Thoughts on Thoughts 7-ish

Bright is flirting with my puppy. This makes me really angry, and I have no idea why. I'm okay with the concept of the puppy dating random girls I'll never meet, and perfectly content with Bright doing whatever she pleases, but somehow the concept of the two of them kissing raises my hackles and extends my claws. It Shouldn't Be.

The thing is, I'm pretty sure I'd be almost equally bothered if it were the Music-girl Puppy were flirting with. Or if it were my grandfreshman. But I'm pretty sure he wouldn't flirt with his freshman, so that's okay. Not that I'm not flirting with my grandfreshman, but I swear I'm not a horrible grandfreshman molester. She's encouraging me.

In other words the High School has invaded my love life, and is causing all this bullshit that isn't quite drama, but seems drama-like enough to me. It's more stupid than drama has any right to be, and is very much reminding me why Avi is a good idea. But I am determined to have a decent relationship with Beshi and do silly normal girl things this year. It's even enjoyable. Really.

And all of this is slightly tangent, and yet still completely relevant. But not really helping me figure out why Bright and Puppy aren't allowed to make out. I don't know if Puppy is allowed to make out with anyone I've actually met, now that I think about it. He's my puppy, and, though while not around me he has complete freedom, the moment I'm involved, I want him to be non-sexual and a pillow, or curled up in my lap. It seems to be a form of jealousy, which is patently ridiculous, but only to be expected.

So I need to start paying more attention to him as an independent being in the here-and-now. Probably, I should call him something other than Puppy. And, just seeing him around Bright and acknowledging that there's a sexual aspect of their interactions that's absent from my interactions with him should help. Also, remembering that neither of them are the type to stop cuddling with me just because cuddling with each other is special.

And the High School bullshit is not fundamentally and necessarily different from other social settings. And the grandfreshman and I will never have anything I don't want us to have. And it is not necessarily immature to have romantic stuff that happens while at school. I think that's everything.

On a completely unrelated note: remind me that I can fight my emotions when I need to, and that I don't need to be anything, even unpredictable.

Things I Don't Really Want to Do

What, me, post? No, you're just hallucinating. I've given up posting.

I've decided I wasn't really serious about wanting to be a bartender. I'm sure my parents would be pleased if I'd bothered to mention the temptation to them. They'd also be glad to hear I'm not going to be a truck driver, a street musiciam, a secreatary, a mountain climber, a migrant farm worker or a hermit. I'm not going to earn a living by decorating cakes, sewing ballgowns, or selling bouquets. Nor am I going to be serious about my sculptures. I'm not going to design buildings, study plankton, or invent spaceships, either. I don't think my parents would have minded those last three so much, but I probably would have.

Every so often, I get tempted to waste life doing meaningless work, just 'cause that's what everyone does, and I ask myself questions like "who would want to be a truck driver?" And then I answer "me" and come up with a few good reasons why spending my life driving a purple peterbuilt up and down the same highway over and over would be fun. Or I'll think, how can I do this useless thing that I enjoy as a job? And I'll come up with florist or bartender. For a while, I'll seriously want to do whatever it is, too, and then I'll realize that it's actually a really bad idea for many very logical reasons.

It's a great stress reliever to come up with an improbable thing like that to spend the rest of one's life doing, though. It makes the realistic things seem interesting, or workable by comparisson. I think that's why I decide to spend the rest of my life mixing other people's drinks or whatever. It might even be an excuse to talk to people, says the optimist within me.

A specific post about change, for once

I haven't posted as regularly as I was "supposed" to. I've been busy, the last couple weeks, and I don't really have time right now. I ought to be sleeping and healing, but this post needs to be written before it loses all relevance and usefulness.

Over the last, say, three weeks, I've aged another mental year or so. It's quite sudden, but sudden, rapid bursts of really obvious changes are typical for me. The actual process of changing will have been more gradual, enough so that I didn't notice it, and the full effect of said changes will also be too gradual to notice. And that phrase made no sense whatsoever. Anyway.

What I mean by mentally aging is becoming more free from oppressive thought patterns, more mentally equipped to deal with the world, and more capable of translating mental readiness into the physical world. The latest set of changes have been focused on responsibility and independence. I find myself much more capable of pretending to be an adult, and doing things that are basic to life without parents.

It's nice to be motivated to take care of my own affairs in a timely and effective fashion, if a bit strange to adjust to. And I'm really not who I was, even six months ago.

This particular change is the last step in the process that began the day I decided I was never going back to school.

Since October: I know my limits. I know how to recover from being pushed past my limits. I know how to judge the quality of my own judgement. I know who to ask to review my judgement. I know the importance of a safety net, and the maintenence thereof. I know how to be a safety net, and when to let other people use their own judgement. I know what I believe in, in terms of politics. I know, to some extent, what I want for my future. I know how to discipline myself to reach for that future. And, most importantly, I know how to cook (enough) and clean (enough) and how to convince myself to do so. Huzzah, for six painfully productive months!

Scheduled Thoughts whatever number it is now.

Playing my flute, like writing in this blog, is something that's really really good for me, but I don't do as often as I should. Every time I spend an hour I don't have making music, I say to myself afterwards, that was amazing, and I should do it more often. But then I don't actually do it more often. The flute becomes expendable. I convince myself I can live without it, which is actually pretty ridiculous. So right now, I'm in the sweet, exhausted foggy afterglow of a nice long time spent with my flute, and I'm writing this post to remind myself that I really should practice more. I can make time. And it is so worth it.

Change

It seems everyone in the blogging world is talking about change lately, how much they're secretly afraid of it, and how much they wish they weren't. Seems like it's time I did a post amounting to much the same thing, but I can't, because I don't feel that way about change at all. Part of the point of change is that it frightens people, so I guess I am a little scared of things like leaving behind everything I know and going out into a world where I may not even have a support system, but I'm not a person who needs everything to stay familiar. To me, that's the definition of a conservative. The idea behind being politically progressive is to support change, because the world won't stay the same even if you'd like it to. Things do change and nothing can come of resisting that. It's survival of the fittest, too. If you don't adapt, you die. So I live my life with fluidity, handle the changes the world brings to me without fear, and sometimes am the origin of that change myself.

That's not to say I'm good at trying new things, but that's mostly fear of exposing myself to ridicule from other people. I'm trying to change how motivated I am by that fear, but it proves to be a slow change.

In fact, I'm more afraid of rididity than of change. If I define myself, I immediately feel the need to prove that definition inacurate by changing whatever part of myself I defined. That's part of why I started using the name Riva in person. I was tired of living under a defined personality, and it was limiting my ability to change.

Change to me is beautiful. It's miraculous and wonderous to realize that I don't have to be in the same patterns for the rest of my life, that I can escape from them with usually no more than a day's worth of thought. I wouldn't say God is change, or anything like that, but I'm certainly not as bothered by the idea of people and things changing as I see that people around me are.

Scheduled Thoughts 4

If I wear all my green early this week, I can accidentally have nothing green left to wear on the 17th... eheh, right. I don't own any orange.

It's not that I support the Irish Protestants, or that I'm making any kind of judgement of who was in the right originally. I'd just like it if people knew that there were people out there who didn't wear green. I'd like it if most people knew why they were getting stupid drunk (ah, stereotypes...) and dyeing their pubic hair green. I actually met a part-Irish guy recently who thought I should wear green and get really drunk even though I told him I'm part Irish Protestant. This, incidentally, was the same guy who landed on my ankle. I'm sure he'd be pleased to know that my ankle will probably be quite green even by Saturday.

Scheduled Thoughts 3

I have an ankle that seems to have been pretty weakened. I've been spraining it about once a month for a while now, only lately it's been closer to every two weeks. Yesterday, a large, heavy, wrestler dropped a lot of his weight onto it suddenly. I actually took painkillers/anti-inflamitary pills for it last night, but it was still impressively swollen and painful all last night, and would not support weight this morning. I've been icing and elevating it all day, pretty much, and it's still swollen in pain. Also, the inside of it hurts, which is one of the warnings I was supposed to look for as a sign that it needs to be x-rayed.

I also bruised a rib and a cheekbone, and have many many sore muscles from lap tag, which involves a sort of wrestling (ask if you really wanna know how it's played). So why does all of this make me happy?

I think it comes down to the same reason I can't consider myself entirely female, ever. I'm fucking macho. Sad, I know. But I enjoy being in pain so I can shrug it off, pretend to ignore it and smile when it hurts because I'm not caring.

Indicators

An indicator, in the language of specialized connotations I use when I want to think in words, is basically a sign of the state of my mind. The logical question to follow that would be why I would need a sign to tell what's going on in my own mind. Sometimes, I get preoccupied with what's going on in the outside world, though, and can't tell until I notice the indicator. Things that seem like accidents or coincidences are indicators, and also things that seem like choices but lack normal logic. If I find myself doing something that fits a pattern and don't know why, I'll figure out what it's indicating.

A basic example is weeks when I find myself dressing or talking in a particular mode, when I don't think I feel like that mode. When that happens, I figure I actually am in the mode, and just haven't noticed, or been paying enough attention. That particular sign is a general indicator that I should spend more time alone or thinking about myself.

The reason I tell all this is that last night I had an existential crisis for no apparent reason. I should be enjoying life and so on, but I just couldn't figure out why I was alive. I got rid of the existentialism without analyzing it much, so it only just occured to me what that was indicating. That was a message to spend more time doing simple things that bring me great joy, instead of complicated things that bring me some happiness. I need to be writing and creating more. And it's wonderful to know that, but I find myself wondering where the message is coming from.

I generally figure it's my subconscious, which is more self-aware than my conscious mind, but it's not like I can tell. It could be God for all I know, and that's an interesting thought. I'm sure many people out there would say with certainty that it's God, and many more would say it isn't. It doesn't matter too much, who-or-whatever it is certainly is a reliable and accurate source.

In other news, I've been playing with the idea that God is the space where things are neither one thing nor the other, and also both.

Scheduled Thoughts 2

Religion is weird stuff.

I didn't realize how athiestic my parents were for a very long time, because they let me be as religious as I wanted. I thought of my dad as Jewish and my mom as sort of agnostic. The idea that I knew, and was raised by, athiests was pretty shocking to a person-thing who learned "morals" from old English children's books.

I got used to that, over time. Just now I had a similar moment of disorientation realizing one of my friends is actually religiously Jewish, and probably believes the prayers she says. She's just too logical to be religious, in my head. I've changed over the last five or six years. That's good to know, but I'm not sure I like having the subconscious idea that religion impossible in a logical person.

Conclusion: I need to be less influenced by the value-systems of the books I read. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is making me superstitious, and The God Delusion is making me an athiest. I'm not an athiest. I'm inventing a religion, goddamnit.

Scheduled Thoughts 1

This is an attempt to have more content in this journal, because I really like the idea of this space.

In this journal, no more than once a day, and no less than once a week, I will post a thought or idea that holds my attention. This does not have to be a full-length analysis of the thought, as in thoughts on thoughts, but can develop into that if it seems useful.

Today's thought is: I hate valentines day. I'm disgusted by it. I woke up this morning with a twisty feeling in my gut, and the thought of all the people with their shiny red heart only made it worse. I know some people hate valentines day because they hate spending it alone and feel inadequate without someone to buy then flowers or whatever. I know other people hate the consumerism of it. Neither of those apply to me, though the first used to, back in middle school, before I decided being single was a silly idea. (I should look at that, shouldn't I?) The fake glitter of it all bothers Puppy (a friend who is either really distant or really close, and I'm never sure which), and that bothers me, too. I think that's the heart of it. And that is as much thought as I have time for today (heh, future subject).

Safety and Love

He reads this blog, so I don't want to write in it in case he's frightened by something he reads.

He says he loves me so sincerely, so I'm afraid I won't love him much longer.

He makes me happy, so I'll have to leave him soon, because I can't depend on him. I can't expect whatever he and I have to last.

Afraid of commitment? Me? How do you figure? I have long relationships by highschool standards. Seriously. It's not like hearing someone say they love me is enough to make me never look at them again.

But I am afraid. I'm terrified. I've had my heart broken once, and I won't have it broken again. Those are the thoughts that destroy my loves. So I'm posting this, where he'll read it, to say I don't mean it when I think I want out. I can't get attached to you, because I can't expect a forever. I know that. So the moment I start getting attached, I start to distance myself, convince myself you aren't worth it. And you are worth it. I love you. I want us to have whatever it is we have, still. That should be enough. I should be focused on the present, on what makes sense in the now. I shouldn't worry about whatever's going to happen, because whatever it is will happen anyway, and worrying never helps. I know that, but I can't convince myself. So maybe if I write it down, it'll help.

This is it. The present is what matters, because at this point in my life, the past is too selective and inconsistant, and the future is too blurred. Neither of them are relevant, except in the ways the past makes me me. I won't ruin something worth having just because of how things were before, and how they might be someday.

Painting my Ceiling

White walls, cracked and fading, and not really white anymore. Barely covered by a scattering of posters, unlike most rooms belonging to people my age. I've always meant to paint them. I should be able to find a color that works with the rest of the room fairly easily, because my room has been becoming steadily more blue over the past several years.

In fact, most of my life has been becoming steadily more blue over the last several years, until people think blue is my color. There was a point when that would have bothered me a lot. Blue is a nothing-color, meaningless. Everyone likes it, no one feels strongly about it. Blue jeans say nothing about the fashion-tastes of the person wearing them.

But, I've been realizing, blue isn't as meaningless as it seems. It takes on meaning from the context it is put in more easily than other colors, in fact. There are shades of it, of course, more red, more yellow. I tend to lean towards the red-gray blues, myself, and the dark ones. I've discovered I don't mind wearing blue, since I've now acquired three blue gowns, and one blue summer dress, a blue wool coat, a blue wool cloak, a blue tie. It's gotten to the point where most of my favorite clothing (with the exception of pants) is blue. And I guess I don't mind that anymore. So I know what color I'm going to paint my walls, as soon as I get around to doing that.

And it's not a problem to paint the walls themselves, other than the issues with moving the furniture. The problem is my ceiling.

My ceiling has more cracks in its paint than any part of my walls. It's dirty, and almost looks water-stained in places. It's also covered in hundreds, possibly thousands, of glow in the dark stars. They aren't the big plastic ones, clumsily held on with putty, for the most part. They're tiny, flat stickers, many of them not even "star-shaped" and covering about ten square feet, not counting the ones that spill onto the wall next to my bed. They're as closely grouped as the stars one can see on a clear night in the country. Once removed, they'll lose their stickiness and be nigh-impossible to store. Even if they didn't, it'd probably be a full day's work to replace them. I can't paint around them. And if my ceiling isn't off-white anymore, they'll be visible during daytime. But my ceiling needs painting, nonetheless.

I guess I should come to terms with the fact that I'll never have a night sky on my ceiling again, and start taking them down. But I don't know how to do that. I don't remember when I put the first packet of 200 up. I'm quite sure it was a packet of 200, because it's always a packet of 200. I have half of one lying on my floor someplace waiting for me to put it up. And I guess that's the answer. I can start over, with what I have left, and with more that I'll buy over the last little bit of time before I leave for college. It may be a while before I start painting, so I'll enjoy my stars while I can, and get used to the idea of no longer having them.

And now I'm ready to start getting my room ready to paint.