Whoever Dances is One with the Universe

Spiritual renewal comes in the fact that my mhari is the best mhari in the whole world (that's right, it's better than yours, damn right, it's better than yours) and sent me the best box in the whole world.

Also I sold ten of my pieces at the art gallery, which = money, and I was accepted into the India winter break Conflict Resolution study abroad programme, which is a three-week programme monitored by two professors I really like, which makes me feel a lot safer about it.

And I kind of hate my Comm professor but I realised I'm not the only one who feels that way, and I realised that my Sosh professor is really exemplified by this metaquote, which makes me feel a lot better; I really like understanding people's motivations, both from an analytic point of view and because it helps me brain that the issue is not me personally (since I am extremely prone to interalise and personalise everything). My Sosh professor is really really quick to call things racism, but she is also a black woman living in a predominantly white central Pennsylvania neighbourhood, so there's probably been a whole lot of accidental tramping on a broken foot. That said, it was frustrating that she repeatedly accused Southerners of hating Jews and being anti-Semitic (imo, it's more that Jewish folks tend to live in big Northern cities, which are exactly the kind of environment Southern folks tend to distrust, although I grant you that there is probably a religious undercurrent as well for a number of folks), as well as the fact that she pretty much said that her white PhD'd neighbour was scared of her for being a black woman despite the fact that the only interaction she described was them saying hi to each other in the morning on their respective walks, and that this fear was only alleviated when she told the woman that she was also a PhD when they met in the grocery store and woman was all "HI! :D We're neighbours and I've totally never said hi, I'm Dr. So-and-so". From her description there was absolutely no evidence of racism (or any reason why the woman would think she was the maid for some theoretical people who lived in her house, or be scared of her because sometimes she drank a bottle of beer on her front porch), but obviously there may have been stuff she left out because it seemed obvious to her. ANYWAY. My point is, there were a lot of assumptions made in to-day's class, but I feel like I kind of get the context for those assumptions, at least to a degree (Sosh professor is from the Bronx until a few years ago, which probably doesn't help with not being suspicious of white people--o hey, I made an assumption of my own), so that helped me be less frustrated.

And I talk a lot about sociological things, ohai. Just wait until my ramble on the subject of Why Is My Cross Okay But That Dude's Shirt With A Bible Verse Makes You Mad?, coming shortly to a self-indulgent livejournal post near you.

Anyway, I'm feeling pretty good for now, although I really need to edit Maria's logic paper.

I really miss my school friends right now. It has to do at least partly with this unholy terror I have that if I'm away from people for too long they'll just forget about me, or they won't want me any more--it's not really logical, it's just one of my biggest anxieties, and it's completely paralysing. Maria's friends are all visiting her over the summer--Lydia's coming next month, as is Elena, and Emily may come after that, and she had Will last week, and later on in the summer she'll visit Will and Elena and Monica.

I got to go see mhari in May, which was wonderful, but otherwise I'm going to be spending summer alone. Like always. Which, when I was still in high school and didn't really have any friends in the state, wasn't a really big deal, because it was par for the course, I never had any friends that I saw on a daily basis for a whole eight years. But now that I've spent two years of my friends being available almost all the time, I feel really, really emotionally cut off.

It's also wrapped up in the fact that I really like to be able to touch people, or else I feel distanced from them; I like to hold hands, or cuddle, or just be physically close to people, it makes me feel safer. So I don't have anybody for that (Maria is not a touchy-feely person at all), and also I'm just so scared that I'll get back to school and all my friends there will be all 'whatever, who are you, why did we even like you?'

and for some reason I'm having a depressive episode, and I haven't had one of those in about three weeks, so I'm disappointed. And there are some things going wrong with my plans for the summer; I wasn't able to get hired by any of the places I applied, so my summer job is doing odd jobs for a man at church once a week, I've had writer's block since before I came home and my poetry won't come out, so my MS is still at forty-eight pages and I'll never hit the fifty I want before I try to start sending it to publishers, and I'm only going to get rejection letters anyway, and I never have time to go to Selinsgrove to get the things I need to finish my Big Damn Art Project. And then the priest of our church [Daphne] told Mama she would give me an internship so at least I could get something official out of the summer, but she kind of reneged on that. She's giving me the connexions to meet some people, but nothing really official, and she refuses to believe I'm serious about wanting to go into the priesthood; she keeps referring to it as "[Soujin]'s discernment process" where I decide "whether she really does want to go into religion or not". I know that I want to do this. I really hate talking about it in these terms, because it feels all faux-spiritual and pretentious, but I really do feel called to do this. It feels like I'm finally making the right decision. And even if it's true that kids my age usually change their minds about their career plans and whatnot, it's still at least polite to pretend to believe me when I say this is what I want to do. It really upsets me.

And I feel like Mama's disappointed in me for not being proactive enough, but any time I have to interact with Daphne I just end up feeling so disappointed and depressed that I don't really want her help. I wish so much that I had a spiritual counsellor who didn't make me upset. I'm meeting with her husband Ed to-morrow, who was a spiritual counsellor (and is a retired priest) at Penn State for years and years, and hoping that since he's an actual human being and not an alien ambassador from planet Daphne we will possibly be able to communicate in a way that does not make me miserable, cross my fingers. I just. I want to learn how to organise a fundraiser and run a vacation bible school and pick out the week's hymns and connect the readings together with the season and current events into a big thick woven sermon. I want to learn from someone who loves God and loves the earthly church, too, someone who visits sick people and helps make prayer shawls and runs the book club and teaches Sunday school because that person wants to, but whenever I talk to Daphne she talks like it's all a huge burden that God's placed upon her and she's only doing it because she knows it's the right thing to do. I don't want to learn from someone who feels that way. I want to learn from someone who loves it.

And I want the sink to start working again and the smell of turpentine to go away and for my heart to stop hurting, and I wouldn't mind if only one of those things happened. It just feels like too much of a buildup.

Also, I have to drive to Duncannon to-morrow morning to see the doctor for my physical for my visa for Greece, and that just reminds me how scared I am to go to Greece and how maybe it's not such a good idea and I won't know anyone and my depression will come back and I won't have anyone to reach out to, and my friends will definitely forget me and I won't be able to connect to people because I'm a stranger and the wrong nationality and I'll fail all my classes or I won't be able to get the classes I need to graduate and it's going to be expensive and maybe I should just stay home-- and then I start to have a panic attack. I want to go, but I'm scared.

And really, really lonely. >_<

tl;dr Soujin is a whiny emo kid with hell of anxiety disorder, hi.

I am planning my untimely death from pre-school nerviness. The professors, they keep sending me e-mails! I have to write down all this stuff and I haven't got a notebook here with me! Ngggah. Also my God no one sells Diet Dr. Pepper it is completely immoral and barbaric.

But the sunsets here are really nice. The lake tends to turn white from the light shining off it, and it stretches pretty far, white and still and shining.

Maria finally stopped getting angry at me; we've been watching loads of X-Men: Evolution, and it's cheered her up unbelievably. It's so nice to have her reasonably happy again. And to-morrow we're going home; I'll pack up the last of my things and by Sunday afternoon I should be settled in at school again, which I'll be glad to be. I think most of anything I hate transitioning. I don't mind changes, and I have a hard time feeling displaced; I sort of make where-ever I am my home; but I really, really hate travelling to get there, or the jittery feeling you get when something's about to change but hasn't gotten around to it yet. Ugh ugh.

I think the Depakote might be working, though. The screaming in my head has gone away, and I don't really feel as angry any more. I still get irritated and stressed out, but I'm not just absolutely furious at everyone. So! Little forward steps.

Deux items:

1. Apparently while I was out my mama called and left a message with my roommate, to whit: "Tell her to make sure she eats something before her exam!" Oh Mama. Ilu so much. And I will have a bowl of soup, if Jitters is stocking anything that is not full of evil priony beefy goodness (contradiction in terms lol whut where).

2. There is a name for my particular suicidal tendencies! Specifically, death instinct, which is a theory developed by Freud that essentially says that people have a natural instinct to want to get away from the stress and craziness of life, they want to stop the demands that are made upon them (whether consciously or unconsciously, for both the demander and demandee -- good God, what linguistic constructs I am making up), they just want everything to go away and let them rest. Which is usually how I feel when I am experiencing suicidal ideation; that is, the strongest emotional I usually experience is being tired. I feel tired and like there's too much being asked that I just can't live up to or fulfill, and I want to die so that I can just be alone and be quiet.

So that was pretty cool, to learn that it's a legitimate psychological theory. Funny thing it was referenced by my Short Story professor in regards to Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, which is a work of PURE CRACK and apparently deeply symbolic and if I have to write an essay comparing it to Joseph Conrad's Secret Sharer and Poe's Cask of Amontillado and Fall of the House of Usher I will stab my eyes out with a red pen, but the point is I tend to take what that particular professor says with a saltshaker, so I am mildly amused that I got something really worthwhile from one of his lectures. Which is not to say that his lectures are bad, per se, just that I frequently either don't agree with him or don't agree with his method of presenting things. Either way, he is infinitely more competent than my Death and Dying professor, inasmuch as he actually knows what he is doing and actually teaches us something, which is more than can be said for her. Also her class makes me want to strangle myself with my laptop cord. It runs my soul through a paper shredder. Once my soul is properly transformed into thin strips of useless, the class takes it, dumps it into a vat of acetic acid, stirs it around for a while, treats it with carboxylic acid, contaminates it with EDCs, then mixes this solution with methane and lights a match to it. Then it spits on my grave. If both I and the professor are still alive by the end of the semester, it will be because I have showed admirable restraint and have confined my fury and frustration to capslocked rants in the margins of my note-taking, and not because she has done anything to deserve survival in regards to her class, which she DOES NOT TEACH.

...That was a pretty good rant y/n? I've never done that before. :D Mmm catharsis.