Been working on it for like two years, so…I guess it’s good to have it be done.

I have this MASSIVE canvas sitting over on the dresser, I need to figure out what to do with that one. And my botched half-finished Mondrian reproduction. I need a more precise brush to do the lines with.

So I didn’t mean to do it, but today was the first day I actually paid money for porn. WEIRD. It’s this book about two guys in the 90s exploring the gay sex underworld in San Francisco. I love novels. You can vicariously live through things that people got killed doing. Awesome! Also, speaking of porn, my new favorite site. It’s mostly SFW.

I’m in love with Calvin Harris these days…and I’m enjoying this lull in my life. I get paid tomorrow, finals are next week…finished my painting. I’m going to rest on my laurels at least until Christmas for getting awesome grades…and try not to think about this situation with Brian. I think we both need some time to think about things.

I got really angry when I thought about it, all the ridiculous decisions of his that I supported because he was my friend…but c’est la vie. I like Brian, and I think he’s awesome. We’re just in a weird space now. I feel guilty, he feels slighted. I’ll give him some time and apologize. He needs to realize that this is just the way that things are going…I can’t please everyone. When I was with Terry he kept saying “but are you happy?” and now that I’m in a good space it’s not “are you happy?” it’s “do I approve of your decisions?”

Okay, I’m reading too much into this. Time for sleep.

I was searching for my music collection to try and find something that represented what I’m going through right now… and strangely enough, I found it.

Mario instant messaged me tonight. He said that he can’t talk to me anymore because he “has deep feelings for me” and I don’t have any for him.

Which isn’t completely true. I like hanging out with him… mostly because he’s the most doomed person I know. Someone with adequate money, friends, but still very, very unhappy. He’s also really awkward… endlessly playing on his iPhone…making those faint throat-clearing sounds that increase in intensity whenever he’s uncomfortable.

I don’t know… I wanted to date him just to fulfill his dream of there being something better in life, but that isn’t a reason to really date somebody. He just seemed so lost…and so alone…and I just wanted to do something to make his life less horrible, but I couldn’t. He had good taste in movies and music and stuff, but he just didn’t do it for me. I can’t explain it.

Friend number two that I lost tonight was Sam. Well, I guess the seed of that was planted a while ago, but I called Brian after he got off work. We were on the phone maybe five minutes, and all he could say was that Sam was mad at me (gee, news flash). He had that “you are a terrible person” tone in his voice.

He dropped this hint that Sam had a blog, and that Sam was probably mad that I had read it or something like that. It was some tiny link on his Facebook… to tell you the truth, I haven’t really looked at his Facebook at all. I just went on it and it says that he’s crying. It was updated 40 minutes ago. He is going to send them a text message to try and make them feel better, but he told me only to talk to him “when all this Zero bs is over and done with and you’ve had time to actually think.”

He’s right, I haven’t had time to think about anything. I found that as I get older, everything just becomes so epic and complicated that when you think about issues, a hundred more spread out…every situation, years of corollaries, mountains of evidence, every glance and comment to be weighed for its veracity. Everything explodes out of proportion infinitely, and I feel like I’m left with nothing. This rift with Kelly will probably never be repaired. I was considering calling her this Christmas, but I’m just not willing to apologize. I don’t think she is either.

I guess I just need to stop overanalyzing relationships. I haven’t seen Christen lately as much as I’d like to… but I feel like I’m being a needy friend if I call her all the time.

Also it feels like there’s this big rift between Brian and I.

I’m satisfied physically and emotionally and I feel guilty about it. I’m disappointed in all of my friends when they get into a relationship and they don’t have as much time to devote to me. I mean, I know that it’s unfair but you do miss it. And for Brian, I guess it’s not only that but my being totally in the wrong with the Sam thing.

I want to be friends with people so I unintentionally of lead them on. I mean, maybe it would’ve been better if I just said “Mario, I’m not into you. I’m never going to date you.” But it wouldn’t have been true. I might have ended up dating him, but it didn’t turn out that way.

When I would have fun with Zero, I felt like it was just going to be a fluke. Oh, surely I’ll get sick of all this. Surely, he will be douchebag. Oh, I don’t like it when he does ___. And then I was all “Hey, you should ____, I don’t like ____ so maybe we could ___” You know, stuff like that. And it’s the old thing with me of the things I hate when I first am exposed to them I end up loving.

But he was an awesome conversationalist and a grade-A cuddler. Which made everything that was going on with Sam so precarious, because just as Sam was actually asking me out it was coming to the point where I was starting to admit to myself how much a genuinely enjoyed being around Zero. And then with the hours of homework, all this cramming for finals, my car breaking down… it was just this tumultuous avalanche of three people pursuing me and I was just overloaded.

Mario endlessly instant messaging me about the next Latino band he was obsessed with, Sam and I getting to know each other with the increasingly uncomfortable subtext of him being interested in me, and then the days where I’d wake up next to Zero… I just felt like it was this oncoming three-way train wreck… and I was trying to guide everything so that it didn’t end up being destroyed.

The only thing I can think that comes close is one time I was ice-skating on the East Coast and I lost my balance and wasn’t able to turn. My brain calculated the trajectory, and I was definitely going to hit this little girl… so instead of crashing into her full force, I grabbed her and picked her up right before I would’ve hit her, and then somehow managed to stop. But it was still really embarrassing. The girl had this expression on her face like “what the fuck are you doing?” and maybe nobody else in the rink had noticed that I was going to hit her before that…but the thing that was obvious was that I had just picked up a stranger…and knew there wasn’t going to be any kind of good ending. I did prevent her from getting hurt, but it was really embarrassing and afterwards I felt like I should have just crashed into her. I mean, it’s a risk you take when you skate. But I convinced myself that I did the right thing.

So, if you’ll excuse the odd metaphor, it was like I was barreling towards Sam and Mario and their was just nothing I could do to stop their feelings getting hurt. Which is why I feel really guilty and conflicted… and I have a hard time talking to Brian, who is obviously hearing about what this is doing to Sam.

It’s nearly 2 a.m. The bottle of violet that I needed to finish my painting is sitting here in its oddly condom shaped bag (apparently Utrecht has bags designed for just tubes of paint), but I won’t get to do anything with it until tomorrow.

My grandma wants to go out and get a Christmas tree tomorrow. I have no idea where to go. She asked me if I knew which kind to get. I wanted to respond with “The kind that’s a tree?”

About a month ago, I threw away a lot of old photos that I had scanned in (a lot of those were of me and Andrew Taggart), and I am finding them EVERYWHERE. Two weeks ago there were three photos arranged in my bathroom. I took them. Today I found five more piled on the breakfast bar. I angrily ripped them up and threw them in my wastebasket.

I am seriously going to have to wait until trash day and then go out and empty my wastebasket after she’s gone to sleep. BITCH GOES THROUGH THE TRASH.

Sometimes, I hate my grandma.

She also left me this note telling me I needed to clean the kitchen. I had just come home with a bag of groceries. Bitch.

I should leave her a note.

“Was going to shank you, decided to get you some nice delicious fruits and vegetables instead. Have a fucktacular day, bitch.”

Whatever. Bitch is too crazy to know that I have finals.

I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamt that my mom and me and Zero were at my old house in Crescent City. The place was all dusty but it was sunny outside and the neighborhood kids were out playing. Zero was throwing a stick to my old dog Rose throughout the dream.

My mom unlocked the door of our old place, and everything was just as we left it. My big blue fish Max in his tank, our cats Lucky and Sukiyaki Tsunami. I asked my mom “did you pay the rent here all this time?” And she smiled and nodded. She had saved this little slice of our life, our one and only home.

I just teared up writing that. I miss the feeling of having a home. I miss our pets. I miss my mom. I miss Rose. She had so much personality, even though she was disobedient as all hell.

I just get so sad when I think that everything that I’ve loved is gone. I didn’t have much of a problem with this when I was 17, but as I get older, I have five or so years of friends, lovers, and hangouts that are just…gone. I often think of this one evening at the beautiful Endert’s Beach. My friends and I had gone camping for the weekend, and one evening Tawna and I went down to the ocean to watch the sunset. I don’t think we had even planned it that way, our friends were being grouchy so we took a walk and sat down on this big rock that overlooked the sea. The sun was going slowly into the waves. We didn’t say anything for hours, it just listened to the birds and the waves…I just had this profound sense that everything was going to be okay.

Of course, there was some big blowout with the friends that were up at the campsite….we had run out of food and everyone came down to fetch us. Tanya and I wanted to stay, but reluctantly, we started hiking back to the camp.

If only I could live in that moment forever.

It’s the office christmas party for the second year…it’s so strange to see that flyer circling around work. The year before it was neon green. Sign up for the potluck, the secret Santa crap. I got my boss’s Christmas card. Got some candy for my secret santa person. Another year goes by, and things seem to be looking up, but it seems like the things that are most precious to me (my friendships) are slipping away.

I guess the message of that dream was that my mom and I both have the dream of a true home, and she has been keeping the dream alive (as have I). I just hope we both live to make it come true.

I really wanted to write last night, but I ended up painting instead. I’ve been painting a lot the past two days…it’s really fun.

So, two days ago.

I went over to Zero’s place, and we watched the first half of Hot Fuzz before getting… distracted.

I had planned to ask about the nature of our relationship that night, and there hadn’t been an appropriate time.

So we end up drawing all over each other with this green Sharpie, so I lean over and write on his chest “So are we dating?”

He made a little joke about it, but a few minutes later he said that he had read my ruminations about it and it didn’t freak him out, so we kind of came to the conclusion that we should date. It’s really strange because it seems so close after the breakup with Terry, but emotionally I’m kind of done with all of that. It’s coming up on a month after the breakup this week.

I don’t know, this whole thing seemed really refreshing and a very different perspective than I’ve had previously. Terry said that I was living in this kind of fantasy world where I wanted this Romeo and Juliet kind of relationship, but I really think about it a lot of that was projection on his part.

The thing Zero and I were talking about is this metacognition that people come and go, and if you’re having fun and you like somebody then that’s awesome, and I like him and we have fun.

I was buying into all this crap about relationships being endless work… and they are, but they shouldn’t make you depressed (which was always the case with Terry). Drew, I was mostly angry at. I don’t get along well at all with Aries-es. Terry was a Virgo, and I should have learned from Alex that Virgos are dead inside. Overly simplistic, but both of them buried their pain deep and wouldn’t let anything near it. I’m such an open person that it doesn’t work like that.

The whole thing is just really cute and new. And yes, I am aware that this is the honeymoon phase. We were joking last night about the day when we wouldn’t have anything to talk about anymore.

5 a.m. that night found me driving to Suzie’s and I got the biggest bottle of lube I could find.

So it’s official.

He invited me over to his house last night, and we had a bunch of fun. I came over and met his friend Lexi, who was knitting mittens the whole time and making awesome MST3Ks to the movie. His super-awesome roomate Mari watched the first movie with us before heading to bed. We MST3K-ed Clueless and watched Secretary. I absolutely love Secretary, I hadn’t seen it in a long time. We definitely need to watch Crash (1996), it is the best James Spader movie EVER.

After the movie, we laughed and played all night, talking to each other in Stacy and Tiffany voices. I don’t know why, but we were just being so cute I wanted to die, LOL. at one point we broke into a rendition of “just Like Heaven.” We’re all about funny voices these last few weeks, from me reading Craigslist sex ads in a Jersey accent (the one that I hear on the phone from my mom every day) to the Daria voices. And the Trent voice…which really turns me on, lol. YOU ALL WANTED TO BE IN MYSTIC SPIRAL! ADMIT IT!

So we look at the clock and it’s 5 a.m. I somehow managed to break his lamp in looking out the window, but it was starting to get light. I have this unholy fear of not going to sleep before it gets light because it the later it gets the more you know your day is doomed…and I had school the next day!

Totally slept though my algebra class. It’s a two-hour block… perfect for catching up on your sleep.

I’m all over that quadratic equation shit though, after class I went into the library and kicked some serious quadratic ass. Yeah, I went there.

Next was geology, big test on latitude and longitude, township and range. The way he had it all set up was we were in groups that were based on attendance. So all of the people that never showed up were all in one group and he even put them in another room so they couldn’t overhear any answers from the other groups. My group was the “perfect attendance” group :)

I think our group did okay… this one girl was WAY too perky about latitude and longitude she was nearly bubbling. “I’m SO excited to take this test! Woo! I totally know everything about township and range!” She works with children, so I guess she gets a pass, but I was counting down the minutes until she broke into a cheer:

2, 4, 6, 8! 68 degrees, 15 minutes west! 128 degrees, 24 minutes north!

I loved how her enthusiasm melted away after we got the first completely inexplicable question. I think we did well though. The people in my group didn’t know that tungsten was a mineral. Is that not common knowledge?

Hm.

I feel like I really screwed over Sam. He told me that he had feelings for me and I said that I wasn’t really ready for a relationship, but the paradox is that I am in one. And it’s even more odious because he sort of despises Zero. But this doesn’t really feel like a normal kind of relationship, which is what makes it okay. It seems like a really good friendship and we do adorable relationship things. Normally I feel suffocated by the kind of scripted interactions you’re supposed to have in a relationship, but I’ve been saying whatever the fuck I want. Which is awesome.

In the beginning, I thought the thing with Zero was just him seeing if he could have sex with me…and we got along great, which made it even better. There was this one point where we were fooling around on the couch watching Run Lola Run and talking in some tangent revolving around linguistics, and he was all (I’m paraphrasing) “Look at how awesome we are, watching an indie film and talking about some obscure linguistic point.” And I couldn’t agree more.

I was sort of embarrassed at how well we got along, what with how Sam and I were kind of giving each other sly sarcastic glances the first night that we’d all hung out. But Zero’s fucking awesome in a lot of ways.

So I was like “W00t, we’re friends with benefits that get along awesomely.” There were some things I wasn’t thrilled about but on the whole, he was engaging without being annoying, interesting, and with similar but not identical interests.

So this one day after we met after I got off work (the week my scooter was dead and I had to ride the bus), and he brought me flowers he’d picked. Which was like the cutest thing ever and may need kind of freak out and reevaluate our relationship. I mean, of course there had been much more cuddling than the legal limit (which I love), and I sort of decided that I wanted to be with him full-time.

So what do you guys think? Too soon? Doomed? Super-adorable? Banana? (for the surrealists in the audience)

I still need to make my dating application. Maybe I’ll make it a web form, that will probably be the easiest way.

So I have a quadratic formula memorized, so I’m going to kick ass at my algebra final. Well, it’s midnight, so I’d better be getting to dreamland.

But listening to all this Luxxury and Calvin Harris just makes me want to dance. I’ll tone it down with some Amon Tobin.

Ok. Sleep.

I’ve been working on my math homework nearly all night long. And honestly, I’m not making a whole bunch of progress. I finished most of Chapter 10 and some of Chapter 11… but there are huge gaps in my knowledge because she is making us skip every other section because we are totally behind. Behind as in let’s cram three chapters into three weeks.

I tried to do the last section that she assigned, and I just did not get the right answer at all. And I was doing them in class and getting the right answer. Lame.

The final is Wednesday. Well, next Wednesday.. I have a whole bunch of stuff to study on geology final. I think I’m going to totally bomb that. He asks us all these insane vague questions, like “why is this area the way that it is?” And he gives us like twenty different explanations of why it could be like that.

Work wasn’t bad, I’m wearing down the big stack of shit I need to digitize and add to the database.

After work, I went down to the downtown plaza and got my movies back from Terry. We were going to have lunch (his idea), but then he said that he had read my blog and that he wasn’t sure or something like that? So I just grabbed the movies and split.

And, for all of you, a lesson in tact from yours truly: do not go to meet your ex with a huge hickey showing.

So, cat out of the bag, Zero and I are sort of unofficially/officially dating or something. Well, we’re having a lot of sex…and a lot of cuddling, and a lot of talking about literature. He’s interested in literature and good indie films, and we get along well. However, he’s very high-strung, and it can be exhausting, but it’s never boring.

I’ve been hanging out with Sam too, and I haven’t quite figured him out yet. He might drop by for a bit after work (he gets off very late). I’m just really stressed out about my math. If only she would have just given us the Chapter 6 test and gone on to new stuff (nobody understood chapter 6 and it took like a month). I still don’t understand Chapter 6. It has something to do with canceling fractions…or maybe the war of 1812…seriously, I couldn’t tell you.

I was talking with Christen last night and I wasn’t really quite sure what to say about Zero and I. it’s my old pattern… jump to something crazily and then be totally freaked out when the person is very different than my image of them. I don’t know whether that’s really happening… I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have any feelings for Terry still, no matter how how irrational they are. And then this huge workload for school is making it so that I really don’t have any time to think about what’s going on.

Maybe overanalyzing things is where I’m going wrong.

Tery called me tonight, sounding distraught, and said something to the effect of that he wanted to pour his heart out to me but that I would write about it. I didn’t know what to say. I mean, I’m not going to promise not to write about anything. Is that unfair? Probably.

Always, I’m of the opinion that everything is better out in the open. I was talking with Sam about that earlier today. He agrees. He says that when he wants to say important things, they always come out wrong. And I’m the same way.

I don’t know… I feel like the book is closed on Terry. My friends ask me “how did you ever even talk to him?” I’ll think really hard about it and have no fucking clue. We would talk a lot about Star Trek, we would ignore each other and stare at our laptop screens, but as for actual talking… all I can remember are arguments.

After it, I cried, I felt like I was going to die for a few weeks, but I got better. While I may not have the superficial comraderie of my Macy’s team, I have friends that I’ve known my whole life (and some awesome new ones) to talk to and work through this.

Interesting side note: Zero actually talked to Terry about a year ago, and all that Terry talked about was dressing in drag. It was a really embarrassing conversation to read…I feel sorry for him. But then again, flip through my archives and you will find some of the most half-baked ridiculousness you’ve seen. Let’s see…I was 19 in 2004. Let’s see…what was I doing this date in 2004.

Secretly I can’t wait to get back to my sad pathetic life in what Becky aptly calls “another dimension.” I can’t wait to work so hard in pursuit of my pathetic little goals. It amuses me to have the “metacognition” (is that the right word?) to know that my life is meaningless and that everything that I tell myself will make me happy won’t. I know that all my hopes are pointless, all my education is pointless. Stupid people will join me in the same place, doing the same thing: rotting in the ground. I don’t know what the point is. All I know is that I’m a machine. I’m a reading machine and a fucking machine and a web design machine and a computer operating machine and a party machine. I hate being a machine. I hate being an animal. I want to be something pure, something real, something that matters…but nothing matters. Nothing will ever matter. Hope is doublethink. God is doublethink. I know what I feel. It’s existence. Sickening…I can feel the blood sucking through my animal veins, my arm…typing…all the muscles and tendons jerking like corpses stimulated with electricity–I can feel my arm…my rib cage…it won’t go away…I can feel all of their existence…it’s so fucking disgusting. There is no escape. There never is any escape.

Well, I was channeling Jean-Paul Sartre… so not a good example, but still.

So I’m having fun and progressing towards my diploma…which I guess is what I’ve been doing all along.

Mario called me tonight… he’s had some kind of concert. I say “some kind of” because it’s Tigan and Sara (the nexus of EEVIL). Everyone that I know that likes them is Evil. Yeah, that’s capital-E Evil to you.

If my credit card isn’t totally overdrawn by Friday, I’m going to go over to Zero’s house and make some Italian food. If I’m there for more than five minutes and we’re not having sex, than I’m going to say that we’re dating. And if we are having sex, then I’ll also say we’re dating.

He even said we should get lube. Do you have any idea what then of the commitment that is?

This is how long Terry and I lasted.

LOOK AT IT!

It’s a barometer of how successful your relationship is. I was on the phone with Brian on my class break yesterday eagerly hashing out the permutations.

“Well I could get a very small bottle and then it would run out and it wouldn’t be bad…”

“Yeah, I did that with Erin and we didn’t even finish it”

“Shit! Shit. Options… well, I could get a huge bottle and then it would be like impossible use it all so it wouldn’t be that much of a measure of success at all. Or would I then have this huge bottle of lube that reminded me of him…OH GOD THE CHOICES!!”

(totally joking, of course)

I don’t know why, but today is all about Luxxury. “Drunk (expensive mix)” rocks.

All right, it’s that time again. What time, you ask?

Quadratic equation time. Oh yeah.

(I also added a post that was hidden before, scroll down if you dare)

Well, I haven’t written in about a week, and it’s not because I don’t love you guys, it’s just that I’m sort of waiting until I have all of my stuff back from Terry to dig in to the situation.

I never thought he would be petty enough to keep my stuff, but it’s always a good idea to expect the worst in people. You’re either right or pleasantly surprised. And it hasn’t helped that my workload for school is spiraling out of control as we approach finals week.

Not to mention that I haven’t gotten my christmas cards in the mail. E-mail me your address if I don’t already have it :)

I’m not a Christmas card-ey person, but I bought this box of 20 cards and it was kind of fun writing little blurbs to people and sealing the envelopes. That and my mom makes me send cards to her side of the family.

I’ve got work tomorrow, I’m doing a bunch on the website. I doubt it’ll be launched in December, but we’re really getting into the nitty gritty of what is going to be online and what won’t be. The interface is nearly done (I find one or two things to tweak every once in a while), so it’s all just putting in the content, which is very time-consuming.

There is some way to automate pulling the stories out of the InDesign documents, formatting them in XML, and plopping them into the MySQL database, but it’s beyond my scripting abilities. So it’s copy and paste for me.

And then there’s the secret santa thing at work…I’m reaching overload.

But there is one silver lining, I went and got some running shoes (fucking finally) and they make jogging SO much more fun. I was able to make more laps than I’ve ever been able to, and my feet didn’t hurt afterwards! Yay! I like staying in shape, it makes me feel a little better about eating pizza and burritos all the time at the college.

Well, it’s sleep time…and it’s only midnight. I need to get up early, jog, go to the post office and get stamps, send some packages…I don’t even want to think about it. But it’ll be done tomorrow, and I will be absolved of all holiday-related worry. I just need to get up early. Which is often a problem for me. We’ll see.

*zzzzzz*