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.