I took a test in my Russian class on Monday. I believe I did rather well.

I just took a quiz in my Chemistry class today. I didn't totally bomb it, but I came close.

I'm going to go see a lawyer tomarrow about my lease troubles with my ex-roommate. To do this I have to go and see my ex-apartment manager to get a copy of the lease. This makes me very uncomfortable. I've acted out with him a few times, and I don't really want to do this again. Unfortunately, I'm wearing rather tight pants today. Well, I'll just keep my long coat zippered up, so he won't be able to see anything.

Midterm in Microbiology on Friday. Oral exam in Russian that day too, and a midterm in Chemistry on Monday.

I don't think I've gotten myself in over my head yet, but I can see how a little bit of embarrassing floundering might be just around the corner if I don't change my habits ASAP.

Sigh...another really long blog here. I'm pretty much just rambling in this one, with little to no rhyme or reason, so unless you're completley bored I would say to just skip it.

I just spent two hours doing pretty much nothing on this computer here, in this computer lab. Every few mintues I remember that I'm supposed to be studying, and I say I'll get right on it "after I watch this little video" (no, no porn...I am in a public place after all) or "right after I finish this article." Then I finish, and I forget that I was supposed to be studying, so I go right on to the next thing.

I think that part of the problem is that I feel too content right now. I spent the day with The Social Worker, who I'm dating (why do I feel so stupid writing that? It's not like there's anything bad about it. If anything I should feel...proud?), and now I feel too good to get myself to do anything but whatever's right in front of me. I need some sort of catalyst to start me into studying mode. Usually that catalyst comes in the form of fear: I'm afraid that I'll fail my class, which will make it harder to have a good academic record, which could make it more difficult for me to make money later on, so I'll be poor, no man will want me, and I'll end up with some alcoholic, abusive boyfriend who I'll be miserable with. But right now I'm dating someone really nice, who doesn't seem especially concerned about my money making abilities. All my fear of academic failure is hinged on whether or not I'll ever find love, but I've already potentially found that, so what am I so worried about?

Okay...I have to find a new reason to be afraid of being poor. Let's see.... If I don't make enough money early in my life, I'll have to be working full time untill the day I die, which will really suck. I won't be able to travel anywhere interesting. I won't be able to get an interesting carreer. When my body starts to fall apart (starts? I mean, when the falling apart process becomes serious) I won't be able to afford medical care.

All of this is ridiculous, though, because making money and doing interesting things in one's life really doesn't depend on going to school. Going to school does help, however. What I really need to remember is why I started going to school in the first place: I was really, really bored. I was living on the streets of Durango, Colorado, and I was so fucking bored that I actually started praying to god to give me something more meaningful to do (I was absurdly religious at the time). I said to God "God, the next person you send to talk to me, I'll ask them what to do, and you can speak to me through them." Well, a couple days went by where I literally talked to no one. One day I was sitting in this cafe, way in the back where they wouldn't notice I wasn't buying anything, and this woman walked in to hang up a flier. She noticed me staring at her (if I'm good at anything, it's staring blankly at strangers), and she struck up a conversation with me. She told me about how she used to be homeless, and how eventually she got off the streets and started to go to the local school around there, and how her life just became much more meaningful after that. I was like "I wonder what I should do, then?" and she was like "Go home and go to school," real dead-pan and straight-forward-like. Not like she was offering up a suggestion, and not like she was trying to convince me, but just like she already knew, and was simply informing me, just like you'd tell someone the time, or what your name is. Well, I thought about that for awhile, while bouncing around from city to city, and eventually I thought "why not? The most I could do is fail, which would at least be more interesting than what I'm doing now. I should just go back home, ask around at the local schools, and see what they say." So I got back to Minneapolis, got my GED, and three weeks later I was enrolled in my first class, "The History of American Radicalism" where we studied left wing groups like the labor movement and ACT-UP, and right wing groups like the American Nazis and The Posse Comitatus (please don't ask me about any of those groups. I got an A in the class, but I don't remember jack-shit about anything).

Ok. So learning is fun. It makes my life more meaningful. When my life seems pointless I go and study. So maybe that's the problem right now: my relationship with The Social Worker is meaningful enough right now. I feel practically full to the brim with meaningfulness, and I'm not searching for anything to fill my existential void. But I can't depend on just one person to fill the horrible hole of pointlessness that rests inside of me at all times. That's not very well-rounded. It just leads to co-dependancy and eventual alienation, both from the person in question and from my own self. So I need to get off my ass, get to the library, and have some meaningful fun with studying.

I do feel really good right now, though. All bright white, warm, soft, and comfy.

I dreamed last night about a ferret and a domesticated skunk (i.e. a skunk that has had the glands that make foul smells taken out). They were horrible little creatures. Three of my friends lived in this tiny little room with them, in the middle of the city (which city? It was a dream city.) All of us, all 10 or 12 of my close friends (including The Dolphin) would get together in this tiny room to smoke this new semi-legal drug called "Metal," that looked like a black cigarette with a silver colored filter. When we would start smoking the drug, everyone would get rather excited, and the ferret and the skunk would get all kinds of agitated. The ferret would start biting us mercilously with his tiny teeth, and the skunk would start scratching at us all with the sharp claws on his powerful hind-legs. It drove me nuts! I did not enjoy being attacked, but when I would try to leave my friends would light up more metal, which was a highly addcitive substance, and I would not feel able to leave. Eventually the ferret and the skunk were thrown into a tiny little cage, much too small for the both of them, or for even one of them. They cuddled down with each other and looked happy enough, but I knew it was just a matter of time before they were at each other's throats again.

So obviously this dream is about me and The Social Worker, who I've been dating lately. I'm not going to speculate as to which was the ferret and which was the skunk, because I hate both animals equally. In fact, I would have to say that of all the domesticated animals out there, the ferret and the skunk are my absolute least favorites, closely followed by guinea pigs. But I don't hate The Social Worker. What I hate, yet am irrationally addicted to, is the stifling intimacy that friendships and relationships bring. The theme of being too close to other creatures was repeated twice in this dream: with the animals in their tiny cage, and with 12 people all jammed packed into a tiny little room. It reminded me of when I was a teenager, and me and my group of close friends (8-12 of us usually) would all cram into someone's tiny bedroom and smoke pot. After about 15 minutes of fun, we would start to come down, and being in such close quarters with so many other people would start to feel very uncomfortable. After about a year of this, I realized that I hated all these people, that their unconscious heterosexism was subtly underming my self-esteem, that I was losing my sense of who I was. I left them behind (an action I totally do not regret in any way) and I haven't been able to enjoy being a part of a group since.

So I push people away, because the feelings that being close to someone brings are just a little too intense for me. But once I am alone, and have had my fill of that, I realize that I'm missing something, that there is something that you can get from intimacy with another human being, something essential to a happy, well-rounded existance, that you can't get any other way.

But it's just too much. I would like a weaker dose of intimacy. Perhaps The Social Worker is a good match for me then. He seems a little distant, a little bit in his own world. This worries me, because I wonder if he's losing interest in me, or something. Actually, I have no idea why it worries me. And perhaps there's no reason why it should worry me. Maybe being very close to someone who always keeps me a little bit at arm's length is actually just what I need.

Guess what? I just got a new job. I'll be working under a tiny little Latin American woman, with piles of frizzy dark hair, deceptively spacey dark eyes (her English is a little rusty, and I think the look of distant abstraction that comes across her face when I'm talking is due to the still conscious act of tranlating what I'm saying to her), and a skinny, olive-hued, anxious face. She's working on her dissertation, which has to do with the interactions between invasive and native plants, and I'll be helping. For now I'll just be weighing, measuring and categorizing her samples, but later on there will be other things to do, because she has several experiments going at once.

I'm very excited about it. It seems like a sweet job for me. Actually, I just feel good today, and I have no idea why. It started last night, and has continued into today. I think it's been several weeks since I felt this good. I don't know why it's happening, or how long it's going to last, but while this good vibes are still flowing I'm going to enjoy it.

By the way, I went to go see the movie Hostel tonight, thinking that all the fear and horror would be cathartic, and I might be able to sleep better tonight. Well, it wasn't very scary or gory (though the scene where the guy starts to puke while he has a large plastic ball tapped in his mouth made me genuinely nauseous and start to gag, which was fun, but still run-of-the-mill for someone like me, who gags when he brushes his teeth, or when there's too much food in his mouth), so I was disappointed in that. What was beyond disappointing and into the realm of disturbing was how homophobic it was. The review that I linked to up at the top points out that the characters are homophobic, but it's not just the characters that are homophobic, but the plot of the movie itself. It depicts homosexuals as nasty sexual predators, and the only homosexual you meet turns out to be one of the torturers, the first one the viewers see in fact. I know that I don't have to tell my friends not to see it, because none of my friends seem to like horror movies, which is why I went to this one by myself, but just in case you were thinking of it, I hightly advise you to avoid it.

I do hear that the japanese version is much better though, so maybe I'll check that out.

I feel incredibly distressed tonight. My Ex-Roomate is refusing to take me off the lease unless I sign some sort of "agreement," which he hasn't given me yet, so I don't know what's in it. He's sent me many accusatory e-mails, in which he insults me, and tries to lay the blame of what happened on my head. He tires to downplay what happened, constantly refering to what happened as "what you think happened" or "the night that you became frightened." He has quit trying to make me like him again and move back in with him. He sees that I mean business, and that I'm not going to be his friend again, and now he's attacking me.

But the truth is that he was attacking me in one way or another almost the whole time that I lived with him. He constantly invaded my privacy. He was allways trying to tell me what to do. He was allways pointing out in which ways I was dyfunctional, and how if I let him tell me what to do everything would work out. Watching him interact with his other "friends" was allways a distressing experience, because he would berate them incessantly, try to make them feel like they were bad people that he could fix, and whenver they said anything to stand up for themselves he would concoct some sort of logical trap, hit them with a torrent of technical words, and when they would become confused he would swoop in for the kill, telling them that the outcome of his statement was that they needed to do what he said. It was really sick, and by the end of my time there I was barely speaking with him. Luckily, by the end of the time I was living there he was spending the majority of his time sleeping on the couch, and his speeches to me were usually just one sentence statements, telling me to not think this, not worry about that, and not do the other thing, which I pretty much just ignored.

The one thing that I did that I'm not so proud of is I promised him, the day after he attacked his friend and tried to break down my door, that if he got my name off the lease quickly and without argument, then I wouldn't tell the apartment manager what had happened. However, after a few weeks went by and no action had been taken, I went to the aparment manager and told him everything that happened, to find out what my options were. I also did this because, reviewing my ex-roommate's past actions, I realized that he would most likely distort the situation to try to lay the blame on me (I have first-hand experience of him doing this. One time he asked me to write an e-mail to someone who was supposed to give him notes for a class. This was right before he checked himself into an institution for a few days, and he asked me to tell his friend that he was in the hospital, didn't have e-mail access, and that he really needed his friend to bring the notes ASAP to the office of students with disabilities. I wrote the e-mail, then sent it, and then felt like shit. I told him that I would never do anything like that for him again). Also, every time I talked to him before he found out I told the apartment manager what happened he tried to manipulate me into moving back in with him, which made it clear to me that he was not interested in getting me off the lease. But I did break my promise to him, and I don't feel good about that. Now, he's using that as an excuse to make things difficult, constantly reminding me in his e-mails (I refuse to talk to him on the phone) that everything would have gone off just fine if I had not broken that agreement, and that now he's forced to have me agree, in writing, to certain things. I shuder to think what these "certain things" might be.

The real point of all of this is that I feel really broken right now. I feel like I can't trust anyone anymore, that I can't open myself up to other people. I thought that I was putting this all behind me, but my actions and feelings say differently. I find myself being very schemeing with other people, and very selfish. I've been avoiding people in general, because I feel very vulnerable in front of them, and wary of how they might try to manipulate me. But I realize now that that's the exact opposite of what is good for me. What I need to do is associate myself with people who have proven to me in the past that they can be trusted, so as to restore my faith in people. Isolation has never helped me. It has always made things worse. Loving association has always made things better. But I'm afraid that my judgement is shot, and that the people that I thought I could trust in the past will turn on me at any moment.

But it's not like my ex-roommate turned on me out of the blue. It was actually a not-very-surprising culmination of events. He was verbally manipulating me the whole time. When I cut off that avenue, and closed myself off emotionally and mentally from him, he took the desperate act of trying to get at me physically. When I cut off that avenue by moving out, he's trying to get at me legally. He's been doing it the whole time. This is not the case with my other friends. They have been trustworthy the whole time I've known them, and I have no reason to doubt them now.

Alot of times I feel like I can't trust a certain individual, or that so-and-so gives me a bad feeling, and that I should keep that person at arm's length. However, I usually discount those feelings, because of my problems with paranoia in the past. I need to realize that there are certain people that I can't trust, but there are alot more that I can. The fact that there are some people out there who could easily do me harm is not paranoid, it's realistic. What I need to do, however, is look at the facts of how people treat me, not go just be feelings. There were alot of things that my ex-roommate said and did before I moved in with him that could have tipped me off that he was of dubious trustworthiness, and that he probably wouldn't be a good person to associate myself with too closely. On the other hand, my long-term friends have shown me, over and over again, that I can trust them. That they're not out to manipulate me or use me.

Why can't I get this out of my head? What do I need to do to start the healing process?

I'm feeling rather gaurded and defensive towards other people lately. I'm feeling rather lonely, but I'm having a hard time getting myself to contact other people. When I do manage to come into contact with someone, my interactions with them feel off-kilter and evasive, like I can't give myself fully into what I'm doing with them.

It's strange living on my own again. Knowing that someone I knew well was in the next room was comforting, even if I wasn't exactly comfortable with that person in general. I slept well on my vaction too, because I slept every night in the houses of friends. Now I'm just with strangers, and I've been having a hard time sleeping. I feel very energetic, and it's mostly a positive feeling. But the lack of sleep is making the rest of my life more difficult.

Hopefully I'll start getting back into a regular schedule soon.

Finnally, someone out there has discovered the truth about what's really going on. All hail the mighty Zogg!

The first few days of the quarter are allways my least favorite. This is because I don't do well with having options. I change my mind about what classes I want to take over and over again, constantly doubting my choices, running back to the computer to change them every few hours, attending 10 different classes in the first week, none of which feel right to me. By the time the first week is over, and changing classes is no longer such an easy process, I'm stuck with three or four classes that I can't stand.

Then everything gets alot better: I know what I have to do, and I know that I'm not getting out of it, so I spend my time just focusing on what I'm doing, instead of just trying to figure out what to do in the first place. By the end of the quarter I feel very secure (though stressed out), and quite happy with the choices I made.

I think this is also one reason why I get so desperate about finding a relationship sometimes (not so much right now, but quite frequently in the past). I just want to find someone, make my decision, and then live with it. I'm sick of wondering who I should be with. I'd rather just start working on the day-to-day activities of actually being with someone. I'd rather be in the process of building something, instead of just wondering what the hell it is that I should be building.