Audrizzle

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.

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