Life is hard for me right now. I feel depressed and unmotivated. I think it's because I'm living in an apartment that has a T.V. In fact, I sleep in the same room as a T.V. I have a big weakness when it comes to T.V. watching. When I get in the right mood I can watch it for 16 hours straight, turning it on right when I wake up, and only turning it off when I'm about to pass out. Because of this, I've never owned a T.V of my own, and that has pretty much solved the problem. But now I'm back in the same house as one, and my old habits, ingrained since childhood, are rearing their ugly heads.

I don't know. I guess I'm just depressed about my lack of personal space, seeing as I'm sleeping on someone's couch. Also, I don't like what it says about me, that I'm 27 years old and still can't keep an apartment of my own.

School's starting again in a few days. I'm totally not ready for it.

I just went to the doctor to get retested for the Hep B. As usual, the results were confusing and inconclusive. I gather that there are 4 or 5 antibodies and anitgens (or whatever they're called) that they test for. I always come up positive for one of the antibodies, but not for anything else. This is confusing for the doctors, because every situation that they know how to interpet either comes up as being positive for nothing or for at least two things. They don't know how to interpret my results. My first doctor tells me to assume that I can pass the disease along. The second doctor tells me to assume that I can't pass the disease along, that I'm not really a carrier. He's also going to get a second opinion for me, as did the first doctor.

So I don't really know where I'm at now. I shouldn't really be worrying about having sex right now anyway, so the whole subject is kind of moot.

Well, I'm back from vacation, and not especially happy about it. Not that my vacation was so great or anything (Portland was boring, the train ride down the coast was disappointing, and San Diego was stressful). It's just that my life here kind of sucks right now. I don't have a phone or any money, so my options are really limited for a week or two. Almost all my stuff is packed away in someone else's basement where I can't get to it with out making special arrangements. I'm sleeping on what is probably the most uncomfortable couch in the world, in the apartment of one of the slobiest people I've ever met.

And the worst part is that I don't really see myself as having enough money at any time in the near future to get my own apartment, where I can have my stuff close to me, have a clean kitchen, and have something comfortable to sleep on. I'll probably be staying with my friend for the better part of this year.

What will probably end up happening here at the new place is exactly what happened at the old: I'll wake up, shower, grab something to eat, then leave for 12-14 hours. Then I'll come home, eat, and go straight to bed.

When am I gonna get my shit together enough to get a place of my own? When am I gonna be in a position where I don't have to rely on other people for basic things, like food and shelter? My dependancy is driving me nuts.

Well, everything is getting worked out. My roommate gracefully agreed to let me back out of the lease, saving me from having to drag all his dirty laundry out in front of the apartment manager. The Social Worker has agreed to let me store most of my meager possessions in his basement. The Amatuer Musician is going to help me move it there with his station wagon. My ex-boyfriend Mark is letting me stay with him as long as I want. Thank you to all my friends for being so helpful!

Actually, I think I might stay with Mark for a long time, like a few quarters. I was cleaning up there this morning, making way for a little bit of my stuff, and I felt very much at home. Like, Mark is real family, and I was at home with him. We've lived together several times before, and the apartment that he lives in now was originally mine. He moved in while we were dating, and I moved out when we broke up. It really feels like it's both me and Mark's home, as opposed to my last place which always felt like my roommates home, not mine.

The only problem is that his couch is so very uncomfortable to sleep on. Maybe with all the money I'm about to save on rent I'll buy him a better one. That and a cell phone.

My roommate got very drunk last night after two weeks of sobriety. He came home with friends, waking me up from my much-needed sleep. Though I didn't see anything, I can reconstruct what happened. He puked in the shower. He pulled himself up by way of the shower curtains, causing the bar that holds them up to come crashing onto the floor. He somehow ripped the soap holder off the wall. He told one of his friends to take it. When his friend ignored him, my roommate screamed "Here! Catch this!" and threw the heavy soap holder at him, violently. His friend (who happens to be some straight guy that my roommate is obsessed with), ran as fast as he could, knocking things over in his drunkeness. My roommate followed. He grabbed his friend by the neck with both hands, screaming and squeezing. His friend tried to act calm at first, tried to talk my roommate down, but soon his exhortations turned to pleadings, which turned into screams for the police (a third friend was standing there watching the whole time). At this point I locked my bedroom door, not really knowing why, and laid back down in the darkness.

The last thing I heard before his friends ran out of the apartment was the straight guy screaming "quit biting my leg!" Then all was quiet for about an hour, except for some rustlings of pieces of paper. Every once in awhile I would hear my roommate say something, but it seemed liked he was talking to himself, so I just put my headphones on and ignored him.

I woke up because I heard him trying to open up my door, knocking and jiggling the handle. Of course he couldn't open the door. A moment later I heard a tremendous crash at the door, which startled me into full wakefulness, though I kept pretending to sleep. About a half and hour later, around two a.m, I couldn't hear anything going on in the rest of the house, so I got up and turned on the light. There, on my door, was a huge crack running almost all the way from top to bottom, causing the door to bend out almost an inch farther in than it usually does. It was quite extreme, and I realized then how easy it would be for him to bust my door down. When I finally got the courage to gather my stuff up so I could leave the house, I saw that there was a huge hole, maybe a foot in diameter, on the outside of the door.

I left the house very, very quickly, and went to go sleep at my friend Mark's house.

I'm never going to go back there when he's there again. I have to do some finnagling with my friends, to see who has a place I can store my stuff, and who has a car to help me move it. My roommate is going out of town on Thursday afternoon, so I can go pack up my stuff then. Unfortunately, I'll be going out of town the next day, so I'll have to get my stuff all out as quickly as possible. I have hardly anything, however, so this shouldn't be too big of a deal. What I'm really worried about is that my roommate is going to go into my room and do something to my stuff while I'm gone.

And the most unfortunate thing about all this is that I have a test to take in an hour and a half, and I'm totally not ready for it.

Everything is grey today. The light grey sky interfacing with the dark grey Olentangy river makes an appropriate background for the concrete bridges and concrete buildings with pale faced people in dark colored coats scurrying in and out of them on campus.

And I feel grey today too. My emotions are fairly even, but caught at a really low level, a flatline with a low tone, drawn in grey. I've been listening to the band "Low," an old favorite of mine, from the far northern Minnesotan town of Duluth, right on Lake Superior. This album cover of their's would be a pretty good approximation of how I feel, if only it were a little darker in shade.

Yes, I would have to say that I feel happier today than I've felt in a long time.

My roommate likes to interfere. He thinks he's helping, which is cute, but he's really just interfering. This bugs the hell out of me, mostly because I see myself in his behaviour, especially when I think about how I treated all my ex-boyfriends. I basically henpecked them to death.

So I want to avoid being like him. I would like to just leave people alone, and just assume that they're doing everything right, but that's not always the case. Sometimes someone actually needs my help. So I'm thinking about what the difference between helping someone and interfering is, and I've come up with a little Hallmark-style saying that will tell me the difference: Helping is showing someone the path; interfering is walking behind them every step of the way, telling them when to take each step, and picking them up and pushing them from behind when they decide to stop walking.

Yeah, there are some people who need interference. My roommate is one of them. I am not. Nor do I want to have much to do with people who crave interference. Anyone who needs that can see a doctor, a psychologist, or a guidence counselor. For my part, I will happily show them the way to a phone book, so they can find these people themselves.

Twice today I found objects that were lost by others: first a cell phone, then some car keys. Both times I went to the nearest employee of the place I found them in and tried to give it to them so they could put it in the lost and found, and both times they flat-out refused, telling me to go to such-and-such office instead. Finally, both times I got pissed-off to the point of irrationality, and got very snappy with the person who I was supposed to give it to.

Incidently, I find it much easier to pay attention to what my teachers are saying if I focus my attention on their wet, fleshy, twitching mouths, rather than look them in their clear, soulful eyes.

Well, I just finished the final draft of my story for my fiction class. Now it's on to revising my poems, and writing a paper that lets my teacher know just exactly how great they are. Then I have to study for my History of English exam, and write a little paper that traces the etmology of a handful of words.

After that it's almost a month that I have off. But I don't really have that month off, because I'm taking the advanced poetry writing class next quarter (I had to audition for it!) and I want to have all my poems pre-written. I'm also probably going to re-take this begining fiction writing class next quarter too, with a better teacher. I want to do this because even though I'm proud of how well I did on my story, it's still not very good quality, and I think there's alot that I could get out of re-taking the begining course again, especially with a teacher that doesn't suck. So I want to have my story pre-written for that class too, so I can spend all quarter doing the real work of revising, working on characterization, paying attention to formal qualities, etc.

Plus, I'm taking two courses on professional writing next quarter. One of them is rather traditional, and focuses on writing specifically for organizations. The other one focuses on using "alternative media," which I assume means computers. The great thing is that after I take these classes I qualify for an intership at some place that does professional writing somewhere. I'm pretty sketchy on the details, but I hear the word "internship" and a little light bulb goes off in my head. I think "internships--good" and so I go towards that option. Considering how many fucking english majors there are out there in the world, having some real-world writing experience could only help me be more competitive.

If I were more practical I would drop the fiction class and take a class on grammer next quarter instead. But I'm just slightly more interested in my creative development than I am in my professional development, so fiction writing it is. I mean, if the economy crashed completely, and the world turned into a Mad Max-style free-for-all, I could still ingratiate myself to a band of pirate nomads (preferably homosexual ones) by creating witty poems that glorify and commemorate all their brave and noble exploits. I don't think that writing business reports for them would have quite the same effect. So, I'm gonna build up both my business and creative skills, and cover all my bases.