solitary solitaire

I really like Solitaire, especially on the computer.  Sometimes I think I am addicted to it, because I could play it for hours if I had the opportunity.  There’s just something about everything having a place, being put into order, that I really like. A red four always goes on top of a black five.  If you win, all of the cards are piled neatly, sorted by suit, and are in numerical order. The cards dance and explode into confetti.  It’s the only thing I can organize, one of the things where the rules always apply, where I can sort of zone out and win approximately twenty-three percent of the time, according to the computer. It's not glamorous or cool, even though I changed the background to have pretty leaves, but it's okay.

I dressed up, it was nice

I'm not going to worry about anything ever again. [Insert mental expression of disbelief here.]  But really, I've decided. I'm just going to be happy.  I think I'm happy right now, which is new and exciting, and my weekend was nice.  Nice is such a bland word, fairly vague, but it serves my purposes here, it has the perfect connotation, perfect for avoiding specificity, which I am a champion at.  It's so weird to feel this okay.  I mean, it's normal, and good, but simultaneously abnormal.  Really good songs keep coming up on my pandora stations, I have two new books to read, and I'm not really behind on any schoolwork, as far as I know.  I'm not going to tempt the fates by declaring that nothing can get me down (way too risky), but things are okay right now.  I want them to stay okay.  I'm trying out this thing called hope again, that pair of shiny new shoes that aren't quite comfortable yet.  That's what it seems like to me, anyway.  Hey, it's better than Buffy's whole cookie dough metaphor, that was getting ridiculous. 

in which I start with a quote but am not an exam

The fascinating Edith Piaf once said, "As far as I'm concerned, love means fighting, big fat lies, and a couple of slaps across the face." 

I really hope she was wrong.  I hope to god she was wrong. 

I've been thinking about La Mome Piaf a lot lately because of this French project thing I'm doing, and her life scares me.  Horrible things happen to everybody (right?), so why not me?  Couldn't I get addicted to morphine and die at forty seven? Why not?  I'm sure she didn't predict that as being her future when she was my age.  

I figured that it's about time that I write an entry I actually publish, instead of ones that I don't, where I write things that I would never tell anyone, things that I am afraid to tell myself.  I think I've written about how writing things down makes them less real before, but I didn't realize the extent of this idea until recently.  It makes things more okay, less scary, because the words are physically there; you can see them marching across the page in neat rows.  Rows--these rows could say anything if you just glance for a second, rows holding symbols that form words that each mean something to form ideas.  If you squint, and look at them through your eyelashes, they are only blurry shapes.  Shapes aren't so frightening.  

i'd do all that catharsis stuff for you

I wish I could solve all of your problems, and put all of the scattered pieces back together.  I wish you were better than okay.

"personal truth"

I was in Ithaca once as a freshman with c and some old friends who have grown up and gone away since then, and we went to a coffee shop where a hippie woman gave us free mate and talked to us about personal truth. I can't remember exactly what she said, but Oedipus Rex was brought up in our argument against her, and we thought we were so brilliant because we had read it and argued circles around this woman, who was illogical, but just had a different opinion than we did.  We thought we knew so much, about how Oedipus' personal truth led to the truth, and how it affected his world.  Years later, in our theory of knowledge class, we were told that there was no such thing as personal truth; there is only the truth, and then there are our perceptions of the truth.  I personally don't see the difference, aren't personal truth and perception the same thing? Right now everything looks darker to me, and I am "perceiving" that we aren't talking, and I'm perceiving that I'm drawing away from everyone, even though that's not what I want, or need.  My personal truth is that I'm losing them, all of them, and it's my own fault. 

ode to d

My brother made me a bracelet so that I wouldn't forget him when I go to college. I thought that it was sweet, but kind of silly. Why would I forget him; he's my brother. He's one of my best friends. Unlike other people that come and go, he'll always be around to make me bracelets out of unevenly-sized clay beads, break out into harmonies, and talk about Harry Potter with me. I'll miss having someone around to make fun of for being obsessed with Apple products and not doing things in a logical order.

math doesn't like me

For once, math is not a codename for a person or action or event, math is what it is, and studying for my math test tomorrow is not working out. It's so frustrating-why don't I understand this? I thought I was supposed to be good at math once upon a time.