September 8, 2009

I just listened to the President's speech. It was great. He accurately, and surprisingly briefly, was able to sum up all the major points of how education and staying in school is important.

I will even more briefly now admonish those who objected to the speech, who kept their children home from school (to not hear a speech which stressed the importance of GOING TO SCHOOL!!). You right-wing mouth-breather FOOLS. You idiots. You hypocrites. You sheep! You bigoted, racist, backward, backwoods fucktards (of course that is only meant for the people objecting who ARE racist, bigoted, and backward, mind you): you are about as good for your children as a shovel is to the face. I hope you feel even more stupid than you already were once you heard the speech, how it was nothing but a positive message about school.

But sadly, a good lot of you will still dig your ignorant heels in and still justify your objection, still cry "NOBAMA" even after hearing it. I sigh and slowly shake my head. I posted it on Facebook, too, but this cartoon pretty much sums up the controversy, and the importance of education, and accurately portrays the lack of education of most of the people who objected to the speech.

I'm killing some time before a scheduled conference call with a World Bank representative about the nonparametric alternative to the Human Development Index we've been developing in the labs.

I'm very depressed.

I'm not on a sugar low, I've had a fulfilling lunch, a full 3/4 liter of yerba mate (which means quite a caffeine jolt). I didn't feel this depressed about thirty minutes ago.

Nothing special happened. It just comes and goes, like a migraine headache. Maybe it's because it really is like a migraine headache, but maybe that's just another misguided theory.

I do know that nothing happened and it just came. And it does, every now and then. There are phases it's rare and there are phases it's common. But it's always out of the blue.

I think allergy medicines are trying to kill me. Not only do they make me depressed while I'm taking them, but I think they've caused some serious personality changes. Ever since the first time I took them, last November, and the idea of suicide popped into my head, I can't get it out again. I have no problems in my life that are severe enough to merit me being this depressed all the time, but somehow I am. I made the huge mistake of trying Claritin again for like, three days about two weeks ago. It was expired, so it didn't help my allergies, but as usual, it caused me to freak out. Since then, I have felt miserable, exhausted, and apetite-less. My stomach and my heart and my head all feel empty, and I need something to fill it. I don't know what.

I can't even pin down exactly what the problem is, emotionally, so no matter what I do to feel better I feel like I'm treating symptoms, not causes. There's just this huge pack of problems that I don't know what to do about. While the problems aren't all my fault, I feel like there's one central issue in myself that I need to solve to learn to deal with any of this. I don't know whether I need to do even more soul-searching to figure out what it is, or whether I need to think less and just let it flow.

Boyfriend and I have been getting in horrendous arguments recently, and I usually instigate it. I don't know why. Maybe it's related to the thing I'm missing. He told me about some drug experimentation he was planning on, and I expressed concern, and he asked me why I treated him like a baby. I said some extremely spiteful things just to piss him off. I don't think I know how to have a healthy relationship. I provoke him on purpose, but he's my best friend and I don't know what I'd do if I lost him. While my general sardonic bitchiness is part of my charm, this goes too far, so I am working on being less antagonistic. I don't have much motivation lately.

School is starting tomorrow. Senior year. I am not speaking to anyone that I don't want to. In a year, I'll be in a new place with new people so I see no reason to remain polite to people who annoy the crap out of me. I'm planning on pretending that I spontaneously became extremely snotty over the summer. This group that I am ignoring includes my exboyfriend, who thinks he knows me better than I know myself and has spent the last two years trying to guilt me into going out with him again. This guilt is what caused all my bad feelings in the first place. He deserves some serious violence.

Plus, two of my close friends have tried to commit suicide recently. One of them, who is bipolar, is to me an older sister. I always come to her for the kind of advice that you'd ask an older sister; sex tips, shaving methods, ego boosts when you really need them. The other one, who I think of as a younger sister, belongs to a family that doesn't care for her psychological wellbeing and doesn't do anything to help her. She is so bright and beautiful and opinionated and silly that it kills me that she's so sad and messed up. And my best friend, who has never been psychologically well, had a panic attack this morning and I want to help. But I can't, there's nothing I can do.

I am daylogging this because if I don't share it, I'll explode. My extra-bouncy playlist hasn't cheered me up. Nor has a ridiculously long shower. Hopefully seeing Boyfriend tomorrow will cheer me up a little. And school will give me less time to wallow in worry and misery. I feel very silly for being this upset about silly things. I mean, I know the suicide of friends isn't silly. But everything else is. My life, to all outward appearances, is perfectly amazing, but I can barely drag myself around. I've got my dream job at sixteen years old, I get good grades, I have a perfect boyfriend and extremely loyal friends, and I'm still miserable. I don't know what to do. Maybe I need saner friends. This entire writeup is disjointed. Oh well. Screw good writing. I'm sad.

Well, I know I said I'd write more. The problem is finding the time. There's so much to do: overdue uni assignment, overdue references for my graduating class, four jewellery commissions...

I'm going to have to start a new regime of "getting stuff done". There's a book on that, somewhere in this house. I'll have to find some way of ensuring that everything I need to do in the day gets done.

So I promise, writing here will be one of those things. Oh, and another of those things is keeping the promises I make to do stuff.

In the meantime, may I harness the power of E2 to name a bridge, please? The Hale St Link bridge in Brisbane, Aust, needs a name. My best friend's great uncle is one of the people on the shortlist to be immortalised in the form of the bridge name.

So if you go to http://www.namethatbridge.com/ and vote for Eric Abraham, I'd be really chuffed :-).

A cool guy, Mr Abraham. Died in 2003 aged 104 - wrote his own 100th birthday speech and stood to deliver it. He was the first foreign soldier to receive the Legion d'honneur for war service and saw the Red Baron shot down near the Somme in 1918 (I quote). If you go to the above website, you'll also discover that he was the last surviving member of the Dungaree Diggers - a group of 28 men who walked 270 km from Warwick to Brisbane, calling for young men to join up for ANZAC forces during the First World War (I quote again).

Thanks guys :-)

TM

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/the-gobetweens-bridge-20090902-f7pc.html
http://www.namethatbridge.com/

First day of school for me. Last year I didn't understand why the upperclassmen were so annoyed with freshmen; now I do. They looked so scared, unsure of themselves. They just looked kind of stupid, scared when there's nothing to be afraid of (at least not on the first few days anyways). I don't have any room to talk, or at least didn't, but seriously, why do kids have to be that insecure at that age?

Getting up at 7 wasn't nice. It wasn't getting up early; it was that damn alarm. Stupid thing has no clue when I'm sleeping deeply or nearly awake, it just goes off regardless.

I don't know if "atmosphere" is the correct word for it, but different situations definetly have a different feel to them. When you step out on the first day of a season (according to the weather, not the calendar) you feel just like you felt the last time it was that season; that's just one example, there are thousands of different things that have their own feel, really anything can if it is important to you. Snow, rain, a particular smell, a particular location or even a particular temperature... I could go on listing them for a while. I think the more of the details that are the same the stronger the feeling; for example if you listened to the same song you listened to every day in the past winter and then stepped out in the cold, it would feel even more like winter than if you only stepped into the cold. Deja vu could be related to this, maybe the kind of situation did happen before, at least the feeling did, and you encountered something that is connected very strongly to the feeling but aren't consciously aware of the connection.

I'm getting a bit off-topic, but school just felt different today than it has before. I don't think it was different, I think it was me. Somehow.