im supposed to be doing anything else right now...

...including writing something for english, though im not sure what.

i cant lift my arm up from my flu shot and ive been eating the chocolate chips i bought to go in cookies all afternoon because dammit its halloween and i want to. this week has beyond stressful with my printmaking project and homecoming which involved spending five straight hours on monday and six straight hours on tuesday at a fraternity house, which you all know is exactly where i want to be every day all the time. but the weight is surely being lifted (only to be put back on on sunday afternoon for sure), but i can be blinded for a few days and pretend like everything's easy peezy.

this weekend should be awesome. i really need a break. and i dont just mean a few days sans school work, i mean a real break. because for me the typical weekend here consists of me attending an awkward party or otherwise social gathering where i make friends with the wall and then the rest of the time is spent crying in sporadic boughts of depression and doing homework. this weekend will actually be relaxing. the little sleep i do get will be guaranteed to be good and i will have company to enjoy everything with. we are going on a motherfucking picnic.

photos to come later.

check...mate

i think if nothing else friends serve to keep you from: a. believing you are crazy b. going through with crazy/destructive plans of action.

i might be crazy.
like maybe i should see a doctor or something.
i might be crazy or i might be female.
its hard to tell the difference.
or maybe im like a crazy female squared or something like that.

i dont know who this person is, he sounds quite uneducated, but he is a noted fashion photographer and im a believer:


"these are everything i did for the last 8years, and i realized its a long(*)road( not so hard and painful if you are passionate about photography and have some nice pictures sometime) .

make sure you have enough to pay your rent and food, or get your frineds and families to pay for it …. just for a while and dont piss them off, they are a life saver…

and keep on shooting and no retirement plans. ”

said not so eloquently, but i appreciate it nonetheless. i think theres something to be said about being ambitious and seeking what you are after. i think its a great idea to learn all you can and get connected all you can, but maybe im overlooking the biggest point, maybe in our haste to get the best college education we can we've all overlooked the biggest point: sometimes it takes a dose of life to learn anything.

i could have attended a pretentious art school. i could run off to new york and work with haughty snotty bitchy fashion people. i could. maybe one day i will. but i dont think it has to be so black and white. maybe if i got my ass out of this apartment and into a life that doesnt involve books and deadlines and resumes and interviews and anxiety, maybe i might actually learn something from my college experience.

perhaps if you expend all of your energy climbing up the ladder, if and if you make it, its quite possible you will have no idea what the hell youre doing when you get to the top.

in my small file of greatest compliments ever received there is one from an alcoholic russian man given to me in a buckhead life restaurant this summer, "i picked you because you have drive, i can see it in your eyes."

no company or internship or trip or other person can give that to me. no company or internship or trip or other person can take that away from me. its one of the few things that truly belongs to me and only me and i get to do with it what i want to.

here we are at the brink of another weekend. another weekend in which i will surely face boughts of depression due to boredom and aforementioned mild insanity which i am currently learning to cope with. i hope that this weekend, no matter where in the world you are, my friends, that you will take a deep breath and breathe it all in.

this is life.
the view is not always pretty.
but theres always something to see.

theres a blog id love to write here, but dealing with cleanup afterward makes it not even worth it. its pointless and useless and stupid. these things shouldnt even matter. i need to give up.

ugh just stop before you say the wrong thing.

im so angry right now.

excuse me.

wish you were here (or even moreso that i wasnt)

Q: Which is worse, feeling trapped somewhere with no way out, or being somewhere you dont like and know you will be able to get out but noooootttt quiiiiteee yet?

A: They're both pretty damn bad.


No im stretching it. my situation is a million times better now than it was even a few weeks ago. but now i am facing yet another weekend here by myself with practically nothing to do.

thats not true, i have plenty to do.

damn, im even boring myself with this blog.

its just hard living a life with one foot out the door.

ebeth and i got to talking tonight about college and life and all that good shit. we agreed that when you get out of high school you think youre the shit and youre going to take over the world in all your excellence and achieve dreams unimaginable to anyone else. you think youre going to be better, that youre going to be different. but the world humbles you. youre really not that different. theres a reason your parents and everyone else arent famous or supermillionaires. and here i am all this time thinking its just because they didnt try as hard as im going to, maybe its because this is life. life is hard. sound simple but its true. in our narrow little high school minds we believed we were invincible. now two years later i think we're seeing the reality of things.

elizabeth asked me i if thought that i had gotten anything out of my time in tennessee (well thats not really how she phrased it, but no matter), and i didnt even have to think about the answer to that question. of course i got something out of it, i got a lot out of it. first of all, i had to know what it would be like to go away. i needed to prove to myself that i could go off on my own and start again and i dont think, even now, that ive failed in that. i went off on my own and i did everything i could do. in truth it could have been great. i could have made tons of new friends and taken off in this new place and forgotten about everyone at home. all the ingredients were there but, it just wasnt the right mix for me. i can say with confidence now that i tried and it just didnt work right here and right now, but i know im capable in the right place and time. so now i dont have to wonder.

aside from that tennessee has served as that humbling experience to me. i didnt feel sheltered here. i had to find an almost extreme form of independence, spending a lot of time by myself and relying on myself to make it through. i feel like im a stronger person for it and i feel like im better prepared than others for the future because of my experiences.

so i refuse to regret or feel bad about my decision. i dont have to explain anything to anyone else. i owe it to myself to move forward. now, i dont have to wonder what it would be like to go away, but i cant stand the thought of living the next two years wondering what it would be like to be close.


its almost the weekend. yuck.

in the waiting line

well, i really cant complain, things seem to be working out great. if i could find someone to live in this apartment next semester that would be even better. my mom told me once that whenever she has car trouble she wants to get rid of that car asap. once it betrays her she wants to have nothing more to do with it. i guess thats how i feel about ut. now that leaving is a reality im ready to go right now, today. honestly if thats what i could do, i would, and i wouldnt look back.

jordan is right, the coming weeks will go by quickly. i have a wedding and pbp shit next weekend, then homecoming week, then jordan coming to visit, then going to uga, then thanksgiving, then formal, then finals, then moving out! it leaves only one or two more weekends spent here alone wallowing in my self loathing and other shit.

its just like now that i realize i dont have to be here forever and that, God willing, im not going to be here much longer, everything about this place pisses me off. ebeth is getting on my nerves with her constant pursuits for perfection in everything and her criticism of what i eat and do and say and how much i work out (or dont). the town is ugly, theres not much productive to do here unless you count drinking as productive.

knoxville may be the car that broke down. it let me down and now i want out of it.

i finally got an a in something : )

(my latest short story for english 364)

Empty Sky

After high school we followed our childhood dreams and moved there. We were so in love, running around the busy streets and dropping into little dives on the corners that had better Chinese than my mom could have ever prepared. I loved the energy of the place, the buildings stretching into the clouds, the taxis reverberating through the canals of streets. Best of all I loved our apartment, a little studio in the meatpacking district. At first it appeared cold, but you and I we made it sensual and cozy. We covered the brick walls with the tapestries you brought me back from your senior trip to Italy. I bought the softest linens I could find for our bed. Many a lazy Saturday afternoon we spent tangled up in those sheets cuddling away the world and school and work and forgetting about it all in each other’s eyes.
I spent late afternoons and evenings up on the roof in my deteriorating lawn chair reading about Gestalt psychology for my classes. As night fell, I would light those Catholic Jesus candles you got me at the market and look at the whole wide world stretched out before me. The taxis pulsed down the streets like soldiers in an army of ants on a voyage. If you looked far enough you could see the water, and beyond that, Lady Liberty. On a night like this you came up with a bottle of wine you had procured from the liquor store down the street we both knew never ID’d, and as night flowed down over all the towers and the taxis and the airplanes in the sky you promised me that one day you would marry me. This was city life.
On Tuesday you left for your morning class and I began my usual routine of reading over the paper as the TV news hummed in the background. But today the news didn’t hum; it screamed. It screamed in bright shades of bold red text and uncertain news anchors and panicked citizens and clouds of smoke and falling debris. I took my coffee to the rooftop and watched in horror as it all fell down in the distance. I spent the rest of the day feeding off a steady diet of CNN and astonishment. I watched as people in sheer desperation jumped from windows to their eminent death. I had never witnessed anything like this before. You came home unharmed but very shaken and told me I needed to take a break from the television. We went up to the rooftop with a bottle of wine and tried to discuss other things, but the other departments of my mind were closed. It was in my mind and it was in my face. To the west, it was much easier to see the water now. The traffic had stopped, and the once bustling city streets filled with agitated taxis now contained only a few confused stragglers who must have been wondering where the world goes from here.
I looked up at the sky. There was nothing. Any other night there would have been airplanes and satellites and spaceships and maybe Donald Trump in one of his ridiculous gold helicopters, but tonight there was nothing but an empty sky. The President had imposed a grounding of all aircraft for at least the next day. The sky was empty and it scared the shit out of me. On this day, everything had fallen out of the sky: people, buildings and airplanes. The sky had nothing more to give, and now it was empty like I’d never seen it before.
The city began its mourning process. American flags adorned every surface, and the President began using words like “freedom”, “justice” and “terrorism”. You told me it was all going to be alright, that we would make it through all this eventually, but I couldn’t shake my fears. The faces of the missing on hand made posters haunted me at the subway. I could not get used to the gap to the west, I didn’t like the better view of the water. I eventually stopped going up to the rooftop. You tried to distract me. We spent afternoons in bed, but I couldn’t help but fear that the building was going to come crashing down on me, destroyed by evil.
When we took a trip back home for Thanksgiving I told you I couldn’t come back there with you. You were crushed, but you knew why I couldn’t stay there anymore. You promised me when you finished school you would come back for me. I hoped you were telling the truth. I loved you and I loved the city, but the city had shown me everything I never wanted to know about the world. It showed me all the things I had turned my head away from for the past nineteen years, and it showed me that ignorance is bliss.

you got put down in class today, again. you know why? you suck.
yeah, i said it.
you do.
and tonight you will go home and get in your bed and dream of a time in the not so distant future when everything will be better.
when you will have friends again.
when you will feel like youre actually getting somewhere.
when you will succeed in your major.

but you will do none of those things.
because you cant.
you cant
you wont
you never will.

i dont know why you think that running away is going to make everything better, but it wont because no matter what you cant run away from yourself.

you have the best of intentions, you really do, everyday, but you cant follow through with a single one of them.

you will go nowhere.

just give up on everything youve ever dreamed of.

you feel trapped now.

leaving wont make it better.

i applaud your efforts i really do, but your game is over.

wanderlust

this apartment makes me claustrophobic. im sure at this point ive made right decision to leave. i cant imagine things being like this another semester.im fine as long as i have a ton of work to do, but as soon as that slows down i get all bored and sad.

anybody want to go to the beach sometime soon?

these small hours

let it go,
let it roll right off your shoulder
don’t you know
the hardest part is over
let it in,
let your clarity define you
in the end
we will only just remember how it feels

our lives are made
in these small hours
these little wonders,
these twists & turns of fate
time falls away,
in these small hours,
these small hours still remain



i think im growing up.
its a scary place to be, but i see it now. i see myself realizing that your life and your friends and your views are not quite what they used to be. family and your true friends slowly become more important and you begin relying on yourself above all. your work is your satisfaction, how people see you isnt. your friends become the people you work alongside, the people you live with. you isolate yourself to a degree and youre ok with it.

this is growing up.

recognizing that this is how it is.
recognizing your parents are how they are for a reason.
and youll probably be just like them.

i dont think it matters where i go, school will always suck. its school. my parents are paying a lot of money for me to go get my ego beaten to a pulp by some grad student wannabe professor.

but thats school for ya.

when i came home a few weeks ago as a curved the bend in 75 S into the city i realized happily that i could finally listen to good radio stations. i switched to the radio and turned it to Dave and the song at the beginning of this entry was playing. im sure its been out forever or something like that, but you have to understand in tennessee they dont have pop culture, and even if they did id probably still be out of the loop.

what ive learned for being here is that happiness is not a given. happiness doesnt sit on every street corner waiting for you to pass by so you can walk and skip and giggle hand in hand until you reach the next street corner where your next jolly escort awaits.

sometimes happiness has to be sought out.

and its in these small hours when you find the good stuff. the stuff thats worth getting out of bed in the morning for. the feelings and the moments and youll never forget.

its great to have a really fun time, but the times that are really the best are the ones that you wont remember what happened as vividly as youll remember how you felt.

sitting in the basement in huge sweats eating chocolate cake and not watching ms doubtfire.

driving south away from here with the heat and sufjan stevens blasting.

roaming the streets of charleston in heels way too drunk off one glass of wine.

dancing to my favorite songs with my favorite people and the worst seats ever.

wreaking havoc in room 305.

standing on cliff overlooking the ocean with my best friend.

laying in the middle of the road with heather and alex at 2 am in the freezing cold.

sitting amongst cigar smoke and a bunch of really smart people playing trivia.

watching fireworks just barely over the treetops on the fourth of july.

i think about the things in the small hours and it makes me see what a wonderful life ive led. its not about what i didnt do or what i messed up on or what i made on my last graphic design project or what anyone thinks of me. its those things that happen in the small hours, nothing else matters. those things are it. they're so small and short in the grand scheme of things, but in their short fleeting moments they are so wonderful and leave such a lasting impression that they make it all worth while.

damn, i wasnt expecting to cry during this one.


its time to be alive again.

welcome to the real world.

i came home hoping for a relaxing fall break and i got something much different. instead my world and perceptions of my world have been turned upside down. its everything i could have asked for basically falling into my lap, but im still not sure how i feel about it. it scares me to think that im depending on so many outside things to succeed in order to get where i need/want to be, things that are beyond my control. this is not me. i need to be in control of everything. i need to know exactly whats going on at all times. i need to have a plan.

everythings so jumbled up now. ive made decisions, but what if i made the wrong ones. what if the decisions ive made cost me my relationship? what if i get there and have no friends there either?

im putting a lot of faith in things i cant touch.

im not so sure i like it.

fuck it and come home.

Where are we now?
I've got to let you know
A house still doesn't make a home
Don't leave me here alone...


And it's you when I look in the mirror
And it's you that makes it hard to let go
Sometimes you can't make it on your own
Sometimes you can't make it
The best you can do is to fake it
Sometimes you can't make it on your own

thursday i gave up.
im done pretending for other peoples' benefits while i suffer in ways that no one else could understand.

i am leaving here.

it seems as though lately things have been coming to a head. i am literally physically exhausted from crying and worrying and being upset about everything. jordan, who has always been very supportive of me staying here and completing the goals i had set for myself finally told me that i could not stay here. he said you just cant stay there, you just cant.

robyn pushed me over the edge. she summed it up in a few simple words: fuck it and come home.

so simple. why didnt i think of that before.

i think that i have gotten over the whole giving up=losing thing. i know now that me leaving here doesnt mean i failed or that i cant handle here. the truth is this is just not the right place for me. i find comfort in the fact that this time next year only one of the six girls from our graduating class at rhs who came here for school will still be here. its not me its this place. i have come to terms with that.

and anyone who says this wasnt a hard decision to make is lying. if i were to stay here i could graduate quickly and easily, but going somewhere else is going to require a lot of starting over again. im very scared about the whole thing. i have a lot more work ahead of me because of the decisions i have made. in essence i have fucked myself over.

im not sure where i want to go to school. i am looking at my options. uga is my top pick though. its the best school out of the ones im looking at and one of the big problems with ut was a lack of social life. i know ill have a social life at uga. its scary to think about how behind in school ill be and how extra hard ill have to work to make up for lost time, potentially being in school for an extra year and certainly working my ass off during the summer, but as kelley, jordan and robyn all said, no matter what i can bet on things wherever i go and whatever i do and however it works out to be better than they are here.

my concerns are far from over, but honestly if my concerns were over i would be a little worried about that too.

i need to clean the kitchen

somethings missing.

im not alone
i wish i was
cause then id know
i was down because
i couldnt find
a friend around
to love me like
they do right now
they do right now


i dont really know how to feel anymore. the future no longer excites me it just scares me and gives me anxiety. in one aspect of my life, i am happier than i could have ever expected and things are turning out better than i ever could have hoped, but it feels like in all other aspects, things are just crashing down.

i am 100% stuck.

i cant see a way that i can move forward and be happy with my situation.

if i stay im not happy.

if i go im not happy either.

maybe im just living too much in the past. remembering the golden years of days gone by and expecting the future to be this happy go lucky good time with amazing memories and fun times.

i just feel like sometimes i dont have anything anymore.

i know thats selfish and wrong to think, I have to many things to be thankful for. its stupid of me to keep dwelling on the bad. i guess im just jealous of those people who dont cry themselves to sleep most nights.

ive become aware that all my blog entries sound the same. everyday just me moaning and groaning about my situation and plausible options. but the truth is im not going to pretend im fine when im not. try as i may to be fine i think im realizing that it is not normal to feel this way and it might not be ok to feel this way. i spend enough time trying to save face with everyone else. my friends, my family, peers at school. wearing sunglasses inside and pretending like nothings wrong when inside it feels like everything is. i refuse to deny my emotions to a computer screen that cant get mad at me for having them.

im just so scared that this is how it is for me now.

i feel like my life is over.

i just hope it isnt.

a case of the mondays.

before i say anything id like to bring to anyone reading this's attention a really cool website that blogger just started: http://play.blogger.com

the website is a continuous slideshow of all the blogholders' photographs as they are uploaded. you get to see peoples random snapshots from all over the world flash before you. i was enthralled. i stared for ten solid minutes.

i decided to go home this weekend, much to the dismay of any rationale i have. i have a lot of work to do this week, but i didnt care. i missed my family so much i just wanted to get out of here.

i never thought there would be a day when i said i missed my family.

as i snuck into the atlanta city limits i turned the curve on 75 south where the whole city stretches out before you. it may have been the most beautiful site i have seen all year. i cried. on friday evening, as i tore up 400 north on the way to my parents lake house i cried. i cried because i knew that this is what i had to do. this was the only thing i could do. in other words, the only way i could feel like someone who is loved by anyone is to go home. thats the only place anyone loves me. thats the only place where i feel like myself. thats the only place where the permanent furrow in my brow relaxes and i feel like i can really breathe. thats the only place where i can be me and have that be ok.

something in me tells me thats not right. something in me tells me thats not the way it should be. no one should have to drive across state lines to feel alive.

im sure this is all my fault.

so now im back here on the fucking computer as usual living my cyber life. im setting up my classes for next semester, or at least trying to in vain.

when your heart and your body are in two different places it makes academia difficult.

whats even worse is when you cant find your heart at all.

perhaps mine has been pulled in too many different directions.

i have to set up classes right now and pretend like everything is ok and i want to be here so bad and so forth and such and so on. but i dont know what i will do.

last semester 18 out of 60 people passed the review. and to be honest, if today i wasnt one of the 18, i might not be so sad after all. im sure i would regret wasting two years of my life in a place i did not enjoy, but at least it would be an easy ticket out.

or is it a ticket out?

besides i cant purposefully fail the review. if i fail it has to be because i suck. if i suck fairly then thats a-ok, but only if i suck fairly.

i dont know what to do. i kinda just want to lay down for awhile.

lay down at home of course.

i think this might be the beginning of me giving up.