I had a "date" last night. We went and got ice cream and then chatted for several hours about a bunch of random stuff. I haven't had such an enjoyable evening for a long time. I think we might be hanging out again tonight or tomorrow. She's so cute!
I'm so glad I got onto OkCupid.com. Soooo much better than the weirdness of craigslist or the lack of anonymity of facebook.
The following are two dreams I had last night that I felt I should write down so I would not forget them.
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I was a soldier, long and lean. I probably could have been a body double for a super model, but wrapped up in all that camouflage I looked rather plain. It never felt like we were making any progress. The war dragged on and all I could think about was my daughter back home. We were both second class citizens normally, names shouted at us as we walked down the street to the "GENETICS ONLY" section of town, but in a time of war, our height and strength made us desirable members of society.
I shook my mane in the breeze as I stood with my rifle in the ready position. The weather was so beautiful, if only the circumstances were less dangerous I would have been completely at ease in this place. Rolling plains, a scattering of trees. Maybe it was the genetically inserted lion genes pulsing in my cells, but I wanted to curl up for a nap in the shade and forget my troubles. In a moment I would leave on patrol into dangerous territory, but I couldn't focus on that. I had to focus on staying alive. I had to focus on seeing my daughter again.
Several other soldiers and an officer joined my side and my relief took up my rifle. We started on our patrol, the same patrol we did every afternoon around this time. But something was different. We weren't walking the direction we normally took. And why was there an officer with us this time? I sighed and tried to focus on staying hidden, but the hairs on the back of my neck kept reminding me that something was unsettling. We emerged from a section of forest and into a large open area. I had never been there before. I didn't see any camps or even remnants left behind by enemy soldiers. I didn't smell them on the breeze. Where were we?
Suddenly a large section of the ground opened up and several enemy commandos emerged from the darkness of the opening. I shouted in alarm and drew my pistol, but a couple of the soldiers pushed me forward. I stumbled a few steps before turning to retaliate, but the ground opened below me and I fell for several seconds before landing in some kind of jelly-like substance in complete darkness. I cried out, made as much noise as I could, thrashed about, tried to run, but heard nothing in response. Where was I? What was this substance? Was I going to die?
I ran and ran and trudged through the jelly until I felt a wall of some sort. It wasn't stone or dirt or mud, but cold metal. Was I in some kind of holding cell? What was this place? I began to cry, realizing that this could be the end. I would never see my daughter again. In fact, with the military treating me like this she was probably already dead. I cried bitterly and for what seemed like several hours. Then the lights came on.
I was in a room, approximately 20 feet by 20 feet, filled waist deep with a clear viscous substance. The walls were metal with fluorescent lights doting them every few feet all the way to the top which was visible as another metal sheet. There were no windows and no apparent doors, but as I observed this one of the walls opened about 15 feet above the metal floor and a man popped his head into the room. He said nothing, observed me for several seconds as I tried desperately to jump and climb my way to the opening, and then disappeared again. The door closed and a new door opened even farther up the wall. A short section of piping extended through it and lots of what looked like ball bearings fell into the jelly a few feet from me.
I furrowed my brow and moved away from them, but the shiny little spheres followed my movements, slowly creeping toward me in the jelly. I began to run frantically around the room, avoiding them as the swirling jelly brought them closer and closer to me. Despite my efforts, a single sphere jumped from the jelly and contacted my skin. I've never felt such agony! A piercing pain ran through what felt like all my nerves at the same instant. I winced and fell to my knees. To my dismay I was paralyzed. The rest of the spheres surrounded my body and attached themselves to my skin one by one, each time sending the horrible shock of piercing pain through my entire body. I couldn't move, I couldn't scream, I could barely open my eyes.
I must have passed out because I awoke to a different room, this time a cell with concrete walls and a large transparent window on one side. I was laying on a small concrete "bunk" protruding from one of the walls. I sat up and rubbed my head, to my horror finding that the spheres still coated my body! I scratched at them frantically, trying to pull them off my skin and hands and face, but I was covered. They had all attached not only to my skin, but to one another by a series of tiny blue glowing threads. I could see myself in the shiny surface of the window.
As I stared through the window I noticed that across from my cell was another identical cell with another genetic slumped against the wall just below the bunk. It was hard to make out the details of its appearance because of the blue glow surrounding my eyes, but it seemed younger and smaller than me. I squinted my eyes and pushed my face up against the glass surface of the window. It was another lion genetic, a young female, dressed in a ridiculous "wild woman" outfit. Her face was badly beaten and blood hung in the fur under her nose. She turned her face in her sleep and I gave a whimper of surprise and horror. That badly beaten face was the face of my daughter. She was in the cell across from me!
I jumped up from the ground and beat frantically on the glass. I growled and yelled and jumped about, hoping that my movement and noise would get her attention. I found that the small spheres all over my body made my movements faster and sharper. I felt as though I could keep furiously pounding on the glass for hours and not become tired. I felt stronger, too. I started looking for weak points in the glass, hoping that perhaps I could break through, although I was unsure of what I would do with freedom in this strange place.
After a few minutes of trying a small metal wire slowly extended from the wall of my cell. I noticed it and immediately backed away, flatting my body against the opposite wall. The wire continued to extend, probably provoked by my excessive activity, and seemed to be headed for my neck. I clawed at the wall, wishing that I could be back home in the slums cuddling with my daughter for warmth in the cold winter night. I regretted enlisting in the army. I regretted hugging her goodbye at the shelter for homeless genetics. I regretted everything. The wire contacted my skin and to my surprise I felt nothing. The wire was withdrawn a bit and then poked against my skin again. Nothing. I stood triumphantly as if to mock my captors. Again the wire poked me, this time causing my skin to tingle. I felt stronger and more alert. The glow around my eyes increased. The spheres all over my body began to vibrate. The wire was quickly withdrawn and alarms began to sound.
"Didn't knock me out, did it?!" I growled at the wall. I felt empowered, as if I could walk through the glass without resistance. I slammed my body against the window of my cell as human guards in the attire of enemy soldiers began to accumulate in the hallway. One began fiddling with the window into my daughter's cell. I threw myself against the glass again, this time causing a cracking sound to alert the soldiers nearest my cell. Again! Again! And with one last crushing blow the window of my cell blew to pieces around me. A soldier had opened my daughter's cell and was carrying her away while the rest of the soldiers blocked my path, shouting to one another. I didn't hear them. I tossed them aside like rag dolls. The soldier with my daughter looked over his shoulder in panic. In a few strides I was right beside him. He began to whimper and stopped running, turned to me slowly and pushed my daughter toward me. I lifted her from his arms and threw her over my shoulder, pushing him against a wall roughly and growling, "Which way is out?!"
The smell of urine immediately filled the air. He pointed down a hallway, his finger shaking as he softly coughed out, "That way to the exit...b-b-b-but your daughter won't wake up if you leave now."
"WHAT?!!"
I snatched the front of his uniform in my paw and lifted him off the ground. "Then what WILL wake her up?!" I could tell that I was choking him and as he gasped for air he pointed in the opposite direction. I threw him to the ground and walked over the unconscious bodies of the soldiers around my cell. The spheres all over my body continued to vibrate and my vision was clouded by rage and worry. I plowed down the hallway. Soldiers shot at me from out of doorways and around corners, but the bullets stopped harmlessly a few inches from my body and hung in the air, orbiting around me as if captured in some kind of field. I batted them to the ground and continued onwards until soldiers stopped coming and I reached a large yellow metal door equipped with some kind of visual identification security system.
A computer voice instructed me to "wait in my location for security teams to ascertain the problem" so I crushed the control panel and set my daughter down next to the door. I could feel the spheres vibrating more violently. I moved my hand in front of the door and could feel a sort of resonance. I touched the door and it began vibrating along with my arm. I pushed my shoulder against it and it gave like butter to a knife. Throwing it aside, I picked my daughter back up and headed into what looked like a giant cavern system.
Rusty brown rock formations jutted around a winding man-made path that continued for longer than I could see. I started to walk when a booming voice filled the air.
"Your daughter is mine!"
I looked around with anger rising in my throat and gripped my daughter tight to my chest. "Where are you?! Show yourself! Whatever you were planning didn't work on me!" I saw nothing but the rocky walls staring back at me. I started running down the path, screaming, roaring with rage. I came to an intersection. To the right, more cavern. To the left, a small metal observation room with several windows. From a distance I couldn't see any movement inside. I started toward it with a purpose. When I reached the door I placed my hand against it and threw it aside like a crumpled piece of paper. Inside were several computer screens, each displaying a different murky lake within the cavern. Frightened that I would ruin the equipment were I to touch it, I set my daughter gently onto the ground near the monitors and used her tiny paw to push a few buttons.
Accidentally I accessed some sort of log about "progress within the cavern facility". The entries began by explaining the discovery of lakes filled with otherworldly materials that could be utilized for a variety of applications. Some lakes seemed to improve hearing, others strength and speed, and still others could stop aging. I watched the logs in horror, realizing that my daughter and I, as well as other genetics, had been chosen to be "guinea pigs" to elucidate the properties of the discovered substances within the cavern. We were bargaining chips in the war, given to the enemy in exchange for a cease fire. I'm sure the army gladly gave away its stock of outcast genetics to save the rest of humanity. The logs talked about different genetics taking to different substances more easily, as well as what substances killed what kinds of genetics. Near the end of the logs I stumbled upon one referencing two related lion genetics, one half lion and the other produced from the mating of that half lion with a human male. It became apparent that the younger lion genetic, my daughter, had been exposed to the same treatment I had been, a mixture of the substances from the lakes in a form that could attach to the body of a host and improve them in every way, with the added benefit of mind control. "Unfortunately" the spheres that had been created could not "commune" with my daughter's genetics because her lion genes were too diluted. Something about lion physiology made lion genetics especially receptive to this treatment.
"Mind control?" I thought to myself. I continued to listen to the logs, discovering that my daughter had been put into a paralyzed state similar to the one that I had experienced when the spheres had first attached themselves to me and that she was not to be awakened unless the "mother" was resistant to the mind control. Two entries referenced my own treatment being a "huge success" followed by concerns about the mind control abilities of the spheres not functioning properly. A final entry, frantically entered, spoke of the mind control signal incorrectly interacting with the spheres, exciting them rather than calming and controlling "the subject" and ended with "ALERT 374: SUBJECT 90 UNRESPONSIVE TO CONTROL. DETAIN IMMEDIATELY. DETAIN IMMEDIATELY."
I shut down the computer system and lifted my daughter's face in front of mine. I softly wiped the blood from under her nose and laid her against my shoulder, rocking back and forth and singing an old lullaby that my caretaker at an orphanage in my childhood used to sing to me. I wondered if she had been raped and if that was the purpose of her scanty outfit. For the first time I took notice of my own attire. I, too, was wearing the same cave woman-like outfit. I wondered if we were both intended to be playthings for the soldiers in addition to being test subjects for these dangerous experiments. I hugged my daughter tightly and hefted her back onto my shoulder, whispering, "I'll save us. I'll free us."
I had to wake her up. I ransacked the small observatory but found nothing that sounded like the anti-paralysis medication that the logs referenced when waking me up. I scanned the monitors for any location that looked like it could yield medical supplies. One room contained a lot of lab benches and a huge lake of what looked to be molten metal. But where was it? How would I get there? A notation indicated that the room was called "area 12" and a map hung against the wall of the room. I quickly found the location on the map and began running as fast as I could in its direction. Upon reaching the entrance to the room, the booming voice again called out to me.
"I've done it! You'll never make it out of here with your daughter and your life!"
I roared so loud that the cavern shook around me. I ripped the door away from "area 12" and ran inside to find a metal statue of a human male near one of the lab benches. This figure had not been visible on the monitors, so I approached it with caution. I set my daughter down next to the entrance and took a few steps toward the figure. It remained immobile. I took a few more steps and it suddenly turned toward me and grabbed my arm, throwing me across the room with incredible force. I hit the opposite wall from the "statue" and all glow of the spheres flickered and went out. Suddenly I felt them, one by one, rolling down my body and onto the floor around me. Everything grew dim and I felt myself passing out, but I forced my eyes opened and staggered to my feet. The living statue approached me slowly, obviously coming to finish the job of killing me. I stumbled frantically away along the walkways around the giant lake of metal. The statue spoke in the same voice that I had heard bellowing in the cavern previously.
"The metal in this lake is the ultimate weapon! I've finally done it! Those spheres we designed were only the beginning! We'll dominate the world with this! You and your daughter have given us what we need to crush every other powerful government and rule with fear for thousands of years!"
I grasped at my chest. My heart felt like it was going to explode. I knew that if he reached me he would easily push my weakened body over the edge to death. I stumbled a few more steps and fell to my knees. His steps shook the walkway beneath me and as I tried to stand I tumbled backwards into the lake of metal. Time seemed to stop an instant before I hit the surface. I was about to melt to death in molten metal. My daughter would be killed or raped or both. She was the only thing I cared about in the world and I was about to fail her ultimately. A single tear escaped on of my eyes before I fell deftly against the lake of metal.
I sank below the surface. I was surprised to observe the the metal lake was actually transparent underneath. I could see the lights of the room and the walkway as well as the human statue stalking back and forth above me. I felt heavy, like I couldn't breath, but I found that I didn't really need to breath. I looked down at my feet and noticed that my entire body was coated with the same metal texture that the human was. I began walking arduously toward the edge of the lake, crawling carefully up the side and reaching for the railing of the walkway above. I pulled myself up out of the lake and jumped to my feet right in front of the human. He stared up at me in horror and I grabbed him around the throat, squeezing as hard as I could. I lifted him as his legs kicked about trying to find the ground. He pulled at my hand, trying to disrupt my grip around his scrawny human throat.
"I could have been human, too, you know. But humans like you make me glad I can't be counted in your ranks." I crushed his throat and dropped him to the floor. The metal layer covering his skin fractured and flaked away, leaving his pink face contorted in a horror fueled grimace. I ran to my daughter's side, checking that she was still breathing. I again ransacked the room looking for anything that might wake her up. I found an incubator labeled "Subject Paralysis Supplies" and grabbed the vials within. Several contained a yellow liquid and a few others contained a whitish powder. I recalled from the logs that "an injection of Yellow 45" had been used to awaken me from paralysis, so I grabbed a nearby syringe and injected a small amount of the yellow liquid into my daughter's arm. She stirred and after a few moments her eyes opened and she looked up at me.
Her eyes widened and she screamed, "Mommy?! Are you a statue like him?! Are you alive?!" I reached out to her and hugged her to my cold body. "I'm...okay, Rai. I'm not sure what this metal is or what it will do to me, but I'm alive." Her body relaxed and she clung to me. "Free the others, Mommy! Free them. The soldiers used us for things...I want to go home..." She started crying and pointed to a control system near the lab bench the human was standing by when I first entered the room. I lifted her as I stood up and held her gently in one arm as I fiddled with the system. The metal coating my paws seemed to resonate again with the metal, scrambling the system, but in a few moments I heard an alarm sound.
"ALERT 16: ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS MALFUNCTION. ALERT 27: CELL BREACH IN ALL SECTORS. ALERT 3: FACILITY SELF DESTRUCT SEQUENCE INITIATED. ALL PERSONNEL EVACUATE. ALL PERSONNEL EVACUATE. 10 MINUTES TO FACILITY DESTRUCTION..."
I looked at my daughter and gripped her tight and I began running from the room. I wound my way back out of the cavern and down the hallways of the facility. Soldiers ran along side me, but we all ignored one another in the hope of escaping. I ran by the passed out soldier who had urinated in his own pants and grabbed his body from the floor, carrying him by his torso. I ran and ran and ran and burst through the doors at the exit to the facility. Soldiers littered the field around the darkened entrance to the underground facility as well as several genetics. We all ran as fast as we could away from the forsaken field.
In the aftermath of the explosion I just kept running. After getting deep into the forest around the facility, I dropped the soldier I had been carrying and stopped running. I didn't feel tired, probably do to the effects of the metal coating on my body, but I just couldn't run anymore. I was too confused, so frightened, too worried about what the next few hours would bring. I sat down against a tree and held my daughter in my lap.
"What now, Mommy? I'm afraid..."
"I don't know. I don't know..." I hugged her tight.
The soldier I had carried out stirred from his unconscious state. He opened his eyes and looked around. Upon seeing me he started and reached for his pistol. I shook my head disapprovingly and he seemed to remember what had happened. "What happened? Why are we out here?"
"The facility is destroyed. I brought you out because you gave me the information I needed to save my daughter. I don't owe you any more than that." I lifted my daughter up from the ground and started to walk away.
"Is he dead?"
I stopped and looked back at the soldier with a furrowed brow.
"If you're alive he must be dead. Especially since you're covered in that metal."
"Yes." I turned and kept walking.
"Thank you." The soldier looked down at the ground as I turned back for a moment.
"You're welcome."
In the following days I was on the run with my daughter, hiding from any humans we saw, traveling in the night when my skin was less prone to glimmer. One night, while hiding below the streets in a city I grabbed a scrap of newspaper that drifted by on a river of rain runoff. The headline read, "MADMAN STOPPED BY BRAVE SOLDIER IN TIME OF WAR," and I assumed it was talking about the soldiers that had run out along with me from the facility. I read further and, to my surprise, the soldier I saved had been interviewed and told my story. I was a hero. Everyone was looking for me, hoping to thank me for overthrowing the rule of a crazed, power hungry dictator. At first I was skeptical, thinking that perhaps they only wanted me to study the metal coating my body.
My daughter and I stayed in the shadows a few days longer until I coughed. I coughed for several hours straight. Since my encounter with the metal lake I hadn't been breathing and my heart hadn't been beating. I hadn't been hungry or thirsty. I just...was. But I suddenly started coughing up metal. The metal on my skin began to flake off as the human's had when I killed him. I thought I was dying. I felt myself drifting out of consciousness.
I awoke to my daughter straddling me, furiously pounding on my chest. "Mommy?! MOMMY!!" she shouted as I groaned and sat up. She tumbled off my chest and ran around me in circles. "Are you okay? Are you okay? Is your heart working again? Are you my mommy again?"
I breathed in. I breathed out. My stomach grumbled. "I'm hungry? I'm hungry!" My daughter started dancing and laughing. "I think we can go out in the sunlight now. Come here. I want to hug you against my real skin." I reached out my paws and my daughter rushed to me laughing and smiling. I just held her for several minutes, listening to her heart beat and mine, her breath and mine, her laughter and my happy sobs.
We emerged from our hiding place to a world that wanted to meet us. Humans all over the world knew about what I had done and how I singlehandedly ended the war forever. I was a hero. My actions had raised awareness about genetics everyone. A civil rights movement for genetics as citizens had begun in the wake of the destruction of that research facility. It was a new world, the world I had always wanted for my daughter.
And then I woke up to go to the bathroom.
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I fell back asleep after the bathroom break and had another quick dream.
I, John Shepard, slowly returned to a standing position from the knee I had taken in this sacred place, unsure of whether or not I had heard the previous statement correctly.
"What...what did you just ask me to do? ...but this is the throne room of your palace."
I looked around at all the beautiful foliage and the curtains falling to frame the throne and the arc of carefully sculpted stairs leading up to it. The light was dim but vibrant, so the crown princess' face was visible even though I was nearly 10 feet below her. She sat as still as a statue, staring down at me.
"I told you to approach the throne and remove your clothing."
She began to remove her many layered dresses and corsets, letting each one fall softly to the ground. (Her outfit reminded me of Final Fantasy games. Lots of zippers and beads and very beautifully designed.) As I watched her garments slide down the stairs of her giant throne, I shrugged and unzipped my pants. Tossing off my shirt, I began climbing up toward the beautiful woman in front of me. She unzipped the last underdress of her lavish outfit, revealing her slender, orange body. I thought to myself, "How could she be this attractive? Are Batarian women THAT different than the men in looks?" The inflamed fluid sacks on her neck characteristic of her species proved that she was ready and willing and the feather-like, magenta tendrils attached to her hips reached out toward me as she leaned back against the right arm of her throne. I straddled her and as the tendrils contacted my bare skin I felt shocks of pleasure rush over my body. I leaned over her and kissed her exposed neck sacks, the equivalent of a human woman's clitoris, and she screamed in pleasure. I slowly pushed myself into her welcoming body and was instantly blinded by the intense pleasure given by the neurotoxins excreted by her species' sex organs.
Unfortunately, our screams and moans of pleasure had received the attention of the palace guards and we were discovered. Of course, to mate with a human for her species is a kind of sacrilege, so we were immediately taken into the custody of the guards.
She was stripped of her title as the crown princess and her younger brother took up the role as successor to the throne after a short and one-sided trial. We were both forcibly ejected from the palace, I with only my casual Cerberus attire and she with only a servant's dress and neck cover. I stared into her eyes and asked, "Was it worth it?"
"To give my body to the great John Shepard? Of course!"
I woke up feeling like a total BAMF and started the day.
I think perhaps I chose the wrong field of research. Biology is really difficult. Everything is alive/fragile/temperature sensitive/shock sensitive/light sensitive/etc. so much so that I sometimes wonder how anyone gets anything done at all. And today was a really terrible day for me in terms of little mistakes. Now I'm left feeling pathetic and drained.
First of all I got up at like 8:30 AM (mind you I have been getting up at noon) so that I could have a meeting with my professor. The meeting went relatively well and afterward I got started on what I had hoped would be my first successful day of research. I was incorrect. The day started off with me adding an incorrect enzyme to a particular mixture, thereby ruining its further usefulness. "Ah well," I thought and continued with the rest of the experiments, hoping that I could at least make sure my incorrect procedure still worked the way it was supposed to even if I couldn't do anything with it in the end. At this point I started mixing up a batch of gel, only to realize that it wouldn't work for the experiment I was trying to carry out. I threw my hands up and made a new, correctly mixed batch and pour it into a mold. Sighing, I carefully pipetted all my samples into the gel and got everything ready, and then turned on the machine that would run the gel for me. I walked away and started doing something else, but suddenly realized I had placed the gel backwards on the machine! I rushed back over and found the situation to be salvageable, flipped the gel around and went back to what I was doing. At this point I ate lunch, confident that when I got back I would have a gel that I could analyze and be proud of.
When I got back into the lab the gel was almost done and I went to the cabinet to get a container in which to stain it. Upon discovering that I had made a gel too large for any of the containers that were scattered through the lab, I again threw my hands up and went to the storage room to buy one. (I wondered to myself, "How does anyone stain these gels?" because people make them all the time. Maybe there is some hidden trap door full of large containers. I don't know.) I stained the gel and went to image it. Of course, my previous reactions hadn't worked and my gel was utter crap. I took some pictures and then started to remove the gel from the imager so that I could save it and show the post doc later, but as I picked it up it ripped in half, leaving me standing with a dumbstruck look on my face. I had specifically remixed it so it wouldn't rip... At that point I just wanted to cry.
And now I'm reading a book trying to figure out why everything went so wrong with my reaction. I'm getting so tired of failing. I'm not even doing experiments yet! I'm just practicing this for training! I can't even succeed at the simple tasks given to me as a training for later!! 
I feel really defeated. I've got more cells growing to fail with on Monday.
What I have purchased, acquired and made for my Anime Central costume thus far includes:
- denim cargo shorts - purchased for $14
- black tank (with internal bra construct) - purchased for $6
- black and red tennis shoes - purchased for $9
- my husband's belt and socks - acquired for free
- Zell's ultimate weapon from FF8 "Ergheiz" - made for ~$10
y = sin(nx) where y > 1985
"It's always darkest before the dawn." I know this is a common saying, but I always remember when my mother said it once long ago. I'm reasonably sure that my middle school experience was very similar to that of most children, but during one particular week it was more awful than usual. I was turned down by my crush, caught some kind of stomach flu that caused me to shit while vomiting, and received the first "eighth hour" of my academic career. I was a loner anyway, but during that week I didn't talk to anyone. I didn't smile. I didn't laugh. I just kept to myself until I could go home and keep to myself in my room. Near the end of this terrible week, somewhere in the peak of my shit/vomit episodes, my mother came to the door of the upstairs bathroom where I was sitting on the toilet with a bucket in my hands and asked how I was doing. Now, not being in a particularly enjoyable position from which to answer this question, I coughed out something about feeling horrible and wanting her to leave me alone. She cracked the door open, to my EXTREME displeasure, and sighed while saying, "You know, Neen, it's always darkest before the dawn," and then shut the door again to me waving her frantically away while shouting and scowling. After she had left me in peace I didn't really think about what she had said. I was too busy shitting my life out because of some bad Mexican food. In fact, I didn't really think about it at all until much later, years later, when I started noticing something about myself.
Maybe I'm bipolar, maybe I'm just really unstable, but I find my mood oscillating up and down between extreme satisfaction and horrible depression. When I was younger, the oscillations were much faster. However, the maximum and minimum amplitudes have always been the same. Over the past few weeks I've passed through the minimum, a horrible tangle of depression and self hatred combined with a dissatisfaction with the world around me, but now I'm coming back out if it. I can feel it. Due in no part to my own actions, I am now feeling happier. I suppose I could chalk it up to a lot of things, but when you get right down to it nothing has really changed. All the major parts of my life are unchanged. And that brings me to my main point, I think I focus on minor details because all the important things in my life are satisfactory. I'm fishing for things to worry about because I don't really have anything to worry about. It's always darkest before the dawn, I'm always most depressed before I realized I'm not really that depressed. I think I just gather a bunch of random unimportant crap up into a big pile and then wallow in it until I realize that it's unimportant and slowly go back to feeling happy again, only to later repeat the same cycle.
But how can I break the cycle? How can I just be happy all the time? I think the answer is that I can't because it's paradoxically impossible. I think saying that it's always darkest before the dawn also means to me that without darkness, dawn doesn't seem that bright. If I could remove all the worry and sadness from my life by "fixing" every little minuet detail, I would also be removing the contrast in my life that allows recognition of happiness. I know none of this is particularly ground breaking or new and people have been saying things like this forever, but I just wanted to have a conversation with myself about it. I'm trying to tell myself that being frustrated and depressed about little, stupid things is inevitable and that I should just get used to it, let it wash over me, and come out of it like I usually do without worrying about how I can "fix" myself or my life because there isn't actually anything to fix.
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I haven't actually sewn anything in a long time. I guess...it kind of had a bad connotation for me after Halloween 2005. You many ask yourself if you know me well, "Wasn't that the day that she started dating her now husband? Wasn't that the day she wanted to commemorate with her wedding reception last year? I'm confused." You would be right. However, there is something else extremely important about that day which I usually choose to ignore. It was the day I broke up with my high school boyfriend after telling him I had been cheating on him...yes, with my now husband. You can certainly see why I choose to overlook this little tidbit of information rather than allowing Halloween to forever be ruined because of it. And you may be asking yourself, "Why sewing? What does that have to do with anything?" I'll tell you.
On the Halloween of 2005 I was prepared to unveil my ultimate sewing achievement, a full Jedi outfit complete with hooded cloak, all hand sewn by me. My high school boyfriend had made one as well and we were going to wear them together on Halloween in Columbia. However, in the weeks that preceded Halloween, I had become embroiled in another relationship and had not told him. I was cheating...physically and mentally. When he arrived I sat down on my dormitory bed and asked him to sit down as well. I could see the apprehension on his face. I'm sure he could sense that something was wrong and had probably been wondering almost since the whole ordeal had started. There we sat, both of us in our Jedi costumes, staring at one another, waiting for everything to go up in flames. I slowly explained that I had been cheating on him. I slowly explained that I thought it would be better if we just broke up. I slowly explained that he should probably just go home. He started crying. I started crying. I hated myself. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I asked him if he was still going to go trick or treating when he got back home. His brow furrowed and he told me he never wanted to wear this costume again. He threw his cloak off and stormed out of my room. I looked down at my own costume, all the delicate stitching, the careful choice of the perfect color scheme, everything thoughtfully put together through laborious consideration of detail...and then I thought about the state of my relationships. If only I had put a fraction of the time and effort into them as I had this that stupid costume I wouldn't have had to tell someone that I had been cheating. I would have realized he wasn't right for me long before that and broken it off much less painfully before heading off to college. But that's a long story, one I've probably already told in this blog at one point or another.
What I meant to say is that after all that I wasn't really interested in sewing again for a long time. But with Anime Central on the horizon I've taken upon myself to create a costume not only for myself, but also one for my husband. I was afraid at first, worried that I wouldn't be able to thread a needle without crying and thinking back on long forgotten transgressions against proper relationship etiquette, but instead I found myself soothed and relaxed and sewing with purpose just as I had back all those Halloweens ago. There is a satisfaction that comes with sewing, especially without patterns, that is unmatched by most other endeavors. I'm happy I can still feel it.
I feel very lucky for having direction in my life, or perhaps I just have a wanton commitment to the path I am following combined with an easily satisfied thirst for productivity. I'm the kind of person who simply chooses a direction and starts walking, and even if the path gets really hard it doesn't really phase me. I've committed to it and have no desire to wonder about what things could have been like given different life choices.
My point is that I don't think my husband is that way. I suppose it is lucky that he sees me as perfect for him, because if he didn't I can tell that he would never had married or even dated me. He speaks a lot about being satisfied with what he has and all that, but when you really get down to it he is a perfection seeker. He wants his dream job and he wants it immediately. There is no waiting or working toward it or suffering through something less enjoyable for satisfaction later on. He wants to be a video game designer this instant. And although he has never said any of this out loud, I can tell in his mind that is what he is thinking. There are no options that are just "alright" or "good enough" for him. It's either amazing or he hates it. I can see where that mindset could be viewed as valid, but it does make life a lot more difficult. I've been trying to find something, ANYTHING, that would hold up to his standards for things that would be acceptable as careers. I've been suffering through his tantrums and bad attitudes about everything. But I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. I've come across something amazing.
I'm not going to state explicitly what it is on this public blog, but for the first time his eyes lit up and he got excited. All I will say is that I came up with an idea for a small business that he is more than willing to own and work at 60 hours a week. Over and over I've sent him e-mails with links to jobs, commented on websites and tried my best to intrigue him with possibilities. Nothing worked until now, not working for Google, not the supercomputer on campus, not even being a cashier at Gamestop. He would nonchalantly suggest that he would look at it later and then get back to playing whatever video game he was involved in at that moment. But this time he actually turned off his 360 and immediately went to the website. I mean, we can't open it tomorrow and there is a lot to do, like apply for the franchise and find suitable locations and apply for small business loans and all that, but for the first time all the effort that he will have to put in doesn't phase him. And he said something remarkable, something I had been hoping was lurking somewhere inside him and just seemed to be absent:
"If we do this then the reward will be directly correlated to how hard I work for it."
He understands. He isn't just a lazy piece of shit. He's just a really picky person when it comes to what occupies his time, but deep down he has the same hardworking spirit that I admire in myself. It just isn't being stimulated at his current job and that's why he's so frustrated and grumpy. There has already been a change in his demeanor! Yesterday I asked him how his day at work was, expecting him to say something about how it was boring as usual and someone yelled at him for some random reason. Instead he said:
"It was...okay. It was better than usual. I have something to look forward to now."
And then he just smiled. He smiled and patted me on the leg as he was driving me home from the lab. I almost cried. I'd been hoping to hear that for so long, but in a slightly different context. Since then he's been less angsty and more loving. We had sex for the first time in several weeks yesterday. I just wish I had thought of this sooner.
Now I can only hope that everything works out. The main thing is that everything will take time, time that he will have to spend working his current job until the business is set up and ready to open. I hope he can make it through, but I believe he can now that he has something exciting to focus on.
Last night (and by that I mean around noon a few hours before I woke up) I had a dream where, at one point, I was shivering uncontrollably and my mother started mixing sugar and water together and then trying to bake the little globs on a cookie sheet. I assume they were to help me from shivering, but she was mixing them out of the ethidium bromide waste bucket in our lab and I was crying for her to stop touching it and that I didn't want the little sugar things but she wasn't listening. Then my father said I should go to the dentist who happened to be one of my professors, only he was completely insane in my dream. After the frightening dentist appointment (where the assistant was a small child dressed as a clown and everyone was okay with this) my father then suggested I go to the doctor and have them take a bone marrow sample from the back of my foot right above the heel. He made it sound really painful and frightening so I ran away. Somehow I met mreechan and we got into this really shitty rusty car and drove to a really old gas station to refuel. We both went inside and I paid for the gas and got back in the car. She came out with a bunch of candy, but for some reason I knew that she had stolen all of it and I was really disappointed and wanted her to take it all back but she had already opened it all. And one of the candies looked like different flavors of PCR primers. We drove for a while and somehow were back at the place where I started uncontrollably shivering and I screamed and then woke up.
It wasn't an enjoyable dream. The entire time I felt out of place and angry or frightened. Honestly, that's the way I feel now during my waking hours anyway. I guess it's starting to seep into my dreams.
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This weekend has been terrible so far. And maybe I'm just sensitive. I know MY terrible is a lot less intense than a lot of people's terrible. I guess what I mean to say is that from Thursday to today, I have been more unhappy than usual.
On Thursday I ruined several samples (only my own, thankfully) of DNA and had to start over from the beginning of the experiment...which takes an additional 36 hours.
On Friday I had finished everything to be back at the point which I previously ruined. I smiled to myself that I hadn't set myself back that far, but as I was measuring the samples I realized that they were ruined as well and I would have to start over again. So much for learning lessons after the first mishap. More than that I also realized that I wasn't able to do something that I expected to be able to do. I know this sounds horrible and egotistical, but that's really never happened to me before. I'm at the point in my life where my shortcomings are catching up with me. The things I'm doing aren't easy anymore. Biological work involves being very gentle and careful and not rushing through things and I'm just not used to it. All my previous work has been with things that are inanimate and can be baked at 800 K before breaking down or even melting, things that can be thrown down a set of stairs and then centrifuged and still be intact, things that didn't require so much...finesse, I guess. Failing twice in a row for very similar reasons each time just...it really made me feel completely inadequate and worthless.
Also on Friday I had several talks with several different people that really highlighted the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing and probably won't for quite some time. I shouldn't have listed biological laboratories as my choices. I should have stuck with the materials science labs and the things with which I was previously familiar. I can already tell that I'll be here for at least five years, maybe six, just because of all the "new" things I have to get into my head before I can really start thinking on my own with respect to my projects and research. It's awful. I feel like a child in a world full of stuffy, self important adults. Maybe going to graduate school was a fool's errand.
On Saturday everything went wrong. I'm going to sum it up as me being extremely fed up with human contact. I didn't want to see anyone, talk to anyone or be inconvenienced by anyone in any way. I was much less tolerant than usual. I just wanted to be out of the site of other humans as quickly as possible. When I got home that night I really wished I had a cat to hold and snuggle and just hide away with somewhere were no one could talk to me or call me or message me. And that made me resent my husband and his allergies to cats. I can remember a moment last night where I just wished he would leave and I could be in the apartment all by myself. I haven't felt like that in a long time.
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Actually, I've been pretty frustrated with my husband in general lately, the smallest offense being that last night at the peak of my dislike for human contact he started playing L4D2 for the first time in a really long time. And he has the Starcraft 2 beta to play! I just went to bed. I didn't even wait for him to say goodnight. I couldn't stand being awake anymore.
The main thing is the whole job situation which I've beaten to death on here. I won't go into it further, but now my parents are calling me all the time telling me I have to do more to get him to keep working. I can only say so many things and cry so many times before it's meaningless. He's made up his mind and I can't change that. I just...I never thought he would be this selfish. I guess I expected that being married would mean we both made sacrifices for each other and for the betterment of our future together, but I guess he never really got that memo. He keeps bringing up that I said I would be happy if he was my house husband and could cook and clean and take care of children, but that situation hinged on us having enough money and children to take care of. Both of these criteria are not met at this time. Well, regardless, I'm back on the pill and I won't have to worry about him quitting his job while I'm pregnant and we need money more than any other time. Now if he quits we just won't be able to put anything into savings for a home, so I guess that isn't so bad.
But you know, the lack of money isn't really what bothers me the most. It's his attitude about the whole situation. Like yesterday I was commenting about a couple of places others had mentioned as good places for a computer science major to work and he told me not to talk about it on the weekend because it stresses him out. I just looked at him in horror, thinking in my head, "What a piece of shit." I mean, I was trying to help his sorry ass by asking other people and doing research into it. Fuck. I don't think that's how you are supposed to feel about your significant other, but it's a growing theme in my day to day thoughts now. And you would think that hating your job would make you more receptive to others having bad days at their own jobs, but if I ever seem frustrated by my own work he gets pouty and disinterested. It's like I can't have a bad day because he's too busy having his own bad day. Whatever.
I always imagined married couples being support systems for each other, working through the hard times together to make it to the better ones, comforting one another when things were going poorly. I guess I imagined a lot of things going differently. Why didn't I notice all this when we were still just dating? I guess the warning signs were there, but I chose to ignore them. I'm sure in the end I'll convince myself that all this is my own fault and that I shouldn't be so frustrated and disillusioned. And then I'll suffer in silence as I go through the motions of being happy like I always do in situations like these. Then one day I'll reach a breaking point and I honestly don't know what will happen. Hopefully I'm wrong and I'll feel better soon. Hopefully.
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I thought my period starting would really make me feel a lot better about everything, but the slight happiness gained from not being pregnant at this inopportune time was quickly overshadowed by everything else. I guess it was too much to ask that I be happy again just from one simple change in my reality.
My period still hasn't started, but I took a pregnancy test a few days ago and it was negative. I don't know if it was a false negative because I took it too early or if my period is even more irregular than I remember it being back in high school. Whatever the reason, I just kind of wish I could get some closure. Am I pregnant or am I not? Is that so much to ask?
In addition I've been really dizzy lately. I get disoriented just while sitting sometimes. I was blaming it on not eating a lot, but it happens kind of randomly and seems unrelated to mealtimes. Internets say that's an early pregnancy warning sign, but it's also a warning sign for like a million other things so I don't really trust the internet. I just don't know what to do.
I have to make a presentation during my research group's meeting tomorrow. I thought I was going to make it a week from tomorrow, but I got bumped up in the schedule which left me scrambling for the last couple days trying to get the stupid thing ready. I just hope I can concentrate long enough to present well.
I'm a real mess right now. I'm pretty much freaking out.
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