Dogs do it.

Our four-legged companions do a lot of things that seem like reflections of their masters. They lounge when we lounge, they usually eat the same things we eat, and they're uncannily familiar with our schedules. In fact, my parents have a dog that has Swiss watch accuracy in knowing the time when my dad comes home from work. She'll get up from wherever she happens to be and will wander over to the door mere seconds before Dad pulls in the driveway.

Dogs are also pretty similar to us when it comes to emotional behavior. A dog's happiness is noticeable. We can see their tails wag and their ears perk up when they're excited, we know that THEY know we're talking about them when their heads tilt in curiosity, and sometimes, we can tell just by their barks how they feel. Seriously. My brother's beagle has a very distinct "feed me now" bark, which is very different from her "don't even think about it" bark.

They're pretty good at conveying another emotion humans are familiar with. Ever watch the ASPCA commercials on daytime television? The shots they get are pretty good, aren't they? You know they're real if you've ever spent any time inside a dog pound. Their little eyes stare up at you, so full of hope and sadness and a little desperation. Watch a woman say goodbye to her son for an unknown amount of time, and then recall the little eyes I referred to in the previous sentence. Vaguely reminiscent, no?

My mother adopted a dog from her friend. At the time, we had a beautiful cat (my cat, no one else's) and an old "mut," for lack of a better term. He was mostly terrier, with just a hint of hound in his nose and floppy ears. Mom named him Rosco. Rosco and the adopted dog, Cuddles (we didn't name him), spent three or four long, happy years together before Rosco's age caught up with him. He was 18 when he died, which, in dog years, meant he had a fantastically long life.

For a solid month, Cuddles would roam the house aimlessly, sniffing the carpet, the couch, the armchair, behind my parents' bed, the bottom of the stairs--anywhere Rosco usually hung out. It wasn't long before Cuddles couldn't find Rosco's scent anymore, and it seemed to confuse him. He would huddle up behind the couch and stare at the little discolored area where they used to sun themselves for hours without moving. A few years later, Mom's lonely dog had moments when the look on his little doggy face would look like it did when Rosco didn't come back in from outside. Confused, sad, a little desperate.

I was a lot younger when all of this happened. At 14 years old, I understood death fairly well because there was a small rash of deaths in my extended family, of older people whose time had simply come; I wasn't unfamiliar with what was happening when Rosco died, despite him being a very real aspect of my daily life, and I felt the usual pall of sadness that seems to hover above the household for a few days.

Something was different, though, in the way Cuddles reacted. Mom, of course, was beside herself, but she understands that pets come and go. The other dog, though, wasn't cruelly made accustomed to that idea, and his behavior reflected the difference. Removed. Stoic. Searching.

I didn't see that expression again until I was in 9th or 10th grade when my friend was killed in a car accident. Her sister was driving the car, and for months afterward, the image of unimaginable sorrow caressed her features. It was in the way she was walking to and from her classes, slumped over, never staring at anything but the floor. It was in her meek "Hello"s and her barely audible "Goodbye"s and the fact that she never really said much more than that. The worst part, the part that still flashes through my memory from time to time, was the look in her eyes. She was seeing something none of us could see, and she was seeing it alone. Only she could really ever experience it. She was a hostage, held at gunpoint by her own memory, and all the camera can see is her despair. When she said "Hello" she wasn't really saying that. She was saying "I'm sorry" and "please help me find my sister."

A few years later, I saw that expression again. A beautiful, well-liked handsome guy from St. Lawrence took his own life because he couldn't withstand the heartache of the world. He was gay, proud and out to the world, and he came from a wonderful, loving family from Burnt Hills, NY. He drove an expensive car, but never flaunted it, he had a terrible singing voice, but sang anyway, and he never, ever made you feel like you weren't worth every second he spent with you. His charisma filled the room before he did and he just languished in it, loving every moment of his life. Or so it seemed from an outsider's point of view.

The expression of pain, of guilt, of desperation, of longing, of agony--of endless searching--reappeared in my life again, but this time, I couldn't avoid it. It was my reflection.

For one entire week after my radiant confidant, my great white hope for my own future (he was out! he was proud! I was scared and alone and not sure what to do with myself, but he came to help me!) took his life, after he callously left me alone in this god forsaken horror film that never ends, I sat on my parents' couch, where Rosco used to sit, and cried. I wept for him and what he must have felt to push him to end his own life, I wept for everyone who has ever lost someone special to them, I wept for his parents and his sister and his friends, who are all incredible people who do not deserve this, and I wept for myself because, when something like this happens to you, that's all that feels comfortable. Tears were comforting. The outpouring of my soul was comforting because I knew that if I kept it in, I would drown and be lost forever.

Cuddles is very old now. He has reached his 14th birthday and, with the way his health is rapidly declining, it doesn't look like he'll have many more birthdays. I noticed something familiar about him when I came home from college for Winter break, but it wasn't until this morning that the strange twinging in my memory became crystal clear-- he's looking for his friend again. He'll roam the house just as aimlessly as he did 9 years ago, and he'll return to the same places he and Rosco used sleep together, places he hasn't gone near since the last time he mourned. The same look of desperation keeps appearing on his face, and now, maybe because he's so old, he'll whimper by himself as he wanders.

Time heals all wounds, but what happens when it isn't our bodies that are scarred? What happens when it's something a lot deeper, deeper even than the bloody battlefield of love?

I mentioned that dogs seem to mirror our behaviors well. It wasn't until I noticed Cuddles's behavior that I realized I'm doing the same thing he is. At random points throughout my day, I reflect on how I'm feeling because an all-too-familiar creeping up of sorrow and loss seems to consume me unexpectedly. Nowadays, I brush it off as hormones or some kind of minor chemical imbalance, but all of the pieces clicked together in a different conclusion.

When someone dies, phantoms of their lives will begin appearing all around you. Things that never had much significance suddenly ignite with their own ephemeral fires, glowing vibrantly as you pass them, triggering memories of much, much better times. If you're like me, those fires become torches in the night that are just out of reach, but you'll keep walking toward them, aimlessly, removed, stoic.

And always searching.

Ho, ho, ho.

It comes once a year and always heralds some kind of pretense. Familial loyalty when, more often, no one gets along. Cheer, when usually, families are lucky to pull the teenager from his fortress of solitude.

I can't be part of the pretenses anymore.

Not because it's impossible. I'm still a fairly decent actor, despite not having actually performed on a stage in a number of years. It's one of those things that never leaves you, like a virus you enjoy incubating, but this Christmas, too much has happened for me to really let myself fall under the nationwide spell.

We spend the holidays with my mother's sister-- my aunt, for those of you don't pick up on sarcastic hyperbole. It's a quiet affair, usually. We exchange gifts on Christmas Eve and then have a holiday dinner on Christmas Day. Polite chit-chat is exchanged before the wine fills everyone's cups, and then the passive aggression kicks into full gear. So, in summary, there are approximately 8 minutes of polite chit-chat.

Generally, I can dodge the verbal bullets my mother's sister's husband (my uncle, again, for the hyperbole impaired) shoots at me from across the room, but without that nice blanket of euphoric belonging, I started metaphorically bleeding, badly. That, or he was just really, really good with his aim this year.

Gems like:
"Yea. I can't wait to have grandkids. What about you, Cath? *looks at me* Oh. Right."
and
"I won't feel safe until Obama's out of office. Remember when everyone minded his and her own business? I wouldn't have liked the air force today, I don't think."
and
"Do you even know where the battery is in a car, Shawon? You know. The little black box with a red thing poking out of it when you open the hood? Oops, gave it away!"

sort of hit home. Then again, I wasn't visited by the wine fairy very often, either, so I didn't have that pasted-on haze only wine can provide.

Then the homey tour of the museum started. My cousins' beautiful artwork, all framed and hung up throughout the house, required a ten minute explanation and a thorough walk-through from their proud daddy. Praise and accolades aside, I learned all about how magnificent they are and how proud he is of their accomplishments. I was sincerely impressed, and I'm actually sorry about my reaction-- I was immediately turned off and wanted to leave.

Not because I disagree with him. Their art really is incredible, and I'm proud to call them my family. I wanted to leave because my parents don't do that. They can't. The writing I bring home and purposefully show to them is read, smiled at, and then dismissed because something more interesting is on TV. The portfolio I labored over for two grueling, agonizing years at the newspaper that I was immensely proud of was looked at and then summarily irrevocably lost. No, really. They still can't find it, and when I bring it up, they're annoyed by my gumption and my insinuation.

No hangings, no portfolios made, no copies made for their friends. Just a pat on the head and a "job well done." That's fine, actually. I'd rather that than nothing. I'd also sort of like some inkling of a memory to go along with their reading of my work, so when I ask them about my favorite poem, my question won't elicit raised eyebrows and a shared look of "uh oh, we're fucked." I'd also like to stop reminding them what my major is and what I want to do with it. It was cute the first time, on my birthday, but now all of the comedy has gone out of saying, "No, I'm not a literature major. No, I don't want to be a journalist. No, I don't think I'm going to grad school immediately." I won't even go into how difficult it is to refrain from sighing and walking away when the word "rhetoric" seems to be some foreign, never before heard Egyptian word when I've only been saying it for the past three years attached to the sentence "I want my Ph.D in Rhetoric."

I'm not feeling very merry today. I almost skipped out on the feast. Why? This will sound petty, but when I opened my gifts, I got two dress shirts (on sale for $10), two ties (also on sale), and an electric razor. My brother, whose interests don't extend much further than his xBox and... no, wait, that's it, got a shirt I'd love, some kind of handsfree headset for XBox live, a video game, new shoes, a new coat, and $100.

I spent in the neighborhood of $300 on them. They didn't understand why I was dumbfounded. At least they got my brother's interests right.

At least I know if I go today, Aunt Carol will defend me from my uncle when he will undoubtedly comment on the fact that I'm not wearing red (I'm wearing a nice seafoam green) and that my scarf is "too long."

Bah. Humbug. I hope your family doesn't make you feel estranged. Actually, that's another line of thought-- I spend a lot of my time dreading coming home, but this past semester had me dreading another day in Potsdam (loneliness is hard).

What do you do when you don't want to go home and don't want to go back to school?

"This living, this living, this living..."

It's been some time since I've tussled with the profound. I've discovered that ignoring the emotional baggage keeps me from having to really examine anything. You can't really see your reflection if you don't look in the mirror, after all, and what better way is there to get to know yourself than by grappling with the emotional overflow?

I won't bore anyone with the obvious cliches that come to mind about overlooking emotion. It's bad. We get it. No one needs another pamphlet or catch phrase to remind us that America is full of mentally and emotionally stunted media slaves.

Despite how ingrained this message has become, stunted I became, and it has been relatively hard for me to unpack it all. There are so many threads that lead to nowhere, so many neurons that hold secrets I've kept from myself that haven't been jolted in a few years. It's a miracle of biology that our minds can store so much information in such air-tight, microscopic proverbial vaults. And so, because I don't necessarily have the combinations to them all, I thought I'd go with a more direct approach.

I wound up a proverbial wrecking ball, downed a shot of tequila, and let the river of crap flow from my brain into nice, bulleted lists. I really like lists, you know-- they're a natural, easy way to remind us that things can still be orderly, even if the things we're categorizing are neon signs lighting up the safe, precious darkness we used to live in, with charming phrases like "You're lonely" and "It's your fault."

That's what they read at first, anyway. I saw last year come barreling out of me first. I tried to stop there, to figure out some method of damming up the torrent of backlogged emotions before I drowned in them, but once you break down this kind of mental structure, there's really no way to stop it except to hope to God there's a buoy nearby.

I have no buoys, which leads me to my next emotional outburst:

I'm admitting to myself that I'm lonely now. Yes, it's emo, and sure, so are a lot of other people, but I can't care about that. I acknowledge now that I have to stop worrying about being some paragon of mental health just because people expect me to be. I'm lonely, damn it, and if pop stars can make bank by telling gazillions of people their problems, I can write a sappy little blog post about it without feeling guilty (there's an underlying tone in this post, by the way-- it's borderline offensive, but it's mostly just bitterness and I regret any discomfort you might be experiencing [sort of]).

Loneliness is this thing that just grips on to people. It hugs them so hard that it's suffocating, but it's really the only constant people who are lonely know. It won't leave you for another man, it won't tell you you're too skinny or too "advanced," and it isn't worried about the imperceptible future. It's just there, always harrying you to cry and be weak. The strong survive without complaining about it, for a while. Then a year goes by without really knowing what a kiss feels like. Then another few months. Then...

Then the vaults start to leak and we nose around in them, hoping to find the root of the problem, when really, the root of the problem isn't in the loneliness itself. It's the inability to express oneself.

It's fear. I'm fourteen years old again, I just realized I was gay, and now I'm afraid I'll be alone forever because how can anyone possibly love a skinny gay man?





--- in the same breath, I'm able to tell myself that this feeling will pass. Either the vaults will close up and vanish again, taking most of the debris with them, or I'll actually work through the flooding (emotional evaporation works eventually, right?). I have an incredible support system of friends and family members, and all of them prefer me smiling to me sulking around the Union.

The bottom line is, I suppose, that I'm aware of the reason I'm not sleeping well anymore, and apparently, broadcasting this to the blogosphere is as good a method of coping as any. Bully for me.

Responsibility or compassion?

It's that thing in life we're all guaranteed to experience, in some form or another. Even if you aren't expected to work for yourself, you're still going to face some form of responsibility somehow. Dressing yourself, for example, can be considered an albeit minor responsibility. Since birth (like most of you, I'm sure), I've been programmed to accumulate -- and take pride in -- extra responsibilities.

When should I say no?

I'm cursed with an overwhelming compassion. It's bigger than I am and it is limitless in its reach. It doesn't matter if you've tortured me somehow; if you've encouraged me to fail; if you've helped people hurt me somehow. When you need a favor that I can deliver, I'll do what I can. I'll go against the better judgment of my more reasonable friends who know when to say that magic word I never really understood:

No. It's almost impossible for me to conceive what it means to say it. No. I can't even remember the last time I used it in reference to something someone asked of me. No.

I don't consider it a failing. Not really, anyway. Even now, when I'm goaded beyond what I can feasibly expect from my enormous work ethic, I don't think I'm failing myself. Because I'm afraid of what it will mean to fail other people.

Well now. There's a thought. Failing others. Is it possible to fail someone else if succeeding will hurt you? Chew that one over.

One sec. People are hovering outside the shop doors. Maybe when I start writing again, after the hordes dissipate, I'll have something more concrete to babble about.

2.5 hours later...

Back now. It's incredible the amount of emotional chaos that can happen in only a few hours.

I wasn't really able to ponder anything I was pondering while people were in here. A few people wanted prices on tattoos, on piercings, ideas for their child's birthday memorial piece, answers to why the shop is so empty, etc. I obliged with probably more bite than was necessary to most, if not all of, them. What can I say? I was having an existential crisis again. That waits for no man, woman or whatever's between.

When the trickle of customers slowed and people finally left altogether, I started catching up with a few people about my new mountain of problems. I mentioned them as my little stressors in my last entry-- they aren't really that little. Big enough, in fact, that after I had a nice, reassuring conversation with Lori, I let Sigur Ros sing me into my own dimension of turmoil, sat down in the middle of the shop, and cried for a solid three minutes. The song ended in almost perfect unison with my last heaving sob, and I stood up, brushed myself off, and went back to work.

"Work." I'm sitting here doing nothing still. I managed to edit Marshall's email, retyped it because I hate copying and pasting things like this, and did some more catch-up work on old facebook messages from dear friends. Now my memory of today is starting to blur.

A few more people strolled through the shop's door, right before I went to grab my approximately 32560346th slice of Sergi's pizza, and then I read Amanda Palmer's latest blog. Oh, and I stalked a few people via their various internet incarnations. It's crazy how out of the loop I've become. I remember being right there, absorbing all of the social goings-on and filing them into different categories of importance. Self-reflection means sacrificing my awareness of the things outside my immediate sphere of influence, I suppose.

Self-reflection. Here comes my looping, full-circle epiphany. I started writing this blog with the intention of expounding my beliefs in things like responsibility, tact and the melancholy that comes with neglecting everything else, with succumbing completely to the endless string of demands people can have of you if you let them.

Instead, I've come to the almost comical revelation that--

Interruption again. This time, it was a large man with a janitor's smock on who wanted a tattoo. I informed him that our artist is out of town for the weekend, but he'll be back on Tuesday. Actually, the conversation was more like:

Jack (the name on his janitor jumper): When can I schedule one?
Me: Well, you can you schedule an appointment for any time after Tuesday.
Jack: Tuesday? Alright.
He turned and started walking away.
Me: We open at 3 and close at 9.
Jack, without turning around: Thanks.
Me: No problem. Have a good day.
Jack, without turning around again: Yep.
Then, under his breath and to no one in particular, my new friend muttered something that sounded like "dumb fag," threw open the door, slammed it shut and left. Nice guy. I should have asked him to take a look at my toilet.

Anyway. Revelation. It's something most of you have already concluded, which makes it kind of silly that it takes me over-extending myself to the outer limits of my own strength and collapsing before I remember it: our first responsibility is to ourselves.

I don't have to feel anything but neutrality about the way Jack must be feeling (I wondered, in this string of thoughts, if he was having a bad day or if he had an abusive father or if he himself was gay and not really comfortable with it or if something bigger, something that exceeds the power of my imagination, happened and he needed to memorialize it). I don't have to worry about the woman who's crying on the park bench, and I'm not responsible for the bad things that happen to my friends and family, even if I'm there to witness them. I can still help, but I can also choose my battles based upon what I can handle and not by the way my broken fail-o-meter starts to buzz if I turn someone down.

I can spend my time for me sometimes, doing the things I want to do, without the threat of "feeling bad" if I say "no, I don't want to drink tonight, and please don't pressure me into it."

Anyway. I've written blogs like this before. Proof positive that history has a way of repeating itself. Or is it more an indication of how difficult it is to break our bad habits?

Is being too compassionate a bad habit?

I've wondered

The theme of my blogs tends toward the wonderment side of things. I ask the ether questions like "What happens when...?" and "Why do people do...?" This isn't an exception.

I've been teetering on the brink of a substantial meltdown. My truer confidants have been bearing with me as I belabor the melodrama of it all. The gist is:

To a writer, the idea that the act and art of writing, and writing eloquently, is no longer an easy thing of affluence has become a challenge is more than a little disturbing.

I'm experiencing a strange kind of block. When I used to be able to envision the way I wanted an essay or a post or a short story or a poem to be, from the beginning to the end, I'm lucky now if I can string together one or two sentences before I'm taxed to the point where continuing is impossible. It's draining to write now, especially when my expectations in myself appear to have taken the whole gym rat craze to heart.

Cue the existential wondering. What is causing me to second guess myself, literally every step of the way?

At first, I wondered if it was my new, in-depth look at this medium. I've started to take my linguistics classes seriously, using what Dr. Henry and Dr. Hersker introduced me to and running with it. Now, before I can really get my emotions aligned to begin whatever piece of prose I'm hoping to crank out, my focus lands, irrevocably, on my seemingly limitless word choices. Is this the right verb tense for this particular paragraph? Will it be more clear if I adjust the placement of this adverbial? The more I dug into the subject, the more "rules" I retained. Hmm. Thinking about it like this is starting to grind my writing gears and I haven't gotten close to the point of this post. Could be something to this theory.

My other theories are less structured. The second-most prevalent (would penultimate be more impressive here? who is my audience? stop it, shawon, stop. just write. just write) definition for my source of writer's angst comes from my inability to dial things back according to the aforementioned source of emotion.

Writers are emotional creatures. We utilize common vernaculars to elicit responses in our readers by knowing how to cater to different emotional responses. If you want someone to fall in love with you, you don't write about the bubonic plague in some poorly-written limerick (unless you're seducing a sadist). If you're trying to persuade people, writing with a purely academic tone won't necessarily do the trick. Therefore, writers usually a catalyst for emotional change, or at least, a halfway decent writer can convey his or her own emotions in a sentence or two. That seems to be one of my current problems.

I lost "it." The intangible thing that comprises all of the arts, but more specifically, the thing that rings as clear as a clarion bell in a person who knows, without any doubts at all, that he or she is meant to do something because it's just part of them. I had that "it" thing, the thing that made writing as easy as breathing, the thing that I've nurtured since before high school. The thing that I had before I knew I was gay. Before I knew what the world was really like. The thing that was so enmeshed in my person that it may as well have been coded genetically, and now, somehow, it feels... incomplete. Missing.

But not really missing. Even now, as I dust out my mental cogs and put endless quarters into the "insert talent here" slot, I can feel the old vibrations of talent, but, as with all complicated patterns, I also know that sometime today, when I'm feeling vulnerable or insecure about something, the entire spectrum of my personality will flicker a few times and then go out. Poof. It's like when people ask if a scream is heard in the middle of the woods if no one's there to hear it.

I hate that expression.

Another theory, and the one that my fellow writer friends keep throwing at me, is stress. Good, old-fashioned stressors are "dimming my rainbow," as it were. Can a rainbow ever be dim, though? Can a talent ever be ripped from someone's still-beating heart like this? Any time I've experienced some kind of writer's block, I can always somehow see what it is that's holding me back. I just can't always do something about it right away. I would realize that time, and time alone, is the necessary impetus for my successful recovery, but now... now it's all just me stumbling blindly through things.

I'll read through my old blog posts from high school, from past semesters--even posts on this very website--and I'm jealous of the writer who wrote them. I don't recognize my voice anymore. One of the same friends who I feel comfortable sharing most things with tells me that she remembers the assignments she had, sometimes, but that's it. That she doesn't ever really remember writing it all. We'd laugh at that and make fun of the professors who assigned them, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm screaming at the top of my lungs, "I do remember, though, or at least I used to be able to. Now I remember nothing."

I'm rebuilding myself slowly. I'm not necessarily sitting around feeling sorry for myself. Despite the absolute terror I feel when I can't write a decent poem or a short something--or even a halfway clever facebook status--I'm still forging ahead. I'm rereading old books and I'm cilnging to those brief moments, like this one, where a ghost of my abilities swells within my typing fingertips so that I can have some vestige of myself bubbling in my neurons for later, during the inevitable crash. I'm even forcing myself to deal with my stressors head on now, instead of evading the ones that cause me the most hurt.

It all sucks. I don't know if you've ever had to rebuild a personality, but it's hard work. My close friends keep telling me that I haven't really changed much. I hope that isn't the case. Through all of this, whatever this is, I hope that, when I reach the end and I'm comfortable with myself again, I'll have changed dramatically. Or a little. Changed enough to put things like this behind me once and for all so that I can start focusing on a career. Or Hell, so I can start focusing on bringing my grades back up to meet my astronomical expectations.

Hope. There's that word again. It seems to be one of my more prominent (ultimate? paramount? stop it) themes lately. Actually, screw lately. It's always one of my themes.

Dum spiro, spero. It should be one of my themes, especially now that I've had it permanently branded on my chest. It was originally supposed to be a reminder for occasions like these, and for all of the things I've trivialized as mere "stressors" because I don't really feel like sharing them with the world. I'm still breathing, so the rest is inevitable. Inevitability is another one of my recurring themes. Fancy that.

I'm reading through my old blogs...

Well, blog. I only ever kept a MySpace blog before I moved onto a paper journal, and then to this very website that you're perusing. After spending about 20 minutes reading through the first few paragraphs of many different entries, I've come to the conclusion that being an English major for the past 4 years really hasn't done anything to guide my writer's voice anywhere. In fact, nothing has really changed about my writing. At all. Go figure. Can I have a refund?

Anyway. Here's what I found that was interesting enough to repost (it was from a while ago, and I was very angsty, angry teenager [despite how well-dressed and like, lol, like... TOTALLY popular I was *hair flip*]):

------------------------

The art of manipulation
Thursday, December 01, 2005

So I'm sitting here sick and pondering. Already bad. But not half as bad as when I'd sit and ponder under the influence of something. Like that rotting reed smell when I open my sax case or the fumes I inhale at BOCES.

Manipulation fascinates me. When all the negativity that's usually aligned with manipulation is stripped from its definition, you're left with creation. People learn how to assert their quick wit and thus master the art of evincing results from their subjects without physical force. Ideally. When manipulation is put to force, it's called torture. Or worse, Stagecrew.

Right now, with simple words and innocent phrasing techniques, I could convince a lot of the dimly lit people that read my blogs that I'm leaving this place. That I'm biding my time before the flight leaves in Syracuse for Rockport, then onto a few more ports along the coast before I finally land in Australia to start a new life. That my postcards to all of my sympathetic friends will dominate the international postal service, and, maybe when the timing's right, I'll return home for a quick visit before shoving off again. That I'll miss everyone desperately, and I truly believe that I'll become the loving person that everyone's known once or twice, and leave behind this angry facade I carry so proudly. My goal is sympathy.

And how many people do you think would give it to me? Even after I post another few entries about bus tickets in Australia, and forwarded emails from the Embassy, saying it's A-OK for me to take up permanent residence?

It's harmless. And I'd have forced my friends to succumb to my will, craving the "Goodbye!"s and the "I'll miss you!"s. If I never left, I'd only obtain, "Thank God you're staying, I don't know what I'd do..."s. Everyone does it, and in most cases, they're being sincere. It isn't negative, as I mentioned above, but it's still the art of pre-understanding. The unconscious knows the emotions of its cohorts and can therefore play off them. I should know.

I do it all the time.

The hardest emotion to conquer is fear. I've been able to bedevil people into frenzies, lure people into lovetraps and mold personalities to my benefit, but I've never been able to strike fear in someone. Sure, I might've been able to rustle up some inconsequential, awe-inspiring respect that looks and feels like fear, but no one's ever chilled when I enter the room, or watches everything they say so as to not incur whatever wrath I can throw together.

Headache's here. It's been fun.

--------------------------

I really just think it's neat that I was thinking about rhetoric before I ever had any formal rhetorical training. It's destiny, I guess. I also guess that this means I can't really demand a refund.

Damn it.

The waiting game

In the 24 hours since the commencement ceremony ended, I've thought a lot about a few things.

First of all, good God it's warm. Potsdam's errant weather never ceases to amaze me. How we're all surviving here, despite the threat of pneumonia and bronchitis, I'll never know. We've probably built some superhuman tolerance to sudden weather changes, in which case-- bring on global warming. Insert sarcmark here.

I've also thought about our natural defenses against things like heat and emotions. When it's too hot, we struggle for a few minutes and then make atmospheric changes. We either physically remove a layer of clothing or utilize some method of cooling, like a pool or a cold shower, or we change the way the air itself feels with fans and air conditioners. In essence, we manipulate our surroundings until they're comparative to our personal preferences.

Emotionally, we do the same. If someone makes us sad when we do not want to be, we figure out some way to change the way we're feeling. We can be reproachful and vengeful, forcing our antagonists to feel what we're feeling. We can also change the way we're feeling, alleviating the sadness with different impetuses that make us happy. Music, for instance, or a change in scenery.

What happens when we don't have a grasp on any of it? It's easy to encourage people to take control of their situations, but what if these situations are formless? wispy? impossible to see?

The graduation of a few characters in my personal history meant various weighted things. I would no longer have to see them or endure their particular brand of torture, and I'm glad for that, but it also meant that I'll never see them again and I'll never be able to endure their particular brand of torture. It took me all weekend, a few pots of coffee, and some serious alone time to conclude that I was holding onto terrible memories because they were the last tangible connections I had with these people. They were the only things I had left that I could curl up in and feel some sense of familiarity, even though they were the starring roles in virtually every sleepless night.

I was waiting for this release. Now that the pressure is gone and the horrible sinking feeling I had during the ceremony is starting to dissipate, I've realized that the aforementioned emotional baggage was there the whole time, but it was masquerading as something else. I can finally see the situation that I need to change, and in being able to see it, I can finally--and utterly--fix things for myself.

I will miss him. God, I'll miss him. But it's time for him to be out of my life. There are so many things that I would like to say to him, but in the end, it's better that I don't. For his sake and for anyone else's sake who may be caught in the crossfire.

The point of this post was to elaborate on my theory about our natural defenses and how they're all linked, working on one another like the wellness continuum, but this is a good place to stop. When I'm not as mentally exhausted, I'll pick this topic back up and run with it again and see how far I get.

Just remember: never let anyone tell you what you're feeling. They're wrong. If you're upset about something, don't try to ignore. You'll be buried by the invisible tormentors in the end. That's how therapists make so much money, after all-- it takes a massiveass metaphorical shovel to dig through all the crap we let accumulate because it isn't vogue to deal with our problems.

Deal, people, and immediately. I waited a year too long.