How I killed my computer, and other such ridiculous things.

I have a difficult time with computer reformatting–that is a fact.  Over the past few years, I’ve had to reformat several computers and deal with the loss of nearly all of my data.  Over and over and over again.  I used to bitch about it a lot in my diary since it was such a yearly thing back in high school, and I had counted myself as lucky for lasting this long with my laptop.

But, all things come to an end, don’t they?

One very malicious virus from one not so official site.  I keep thinking, “If I hadn’t gone onto that website, if I hadn’t clicked on the allow button for what I thought was my virus-protection, if I had backed up all of my things beforehand…”  But there’s only so much you can do with ‘what if’s.  After a while, they stop mattering, and you have to see if you learned something from the situation.

I was reading about astronomy.  Astronomy! When the website forced a pop up that was suddenly taken down by an ‘Allow Disallow’ kind of prompt.  Seeing the pop up as Vista Total Security, I thought that it was the virus protection automatically installed on my computer and pressed allow.  What a stupid thing to do.  Vista Total Security, my friends, is actually a malware virus.  At first, it tricks you into believing it’s automatic virus protection, but after a few hours of constant warnings and pop ups from it telling you that your computer is infected, you begin to wonder if maybe Vista Total Security is the virus.  Well, it was.  And I immediately started backing up my files on my new external hard-drive.  Good thing I did, too, since my entire computer wasn’t working after five hours.

I called Marshall for some help with it, and he ended up recommending that I reformat the system by installing Windows 7, which I had happened to keep up here in case I wanted to switch over.  So, for several hours last night, I made the switch and then uploaded all of my previous information back onto my laptop.

Except some of it was missing.

Most of it being music.

Three fifths of my music.

Now, I’m the type of girl who collects music and takes it pretty damn seriously.  I organise it into wonderful playlists and care deeply about my connection to certain music.  So, seeing that 3000 of my songs were missing was a bit of a shock this morning.  I just stood there in front of my computer wondering how my iTunes could only have saved what was uploaded by CD rather than both CD and flash-drive.  I felt foolish for not checking beforehand that everything had been saved.  And I felt betrayed.  It should have copied, and even if I had known when I was transferring everything, there wouldn’t have been enough time to save everything before the virus took over.  It all came down to electronic betrayal, and I couldn’t help but feel frazzled.

But not too terribly upset.

Sure, the what-if’s have been soaring, and I certainly wish that I hadn’t lost so much, but I know that I can get much of it back.  I have so many CDs in my truck from my previous computers, so that’s a start.  My friends have offered me up their classical music to replace my Chopin, Vivaldi, and Tchaikovsky, and I’m confident that things can be right.

I realised today at lunch that, had this happened back in high school, I probably would have cried.  Actually, I know that I would have cried for at least a day because, when I did originally lose all of my music (even though it was only 400 songs at the time), I cried for days.  But I keep thinking about the situation now and how it really doesn’t matter.  I’ll get it back.  Everything I actually cared about will be back in my music library, and the world will move on, and I’m still alive, and my photos are all intact, and things are actually pretty damn okay.

Being positive in light of miniature disasters mean the difference between being able to handle the stress and completely shutting down, and I’m willing to start taking the stress on as direct challenges.  You delete my music?  I get it back.  Easy as that.

So, here begins the epic repairing of my music library.

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Moving On

And here is where I continue telling you about my life and what has been happening lately in some type of witty but meaningful manner, all of which should lead to some life lesson.  Except that I’m not really the type to have it all mean something except for a rant that could be finished within a single sentence.  Maybe a sentence with semi-colon in the middle, but you get the picture.  But the reason that I’m writing all of this is to say that, for today (and maybe only today), I have the confidence to write as though I do not have an audience.

It’s a tricky thing, writing for an audience.  It’s something that I originally didn’t think that I would encounter since the internet is sometimes a massive wasteland of unread rantings, and yet people did start reading this.  And, somehow, that made my writing become a bit more artificial.  For the first time, I had to start worrying about who would read and what they’d think and whether I would upset them.  And it was important to keep in mind, because I did hurt some people, especially around a year ago.  Anger is a strange motivator that can cause you to have better work-outs or more motivation toward an exam or the ability to change the world you live in, but it’s also a force that can come across in waves.  You may think the first wave is brilliant, but the second comes back with the hurt feelings of others.  And, for that, I am held fully accountable and sorry.

But I do want to be more honest with you, and I do want to be able to tell you how I really think and feel without worrying about condemnation or assault.  While this may never be as fully ‘me’ as, say, my diary, I still want this to be a fully honest public forum that expands from my thoughts.  So I leave you for only this moment.  This tiny little moment.  And I want you to know that I will be back and I will be writing more and it will be of a level of honesty that really hasn’t occurred on here since my blog was first activated (minus the two years that it sat in cyber-space).  I hope that I can speak with all of you on a better level, regardless of what anyone may think.

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Maturity

Sometimes I doubt whether I’ve matured at all in the past two years.  It must have something to do with leaving teenage egocentricism and starting to develop at a much slower rate, even if all kinds of crazy things are going on all around me.  I keep looking back to when I was sixteen and seventeen and thinking that maybe I wasn’t all that stupid, which now strikes me as odd.  All throughout my life, I would look back at the things I wrote from a few years before and scoff at how incredibly dumb I was.  Now, though I’ll laugh at how I know better as an adult, I can’t bring myself to make fun of myself from a few years ago.  Once I hit that point where, cognitively, I was an adult, things just kind of… stagnated.

But, as a slap to the face, I received a very lengthy comment from a man whom I had written to a year and a half ago about his doctrine concerning suicide and religion.  To sum up his argument, it was that by teaching evolution/atheism, that it was the cause of teenage suicide.  Finding that ridiculous, I had written a letter to him detailing the causation-correlation dilemma and psychological facts presented with teen suicide.  But, when I had posted a copy to my blog, it was not in the most civil of tones and was quite condescending.  Looking back, I wish I’d done something different.

I never agreed with him.  I still don’t agree with him.  But even sixteen months later, I’m shaking my head at my behaviour.  It’s the nagging question: Why couldn’t you have presented the facts and left it at that?  I wonder why, and it makes me question my maturity.  And it makes me wonder if I have matured since then since I now see what I wrote in a different light.

It’s just something to think about.  Maturity, and what the word means when it really comes down to your actions, behaviours, what you say, et cetera.

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All right, here: I wasn’t so ‘invincible’.

It’s been a year.

Okay.  Almost.

It’s nearly been a year since I really picked this blog up and decided to let it be more than the single posts about Christmas from 2007 (yes, for all of you who did not know, this blog has been alive for quite a few years).  I don’t really know what to say to my blog.  Happy Birthday?  No.  Not really.

A year ago, I was sitting outside in the Quad, dreading the winter that was to come, watching the people around me, feeling so philosophical.  I guess not much has changed.  I still chill in the Quad all of the time (just maybe in different places), still watch people to figure out more about what they may be like, et cetera.  Maybe I wear more scarves now and my hair is longer and I have more music in my iTunes library.  That’s about it from the physical perspective.  But, you may wonder what has changed in this past year:

Well, I’m more outgoing; that’s for sure.  I’ve opened up more than I could have imagined by talking to strangers and being genial.  Unfortunately, this also means that I’ve been more open with how I feel about things, which causes drama and anger.  People have thought that I’ve grown meaner.  I think I just grew more honest and maybe a bit more secure.  Sometimes, that backfires.  I question whether I want everyone around me to know that I’m excited or happy or stressed.  Sometimes, I turn back into the girl I always was in middle school and just hide everything.  As unhealthy as it is, I still find it comforting to hide behind my mask at some times when I’m not completely sure of my surroundings or if I just want to know I still have the strength to play this charade.  It’s an INTJ trait, I’m afraid.  We are a manipulative bunch, after all.

I’ve made new friends, too, and I guess you can say that I’ve lost some others.  I didn’t know a year ago just how amazing my dorm house was, but now I see all of these people I love every day, and it feels like the best family one could ever have.  We spend our time together, working, playing, relaxing, cooking, stressing, and everything else that a family shares.  It’s blissful, and I’ll be sad to leave when, in another year, I find myself no longer in the dorms.

I’ve also learned a lot.  That should be a given since I’ve been at uni for a full year, but I never would have imagined from last year just how much I would learn.  So much of my classes has been applied to everyday life or general conversations, and it leads me to wonder just how I got through in the past without the knowledge that I now have.  It’s also been exciting to apply what I learn in one class to other subjects.  Something about intuitively combining information in order to allow it presence in another department of life is terribly exciting.  It’s the proof that I’ve learned instead of just absorbed information for it to be squeezed out of me come exam time.

Also, I’ve multiplied my music and film collections.  Here are just a few for you:

Music:

• Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine”
• Loreena McKennitt’s “The Visit”, “The Book of Secrets”
• Yael Naïm’s “Yael Naïm and David Donatien”
• Kate Havnevik’s “Melankton”
• Florence + the Machine’s “Lungs”
• Imogen Heap’s “Ellipse”
• Nickel Creek’s “Why Should the Fire Die?”
• Patrick O’Hearn’s “Glaciation”
• Kingdom of Heaven Soundtrack
• Emiliana Torrini’s “Love in the Time of Science”, “Fisherman’s Wife”
• Joanna Newsom’s “Have One on Me”
• Beirut’s “Gulag Orkester”

Films:

• Kingdom of Heaven Director’s Cut
• Sleepy Hollow
• Marie Antoinette
• Pleasantville
• Mean Girls

Books:

• Great Expectations (Dickens)
• Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) (even though I hated every single character)
• Sense and Sensibility (Austen)
• Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury)
• All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque)
• Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

You can have at it on the media that has been with me during the past year.  Meanwhile, I’ve learned how to make three new types of hats, bake bread, make vegetarian entrées, pay bills, and work at a summer job basically teaching Missouri state history.  So, it’s been educational and new.

But I still want to assure you that, if the ground was not so wet, I would be outside right now, watching everyone around me, listening to some good music, and thinking about everything that happened to occur to get me in that spot and everything that was to occur.  I may not be listening to Muse, and I may not be commenting on my personal philosophies, but I would still be there.

I might as well be right now.

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Teenage Culture

It was a long day of working outside in 96 degree heat with small children around a camp-fire, cooking up stick bread and dump cake and making our own butter.  Six bottles of water, one packed lunch, and an entire outfit soaked in sweat later, it was time to go home and chill.  Of course, first things first, I needed food.  So I took some old black beans, added pepper jack cheese, onions, and a tomato, cooked it in the microwave and ate it along with bread and butter and yet another bottle-amount of water.  And then I showered.  Or, rinsed off would be the more correct phrasing.  And, finally, I was then able to chill and read random fashion/living blogs and avoid Facebook like usual.

The reason that I mention this to you is because I was informed during my blog reading this afternoon that this is not normal teenage culture.  Nothing seemed weird to me when I was making my own breakfast, lunch, and dinner; volunteering at an historic site; or not washing my hair.  But, turns out that these are all faux-pas.  During my reading based off of a Seventeen article, we are supposed to eat macaroni and cheese or go out to get good food.  Then, we’re supposed to work at the mall in some fashion forward boutique where we will be yelled at by gorilla-managers and stomped on by customers for a small pay check.  And, last, we’re supposed to take that second shower of the day where we rewash and then attempt to add the oils back to our skin and hair before blow drying and straightening our hair before just going to bed.

And it left me thinking, “What the fuck?”

Or maybe it just had me reeling that some ordinary day wasn’t ordinary at all in the standards of big businesses or media that would like to think that teenagers are all one stereotype.  According to them, at nineteen, I should still be painting my toenails every night before talking to my gal friends about who I should totally go on a date with after watching that new Twilight film.  They believe that women my age should be more interested in clothing, make up, and hair rather than careers, education, or our own opinions.

As much as I suppose I’ve known all of this goes on, it still manages to sicken me.  Teenagers are not the same person duplicated over and over again.  We are a force of many different people–perhaps even more varied than the majority of the adult world.  As a woman (and, yes, a WOMAN) who is both an adult and a teenager, I feel that my word on this should be fairly solid since I can see both worlds for the time being.

Media outlets try to push every piece of merchandise and accessory available to teenagers through the presumption that we are all the same person, and maybe they make a lot of money doing that.  But they also lose our trust when we are all labelled as trouble makers or fashion addicts or skater punks.  As an example, there was an occasion once at the mall when I was fifteen when I was followed around by a security guard and then questioned just because I was a teenager and because I was wearing the colour black (which happened to be a black polo with a grey pearl necklace, mind you).  When confronted, I commented that I was being pushed into a category I didn’t belong in simply because of my age and that it was blatant ageism.  And that security guard no longer had my trust because of that, which is sad since authority figures should be respected–not flattened because you have no faith in them.  I’m not saying that Media should be authority, but if it wants to act as such, then it needs to win over our trust by treating us as actual people.

So here’s what I have to say to those who believe my life is not the norm of teenage culture:

What is the norm?  Is it really that abnormal that I don’t work in the food or fashion industry?  Is it that abnormal that I love uni and learning?  Is it that abnormal that I not only cook all of my meals myself but cook them very healthily?  And is it really that abnormal that I don’t always wash my hair?

I mean, really, I like that my fifty year-old co-worker at the historic site quotes Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy while talking about politics or that my hair is healthy because I don’t over wash it.  I like the food I eat, even though it’s not fried, full of chicken, or dumped in sugar.  So to those who say that I shouldn’t enjoy these and that they aren’t normal teenage culture, stuff it.  Here’s to all of those teenagers out there who are real people rather than what someone would like to think of them as–one dimensional zombies, bumping into each other while trying to buy another 26 dollars in anti-frizz serum.

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True American Values

From a site about ‘true American Values’:

“As arrows are to an archer, children are to a father.”

So, children are instruments for killing things or hitting darts for entertainment?  Last I checked, children weren’t meant for that and shouldn’t be used as tools of destruction.  And why should the children only be used or coveted by their father?  What’s the say of all the mothers out there who birthed and helped to raise those children?  There’s no winning me over with sexist or discriminatory remarks, now.  Nice try American-values website, but you didn’t quite hit the bull’s eye with this one.

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1990s

Oh dear goodness, I’m practically rolling around in my childhood right now, listening to Dixie Chicks on shuffle and scribbling song lyrics into my diary.  It’s moments like these that remind me that I still have some type of grasp on who I used to be and continue to be.  And even while most of these songs are such rubbish, so much makes up for it: Chris Thile mandolin solos, choruses shifting into minor chords, power building up in bridges.  Oh, the bluegrass of the late nineties and early 2000s was magnificent.  Think on it–Dixie Chicks, Nickel Creek, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Alison Krouse.  A lot of great bluegrass came out then.

In fact, a lot of great music came out in the nineties, but it’s taken me until nearly twenty years later to realise that this crap was… well, not crap.  My room mate for next year is really into nineties alternative, which I started getting into about five years ago, and I’m fairly certain that you’re going to be able to walk into our room and feel like you’re in your childhood.  Matchbox Twenty will be playing in the background while you reach for my Skittles candy machine and a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  Only our laptops will give us away.

One day, I’ll look back at the nineties and 2000s as the “Good Ole Days”, and I will lament about the kick-ball and hiking in the woods and climbing the trees while singing Spice Girls and shoving Pokèmon cards into our Lisa Frank binders.  God, I still have those Lisa Frank binders full of Pokèmon cards in my closet, right next to a bin of Beanie Babies that I was so sure would be worth a ton of money and put me through college.  But you can buy those same Beanie Babies from a garage sale for fifty cents, so, so much for that monetary adventure.

But I’ll look back at all of this in wonder; that much is certain.

I was reading Fahrenheit 451 today while waiting for the mall to open and let me buy a Father’s Day present, and I was surprised by how everyone around me reminded me of the characters.  Sure, in limited ways, but so many people are the sheeple like the majority of characters, and I wondered if I would be like Guy or Clarisse or Mildred or Beatty.  When we read things like this or Animal Farm or Ishmael, we always want to pretend that we would be one of the enlightened ones.  One of the people who catch onto what society is up to and starts fighting the system and thinking for ourselves.  But, in all reality, would we really be that person?  Or would we be following the motions like anyone else, living day to day with no other question?  Would we wake up and go to school or church or work like every other day?  Would you be the one to sit in front of the telly and soak in everything that it had to offer?  I was that person for so long before waking up, but as I read, I still can’t help but realise that I would be one of those people.  I’d be a sheeple right next to everyone else.

We can’t all be a Clarisse.

Will books be banned one day like in Fahrenheit 451?  It makes me wonder if the good old days will be right now because of the knowledge that we presume to be free.  And it’s something to think about.

But for now, it’s best left to Dixie Chicks and scribbles of what I think into a diary that no one will ever read.  It’s better off in poems that tell stories of far away places where people learn lessons in the strangest ways that no one else will understand but in glimpses of another’s mind.  It’s better left to sentences that don’t know how to end.

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Posture

I’m a strong believer in the saying, “Fake confidence because eventually it will become reality.”  Last semester, I posted it on the door to my dorm for my house to see, and I still get occasional comments about it from people, especially a young woman in my house who took the phrase to heart.  Late at night, when we’ve finished watching films in the living room and we’re slowly leaving to go to bed, she’ll mention that she enjoys the encouraging phrases.  And I’ll mention that I enjoy them as well; it’s why I put them up.

Today, rather than posting my usual “Stay warm, kids!” or “Have a great week!”, I posted another encouraging dogma that I had forgotten about until recently.  On the door reads, “Sit and walk with good posture–you will feel more confident.”

Oh, how true this statement is.

Two days ago, I was reading through my Guide to Relaxation book that I brought back up to school from home for the yoga guide and stumbled upon a section on correct breathing and posture.  Suddenly, I could remember the little middle school me looking at the entry and taking to heart that I should have better posture.  I remembered sitting up as straight as I possibly could in my eighth grade history class for an entire day and doing the same that evening while on the computer and feeling so sure of myself.  I had great posture during that time, and I’ve occasionally wondered why I had forgotten about it.  So, when I read the posture entry, I set a new goal for myself (to go along with my million of other goals for the next three years).  I started sitting straighter while at the computer to start.  Then, I started sitting straighter in my classes today and standing to my full height before setting off to walk somewhere, making sure that I wasn’t slumping while I stepped around.  And, let me tell you, I feel more confident.  Sure, I’m dressed nicely and am feeling pretty good to start with, but others have noticed in just the span of a day.  People who have never spoken to me saw me today and said “hi” or asked how I was doing; and none of them seemed at all surprised when I said that I was doing quite well.  It was what they expected.

So, here’s my little goal for you: start working on your posture.  If the increase in confidence doesn’t draw your attention, remember that it increases breathing which in turn helps concentration (I’ve never concentrated so well in my experimental psych class as I did today), it strengthens core muscles (tight abs, yo), and it can help prevent back pain.  Those should be some great reasons to start sitting or standing or walking a little better, methinks.

– – –

I do have a lot of goals for myself, though.  None are all that strict, but they are life rules/goals.  They’re things I want to incorporate into my own life in order to live better, and they are not flitty things, either.  They’re very solid and long lasting, which also equates to taking longer to develop.  Like habits, they can take years to set, but once they are there, hopefully they’re there for life.

My first goals started about two years ago with finding myself, which I’ve done a pretty damned good job of.  I’ve found a lot of who I am and a lot of who I want to be which allows me to move on to the next step.

My next step was to start changing some physically.  For starters, I chopped off all of my hair and donated it a year and a half ago, which allowed me to really think about what I wanted.  Of course, it was obvious that I wanted my long hair back, but I was able to start new with growing it out.  I also found what my personal styles were and have been slowly changing what I where and how I dress in order to more readily reflect that.  I also worked a lot on health with becoming a vegetarian, though I’m by no means finished with my eating habits.  I’m still interested in filtering out a lot of the sugars, salts, fats, and non-real things that I eat.  And I’ve also aided health with more stretching and yoga, though it’s still a work in progress.  Really, all of those are works in progress.

My other big goals lie in personality and speech.  I’m often annoyed with myself and the way that I carry on talking forever when half of what I say is meaningless, so I’ve started to work on Meaningful Speech.  There was a section about it in my spirituality text book, and I was incredibly intrigued.  The entry speaks about becoming more aware of your thoughts and then translating that into words.  Or, you could look at it as becoming more aware of what you’re saying and seeing if your mind is even playing a part in this process.  For me, I often just say things to say things.  Like, I’ll make too many comments while watching a movie or just say phrases and jokes that we’d be just fine without hearing.  So, I’ve started working on that.  By no means have I shown any improvement, but I have been catching myself more often.  I spoke to my spirituality teacher about that today, and we agreed that it was a step in the right direction.  Who knows, maybe in a year or two, I’ll be saying things that are more short, precise, to the point, and meaningful.  We’ll see how that works.

– – –

As we all know, mental health intrigues the fuck out of me.  It’s why I’m a psychology major, after all, and I’ve found that I like applying my skills a little early.  So, I meandered onto Yahoo Answers today and started giving advice and counselling to those with mental issues, and I found myself enjoying the different pieces of advice that I could give.  It helped me realise that I’ve learned quite a bit and can already do some things to make a difference.  Sure, most of my posts said that I was a student and recommended going to a psychiatrist/counsellor/psychologist, but I was able to give a whole lot of recommendations and advice that astounded me.  A year ago, I couldn’t have told anyone nearly this much.  Now, things are a little different.  I can’t wait to see what it’s like in another year, or heavens-to-Betsy, in three years.

– – –

The next section has been deleted.  Sorry.

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Nerves

When I was six, I remember sitting on the bus next to my then best-friend, Simran, and asking her how we knew what was going on in other people’s minds.  She seemed confused by the question (as any first grader should have been), so I gave her an example.  If you said something true, but your mum told you that you had lied when you had not, how could she prove that you had or had not lied?  If she could not get into your head, what made her claim valid?  I’m sure Simran still did not understand me, so we probably started talking about Spice Girls instead (whaddup, 1997?).  But, even then, I was mystified with the mind and how little we know about it.  It’s why I’d grow so angry when someone said that I had lied when I hadn’t.  One time, I screamed at my mum, “You aren’t in my mind!  You don’t know!”  I was seven.  And it never really occurred to me until recently that children that young shouldn’t be contemplating such strong philosophical and psychological questions.

Sometimes, I think I’m still too young to ponder at the things I do.

– – –

This morning, I woke up before the sun–something I haven’t done in a little while.  As I sat at my desk, reading psychology, I was able to watch the sun rise.  At first, it was a splotch of yellow light on the horizon, breaking the deep darkness that had settled over Kirksville.  Then, stripes of purple and then of pink appeared, with the yellow splotch now a strong, orangey base.  Soon, the entire sky was enveloped in a wash of pink and purple, covering the clouds and glittering off of the eight or so inches of snow.  Beautiful.  It made me happy that I hadn’t slept too much past my snooze alarm.

I had so many weird dreams last night, but I can only access bits and pieces.  Something about a great, glass tower with a mighty telescope on top.  Something about a popular rapper that I made fun of and had no respect for.  Something about a large, green spider that I killed so cautiously with a fly swatter and then buried into the carpet as though it were dirt.  There were so many people, and so much conflict, and I’m still reeling from the impact of what it all means.  Sometimes, my dreams really are tumbles of nothing, and other times they mean cryptic little things about the way I’m feeling.  Something in my mind tells me that this was just a jumble.  A stress jumble.

Last evening, my house was together and sharing a dream dictionary.  Turns out unicorns mean something bad to our Mr Freud.  I think it’s all full of shit.  I don’t buy into a dream interpreter or any other interpreter for that matter who tries to figure me out when not knowing a damned thing about what actually goes on in my mind.  It’s why I like to interpret my own dreams.  It’s why, as much as I love MBTI, I know that it has faults and that everyone is different, even if typed the same.  It’s why I put no store in all of those quizzes that ask “Which Character from [insert show here] Are You?”.  I don’t buy into anything that doesn’t actually know me because, as one of my friends told me, I’m a very cautious person.  Yes.  Yes, I am.

– – –

This past weekend wasn’t the best for me.  I’m still dealing with not knowing the interview results (though I’ll probably know before I can post this blog and will most likely tell you at the end), and I’ve come to realise that I may be depressed.  And not in the sense of the word that I’m just feeling down, but in the actual sense; the sense that means that I’m clinically depressed and should probably be getting some  help for this.  So, I planned out my week and found some free time on Thursday.  Once this slot of free time comes up today, I’m fairly certain that I will march myself over to the university counselling services and sit down with someone.  I don’t really care what happens, but I feel that it’s a big step that I need to take in order to get better.

I ended up looking through my diary to see when I really started getting depressed constantly, and my date landed on 10 December, with trails of unhappiness sinking in at the beginning of November.  I was surprised to see that I was so unhappy in nearly every entry, and it was a little bit frightening to realise that, without that way to keep track of my life, I may not have really realised why I was so upset.  I would have kept blaming it on the nerves of not knowing my SA results, rather than digging to the deeper problem and realising that something was seriously wrong.

So, when I go to UCS today, I’ll tell you how it goes.  I’ll tell you if it helps, and what will be done.  If there’s nothing to say, I won’t say it.  But if there is, expect more on the issue.

– – –

The results for SA were supposed to be email out any time after 23.00 on Wednesday night.  It’s now 7.20 on Thursday morning, and I’m growing more and more excited and nervous.  Last night, as I drifted to sleep, I told myself that it was nothing different from a cast list back in high school.  Stan would promise it to be up on Monday, and you’d end up waiting until Thursday afternoon to see any results.  All the while, your stomach would churn, and you’d feel ridiculously nervous about the entire ordeal.  If you multiplied that reaction by ten, you’d get how I was feeling.  When I think about that email coming through to tell me, well, my chest and stomach and heart tighten until it’s physically painful.  So painful that it causes headaches and puts me to bed, keeping me from studying for a psychology test.  These are serious nerves; I can’t wait until it’s all just over.  Then, I can work on accepting my year to come as it will truly be.

– – –

In Time Updates:

7.35: I’ve probably pressed the refresh button over thirty times since 23.00 last night.  Every five minutes, and I’m checking that email again.  And every five minutes, I’m once again left with no information.

7.42: Still nothing.  I’m reduced to scrounging Facebook and reading psychology texts.

7.51: Time to give up for a while and read even more psych.  Today’s exam is going to kill me.  I’m really sorry if you’re still reading this.

8.03: Again, really sorry if you’re still reading this; nothing has happened.

8.40: And still nothing.  I might as well start studying for my physics lab.

9.00: And still nothing, again.  I might as well just post all of this up and make a second post with the results when they come.  Sorry for making you read this; then again, it was your own doing.

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Sickening

(Note: I just finally made this entry public after several months of letting it bubble as a private post.  Do with it what you will.)

I’m incredibly sickened by modern horror.  The film industry pushes boundaries, I realise, and this has lead to many great things.  Wizard of Oz pushed boundaries with its break into colour.  Sleeping Beauty pushed boundaries with its transformation from live action to cartoon in the hands of artists.  Lord of the Rings pushed boundaries with its computer generation.  But the technological boundary is different from the human mind.  Psychologically, we have boundaries, and if they are broken, what is left of us?

My house is watching a horror film right now called “Funny Games” or something to that effect, and I am sickened.  It deals with two guys who are going to kill a family for the fun of it, and they kidnap the son to make the mum take off her clothes and other such atrocities.

Yes, I realise that these kinds of things happen in real life.  And I realise that it can be put into film.  In fact, it being put into a film does not bother me.  What does bother me is that our society has had our boundaries so torn away that people find this entertaining.  Entertaining?

ENTERTAINING?

What the fuck is wrong with people?  Have we really had murder and violence and sex and gore thrown at us enough to completely desensitise us?  Well, yes; we have.  But at what point have our boundaries been broken that we’ve learned to enjoy watching this?  What the fuck is wrong when Saw can make six movies because people just love watching other people die so much?  How did we get to this point?  How can we hold so little regard for human life and laugh at someone literally being ripped limb from limb?

Do we not have sympathy any more?  We must not.  And empathy is out of the question; we lost that long ago.

I just don’t understand.  I watched all of five minutes of My Bloody Valentine before I made my friends shut it off so that we could watch something else.  Even though the gore was unrealistic, it didn’t matter.  The movie was purely a bunch of people dying.  Just, dying.  Being murdered.  And here, my friends sat around, laughing at the thought of people dying.

Maybe I was never desensitised to it all.  Maybe I kept myself in some kind of bubble.  Or maybe I just never wanted to be desensitised from it all, so I made sure to still feel the fear and pain.  Fear and pain from death, well, that’s human.  That’s why we have religion–to remove the fear from the pain.  But when there’s no fear because it’s humorous, then what happened to the soul?

That’s just it.  What is so damned funny about people dying?  Every day, I read the news.  Another 2000 dead from an earthquake here.  Another sixteen dead from a bombing there.  Another three killed by a train that fell off the tracks.  Another six murdered.  What the fuck makes that so funny?  You can tell me, “Oh, but Missi!  In the movies, it’s just a murder, and they usually deserve it.  It’s not like it’s real.”  So what that it’s not real?  What makes it any different from all of the people who do die every day?  If you laugh so damned much at the idea of death, why are you not laughing at those people who really are dying?  Is it because society tells you not to?  Or are you laughing inside?  Or do you just not care about them at all since you’ve given up your own conscience in order to be entertained?  What the fuck makes the idea so damned different between a movie and real life?

Not much.  That’s what.  People really do get murdered.  Tornadoes really do suck people up.  Bullets really do get in the spines of eight year-olds.  You laugh when it’s on a screen; you might as well be laughing at the real thing.

People aren’t living any more.  They’re just shells.  They sell all that they have in order to be entertained.  We’re laughing ourselves to death.  Neil Postman had it right when he said that we were “Amusing Ourselves to Death”.  He didn’t mean it quite in this way–his ideas were more Orwellian in nature–but it all leads to being empty and hollow.

And for how much do we sell our souls?

One dollar at Red Box.

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