Not this shit again.

I managed to skip Biostats today. Not intentionally. We were dismissed from Organic and, instead of sitting there and waiting for my professor to come in, I just... left. I spaced. I honestly thought it was time for me to go. I forgot a whole hour of my day.

But oh well. I can catch up later. I'm stressed, is all.

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I'm at home right now, which will help. I talked to my mom about Thanksgiving with Ryter-- she said she's okay with it, but I haven't talked to my dad yet. That will not go as well...

Honestly? I'd rather we just did separate Thanksgivings this year. I think he said they do a deli platter. For Thanksgiving. My mom does a big-ass turkey and a whole mess of side dishes and she's a fabulous cook. She suggested we do the dinner Friday, if Shrewd could get Friday off work, but if Shrewd's at Crate and Barrel she'll need to do day-after-Thanksgiving sales. Moving it would be so unbeleivably perfect... but unlikely. So I may be skipping my mom's amazing Thanksgiving cooking for Ryter. I hope that kid knows how much I love him.

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I played my Marvel Heroes monopoly game tonight with my mom and dad. I lost, spectacularly. Mummy won, and she was talking to Shrewd on the phone for the first 20 minutes or so. It didn't help that Daddy had the TV going for background noise, which makes it impossible for me to concentrate. But it's a cute game, and a lot of fun. Park Place was Magneto, Boardwalk was Professor X, in case you're curious.

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So I was sitting here writing this at midnight, and now I'm crying. Why am I crying? Hell if I know. I'm just crying. And I can't see the screen very well.

okay, so maybe I do know. Maybe I'm crying because I'm so stressed I accidentally skipped a class. Maybe it's because I just finished my third test in less than a week this morning. Maybe it's because I spent 15 minutes of that test on one problem only to realize that duh, 1200 divided by 300 is 4, not 400. Maybe it's because I can't stick to a diet and every time I look down I am reminded of how fat I am. Maybe it's the fact that he, completely innocently, made me feel incredibly embarrassed and ashamed of the one feature of my body that I have always felt really, really self-conscious about and wanted him to approve of. Maybe it's because I have a Orgo quiz Monday and a test in two weeks. Maybe it has something to do with all my Daphnia dying and my turning in a crappy report on them. Maybe it's the fact that my boyfriend has told me that all the not-quite-sex stuff that we do together does pretty much nothing for him, and basically told me to lay off anything more than kissing until I'm ready for sex (not that he's saying that needs to be soon). Maybe it's the fact that this is the first time I've been home for longer than an hour since I went to school, and I can only spend the night, and no one's going to be home tomorrow anyway since it's Thursday and they have to work, and by the time they get home I'll have to go back to Durham so I can be around to spend tomorrow hiking with Ryter, and spend the night before him sleeping in his god-awful uncomfortable bed and not touching him, then go spend Saturday being smiley and happy for his family, and Sunday doing homework. Maybe it has something to do with not being ALONE since... god. I can't remember. I can't remember being alone. And I'm increasingly retreating into my fantasy worlds to the point where reality seems surreal, and I can't fix that problem because I have maybe five friends and they're all so busy with jobs or extracurriculars (you know, lives) that I can't spend time with them instead and have THEM pull me out of this world I've retreated into. And I feel like I can't tell Ryter because he's stressed out already and his problems are worse than mine, and besides, he's the reason for some of mine and that will make him feel worse and when he feels guilty it makes me feel bad for making him feel guilty and ultimately, even if it was his fault, I wind up suffering emotionally more than him.

I'm so sick of crying. The way I stop crying is to retreat into a fantasy, where I'm pretty and healthy and supreme dictator of earth. But when I retreat into fantasy it's worse when I have to return to the real world. So I have to decide if the temporary relief is worth it.

My crazy week

This is one of many new blog entries from tonight. Check the first one here.

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Monday I learned I had the Biostats test, and promptly freaked out. That was yesterday. It wasn't too bad, but I did get a lot of studying in. But I went over to Ryter's and burst into tears anyway, because of it.

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Tuesday was my field trip with Ecology to Blue Job Mountain, which is a protected wilderness area that used to be a blueberry heath, so it's a young forest. As my teacher is a bit of a naturalist type, it was very informative and interesting. As I had not anticipated climbing up a mountain, and had expected instead that we would drive up and wander around a small wilderness area, I did not have enough water and I am too out of shape, and I was dying by the end. But the views? Amazing.

At the top there is a rickety old tower from the 1910's that is used to watch for fires, I believe. We climbed up and took pictures from the top. That was cool, even if the narrow stairs did make me fear pitching forward the whole way down.

Of course, the best part was watching the "I'm only in Bio to do pre-med, why do I have to take Ecology, wah" types complain about the mountain and more specifically the wilderness, and the potential for nail-breakage.


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Also Tuesday, I discovered that my lab partner in Ecology and I had managed to kill all of our Daphnia in our experiment over the previous week. Oops.

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Wednesday was my 20th birthday. Yes, I am 20 years old now, and officially not a teenager. Two decades. Holy cow.

I didn't do much for my birthday on the actual day (we're going to the New England Center-- my family, Vivacia and Ryter-- tomorrow) but I did break from studying for a few hours and went to eat dinner with Ryter, who ordered a pizza, which was sweet of him. We also ate leftover pieces of a cake he had (yes he buys cakes randomly), which, we discovered, was decorated with magnets. Yes, what we had thought were merely decorative fish-shaped cake toppings were actually magnets, stuck on top of the cake... and we watched the baseball game (he's very into baseball, it's the playoffs). It was nice. I mean, it would have been nice to have a birthday wish and all but that sort of thing gets harder as you get older and people care less and less about birthdays.

In Which I Am A Bit Emo, I'm Afraid

Tonight, while I visited Ryter and comforted him because he was dealing with anxiety after a not-so-good doctor's visit, my mother accidentally fed my father meat in a marinade with too much sugar content and he lost feeling in his feet from the diabetes. He complained to her, she flipped out and angrily scrubbed the remaining marinade from the leftover meat, while he continued to complain every now and then because he couldn't walk right and was hurting.

She then drove off to go scream bloody murder in the car, parked in some lot somewhere. My sister cried and was petrified that she would hit a tree, she was so upset. This is not the first time this has happened. One of these days my mother will drive off angry and hit something and wind up in the hospital or worse. She needs therapy more than I did when I attempted suicide, and she will refuse to go because she thinks it's a waste of her time because honestly, I think her will to live is wholly rested on the fact that we need her, but she wouldn't really mind too much if she died. And my mother always tells me to throw out clothes that I still know I can mend.

Now, because my sister will cry, my father clearly has the tact of a walrus and my brother wouldn't know how to start, I have the task of going to her tomorrow and trying, yet again, to convince her to see a psychiatrist, knowing that if I do not the next time she drives off angry she may not come back.

God... I just want someone, anyone, ONE person in my life to be more stable than me. I just want someone who can be a rock for me. Someone who I will always know what to expect from. I don't want to be the responsible one in this family. I don't want to talk to my dad about how he needs to change his ways or he will lose his "perfect" children in all but the most perfunctory sense, I don't want to convince my mother to go into therapy, I don't want to have to protect my sister from them both and I don't want this life.

I wish the functionality we present was the functionality we possessed.

We're so 1955...

"Use proven methods, avoid shortcuts."

Besides being the Faunon (about which I know nothing except that it's probably related to Faunus, the goat-legged wilderness god), today is Lincoln's birthday. Not being one to celebrate the birthdays of dead presidents, I did not properly honor this occasion. I did, however, honor another birthday: that of Charles Darwin (who was a president, but of the Council of the Geographical Society, so I'm letting it slide). I honored this great day by not taking out the trash, thus allowing evolution to continue in that location.

Happy birthday, Darwin, I'm sure you don't look a day over 198.

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So...I had a sort of meltdown today, after the Health care seminar ended. My RA happened to be wandering around and he came in to talk about something going on this week and he noticed I had been crying, so he talked to me about it. I'm calm, now-- not over the crisis, but not crying, either... Still, this is the blog entry I wrote mid-meltdown.

I can't do this. I can't be a doctor. I can't go to med school and I can't do the career I always expected I'd do. It was never real to me, the idea of me as a doctor-- it was this distant, intangible idea where I had more marketable skills than a little bit more intelligence than Average Joe.

I don't really want to go into medicine. If I could have any career in the world, I'd write bestselling novels or screenplays or the scripts to comic books, or someone would pay me to draw whatever I wanted. I wouldn't be in science, I wouldn't be dealing with people every day...

There are two worlds that I live in at the same time. One of them is the real world, and the other is the one in my head. In the real world I'm a painfully shy, unattractive, reasonably intelligent but completely antisocial college student with no useful skills who's too afraid of human interaction to do what it takes to gain those skills. I want to do so much, I'm interested in so many things, but every time I learn about something new I want to do I find out that it requires social skills and I seize up. There was a woman at the Health care seminar today talking about international research opportunities and I was thinking, "oh, that sounds cool" and she mentioned that part of it was finding faculty mentors and convincing them to support you, and then going abroad and working with the professors one-on-one and with the natives, and my first reaction was "well, so much for that idea, I could never have the confidence for that." In the real world I'm hopeless and relatively worthless and have very few prospects, career-related or relationship-wise.

In the world in my head, I could be a doctor. Or a physician's assistant, or a lawyer, or a politician. In that world my books would actually make money or my sketches could actually sell or I'm attractive, thin, and sociable enough to marry someone rich and powerful and spend my life organizing charity functions and raising kids. Heck, in that world I can befriend a centaur or walk on the moon or have some important role in the destiny of the earth. In that world, I've lived my life; I'm not some sheltered girl from suburbia who thinks she's capable of independence.

I can't tell my mother about this little crisis, because she'll tell me to major in creative writing or something I love, and then I'll have to point out that my writing is mediocre and I refuse to be a starving artist. I'm beginning to see the power of the lines between dreams and reality. I will never be an artist or a professional writer or a politician; I've known this for years. I'm beginning to wonder if I need to add "doctor" to the list.