no, not the store... (championing a lost cause here)

anyone remember a guy who went by the username IKEA who used to post here (possibly 8 years ago?)?

i just found a mix that he made for me. it arrived in the mail (from England?) at my apartment in Maine in 2000(?).

anyway, i just wanted him to know that i really really like the cd and listen to it all the time now.

i remember, many years ago, when I used to hang out in the Moz-solo chat room regularly...

There was a regular there who warned me against graduate school. I can't quite remember her screenname. I was applying to gradschool and she kept telling me not to do it, that it would ruin my life.

I was sure that I could succeed. I'd never yet encountered something that was too hard for me. So I listened to her warnings, but went to gradschool anyway. --the most prestigious program in my area in the country.

It was the hardest thing I'd ever done --single mom and grad student at an elite school. It was hell on earth.

Now my PhD is in sight. It looks like I'll graduate only a year and a half late. --and I'm finally realizing(admitting) that this was the wrong life path. It was too hard for me. To continue on past the PhD is dooming myself to a world of chronic stress and chronic pain.

So now I'm processing this.
And trying to look beyond the tears to what new and exciting thing will come next.

my heart and prayers are with all of you in London.

interestingly enough, Hairdresser on Fire keeps playing over and over in my head; particularly the line "is it home of the free, or what?"

i don't know what my brain means by repeating this, but it is on my mind.

there's nothing worse than the feeling of slugs popping under your steel-toed combat boots as you walk gingerly through the garden to check on the arugula.

spending a few weeks in maine at my mom's house. my daugher's happily in summer school and my mom is paying me to help deal with the estate of my 1st cousin, twice removed, who died last summer.

back in my old haunts once again. emotions swirling.

lack of nicotene.

and tonight i had a complete breakdown in front of my mom. over body issues no less! i hate it when i make a scene about something when it really has nothing to do with what's really upsetting me but i haven't zeroed in yet on what the real cause is. that's how it was, me crying about my breasts and my hair and a host of other issues and getting more and more frustrated that my mom was trying to help, getting frustrated that she might be thinking i was actually crying about what i was talking about. argh!

and then, as i climbed into bed the words rang out in my head, "i don't feel special!"

how simple

i've spent my whole life being fawned over or obsessed over or standing out in some way. and right now i don't have that attention (at least not overtly). and i realize that perhaps now is the time to feel special in private --with no one pointing a finger. if i can remember how to achieve this i will be well on my way to feeling more whole.

------

oh, and Razor, on a totally separate note: yes, i always wanted to be a boy. i was always one of the guys. it wasn't until i had a kid that i started to appreciate how cool being a woman was.

isn't journaling all about nostalgia? or is that just me. --even if i'm writing about current events, it's with an eye to future nostalgia.

today i'm up to my ears in work, listening to an online alternative eighties radio station. And an old Smashing Pumpkins song comes on. And I remember being 16 and lying on my friend Millay's floor trying to soak up all the romantic darkness and misery of the world. It was a time when everything still held a touch of magic and some connection to that mythical world buried deep inside my head. I miss my magical teenage brain immensely. I cannot do it justice here.

But hopefully if I keep typing I will somehow manage to recreate that voice in time for the writing of my memoirs.

my god. i just noticed that it's been 2 years since I started a journal on this site.

hmmm...

I really oughta give David T. some money or something.

I've been kicking around here since (i think) 1998!

I guess this is a testament to old habits dying hard with me.

Did you notice I'm not working? ...yeah, me too.

she knows i'm not working as well as I could be. As efficiently. I know this, too. But what am I supposed to do? I'm wracked with guilt at any given moment of the day over how much I'm not getting done, and yet I'm working constantly. I know I'm not producing up to speed. But I can't do more than I am right now. I really can't. A voice in my head says, "yes you can". But i'm overworked. I love everything I'm charged with doing, there's just too much of it. So either I let things drop, and feel guilt about "not accomplishing" or I do everything in a slip-shod manner and feel guilt about "sucking". And still I plod ahead determined to do everything and do everything well --and I'm drowning in self-pity over all I cannot do.

...or I could just drown in my coffee, which I proceeded to somehow spill up my nose while previewing this entry.

I suppose feeding the internet addiction less would also help my predicament.

oh dear.

http://www.googlefight.com/

i made morrissey & robert smith fight
i made the smiths & the cure fight

morrissey lost both

but he beat Johnny Marr.

my goodness, i really need to start acting like i'm working in my office, rather than just perusing the web!

There's this side of me that revels in the obscene. And I just now realized that it never shows in my journal entries.

I also am obsessed with pretending I'm still a teenager. I waste a huge amount of time on a message board that is populated by teenage kids. Sometimes I act like their mom, but most of the time I act like one of them. Even though I realize more and more that I feel much more like a 30-yr-old woman than I feel like a teenage boy these days. And then sometimes I surprise myself. I was reading a thread about "highschool stories" and found myself contributing the text below:

when i was a sophmore there was this senior kid named Jeff who was obsessed with faking his own death --specifically hanging himself. On any given day you'd find him hanging somewhere on campus. The teachers were less than thrilled. He did it one time in assembly as part of some sort of student presentation, but made it look like an accident. Our dean of students (who apparently as a kid had found his parents' double suicide) had a nervous breakdown right there in front of everyone. I think sometime later that year the students all banded together and threw him (the dean) in the school pond.

Yeah, Jeff was my idol. He also had the ability to vomit at will. And he used to love to do it during dinner. I prided myself on being the only person who could continue calmly eating my meal when he threw up into his plate next to me.

Come to think of it, Jeff also had a gross-out contest with his friend Lucas. This went on for weeks, each one-upping the other. I don't remember all the details, but I do remember walking into their dorm one day and seeing Jeff peeing into Lucas's cupped hands and then Lucas splashing it on his face.

I realize this is the wrong sort of thing to be typing on Morrissey-solo, but it's where my head is at today. I've got a million things to do, I'm at work, I want to be home packing, and there are many many other responsibilities to which I must attend. But right now I feel like running around with a squirting flower attached to my lapel and injecting some juvenile joy into the morning.