Audrizzle

So Billy Mays died this weekend, and it really upset me. I don't know how to explain it, and I'm not sure if I even want to, because when I tell people I loved him, their initial reaction is "lol wtf?" and when I explain further the reaction seems to be "Jesus christ you're tucking weird."

Anyway here's the post I left in the Billy Mays Fansite Guestbook.

I am shocked and truly saddened by the death of Billy Mays. I have always "loved" him and felt connected to him in some strange way, I can't explain it ...
It's just that he was so full of life and enthusiasm, and he really believed in everything he was selling. I have worked in sales off and on and Billy has always been my inspiration... Not just in work, but in life as well. Always be there, always be smiling, always give 200%. Thumbs up, and believe in what you're doing.

It's so horrible to think that a man who was so exuberant and vivacious is now lifeless... I can't imagine the pain his loved ones must be going through, as I never even met him but am still incredibly upset by his death. I wish those who loved him and were close to him the best, as well as those who loved him from afar like myself. I hope everyone can take with them the lessons Billy's taught about sheer joy and enthusiasm, in work and in life. I know I will.
Rest In Peace, Billy. You are in my heart now and will be forever. You (and not your products) have truly made a positive impact on my life and the way I live it.

However many steps I take forward, I always end up going backward.

On Thursday I spent the day with my mother and her new boyfriend Paul. I gave her a shawl that I knitted for her, which she loved. We went to therapy, which went well. We went to lunch, she had 2 glasses of wine and so did I, but it was OK. We looked at apartments, and she thought I deserved to live in a better place than any of those that we saw. She wanted me to be happy. That night we got caught in a crowd and I hugged her and told her how much I really love her, how I used to be embarrassed by her when I went out with her but that now I was so proud of her, I was proud to be her daughter, and I was so grateful that she cared about me.

And I meant everything I said. All of it. I still do.

She said she loved me too, and I knew she did.

But still, that night while I was driving home I stopped to get gas and also bought cigarettes. I burned my left arm and right hand 5 times. I wasn't depressed, I wasn't crying, I was a little drunk but no more than I am on other nights I go out, and other nights I don't end up wanting to harm myself. Or if I do, I don't do it.

But for some reason, on Thursday night I did hurt myself. I burned myself badly.

And that really scared me because I wasn't feeling depressed, I wasn't feeling angry at myself. I was amazed at how well things went that day. Has my urge to punish myself become unconscious? How can I fight it if it's gone underground and I can't even recognize it's there?

Also, Friday night we went out to dinner with my friends and all was going well until Mom mentioned that Gordon died in March. She and Gordon dated from 2001-2006, and he was one of the few people that took my side and helped mediate when things got rough with mom. In 2008 when I was living in Florida and working at Office Max he came and visited me often, and asked how my mom was doing and how I was doing... he was such a good man. He always told me he thought I should go to Johns Hopkins University.
I couldn't believe it.

I started crying and couldn't stop (despite the fact that we were at one of the fanciest restaurants in town, so fancy it wasn't even IN town), and then I got a text from Charles saying that Snowy had died as well. Snowy was our household pet for a long time, we got her probably in 1992 or 1993. She almost died, attacked by our dog Carmen (who had actually killed our previous kitten) but then Carmen got sick and died and so Snowy lived the rest of her life as a mean, traumatized pet. When I started dating Charles in 2005, he was really in love with Snowy despite the fact that she was as mean to him as she was to anyone else. As my dad's Alzheimer's progressed, Charles took responsibility for taking care of Snowy.




In August of 2005 when I moved out to go to college, Charles continued to go to my dad's house to feed, clean up after, and attempt to play with Snowy.

Even when Charles and I split up in spring of 2006, Charles still cared for Snowy. And my dad, too, they got along well. When Charles got an apartment that summer he got his own cat, Leo, (seen here with Hilary) but still as soon as my dad would let him, Charles adopted Snowy and until a couple weeks ago I guess they were all one big happy family. Charles said Snowy was very sick the last couple of weeks, probably from her kidneys, and he had to put her down yesterday.

Anyway, if she lived to be 16 or 17 I guess that's a good lifespan for a cat.

I feel bad devoting more of this entry to Snowy than to Gordon, but I don't know all that much about Gordon. A few things about Gordon that I do know for sure: He loved me, and he loved my mother. He was funny and honest, and he believed in me and wanted to help me. He did help me, me and my mother. There are several occasions I can think of where my mother and I would have killed each other if he hadn't been there to calm us down. And we probably wouldn't have ANY relationship today if it weren't for him.

No offense, but my mother has just about as many issues as I do so one must be a saint to deal with her, and Gordon certainly was. Unfortunately, prostate cancer got him, and fast.

Obituary for Gordon Brown Jr.

A thought just came into my head. "Why did Gordon have to die? He was such a good person, I wish I could have died instead of him, I have nothing to offer the world and I'm just miserable all the time anyway." Then I caught myself. "No, I do have a lot to offer, I have a great future ahead of me, I can and do make people happy. I am happy myself very often, though some people don't see it. I enjoy my life, and I'm not giving it up."

That's progress, right? That's definitely a good thing to be thinking.

Now, if I can think like that, why did I stab myself repeatedly with lit cigarettes on Thursday night, before I heard any of this bad news? I wasn't crying when I did it, I wasn't listening to Elliott Smith or anything sad, I was just driving, listening to Beck. and I just couldn't help myself.

I couldn't help myself.

But I have to help myself... If I don't, who will?

Labels: death, family, mental illness, therapy

Something's going on, something's happened.
There's just a stillness, a silence. I'm not sure if it's peaceful or deafening.
I just feel empty. I don't know why. I can't even think of considering why. I'm empty, and I have to stay that way. I have no choice.
Something's happened.
I don't know what. I don't understand. I don't have any desires, any thoughts, any memories taunting me or the usual negative affirmations coursing through my brain.
And that's good.
Or it should be good.
I just don't care.
I feel genuinely bored, more bored than I've ever been in my life. Other times when I was bored it was because there was something else I had in mind that I wanted to be doing.
Now there's nothing.

And it's only Tuesday.
Last week flew by because I slept the whole time. So far this week is dragging because I've slept all of 7 hours in the last 72.

And I'm tired.
Believe me, I'm tired.
But I can't close my eyes. This morning at 5 they just popped open and now they won't stay shut.

I keep yawning. Physically, I'm exhausted. Mentally, I feel like my brain is just a factory. Just going through the motions of everyday function.

Except my usual non-function. Or really, I should call it "negative" or "counterproductive" function.

I can't draw, I can't write. It's so hard for me to do this. There's a pain in my thumb, it feels like a splinter or a cut but nothing's there.

The pain in my chest has spread up and eastward. It's below my armpit now, though more toward the center of my chest, and I can feel it hurting through my back too.

I don't know if any of this makes sense.

It's not that I feel weird, I just feel nothing.
I wish I could feel something in reaction to the nothing, but I can't. I'd like to be grateful to be at peace, or to be angry at the apparent disintegration of my soul, or even just to go back to feeling the misery I usually feel.

I'm trying to find the cause of this.

Yesterday in therapy we came to the realization that my episodes of self hatred are triggered by my participation in successful or positive social interaction with other people.

I had what I consider to be a successful social interaction with a friend last night. As I should have come to expect, on my way home I had a violent attack of self loathing. I cried, and I wanted to hurt myself so badly. I have never felt the urge to hurt myself that much. I wanted to get home as fast as I could and I wanted to see blood.

Then I told myself to stop. That it's okay. It's okay for other people to like me. I don't have to punish myself for who I am. I don't have to punish other people for liking me. It's okay.

I don't know why, but it worked. I calmed down. I made it home, and when I got here, I went to sleep.

So maybe I'm okay. Maybe I'm better. I mean, it seems improbable that I could be "better" instantly, but something happened and I feel very different.

Which makes me wonder, once again, what am I without my illness?

And yet, unlike in times past, I don't feel the urge to run out and create drama and bring back all the problems. I don't feel the urge to do anything.

I've never felt like this before. I don't understand it, but that's okay I guess.

Labels: apathy, mental illness, people, relationships, self-hatred, therapy, treatment

I can't write the word "hatred" without splitting it and seeing the two words "hat red". Hat red? A red hat? How involved with hatred can a red hat be? Pathetic.

Pathetic pathetic pathetic.

It's not as moving if I copy and paste "pathetic" a hundred times as if I write it in my notebook.

Which I did.

Pathetic.

It's june. It's 10 years since I went to my first concert: june 1, 1999. Ben Folds Five at the American Theater in St. Louis.

I guess I had been to other shows before, with my parents or whatever, but this was the first concert I was actually going to of my own volition, that I actually chose to see. It was great.

Jude opened, Ben Folds Five played, I was in love and cried (as is to be expected from a thirteen year old girl) and I'm still grateful that I got to see BFF before they broke up.

After the show I got to meet the band. Which was exciting for me. When Darren came out he didn't have a sharpie to sign things with, but I had one and I let him use it. He gave it back to me after finishing and some girl offered to pay me for it but I said nuh-uh.

Hatred.
Why am I thinking about hatred? I don't hate anyone else. I have nothing against anyone else. Just myself. I hate myself, but that's no news to anyone. Nothing surprising to anyone, nothing out of the ordinary.

I've been listening to The Halo Benders a lot lately... it's Doug Martsch from Built to Spill and another guy whose name I can't recall at the moment. It would be so easy to google him, except I'm in IE on someone else's computer and I don't want to start a tab riot like I have on my computer back home. Anyway, the other guy has a really unique voice, and I recognized it immediately... he did vocals on Beck's album "One Foot In The Grave".

I feel like I have two feet in the grave.

Better yet, one hand and one foot in the grave. Both righties. My right hand and my right foot are in the grave. Somehow I manage to write throughout all of this.

I'm on my 6th beer for the night. This evening I'm drinking Shock Top Belgian White.

The first place I had this was at Bar 4 on 7th Ave in Park Slope, NY, where I met my new roommates. It's funny because I could afford to be a third roommate there for what I would pay for a luxury one bedroom here. And really, I'd rather be a third roommate in NYC. At least there it would be easy for me to get treatment. If I didn't have to worry about persecution for mental illness.

But no, I don't care how much other people hate me, because it could never match the amount that I hate myself.

It's selfish. If I'm going to be filled with hate, why don't I hate anyone else? Why am I so selfish about it, why do I only hate myself? I should be hating the republican party or my parents or the government or Michigan or something.

But no. I'm too busy hating myself.

Pathetic.
Pathetic pathetic pathetic pathetic pathetic pathetic pathetic pathetic pathiehrtsoihdxhf


I didn't copy and paste at all. I totally would type it out a hundred times for you, but you don't care either way. No matter what, you're not going to find me as pathetic as I find myself.

Happy Birthday Norris. Too bad I'm too selfish to care about anyone except myself.

I feel kind of bad that I haven't written anything here lately. But I haven't written anything here because I've been feeling kind of bad lately. Make sense?

Often, if I'm "depressed", I'll avoid making plans with people. The fact of the matter is that if I'm not happy with myself, I'm not going to be happy around other people. It really really really bothers me when I refuse to hang out with someone on the grounds that I'm in a bad mood they often reject my feelings and say "Oh, I can cheer you up..." That's what it is, a rejection of my feelings. It's kind of like rape, if person A says "No, I really don't feel like having sex," and person B says "Oh, come on, you'll like it." I know they're two different situations, but to me they seem really similar, and thus I feel quite violated if someone chooses to outright deny my right to my emotions.

I mean, it's not like misery is an emotion I really enjoy experiencing, but I've found that to suppress any emotion - positive or negative - is not a good thing to do. For me, anyway. I can't really speak for everyone else, and I have no desire to.

Moving on. On the topic of writing: I've been "journaling" a lot lately. As in, physically writing in a notebook. Moleskines have always been all the rage, and though I'm a slave to fashion I just can't get myself to stick to using them. Since early 2006 I've been very "into" full sized spiral notebooks with graph paper. When I was at Cottonwood I used my black graph notebook as a journal, but that was primarily because I didn't have access to a computer at the time. When I got to Angelus, they let me have my laptop so I pretty much wrote everything in an Appleworks document. Nothing made it to the web, but I have over 100 pages typed (single-spaced, 10 point Times New Roman) from my experience there. Occasionally, when I'm feeling nostalgic, I'll go back and look at it, usually when I'm looking for specific dates of events.

That's one thing I'm weird about, having the dates of everything. I was kind of a "know-it-all" there, I knew the dates of every major event, every person's comings and goings... And now, a project I'm working on is organizing all of my old photos- I have over 15,000 digital photos from 2001-2009, and everything before May of 2003 was just kind of floating around and didn't have any "date taken" information attached to it. So, I've been trying to go through all of these old photos and correlate events with known dates... Bastille day, PrideFest St. Louis, our trip to Colorado... I've been cross-referencing everything with old diary entries, and it's kind of fun. I think it's kind of amusing that I spend so much of my free time doing the exact same thing that my father uses his free time for - except his photos aren't digital.

But back to writing. I've been getting these graph paper notebooks from Staples for a while now and just using them for general "business" type notes, appointments, phone numbers, endless "to do" lists (that never get done), directions, rough drawings, ideas, whatever. No graphs, sadly.

About 2 months ago I was at a bar and decided to actually write in my notebook. Not out of necessity (something I needed to remember) but because I wanted to.

I kind of went crazy and filled up ten pages. What did I write about? Well, crap. I wrote a bunch of crap. And I was happy to write it, because I knew that no one would see it. For the first time in ages I wasn't writing for an audience, and that feeling was very liberating. I mean, not that the things that I write here are all that great, but I can write about some REALLY stupid stuff if I don't think anyone's going to read it.

So, what's the point? I don't know, exactly. I think for me writing is just a different form of thinking. It's similar to talking on a tape recorder... I would NEVER let anyone else hear the crap I record. But, I never go back and listen to any of it. So I couldn't really say why I record it. I guess it just comes back to this obsession with knowing everything. Everything I did on this day or that. Everything I was thinking at every moment of my life. I don't know why, but I just feel there has to be some record of it.

I think I suffer from chronic nostalgia. The definition of nostalgia is "a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations." A synonym is "homesickness". I'm not 100% sure if I agree with the definition... many of the periods I "long" for do NOT have any "happy" associations attached. The case is usually that at one point in the past I thought I was miserable, but looking back, in one way or another I enjoyed it, and I miss it.

I should really focus on the present. If I am longing for the way things were in the past, I am surely forgetting that in that past I was likely longing for a former past, during which time I was longing for a past even before that, and so on.

I think it's interesting that "homesickness" is considered comparable. In my case, at least, I don't think I can be homesick because I've never really felt "at home" anywhere. I mean, duh, I've moved about 100 times in the past year, but besides that... when I was a kid I don't think we stayed in any one house for longer than a couple years, sometimes we moved more than once a year. Hmm, maybe that's where my nomadism comes from.

Well, maybe that's a reason I get attached to so many things/situations... I don't really have a "base" attachment in my past to compare things to, so I'm constantly looking for new "homes" - and I don't mean home in the place-where-you-live sense, but in the sense that it's the place where you feel comfortable and safe, "right". And sometimes in my life I find a place or a thing or a person and I just immediately fall in love with it because there's some void in me, some abandoned emptiness from my childhood that still yearns to be filled.

Or not. Haha, that's what I get for being so noncommittal. "I think" "maybe" "I guess" "probably" "kind of" "sometimes".

Anyway. So, I've got this graph notebook, and I've been writing in it. I don't go to bars and write because I want someone to ask me what I'm writing, in fact, I don't even have a prepared answer. People ask me all the time. I guess I say "just my thoughts, kind of a journal." I should say "I'm writing a personal narrative" because that's just kind of a pretentious asshole way of saying journal. I don't like the word "diary" because a) it sounds girly and childish and b) the word "diary" sounds kind of similar to "diarrhea". I think people ask me because they think I'm writing something interesting - novel, memoirs, manifesto, poetry, whatever - but really they couldn't be further from the truth. I write in a notebook because I can write whatever the hell I want and I don't give a shit whether or not it's any good.

"I'm writing young & gifted in my autobiography
I figure who would know better than me?
I'm certainly the former but I'm not so much the latter
But no one's gonna read it so I'm sure it doesn't matter"

So, if you see me at a bar writing, and you're wondering just what I'm scribbling, let me tell you now: it's just boring crap. But you can still ask me about it if you have no other ideas of ways to start a conversation.

See you in a month.

Was just watching an episode of Nova that focused on fractals, and some stuff came up that made me think.

The subject came up of "The larger an organism is, the more efficiently it uses energy." So if an elephant is 10,000,000 times the size of a mouse, somehow it only needs 10,000 times the energy to run itself. This has been a long-known fact, and the formula for it is E=M^3/4
This also makes me think about how big things are slow(elephants, whales), and small things (mice, hummingbirds, etc) have high metabolisms and move much more quickly.
But the other thing that it made me think of is merchandise. If you buy a big tube of toothpaste, a tube that's say 5 times as big, it doesn't cost 5 times as much, usually it doesn't even cost twice as much.
The smaller something is, the less efficient it is - in terms of cost, energy, resources, whatever.
This is just something I thought of.

I think this might have to do with the fact that things can only be so small - cells, for example. There are many more cells in an elephant than a mouse, therefore the elephant's cells can be more organized. Think of it as being similar to pixels - the more pixels you have, the more definition you can have. Pixels are a set size, however - as are cells - and so if the image is going to be smaller, it's going to have less definition. Cells are *probably* the same size no matter what animal it is (the same or very close to the same - i haven't done biology in too long, and food stamps won't pay for microscopes - or elephant & mice tissue, to my knowledge).

It's like the small tube of toothpaste essentially costing more. The exterior tube that holds the toothpaste is still going to have to be thick enough to hold it, whether it's holding 1 ounce or 4 ounces. I think, though, i'm not really sure.

One thing that I am sure of: surface tension. Surface tension is the reason that shrinking/growing things doesn't work. Let's say you've got your jesus lizard, at its small size it can run across the top of water. But if you made it bigger, say, the size of the actual Jesus, then no way, it wouldn't be able to do it, the surface tension wouldn't hold it.

In the larger animal, more systems can be automated. More cells are the same and don't need "blueprints". So say in a large animal there are 10 organs with 10,000 cells each. That means you need 10 sets of blueprints for 1,000,000 cells. But if you've got a small animal with 10 organs but each organ only has 100 cells, that's 10 sets of blueprints for only 1,000 cells. So clearly, you're going to have less efficiency there.

Also: I know it is very very unlikely that any animal would have 10 organs with 100 cells each. I'm trying to keep this simple.

Eh, it's 4:38 AM.

I shouldn't get into math/science stuff this late at night. I'm more "mad" and less "scientist".

I usually don't post stuff that I see online that I think is funny all that often, but this is probably the funniest thing I have seen in at least the last week and a half, and other people think it's funny too. So, you might enjoy it!

Anyway, this was originally posted on twitter by domfosnz, though I don't know if he/she is the origin of the picture.

The original picture is here, on imageshack.
I decided to also host it myself in case it disappears, because seriously, this is FUNNY.

Anyway, here is a link to it because it is HUGE. Enjoy.





Also, all the notes are left by a person named "CRAIG" and they are all written caps lock Times New Roman black-on-white (though that's kind of expected) so i was thinking maybe it's a play on craigslist? Because that kind of shit is probably the "best of" craigslist type stuff. Though I haven't seen it on the official "best-of-craigslist" page yet.

I'll have to look. That stuff's pretty funny too.

Anyway, ENJOY!
PLZ RT!