Everything feels upside-down and inside-out. This afternoon I drove by an alley, and as I looked down that alley the whole world was so beautiful I couldn't breathe. It was too beautiful to handle. The crumbling bits of concrete, the people that live behind so many walls, the mother that abandons her child... such an aching beauty. I saw the leaves hanging, shivering, from the trees. Fall has so much symbolic significance to me. I looked at that leaf and everything was printed in the pattern of its veins, all of the pain and the hope of the world.

In creative writing today we talked about epiphanies, and he showed us part of this movie called American Beauty about how the most beautiful thing a man had ever filmed was a plastic bag dancing in air currents for fifteen minutes. It made me feel like every atom of me was singing, but singing in a way so unbearably melodic, and yet disonant at the same time... I always notice the little things, like that sack, like the leaves, like the alley. I think maybe I'm weird that way. And it all seems sad because it's all so beautiful.
The man in the movie said there was a benevolent force. We talked about whether such a force exists, or whether it was just a projection of what the man needed to find meaning in his crappy life. Don't we all do that, look for those little things that somehow give us meaning in all of this beautiful brokenness? Are we enough, just our thoughts, just how beautiful that dancing bag is, or is that not enough, does there need to be more?
We are so hungry for meaning...

Lots of things have been going through my mind. These past few days I've been thinking about how everyone else in the world but me seems to have felt something remotely sexual by this point in their life. And I thought about being asexual, and I don't want that... That whole world of masturbation and orgasms and sex and all of that seems very ugly to me, and at the same time achingly beautiful like the alley and the leaf. I don't really want to be a part of that, because I honestly can say I hate sex more than anything else in the universe, more than anything and anyone, but I don't want to be left out of it... I don't want to be this hollow. I don't want to think about my life and realize I may never feel anything, any lust... I just want to feel it. I just want once to be normal. I don't want to be the shell that sex fleshed and left empty.

On Tuesday we left for Salt Lake at 11 a.m. As we drove through Idaho Falls I thought about all of my friends there, and Josh, and being within miles of all of them without them knowing, without seeing them... same with Salt Lake, with Rachel there. It was like my life had split drastically from itself, turning inward somehow... I don't know.
At the MIT meeting I felt this intense, ravenous hunger, so intense that I almost felt like I had to leave the meeting because I just couldn't stand it anymore. I wanted to go there so badly... so badly that I almost wanted the man to stop talking so I wouldn't want it anymore, because I knew the pain would be unendurable if I didn't get in.
We drove back overnight. I drove until a little after midnight or so and my dad drove until 4:30 a.m. when we pulled into the driveway. Everything felt disconnected. The way I sleep in cars is by turning my ipod onto something really, really loud. For some reason I have to have really loud music playing to sleep. So I kept waking up when the cd's were over, and it was so dark, and my contacts felt like lead weights. It was so confusing. Then when we got home I had to get my portfolio ready for the University of Chicago, then I took a shower at 5:15, and I finally fell into bed at 5:35ish. I slept through seminary, got up at 7. It took forever to unfog my mind. I couldn't figure out where I was or what I was supposed to be doing for the first ten minutes I was awake. I just kept thinking about second order partial derivatives, and I was mad at myself for not being able to get my brain to understand them.

I went to school Wednesday until 11, went and got my retainer (they screwed up the color, so I got to get a yellow one, which made me happy, right now I have bright ugly orange), then got in the car to drive to Bozeman for my UC interview. I was seven minutes late for the interview, but otherwise it went really well; the lady said she'll strongly recommend me for UC. Towards the end of the interview I was having a hard time looking confident and interested though because I was falling asleep.

I have the MIT interview on Saturday... that's the one I need to do very well in. Although UC has it's definite benefits over MIT.

Today I debated for the first time since the horrible NFL's last year. It went really well. Even Amanda and Brittany were impressed, but no one was more impressed than me.

Everything feels slightly off tint, way out of control. I missed math yesterday so now I don't know what's going on; I'm worried about my English grade, I screwed up my chemistry lab... I don't know. I feel like a hampster in a wheel, running as fast as I can just to stay in the same place.

I have a terrible headache and my teeth hurt.

I feel like self injury all the time. I get urges lots of times every day. I daydream about it. I want it. I'm holding on with the very edge of my fingernails, trying not to fall over this cliff, but it's hard when so much of me wants to just let go.

It's another one of those things that's brokenly, achingly, attractively, nostalgically, endlessly beautiful.

Is there some law that I was not aware of that dictates the requirement to break out the day before your senior pictures?!!!!

GRR!

Erin and I babysat five kids under the age of five on Friday night. I did a lot better at holding them and stuff. I really love kids, and they like me, I just wish babysitting never involved touching. I sure wish my babysitters hadn't touched me.

I don't know why I'm writing. There's nothing much to say. I did homework all of yesterday, leaving the house only to go on a bikeride. I did the MIT application today, and now I need to work on my senior project. Everything is so methodical. It's nice but it's numbing.

Only one interesting thing has happened: my parents and I got in this fight over the way I eat (My health teacher used to make me mad by calling it "starve and stuff," it's like bulimia but without the purges). I was being all defensive. I don't know why I do that, because I know inside me that they're right and I need something different.

Anyway, so I'm going to go to a dietician. I have to pay for it, but maybe they'll be able to help. I mean they deal with people with eating disorders a lot... I just need some sort of normal way to eat. I can't break these habits. They won't die.

They'd better help. I don't want to waste $100. I'm not really rich.

rant (take whatever take I'm on)

Warning: if you are a hunter, or like hunters, or hunting, you may not want to read this.

I was driving home today from my violin lesson behind a truck pulling a horse trailer. The back of the truck was covered in deer carcasses. The heads were whole, marbel eyes glossed over, anters climbing into the air, but the bodies were gutted. The meat was scraped out, and all I could see was a bloody mess of broken ribs and legs. The blood wasn't really what I think of as blood-colored- it was a pink, smeared against the white bone.

I felt like my stomach was crawling up my throat in acidic hitches, trickling towards my mouth. It made me feel so sick and so sad, just those empty deer with the whole heads. Then I was really angry that this idiot was driving around with these ravaged deer in plain sight. Does he think little kids want to see that? I reacted to it very badly now; I can't imagine what I would have done years ago. I still remember one time in gradeschool when the car in front of us hit a deer. I cried a lot.

WHY IN THE WORLD DO PEOPLE THINK IT'S FUN TO KILL HELPLESS ANIMALS THAT DON'T EVEN KNOW THEY'RE THERE??!!! Yeah, sure, that's really brave, creeping up behind some beautiful creature, so quiet it can't hear you, and putting a bullet through its heart. What's fun about that? What's glorious in that? It just seems like slaughter to me.

I don't really like the slaughtering of cows that goes on for the meat industry, that upsets me too, but hunting upsets me more, because people do it for fun, and I don't think many ranchers really enjoy killing their cows, or try to sneak up behind them and shoot them.

I could never watch the life leaving a creature's eyes and know it was me. I don't believe in killing anything- not spiders, not box elder bugs, not deer, not people. I don't understand how people can enjoy that so much. What sort of machoism can you get? It's so cowardly.

It makes me very mad. It always has. I could never be proud of shooting something. I could never be proud of violence.

If I ever doubted that you loved me, I no longer do. You're right, I need reminding. But your responses have proved that you care. That feels wonderful in a way, and in another way it feels bad, because I'm not sure I'm deserving of your love or care. I worry I'm not the person you think I am. I feel like maybe I'm just manipulating everyone.

All day I have been in a sort of haze, a haze of my own life, and the culmination of what I have become. Torn open like a carcass... which way to go?
The images come back- leaning over the toilet for hours, clutching my stomach in pain, being incapable of stopping cutting my wrist, feeling out of control but finding control in that. I closed my eyes and kept remembering that fantastic way cuts get deeper in a dissociative haze, that way that you feel when you've eaten a little bit, and it's so out of control, and then you purge and it's like this pure perfection.
I remembered.
Colors blur. The sky seems a bit angrier, a bit bluer, a bit farther away. My hands are so pale, really. My fingers are so short and capped in stress, capped like unit vectors (math is slipping away, away, away...).
There could be control in measuring the compounds accurately, in redoing the flame tests, in testing the solubilities, but no, I brush through those and long for the control of swallowing 12 pink pills and feeling sick before they descend my esophagus, just from my memories of so many sick, high, sleepless nights...
I remembered.
And oh my gosh I want it. I want it all. I want the agony from the laxatives, I want to feel high and disconnected and slurred from the lithium overdoses, I want to taste in my mouth that acid from throwing up, I want to feel the satisfaction in knowing I was destroying my teeth, I want to cut things into my arms that leave shiny-pink avenues .5 cm thick, bunched up under the glaring light. I want to hold those cool razors in my hands, see the way the blood looks in the water as it flows towards the drain, feel all of the hope in all of that, know I'm controlling something, destroying something and in that destruction building an empire, a hierachy of things that matter more than Key Club or AP English or grades or me.
Like I wrote on the day my mom found out about my eating disorder 1.5 years ago... it all appears as this glorious, crystaline chandelier- my entire life of brokenness. So pitted with hair-line fractures, swinging for that instant in the slight wind, catching the glow of something infinitely far from the sun...
It is so beautiful.
It is all an excuse. It's a marvelous excuse. I can escape my inadequacy. I have something to blame for my failures. It's just me. I just am this way. I SI. I had an ED. It's just me.
I NEED CONTROL!!!!!!!!!! It's so easy to go back, so wonderful, so magnificant, so perfect. I can live my life forever in this mudhole, and it would be all of the excuses I ever need for not being good enough, for being a lazy failure. I don't have to fear my potential. I don't have to face it. I can just be safe, be in control, be so freaking happy with misery.
All day in this haze... it's all so attractive... I miss the brokenness... I am so terrified of being whole. What if I can't be whole? What if I am stripped of all excuses, all busyness, all stress, all self-destruction, and I still can't function, I still fail? What then?
I worry about debate this year, because there will be no excuse if I lose. It's like that, all of this. It's such a wonderful excuse.

So that's the haze I was in, colorful with so many falling, blushing leaves... again and again that image, the dying leaves finally letting go from the sources that could never feed them forever.

But that wasn't all. All of your comments on this blog made me think. I talked to Ariel last night, and she told me I had to keep going. I said no, I don't have to do anything. I have been feeling very rebellious to obligation lately. I said I don't care. Or rather, the part of me that doesn't care is bigger than the part of me that does.

But I thought about it all day today.

Emails from people contributed. Do I want to spend another year high, tripping over my feet, incapable of thinking clearly, of playing a musical instrument, throwing up over and over until it hurts?
My mind remembers the agony of those lithium highs.

And finally my own words, such faith in them. What if I'm not really the person you think I am? What if I really am weak? What if, when I let go of these excuses, I really do fail? What if I'm just a horrible manipulative person?

Staring out the window, all those leaves spiralling down...

I drove home and I ate dinner.

I'm scared. I'm so scared that if I face myself, I won't be good enough. I want all of that self-destruction. Life is manageable with that. Life is possible and under control.

So let me tell you this:

Maybe I am worth nothing! Maybe I really can only survive with self-injury and eating disorders, always running from any possiblity of happiness! Maybe I'm incapable of being happy! Maybe I'm really selfish, and angry, and oblivious to what matters in life! Maybe I'm mean! Maybe I don't have any sort of empathetic bit in me! Maybe I'm actually cruel! Maybe I'm just manipulating you all, maybe I really would be okay, but I tell you I won't so you pay attention to me! Maybe I am a pathetic, amoral, cowardly excuse for a human being! Maybe I will never be able to love anyone correctly!

It is possible.

And maybe I don't have to choose to keep going. Maybe I don't have to keep eating, not cutting. Maybe I can choose to just live in my safe, romantic misery.

This is the important part:

I want to. No matter how badly I want to go back to my brokenness, I want to be the person you think I am. No matter how afraid I am of that life you're convinced I can live, I want to.

You reached me somewhere unreachable. You touched some untouched part of me with your compassion, even if I am completely undeserving.

EVEN IF ALL OF THIS, EVERYWHERE, EVERYTHING, IS JUST A LIE...

I want to keep going.

Lest you get confused and think I am being nobly brave or something ridiculous like that, let me tell you I am incredibly afraid. I am convinced I will fail. I am convinced that I cannot face my own potential, and that even if I could, I could face the fulfillment of it. I worry that I am just a selfish, evil person.

But I'll keep going. I'll keep going not because I have to, but because I want to.

I hope you're right about me, despite the universal confusion of falsehood you may all be under. I really hope you are right.

But whichever of us is right...

I won't give up.
(OH but I want to!
... but I certainly don't have to.)

I knew when I came in today that I should take the box with me, but I didn't. I figured no one would look in my car. However, my father went to get something and he found the box of them. My only hope. The only salvation left.
I got yelled at by my mother for ten minutes. Why don't you talk to me? Do you think it's okay to just talk to Terry and never us? I have been working my ass off to pay for you to go to college and you don't talk to me. I'm not giving you any money if you don't talk to me.
I just sat there.
My father was trying to give me all these tips about how to avoid binging, how to lose fat, etc. etc. It's only partially about that though.
I NEED CONTROL. I need it so desperately it feels like a physical need. It replaces my need for food.
I didn't OD last night. But I am definitely not eating. They can't make me. I'm busy. I'll stay out. I can buy more boxes. They won't know.
For now all I can think of is SI. It's not nearly as much control as controlling my eating, but it will tide me over.
I thought about it today in my car. I told myself, You can't do this. You can't be weak like this. You have to be strong.

BUT I DON'T!!! I don't have to be anything. I don't have to be strong, I don't have to talk to my parents, I don't have to eat, I don't have to keep blurring through this loss of control, I don't have to get straight A's, I don't have to be perfect. Maybe my busyness is just a cover for if I ever fall apart. So far I have been completely unsuccessful in my attempts to fall apart, but things could change, couldn't they? I need the excuse.
I won't fall apart though. I can't.

I feel so horrible. So out of control. It was marvelous today, not eating. It felt like getting a drink of water after months (three and half months) in the desert. I don't have to do this. I do need control. It's not giving up. Maybe it's the strong thing. I don't know anymore.

Don't try to tell me not too. You live my life of debate, pit orchestra, violin, cello, piano, counseling, AP English outside of school, quintette practice, AP English essays, AP government tests, math that's quit making sense, college applications, grades hanging, mother screaming (yes, she did just scream), deadness... You live it without control. Then you can tell me what to do. Not until then.

Ah screw it. I give up. I'm a pacifist, not a fighter.
I only worry about my teeth...

I am that weak.

You know, it would really suck if blogger crashed.

It seems my packing habits are leaking into my homework habits. I don't really want to do my homework. I have quite a bit left, but I just don't feel like it. I feel like reading Harry Potter and listening to Mahler and Elliot Smith and lazing about on the couch. I don't really want to go read about environmental policy or the Koran.

This morning in church I had a very distinct moment of weakness. I realized that I can't just keep eating, how ridiculous! I had to start throwing up again, I had to stop eating. Why in the world did I decide to start eating?
I started planning on how to go back to it. I realized I was stupid to think I could live without the bulimia. I realized I had to go back.

I have decided since then that I'm going to try to keep going, but I've hit the wall. It's very solid, very imposing. Where do I go now? It seems as if I can only go back. I will try to forge onward, but the doubt is planted.

I hope I'm not this weak.

exercise in optimism

Five reasons why today kinda sucked:
1. I only got four hours of sleep last night and the night before, so today in math I could not figure out what in the world was going on. Differential vectors were popping up all over and I didn't understand how to figure it out. I still don't entirely.
2. I signed up for another AP class, this one out of school. It's the AP technical English test (I'm in AP English lit). I'm excited to learn, but I also keep signing myself up for more and more things every day. I think I have some subconscious desire to kill myself off.
3. I had to go to a cello lesson after school. The music kept blurring; I just couldn't focus.
4. I have a lot of homework for the weekend, already too short.
5. It's really cold and I've been freezing all day.

Ten reasons why today was good:
1. I woke up this morning.
2. I went to Great Harvest after school and they gave me two free pieces of bread. I kept trying to pay for them, but they wouldn't let me. That's enough of a reason to make up for all of the bad.
3. When I put on my sweats after my cello lesson they were really warm, because they were under my electric blanket, which I forgot to shut off this morning.
4. My senior project is underway, mentor and all. I decided to heck with the genetics lab. Mrs. Van Alstine kept telling me to write the book because it's probably the last time I'll have any time to do anything for myself, because things just get busier and busier and once you have kids you might as well forget about doing things you enjoy. She was making me more and more depressed, but she drove me to the book rather than the research project. I'm writing a satirical fantasy about government corruption, ethical obligation, environmentalism, discdrimination, self-actualization, and the true meaning of heroism. I think it'll be good. I've got lots of good ideas.
5. I really liked all of the clothes I was wearing today. I know that doesn't seem like much, but it makes me feel more confident.
6. It's Friday and I get to sleep in tomorrow.
7. Somehow (must be the announcements, which we never see in AP gov because Mrs. Lynd goes over) everyone knew that I was a national merit semi-finalist, and they were all congratulating me and such. It was a little awkward, and I kept turning bright red, but it was also nice to have done something interesting that everyone noticed.
8. I didn't gain any weight even though I had ice cream for dinner wednesday and thursday night, and last night I also had cornbread and honey butter and a brownie.
9. I'm stressed out and stretched in all directions, but I'm doing alright. Even today when I was really tired and couldn't think things felt okay.
10. I get to read Harry Potter tonight!!!!

no good very bad day

When I was little my dad used to read me a book about somebody's (Alex's?) "no good very bad day." Today was kind of like that.
I woke up planning to take a shower but then didn't have time, so my hair is a mess. In chemistry we couldn't figure out how to use pipetters so now we're way behind our lab (and my new lab partner apparently isn't accustomed to the method of sort of fudging through labs- everything has be consice for him). In government I contemplated just leaving school. Not that it was that bad, but I really don't like Mrs. Lynd. She told us to take notes on a movie on Silent Spring that related to a diagram we'd drawn about policy making. So I took notes on the movie and explained how everything in the movie tied into the policy making diagram. When I got it back she'd taken off a bunch of points because I didn't visually represent the notes on the policy making diagram, which she most definitely did not tell us to do. Also, on our vocab quiz I missed one of the definitions because it wasn't in the book and she'd never explained it to us. I cannot stand teachers like that! Mrs. Chamberlin, my money management teacher last year, was like that. So now I have a lower grade in government for a ton of stupid reasons that just have to do with Mrs. Lynd not explaining anything.
So I missed half of physics trying to tell Mrs. Lynd that I need be told exactly what to do. Also, when I told her I wasn't going to be here tomorrow she told me tomorrow was a work period in which we were supposed to read chapter 21 and this other thing, so now I have to read all of that at home. Then in creative writing I had another writer's block... I have not written anything worthwhile in quite some time. It was really frustrating. Then we peer edited our essays in AP English and I realized mine is really bad so I had to rewrite the whole thing tonight, and I also have to write another essay that is due friday. In math we got a ton more homework (but at least I'm better at this concrete math than at visualizing things). Then I had to go to pit orchestra, and I really sucked. I haven't had time to practice anything. I practice in the morning but I don't seem to get anything done, and I practice after school but I don't seem to get anything done.
Then I just had ice cream for dinner and I feel pretty bad about that and now I am procrastinating doing my mounds of homework.
Senior project starts tomorrow and I still don't know what I'm doing, and debate starts tomorrow and I honestly have not devoted six neurons to thinking about healthcare.
everything caves in...
oh and now I have to go eat even though I had ice cream. YUCK.

The one thing that cheered up my day: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8718728501056290731

you can do it

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering.-- Dostoevsky

I guess it's hard for people who are so used to things the way they are - even if they're bad - to change. 'Cause they kind of give up. And when they do, everybody kind of loses. --Pay it Forward

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. --Abraham Lincoln

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power. --Alan Cohen

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. --Anais Nin

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. --Anais Nin

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. --Anais Nin

The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. --Charles Dubois

In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. --Eric Hoffer

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers. --M. Scott Peck

It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear . . . . It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to. --Marilyn Ferguson

All things change; nothing perishes. --Ovid

The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love. --Tom Robbins

We know what we are, but know not what we may be. --William Shakespeare

"Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have—and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up." --James Belasco and Ralph Stayer

We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die. --Auden

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness. --Marshall McLuhan

What is required for effective change is continuity of sincere effort to release and let go of inefficient thought patterns from the past. --Doc Childre and Howard Martin

It is never too late to become what you might have been. --George Eliot

Many people make fun of me because Pay it Forward is my favorite movie. But in this movie is the greatest truth: people are so afraid of changing, and if we only stay in our comfortable "manageable" (according to Eugene) lives, then everyone loses.
Don't tell me you're not afraid of change. Everyone is afraid of change. Even the liberals crying for economic reform are afraid of changing the things in their hearts. I myself am terrified of it.
We grow laterally and we employ methods that keep us alive and make us feel safe. It takes years, but we conform completely to these things. We may consider the possibility that there is something more out there, but we are too afraid to leave our safety and grasp for something we don't entirely believe in.

I'm only seventeen, so I guess you could disregard everything I'm saying. I am saying it completely aware of my hypocrisy as well; I won't deny my aversion to and fear of change. But let me tell you- we don't not have the live our lives the way we are living them. We can have more, be more. It may scare us to death, but I'd rather die trying. We can never give up and be satisfied with things that are no longer good enough. We have to move on. There is safety in the moving. There is safety in the end.

You can do it.

Ariel IM-d me, needing to talk to me because her parents were being awful. My mom got very mad- she thinks I spend way too much time on IM. I told her Ariel needed to talk to me because her parents were arguing. My mother said, "Oh, why don't you just have her call family services?"
I went back to talking to Ariel. A few minutes later my mom said (all in her sarcastic voice),
"Have you had her call the police yet?"
"No," I said, "That was Craig."
"Oh, right, how could I forget?"

She is still so angry. So very angry. She always will be. She'll always hate me for it, whether she admits it or not.

It wasn't the right choice, I don't think. I think maybe I should have never told.

I wrote this for creative writing. I'm aware it's a little sacrilegious, but it's not really about God, if that makes any sense, it's about an absence of order in life... I'm also aware that it is a bit pessimistic, but that is becuase it had to be under a page (that was the assignment). I was going to add on a bit about how humanity really isn't all bad, and there are a lot of people but the media and the people that are not helping the situation take the center stage, but I ran out of room, so it's left in its cynicism.

Sacrilege

Sunday (or Monday, depending on who you ask), about 15 billion years ago: God, in his loneliness, created the universe, using His vacuum of space to suck the meteors and the planets and the stars and blow them out in a cloud of spectacularly messy dust. God tweaked the vacuous space for ten billion years until in one small corner of creation He saw a speck of light as the Sun heaved into being, and He divided Day and Night.

Monday, 4 billion years ago: God took the mishmash of molecules dancing through the infant earth and created liquid water, separating it from a developing atmosphere. God let the earth stew in the steaming juices and life began to organize itself loosely with chromosomes and photosynthesis and algae floating on the sea.

Tuesday, 1 billion years ago: God looked at the rocky crags of continents and spread algae and fungi to the land, blowing air into the parachute of their evolution. Eventually hard cell walls and roots developed and fertilization with wondrous seeds.

Wednesday, 15 billion years ago: God gets confused on day four, and in His confusion he will reinstate the universe, creating again the Sun and again the Moon and again the sparkling drips of light throughout the heavens. He slipped back into time and changes things.

Thursday, 700 million years ago: God started with the sponge, a mouth and anus. Jellyfish came next, opening and closing through the water like little sacks trailing venom. After the jellyfish everything began rolling- flatworms, arthropods, mollusks, vertebrates, sharks, insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds. God admired, for a moment, the simple multiplication, before smashing some meteor into the Earth. Perhaps the dinosaurs were an embarrassing mistake.

Friday, 50 million years ago: With the unlucky dinosaurs out of the way, God created horses and cattle and Neanderthals and Homo erectus. God looked at this ecological mess and saw the beauty in its intricacies. He was, however, still isolated in his loneliness, and so He created a man, a man from his own image, capable of compassion, capable of love, capable of peace, capable of beauty, capable of hope…

Saturday, 100 thousand years ago: God slept for 100 thousand years, a short nap, not even a whole day. He rested, breaking the slumber only to send his son to die, falling back asleep again as apostasy smothered the earth, hazy in that state between caring and oblivion.

Sunday, today (or perhaps the day before, or maybe even one hundred years ago, depending on who you ask): God wakes up feeling a bit sore and more than a little tired, but anxious to view the progress of his people on the earth. He decides the most efficient way to know how we’re doing would be to watch the news, so he turns on CNN and he hears: “Western tourists abducted in Yemen” “Police hunt poison moonshiners” “Vandals attack pope’s birthplace” “Suicide bomb kills Afghan governor.” God watches the videos of religious zealots blowing up buildings in His name; He watches grown men raping small children; He watches car bombs blow up soldiers; He watches people in Africa starve to death when plenty of food lies a few miles away; He watches angry protestors blow up abortion clinics; He watches men beat their wives and their children; He watches teenagers hooked on drugs lay twitching with seizures in the street.

He watches until he is so sick that he cannot watch anymore and then he turns off the television and with unimaginable weariness he goes back to sleep.

Perhaps we are, despite all our potential, just another embarrassing mistake.

money can't buy me love

I hate money. 95% of the arguments that my parents get in are about money. Now they are all about me, about college. Everyone gets angry and frustrated and they always end with telling me I will probably have to go to BYU. (Yes, I know there are many other options, but they don't seem to believe it.)
I hate money. I hate the corruption and stasis that exists in concentrations of money, I hate how the rich are blind to the plights of the poor. I really think everyone deserves equal resources and equal treatment. Bill Gates has started an extremely high-tech high school for lower-class blacks. Although I think there should be an equal racial and socioeconomic representation, I approve this action. People in lower classes who are disadvantaged need a chance to change their status. I know that these days this can sometimes go too far when racial minorities are occasionally awarded positions just based on their disadvantaged status rather than their ability. But I think that everyone should have equal access to education and technology that can increase their ability, and job decisions etc. should be based entirely on ability, not on class or race.
Why can't everything be equal? Why can't the government help people that are in lower class neighborhoods have the same opportunities as rich people? Why do people like me slip through the cracks of the financial aid system and land on the rocks and the arguments?
Why is everyone just so focused on increasing their own station rather than helping others gain the capability of doing the same? I hate the elitist nature of our government. I hate the rich beurocrats that control things just because of money. I hate the disproportion that exists. It is better now than it has been for much of history, I know this. But there are still great margins between economic classes; everything is still so stratified.
I know there have been important advances lately to try to help the situation. But in the end there are still so many people like me (and worse off) that just slip right through.

Why can't everyone just have the same opportunities and benefits and resources regardless of gender, class, race, etc.?

I know they tried the socialism, the communism, and it didn't work. But I really hate the stupid capitalistic system.

Things have been busy. I wish I didn't feel like I had to be busy.
I'm just going to talk about my classes, since that's what's dominating my thoughts. First, I am very frustrated with chem 2. Mr. Shenkle keeps talking about how scientifically advanced my school is, but after a year of chemistry I still feel clueles. In biology 2 I knew I could do okay on the AP test. In chemistry, I know it would be idiotic to take the AP test, although we should technically be able to.
Government is interesting. I really like government. I really like thinking about different structures and politics and all of that. But my teacher makes me feel anxious. She jumps all over. I get really confused.
I don't feel like I'm learning anything in physics either. It's fun to make model rockets, but what does it mean? I hope I am not the only one frustrated with fun classes because I don't learn.

Creative writing and English are the classes that are really interesting me. I haven't had a good English teacher since 9th grade, and Mr. Proctor and Mr. Pogreba are definitely the best English teachers I've had in my life. My problem in creative writing is that I can't seem to write about anything but child abuse, in every form. We are writing short short stories, and even when I specifically tell myself I will not allude to child abuse in any way, something leaks in. Even if the allusions are things no one but me will ever notice, it bothers me. I get angry with myself and my books. They always turn into child abuse/mental illness chronologies. I want to write something different, happy. I just feel like I'm not qualified to write about anything else.

Mr. Pogreba told us that he would spend the first eight months of school teaching us English, and then we'd spend the last month unlearning everything he taught us so we could take the AP test. I'm glad Mr. Pogreba realizes (unlike my history teacher last year) that the AP test, and preparing for it, is entirely useless.

I wanted to write a book for my senior project, a book with an organized, fluid plot, in which my voice is consistent (in other words, a book that doesn't have the problems my previous books have had). I wanted to write every day, a fantasy book about the meaning of heroism. But then I sat in the senior project meeting today and I realized that colleges would be much more impressed with me if I did my genetics lab project for my senior project. So now I'm doing that. But I really don't want to. I'd much rather write a book. I hate that colleges are dictating everything I do right now. I want to enjoy myself this year. It's about more than next year. It's about now.

email to Josh

I listened to all of you, and what you told me about Josh, and I thought about it, and I tried to integrate it into something I could understand and really believe in, and then I emailed Josh explaining it all to him. I really feel like I did the right thing in writing this email. Not the easy thing, no way. But definitely the right one.

hi josh. i'm just going to spill to you everything that i'm thinking and explain the whole situation from my point of view.
first of all, when i couldn't talk to you anymore, i had to really rethink my whole life and my philosophy about life. it had been really centered around you. i thought that if you were gone, i had no reason to live, no reason to grow or subsist or anything. everything i'd ever believed kinda fell apart, including religion. i had start from zero ground.
i read a lot. i read a lot of philosophy, from plato to nietzsche. i searched very diligently for truth, and i prayed for revelation. i didn't really know if i believed in our religion at that point, but like i said i started from the bottom, so i read and thought until i realized that i did believe in God, and everything just started evolving in that fashion.
so i started over, and i did everything i could to try to start developing a life philosophy that didn't center around you. i seriously questioned my spirtuality, and i discovered that i do believe in the doctrine of our church, but i really disapprove of many of the ways that it is humanly organized. i think that people should develop truths and then search for religions that match those truths. i don't think missionaries should shove religious views on people; i think they should explain to them how to develop their own spirituality and then have faith that if these people are really searching for the truth they will end up at mormanism. there are still a few issues i have spiritually, but having read a lot and prayed a lot, i've sort of arrived at a deep integral spirituality that is much more than just a flat religion. (you should read 'a theory of everything' by the way. it really pulled things together for me, especially after reading so much philosophy).
after reading a lot of philosophy, i developed my own personal philosophy that related most of all to existentialism. i really believe the psychological philosophy i developed (based ironically mostly on sartre), which is basically that most people aren't aware of their true motives and they just buy the cultural conscious motives people tell them rather than deeping into their subconsciuos for the real reasons for their actions. i think that existentialist philosophers have really delved into the subconscious and liberated themselves in that way. i don't like what sartre does with trying to make existentialism a philosophy though; i just view it as a method of philosophizing, much like nietzsche and kierkegaard did. i think that people need to arrive upon their own truths if they are to truly develop an integral, comprehensive understanding of life and the world in its entirety. up until this point in my life, i had bought cultural truths and relationship ideals. when i couldn't talk to you and i had a lot of time on my hands, i was forced to really think about all of these things and realize that i really had no conviction in any sort of truth. i'm still working to develop my unique philosophy, but it is definitely emerging.
i had to rethink all of my abuse, and my concepts of blame, and whose fault things are. it is hard for me because i have always had a hard time placing blame on people. for instance i have a hard time blaming my mom for what she did, because i know that people abused my mom, and i know that people abused the people that abused my mom, and i have a hard time finding a primary mover that is entirely culpable. therefore, in my confusion of where to lay the blame, i have blamed myself mostly. now, after reading psychology and thinking about sartre, i have decided that people are entirely accountable for their actions. i know the judicial system wouldn't work if we did the same sort of psychological analyzing that i have been doing. we simply have to assume that people have agency. however, this view of mine is also still under construction, and i am thinking about it a lot.
i have realized that past all of my doubts, my core philosophy is simply that of love. i am opposed of violence in any way, and i believe that God is mainly about love. the only commandment people really need is to love all humanity. the other commandments follow. i think that this should be the core of anyone's spirtuality. i know i want to join the peace corps and help people. i know i want to make a difference in people's lives. i also believe that if we truly loved our neighbors, all of them, we would never abuse them or hurt them in any way. if everyone just observed this main philosophy of love, there wouldn't be much crime. now i'm not sure if humanity is capable of living and operating under such a philosophy, but i do think that it is the core of my every philosophy. i really do love everyone on this earth, no matter what they have done, and therefore i don't think i could ever truly harm them in any significant way.
the main value i have been trying really hard to develop is integrity. i decided it's really, really important to me that i keep my word and live truthfully in every way. no more walls; none of that junk. i want to live honestly and openly. i'm still working on this a lot.
i haven't binged or purged since may. i have been eating a lot, and i have been running 2-4 miles or bikeriding 4-8 miles every single day. i feel healthy and in control. i have become a vegetarian, and that has really helped me feel in control as well. i still feel strong impulses to return to the eating disorder, but i really like this healthy way of life i am living now, way too much to sacrifice it all to going back to misery. it is always easier to be miserable and blame myself and self-injure, but it is worth it, i believe, to do the hard thing, and be healthy.
i haven't self injured since i cut my wrist. my philosophy on this is just like my philosophy on eating. it's time to be healthy.

now the reasons i have been doing all of this- learning to be healthy, developing my own philosophy, fostering a new kind of spirituality- is that i know my life cannot revolve around you. i know that if we are ever to have a healthy relationship, i need to take these actions to be healthy completely independently of you, and for reasons entirely other than our relationship. i am doing these things because i love myself, and it's truly time for me to be healthy in a way i have always been afraid of. it scares me a lot, but i think it's a good way of living, and it's a good change, and i know i can do it. so i'm not doing any of this for you. i am doing it for myself, and so i can live a happy, healthy life no matter what happens to me.

that being said, i still love you incredibly much and think about you 24-7. i care about you and i worry about you. i have gotten angry with you, i have been incredibly sad, i have been worried... i have crossed the emotional spectrum ten times over. i know that i can be happy and healthy without you in my life (and it's extremely important to me that i know that), but i also know i want you in my life, and i want to spend forever with you. i know that what i am doing now could make our relationship a billion times better and healthier. i am actually glad that i was forced to develop this life completely separate from you, because i know i'm a much healthier person now. the fact that re-evaluating myself and my life in this fashion will make our relationship that much stronger is an awesome perk.

i mentioned that integrity is extremely important to me now, and i am working on it a lot. this means that i do want to respect my parents' wishes not to communicate with you. i really do want to communicate you, so my respect for their wishes is entirely separate from my personal desires. i am trying to think if there is any way i can honestly still communicate with you, but i can't think of anything at the moment. actually, i have one idea, but i don't know if it will work. i am surely going to have my dad call yours quite soon. please have your father be completely honest with mine.

i know that what i am doing is also what you need to do in order to eventually have a healthy relationship, what with the developing a life philosophy completely separate from our relationship. i know that you are accountable for your actions. the problems that you were having when we last spoke i think are my most immediate concerns; i don't think it's okay for you to be self-injuring, or abusing your brother (or letting him abuse you), or drinking, or touching girls inappropriately in ways they do not wish to be touched. i think you need to take complete accountability for those actions. and i think that before we can ever be healthy together, you really, really need to undergo the process i have undergone this summer of creating a life that you can live and be happy in whether i'm in it or not. i know that if you do this, and you reach the same point in your life that i have reached, in which you want our relationship back very badly, but you still have a healthy existence without it, then we can begin to have the healthy relationship that we have never had. it's important to me, though, that our relationship move in a healthy direction.

you can reply to this email, and in fact i want you to reply, but keep in mind that i do intend to respect my parents' wishes in the long term, both because i value my integrity, and because i know that if you have time to grow in the ways i have grown (time separate mostly from me), we could have an amazing relationship. that isn't hard for me to say. all i really immediately want right now is to be with you and hold you and tell you that we can do it all together. but we can't, not until we can both exist healthily on our own. and i *know* that.

all of that said, i still love you, yes, to the infinite power. i am doing pretty well. i miss you (also to the infinite power), but i know that who i have become since our communication was cut off is a really healthy person. i'm ready to be healthy. i hope you are too, whatever it takes.

evolution

The children are crying crayon tears
and every pool of innocence mimes the imperfection
of the hollow condolences
uttered by yesterday's generation,
already ruined by fear.

the tissue sillhouettes
hang in the window where they are a mirror
of crinkling lives
lived out by the sinlessness
that slowly rains away.

years go by
marked by blurred air.
children grow up in the devastated motions
of their parents' mistakes.
nobody watches the paper cutouts
as they slowly brown and curl.

the end of the spiral
of disillusioned time
is the day when the children-
maimed, bruised, broken-
help their own children
cry crayon tears of their own,
and every pool of childlike innocence
mimes the imperfection
of another generation.

somewhere, in a window
as thick as forever,
one more season
of paper dolls flutters down
to decay like rusting leaves
in the fall.

I'm feeling a little bit better. I'm pulling through it. I was feeling rather depressed a few minutes ago, but then I took stock of what I was actually doing and it made me laugh.

It is 11:00 p.m. on a vacation weekend and I am currently browsing a calculus math help forum and doing other people's math problems for them while reading Discover magazine, which is talking about using capacitors with metal plates covered in carbon nanotubes to replace mobile phone batteries.

Could I possibly be more of a dork, and without even realizing it?

Yesterday I rode my bike to try to let go of Josh and ended up holding him tighter. Today I'm going to go get on my bike because I'm afraid I'll kill myself if I sit around here, and I made a promise to someone that I would live. Even if they didn't hear that promise, it still stands. I don't want to kill myself, although I want to die.

I'm going to go get on my bike, and I swear to you that by the time I get off that bike I won't feel suicidal anymore, even if it takes riding all night.

I hope I don't fail like last night. I hope I can just sleep and things will be okay tomorrow. I just don't feel like living...

You can tell I'm fighting, though, can't you? It must be a good sign.

I want to die right now. No, I want to melt away. I want to erase myself, my past, my future. I want to disintegrate.

Oh God, I'm so lonely without him. I tried running, bikeriding, away from the way I felt, but I can't. I can't ever leave. He's the only person I have ever loved; he's the only person that has ever really loved me like that. I don't care what they say, what you say, what anyone says, he's the only person I want to be with forever.

I am trying to learn how to live without him, because they told me that's the healthy thing to do, but I can't. I want to fix things. I want to make them better. I want to erase all these mistakes. But I can't, and so past all my desires to fix what can't be fixed, I just want to let go. I just want to blow away. I want to blow away into the air he breathes into his lungs so I can be in him always, in an uncomplicated way.

I am a national merit semifinalist. I might get a scholarship. It just seems like a pretty picture that is very far away; in the end all that is real is that there is a gaping place inside of me, no matter how unhealthy that is, and only one boy out of all of the boys in the world can fill it just right.

My metabolism showed up again after a few years off. I have been eating a ton, probably due to being so anxious and scared. It's probably not good that I'm emotionally eating (it seems I either don't eat or eat a lot), but I have been a bike-riding fiend (and a running fiend), so I'm gaining no weight. It's weird. I'm not used to my metabolism yet. It's nice to have it back, though. It's nice to eat without everything I used to do.

I got on my bike today and swore that by the time I got off it I would be over him. I rode around town, one or two hours floating by in a grid of gravelly streets. It was hot out, but I cried the whole way, and the tears evaporated in the wind, sucking the heat of my skin away so they could be free, leaving me here. My eyelashes, long as they are, brushed against the lenses of my glasses and left bars of moisture. The only place the bars didn't cover was my peripheral vision, that tunnel so blurry that it is like a mirror covered in condensation. Trapped.

I was trying to let go. I have to, I think. I have to move on, somehow, be happy. It's so much harder than they make it sound.

I listened to Something Corporate as I flew down the hills recklessly, and every song was about him. (Someday you'll be a man, and men can do terrible things...) People do hurt the people they love. Josh never abused me. I know that he loves me. Maybe it just hurts me to know that. Maybe I'm selfish and angry and confused and lost and there is no justification. I don't know.

I rode over the chip-sealed streets as the sun hung down and the chill bit into the air. I saw the first trees rusting over, the death creeping in. I swore that by the time I got home I would be over him, but as I rode back into my driveway I loved him more than ever.

I'm so confused. I don't want to hurt people. I don't want my love to hurt you...

It's odd how a few words on a page can crumble seventeen years of work. It's odd how a few pixels can break through ten million tiny locks ticked on chains around your heart and bury a needle in the muscle. A needle isn't big, but it hurts. It hurts and hurts and hurts.

Take the worst news you can imagine receiving, times it by a million. Try getting told that the people you care most about don't really love you. Try fighting it with every atom that makes up ever cell that makes up every tissue that makes up you. Try throwing seventeen years worth of pain in the face of it. Watch it blink. Pray that it is blinded. Feel the air flow in gushes out of your lungs when you realize it still sees. Maybe, then, maybe you start to feel the defenses crumbling. Maybe then you start to feel that raw needle shifting in your heart. Maybe then you begin to realize that only truth is unblinded by deception.

He can't have loved me nearly as much as I love him.

It is funny, how we cover the pain with anger. It is like pain is too much for us; we have to hide under that reflective shield. I am so angry, but at nothing. It is unfocused anger. It blurs, it buzzes. It breaks down the locks and it turns all the keys.

"You write such pretty words, but life's no story book. Love's an excuse to get hurt, and to hurt." (Bright Eyes). I thought this was true. I thought love was pain. The fifth or sixth entry in this blog is about what I thought up until now.

I've said that he's told me he loves me a million times (you write such pretty words) but that his actions never were in accordance with his words (but life's no story book...). I have for months believed the words. Words are nothing. Words are nothing in the bible, words are nothing to Nietzsche (don't smite me), words are nothing when they come from people's mouths. Words are pointless when Nick C. is ranting about anarchy and the follies of the American government (all theory, no action). Action proves.

Ignore all the words. It's not just him, either. It's everyone. Imagine a brother you adore. You thought he would never leave you. Imagine all of the words (I love you), imagine that story book. Then imagine the action- oral sex on a living room floor. I love you. Sex. Oh, what a conflict.
(do you feel your heart breaking, the locks clicking, the flood raging?)
Imagine watching the police come to your house to tell an angry boy something. Imagine your father pushing a boy into a closet. Imagine the crash of wood, unrepaired for years. Imagine drugs in a suitcase. Imagine a boy playing video games with his sister.
She never got mad, she was never ever mad...
She never got mad. But maybe I do. Maybe that boy betrayed me. Maybe he didn't love me nearly as much as I loved him. Maybe he forced me down on that floor not because he was angry, or lost, or dissociative, or unculpable. Maybe he knew what he was doing, and maybe he did it anyway, no matter how wrong he knew it was.
HE LEFT ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I hated my parents for that. I hated them for sending him away. But they didn't send him away. He left me. He never cared like I did. We never talk about it now. All he can say is sorry. Maybe it was his fault. Maybe I am angry if it was his fault. He left me.

(your love is gonna drown)

Imagine a mother who tells her daughter she loves her no matter what. Maybe she was abused as a child. Maybe she doesn't even know it's wrong. Maybe she really does love her daughter. Imagine that daughter getting hit. Not badly, physically, but bad enough to shatter some emotional bridge. LOSS LOSS LOSS. Imagine a girl with a cut wrist in eigth grade and a mom, "How could you do this to me?"
It wasn't me. I didn't do it to you. But you did do it to me.
"People hit their kids all the time..."
There is a line. You see it blurring, blurring. There is no line anymore. There is a sky as black as nothing.

Oh, but you love me...
You don't love the ones you hurt. You don't hurt the ones you love.

Imagine a mother giving away a turtle a little girl loved but neglected. "You take care of the things you love," she said. "If you loved Herman, you would take care of him."
If you loved Lindsay, would you take care of her?
(You write such pretty words...)

It hurts, doesn't it? The girl on the floor, the things in her mouth, the mother with the turtle, the boy on the plane. It hurts. Why? Words don't match actions. The words, they never match actions.
Actions speak louder than words.
If you loved me, you would take care of me. You don't hurt the things you love.
(Love's an excuse to get hurt...)

All of this hurts. It sifts through the walls of years of deception. It buries the anger. The TV is playing, such soap opera lives. Loud enough to drown out the echo of a flat hand against a child's cheek.

You think this hurts... imagine it as a dead ache, an old wound festering again in a new irritation. Now imagine, parallel to the aching needle, a knife slicing through walls and entering the heart.

There was a boy, you see. And he said, you are the only one. And he said, you are my only one. And then he OD'd for me. And then he kissed a girl. He told me I don't make him feel loved.

Can you think of anything worse to tell the girl who held the turtle who spit out the taste.

[My mom wants me to watch TV right now. She said she's sick of me. She just told me 'go to hell.' Actions speak louder than words].

You love a boy, you love him so much you would do anything for him, and you realize you're not the only one, there are other girls, there are other people, people better than you.

He can't have loved me. I don't care about his pretty words. He can't have loved me.

Do you feel that needle sifting, sifting? Do you hear a little girl in a room with her cousin, "Will you play that game with me?" It was enough, that sentence, for thirteen years of guilt. I want to be done. I don't want it to be my fault anymore.

30 seconds mom says.

The knife shifts, the heart explodes.

Give a little bit of my love to you.