*still shaking fist at College Board, but more happily now*

At the risk of opening myself up to a few "I-told-you-so's"...

MIT undergrad statistics: (from www.mit.edu)

Acceptance rate= about 13-14% (And I think everyone that applies has either a 4.0 gpa or close, and high SAT's... so it takes something extra)
Middle 50% score range of admitted students:

SAT I Verbal		[690, 770]
SAT I Math		[740, 800]
ACT Composite		[31, 34]
SAT II Math		[740, 800]
SAT II Science		[710, 790]
SAT II Humanities		[700, 780]

So... my SAT scores came back, and I got a 770 on the SAT II Math and a 760 on the SAT II Science (biology), and a 670 on the SAT II Humanities (US history).
So I have to drop the history score and take reading in the fall, which I'm sure I can get at least a 750 on, and which I should have taken in the first place... And I have to take the SAT's this weekend and get over a 1500 preferrably, and I need to take the ACT's in two weeks and get a 34 or above preferrably (as opposed to my current 32) (which I can if I raise my math score by at least two points). I think those things are possible.
And...

MY SAT II MATH AND BIOLOGY SCORES ARE HIGH ENOUGH FOR MIT!!!! I felt so bad about those tests, and I was so nervous about the scores... I thought there was no way I scored high enough. I could always retake the math, but retaking the bio wasn't really an option, so I only had one chance. (Dropping the history and taking the reading is not going to be a problem.) And I did it!!!

My bio score bodes well for my AP bio test, but it must be noted that my low history score does not bode well for my AP US history test. Oh well, no use in worrying until the middle of July (when AP scores come).

All of this means my grades and test scores are high enough to get into MIT, Caltech, etc. But... so are everyone else's that applies, I think. It's going to take more. I've got the leadership as down as I'm going to get it... I'm church class president (soon) and key club vice president. I have the out of school activities (I'm going to be very successful at debate I hope this year, and I play all of the string instruments and piano and have been in the city symphony). I have the service (I'm in National Honors Society and I volunteer weekly at the Humane Society). I have the phony prestige (National Honor Roll).

What matters the most is whether my father can get his stupid hospital to let me work in his genetics lab this summer. I honestly believe that will make the difference. I suppose if they won't let me work in the lab I can do paperwork and research papers and get something published, but that's not as exciting as actually doing the PCR and running the gels. I think that if I do that this summer, I actually have a good chance of getting in.

But I can't get my hopes up!

One more bit of good news before I sink back into depression: this past week my eating has gone really well. I haven't binged or purged, I've eaten a reasonable amount, and I've been steady at 109 pounds. Which I guess I can live with. I've felt pretty good about eating too. I think for some crazy reason I feel more in control of my life now... No, don't try it at home, cutting your wrist probably does not generally aid people in beating eating disorders. But it has helped me a lot. I'm starting to believe that maybe, with a lot of work, I can live without all of these horrible aspects of bulimia.

Finally, Josh left two messages on my cellphone. He called during money management actually, and I didn't know my phone was on, so I had to sprawl all over my backpack and talk loudly to keep Mrs. Chamberlin from noticing when it rang.
He read two poems to me. Just the sound of his voice was enough to melt every single resolve in me to not come running straight back into the relationship we had. Him reading the poems was more than enough. Also, I got our prom pictures today, and we look really good, and I remember how happy I was that night, and the night before... (I WILL post pictures soon, I promise).
I don't know if I can do this.

Life is crazy. Today I sat in front of the television, watching this cartoon Erin loves, Avatar (it is pretty sweet), reading kids' books, feeling angry angry angry, eating 94% fat-free popcorn, thinking constantly of Josh.
"Move on," my mom says, "let go."
Ha.
I wrote a poem, anyway, and I like it, the first poem I've liked in a while. It's about confusion. It's about life when it falls apart and the laws of time disintegrate and everything coexists in your mind, past, present, and future.

ADD

would you like to care?

...like to care...

FOCUS
the way your mother drinks coffee on monday mornings with tired eyes

do you want to be like that?

death is waiting in its homespun lair.........................you see it now......

there is no evasion

would you like the world to make sense?
oh, sense...
what is sense?

it is the broken leg of the spider,
so inticrately painful even though it has seven more;
greed is the phantom limb

[[you see your father in the night with his hands cupping pills]]

'let me see your tattoos' they ask
do you feel that momentary panic?
do you feel the bluejay wings scraping for an instant
at your past?

do you want to scream,

IT'S NOT A ((TATTOO))! I CUT MY WRIST!!!

oh, but you're okay, aren't you?

your mother, she talks about it

yesterday:
my daughter, she's fine, she's happy, she has good grades...

what? is there more than that to life?

your father, standing in the dark, your mother, drinking coffee...

wouldn't you like to care?

I went to X-Men 3 yesterday and cried the whole way through, safe in a cacoon of anonymity in the dark theater full of people focusing on everything but me. All that love... and that painful truth that Wolverine couldn't have the one person he loved, he had to lose her because he loved her... sounded a bit familiar. Then Erin drove me around town and we talked about the future, how I am going to change, how I am going to get better...

And today, I watched Pay it Forward. Many people have told me they don't like this movie, but I don't care what anyone says. Every time I see it I am reminded of why it's my favorite movie. So much of my life philosophy is embedded in it. And don't tell me it's stupid that he dies in the end... what greater love hath a man than this, that he lay down his life for his brother? Also, the first time I saw that movie I was twelve, Haley Joel Osment's age, and I thought he was so hot. To tell the truth, watching it today at 17, five years older than he is in that movie, I still thought he was hot. Hmm... maybe, in addition to every other problem I have at the moment, I am becoming a pedophile.

Actually I asked Shauna once why I am sometimes so attracted to guys with bodies that look young (or just young guys) and she thinks it's because of the innocense; they can't hurt me. I don't know.

Anyway, I am just trying to leech this pain out in healthy ways. It's so much pain, so hard to deal with it. I can do it; I keep telling myself this; I can do it. I feel like cutting, but the idea of cutting is so repugnant to me. It's definitely not what I want right now, and I have enough control to keep myself from resorting to it.

OUCH OUCH OUCH OUCH OUCH OUCH OUCH OUCH OUCH OUCH

That is how I feel right now... Just... OUCH.

one step forward, two steps back

My wrist got infected, got cured again. I wear a scrunchie around it and nobody asks. Nobody but Shauna and Erin. So I told them. The rest of the world will never know, will never care, what happened to me on Wednesday.

Today in my therapist's office was a nightmare. She stuck a wedge in me and pried me apart. All the DID came back. I felt so crazy. There were so many voices screaming inside of me... I kept seeing everything in odd angles. I imagined myself small enough to crawl around in the sphere of the lightbulb, safe, away from all of the nightmares... it all crawled in my skin and I sounded crazy, so many people, too many conflicting emotions... she pried and I split, shamefully, crying all the way, but I split and she knew... I'm not healed yet.

I wanted to scream and break the ceiling bulb even as I ran inside it.

And my parents came and told her about Josh, what he's done to me. All of these months he's put so much pressure on me. I'm the reason he lives. I'm the reason he dies. He told his therapist I'm the reason he OD'd. I'm the reason he wants to get better. I'm the reason he can't. I've been so scared that if I left him he'd kill himself. My parents and counselor says he's abused me unconsciously, and manipulated me, made me bear more than any human can bear. I'm finally broken. He finally crashed and I broke with him, broke into all of these personalities that are still inside of me.

AM I CRAZY? Because I feel crazy... I thought the other personalities were gone, but then on monday and tuesday they were materializing due to sexual abuse stuff, and on Wednesday they all came back. When I'm with people it's usually okay, I can focus myself into one person. But it was apparent today that they are all still there inside of me, fractured bits of me, pieces of a broken past, waiting for something. It felt horrible... like alcohol in a raw wound.

I can't talk to Josh anymore, not for a long time, not until he gets better and can be with me without worshipping me, without making me all of his reasons, without expecting me to be more than I can be. I'm so mad at him. Not only has he turned his life upside down, but he has turned mine upside down.

I can't explain how it feels to lose him for now. I can't really tell you how much it hurts, because when I think about it my mind starts to shut down and drift apart again, and I don't want that. But I can tell you I'll surive. I'll survive because that's what I do. People hurt me. Love hurts me. All of the people I love leave me. Every time it hurts just as badly as the last. But I get up again, and I keep living. I keep surviving. And I will survive this. Although some part of me will always been inside Josh, and I won't ever get it back.

I had my birthday party tonight. It was girls only. We are all so used to parties with guys where everyone plays football and wanders around feeling awkward. I wanted to be young again, and I wanted them to be young again. It was a survivor party. Everyone came and drew tribe names and painted their faces. There was about thirteen people there. We played team games, and then we played individual games to see who won the gift certificate. I had to eat a cup of pig intestines. The final challenge was holding a live cricket in my mouth for three minutes. That cricket was jumping around in my mouth, scrabbling its legs and tail against my tongue and the walls of my cheeks, but I did it. I spit that thing out and it was still alive. It hopped off, drenched in saliva. I won the survivor game.

We played party games, told stories about our most embarrassing moments and our first kisses. There was pizza and ice cream and presents. I had a hard time believing that there could be that many people that really cared about me in the world, but there were, and I knew that everyone there loved me a lot. The panic from everything- going crazy again, losing the boy I love more than anyone- subsided just a little, and I did feel young again, and alive.

But I am hurting, very, very badly right now. I love Josh. I love Josh in ways I could not begin to explain. I know, now, that I have to lose him. And I know that I have to move on, because it wouldnt' be good for me to remain trapped in the past with him. But it feels... it feels like living without a heartbeat... like somehow the blood is washing through me, filtering through my kidneys, feeding all my cells with oxygen and glucose so they can respire happily, but I'm not really alive, and my heart isn't really moving.

Things aren't really okay. I'm not sure if they ever will be truly okay again. But I believe in life still. And I believe in myself. And I believe in surviving and moving on, even if for a while I am not whole. I can be happy. I can be healthy. I can do this, with or without a beating heart.

I'm so used to losing the things I love most.

urgent care

What do I write? How do I explain? I almost died tonight, I guess, according to my father and urgent care.

Shortly after writing my last entry, I completely lost control. I dissociated. It was a knee-jerk reaction. I couldn't stop it. One second I was here, in the world, and then I was gone. I wasn't suicidal. You know that. I don't even remember cutting my wrist. But I guess I did. When I woke up, the cut was deep and blood was everywhere. I was still cutting. It was bleeding so much I was worried about the artery. My father said I almost cut it. He said I'm really lucky I'm not dead.

I threw out all the razorblades. My mom drove into the driveway. I stood there, dripping blood, and I said I needed stitches, quickly. My dad drove up and I got in the car and we went to urgent care. They gaved me five (or six can't remember) stitches across my wrist, told me I'm lucky I didn't nick any tendons because they were all exposed.

Oh yeah, that was what woke me up. I felt a tendon with the razorblade and it sent a tingling shot up into my hand.

They wanted to admit me to the same psychiatric hospital I was at in eigth grade, but my parents called my counselor and my psychiatrist and I explained to them that I wasn't suicidal. Hearing about Josh triggered that horrible dissociative reflex. I don't know what happened after that because I don't remember it, but I must have pried some new blades out of a razor and sat on my bedroom floor and sobbed as I cut my wrist. I woke up with tears on my face. I explained all this to them, and they said I didn't have to go to the hospital. I have to sleep in my parents' room for a few nights. I have to see my psychiatrist tomorrow and my counselor on friday. I have to figure out how to make it so this never happens again.

They all kept saying how lucky I was that I didn't die...

I am angry that I did this. It won't help anything. How am I going to explain six stitches on my wrist for two weeks? What will I tell people? People don't just accidentally cut their wrists.

My hand is still numb from the anasthetic (maybe the same kind they sent in massive overdoses into my Sandy a week ago). They injected it directly into the wound because the nerves were exposed.

I'm such a failure. I was supposed to be strong for Josh... I didn't want this to happen. I wanted to be steady for him. Apparently ibuprofin can cause serious liver damage, so I'm a bit worried about him...

When he most needed me I went and almost killed myself. Now my parents aren't sure if I'll be allowed to see him next month. But I'll fight for it. It's so hard to be so far away and to be so worried...

It feels unreal. I feel so weird. The cut was a quarter of an inch deep. I had to explain to all the nurses and doctors that I did it to myself but I didn't mean to.

I just want to sleep and sleep until this all goes away.

I HATE YOU STUPID FREAKING WORLD!

I got the message on my cell phone. He took the ibuprofin on Monday night. They took him to the emergency room. He's been in the hospital since then, and will be there a few more days. I don't know what kind of hospital. But he told me he could hear the birds singing outside his room, and I told him a week ago that even when it was the dark I was the singing of the birds, not the sunlight. I am the constant thing.

I don't feel constant now. I feel intensely suicidal. It is odd how that works, how he can OD on so many pills and nearly kill himself and when I find out it is such a blow to everything that the first thing I imagine is doing the same thing, cutting my wrist, dying somehow. But I won't kill myself. I have to be here for him. That's what's so hard... I have to be here for him right now but I don't feel like I can be there for anyone. I feel like I'm falling apart. Sexual abuse memories keep tearing me away from the world. The need to jump off of the roof is almost uncontrollable inside of me right now. I can't OD... I can't do that to him, can't end up in the hospital like him. I have to be strong. How? How can I be strong right now? How could he do this to himself?

I'll have to cut... deep... I'll have to cut until I feel strong enough to live...

BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN LIFE, GOSH DA**IT! I BELIEVE IN LOVE!!! I BELIEVE IN TOMORROW! YOU STUPID F-ING WORLD, YOU'RE TRYING TO BREAK US, YOU'RE TRYING TO TEAR US APART, YOU'RE TRYING TO MAKE US BELIEVE THAT DEATH IS THE ONLY OPTION. BUT I DON'T BELIEVE YOU!!! I REFUSE TO!!! THERE IS SOMETHING BETTER THAN THIS!!!!!!!!!!

oh, God, please... it can't end like this.

the past

They don't die, do they? They are slithering inside of me, they are washing into the axons, washing through the synapses, inundating the paths of my nerves until they are all I think about, the memories.

The membrane around me is thick enough, an endometrium, to make me believe in the days of light that there really is no darkness, that the past is dead and gone. It is so easy for a small being in a tiny globe of light in the darkened universe to believe that the light is all that is real, and the darkness is but a dream of less-informed men. It is easy to lie to ourselves like this. But in a lie, in a lie of light in a world of darkness, imagine what a pinhole would do to the sheltered person's morale. Imagine the darkness, amorphous, ooazing in and filling the widening cracks of the weakening sphere. What is there to believe in, then, when ones resistance has always been anchored in ones own perceptions? How do we survive when those perceptions are devoured by impenetrable darkness?

Do you know what's even more sad? I bet you didn't have to imagine that. I bet all you had to do was remember.

Today was birth day in biology. Siobhan put the scissors in the horns of the uteris and cut a slit down the pale gray. There was no obvious kitten inside, but yet another sack, sacks within sacks, zones of placenta, until finally- a cat with small paws, an open mouth, and a tiny tail, three inches long.

It was amazing, the fury I felt in that moment. This would be cessarian section of life, not death, if we weren't tearing these cats apart. These kittens missed their chance to breathe; the alveoli in their lungs collapse wetly against their sunken chests. Why would a humane society euthanize a pregnant cat? Kittens sell quickly. I know that. I go to the Humane Society every week, and the kittens are always gone in less than two.

It made me so angry, that unmistakably human inclination to squash life before it begins.

And then there was the reproductive system. In our cat there was only an emptiness, and we held injecting fluid under our probes and prodded at spayed tissue, pretending fallopian tubes into existance by yanking on the femeral area.

I feel like a kindergartner saying this. I feel young. But maybe there is something important in that hesitation of youth. And I can't handle those words. I was clinging, in biology, on the edge of PTSD, struggling to breathe to remain conscience, to escape dissociation. There is no control, really, over the dynamic spiralling of emotion, though, in a triggered mind. I fell back into the memories with nothing to hold on to, nothing to keep me down but the smell of long-dead cats and the obscenity of dissected kittens.

I've been lying to myself. It doesn't go away, does it? The past? I always think I've worked through these memories, and then I trip and fall into that same old pit. They are as fresh as ever. They sink into me like lead, too heavy for my arms (too small for adult blood pressure cuffs) to lift.

Do I square my shoulders, peek out of the imploding globe of light into the darkness? Do I accept a future perforated by these miserable days? Do I turn and run, run and run and run until the day it catches up with me again? Do I go through the unspeakable pain of facing it one more time?

But it's not one more time, is it? It's today, and then a year, and the year after that, and all the years. It's the pressure of diffusion... all that darkness is pressing, pressing, and there are only two plausible scenarios: either my ball of comfort will be completely destroyed, shattered into infinite pieces, or I will be compressed by the darkness, slowly and then faster, until I am ensconced as deeply in that lie of light, as airlessly, as those kittens in the womb.

terrible day... mi vida corre siempre

I don't know how to start about today. I'm not censoring anything. This is my blog. No matter who reads it, I need that honesty still, I need that realness... So those of you that don't me, just don't read it if you're down. I'll still be honest.

This morning Shauna told me about Stuart (her old boyfriend) fingerbanging her and her giving him a handjob. She is definitely not my first friend to do anything sexual (a lot of mine have, and a few have had sex), but she is the closest. It felt a bit painful for some reason, hearing her recount it. And also some part of me (which I wanted to suffocate) wondered what it was like and was aroused slightly by the conversation. I don't know why I believed in middle school that my friends would stick to what they said back then, that they would have sex until college, wouldn't smoke pot, wouldn't drink. Maybe because I believed I would. And I have, with everything except drinking obviously, and I think the way I drank is a little different than the way my friends do, except maybe JoAnna.
And Shauna only said she wouldn't have sex... she said this handjob stuff is her boundary. I don't know why it hurts so bad to hear about it; I don't understand how it screwed with my heart/mind, but it did. Oh my gosh I love that girl. I wish her innocense had remained. She was always so innocent, until this year I think. What she did with Stuart doesn't really shatter that innocense, but the awareness with which she did it does. At least she does not regret it. For my sake I wish she did, but for her health I'm glad she doesn't.
Also, thinking about sex today, I know that saving it until marriage (not counting the sex when I was little) won't be hard for me, because it's what I really want, and as long as I stay out of problem situations (Shauna confirmed my experiences, saying there was no point at which time stopped and asked her whether she wanted to continue, it just happened) like that one with Matt in September (curses on him always) I'll be fine, but it does make me curious of this world all around me that my friends exist in that I promise I will not touch.

I also found out my Jo Jo has a restraining order against her boyfriend Mat today, which upset me because it guarentees that my suspicions that he was hitting her, besides telling her he'd kill himself if she left him and coercing her into having sex and pulling her into the nightmares of alcohol, are probably correct. I can't imagine anyone hurting JoAnna... she lives to please others. And I know she needs his abuse in the same way I need abuse, but I would do anything to save her from it, if I thought it would work. I hope she honors the restraining order her parents fought for, but I don't think she will. She's too lost in that stupid boy (who has plenty of problems of his own, so I can't hate him really for hurting her, although I hate that he's hurting her).

(Brief inerlude in my depression... I thought Siobhan and JoAnna had forgotten my birthday, but they came over last night while Erin and I were watching The Land Before Time, which is an awesome movie, with flowers and a Barry Trotter parody, and I haven't felt that loved in a week since Josh was here, and from them in forever, just by that simple action of remembering my birthday. It made me so, so happy.)

Also I was trying to talk to my mom tonight and somehow we got around to 'what happened' and she said that most parents hit their seventeen-year-old kids in the face if they do something wrong, which sounded a bit off to me, so I said so, but she then started on how she didn't do anything wrong to me until I was fourteen, and that I exaggerated everything. I know she'll never believe that she did anything, but I need that vindication so much... and then she started yelling at my dad that he should be taken away by child protective services because he threw that thing yesterday and actually hit her, with the intent of proving that what she did wasn't any worse and her having to leave the home was ridiculous.

Oh my gosh, I always forget that can of worms... I was so, so angry at my mom, so of course I immediately thought of hurting myself. I cut my hand a little, but then I decided that instead of turning all of my anger inward, I should reach out to people that cared about me. So I wrote Josh an email which will probably depress him even more as he is currently on the verge of OD-ing on ibuprofin, and I can't get ahold of him, and I talked to Ariel, which helped a lot, and I called Erin and talked to her for over an hour.

Oh Erin... she is an amazing person. She listened to me... somehow, with the physical abuse and Shauna going on about that handjob this morning all the sexual abuse came out too... is it wrong to masturbate in front of a three year old? Is sex bad if a four year old asks for it? Is it bad for a babysitter to reenact it? Is fingerbanging a three-year-old bad?
People keep answering those and all the others, and I keep forgetting... I can't hold it in my head long enough, I can't believe in myself enough to believe it. I can find guilt in that three-year-old and four-year-old, and I latch on to that guilt in a way I can never hold on to the innocense.

It helped a lot, to talk to people, to reach out (see, I AM changing, I'm not just imploding nowadays, I'm seeking help), but I still feel mildly suicidal. No, suicidal is not really the word, as I'm not actually considering killing myself. It's just suicide ideation. It sounds nice right now, being dead. All the pain gone. The cutting doesn't really work. The bulimia is a nightmare. The inhalents only created an ethereal fog. The alcohol only built more guilt. Nothing on this earth can take me away from the pain, so death is appealing.

I won't kill myself. I still believe too much in life. I'm not desperate like I was in November when I cut my wrist. No, I'm just so tired of hurting. So tired of living. So tired of the world being just this big construct of pain.

More than me hurting, I'm tired of watching other people hurt. More than helping myself, I want to help them. But I just can't figure out how.

I have been a hundred times on the point of killing myself, but still was fond of life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our worst instincts. What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us, and hug him close to our bosoms til he has gnawed into our hearts?
-Candide, Volataire

I am really enjoying this book, as it is hilariously cynical and satirical of many forms of ridiculous optimism, but this fragment, although embedded of course in the sarcastically horrible story of an old woman, sort of grabbed me. I wonder if it really is the worst of our instincts, or the best?

I wish sometimes that I could just be stone, just sink to the bottom and settle there to grow a film of dust; the resillience in me is annoying; something in me always bounces. I'm bipolar. I can be depressed for days, weeks, months, but there are always bounces, always moments when I am flung back into the sky.

My parents have been yelling all day at each other and me. My father threw something at my mom and she told him that if she gotten take out of the home for being abusive then we needed to accuse him of being abusive too. It wasn't quite the ideal birthday. I don't want my family to be like this when I'm older.

I am happy, but in a cynical, lost way. I find a horrible emptiness in happiness, a void that depression fills but happiness ignores. But I'm taking the pills again, prescribed and others... I do care about life, still. Even if it is the worst of instincts and the serpent devours me, you are all right, there is hope, there is a way.

seventeen...

Wow. Seventeen won't seem old when I'm forty, but it seems old now. I could go watch an R-rated movie right now if I watched them and if I went to movies on Sundays.
My mom's being really mean today. I guess it's not some rule that people should be nice to you on your birthday, but it would be nice.

Look at me, alive, seventeen. Wow. Some cicadas stay underground for seventeen years before they crawl to the surface to live for a day in the sun, and then die.

I need to be a teenager more often

Today I went to my counselor, ready for her brilliant solution, and she told me there wasn't one. Apparently she 'staffed' my case, which means she told the other counselors in her office about my problems and they talked about it (no specifics), and they all told her that the eating disorder was a big deal, and ingrained, and that it was too big to have an easy solution.

It's horrible, to have hope, and to hear that, to hear it's going to be just as hard as I've always feared, to hear there's no fixing something that started so unobtrusively with one fell swoop. I wanted to hear that there was some place I would go and they would fix it for me. I suppose residential treatment is a really plausible option right now, but I don't want that, and my counselor is willing to continue trying to work with me as an outpatient. And we have no other resources in my semi-small town.

So I was a little depressed, and I wanted to shake it off. After school Erin and I went to Dairy Queen and I got my sugar-free fat-free orange concoction, not guilt-free, but not binging. We went to a park, and there were all these people running around in this fountains, you know those squares of ground with all the holes that water comes shooting out of, teenagers and adults and little kids all running around in their clothes in the heat. People... looked so happy, it hurt. Happiness always seems to hurt me in some profound way. Anyway, Erin and I went on the climbing wall, the monkey bars. It was raining and I went down the slide and the butt of my jeans got all wet and I didn't care. That's being a teenager... that, the return to innocense, to childhood. People think that being a teenager means responsibility, busyness, homework, making out, sex, swearing, depression, emo-existence. But... they're so wrong. That's not being a teenager. Being a teenager is going back and being young again, laughing, running through fountains, going down slides. Being a teenager is recovering all the screwed up parts of your childhood that never quite worked out, and relinquishing them at an age when you're more equipped to appreciate them.
"Never too late for a happy childhood."

Tonight I went to a baseball game with Stevie. The weather was so perfect, and the grass was so green, and summer was descending slowly, its parachute encompassing the warm air. We talked as the teenage boys slid around the bases, as our hometown lost spectacularly. We cheered for the other team, sometimes on accident, sometimes on purpose. We laughed, joked, etc.

I was young. There wasn't the seriousness, the fear, the guilt, the hatred. I'm so used to social situations being like feeding frenzies. I'm constantly panicked about being judged. I'm always worried that I'm annoying. I'm always telling myself to shut up. I hate that sinking feeling when one of my friends puts me down (which Siobhan does a lot). Sometimes all the heaviness of it collapses so much inside of me that I lose all the joy of my friends. Today was good, playing on the equipment, watching the fountains and the baseball game. I remembered that the panic isn't what it's supposed to be about. Friendhips are supposed to be about more than that...

I'm so frustrated, angry, upset, lost in this eating disorder. I would like to kill it, if it was something I could kill. I am more angry at it than I am at my mom, when I am in that blind rage. But I'm still human... I can still be young... I can still go back and live in the ways I missed before.

Convoluted, yes. Everything is.
My hypocrisy has ceased to bother me. Yes, I'm intolerant of intolerance. Yes, I know that's a paradox. But if everyone was tolerant of each other's intolerance, what would we be? The word loses meaning. Life loses meaning.

I'm sick of being a yoyo. My moods, my eating. Up down, binge purge.

I'm very mad at my mom right now. Do I have a right to be? I have no idea. Our relationship sure is more healthy than it used to be. But... something's still missing. She's still so touchy. I'm still so out of it somehow.

I have no money, so I drew a picture for my friend for her birthday, colored pencil birds that look to bright to exist in this world. I fell back into that lethargy that comes with art and I remembered, and it hurt. I miss art so much. I miss the pencils, the charcoal, the ink, the paint. I miss three different kinds of erasers for three different mediums.

The birds look okay. At least I can still draw.

Is it possible to be so full of love that you are empty, devoid of life? To love and lose... I don't know.
Josh called tonight and all of the infinite reasons that I love him reasserted themselves. But also a fixation on emptiness lodged back into my stomach... and today at the Humane Society we brushed this dog that looked a little like Sandy... and all of the trees with their bright pink flowers reminded me her and I felt lost.

Yesterday, as they injected her death, I doubted accutely. It's the first time in a while that I've had that strong of an attack of doubt. Everything I know is true about my church and God and resurrection suddenly became hazy and doubtful. I couldn't believe that she was up there somewhere, waiting for me. It seemed so much more plausable that she was gone forever.

I am hollow with the fullness. I don't know how I feel. I haven't taken my medicine in a while. I haven't wanted it for some reason. Everything is sharper without it.

I will beg on Friday. I will sit in her office and beg for a new life. I can't do this anymore, I can't handle this anymore, I want to be something more than this. I still can't stand how small I am in the infiniteness of time, how tiny a crack I carve in the universe. I am nothing and my dog is nowhere and all I want (to hold the boy I love) is thwarted by physicalities.

I don't know. I'm happy, but I'm depressed. Depressed, and lonely still in a profound, insane way, because I am no longer alone.

death of a loved one

Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or "broken heart," is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.
-Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I suppose that what they have been trying to tell me all day is that this quote applies to dogs, that euthanasia is okay. I only know that as I held her head, as she begged to be petting (nudging her nose at me) even as the massive amount of sedative put her to sleep and stopped her heart, I hated my parents and I hated that vet. It felt so worng. I tried to keep my eyes open but I think I was crying too hard. I wasn't sure of the exact moment that she died. Her eyes didn't close. Her body was still warm. But I felt it sag a bit on me, more than a nudge, and though I suppose it was a quick and easy death for her, I believe it was the beginning of a long and painful death for me.

I have been in two dimensions all day. One is a dimension of unbelievable pain in which my head aches, my throat hurts, and the crying is unceasing. The other is a dimension of apathy, of disbelief. She can't be dead (though I felt her dying); she's still here somewhere, panting, waiting to nudge me to pet her, to love me unconditionally in that amazing dog way that she always has.

I don't know what's going on inside of me. I can't feel and I feel too much. I feel like puking up everything I've ever felt. Then, maybe, I could move on. I'm scared that the sorrow will create a gouge in life and I will be stuck. I'm scared I'll forget her and never feel sad again.

Time

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last. "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." -Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans

It is interesting, and heart-breakingly tragic, the way we take the destructive traditions of our parents and continue them, replicating them in exactness.
I shouldn't write in moods like these. The sentimentality splinters things. I am unable to see the forest for the trees. That is the story of my life, really. I see life through faceted eyes, like an insect's. I see everything in detail, in pictures, and am unable at times to logically draw conclusions, to arrange things so they make sense. I suppose, though, that there is greater worth in that than in being unable to see the trees for the forest (too many cliches, sorry), because a forest cannot exist without trees, while trees are the constituents of a forest.

So I will write in pieces. It is so much easier than the mental taxation of constructing narrative.

My dog threw up blood all night. It came in large puddles, long after it seemed possible that she would have any more food or liquid or acid in her stomach. We brought her home from the hospital yesterday, and she was doing well, and she ate a lot and looked alive. This morning she lay in a pool of her own blood with her head down and her eyes yellow and sad. Tomorrow will probably be the day, the euthanasia. Does it feel wrong to me because of my moral views on animals and consciousness and agency? Or does it just feel wrong because I am selfish, and need her desperately? I have discovered that when looking at the world through a moral lens it is the intentions that clarify people, not the actions.
Death is something, I suppose, that cannot be escaped. We tried. She lay there with IV in her paw, naked in the shaved area. We fed her halibut because it was all she would eat. We believed, for a day, that she would get better, but she did not. That's why doctors should never tell the family of a loved one that they have a 50% chance of surviving- because the loved ones regain 100% of their hope, and it hurts so much more then to lose it.

On Friday when Josh came I felt something I've never felt before, something I can't pretend to understand. I sat downstairs on the couch with him, watching a movie (Dragonfly) and I believed there was no way I could hug him hard enough to squash the urgency. Not sexual urgency. I don't know how to describe it. I needed to be inside of his mind. It wasn't enough to be sitting by him, hugging him, holding him. I needed to be him. I needed to surrender all of the doubts and pains and walls and become something more. It was a more intense, insistent need than any desire I have ever experienced before. As I sat there, I felt that that moment could only dilate, that time couldn't exist sequentially, only simultaneously, only in that moment, oriented on love.

And time... I have been wondering whether it is the human conscience that forces time into sequence. Perhaps time could exist objectively, constantly, non-linearly. Maybe it is possible to escape the human interpretation of time into a more godly one. Though that doesn't explain Einstein's hypothesis, that at the speed of light organic, biological functions slow down in the speeding body will not on the motionless planets surrounding it. That implies that people can manipulate time, which is ultimately far more frightening than the ability of manipulating even colossal matter. But can we manipulate our experience of time, even to the extent of manipulating biological processes?

There was a moment Saturday when we stood beneath a tree, and I noticed everything in the way I do. My mind takes photographs, not footage. It takes effort for me to arrange the moments and somehow reconcile time. Anyway, in this moment we were surrounded by this halo of blossoms, a tree with flowers whose white centers radiated outward into a deep pink. I felt anchored to the world by his hand and his eyes (I have always had a blue-eye fixation). The air was just warm enough for me to feel safe. The ground below my feet was scrubbed from all the snow and then the sudden warmth. Noise from a bicycle convention drifted through the selectively permeable membrane of blossoms. Disarmingly full of life, the smell from the tree make the reality of spring inescapable.

My friends met him in their usual unorganized fashion. JoAnna and Siobhan continued existing in their somewhat isolated sphere, punctuated only by the advent of some new loud breed of laughter that JoAnna developed. Josh was protective in a way I desperately needed. There was the usual constant jabbing from Siobhan, sarcasm on that uncomfortable edge between mutually funny and symbiotically predatory; however, this time I had a shield (who looked very hot in plaid shorts... so hot that I almost forgot the evolutionary advantage that I had over the wooden table in that I possessed a brain). I wondered briefly whether I deserved protection, whether maybe I deserved the cynicism, but then I shut up the voice and reveled in safety.

There was a moment in a museum when my lips might have found his and the sculpture of a tree with its swirling, multi-colored leaves (fabric and the thinnest batting) made darting shadows on the hardwood floor and we were surrounded in art and beauty and time but the real art and beauty and time were coming from inside of us, not the painstaking creations of charcoal and oil and fabric and clay.

Layer after layer of makeup piling on a face... you wouldn't believe how many layers of differently colored concoctions it takes to make a face look human. The eyelash curlers tugged slightly at the translucent vein-laced skin over my eyes. Foundation, bronzer, blush created plateaus on my cheeks. Four different shades of eyeshadow covered my abused eyelids. It was all executed by my sister-in-law with an air of reverence for my air, put up by a stylist wielding an infinite supply of bobby pins, curling down in layers around my face.

I tried to feel beautiful, in the moment, but I had lost my shoes and the ones I wore were a size too large (although I later escaped the awkwardness by shedding them at the dance). I felt like some tangerine vision. I concentrated on beauty, and I found it in some places- in my hair, my face, my dress- but that insufferable voice inside of me would not yield its opportunity to remind me that I need to lose weight. It means something, I suppose, that in my most beautiful, invulnerable moments, I am still completely defenseless to that voice.

Do you have any idea how beautiful a boy with blue eyes and blond hair and freckles can be in a tuxedo with an orange bow-tie and cumberbun(sp?) and shiny shoes? No, you don't. I think that nobody has ever seen beauty in the world in quite the same way that I saw in that boy in his tuxedo.

Even when completely lost within someone's reality (the way I was in Josh's), the guilt still pounded constantly down on me in heavy anvil-like strokes as I ate dinner and took pictures of the way our hands looked under the table, framed by the yellow roses in my corsage.

The dance... what matters about the dance... is the way two humans (or three or four) can become an island in dark waters. It's not that I will judge my peers for what they wear, or the way they act, although perhaps I am, unintentionally. It is that prom, for them, was about rebellion... dancing close enough to completely level boutenaires(sp?) plastered against buttonholes. For me, in prom, I find myself in adherence to beliefs. There were four girls (including me) out of over a hundred wearing dresses with sleeves. I won't lie, and say a part of me wasn't embarrassed. But the part of me that found a sort of pride in being able to squash that embarrassment with my desire to serve something more than what my peers decide is popular was more powerful. I felt... yes, alone, almost completely, in the way I was dancing, the way that I acted... but I knew it was an okay kind of alone. I have nothing against all of the girls there that don't believe it's wrong to wear sleeveless dresses. I know that's part of my religion, and I don't share my religion with them. But it hurt to see people that I know believe in my religion letting their fear of others win out over them... friends from my church dancing in that way that repelled my eyes, wearing those dresses that I only imagine wearing for an instant before I reject the idea. It's not that I'm disappointed in people for having beliefs different than mine, I know that's inevitable. But I'm very disappointed in people that have the same beliefs in mine but don't stick to them. What I admire in people is not the way they act when it's easiest to follow what they believe in, but the way they act when it's most difficult.
Not, of course, that I am perfect.
But in this way, we were happy islands.

Of course, we cannot escape prom without some horribly embarrassing story. We requested a slow song (they don't play many slow songs at prom, because people don't need slow songs to dance very very close these days) and we were standing at the dark bottom of the stairs, pretty much in privacy, and it's not that we were doing anything really wrong, or that it was any different from the way everyone else was acting, but I guess it was that we were alone in that alcove, which I'm sure did not look good to the police officer that barged in on us and told us we'd better leave that area (or to the people that laughed at us as we did).

There is something so fulfilling about finally going to church with someone after so many months of fighting darkness. I can't describe that. I guess it's a photo I can't share.

Shauna asked me on Friday if I thought I would really make it to marriage without having sex. I think it's unfathomable to her. But you wouldn't believe how many amazing things you can do "just kissing." It doesn't really get old.

Upstairs, it still smells like vomit and blood.
Every joy, I think, is sandwiched by some tragedy.

pulling out of it

Thursday was bad. I felt almost suicidal. I kinda went through school in the haze. My mom told me they were putting my dog to sleep today. I was eaten by guilt. I felt myself falling back into the abyss, and I didn't make any attempt to pull myself out. I didn't take my medicine. I felt overwhelming compulsions to cut, and I would have if it wasn't for the various people I knew that would disappoint. I guess I am proud of that- of getting through those cravings without succumbing.
My dad called after school Thursday and told me there was a chance of Sandy's (my dog) main problem being an autoimmune anemia and not hepatitis (although she has both, if the hepatitis was underlying she would die), which is treatable. I went to get a drink and see Charlie's house, and although the guilt was still there, I told him that Josh was really the only one for me, and that I couldn't make any sort of committment to him, and that I just wanted to have fun with him and hang out with him. I went to see my doggy and she looked way better. All her blood counts/jaundice counts (ballyrubin?) etc. were way better. My parents said that today they're even better, and she actually stood up and took a step on her own.
Today after school I went to Tizer Gardens with the same friends I went with nine months ago (Siobhan, Kyrstin, and Jo. Emma wasn't there this time, because Siobhan was mad at her or something) and it was so fun. I ate three smores. I'm feeling it now, the need to purge, but I'll fight it. I felt alive though. Being with friends makes me remember myself.
And today I also felt like a teenager in the way I acted with my friends, with Erin and everyone. I just laughed and laughed, and I threw a shoe at Siobhan when she called me brain dead, and I sang out loud to music and wrote notes in class instead of paying attention (multivariable discrete dynamical systems should NOT invade linear algebra. It's so confusing!). I was... a teenager. Not the depressed, suicidal, lost teenager I was yesterday, but a teenager with hope again.

And guess what! JOSH IS ON HIS WAY!!!!! That news is almost as exciting as my dog having hope. I've missed him so incredibly much since I last saw him. I have tried to plan out this weekend so it will go well, but I fear I will never do as good of a job at date-planning as he does. My parents or my brother/his wife will have to drive us everywhere, but we can be 'alone' in public places, which is actually I think a good compromise, as I didn't think my parents would even let him come.
I need him... I need him in a way I've never needed anyone before. I think he is a part of me. He knows me so thoroughly. He knows everything about me, all of my abysmal failures and all of my menial successes. He knows me and he loves me anyway. That means something... I understand that what I have with Josh is rare. It is worth more than so many temporary things in my life. I believe it will last.

I got my hair cut by the way! Six inches. Maybe I will post prom pics later. Anyway, I have got to go take a shower, as I smell like campfire smoke.

I feel a lot better today though. It reminds me that even when things feel utterly hopeless, change is possible, for better or for worse.

I'm worried about them all. Everyone.
My dog will die tomorrow. The vet's having a race to kill her before she dies. I don't know. I've always been so skeptical of euthanasia, but I don't have a say in it now, and it will at least be nice to be there...
Those no pretending anymore, though, that she'll get better. She's really, really sick.

I told Erin this morning, and she hugged me, and that felt good. But I needed more. I needed to cry and scream; I needed someone to hold me down as I kicked the way my father used to when I was so angry.

Yesterday I was talking to Shauna and Erin, and for some reason they started talking about how I don't eat, and we had this big discussion on it, and I think I started yelling... not at them, but at this, at my life, at myself, at all of it.

I know that what I need is to be able to be sad, but I am so efficient at freeze-wrapping pain and storing it away. I sat in my car this morning and I thought about me in eighth grade, when all the teachers told the school counselors (very helpful individuals... not) that they were 'worried about me.'

Worried... I'm so worried about my friends. Not all of them, but quite a few, who are unhappy but who don't talk much to me anymore; they only tell me enough to tell me how miserable they are, and then after that I'm left with the worry.

You know what? I'm sick of it hurting. Life. I'm sick of life hurting and I want it to stop. I want to be better. I can't live like this anymore, I can't I can't, I don't care if it means going to some residential hospital, I don't care if I hate all the nurses, I don't care about anything as long as it goes away, as long as I can live life... the way I am when I feel young.

I want to help you, please believe me that I do, but I can't if you won't let me in, if you build all these walls that look just like mine...

Life coexist in my house, life glaring brightly and constantly moving, death eating space on the kitchen floor.
My new dog, our maltese puppy, is so alive... she's always barking (obnoxiously at times), moving, sleeping in your lap, full of movement, age, long telomeres.
But my baby, my original baby, the dog I've grown up with, the dog that has followed me from room to room for a long time, can no longer move and is immobile in the kitchen.

Rottweilers are simply amazing dogs. They are incredibly loyal and sweet. They are not mean if you train them not to be. Sandy has never hurt anyone. She has been the perfect dog, the dog I'd make up in my mind if I had to create all the exact traits I wanted in a dog.

She is... twelve or thirteen. But she has a pancreatic disorder. Her pancreus can't produce the enzymes that her duodenum needs to digest things, so we have to dust them on her food for her to eat. The disorder has aged her a lot. Our twelve-year-old labrador is still crazy, getting old but still full of life and mishchief.

Sandy's on Rimadyl (sp?), and they switched her to a generic a few days ago. Yesterday she lurched into the dog pen and refused to move. My brother and dad carried her into the house. Today when she got up she fell over and urinated just lying there on the floor in the garage. She couldn't- or wouldn't- get up. My mom took her to the vet and she fell over at the counter and lost a little poop onto the floor (it makes me remember Sasha, dead, her bowels falling out as we sobbed over her tiny body). Now she's lying on her dog bed in the kitchen and she won't move. She'll drink water, but she won't eat. The vet wanted to try cortezone injections, so that's what we're trying.

It seems to me though that she's giving up on life. And maybe it's horribly selfish of me to say this, but it makes me angry at her. I can't count how many times I have hugged her, sobbing from something or other my mother has done to me. She'll always put her head in my lap, let me hold her, so it becomes more of her holding me than the opposite.

We were young together, her a puppy and me four years old. We grew up together. But now she's old and I can't follow her there. Now her hips are giving out and she has a bad back and so many cataracts that she can't see and she can't hear very well. And she's given up. She's given up in the kitchen.

She can't die! Not now! I don't care how selfish I am in saying this. Maybe it would be better for her, to die, to escape that pain in her joints, but I don't think I could survive... The night Sasha died I lay in a broken mess and I slept on my bedroom floor with my arms around Sandy, so glad to still have her, that bit of life left in the death.

I can't lose two dogs in nine months. How cruel, life, death, all of it. Dogs become a part of your heart. Our lab... he's hyper. I love him, but not like I love Sandy. I nearly died when Sasha died, but Sasha was still something young to me, still not totally attached to me. The violent, unexpected way she died made it hard, but really already, despite all my efforts, she has melded into Zoe in my memory and my thoughts. Sandy... Sandy is so connected to me. Sandy is my everything. She has always been there for me. When my house wasn't safe I would go sit with Sandy, and things would slowly be okay again. Since I started cutting, I have gone to Sandy before the blade. If she were to die... it would cut out a significant part of me. I'm not being melodramatic. This is what happens when you love a dog more than you love yourself, far more, for thirteen years.

But what can I do, plant all 109 pounds of me between her and death? Refuse to move, refuse to let her go, even if the pain is too much for her to bear? But why is it okay to euthenize dogs, and very illegal to euthenize humans? Is there a difference in the value of life? Does complex consciousness and an accute sense of past and future make every breath have a higher intrinsic worth?

I can't do anything, really, if she's decided on it, but watch her die in the kitchen as the obnoxious life that I also love blurs my peripheral vision.

What do you do when you eat so much that you feel like junk, that you gain... what? Four, five pounds? in a day... and you can't purge because you have a test in the morning and can't risk any of your methods, so you have to deal with it, sit here feeling like every cell of you might be on the verge of rupturing, and you can't stop it, you'll just explode?

good times in biology

So... the SAT's went pretty much just as badly as the AP history test. I am beginning to accept the fact that my school just might not be capable of preparing me well enough to get into the colleges I want to go to. Or, to take complete accountability, maybe it's me.

Anyway, music festival went very well, I did very well on all three of my solos and my ensamble. That's the only thing I'll do well this weekend, I believe, and sadly the least important now and to my future.

I went to a coffee shop with my friends tonight and we studied AP bio for five hours, eating the forbidden, glucose-riddled chocolate-covered coffee beans (which I maybe am not supposed to eat because of my religion? I wasn't sure, I probably should stop) and gummy bears (which annoyed me, as I like white, but I kept accidentally grabbing yellow because it was hard to differentiate cololrs in the paper bag), and drinking italian sodas (sugar-free). We spent a lot of time going over reproduction and the menstrual cycle, as we haven't talked much about that, and it was quite entertaining, arguing loudly about estrogen, progesterone, androgyns, and the positive feedback where estrogen acts on something (I've already forgotten) to create more LH and FSH I think which creates more estrogen. I've forgotten it all already. Sad... But it was fun watching all the people in the coffee shop stare at us as we screamed about oogenesis, sperm production, menstruation, fertilization and the like. It's a good thing it's a high school class. In middle school we would have been too embarrassed to discuss it. Now, we don't mind broadcasting it to coffee shops.

So quick review of feedback mechanisms: positive= lactating, estrogen, childbirth. Negative= regulation of the medulla of carbonic acid levels in the blood, action of the pons to increase/decrease breathing accordingly; glycogon acting on glycogen to convert it back into glucose; ADH production when not enough water is being absorbed in the distal tubule area of the nephron.

It's hilarious that I know more about biology right now than everyone in my school but four other people, more than I thought it was possible to know or cram into my brain, and it's still not enough, I am (we are) still grossly underprepared, and time is running out.

What a nightmare, all of this, coalescing all at once.

The AP history test is over, complete with its horrible botched multiple choice section. I played my cello solo tonight, trying to imagine Shauna dead (it put emotion in it). I played with my ensamble. Tomorrow morning I take the SAT biology, US history, and math 2 tests. Tomorrow afternoon I play my piano and violin solos. Sunday I cram all day for AP biology. After the test on monday it will all be over...

but now it all rains down and I can't quite breathe.

armaggedon

I watch the end of the world approach. It comes wearing AP history practice tests with increasing numbers of red slashes through the bubbles. On my first practice test I missed 10, which is good. Second, 17, which is pretty bad. Third, 22, which is terrible, and I don't think good enough to pass with a 3.

I don't know what to do now. This doesn't happen to me. I pass tests. I do well. I guess I should have studied more. I can cram all night. I guess I'll have to do that. But how can I resign myself to something that will ruin my transcript?

I feel really odd right now. Time is ticking. Sleep would be nice, but not necessary I suppose.

Back to Columbus for the third time...

Please, think of me, pray for me, do something for me... I need it right now.

Christmas letters

I was looking through my dad's desk (I'm pretty sure that's probably not something I'm supposed to be doing, but I needed to find a piece of my past), and I found all these Christmas letters. It was interesting to read what was written about my family as I grew up... things change in-between, but it's mostly the same, year after year. So I'll post bits. (My father wrote all but one).

1988
Sheryl has blossomed in several directions... I have spent the year writing grants... doing research... and running a clinical DNA testing lab. Craig is now 7 1/2, in second grade... and into... karate and soccer, video games, and collecting 100's of baseball cards. We cheated, took advantage of genetic technology, and found out that we're having a 46xx (otherwise known as a girl!!)

1989
This year, little 46XX, AKA Lindsay, has added a new dimension to getting ready for the holidays. Sheryl has spent the year being pregnant, a mother, and... a part time student. John continues... at Children's Hospital. Craig is in 3rd grade and doing ok, though he has caused visible greying of his parent's (and teacher's). ...He played soccer... and will play... Little League. Lindsay has had reflux for her first months and this has caused "Lindsay spots" on the carpet all through the house. She is a real charmer and a joy for all of us. Craig is happy to have a sister.

1990
Well folks... [we] have finally gained Yuppie status with... Microsoft Word, a totally foreign concept to [us]. ...Craig scored the winning goal in the... championship soccer game. Sheryl continues taxi serve. She may finish school by the end of the century.

1991
We went on a family trip. ...Craig tried out some of his early teenage behavior... to make things more interesting. Sheryl... is often double scheduled. Lindsay, on the contrary, doesn't grow at all and still wears things a few sizes behind her age. However, we think that some day a long time from now she will stand over 5 feet tall anyway. She is incredibly verbal, especially when she hears... words we aren't supposed to use. She... loves her "Craigy." She... learned to get in and out of the crib, stopping the blow with her right harm, which required pins in the OR to be put back together. Hardly showed her a bit as she immediately learned to do everything left-handed. ...I just try to... reduce the size of piles on my desks.

1992
[I wrote] an article on atherosclerosis gene mapping. Sheryl [is a] professional student and spends her daytime hours chasing after Lindsay and doing homework with Craig. Craig is definitely into puberty in a major way in terms of attitude and shoe size. He is extremely popular with the opposite sex and we have had several major crushes (mostly directed from the female side) with which to deal. ...School is not a priority. Craig played well on the basketball team... we hope for good things this Little League season. Lindsay has started preschool and ballet lessons. Lindsay is happiest reading books, which she does for hours every day. We're hoping that "Wead a book" Lindsay will be our future outstanding and independent school student.

1993
I am still working solo. I will be glad to leave California and its problems behind. Sheryl has temporarily given up her student career with so much to do to run the household and manage the kids. Lindsay loves preschool, 'pre-kindergarten' as she always corrects. She is definitely 4 1/2 and don't forget the fraction! Loves to draw and do gymnastics. Craig continues hormonal toxicity with arguing as the main symptom. He is doing basketball, Little League, and football. We finally had to say no to soccer....

1994
We all really like [Montana]; however, the locals have not been friendly. Craig has not bmet as nicer a group of kids as he had in our isolated and protected suburb in Danville. His friends often come from broken families with significant smoking and alcohol abuse. I have made the easiest adjustment with my work. Sheryl... is busy. Craig continues to be a social animal with all the usual teenage interests and challenges for his parents. [He] still loves his sports. Lindsay is a marvel. She is quite an artist and is quickly learning to read and write and has an interest in the piano. I think she will be the intellectual type. However, she is unbelievably strong-willed (a little bull), and I think will be an equal though different teenage challenge. Fortunantly, that's a ways away. ...She got another arm X-ray and it was broken. She doesn't even know how or when she did it.

1995
We had to send Craig... to a residential behavioral treatment program in March. He has been a challenge. He became a danger to himself. We hadn't seen him fort 8 months and he was in Western Samoa, so we finally visited him for Thanksgiving. Lindsay has the toughest time. Sheryl and I have both been busy. Lindsay is taking violin lessons and excelling with her reading and with school in general. She played T ball and soccer this year.

1997
We had Craig back from last November until this October, but he crashed and burned again and is back in his program. We know he needs to be there. Lindsay is much better adjusted this time. [She] is doing very well. She is excelling at the piano, violin, and is taking art and horse riding lessons. Sheryl is busier than if she worked full-time. My work is going well.

1998
You will never believe this, but it is really true. I, Sheryl, am finally writing the annual Christmas newsletter. I'm in college for my teaching certificate. Craig is home for good now- well at least until he turns 18. Right now he's taking a couple of correspondance courses from BYU and working full time. Lindsay has turned into quite an artist. She does piano, violin, girl scouts, art lessons, and if she has her way it'll also be cello and riding lessons again.

2000
I Have been a lot busier for the past two months. Work goes well, and our band plays when we can. Sheryl is busy teaching sewing. Lindsay is in 6th grade and brought home her first report card, all As or better. She is incredible! The violin and piano go well, and she has begun cello as she was too advanced to play violin in the class orchestra. Craig is paying a few debts to society [he was in bootcamp] He has been out on his own for almost 2 years now, but is again "under supervision."

2001
I did not think I would live to see something as awful as 9/11. I viewed it from... California. Other than that, I decided to quit the band. I love my work in the church, but it is very busy. Sheryl too has been busy and spent the year working at a sewing shop. Lindsay continues with violin (she is becoming quite accomplished), piano (a close second), and now cello. She is a great artist, taking art courses, adn quite a writer, having recently compiled a book fo very good short stories. She is still interesting in astronomy... but with all the above talents I am not sure where she will end up. Craig is working 3 jobs, paying his bills and fines, and maintaining his probation, with several years left. He has no more chances with the authorities.

2002
Believe it or not, having a 13 year old girl at home is a deligh, which is not even to say enough about what a joy Lindsay is. And Craig!! Finally he is seeing how much easier it is to follow the rules. The authorities are very happy about his progress. He has a very nice lady friend, fairly serious, and we actually approve her company. ...Our department, hospital and state budgets are a worry. Church is a real anchor for me. Sheryl is overcommitted as usual.

2004
Lindsay is in the symphony now, just to make her life a little crazier! Sheryl and I continue with our same activities and jobs, sewing and genetics.

And that's all I found. But it was interesting to me, how although you can see some progressions, mostly my family (including me) has stayed pretty static. My mom was always overcommitted with jobs, being a student, and volunteering everywhere. My dad was always discovering some new gene and playing in his band. My brother was the most dynamic, slidding further into the abyss, spending 2 and a half years on an island off of Australia, going to jail several times, and finally, landing in bootcamp with one last chance. I'm not sure how he pulled everything together after that, but since 2000 he's been doing well. He's still on probation, but he's married and has his fines paid (and he's visiting us this week from Florida!). As for me... I don't know. I've changed a lot internally, but I was never as external with my inner problems as my brother was. I was always the musical, artistic, intellectual one, always reading, always the good child while my brother caused most of the problems. In some ways I felt ignored.

Anyway, I found those interesting. It's weird to go back and see censored versions of our lives like that, leaving out the bad details, because nobody wants to read about horrible stuff like abuse and almost dying from drug overdoses and stays at psychiatric hospitals and suicide attempts on their Christmas cards.

Lonely

I've been watching all the people, the kids at my school, reading emails that my Jo Jo Joanna wrote me about how sad she is, and how, ironically, all she eats every day are jo jo's, those slabs of potatos that stick in my throat.
I wish I could fix us all. Everyone has something inside of them that makes them hurt. I'm always complaining about my life, but there's so many people that have it so much worse...

We live in a world that is fast approaching carrying capacity, where the density of some Indian cities is incomprehensible, where people surround us everywhere we look... and yet, we are all so incredibly lonely.

I love the Beatles, so it immediately makes me think of this song:

Ah, look at all the lonely people
Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
who is it for?

All the lonely people
where do they all come from?
All the lonley people
where do they all belong?

Father McKenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear
No one comes near
Look at him working, darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there
what does he care?

...Ah, look at all the lonely people...

Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came
Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave
No one was saved.

All the lonely people...
where do they all come from?
All the lonely people...
where do they all belong?