I would like to speak to the person in charge of alloting skin pigment...I think I'm short some.

June is a great month. July is even better but both of them are not any fun if you have to spend them in long sleeved shirts and pants because you will be burnt to a crisp otherwise..how do all of you people manage to maintain your beautiful golden bronze skin tone? All I can pull of is tomato red...it's not quite as attractive as I'd hoped. People seem to like tomatoes but enjoy the shade less when a friend is wearing it.

I'm completely incapable of connecting my thoughts to my fingertips lately, you'll have to forgive me for my drivel...hopefully my eloquence will return soon, it feels like a long time since I've had anything at all to say.

Hurray! I'm finished exams. Finally, free!

My last exam was this morning, a social studies diploma. 70 multiple choice questions and an essay. I think I did alright though I had the worst time concentrating..my mind wandered all over the place. As a credit to my attention span though, most of my daydreaming was sort of on topic...I was trying to figure out whose bright idea the essay portion was. Who on earth figured they could get an accurate representation of my social studies knowledge by handing me a vague question and giving me an hour and a half to come up with something brilliant?

Diploma:You have 90 minutes. Tell me what you think about stuff. Be specific and use examples.

Me: Um..ugh...*drool*

sigh. So now the Department of Education is going to think I'm stupid when in reality my genius is staggering.

Someone needs to start an ad campaign for compassion.

Normally, the fact that it seems the planet is populated by no one other than self-centred, bitchy people who think they're funny would make me sad. Today it's just making me angry. Really, really angry. Who do people think they are? Do they seriously think their nasty, sarcastic comments come close to passing as witty? They seem to think so, they inevitably give a little snorty laugh after their oh-so-clever retort and generally seem pleased with themselves.

The part that makes me angry enough to have to grind my teeth and clench my fists to keep from hitting them is the idea that something justifies it. "I'm having a bad day, I just can't be bother with formatlities." I'm sorry? Where do you get off thinking that your meagre problems justify your throwing empathy to the wind? I can understand someone who is stressed enough that, even though they're trying to be decent, just has a moment where they snap and something nasty comes out. That I can justify, but the idea that just because your life isn't perfect you have any right to make another human being feel bad is so egotistical I'm actually disgusted by the arrogance. People's entire families die horrible, painful deaths in front of them, and then they lose their job and their house and their boyfriend runs off with their best friend and still you find them with a strained smile on their face and a sense of humor. I don't care what's happening in your life, there is never any excuse to treat someone badly. I'm furious with the people I see every day who seem to think they have an excuse. I haven't got the bitterness in me quite yet which would allow me to just tear a strip off of them so I've decided to wage my campaign in my own little way, I recommend you all do the same.

My strategy involves that moment when they stare over at you, so pleased with themselves with that "Oh I'm so funny" look on their face. When they glance over (and they will, what ego doesn't need stroking), looking for you to confirm that, indeed, they are hilariously funny, don't respond. More than that, glare icily at them but with a semi-grin on your face. It's just enough of a stony response that their smug, amused smile will fade uncomfortably but they won't be certain enough of your anger to bother remembering it. It works like a charm. Sort of.

The only problem with this strategy is that it lacks the major detail of positive/negative reinforcement...a clear outline of what the person is doing right or wrong. If this person is an asshole they are not going to recognize that the short, insulting replies they give in an effort to be funny are really just disgusting in their cruelty. And there really are very few ways to get this message across to them without actually saying it. I'd be all for saying it but the chances that the person would actually take anything you say seriously are 0. Plus you'd have that nasty defensiveness stance on their part and if you get a spiteful, sarcastic person on the defensive you have an experience similar to trying to hug a porcupine.

There is, unfortunatly, no way to change these people. Maybe, on their deathbed, they will think, "gee, I wish I'd been nicer to my mother," or father or that kid next to them in science or their siblings or that stranger who asked them for directions. Most likely though they won't. But at least, through stony silence you're nor becoming complicit in the decay of mankind.

My possibly new favourite passage ever:

"Then that same afternoon it was Florentino Ariza who saw the face of death when he recieved an envelope containing a strip of paper, torn from the margin of a school notebook, on which a one-line answer was written in pencil: Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant."

From Love in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Marquez

I'm developing something of what the victorians would have called a temperment. Lately, all I can seem to stomach are mangoes. Anything else just makes me nauseated and I cannot swallow any more than a few bites without feeling genuinely ill. It seems like a very snooty thing to do on my part though, refuse to eat anything but mangoes, so I'm eating other things. But I'm not enjoying it.

I'm not sure why mangoes though...maybe because I'm sad and mangoes always struck me as the happiest of fruits. I've always thought that, if you ever asked a mango how he felt, he would tell you he was very happy with his life indeed. Grapes always seemed like the saddest fruits to me, something about the short timespan they have before they start to go wrinkly in the sun, and that the poor things end up as raisins eventually. Raisins are very ugly.

Wrote my stoiche final this morning. I'm willing to put money on the fact that I failed. I am not happy with this fact, I've never failed an exam in my life. I'm trying very determinedly to convince myself that I won't need to know the volume of sulphur dioxide at 880kPa and 34 degrees Celsius at any point in my life. I'm right, aren't I? This isn't something I'm going to need, is it?

Strange things have been happening to me.

First, my body and emotions, who I contentedly ignore unless forced to do otherwise, have forced me to do otherwise. I went to go write a test this morning, only to discover I had the wrong date. The test, in fact, is to be written tommorow morning. Woohoo! right? An extra 24 hours to study? Right on! No, apparently not. I apologized for my mistake, walked very calmly around the corner and then spent 45 minutes trying to keep myself from bursting into hysterical sobs. I composed myself but it begs the obvious question of why? Why did I feel like crying? Why didn't I cry? Why didn't I just read the test slip better and figure out what day the test was actually on so I could avoid the whole mess?

Outside of my psyche's desperate attempts to inform me that I need some TLC, other strange things have been happening. Like I've been discovering that I have power over people. I don't like this. It's scary and annoying to take responsibility for your affect on someone else's life. I quite preferred the notion I held where I did whatever I wanted and no one really cared. That is no more. Now I know what cards I hold with my parents, for example. I know how to get under their skin and how to do it well...so do I? I don't know...it's tempting...but now that I know that X+Y=Z I feel so much more guilty adding Y and complaining about Z is so much less satisfying.

It's annoying but more than that, it's eerie...life and relationships have suddenly been reduced to a set of very less-than-romantic set of equations. If X exists and I add Y we inevitably find ourselves looking at Z. How boring. And sad...the spice seems to be gone. But the lack of spice in my life is a whole other story...

Maybe it's just finals that have me feeling like an alien in my own body...maybe, when they're over I'll discover that life is fun and nothing sad is any more permanent than anything happy. Perhaps I'll feel spontaneous and suprised by things again. Logic won't seem so damned appealing and the impossible gaps I'm standing in front of now will be bridged somehow, in some excitingly novel manner. But, in the meantime, life seems very sad indeed.

I want you to want me, I need you to need me. I'm begging you to beg me and I'd love for you to love me...

You know the song, right? It came up in conversation last night with my friend J*. We were talking about high maintanance vs. low maintanance people. I'm low maintanance, I know that right now. I need someone who will see bad things happen to me and rush to reassure me that I didn't deserve it, the other person is a jerk and that I'm still wonderful but that's about it. I don't generally need to be healed. Comforted, held, and loved, yes. J* functions about the same way. (We figure we should date because we'd only have to see each other once a week. We could validate each other over coffee and be on our way.) And, while we don't need to be healed by the one we love, we both immensely enjoy So we started talking about people who don't work that way...the people who want to be needed simply for the sake of being needed. The ones who need to confirm their existance by forcing someone to chase them down, wasting away with the grief of their unrequited love.

I would like to be needed by the one I need. (I'm not saying that there is someone in particular that I need at this moment, who doesn't need me and so is making me sad; this is more of a general life statement). If I adore someone enough to need to see them, I would like to be adored in some at least slightly similar fashion by them. This, I believe, is different than needing someone to need you simply to feel good. You hear women say, "I wish he loved me!" No one ever asks if it's because she loves him...more often than not this isn't the reason. Most frequently, women simply desire the sense of glee they seem to derive from having a man chase them around, tongue hanging out. We're likely not teases simply because the teasing itself is fun, we're teases because their frantic pursuing is fun. We refuse to call him unless he calls us, but rarely are we not calling him because we've simply moved on to other important tasks in our lives. No, far more often we are sitting, sulkily, by the phone - hating him for neglecting us like this.

It's no wonder men think we're confusing. Men are inherently more logical than women are. (I know that sounds like some anti-feminist slur but it's not, it's simply a fact. Men function using logic, their directional skills are better than women's because of it. Stop looking at me like that! Sigh, I give up trying to explain that comment away now...) If women used logic in their day to day affairs more often I have a feeling that sense of confusion would soon evaporate. We love him, and so we want him to love us. This is not something imcomprehensible...and I don't think that men are incapable of understanding it, but so often we don't want him to love us for this reason. We want him to love us because then we will feel loved. Personally, I don't understand it...For me there is no greater joy than discovering someone I care about (especially in that way) is feeling the same way I am. It's bliss. Or when you start to move in synchronicity with them, use the same phrases and respond the same way. That, for me, is the best possible feeling. But if I'm not interested it does nothing for me..the guy could read my mind and speak every word simultaneously but I really wouldn't care. Having someone be interested in me simply for the sake of feeling wanted is just a concept I can't understand.

Actually, I more than can't understand it. There's a vicious, potentially hurtful quality to it that disgusts me. If you can make someone want you simply because you were in the mood to, what do you do when that person's heart is broken? It's one thing to accidently have someone fall in love with you...unrequited love is an eternal theme for a reason: it happens. But how dare you deliberately coax the person into wanting you, only to dump them on the floor when you decided someone else would be more fun! Human beings have the capacity for mercy and for empathy and that is quite possibly our greatest gift. Any living thing can find pleasure, they seek it out in fact...but the ability to forgo pleasure in the event that it will cause pain to someone else is the mark of true intelligence. If you haven't got the self-denial to do it, in my books you belong way down there with the dandilions on the food chain.

I believe disillusionment is totally avoidable. More importantly, I think that it's a myth.

Those movie scenes where the girl looks angrily and teary-eyed into the face of her man and says something like, "you are so not who I thought you were," always made me angry. I didn't know why. Now I do. I am pissed off by all of the people who wandered into a relationship believing they were dating Christ-Incarnate and then have the audacity to blame the other person for being who they were all along. I have nothing but anger for these people and their 'hurt' and 'betrayal'. Unless the guy you're seeing has fallen into the arms of Satan during your time together, you have nothing but your own pathetic desperation to blame for your sudden feelings.

So I have no sympathy for those of you who, upon discovering who your partner really is, run screaming off into singlehood crying bloody murder. I think they key to learning to avoid being disillusioned is to practice patience. I have a list of things I meant to blog about in the last few days, so I don't forget them. Right below "Disillusionment is bullshit" is "I promise I will be patient, even when...". You're probably wondering what that means. I realised just now that these two ideas are so tied together that they need to be written together.

I am not a dispassionate person. I am excitable and enthusiastic and spontaneous. I do, however, view love as something of a character sketch. The chances that I'm going to leap into a relationship with someone I've just met are slim to none. As strange as it sounds, I'm going to watch them. Listen to their stories, their opinions...read things they write and see things they make. Form in my head a 3-D image of who they are before I decide if I'm interested. By the time I get around to it, I have at least a general idea of the evils this person is prone to committing. I know their weaknesses, their habitual sins...and, if I'm interested, I'm interested anyway.

I don't want to change people. This strategy of mine lets me see into the person and decide if their soft spots are things I can live with. And what is the key to living with someone who habitually commits the same transgressions? Patience. Patience is what allows you to see past the action, into the person and read their desire to change. And, if it's present, you wait until they can. No matter how long. As bizarre as it sounds, by the time I've decided I'm seriously interested in someone, I've already thought long and hard about whether or not I can handle their constant getting caught in traps. So far, in the people I've studied before approaching, I've been 100% on in my summary of their faults. I went in anyway, and I stayed in.

It is because I've been so accurate that I believe that anyone who wakes up one morning to find that the person they're sleeping next to is "So not who they thought they were," is probably brain dead. Believe what you want to believe, but don't you dare get angry when someone wakes you up from your daydream, Princess.

Time for a blog on a subject I've been meaning to blog about for a while now.....Love. Hey, I saw that. I'm very aware that it's quite likely no one wants to hear the thoughts of this 17 year old girl on love. Whatever, you probably shouldn't have come to adore me with the stalkerish admiration that you have now, should you.

I've never been one for girlish romantic fantasies. For a long time, my idea of the perfect marriage involved marrying your gay best friend and enjoying tax benefits and the joys of being single for all of eternity. I eventually realized that my disbelief in love probably resulted from the fact that I had the same high standards for it that I have for everything else on the planet. True love, for me, had to be perfect love, and nothing on this planet is perfect. Therefore, true love did not exist, and the sooner the world realized this the sooner we could all go back to being productive and things.

It took me a bloody long time to realize that the idea that love had to be requited and unconditional to be perfect was total bullshit. Hey, if you're the one cast in the Disney movie who gets to pretend it happened to you, congratulations, enjoy it because you're not going to come across it at any other time while you're on this planet. Gradually, I replaced my disbelief in fairy tale love with a belief in the possibility for true love. The belief though, included an acknowledgment that love is inevitably tragic. It isn’t love, however that will break your heart. Attachment and insecurity will destroy you. The First Noble Truth: life is suffering essentially captures the sentiment. The Second Noble Truth: the root of all suffering is desire captures the cause.

Before I say anything else, I want to make it clear that I in no way know what I’m doing. I have my goals and ideals but if at any point I sound like I know exactly how to execute them please don’t believe me.

I got asked yesterday if had any goals for this year (for those of you who are unaware, it was my birthday recently). I answered, without hesitation, that I would like to learn to understand unconditional love. I don’t seriously think I’ll be finished that in a year, but I’d like to make a dent. The times in my life when I’ve been hurt didn’t result from my trusting people but, rather, from my expecting things from them. Secret to avoiding pain: stop expecting things from people. On the surface that sounds like your typical fucked up kid philosophy. If you don’t need, you can’t be denied but that’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is, I want to learn how to be able to love someone, appreciate someone, support someone without ever needing them to do the same for me. I think true love is present most in the person who watches the one they love fall in love with someone else and smiles, pleased that they’ve found happiness. I can’t do that. No one, really, can do that but I’m really far from being able to do it. I’m jealous, I’m possessive, I’m catty...but I’m working on it. I’m really trying to work on it.

I think I’ve discovered the reason for my perennial depression too: all my life I’ve been waiting for someone who will love me the way I want to be able to love. Finally, I’m realizing that this may or may not happen, but either way it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to derive true happiness from someone else needing and wanting me, but from learning to be pleased for others and their successes, even if they threaten me. I’m afraid though, that it may take me more than a year.

I am going downhill, fast. I did my usual Saturday night thing which includes box office for a local theatre company, did splits and paid the actors. Intermission ended and I decided to scrap my original plan which was to go across the street and make a serious attempt to get really drunk (ask me about my my freakish alcohol tolerance some other time..). Instead I went into the office to file the sheets from the show, sat down and did not get up for 45 minutes. I just sat there, in the dark and wanted to cry. It would have made sense if I had cried but no, I just sat and felt like crying.

I do not know where my sudden, suffocating sense of grief has come from either. Melancholy has been lingering in me recently, but that is nothing new, I am always melancholic. No, this is something entirely different, and I can not explain it and so I can not fix it.

I am just so horrified by the choices I have made lately. Pursuing things with no thought of the consequences for me or anyone else involved, with a sense of frenzied spite I was not even aware I was capable of. And now that the consequences have hit, or seem like they might be soon enough, it is beginning to dawn on me that I have made a serious mistake, and it is far too late to fix it. And so people, people I care very much about, are going to be hurt.

I'm so guilty..so ashamed of myself but the one I hurt doesn't realize it yet, perhaps will never realize it. While this person suffers and deplores what they're done, I'm forced to hold my peace and know that they didn't do anything. the truth won't help them, coming clean can't fix a damned thing at this point. I'm responsible for their guilt...providing the opportunity, pushing it and pressing at something I shouldn't have been doing in the first place. All the while doing it so underhandedly that they now believe I am completely innocent. I should be proud, right? Anyone who knows the situation invariably reacts with, Good job! Wow, I'm so impressed by how you did that! How did you do that. I tell them I don't know, it just sort of happened. It's bullshit, I know exactly how it happened. I knew exactly what I was doing and I knew I shouldn't have been doing it. But I did it anyway, and look at the mess I've made.

There's an Ellen Reid song which goes, "Before I open my eyes/before I let morning in/before I can realize/I know./Oh I know, I did a bad thing./I did a bad, bad thing...I wonder if I'll ever learn/I hate this feeling every time/soon it will be my turn/I know/Oh I know, I did a bad thing.�EAnd it's true...so many times while I was making this mess I knew I could stop, should stop but I didn't. I pressed on, I forced it, I made it happen and I loved every minute of it. But somewhere along the way, in my fun, I forgot that on the other side of this equation there is another human being. This is someone's life. There is a person out there who is hurting, and blaming and hating themselves and it's my fault. And it's too late to fix it now..and I cannot apologize because they don't even know what I did.

On top of that is the situation at home, which is, essentially, that I cannot be here for very much longer without spiraling into madness. I need to get out but fate doesn't seem to agree. It doesn't matter how many job applications I fill out, how many interviews I request...no one wants to hire me. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to pay rent. And I'm at the point now where I'm willing to move into the rented suite of some slimy stranger and pay him in sexual favors, so long as I'm not living here anymore. Personal dignity is so far out of the equation it's laughable.

All of this sounds so despicably dramatic too, I know. And it's not like that..it's not as if I'm struggling to lift my head as I walk down the street. The friends who read this are going to wonder what the hell I'm talking about, because I'm functioning. I appear to be functioning just fine. And then they're going to want to help, for me to stop pretending I'm alright when I'm not...but that's just the problem. I'm not pretending. I'm not faking smiles and laughter simply to make them think I'm okay...this deep sense of sadness isn't something I'm trying to hide. It simply comes suddenly and without warning, and always when I'm alone and so I can't talk about it. Even if I was able I would not be willing, and there isn't anything to say. It was just in the dark last night, in the office, that I realized I'm carrying it...finally some sense of description materialized for this vague, peripheral dark cloud I've taken to wearing. And by simply recognizing that I am wearing it, I felt better...It's so much easier to exist, knowing that you're sad, even if you discover it is for no reason, than it is to have some undescribed, shadowy sense of malcontent on the fringes of your mind.

Maybe, eventually, it will give itself borders. Then I can banish it entirely.