darcy_mackenzie

I finally had a good sleep last night. The last few days my sleeping and waking have been troubled. First, I finally got a diagnosis on my ankle pain: superficial phlebitis, ie, swelling and inflammation of the veins. Not a serious condition and treatable, but with risks of deep vein thrombosis, ie, blood clot in deep veins possibly breaking away and causing stroke/death. I'm not sure it's a huge risk, but of course my overtired mind is concerned. So I feel fragile.

It's also been crazy because over the weekend I spent a lot of time with a new person who I find very attractive, and for whom the feeling is mutual. We are both ok with it being non-committed, because I am trying to cling desperately to what little independence I've generated in the past month of singleness. He is absolutely an amazing person, bringing me flowers, making me dinner, showering me with affection, listening sympathetically to my feelings, telling me I'm amazing. I mean, I don't think it's me in particular that is so special, it's just his way. But it makes it hard to keep my distance. I labour under such delusions that I can ever take anything lightly. I don't think I will ever truly find myself unless I can stop getting caught up all the time in romance. It's hard enough not to get caught up when someone is just beautiful - when that person is also kind, it's even harder. I will do my best. I probably won't see him for several days. I suppose if I can't control my emotions then I can at least control my actions (it worked for dealing with the ex).

Time for one of three daily baths to heat my veins. You would think all this romance would be getting the blood flowing, not clotting. How unromantic is a blood clot!? But, I like any medical treatment that involves sitting in the bathtub.

Oh my gosh. I did not predict it would be so hard. Today and yesterday were brutal. Losing your lover is like losing an organ - the organ of happiness and reason. Nonetheless, the day is coming to an end and I feel like I am holding on. When things got really bad today, I went for a great bikeride in the snowy dark down to Kitchener. I felt like it would save me, as cycling has done in the past. I was planning on having dinner with Sukhino after. When I got to her building, I just sat outside, taking in the peace of the moment. Upstairs, some kind of wind instrument was playing. I sat and listened and listened. I got up to go and thought to myself, later, in a bad time, you will wish you had stayed longer in this moment. So I stayed, and by staying, imagined that now there would be no future bad time, but that I would always hold this moment.

Sukhino made me a wonderful dinner of fried eggs, toast, and salad, which I deeply enjoyed. We talked for ages and had some excellent bonding. She's seen me through so many crises, and she's always the one that makes me remember that no matter what happens, I keep existing, and wonderfully so.

I am feeling excellent right now. It's almost a sort of mania that comes late at night to loud empowering music after a day when you thought several times you couldn't bear to live through to the next minute. When you feel like the lowest and most pathetic form of life all day, and feel that nothing in life is worthing getting out of bed for (except maybe Party of 5, the new 90210, which in on in re-runs on Vision - House MD I can watch in bed on my laptop). So when you feel even slightly better, because you finally remembered your ability to care for yourself, and then went to a great dinner party and later got a very long and expert foot rub from a very old and beloved friend, then you feel incredible. And by you, I mean me. I feel like the most amazing woman on earth tonight.

Various snapshots of the last couple of days: standing in the 306s of the library, ie, the break up advice section, I run into a friend. "What's up?" he asks. "Oh, just hanging out in the break up section" I say, sounding enthusiastic yet pathetic. "Oh," he says, "Yeah, I heard." I can see that a change of topic would make things less awkward. Later a new friend gives me her phone number on a band-aid which I hold against my heart. I cried openly into my tea at Cafe 1842 while various regulars avoided my haunted gaze as I searched their passing souls for some sense of meaning to life. The Huether Bathroom witnesses yet again my crying in the stall (how many times have I felt like shit in that bathroom? It's like a therapists office or something). A pilgrimmage to find a copy of House MD Season 1 Disc 1 and 2 takes me all over Waterloo as I walk like a zombie and try not to remember him (my ex, not House. Thinking of Greg House as my new boyfriend is sickeningly comforting) at every turn. Finding the DVDs at Rogers felt like achieving enlightenment, it brought such joy. Watching the View because I literally couldn't get myself off the couch I was so sad, but then somehow getting so caught up in the Rosie-Donald-Barbara controversy that I actually bitched about it to my roommate. Realizing the cat isn't going to come and comfort me in my bed, I put down a blanket next to her blanket in the hall and lay down with my head against her warm side, cry and cry. Food wasted: one whole veggie burger meal from Marbles taken out when we fought for the last time before breaking up and thrown out because eating meant saying yes to life and that seemed like a hard to decision to make this weekend. Two expensive smoothies I forgot to put in the fridge, one not even opened or taken out of my bag. Applesauce, a tofu burger left in the George Foreman. Bread that dries out, cheese that goes bad, because just getting it out of the fridge and trying to eat it was the extent of my ability.

I am proud of my suffering this week. I have been assigned a job, I feel, which is very complicated and involves many tasks, some of which are learning to love myself, believe in the future, let go, understand my ended relationship, and, it seems, mostly challengely, tolerate pain.

On Saturday night I told myself if I could get through the night without calling him, even when my whole body was shaking with fear and my heart was breaking, then I would be free. Not that all the shit would be over - in fact it would just be beginning - but that I would know that I could do it, could face the pain and suffering without taking refuge in a man. I don't know that I ever believed I really could before now, at least not in the last few years. I am not sure what is coming in the next while, but I would feel so proud of myself if I was able to be strong and get through the pain. That would be an accomplishment as powerful as having loved someone.

When I wrote my last entry, yesterday morning, I couldn't have imagined how bad today would be. I mean, the last 24 hours have plunged me into a totally unexpected hellish vortex of suffering. To make a long story short, D. broke up with me. It had been over 2 years. I am still in shock. I have always been somewhat paranoid of a breakup, because I'm a generally anxious person, but I really did not expect it. It's beginning to sink in, but today and last night have been really hard. I can see, looking back, that this is not a surprise. Things had been rocky for over a year. But it seemed that underlying that was a solid core of love and interest. Guess that was mostly on my side. What a heartbreak and a blow.

People tell me that I will be happy again, but it's difficult to imagine. I can't imagine ever loving anyone as much as I love him, and I can't imagine how life without him could be anything better than survival.

I guess we'll see.

I am looking for a job. The best part, in a way, about a new job, is new clothes. I actually don't like to shop very much at all. I like to look good, but mostly I like to do that by inheriting interesting clothes from friends and relatives. For example, when I went to Ottawa over Christmas, I was aiming to buy new boots and a new jacket. I saw nothing I really liked (although there were some very nice North Face jackets, but jees, 400$!!) but then my Mom said I could have the jacket my sister bought in Japan (hot) and her old docs (not as hot, but pretty sweet). This is the kind of shopping that is ideal in my opinion.

That being said, I am looking foward to the new clothes of the business world. I am looking for a very low responsibility clerk-style job where I can just show up for 7.5 hours and get paid for doing shit. But I plan to look very good doing it. I might even wear high heels. I am going to look like an adult!

I'm not sure why this is so intriguing to me. I guess it's because I have a sort of needy, trying to fit in sort of personality where I want to look stylish alot, but I can't figure out with subculture I want to belong to publicly(they are all sort of interesting in their fashion). I mean, my actual subculture is "people who dress like total shit and hang out in the woods alot, ie, crazy artist type", but I also like the way other subcultures dress plus I want to fit into society so I can never decide what to actually wear when I'm not in the woods or at home. Add in my lack of interest in shopping and I just always feel slightly stressed about my clothing (which is such an intellectual waste of time). Thus: becoming a "professional" will guarantee me a uniform of "nice work clothes" which I can wear around after work. I mean, it's not my favourite look, but having only those types of clothes will cut down on the annoying amount of time spent planning what to wear and ever thinking about it, so I can spend that time ... hm. Maybe working. Maybe the solution to these sorts of trains of thought is just to have a job.

Here is something funny:

The other day on our local news program, here in Waterloo, a segment was run on vandalism at a local organization's buildings. The vandals had sprayed painted something anti-Semetic on the ground, to the consternation of both police and property owners. But then, according to the reporter, another "mysterious" piece of graffiti was written on a portable; the reporter suggested it was not intelligable and must be some kind of nonsense. It was

π = 3.141592653589793238462643383279.

! Mysterious !

My sister and I have been bonding lately through expensive phone calls at 18 hours time difference. Do you know that there is a bar in Auckland where women swim naked, as mermaids, in great fish tanks, coming up for air every few moments, while men (and, apparently, my sister) look on? We haven't seen each other for more than 2 weeks total in several years, so when we aren't complaining that our lives seemed to have slowed to a crawl, we're reliving our shared childhood. Today we agreed that playing with Barbies was the only time we ever really got along. That's not true, but it was the purest of encounters. We fondly remembered a classic story we made up and had the Barbies act out which we called "Larry and the Milkbag Accident", which is both as simple as it sounds, and, as most stories tend to be, much more involved.

"All the Barbies live together in a dorm, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the dorm on A Different World. One night, Larry, (a male identified female Barbie with curly orange hair whose name and character were a tribute to the benignly sleazy, chest hairy sex-hound neighbor from Three's Company) had a craving for milk. He left the dorm after curfew and tried to sneak back in. As he was coming back, he dropped the milkbag on the floor with a tremendous noise, and woke everyone up."

My sister asked me if I still had the Jem tape (the Jem doll was the R.A. to the dorm, and her name was Stevie) and I speculated it might be at my dad's house with all the nerdy tapes our family collected in the 80s(one of them being a tape bearing the painfully earnest name "Clowns and Lovers", featuring a drawing of a man wearing half a clownsuit and half a tuxedo, made by a friend of my dad's before Karaoke became a public affair, and middle aged men could go to studio and sing their hearts out to a drum and synth machine - I can still see my dad dancing to this tape in his housecoat the night before his second marriage, after we found it in the old tape box). I went online to download the two Jem classics: "The Mood I'm In" and "Love is here". When I typed the second one in I got an amusing variety of pornographic movies with humorously Jem-inappropriate titles, such as "Teen enjoys getting her cherry popped" and "Elegant orgy allows for anal penetration" but by the far the best one was "Attractive couple enjoys slow rhythmic fucking to light jazz (love)".

Why is life so fucking good?