She said, "show me the world that's inside your head".

I'm sitting in the living room as Rephe plays a game and maos a bit.  The Christmas tree is lit up and covered with ornaments that were graciously donated by my parents.  It's a tiny tree, but it looks like it's trying really hard to do the job.  It's charming.  And the lights make it feel just like Christmas.  Honestly, I didn't realize that it was already so close.  It's like the year crawls by, waiting for it to come, and then Thanksgiving finally arrives and you realize there's barely any time left to gather up presents and find a place to have a Christmas lights date.  ^^;

Thanksgiving was awesome.  My mother made the most amazing stuffing (seriously, everybody that tries it says so), and cajun spicy turkey.  And then we enjoyed Seth's company (and played Super Mario) until around nine, when we left to start our Black Friday rush.  I was going for something in particular, and the store opened at ten.  ...By the time we got there, we had to stand at the end of the parking lot, past about 4 giant building complexes, in line.  And then, once inside the store, I had to stand in a line that weaved through every aisle in one side and around the back of the store to get to what I wanted.  Luckily, old people are dumb and don't really realize what an awesome deal was going on, so I got exactly what I wanted.  (For someone else, of course.  I'm not about to buy myself anything this close to Christmas. )

And then Wal*Mart.... we went immediately to Wal*Mart to scope out a new TV for my Christmas Present.  The sale didn't open until 5, but at 11:30, people were already standing in line, so we did, too.  We were there until two, when they handed out 14 tickets... they only had 14 televisions.  Luckily, having gotten there at 11:30, we were among the very last to get a ticket.  I know that my major Christmas present is going to be a 42" TV.  I'm so excited to have one bigger than a computer screen! XDXD.  But, I don't get to bring it home until after Christmas.  Mao.  But!  While we were there, the very last TV had been sniped by somebody who realized that they weren't going to get one.  The lady who would have been last, who had wild white hair and was thin and pale, was infuriated at the people for stealing it... so she took off to find that TV.  She found it and argued with the guy, who kept calling her a ghost lady and trying to sneak off with it... eventually she called the security on him and they got it back for her.  She was pretty much a television hero. :3 

After all of that, plus about three other stores, we went home to get a two hour nap, then got up to rush out to gulfport to check out stores there.  And then, as soon as I got home with my minimal haul, Seth took me out to look at even more stores, and we played Mario again until sleepytime at about 10:00. 

Not to call anybody out or be disdainful at all, but Seth did pull some funny stuff on me during the weekend that I've got some thoughts about.  It started with a text: "someone said something funny about you last time you were here.." I asked what.  "They asked if you and I were dating."  As if that wasn't a painfully obvious feeler.. I just said "oh" and waited to see where it would go.  He started saying that even though he doesn't consider being taken "the end", because you're not married yet, he wouldn't barge in on a relationship because he's not like that, even though he's thought of it, and then started talking about how easily he seems to make me happy and how he could definitely handle my moodiness, when I said that I wasn't that easy to please.  That upset me.  How much does he really think he knows about me?  Does he know what makes me happy?  Probably not.  Does he know what life means to me?  Definitely not.  Does he even know what my favorite songs, places, movies are?  No.  He can't even tell when I'm really happy.  And he doesn't try to know me, he doesn't even try to be polite, sometimes.    If there's such a huge difference in personality that he doesn't even understand that speculating about the stars is my idea of a meaningful conversation and we can't even agree about which parts about life and love are the truly important ones, he can't possibly pretend to know or understand me.  I think it's absurd that people still refuse to understand that you cannot love a person unless you have some understanding of them-- sure, an understanding can be made with just one glance, but that's not the case here.  You can't love somebody that your soul doesn't recognize.  It's all of the tiny things that build a person, to me, and I can't love somebody without piecing those together, nor can I accept that a person's feelings for me are real unless they've seen some of those pieces of me.
/rant, I guess.  It just makes me so angry, what people try to pass off as love, these days. 

The cold weather coming in was amazing.  The water finally froze.  :3  And when I got back and hugged Rephe again, I could really feel his warmth. 

In response to you: Of course you meant more to me than that.  I loved you.  Somehow, I felt like there was some kind of fate or destiny in play, everything just seemed too coincidental and right to go any other way.  And then one small thing happened, tipped the scale, and it did change the trajectory.  I know what you mean, sir.  I had a turning point, too.  There was me, with my idea of love being such that if I had a good time with somebody and saw them often, then I knew them and we were in love.  And then there was him, [that guy] who made me smile once when I was feeling lonely by bringing me his favorite cup of cocoa.  He was unknowingly passionate with every breath he took, & it changed me.  And then he broke my heart irrevocably, and I was happy for it, because that was the moment that I realized what love really meant, that my feelings weren't going to change for anything, and that I'd always fight for him to be happy, whether it killed me or not.  He taught me to look at the subtleties of a person, whether they liked poetry and what their happy was, & why.  And he taught me passion, and wonder, and despair.  And the difference between love and in love, and I'll never, ever see things the way I used to because of him.  I'm not trying to compare our situations (I'd just gone off on a tangent.  I get lost when it comes to this.).  In the end, I meant to thank you for letting me be for you the thing that changed everything for me.  Simply that.  I'd go back in a heartbeat, to both times.  I'm not sure if you would, but just to see it again, I would.  I'm sorry that I got so far off topic.  And sorry that I didn't answer.  I was out with Seth, the first couple times, and then driving (I'd just almost gotten myself into a wreck, so was in no condition to dig for the phone).  Plus, I'm feeling triply phone-shy.  Mew..

So then, two weeks.  Two hellish weeks until absolute happy.  ^__^

Dear diary,
I'm glad that I keep a journal.  I went back through my Spain one and relived with great acuity every amazing building, every letdown of a day, the rise and fall of a girlcrush, the end of a soul-crushing relationship..  I read how every talk with Andrew made me feel inspired and full of life, and how I met Reflectionist.  I don't think it would hurt him too much if I mentioned that my very first entry about him described how I wondered what it would be like to love somebody that I thought was unattractive.  My opinion about him is completely changed now, of course.  Now, I know that his eyes are the most vivid shade of blue that I've ever known, at times, and that his smile, especially the one that shows his fangs, is charming and warms me, and he's got the cutest hair and he's really, really cute.  I read out loud how, over time, as he was telling me about his downfalls and his regrets, and about his happiest times and the simple things that he enjoyed, I fell in love with him rapidly and recklessly.  And how I really fought against it, because it would complicate things and I just didn't want that then.  I just wanted to be able to love people simply.  At the time, I was really sick of people wanting more from me, when I just wanted to be able to enjoy my feelings, and enjoy them without any expectations.  But I couldn't really help myself; Reflectionist really affected me.  And while I was reading, I fell in love with him again, for his enduring patience and the way that his words speak to me, and for the way that his happiest things are the simplest, and how all he wants to do is make phat beats and mao all the time. :
But reliving the past is also my downfall, because I also relived the miserable days, when I was still struggling with the reconciliation of the break up, when I was hurting and Jake, who I was just beginning to try to trust, wasn't there for me at all, when Andrew, who I was beginning to be extremely close to, unintentionally said something that completely shocked and hurt me.  And of course, rereading the things that I'm missing now: Reflectionist telling me that my feelings meant more than the world to him, that he'd give up the entire world to be mine, panicking when I didn't return a text for a few hours and contacting Toan to try to figure out what was wrong... when I didn't respond for fifteen minutes, he became enraged with worry and ragequit'd.  I miss that innocent passion.  I don't even know what got in the way of that.  I'd hate to think that it's a more "matured" love, because what could be more mature than a passion that outshines everything else?

I also read through all of the facebook conversations he had before we ever spoke, just to try to get to know him better.  He didn't mind.  I don't know what I learned.  I was shocked at a Reflectionist that seemed so brash and crude, who seemed to want to pursue the extremes of people.  That was when I decided to lay myself out and open up the journal, with all of it's shallow and flippant decisions, the impulsive decisions, and the way that I'd judged him from the very beginning.  I wanted to relive some dark part of me, too.  And we talked for a while.  It was a beginning.  I hope there's more to come.

On Sunday, I had the day off.  He & I decided to go to the mall to finish up some lists and spend the day without obligations.  I had another agenda, he'd been really quiet and depressed lately.  His house in Missouri has recently burned down entirely, and I'm pretty sure that he just wants to see his family right now.  I'm horrible at conversations and every situation in general, so all I could think to do was try to distract him.  It wasn't working.  I'd offered him drinks and snacks with no response, so eventually I just asked what was on his mind.  I said that I thought that he was trying to tell me something, but I couldn't figure it out.  He told me that he simply hated himself that day.  And I, with my dumb self, couldn't think to do anything but take his arm and point out cool things in various stores until he, exhausted, asked to leave.  I couldn't help it: I'd failed on my objective to finish my list and the one to cheer him up.  My face fell, and I stopped moving.  He stopped, looked at me seriously, and suggested that I pick another store to look around in.  And we did.  He made some serious effort to cheer up during the rest of the day.  I shamelessly had a lot of fun and enjoyed being on his arm, watching his expressions change and being somewhat moody with him.
But it made me sad to know that even when I do have time to, I can't save him.

I love you, Rephe.

I won't be writing again beforehand, so Happy Thanksgiving, guys! 

I guess it means something when a project that I've put off for so long suddenly goes missing the night I decide to revisit it.  Perhaps it's been exiled since the day that I began it.  I wouldn't put it past myself to forget whatever transgression it made that night.  In any case, it was going to be a cop out project anyway, focusing on past-Sephys instead of looking at the reality of things.  Today, I'm on the mindset that the reality of things is the here and now, although I treasure my past and put all of my hope and wonder into the future, still.  But the "reality" of things is bleak.  I've began bleeding again, after just a few days reprieve.  My nose started bleeding again, too... and for those reasons or another, I'm so fatigued that sleeping for nearly two days straight hasn't given me energy, nor has sleeping properly for a night, nor eating completely healthy foods.  But I just can't see myself finding time to see a doctor.  I'd rather waste away giving it all I've got, anyway.  For some reason, I feel like seeing a doctor would be surrendering.

Oh, yeah, and I'm out of toothpaste, but I've rationed all of my money for presents so tightly that I've got none left for things like that.  Haha...;;

Jake got a new roommate this week.  We were there to meet him on the day he got in.  He's an army head that's totally into music and plays video games with us.  He's got a really sultry voice and seems like he's a bit reserved, but I think that that's just a front.  One of his first questions was whether we liked to drink.  We had fun rockin' out some games that night, and ever since then, I've been doing this crazy 4 hours of sleep, 2 hours of work during the nights to catch up with paperwork, and attending clinicals and classes during the day.  I can't believe this semester is almost over.  It didn't even hit me that this was a regular fall semester, with normal classes happening elsewhere on the campus, until I walked into the A&H building on the way to my car for a bathroom break.  I realized that I'd gotten there between classes that lasted for 50 minutes and had a regular schedule.  It felt strange.  I don't even feel like I'm in school anymore, it's just a program to me now.  That must be why I don't enjoy it the way that I enjoyed undergrad.

I don't really know how to interpret anything else that's going on in my head.  Everything's all hiding behind a glaze of absolute fatigue right now.  No matter how hard I try, I can't remember my dreams when I wake up, and I cannot for the life of me stay awake for more than a couple of hours while I'm at home. 

I'll probably be writing from Louisiana next. Thanksgiving is almost here! :]

I spent some time looking at Reflectionist's old livejournal today.  Something about the eloquence and familiarity, and the evident feeling of those words, got me thinking.  I jotted down the skeletal thoughts in a notebook and then went on with classes, but the ideas kept pervading, so before I get back to my frustratingly failing study routine, I want to take this idea and really look at it.  I've always considered myself to be a Romantic, an emotional thinker rather than a logic driven one, and I've always been inspired by the Sturm und Drang movement, which valued the freedom of the extreme emotions rather than the constraining rationalism.  So, then, it's odd to me that I've come to this resounding feeling.

Is it okay if I give up on love?  I am in no way saying that I do not believe in love, nor do I believe, for a second, that Rephe does not love me.  I also love him immensely, and I couldn't imagine wanting to abandon my life with him at this point.  He's the backbone in the meaning that I've assigned nearly everything, at this point.  But. I've got to admit that the love that I've always believed in and fought to discover doesn't seem to be a very possible type of love.  I've always believed in passionate love, a deep, driving feeling that forces things to change and remains tumultuous and moving through time.  I've always thought that strong emotions and defying logic should always be a part of it, that fighting for expression and trying to win over the person that you love never really ends.  I always wanted something that would remain fresh, and never get comfortable and routine.  But I'm finding that simply being human seems to knock that possibility out to start with.  When we're exposed to anything for so long, we get comfortable with it, and then it's only the outlying bits of it that seem fresh and new.  And there's also the idea that everything, eventually, moves toward a state of putrefaction.  Nothing can really stay in such a tense, unpredictable pattern forever.. it just takes too much energy and heartbreak.

But as for myself, I like the storms and the effort and the extremes.  I love to feel the uncertainty and the heart racing and the crying just to have the satisfaction of feeling, for a fleeting moment, the effect of somebody telling me that they love me.  I feel like if something's going to end, it must end when it's still climbing, before you reach the top and start coasting, otherwise, you'll remember the coasting and not the exhilaration of the effect of the feeling that you tried so hard to capture.  Perhaps it isn't that way for everybody, but for me, it's not enough to be comfortable.  I want the feeling of falling in love to last forever, not the feeling of loving somebody that I'm comfortable with.  I want to be driven to know them, and fight to show them who I am, because that is when I'm giving it everything I've got.  And besides, that's usually before they've had the chance to see all of my flaws and realize how mundane I can really be.  How insecure and ciritical, overanalyzing, judgmental, mean.. that's when they still see only the parts of me that twist things in a strange way, and breathe in the tiny beautiful things around me. And that's before they get used to the good times, and start taking it for granted.  I hate the part of love that takes things for granted, and gets stale.

But it's not that way.  Love leaves us satisfied, and even though it keeps my heart racing, even though I still care about him with all of my heart, it's not extreme and terrifying anymore, and somehow, some part of me just misses that. 

Anyway, we skipped some of that.  We never had that huge uncertainty and distance, he never wrote about me with that intense longing and passion, and I've realized that we can't go back there now.  He knows too much. And I regret that; I want to be a person that inspires passion and beauty and life in somebody forever, the way that love did to me.  I just can't accept this passive love.  I want to be ignited forever.

Now I'm spinning myself in circles, because, as always, I don't have a conclusion to these things, just the questions. I feel like there's a lot left to be explained: I'm happy with everything about my life except for school, and I love Rephe.  But everything else is in the air right now.

Sometimes my life confuses and infuriates me.

When I give up everything, from books to games to friends to study because I'm hanging on by a thread and I really can't afford to make a C, I make a C anyway.  So when I get frustrated and tired of it all and throw my conscience to the curb and play video games instead of study, I make an A.  I don't know what that's telling me.  Maybe my skimming through the notes instead of burying myself in them led me to read only the really important things.  Maybe, since this was my first peds test, it was telling me that I'd be really good at pediatrics.  Maybe it was a fluke.  Maybe I needed to relax.  But it seems extremely unjust that when I'm throwing every part of me into succeeding, I can't do anything but fail, and when I let go of all of that passion, suddenly I'm at the top of the class. 

The movie industry called me out this week.  Ask IT, our technology center, called me in and tore my computer apart, looking for a movie that they tagged me for torrenting.  I don't torrent.  It wasn't my computer; at the end, they apologized profusely for putting me through all of that.  While I was there, I learned a lot about the way that they tag and how they get you.  They've got some sneaky tactics-- the way that they target hits the machine, so that it's hard to get the wrong person.  Maybe it's common knowledge, but I had no idea.  Anyway, the first offense here (which doesn't apply to me, as it wasn't my computer) is just a warning.  After that, it's a trial.  People have had to pay millions to these people for torrenting.  And some of their technology is scary.   So, if you do it, please be careful.   Or, you know, just don't do it. 

November is racing by.  It's actually cold enough to wear a coat now, sometimes.  I've been looking for Christmassy places to visit, and wrapping up the year.  I decided to lay out a list of things that I was hoping to accomplish by the end of the year.  It surprises me to realize that, when I made a list at the beginning of the year of things to accomplish, it looked nothing like this one.  Off of that list, I managed to complete a couple things: I have a plan for the future and I -was- accepted into AMNP, although I couldn't have imagined how much frustration it would be giving me.  I'm in my own place and happily going on dates with Rephe here and there.  Within the next couple of months, I really want to stop bleeding (because I haven't yet, but I haven't had time to be seen, either), start a tradition (maybe having pizza every Friday, like we did when I was little), look at Christmas lights, and see a place I haven't seen before.  None of them seem hard, but I think that every one of those would make me really happy.

I'm going to be honest, all that's on my mind right now is playing video games. X3.  I'm waiting for Rephe to wake up so that we can get some pizza, finish up this Blazersgame, and then celebrate our first long weekend of the semester.  So then, with love;
 
 [Restart] or [Continue?]

Yesterday, from the time we had dinner and watched Scott Pilgrim for the first time (it was pretty good) until about two in the morning, Rephe and I were cutting out paper snowflakes to hang from the ceiling, and making thin strips of paper to string together in a paper-link chain to hang on the walls.  We've been investigating other Christmas decorations to make with paper to be festive and make this place look like a party.  It was so much fun that I had difficulty getting to sleep. 

We've been hanging out with his roommate, Anthony, a little bit this past week.  Mostly it's just been a date to Moe's and a lot of them playing Anthony's xbox while I studied.  Watching them helped me to reach a decision or two... and I have to admit, it's been pretty fun.  I guess Anthony has a couple cool points.  Watching Rephe laugh and relax like that really made me happy. 

Something else that made me pretty happy was a delicious pumpkin pie.  Jake was supposed to be making it himself, but when he opened the can of pumpkin, he just dumped it straight into the pie crust!  XD I had to go and scoop it out, hurriedly mix in all of the cinnamon, sugar, and other ingredients, and shove it into the oven myself.  It was the first time I made a pumpkin pie, and I have to admit, I was pretty proud of myself.  It turned out to be extremely delicious.

To quickly get these things off of my mind: these tests aren't a good way to measure what I've learned.  They're not really application, they're brain-rape.  Stop dancing around it, teachers, you're just reveling in our pain, aren't you?  / My mother had a dream that I stayed with Rephe, we got engaged, and she cried her eyes out until I decided to break it off, and then everything was fine again.  Except Rephe and his mother were depressed, and I was depressed.  So really, she was fine.  I think that she should probably just accept my feelings, as she doesn't have to wake up face-to-face with them every day, and I'd like to be proud of the decisions that I make.  I don't want to live my life regretting the could-have-beens, even if it means that I regret the "was".  I've gone off on a tangent.  There's nothing about here and now that I regret.

I wonder what the root of every depression is, or what characteristics depression shares?  Sometimes, I see him being so lifeless that I swear I'd kill to cure him.  I just wish I knew what to do.

Happy November.  I can't wait until December.