Everything will be alright. Everything. Will be alright.

I've made people laugh until they cry. I can cheer my friends up. I still have friends despite the sopping shit rag I've been lately. I've been told I'm a good story teller. I've been told I have a lot of potential as a writer. I've been told, despite episodes of crippling depression and anxiety, I'm hilarious.

I had my best friend stab me in the back. I had the most important person in my world lie to me. Despite it being 7 months now, it still hurts. A lot. It still crosses my mind more than I wish it would.

But you know what? I'm doing alright. I'm working on doing alright. The sadness that made me useless for months has devolved to a level of frustration as my other stressors (school, money, pets, never being as internet famous as I feel like I should be) and I feel like I can put a cap on it when it flares up most of the time.

Falling out of love with someone is the hardest thing I've had to force myself to do. I wish I was exaggerating. Literally the hardest.

Do I still hate myself? Who the fuck doesn't. Do I still wake up, a little bit bitter that I didn't die in my sleep? Sure enough. Is my sadness a bit more well distributed? Yeah, I guess so. I have more things to be cynical about than a girl that broke my heart.

So. Sad optimism. Things'll work out.

Nanowrimo Prep.

I'm already getting excited. I'm honestly going to attempt the 50k in a week and come what may the rest of the month. We'll see how this goes.

In preparation I'm doing the following:

• Writing out a list of prompts. Cutting them up. Putting them in a box.
• Getting a box shaped like a book. Paint and collage it with things that remind my of my main character. Put prompts in here.
• Make a brief playlist for each character involved.
• Turn the spare/storage bedroom into an office/writing hovel.
• Invest in some Field Notes notebooks.
• Write down what I do everyday so I can seriously evaluate how much time I waste. A lot, I'm aware.

YEP. So this blog is temporarily ~nano blog~.

10am Thursday morning.

It is 10am. I am still in my night gown but I've bothered to put my glasses on (why? they're not real, anyway). There is a load of laundry swishing around the washer. I have a pile of books strewn across my living room table and a shift to work at 5pm tonight. I'm listening to: old Looney Tunes, the sound of two of my cats wrestling each other and that washer I mentioned earlier. Things are alright.

I write this because I normally hate mornings like this. They drive me crazy. You remember when you were in grade/middle/high school and you were sick (like actually sick, not playing hooky you douche-bags) and you'd be laying in bed-- it was around 10am you would wake up (I mean you're sick but COOL you got to leep in) and just lay there with your swollen throat and puffy sinus and wonder if your friends wondered where you were. What were they doing. Were they making fun of Mr. Preggir? Because his nose looks like a dick? Then it hits you: you miss school. You miss feeling not sick and your friends; maybe not school. Suddenly you feel useless and gross- no amount of shower can get this layer of "sick" feeling off of you and you haven't done any homework and you've just watched cartoons all morning and coughed into a pillow and whined at your mom.

. . . I sincerely hope that's what other peoples sick days were like, because I'm going to feel fucking stupid if they didn't. Anyway.

This is still programmed into me- hanging out around the house at 10am = being useless and gross. Especially if I'm still in my pajamas. For some reason I'm totally okay with it today though: I'm being productive, I know I have to work later (even though that's usually frustrating also; I HATE closing shifts when I have nothing else to do during the day. I just sit around and wait for work to take me like the hand of death in the night #dramatic) and I know I have homework to do. Usually at this time of the day I'm itching for an excuse to leave the house; go do my work somewhere else.

But here I am. All is well. Viva la Thursday morning.

Total Side Note: Has anyone else gone back and watched Looney Tunes as an adult? I liked watching them when I was a kid, but listening/watching them as an adult, the writing is really clever and the timing really is fantastic. Sometimes I still really want to be an animator. Is there some kind of degree in the historical impact of cartoons? I'd be on that shit.

A few things on the subject of "literature". Largely cheesy.

Literature and the analysis of it is the ability to rip the skin off of everything with words. It's beautiful, having that much power over text; any text. I feel so thankful and inspired that I have the ability to work with it like this. On this level. I feel like books let me understand them sometimes, not the other way around.

This is the few things I'm confident in. Literature makes me feel so confident, makes me feel intelligent but makes me feel tiny, insignificant and, for lack of a better word, stupid. It humbles me. I will never completely understand it and that, in itself, is comforting. This is a realm I'm comfortable in my insecurities and lack of understanding.

A theory is that literature is completely defined by the community and the environment; if you're involved with a church-- your state, your government, your peers. . . those are what determine what is technically literature. I found this amusing before I realize I'm surrounded by other English majors. Who also are the ones that study theories like this- that we only think it's literature because this group said so. Not really worth delving into right now (I'm pretty sure I'd give myself a migrane) but interesting, none the less.

The physical world holds no place for me. I find my comforts in line breaks and the indents of paragraphs. You are flesh and blood, but I am a semi-colon wearing a human skin. The sole purpose of these hands is to hold a pen, and moments spent doing otherwise feels a waste.

"My words become me. I suit them."

(The Invisible Man)

Bye summer, hello fall!

Summer, I hardly knew ye. But I got a 3.5 over summer semester (overall GPA is still in the toilet so. . . boo on that) and read a total of 10 books. Not as much as I would have preferred, but not bad. Not bad at all.

So! Fall semester! Taking:

• French! Haven't taken this since high school so it should be an adventure.
  
• Literary analysis! Largely fun because I get to abbreviate as "lit anal".
  
• American Lit 1! Online! Fuck!
  
• Expository Composition! Also online! Double fuck!
  

Been getting SUPER into zines since I moved my friend up to Portland. It's incredibly hard to immerse yourself in something when there's none of it around you. Boo. To Etsy! In the works of. . . 4 or 5. Haha.

Wow my life is boring. I'll make a "FALL SEMESTER" reading list later.

"I hung out with bear yesterday and I forgot how amazingly awesome she is even when she is sick. I keep talking about how grossed out I am about this whole thing but I keep forgetting that bear told me everything out of love. She felt bad for lieing to her best friend and I respect her for telling me. I love her so much. She thinks that shes a shitty person but honestly shes the best one I know. I wish I could be halsf the artist, writer, comedian, and person that she is. It surprises me how well she can mask her feelings when shes around so she doesnt gross me out. I think that im about over the grossed out phase and mght be ready to be mad at my sister for cheating."





Woods deleted her blog, but I saved this because I'm an egotistical asshole and this. . . honestly made me feel a lot better when the whole 'situation' went down. Love you bro, thanks for carrying me up that hill.

SUMMER READIN, HAPPENED SO FAAAST.

SUMMER READIN'.


DONE!
Novels/books:

• Bret Easton Ellis; American Psycho


• Rob Bell; Love Wins


• Virginia Woolf; A Room Of One's Own


• Virginia Woolf; Flush, a biography


• Kurt Vonegut; God Bless You, Mr Rosewater


• Patton Oswalt; Zombie Spaceship Wasteland


• Virginia Woolf; Jacobs Room


• Rachel Caine; Glass Houses


• Virginia Woolf; A Haunted House and Other Stories


• Anderson Cooper; Dispatches From The Edge
  

Short stories/poetry/plays:

• Charlotte Gilman; The Yellow Wallpaper


• Zitkala-Sa; Impressions of an Indian Childhood


• Edward Albee; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The "to do" list:

(either the authors names have escaped me or I'm too lazy to type them. No one reads this anyway. . . so I don't really give a good goddamn. Not even a bad one.)

• Sylvia Plath; The Bell Jar


• Knut Hamsun; Hunger


• MORE VIRGINIA WOOLF (Orlando, The Voyage Out, A Writers Diary)


• Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

To be updated as the months progress. Yes I'm including school reading because shut up, it takes a lot of time.