I hope hardly anyone/no one reads this blog. (dafuq)

Oh my God. I think I am the worst. I want to have sex so bad. I want to know what that feels like. So. Badly.

I'm sitting here reading about this woman's transition into womanhood and her challenging journey to do so (she was born a he) but I'm simultaneously listening to the playlist my boyfriend and I made to play during sex and I want to have sex or at least be penetrated somehow I don't even.

I have never felt these things so strongly. I want to know this person like I've never known anyone. I want him to know me like no one's ever known me and I realize just how dangerous and tricky and sketchy it is and goddamn I take things for granted. I take so much for granted. We could die today or tomorrow or so could my family and everyone I love and everyone he loves and everyone we love and everything could completely fall apart and it wouldn't be like the piece-of-cheesecake apocalyptic world of "Warm Bodies". I will be the first to admit that I have ridiculous expectations. I know it'll be awkward. It will be the potentially most awkward experience that we will ever experience. That it will be something profoundly uncomfortable. But probably awesome anyway; the physical aspects, the fact that our bodies respond in certain ways to certain touches in certain places, regardless of how poorly they are performed, might make up for it.

I hope so anyway.

I am kind of down on the moral side from the ways I've been.

Young, moral me is looking at older "backslidden" me with those little concerned eyes, probably crying for my sad soul.

She's looking at me all "This will ruin your relationship. And it will ruin your relationship with your future husband. And yeah, he doesn't share some of your beliefs, and I know that that hasn't stopped me before, but--showing that much of yourself to someone? Before you're married? Honestly. What are you thinking? How far have you walked away from our God?"

"I would tell you that you don't know what you're talking about because you've never been here, kid. I hate calling people kid, actually, I mean, I enjoy it, but I don't because it's a little bit patronizing and I don't particularly enjoy patronizing anyone--however. Dear. Darling. You. You don't understand. Well, you might understand, but you've never had opportunities like this. You've never felt this so strongly. I mean. Do you know how my vagina feels right now? Just. Right now. With these thoughts."

"You still have no idea what you're doing or what YOU'RE talking about. You are something else. You really are. You still don't get your dang vagina."

"Do you know how nice it is to swear? My Goddamn vagina is fucking fantastic even though I still have to get to know it! I mean! Honestly!"

"I let my friends swear around me now! That doesn't mean you should do it! Anyway. Alison. Do you understand what you're getting yourself into? What kind of impact this has on the people around you? What kind of example you're setting? Is this honoring to God? Is this honoring to the life he has planned for you?"

"...Okay, so my life is not particularly honorable at the moment. And He's definitely sending me a few messages. But. BUT. This is natural--maybe natural in the way sin is natural, but it's natural. He made your body like this. He made my body like this. Our body is made for these things."

"Did you not listen to your mentor last Sunday? It's like that because of marriage. To glue together marriages."

"Okay, but who bases their marriage on sex?...alright, alright, I know. I know."

"Don't say 'I know'. You should listen to your parents more often."

"I should. Fuck, I should do the dishes."

"Alison, you should still think about what you're doing. You have such a beautiful life. God has given you so many opportunities and he's made you for more than that. More than what you're doing now."

"I'm aware, kid. I'm aware."

"You don't live like you're aware."

"I'm gonna go do the dishes."

"Alison. You need to do more than that. No, you need to rest. You need to rest in Him. Haven't you been hearing that the past six years of your life? What's it going to take to make you do that? Will He have to put you in a position where that is all you can do? Are you going to wait for an awful event to make you rest and give it all to him? Is that what it's going to take?"

"I'll talk to you later."

"...alright."

"For your information, you're just as insecure as you were. And more selfish. It's unpleasant. Don't become me."

"I am you. You are you. The only you that can be is the you that you are. So I became this. I'm not happy with it, but it is what it is. I can't do a thing about who you are now. You have to do it, Alison. You have to make the changes. I can only sit back here and vent my anxieties to the guidance counselor."

"I know."

"Please make us something better. Please pray, Alison. Please rely on Him."

"I'll try."

"Don't try. Rest."

"...I will."

"He makes all things possible."

"Okay." 

Roleplaying.

The bane of my existence. Not really. Actually, this particular writing exercise, this socially engaging and 100% addicting sort of story building does wonders for persistence in writing. Because I can't stand not doing it when I'm in a functioning, active, roleplay. Whether with friends or strangers (who usually end up being my friends by the story's eventual death or planned conclusion).

Regardless, the tendency to obsess over these things does prove rather unhealthy. And to begin a consistent roleplaying life at the beginning of my senior year of high school (in which I will be attending college) seems somewhat of an unwise decision. But it does prompt a lot of writing. A lot of interesting, engaging, serious, and even humorous writing. It does create social camaraderie, even if much of it is my roleplay taskmastering.

So.

We'll see how this goes. I certainly hope I learn how to manage my time this year. 

Franny and Zooey+Catcher in the Rye+Me+Damir from "Sunlight"+John Mayer? (Parody/"Fanfiction"/Serious whatever/Ihavenofreakingidea)

We were walking in Central Park, smoking of course, on our third packs, with ducks on the pond. Symbolically. It seemed as though we were in another time. Likely around the late 1940's or mid-1950's. Potentially. It really did seem that way, however.

He started to ponder aloud something vaguely relating to Eastern philosophy. I nodded along, thinking of his entire credibility. He was the most genuine person I knew, he really was. Just so ---dam honest all the dam time.

"You wanna go get a cocktail? I'd really like to go get a cocktail right about now. The ducks are so depressing, they really are," I said.

He took a Salinger-protagonist-length drag on the current cigarette he was smoking. Unfortunately for us, we knew how ridiculously idiotic such a habit was to have, but we did it anyway. He shrugged, and we started heading for a bar, a club, anything, anywhere. New York City was sorta phony, at least where we were, but we were there anyway.

We found some dank place, but we got a couple of drinks anyway. We looked at all the people there. All phonies, all of them. I talked about some people I used to know, how hard it was to have a real intellectual conversation with them. He nodded along. He totally understood what I was saying. It was nice, that he was so terribly older, but not too much older, than I was. He knew enough. I didn't know much. But he did.

"That's about right," he said, in response to some offhand comment I had made about our cynical culture and my odd friendships. Or potential friendships.

"Yeah, I thought so."

He nodded. I took a look around. It was such a dank place, full of phonies anyway. It was depressing, actually.

"Wanna stop over somewhere? Go back to that old hotel? Your girlfriend probably wants to meet up with you. Your dad, maybe."

"In a minute or two."

"Okay."

I wanted to go back. I had a few people waiting for a call. I needed to get to a phone, at least.

He paid for the drinks and we started heading back. It was a long walk, but he never seemed to have as many problems going too far as one might expect. He once walked about 12 hours of an entire day in some phony hipster town. It was a painful walk, he said. But a good one. Long bus ride, too. I would've gone along if he would've told me he was going. He brought his dad and I a couple of pomegranates from their gigantic farmer's market. I wish he would've taken a couple of pictures.

We walked into the hotel, him and I, tired as hell, really. I wanted to go to bed. We took the elevator up, and I headed down the hall for my room.

"I'll meet up with you all again later. Dinner, maybe," I said, as I headed for my room.

"That should be fine. You know where we are," he said, sticking his keycard in the slot.

"Yup."

I followed suit, and entered my room, curtains closed. It was three thirty in the afternoon, and I could hear the sirens and horns and cars driving, a little bit of music from somewhere. And I heard the words of others just beyond our thin walls. With this, I collapsed into the hotel bed. 'Till six, I told myself. I'd get up at six. 

Completely and entirely unproductive, but I am re-reading part of Sunlight and...

I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO MAKE MYSELF NOT BARF. THIS IS THE WORST.

I read The Fault in Our Stars by John Green...

...and watched Esther Earl on her YouTube channel. And looked at photographs. And watched vlogbrothers videos of John Green in Amsterdam, and loving Amsterdam, and visiting Amsterdam X-amount of times on video, particularly featuring The Yeti and even Henry somewhere, and fragile tulips, and excited Nerdfighters.

And I copied parts of The Fault in Our Stars for my Serious Prose Interpretation piece, and found that there was no way I could do the story justice, not in the slightest, without being an incredible actress, and having some sort of personal experience to the book and its many life-ly subject matters.

And so it goes.

I can hardly write anything coherent, since finishing TFiOS on Sunday. I just... there is no possible way right now. I want to end up like John Green, but I'm also this non-infinite thing, this person who is an extra in God's movie, 2/5 of a second my life is... (that metaphor was stolen from Francis Chan's crazy love). And here I am, attempting. I'm inspired to do a lot of things, but I'm also sort of swimming in this strange pool of fog and emotion and going up and down, and I don't know why, but I do have a packet for my church's counseling center coming. And I'm trying, but not really. I don't know what's up.

I just want to glorify God, really. And I want to let go of the many things I grasp so hard, even though they give me rope burn (metaphor stolen from a Beliefnet article about Letting Go as a Buddhist principle...). And... I just... there's a lot on my mind. I should go to bed.

But I probably won't.

The Psychonovelist (December 1st, Day one past NaNoWriMo 2011)

It would bore you if I told you, like my usual activities, I was attempting to do some research for a class paper, and then got horrendously distracted by the research information itself, and then began to think about my silly, silly NaNovel of this year. I finally wrote a last chapter that could conclude the story, if I chose to leave it that way. And oddly enough, with all the cheating (words pre-November, putting in school assignments for word count, etc.) that I did, I only arrived at 49,533 words at 12:15 this morning without the school assignments. So technically, I really lost this year. But I still got my 50,000 in last night, at least on the NaNoWriMo site's word counter.

But here's the point. I was researching for a two-page, ridiculously easy "research" paper for psychology (which is due tomorrow, and I've had way too long to do it), and I found a blog on PsychCentral.com, with a woman who has similar disorders/the exact ones as one of my fictional secondary characters in my story this year.

A note about Sunlight:

It was the most depressing thing I've ever written. I honestly think it would HARM mental health for someone to read it, now that I think about it. It's just an endless cycle of the saddest stuff I could put in a story, with just nothing but that endless cycle. There were some great, wonderfully insightful, interesting parts to it, but most of it... well... just think about those video games where you search through a room to find something creepy to jump out at you. This story was like that--but with depressing events instead of creepy or shocking.

I've spent November writing papers and speeches about mental health and mental disorders and reducing stigma. I spent my summer reading publications about reducing stigma and increasing social model usage for disability. I've spent this whole year learning more and more about these issues, doing my dang best to find this stuff published by people with firsthand experience, not just someone speaking out, and look what I've done.

I believe I've done the absolute opposite of what I intended. I wanted to write something "realistic", but not hopeless. I wanted to portray the dark and difficult sides of a combination of dark and difficult life circumstances, tragedies, trauma, and the like. I understand that, often, these things do lead to worse circumstances.

But people do live. The whole point was to make it about the living, not the dying, and I wrote the entire damn story about dying, pretty much. Sure, I spend my life trying to understand what goes on in people's heads, how a mind works in response to so many different things, and how thoughts are processed when a mind is different than other minds. I want so much to write something of power, of significance, of realism (although some argue that fiction cannot be realistic--I can respect that. I accept that.), of life. And, yes, I suppose, mortality.

But who the heck (look at my language, guys! oooo:) wants to read a story about an already "troubled" young man and his "troubled" family who dies before him, and his "troubled" but fairly well girlfriend doing normal things and him being totally incapable of facing the fact that... well, she's moving on with her life, and he's not? And he feels like he can't? Can I please, please, PLEASE, throw in those magic superhero unicorns and green space donkeys I joked about all month with my friends? The story is totally hopeless. Not because his life is, but just because... I mean, I can't even "save" my characters, let alone people in real life.

It's not about saving him, obviously. Or other people. But... I mean... with the story the way it is (and I can promise, with my whole heart, it will not FREAKING STAY THAT WAY), how on earth is this going to elicit any positive change? It'll be a trigger for those who face similar issues, it will be a horrific story for a "good cry" for the ones who can handle emotional stories and like them, and a testament to me being utterly weird and messed up.

And oddly enough:

http://www.apa.org/research/action/writing.aspx

(So I hardly have any traumatic experiences myself, but apparently it shows I have GOOD mental health, not poor. I always find that odd, because you would think it would be the other way around. But that's not so.)

Anyways, that's just my vent for today. The cool (alright, totally cheesy) title is just because that's my IDEAL self, which is currently in conflict with my REAL self. Carl Rogers, I think. Humanistic psychologist. Took up a month of my Relationships and Family class last year, got a section in my textbook.

Have a good day, everyone. Enjoy December.

Spiral

Nature vs. nurture,
natural vs. unnatural,
twist
turn
talk
talk
talk
speak
listen
ignore.
"Debate never wins a heart"
be still,
and listen listen listenlistenlisten.
truth,
or lies,
cruelty,
or harsh
reality.
"Honesty is not always the truth."
Turn off the light,
and don't look in the mirror.
Tearstained red eyes,
watched her a minute,
held a second.
Stared at the cold floor.
and but a child asks
senses
conflict.
"Out of the mouth of babes..."
you must
know
both
sides.
Twist,
turn,
talk,
speak,
listen,
ignore.
Recall.
Truth,
or lies,
harsh reality,
or cruelty.
Judge and you will be judged.
Twist, twist, turn.
Upon the sand foundation,
swallowed in the sea.
hide in the dark room,
ask,
"God, what the h--- is wrong with me?"
washrinserepeat
walk downstairs,
and
display
hypocrisy.
twist.
talk.
ask.
forget.
ignore.
recall.
Defend,
your
position.
Know
your
"enemy".
twist
twist
talk
the sandy foundation,
the crumbled home in the stormy sea.
The wave tossed
in the ocean.
Disregard,
or listen.
pin the
D or H or A or T
upon your breast,
or hide.