I am more emo than Savage Garden

My back pain is back with a vengeance. I don't even know what brought it on. I didn't move or twist weirdly at all today, but by the time I was washing my face tonight, I couldn't even bend over the sink. I had to stand almost upright and I proceeded to splash water all down my clothes. I wonder if this is what it is like to be old and deteriorating like John McCain. Why is my life so difficult? ....I have asked that in my head this week so many more times than I can even count.

It's funny, though. Sometimes, the person who can best comfort myself is me. Like when I had to pull an all-nighter in Odegaard for that group paper in polisci, and then I got sick and threw up in the bathroom at 5 am, when I still had 5 pages left to write. Everybody tried to make me feel better, and Samantha taught me how to snort water to make my nose/throat stop stinging, but the thing that comforted me the most was the subject lines I used when I was e-mailing the updated versions of the paper back to myself. They were all titled completely dorky things like "I love you, babe," and "I love sex and starbursts". My little messages to myself were the primary reason I stayed upright and typing until 9 am.

Also, when I used to get really really sad (before Olive died, because now I have somehow lost the ability to get as upset), and I couldn't go to anyone else for help, either because it was late at night, or I was upset about something that I couldn't tell the people around me, then I used to sing myself my song. It was a song that I had written way back in middle school when my friends and I were at the height of our brooding intorspective phase. And we all decided to write our own song. Supremely dorky once again, but when I got uncontrollably upset, that song was one of the only ways I knew to feel better.

I think it's because when you use something that you have written to yourself or done in the past to feel better, it's like you are actively comforting someone else, even though that someone is yourself. There's something about exerting emotion for other people that automatically makes you feel better. Like the way that when a friend is having a hard time, you can immediately forget whatever petty nonsense was making you upset and go talk to them. And so I fake myself out by pretending to be helping somone who needs me.

I don't actually know what I am going on about. Or rather, I know, but I don't know why I am bothering to write it down even when I can't explain it fully, and when it doesn't really matter. At least it isn't insulting to anybody....which is an improvement, I suppose.


Alternately, when you are upset (because you might not have written your own song in middle school or feel comfortable writing yourself e-mails...), I would recommend chucking your roommate's Ronald Reagan bobblehead at walls. This is what I do sometimes, and it never fails to satisfy me. He is quite a stubborn little beast, and has yet to break. It's true that I might feel guilty if it did break, since it belongs to Max, but not that much considering he refuses to take it back ever since he hid it behind my curtains one night and scared me half to death. He thinks the idea of me sleeping inside the same room as Reagan is hilarious...hmph. Little does he know of my domestic abuse.






"Alice:
I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!
[...]
Eaglet:
Speak English! I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either!
[...]
Alice:
I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir, because I'm not myself you see."
-Lewis Carroll, brilliant fiend