things

I try to be overly nice to homeless people just to show them that I'm not afraid of them even though I actually sort of am. Sometimes they are very friendly back and this makes me feel fulfilled, like I've done something good - when really all I've done is talk to another human being. Sometimes that's more than I want to do. Mostly.

My dog is sort of scared of strangers and today three very gay guys started waving at him from across the street. Having a dog is a weird thing because people stop addressing you and just talk to your dog. Then you have to be the dog's voice. Like, I have to say hi for him. Or I feel compelled to - which maybe isn't necessary. Anyway, my dog has really long ears and a lot of sort of puppyish features and people are drawn to him. The gay guys crossed the street to talk to him but he was really afraid. I forced him to sit so they could pet him. I left feeling really weird and with a hole in the knee of my tights from kneeling on the sidewalk next to him as the gay guys forcibly rubbed his head. They had dirty fingernails and were very over the top. I think that they were on meth because I am always suspicious of everyone in a way that I recognize as sort of square.

I have a secret stash of Martha Steward living that I read while I'm in the bathtub. I like the recipes. I like to read recipes but I mainly eat burritos out of a pouch or spoon fulls of peanut butter.

Today everything made me feel angry. I do not want to own pets today or partake in any of the responsibility that goes along with it. I just want to be alone and think quiet thoughts and not speak for 8 hours and look at things. There is always a cat trying to crawl onto my lap or my dog is always spinning in circles trying to chase them. He's really full of joy and I tend to be more of a contemplative, quiet person - so today I am not feeling the connection. This makes me feel guilty to admit, but I don't do well with needy things. I should never parent a child. I'd probably sit it in front of the television so I could be alone in a room to think. I keep yelling very loudly at the animals because they are making skittering noises and needing too much attention. I think to myself, after I yell, that I must be sort of breaking their spirit and it feels really abusive and I feel guilty but I don't stop because yelling alleviates my annoyance on some level.

the fucking 'n' key keeps getting stuck. most of the words that I have typed with the letter 'n' in it have had to be typed more than once. This, compounded with everything else is making me feel very tense and like I want to fucking bash something. Not sure what is wrong with me. Think I will take a bath and read or something.

I have felt a lot, recently, that I have no creative outlet. Makes me feel empty. I tried taking up knitting, my grandmother began to teach me last year but I gave up easily and now she's dead. Seems hopeless. Am a little interested in Crewel Embroidery, want to make pictures of old houses and birds and flowers to remind me of my grandmother. Not sure that I will. Seems like a commitment that should be important because of the meaning I've assigned to it. I'm pretty sure I will bastardize my own good intentions with laziness, not really up to that just yet.

I have felt real quiet and contemplative all day. Looked at the internet for about 3 hours, give or take. Refreshed pages, looked obsessively at stranger's pictures, felt that pretty much everyone in the world is having more fun than me. I felt like a loser, didn't feel like walking my dog, kept smelling shit but could find it no where in the apartment. I sometimes feel creatively and mentally drained by monitors. Computer, television. They seem to suck my life force. I will think this and close my laptop and turn off the television, or at least try to watch something "smart" and not "shallow" but old habits die hard.

Started looking at pictures of food. It's a new trend or a moderately new one, and I like it. Sometimes I take pictures of my food because it looks artistic in a way that I recognize from other pictures I've seen of food, ones that I know are actually artistic. Have never posted pics for anyone to see but I'm often tempted. Today I made two sort of intricate meals, both of them using really pretty and bright ingredients. It took me a while to do, and I thought that maybe cooking is my creative outlet. I took pictures of these meals. maybe I will post them, I have to decide. I don't even know why it is important at all, who cares?

My dog curls his entire body up onto a pillow. It's like he's afraid to have an inch of himself not on the pillow, like maybe he thinks that beyond the pillow is lava. I used to play that game all of the time.

Dowloaded a bunch of meditations and Tibetan chants. I try to meditate. put a scarf over my head, sit still and listen to the singing bowls. Usually I can only focus on a cramp in my foot, or end up thinking about things that make me sad or unsatisfied. I don't know what it is to 'clear my mind' - not sure how that would look, but I think it might be what death is.

For the first six months at my "new" job I described what I do as, "working with autistic first graders," until someone corrected me. "They're first graders with autism. Their autism doesn't define them." It made sense and I felt really guilty and my extremities felt weak and I felt stupid. I just shrugged and smiled sheepishly and then spent the next few days replaying that moment in my mind, cringing on the inside at how dismissive or defensive or unempathetic I must have looked - just shrugging like that.

That always happens. I always do things like that, say something insensitive or react to something in a way that I know is not socially acceptable or maybe just not "nice" and then I end up hating myself for it. I will argue with myself, internally - like, "who says things have to be THIS way? why is there a code of ethics and who came up with this code? why should I feel bad if I made someone feel bad?" but then I still do. Feel bad. I can't really help it.

Sometimes I wonder if working with children with autism is the best job for me. By nature, they live inside of themselves and my job is to bring them out - if only a little bit. I struggle with whether this is even necessary. At all. Maybe it is so they can, like, function in life but then I think about the fact that I'm 26 and I'm not autistic and sometimes I can't even function.

I take walks with one of my students every day. He likes to go outside and so do I, even in the snow, even in the rain, even when it's really cold. During our walks, I always think to myself, "I should be talking to him, getting him to label things in the environment, asking him questions." I think those things but I don't do them.

Sometimes I just sing songs or act out obscure scenes from The Little Mermaid. He loves Ursula and so do I. He has no concept of what is "in" or "interesting" or "counterculture" or fucking"subversive" - he just likes when Ursula gets really big and takes over as ruler of the sea. It makes him laugh. His simplicity is inspiring. And, I realize that none of the things I do on these walks are teaching him "life skills" but it's my favorite part of our time together. Mostly we are silent.

Today we spent a great deal of time just looking into this little stream. I wondered what he liked about it, what he was focusing on. I liked watching this one leaf. I saw it fall in the water and I watched it travel down. It sort of looped and spun at one point. I thought about how things in nature just exist with no awareness of their existence - or none that I know of and I felt sort of jealous. Of nature. The leaf wasn't sad that it was no longer "living" on a tree. It didn't feel scared, or tentative, or confused, or indifferent, or elated to be traveling down the stream. It just was. Or wasn't.

He kept throwing acorn shells into the water. I imagined that he was interested in the ripple effect. I like how that looks, too. He is a very visual child. Gets excited and flaps his arms when something appeals to him, visually. I love him.

I thought about all of those things as we looked into the stream. I wonder what he thought about, if he thought about anything at all. Maybe he's super Zen - or maybe he was having these ingenious ideas. He doesn't have language but one day it will all bubble to the surface in crazy and wonderful ways. I wouldn't be surprised. The ability to speak, write - verbalize in general means very little. I think he knows himself better than I could ever dream. Is it fucked up that I envy him?

Then, I seriously considered throwing my cell phone into the water. My hand felt "thirsty" to do it - alive with the sensation that it needed something that couldn't be quenched. I knew I wouldn't do it but I kept imagining it making a splash and then sinking to the bottom. The water would get murky and then it would settle and I'd regret it. I know he would like the splash though. I kept thinking that he'd get a kick out of it. I didn't do it but not doing it made me feel sort of guilty, or selfish, or petty.

I work at a summer camp from 7:30 every morning until 5:30 every night. Alex works at the Mountaire Chicken factory every day from 4:30pm until 3 in the morning. We never see each other but each day I get a pretty good idea of what he's been doing based on my Firefox history.

Here is a list of some of the best google or wiki searches in recent days:

(google search)
Does alcohol make you charismatic?
Drunk charisma
Does drinking give you more confidence?
How to talk to people
Top 6 ways to overcome shyness
What is the meaning of life
Pam is lame
I hate pam from the office club
Zooey Deschanel naked pic
She and Him
grills (for teeth)
my basset hound keeps shaking his head
ramen noodle recipes
recipes using ramen
chords for Sheryl Crowe favorite mistake*

(wikipedia article)
Meaning of Life
Quarterlife Crisis

*I'm at a loss here.

The underside of my arm is really really soft. I realized this today while I was driving. I tried to focus all of my senses on how my skin felt against my fingertips. I tried not to feel my fingertips against my inner arm. I do things like this often, try to separate myself from myself. When I did this today my inner arm became really ticklish. I guess because I was focusing too much on not focusing and the nerve endings were standing at attention because they were being paid such close attention to.

When I was younger I used to stare in the mirror at my face until it stopped making sense. I would smile really big and if I kept staring suddenly my face became insanely foreign and I wouldn't recognize myself at all. This was around the age that I would try to sit still and think of nothing. I would close my eyes and tell myself to clear my mind. Then I would begin to argue in my head that if I was telling myself to clear my mind then my mind wasn't clear or focused because I was focused on clearing it, or telling myself to clear it, and then I'd start to get confused and things would feel really unfocused. After awhile I would be able to see the blood vessels in my inner eye lid. They were sort of a neon orangey reddish over a blackish. I guess I used to meditate at age 7, that's what I was doing right? That's the point of meditation...to clear your mind. I still find it just as impossible as I did then, but I appreciate the necessity for such pursuits just the same.

All last week I was convinced I had heart disease because my left shoulder ached. I googled "Left Shoulder Pain" and sent myself spiraling down a well of irrational fear. Suddenly whenever I breathed in my chest was tight or heavy, like an elephant was standing on it gingerly. Over the next few days my shoulder pain had spread across my entire upper back. I was convinced I would die in my sleep and began to have heart palpitations. In the back of my mind I knew how irrational I was being but the pain was real. I went to the library and got a book called Mind Over Back Pain. I read it during my lunch break and my coworkers made fun of me.

The book said that something like 70 percent of back pain is in our heads. In the 1970's doctors saw an influx of patients with stomach issues, and they began to relate them to stress. Since then, it's become widely known that stress can lead to things like ulcers and sour stomach, and the simple knowledge of this has decreased the frequency of stomach problems. Apparently now we store our tension in our shoulders and back. I'm sure someday it will manifest somewhere else. I'll probably get cancer from worrying. Anyway, ever since I read that book my back pain has been gone.

I think that River Phoenix's brother had the hardest name to spell ever.

I can see better out of my periphery

purr

I've been reading Richard Brautigan again and my thoughts have begun to form a similar structure to his narrative technique. They are short, matter-of-fact, dreamy, sometimes pretty and of little consequence. My mind is so easily changed, not in conviction but in pattern. It's like after I've played Tetris for 2 hours in a row and I walk around fitting everything I see into some sort of puzzle, unending, and unnerving because it's not fast enough and the music has heightened. It takes simple things, word in a row, blocks falling quickly, and these formations reform my thought process. It's interesting, but I'm not sure what it is, or what i mean.

But I like Richard Brautigan. In Watermelon Sugar always conjures pleasant sensory images of crusty houses made of Watermelon Sugar;, sticky and sweet cities. Very nice and pretty and pleasant and many other adjectives that are sort of vague but overall positive. That's what the novella is like.

In other news, I saw a picture of a slice of pizza topped with pizza bites. A metapizza. So clever, and scrumptious. The world is too much sometimes. I like it here.

Unrelated: lately I've been feeling the way I feel after I leave a movie theater late at night, and it's really silent in the parking lot, and dark, and cold, and I'm not sure if I'm alive or walking in a dream - things seem echoey and surreal. The light from the streetlamps stretch in long shafts like hazy sun rays, and my eyes feel blurry and tired, like my mind. Day in and day out, this feeling that I'm disconnected from something tangible that I can't put my finger on. It's all ironic. Maybe I mean to be confusing. Maybe none of my thoughts are genuine and my sentences are just structured to look complex and sound introspective. But that's just it, I don't know myself really, or my intentions. It's like I'm walking from a dark theater into a dark night with blurry eyes and sleepy limbs.