Granted, they're not research books, they're fun fantasy/sci-fi novels of great fun and not-so-great literary merit(read: not famous for English teachers, and therefore not likely to be carried in a predominantly research based facility). After I suggested non-collegiate inter-library-loan, he said it wouldn't get to him fast enough. So, I suggested he use his own money to go out and buy these books. Now, the whole time I can tell he's evading my questions, because he just wanted to rant to some other people that he can't find these books he wants. So, this tears it and he finally tells us all why he needs these books so soon. He wants them for a train ride. For crying out loud, borrow someone's GBA and play the games you're already addicted to! Or, maybe just realize that if you're not willing to put time or money into something, that you're limiting your results terribly. I've got three words for you - Quality, Speed, Cost. You can take two to minimize, and the other increases. Get what you want now for more money, or get what you want too late for cheap, or don't get what you want but get it cheap and quickly. Oh, and somehow enjoying a train ride, watching scenery, or taking a nap won't work.
So, that's part of the problem. He can have a very condescending "oh grow up" attitude sometimes. Now, granted, he's usually right. But sometimes, he's doing the same stuff he wants other people to quit doing. Lately, he's decided to tell me that he's lied about my snoring, that it DOES keep him up at night. One night he even used an alarm clock and music all night so I didn't get any real sleep. When I confronted him with my lack of sleep the previous night, he just kept his back turned from me and replied "so what? neither did I." Great attitude there - wonderful adult problem solver.
NEWSFLASH! If you have to lie about what upsets you so you can feel good about what a freaking martyr you are, then you're not a martyr at all, you're just an internal attention whore. Having issues with people isn't fatal; just come out and tell people what you feel and in the end, the people who stay are friends. Now, I've looked into my snoring problem a bit. I have a largely congested nose most of my life. I'm not keen on taking once-a-day drugs so I can become dependent on them every day. I've got my emergency medication and that's good enough to keep me breathing. So, as it stands, I was never a big fan of trying to breathe through the heavily congested passageways of my nose. However, there is some help when I happen to be unclogged and i move the septum in my nose about 1/4 an inch to the side - it gives me the ability to somewhat briefly take a breath through my nose without struggling for air. Now despite the fact that my snoring probably doesn't occur in the nose, Jess went out to walmart to get me some BreatheRight strips for my nose. I started using them, and then I remembered.... I remembered another reason why I snore. First, I have a fairly large tongue and an incredibly small pallet. That little space in your mouth right above your tongue? Yeah, that space... I don't have much, and many people with small pallets have eating/speaking/snoring disorders. But then again, one of the Three Tenors has a small pallet, so it's not an absolute curse. I could have my pallet raised and spaced out, but it's a procedure akin to braces, but much more painful. First, they cut in through your bottom jaw up through fleshy parts so they can reach the back of your mouth and proceed from there. Then they place some distant cousin of the medievil stretcher at the roof of your mouth, and it has a little gear in the middle. Then the fun starts; they forcibly split open the roof of your mouth, and as they slowly wegde open portions of your flesh, your body heals in an appropriate fashion, so as to MAKE you have a larger pallet... The whole thing is rather like a tradition of asian women disfiguring their feet to fit into those absurdly small shoes at terrible angle. Plus, the whole thing is rather special, and I'd need to be unconcious for a while, the bill (not covered by our insurance) would be in the thousands, and there's a chance that I could permanantly lose all muscle controll near my jaw. If you can take away the bill, maybe there's a chance I might consider dealing with the risk and disfigurement and torture. Or I can hope that this $4 pack of nose tape will mute my snoring a bit.
Also, I don't think you realize what a burden it is for you to always be sleeping in the room. If you were always awake in the room, that'd be fine. But when I'm in the room and you're trying to sleep, I'm somewhat obligated to keep quiet. Plus, medically speaking, if you're sleeping most of the day, you're not getting much REM sleep. Your body isn't getting any really good "deep" sleep cycles - you're just hovering around that sleepy-lethargic inbetween state, and then you blame your lack of sleep soley on the amount of noise I make. I'm tired of having to hear about why you're pissy from other people. A normal day usually consists of you biting my head off, and then me finding out from somebody that you haven't talked to your bf in a while. An abnormal day now consists of us being friendly, goofing off a bit, and me finding out later that you just spoke to your bf a while ago. This is the opposite of how things used to be. I'm tired of you being pissed at me, and finding out later that it's most likely corresponding to some other annoyance. Am I such a child to you that you can't tell me about your problems anymore? What did I do to deserve such a cold shoulder. I was downright ELATED when you walked into the room and YOU said "hi." Usually, I get the first line of "hi," and your response is on the order of grunts, nods, or no response at all. You've got to tell me what went wrong and how I can fix things. Either that or tell me why you can't tell me what's up. Just say something, I need to know what the hell is going on. I know part of this is payback for me misunderstanding you a long time ago. If you don't think I've learned my lesson, tell me. None of this running around all cold bullshit. Cut through the crap and tell me what I am fucking up so badly, because I know PART of the blame HAS to fall on me, and because you're certainly not giving this treatment to everyone. I wish we could still have fun like we used to, and like we rarely do now.
or something like that >.>
Yeah, so self-destructive = bad.
This 3000-word paper is killing me, and it's just so hard to bring myself to work on it. Part of me knows that I need to do the work in order to get grades worthy of grad.school and keeping the scholarship. The 3.0GPA-dependent scholarship is what keeps me at LVC, and therefore with Jess. Obviously, the quick solution is to do work to be with Jess. But sometimes, i just get so frustrated that I don't see things immediately, that I quit before I start. Now, take a class like probability, where EACH exam draws on the last, and each LESSON draws on the one before it, and you've got a recipe for disaster. I'm pulling a ROCK SOLID C- in that class. Then, quantum, i screw up a few HW's, and get B's on the exams, and I'm headin' for a C- in that as well. Add to that the fact that I'm not acing Calc III like I wanted to - I'll be getting a B+ or A-, I hope. Plus, Creation & Cosmos has that paper, and that's putting my grade around a C, after super-screwing up that second "reading quiz" (read: difficult TEST on placing obscure quotes within a few hundred pages of reading, with 10 questions, worth 15% of the course grade). Yeah, so that pretty much screwed my course grade a bit, but i still could get a B or a C depending on my paper being great or good. I hate my current paper topic, but it's the second one I picked, and it's terribly boring. I don't think the kind of thing I want to write would be considered a paper, and I'm half-tempted to write that thing too, in my spare time.
But what's worse is I can't get much help from the people around me. Jess inspires me to work, but sometimes I just feel so drained emotionally by the end of the day, for one reason or another. After telling mike and julia to screw off, they haven't bothered me much at all. They keep themselves away from us, and might even think they're teaching us a lesson, but the only lesson I learned was that if someone's pissing you off, constantly saying that the one you love has bad judgement in being with you, you can tell them to go fuck themselves, and they will. That's an awesome lesson for me.
Jenn's fun to hang around with now. Since Jess isn't required by the "BUT WE'RE FRIENDS, YOU HAVE TO NEGLECT ALL OTHERS FOR ONLY US TWO" rule to spend time with a certain pair, she can spend time with me AND with Jenn. It's a nice concept. Spending time with friends and loved ones. Amazing. So, we've been watching movies and anime and such, and I'm getting to know Amy as more than "that girl that's sitting at the computer in the room that Jenn lives in." So, that's nice too.
Plus, recently, I've been having a great time with Andy and Dan watching "Scrapped Princess" and the rest of "Rah Xephon" and we might even start some other series too. It's great just to sit down and chill out for a bit. I know I should work more often, but this isn't one of the things I want to get rid of. Nightly anime sprees are good. Even if it's just two episodes, it's a nice break.
So, I'm happy with Jess, I've got friends at LVC, I've got friends outside of LVC, family problems have all but dissolved completely, and I'm moving into some really elegant and nice math. I should be completely content. Bliss. I really can't ask for things to be better. And I risk all of this by not working enough. I don't understand it in the least. Now, if you don't have one of these mental problems, you're really absolutely no help in an issue like this. Telling someone that's depressed to just be happy doesn't work. So, for the most part, people just don't understand this, and interpret all these actions as laziness. But how can I be *just* lazy when there's so much I go beyond the requirements to do?
So, I think of the one person who I know think can understand what I'm going through. But he's too busy absorbed in the same SHIT that's stopping me dead in my own tracks. Plus, on either side, there are times when there's so much self-hatred that neither of us can comfort each other at all. It just becomes another competition to who can teach the other one the BIG lesson to make them grow up. Seriously, it's both of us banging our heads together, locking horns over the same shit. I notice that he's not doing his work, so I tell him to do it, which just gives him more reason not to do it. Repeat for him towards me. Personally, I think it's because we see so much of the things we HATE about ourselves in each other, that it's easier to lash out verbally and give the cold shoulder to them, than it is to do to yourself. So, as it stands, I always feel like he's treating me like a child. I'm just some whiny little brat who always did his work before and I should just buckle down like I used to, so I can be the good little student again and get the right grades, so I can quit my bitching. Mix in a little hypocricy from before, when I would tell him to work, not knowing the fuller joys(pains?) of Greater Procrastination, Full Diversion, and Grand Unified Videogaming Theory. And yeah, in many ways I'm a child; when pushed too far by two insignificant fignuts, I dumped rage on them, instead of calmly taking it, or fixing it another way. I sometimes whine when requirements for a project don't fit what I think they are. What he doesn't hear are the countless self-beating comments about my lack of intuition, my previous failures, and my impending mathematical doom somewhere before getting a graduate degree of some kind. That's mainly because comments that provide a check for the ego don't come off as anything but "PITY ME!" statements in public.
But today I'm realizing that even though he's mature sometimes, he can be a real kid too. He's upset that he can't find a book. More precisely, a book that he hasn't read, from a list of specific authors, at our school's library. Even the Inter-library-loan is limited so that he still can't find the right books. Granted, they're not research books, they're fun fantasy/sci-fi novels of great fun and not-so-great literary merit(read: not famous for English teachers, and therefore not likely to be carried in a predominantly research based facility). After I suggested non-collegiate inter-library-loan, he said it wouldn't get to him fast enough. So, I suggested he use his own money to go out and buy these books. Now, the whole time I can tell he's evading my questions, because he just wanted to rant to some other people that he can't find these books he wants. So, this tears it and he finally tells us all why he needs these books so soon. He wants them for a train ride. For crying out loud, borrow someone's GBA and play the games you're already addicted to! Or, maybe just realize that if you're not willing to put time or money into something, that you're limiting your results terribly. I've got three words for you - Quality, Speed, Cost. You can take two to minimize, and the other increases. Get what you want now for more money, or get what you want too late for cheap, or don't get what you want but get it cheap and quickly. Oh, and somehow enjoying a train ride, watching scenery, or taking a nap won't work.
So, that's part of the problem. He can have a very condescending "oh grow up" attitude sometimes. Now, granted, he's usually right. But sometimes, he's doing the same stuff he wants other people to quit doing. Lately, he's decided to tell me that he's lied about my snoring, that it DOES keep him up at night. One night he even used an alarm clock and music all night so I didn't get any real sleep. When I confronted him with my lack of sleep the previous night, he just kept his back turned from me and replied "so what? neither did I." Great attitude there - wonderful adult problem solver.
NEWSFLASH! If you have to lie about what upsets you so you can feel good about what a freaking martyr you are, then you're not a martyr at all, you're just an internal attention whore. Having issues with people isn't fatal; just come out and tell people what you feel and in the end, the people who stay are friends. Now, I've looked into my snoring problem a bit. I have a largely congested nose most of my life. I'm not keen on taking once-a-day drugs so I can become dependent on them every day. I've got my emergency medication and that's good enough to keep me breathing. So, as it stands, I was never a big fan of trying to breathe through the heavily congested passageways of my nose. However, there is some help when I happen to be unclogged and i move the septum in my nose about 1/4 an inch to the side - it gives me the ability to somewhat briefly take a breath through my nose without struggling for air. Now despite the fact that my snoring probably doesn't occur in the nose, Jess went out to walmart to get me some BreatheRight strips for my nose. I started using them, and then I remembered.... I remembered another reason why I snore. First, I have a fairly large tongue and an incredibly small pallet. That little space in your mouth right above your tongue? Yeah, that space... I don't have much, and many people with small pallets have eating/speaking/snoring disorders. But then again, one of the Three Tenors has a small pallet, so it's not an absolute curse. I could have my pallet raised and spaced out, but it's a procedure akin to braces, but much more painful. First, they cut in through your bottom jaw up through fleshy parts so they can reach the back of your mouth and proceed from there. Then they place some distant cousin of the medievil stretcher at the roof of your mouth, and it has a little gear in the middle. Then the fun starts; they forcibly split open the roof of your mouth, and as they slowly wegde open portions of your flesh, your body heals in an appropriate fashion, so as to MAKE you have a larger pallet... The whole thing is rather like a tradition of asian women disfiguring their feet to fit into those absurdly small shoes at terrible angle. Plus, the whole thing is rather special, and I'd need to be unconcious for a while, the bill (not covered by our insurance) would be in the thousands, and there's a chance that I could permanantly lose all muscle controll near my jaw. If you can take away the bill, maybe there's a chance I might consider dealing with the risk and disfigurement and torture. Or I can hope that this $4 pack of nose tape will mute my snoring a bit.
Also, I don't think you realize what a burden it is for you to always be sleeping in the room. If you were always awake in the room, that'd be fine. But when I'm in the room and you're trying to sleep, I'm somewhat obligated to keep quiet. Plus, medically speaking, if you're sleeping most of the day, you're not getting much REM sleep. Your body isn't getting any really good "deep" sleep cycles - you're just hovering around that sleepy-lethargic inbetween state, and then you blame your lack of sleep soley on the amount of noise I make. I'm tired of having to hear about why you're pissy from other people. A normal day usually consists of you biting my head off, and then me finding out from somebody that you haven't talked to your bf in a while. An abnormal day now consists of us being friendly, goofing off a bit, and me finding out later that you just spoke to your bf a while ago. This is the opposite of how things used to be. I'm tired of you being pissed at me, and finding out later that it's most likely corresponding to some other annoyance. Am I such a child to you that you can't tell me about your problems anymore? What did I do to deserve such a cold shoulder. I was downright ELATED when you walked into the room and YOU said "hi." Usually, I get the first line of "hi," and your response is on the order of grunts, nods, or no response at all. You've got to tell me what went wrong and how I can fix things. Either that or tell me why you can't tell me what's up. Just say something, I need to know what the hell is going on. I know part of this is payback for me misunderstanding you a long time ago. If you don't think I've learned my lesson, tell me. None of this running around all cold bullshit. Cut through the crap and tell me what I am fucking up so badly, because I know PART of the blame HAS to fall on me, and because you're certainly not giving this treatment to everyone. I wish we could still have fun like we used to, and like we rarely do now.