Changing over the server has been taking up nearly all of my free time. I think I have finally gotten it right. I’m saving nearly $135 dollars a month. The old server company offered me the same server at a discount but even now I’d be saving nearly $60. It’s only well and good to move up if it’s strictly necessary and it doesn’t seem it will be. mod_evasive and mod_security have been the banes of my life the past few days but it seems to be moving smoothly now… have I spoken too soon?

We workshopped the semi-incestuous story last week and it got a pretty good reception. I also got some help from another individual online - desperately need to reply to that! I think that will be the story I want to revise first and foremost. I think it needs more work than the other story even though the ending is leaps and bounds better.

I desperately want to buy books. I’m nearly done with the stack of books I bought last spring and I know I could get good deals on them on the Internet. Shipping killed me last time and doubled the price tag. However, I will probably hold off until after Christmas. I want to read more Jeanette Winterson, I want to read Lolita, I want to read Cloudstreet, I want to read more poetry. I’ve moved away from poetry and that makes me sad.

It’s funny. I spent most of last summer half in love with a friend of mine and a few days ago he approaches me with a question. One that shook me up. I don’t regret completely cutting off those feelings for him or making myself see him as only a friend. I just didn’t know how to respond because I used to be infatuated with him and couldn’t just brush him off as I’ve done with other men. I didn’t say, ‘No, been there, done that,’ but I couldn’t say yes, as tempting as it was. I don’t trust myself with a no strings attached relationship, especially with somebody I had deeper feelings for.

I’ve been thinking on expanding what I call the semi-incestuous story. I turned it in for workshopping but I wonder if it needs more of an ending, a high point to what really isn’t action filled. It was orginally a piece of fanfiction until I realized even though some details were right the characters were nothing like their counterparts in the original work. I did rewrite the last scene almost completely, added more clarification and small scenes, and did some edits. It feels incomplete, though. I just don’t know what to do with it or if I should just dump it in an unused folder on my computer and forget about it after it’s workshopped. The details and interactions feel right, the plot - or lack of it - don’t.

Forgetting about old writing is almost a hobby of mine. I put the writing away, come across it months or years later, and marvel at how terrible it is. I rarely find it within me to take a fresh approach to it. I think that’s a bad sign.

There’s not much to write about. I have an addiction to pinkberry. I know it’s not real frozen yogurt but can’t bring myself to care.

I find it a bit amusing to what lengths people will go to to fix poor grades. We got our first paper back from the professor and a 4.0 GPA student threw a snit fit. It was tense in that classroom! She apparently wanted to kill him, she was going to go to her counselor and the head of the English department. I’ll admit I put more effort into the paper than usual and managed to scrape by with a B but nobody got below a C. It’s not as if half the class failed. Still, if you’re going to follow through with a PhD in English you need good grades. I can understand the shock of getting a poor grade but don’t quite understand going so far as talking to the head of the English department when it was not entirely impossible to get an A. It was only difficult.

Entitlement issues? I have a 4.0 so it’s impossible for me to be anything but perfect issues? I’ll be happy to get my BA and move on, fuck the 4.0.

Maybe the lack of ambition is at the heart of my problems. I still don’t have a clear idea of what’s to come after I get my BA. I don’t want to go further in Creative Writing - MFA - because that leads to teaching and I have absolutely no interest in teaching.

Twenty-five today. I made it past the unexpected twenty-one and swiftly made it to twenty-five. I feel old. Intellectually I know it’s not that old but when my sister’s friends view me as someone who should be sprouting white hair and have been married five times… yeah, it feels old.

I’m alive. That still surprises me. It would have been expected for me to die but I’m not. I think I’ll find myself repeating this at every milestone. I’m a quarter of a century, I’m going to graduate university (haha, so late it’s embarassing). I might just have a future.

I’m not sure where the road is leading me.

Moving on. School is proving challenging. About four hundred pages (it seems) of reading for the whole of next week. That’s just one class. I still don’t know what to expect.

I’ve been writing steadily. Prose instead of poetry. Not all with the same idea, the same characters, the same tone. I wrote a story about her and I keep sneaking around when I print it so that it will not be discovered. I know she would be very angry if she knew I wrote a story about her. It’s taken a story I know about her and created my own ideas, my own take, my own ending. It’s not the story, it’s a different carcass on the bones of something that has been secret and shameful. I wish I could do more with it, make it more successful.

Gearing up for school. I want to buy my books early. I basically know what classes (two) I’m taking but I wish I had the 3:30 class because it would mean there was only 45 minutes rather than nearly two hours between classes.

I finally finished Atonement by Ian McEwan. I enjoyed the read far more than I expected to, this was sort of a snap judgment based on the reception of the movie by people I respect. Good to know that it’s almost always true that the book is better than the movie. I really enjoyed how Briony, though older and wiser, never really lets go of her need to atone. She may be dead by the time it happens but she won’t give up on it even though it would not have made a bit of difference in anybody’s life. The images, especially in the first part of the novel, are beautiful. A languorous life upset.

I think I need to get back into working on phpFan, revamping the scripts for my artwork and writing sub-sites has taught me more, it’s given me a different idea for templating, at the very least. That’s always been my stumbling block, unfortunately. I still need to work on the Gallery of Pain (yeah, the name, wince) members database/submission system.

I haven’t been writing much, the last of any good was a short story/fanfiction. Here is a poem I wrote that sort of calls attention to my annoyance with making glamorous and sophisticated speakers in poetry.

sophisticate

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I just rediscovered a song I’ve loved since childhood. O Quizás Simplemente Le Regale Una Rosa by Leonardo Favio is gorgeous. Most people wouldn’t like it but it reminds me of good times, of the kitchen in my childhood home, being warm.

Summer has gone pretty well so far. It’s almost over. I went on a two and a half day trip to Las Vegas. Then we headed north to Northern California. Carmel was one of the stops on the way and was a beautiful little town, the walk uphill to the stores is a bit steep but it’s definitely worth it. Still, horrid food in Monterey, it was hard to tell which was fish or chicken… it tasted that much the same.

San Francisco was very busy but the crepe place was excellent and I liked walking up and down the pier. The ride in the horse drawn carriage was a first. I can’t recall another experience like it, just a moment to unwind during a busy vacation where it was go go go. The Napa Valley was also beautiful and there was much wine! I gave my wine tasting pass to my brother (yes, he’s legally able to drink).

I finally got the Short Stories workshop. I’m rather nervous because I haven’t written a real short story in a long time. Two classes and my BA is mine. Part of me wonders if I’ll fail at the last moment. It hasn’t happened yet but it could and there’s this childish feeling that I’ll jinx myself by saying I’ll graduate in December and that’s that.

I’m still wondering how I got here, one semester away from graduation. It doesn’t seem I put that much effort into it… despite all the anxious finals and the mental health issues that got worst during times of great academic stress. Do I deserve this?

The tentative answer is: yes.

I’m obsessed with this song. Completely obsessed.

Been debating buying a new domain for going on six months. Just can’t bring myself to do it just yet. Have an eye on a few names. It’s wasteful but oh-so-tempting.

I hardly ever write in here. My life has been clopping along at a more even keel than in the past. Worked a bit more on the pieces of my past I write down. Super-secret shoes and stupidity. It’s interesting, remembering. It doesn’t feel like it happened to me.

A lot of stress because we were moving and now we’re not. Spent a few days in hell while dozens of groups of people came to lookat our house. I kept imagining people were going through my things. Though why would they. Lots of anger and some breakdowns into tears because of stress. Never mind last week when I cracked because of lack of sleep and an argument with my father. The arguments are coming more frequently now that he’s been around more often which leads me to believe that it’s absence making the heart grow fonder rather than real growth that kept us friendly since the divorce. Love him, though, and respect him. I just can’t see eye to eye with him on a lot of things. Not really political or social beliefs, more an unwillingness to compromise on his part and partially on my part.

Been reading a lot, working through all my books. A lot of Bret Easton Ellis. Lunar Park was beautiful, I found I preferred it to the others.

Last summer before I get my BA. I haven’t gotten the short story class yet but if one more person drops the class the spot is mine. Think good thoughts for me, I need this. Though considering how often I don’t write I don’t think there’s too many people hanging on my every word. (;

Next to last semester of school is finally over. I have a long summer stretching ahead of me. It’s somehow hard to believe that next semester is the last (if all goes well). I’ve been in school forever it seems. Took about two years of medical leave and am finally graduating years behind everybody else.

It sort of amazes me, sometimes, that I’m still alive and am now going to be graduating. My parents never expected me to live past my twenty-first birthday. I never expected to live past my twenty-first birthday. The summer before university began I was seventeen, suicidal, and took my first major overdose less than two weeks after I graduated high school. I spent six or seven weeks in two psychiatric hospitals and came out unwilling to try for a better life. I was convinced self-destruction was my calling, it was the only thing I was good at.

Up until then I had only written a few horrible Dawson’s Creek fanfictions. I went to a poetry reading my first semester of university and began writing poetry ocasionally. My first semester of university was the only one where I attempted to be a part of the university community.

Since then, I changed my major to Creative Writing. I considered and decided against going into the medical field. I decided against becoming a psychologist. I’d love to become a writer but poets don’t make money.

I love writing scripts. It’s what I’d like to do with some formal training.

I haven’t cut or hurt myself myself since the beginning of April 2007. I haven’t purged since early Winter 2008. My last overdose was Fall 2006. I haven’t been hospitalized since April 2007. I haven’t been in therapy since 2007.

I’m alive.

I’ve been feeling a disconnect with school lately. No desire to go. No desire to write essays or read short stories that bother me. To Room Nineteen by Doris Lessing made me want the main character to get it over with faster and I don’t like that sort of ruthless attitude. Fake character but oh-so-annoying.

“Punishment” by Seamus Heaney is gorgeous.

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A title going around on my message board. It’s true, medication seems to often sap the creative drive of a writer and, likely, other artists. Suddenly it’s not so easy to put together words, form images that will carry a piece, find new ways of phrasing things. Out trot the tired cliches from past writing. If I usually wrote on paper there would be wads of paper all over my desk. This is all thanks to medication that rewires our brains into feeling human. Perhaps a lesser human than previously, one that stumbles when it comes to finding their muse. I don’t particularly think that mental illness usually makes one brilliant or creative but losing that part that makes you able to write several different works a month makes it almost worth it to throw those pills away and regain whatever it was that made words come so easily.

I have managed to begin a memoir of sorts. I’m not sure if I will ever complete it though I’ve been urged to by family. It just seems like masturbation in some ways but in others it’s interesting looking back and seeing the journey between fucked up and ‘fine’. ‘Fine’ is being able to look at yourself and find that you care if tomorrow happens.

Not much to report in my life. School and yet more school. I whittled down to two classes because I was told I had no need for the other. It seems the list may shrink down to one if I write a letter to get my Advanced Placement grade. Then, after this semester, two classes until graduation. I don’t know whether to be excited or dreading that final detachment from the umbilical cord. I opt for an uneasy medium, planning what may or may not happen.