my heart is a glorious machine;

Sigh. It's a bad week for my brain. Bad bad bad bad. I guess the minor panic attack level of Off My Meds wore off and gave way to the more subtle insidious low-level not-sane-ness*, and then there's this stupid cold, and for the last couple of days it's been this fun party game of Which Part Of My Body Is Going To Stop Working Right Next? Yesterday was miserable -- my sinuses hurt, I can't breathe, my own voice comes out wrong, my throat hurts, I'm cramping mysteriously and can't find the ibuprofen, my eyes hurt, there's an edge of nausea, and also my face hurts a lot, because apparently I am never going to stop breaking out like a thirteen-year-old and gorram it, acne can hurt like the dickens. Today and yesterday, of course, the skin on my lower face was so dry it was flaking off my face and I looked like I had milk crusted all over my mouth, and it hurt, and finally I just scrubbed my face raw with a pumice stone and slathered it in Eucerin about eighty times until most of the dead skin was gone, and hey, my face almost feels like a face again!

I am well aware of, er, the word insanity -- but there's a line between actual insanity and simply... not being very sane. Which is what I am when depressed. I find myself speaking and acting and reacting in ways that don't make any sense, even to me... and they're all ugly. Dear people who think my depression rehabilitation should consist of stabilising on drugs and then slowly weaning off them: shut up.

On the brighter side, my appointment with the free clinic is somehow tomorrow (I know the lady at the desk told me October, more than once, so I'm choosing to believe miraculous forces intervened to preserve my well-being), and today I picked up some sample other medication from my doctor's office, so we'll see how that goes. I also have two more job leads -- a new coffee shop (!!!) just opened up, and the newspaper's advertising for someone to write obituaries and police blotter stuff and possibly the occasional article, which sounds like a pretty excellent deal, actually, especially for resumes in the future, although as an application I have to write an essay letter to the managing editor on Why I Would Be Good For This Job and... I don't know what to write. Although considering that I am clever, eager to learn, and know my way around a semi-colon, I might actually qualify for this job more than quite a lot of applicants, living as I do in a very uneducated area. Not even bragging here, it's the most depressing thing about this corner of North-western Pennsylvania -- nobody's curious about anything. (Also they mention in their advertisement that they're looking for accuracy and attention to detail... except they mysteriously capitalise Accuracy all of the five or so times it appears. GAH. Here's attention to detail for you!)

And: we bought a new car. It's a bright blue Ford Focus and the first twenty-first century car we have ever owned. Um... and all that that implies? Anyway, it's a lovely car, feels as though it's rather fun to drive, has a CD player and a working cigarette lighter (look, this is a big deal, considering the technology levels of our previous cars) and the sound system is fantastic, omg. Seriously. I want to go on a road trip or learn to drive this very minute so I can soar down the highway blaring things. Irritatingly it is also a better sound system than anything we've got in the house... Ought to be running off to fetch my learner's permit in the near future, although schedules still have to be finangled to make room for that. (Could have gone today, but the DMV is closed on Mondays. Well... thanks.) 

While we're still on the subject of Things Which Do Not Suck (...it's been a bad, bad, awful week), a package from lady_moriel arrived for me this morning! Now, Kyra has a habit of sending ridiculously awesome packages, although these smorgasbords of win usually appear around Christmas and my birthday. She mentioned she'd picked me up a copy of Ender's Game at a yard sale, and also -- hello, this is an example of how Kyra is made of win -- she remembered me wistfully admiring some stunning but expensive silk scarves at Woolies (is Woolies an Alaska-only place? because I can't find them on Google -- just references to Woolworths, which does not sell lovely organic hippie folk festival clothes for sadly exorbitant prices -- and a few directory references to stores in Alaska) and had her sister pick one up for me when she was on a school trip to Turkey, because they are very cheap there. And it is so gorgeous I cannot even deal. Photographs do not do it justice, but they can try.


But Kyra, being also sneaky and awesome, did not mention that the package headed my way also contained an Iron & Wine postcard and pin and the Goblet of Fire DVD (in widescreen, even!). Sneaky sneaky.

And now I've nearly managed to make myself feel a mite better, although I still feel as though almost the entire day has been wasted, and my novel is still stalling on the sixty-fourth page, and my head doesn't quite belong to me, and there are an awful lot of failures and things left undone and things I can't do looming in my future... sigh. Fie upon thee.

The air is very lovely today, thick with warmth and sunshine -- it had rained from my birthday through Saturday, and while I enjoyed that very much, I did miss the sun. Oddly, this year I can't seem to get enough of the sunlight. I keep thinking of Robin McKinley's Sunshine, and how after her ordeal Sunshine would spend hours lying out of doors, drawing sunlight into herself -- craving it. Perhaps this past winter felt longer than most: nearly every time I step outside I am overcome by a knee-wobbling urge to fall backwards onto the grass and lie there, taking in the sunlight  the way cloth takes in water. (It would be awfully nice if I could draw on this stored sunlight during the winter months -- be some kind of wacky sunlight camel with stored light to subsist on when light is scarce!  --Hmm, put that one in the story file.) 

Sunday after church we went to a barbecue with several of my mother's internet friends. I ate two hamburgers and an obscene amount of fresh home-made peanut butter fudge, but honestly, can you blame me?

Today: doctor appointment, fetched Ritalin and new earbuds (purple) from Wal-Mart; am keeping the receipt in case they die quickly, as earbuds seem wont to do. Also fetched vanilla milkshake on the way home. *shifty eyes* Was complimented on my hair by a young man. Hmm. (I currently have rich purple locks of hair coming from my temples, and a couple of little stripes in the general arena of my former fringe.) Going to see my physician is frequently rather a confidence booster; she frequently seems to be quietly impressed with my independence and coping strategies for depression and ADHD, which makes me feel a bit better and bolder because I frequently think I'm doing rubbishly. (People ought to stop being so confident in me, honestly, especially in regards to telling me that I could totally get into Harvard.  Oh help. Don't get my hopes up, people! Harvard would probably pay most of my tuition if I got in, but.... no! I would never get in! Be quiet! ...It would be brilliant, though. OH HELP. The fact that more than two people have told me this is not helpful at all.) 

I feel as though I ought to tell you, my dear f-list, about My Life Thus Far, as in the last several days I seem to have told everyone else (well, mostly my psychologist and my physician, but it feels as though I keep telling this story over and over). What it amounts to is that I am doing better. Really I cannot quite manage to wrap my fingers convincingly around how much better I am doing. Things come up -- you've read about several of them -- tangley, complicated things, horrible terrifying growing-up things, but those are the creases, those are the hollows, the valleys, the gopher holes -- life, lately, has been strangely good.

Or rather, not a lot of the situations have changed -- although I am not in the Hell Kiosk any longer, and spring is here, bringing warm weather and sunlight with it, and that does help considerably. No, it's my head that's changing: in that it actually seems to be working half properly, for the first time in years, maybe. Mostly people don't give me hives, I don't toss and turn in bed because I can't stop brooding enough to go to sleep, I can enjoy enjoyable things, and I don't feel so tired. I even sleep better, and less -- my body still wants to sleep more than I think I need to, but it's not constantly demanding twelve to fourteen hours the way it was before. I feel as though I'm getting along better with my family and managing to do my chores a lot more easily (which helps with the getting along bit). There's still a bit of... emotional clouding; I still have to work a little harder to feel than I did when I was young(er), but it's less hard now. Sometimes I don't even have to try. Sometimes just the moon in the trees or the first glimpse of spring leaves is enough.

I'm honestly certain that it's the Zoloft, at this point: the therapy sessions and things have helped a lot, but the Zoloft has been connecting all of the loose wires in my head. I know the Zoloft is what's working best because I went off it twice for about two or three days when I wasn't paying proper attention and my prescription ran out, and while I was waiting to get it filled, I crashed hard. I attributed it to outside factors -- because there were outside factors! and anyway half of them were the same sorts of things that have been plaguing me for years -- but it happened both times and calmed down as soon as I was on the medication again.

I am beginning to feel as though I've been wandering in black and white and suddenly I can see colours again.

You know those stories that musicians sometimes tell you at concerts, about how they wrote and composed this or that song fifteen or twenty minutes before they performed it on stage or recorded it? Well, um, that kind of happened today. It was interesting. Now, It wasn't so much writing a new song whole cloth as writing new lyrics to a traditional song and taking it from sing-song children's church song to something with a little actual depth inside the same repetitive field-spiritual sort of format. And I'd had bits of it in my head for a while. But I kind of made up the set list in the car on the way to church, and added another song in the middle of the performance before mine (my father's friend Jim), and then everything went astonishingly well, considering. Except for the rather discouraging and depressing fact that almost no-one was even listening to me and most of them were talking fairly loudly. (And when there are only about eight people in the room, having most of them talk loudly through your performance tends to make one feel a bit... well, not terrifically valued, anyway.) I kind of had to curb my rising frustration before it boiled over into actual fury, which mostly meant concentrating more on the music than on the people not listening to it. And it did feel nice, to be sitting up on a stage, albeit a very little one, and hearing one's voice stretching out through the sound system and filling up a room, albeit also a very little room.

After my set I lay down and went to sleep on a pew, at least half by accident.

Last night was not of the good. I lay in bed for hours not sleeping and not knowing why I couldn't fall asleep, seeing as I was so exhausted that my eyes were stinging. By the time I was woken in the early morning to go to the church, I may have attained about four hours of sleep. So, you know, things have been... weird. (Am going to sleep any minute now. Honest. If I shut my eyes right now, I probably would.)

Morning was mixed; I was cross and physically miserable (and hideously unwell-feeling in the early morning; don't even know if I had some tiny bug that goes away with standing up for more than two minutes or if I was so sleepy that it actually caused a more than usually bizarre sort of nausea), and we didn't get nearly the crowd we'd hoped, and oh how I wanted to go home and sleep. But... I found some parts of the celebration/service fulfilling. I'd rather not have another go at it, though...

I've just got back from the library, and it is the first time in months that I have walked, not run, there and back, braced and bundled against fierce cold. Yes: we're having a warm spot! I am giddy with it! I have worn skirts two days in the row, almost the first skirts I've worn in two months! My dresses have been hanging forlornly in the closet feeling lonely and abandoned, and I find that months of trousers leave me feeling not entirely like myself (and the combined efforts of work and winter have forced upon me a self not only perpetually trouser-clad, but in flat shoes).

The air doesn't quite smell like spring -- it's mostly only the warm-ness of it, and the smell of mud, because spring has a sharp green growing-things edge to it, and of course it is February, a dead month if there ever was one. But the scent is heady enough that I was taking great hungry gulps of it, walking through mud and slush to the library in my favourite high-heeled boots. If only it would last!

Today is a nice respite, or I hope it is, because lately I have been a mess, in every way I don't like, and I am tired of being kept up late with existensial angst, and brooding over failures both real and imagined, and having to bully myself out of bed in the morning, and all sorts of other things which do not belong in this entry.

Hmm. Have just woken up from mostly intentional short nap after forgetting to post this. Interesting experience: listening to NPR while drifting in and out of wakefulness. This is not really a new experience, because for the last year and a half I have been switching on the radio on waking in the morning, whether or not I am actually awake. However, this morning waking and dreaming understandings created a strange, fey conconction of story. A man was being interviewed -- was he actually Asian, or was that my dream? No, I think he was, though his voice wasn't, and his name wasn't; I'm fairly certain the anecdote about his great-great grandfather (or close to) choosing an English name upon reaching America was real. Beyond that, I don't know which of the things I remember actually has any counterpart in reality: he lived in a strange house-restaurant on the shore of a beach, there was something about not wanting anyone to recognise anything as coming from the Old Country (Japan? was this the 1940s?), and having to leave one's home very quickly, with a minute's warning in which to gather your things, which seemed to be more of a bizarre custom than anything else. There was some odd imagery of the house-restaurant on the beach, curiously open -- doors, windows, outlay -- full of shells and odd things, standing there abandoned on the shore. Eventually I swam upwards out of the sleep-waves, and whoever-was-the-interviewer was telling everyone that they had just interviewed Someone Or Other, novelist. How very curious.

I think that every year in recent times I have been thinking, as one year passes into another, that I am tired. I try to make resolutions, but they tend not to go very well. I hope for every year to be better than the one before it: and in many ways this turns out to be true -- if it's not better, it's deeper, higher -- and yet every better year ends up bearing with it an equal proportion of worseness. This was the year that Kyra stayed with me for a week and we watched Order of the Phoenix late at night on my rooftop, that I spent my birthday in the city falling in love with the skeletons of houses, that I saw Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet play two magical shows, and Patty Griffin & Emmylou Harris & Shawn Colvin & Buddy Miller in a grand hall in Pittsburgh, that my hair stopped being its natural colour possibly forever, that I stayed home alone for several days and skywatched and lit candles and had a lot of bacon, that Alessandra and I (and sometimes Caroline, or Sarah, or Hannah, or Victoria) and I jammed up on her narrow bed in the cold and Watched Things and fell in love with various fictional people and learned "Once More, With Feeling" and Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog by heart -- and then Jonathan moved here and we watched Doctor Who and had NaNo parties and there was music, and I came back to the weird neo-traditional folk that seems to be my musical destiny. And ... I played my first gig. Sort of. And moved into a lovely house, after a great deal of angst. And acquired a job, though I wouldn't put that on a list of beautiful things of which this year was made. And I wrote 50,0016 words in a month, almost entirely by accident.

But of course for all of this I had horrifying new depressive lows, spent half the move sobbing in exhaustion, and all sorts of things went wrong and tangley and horrible and I am still sorting them out. I feel closer and further from humanity at large and fiercely, cynically rebellious against capitalism, and I still don't know what I'm doing. Anywhere.

Instead of making resolutions, which tend to be do more be more and stop eating so blasted much when you're depressed, I have to ask myself: what do I want this year? Well: I want to be alive. I want to be alive every minute. I want to be healthy clean through and finished with abandoning projects as soon as I start them because they're too exhausting to finish. I want to stop being defeated, especially by myself. I want to go to college. I want to hear more live music. I want to work a job that I love. I want to have a better idea of what on earth my novel is about. I want to be a better person in relation to other people. I'd also like to buy more books. In hardcover. And experiment with making ice cream. And buy a laptop. And do things myself, instead of hoping that other people will make them happen. (How I wish I had the resolve to make this last an actual resolution!)

Today: I slept in, but not too much, and spent all morning reading fairly intensely, and eating things, like cereal and chocolate pie, and I went to see Dr DiGilarmo, and acquired candy, and lit up the candelabra and listened to The Baroness straight through, as a kind of farewell, and there's a little thin curve of milky moon out the window, over the church spires and beyond the one stark tree, with a little spark of a star below it, and the sky's blue as the deep parts of the ocean. Soon: I am going to welcome the next year over the threshold with friends and foodstuffs and probably games of poker. Now: Mum and I are making calzones. 

I twined my smallest strand of fairy lights all around my iron headboard this evening, and when the lights are turned off in my bedroom, they send faint finger-touches of colour all about the walls and the bedspread like little blessings.

Thus far the Day Off has been a success. I did not, as I often do, spend a lot of time getting around to accomplishing something, and ending my day of lazy leisure with a thick feeling of disappointment. It took a while, but I did do things eventually -- went to the library (that was purely for pleasure, but as it involved running two blocks in the bitter cold, it woke up my senses enough to get to the Next Step), made a large lunch, cleaned my bedroom. I listened to NPR all day, which I have sorely missed, and -- well, I would have slept in if not for my appointment with Dr DiGilarmo at ten am, which I also ran to (only a block, though). I feel a little less -- jumbled about, now, I think, in some ways? And -- several weeks ago he had me take a test for ADHD, and the questions made me laugh because I was checking "VERY OFTEN" for nearly all of them, so he had me take another one today, to see how consistent my scores were, and -- they were pretty ruddy consistent. So I have an appointment with my doctor on Friday ...  

(I'm rather optimistic about this -- even depression treatment hasn't cleared up some of my messiest mental problems: the fatigue, the inability to concentrate, the way I keep drifting around life unable to touch anything; the way I can never, ever, ever finish projects, or half the time start them; the general feeling of my head never being clear, like my bedroom, except I know how to clean that, and my head just keeps getting more and more cluttered and disorganised and uncomfortable. If I can just straighten out my head -- I think a lot of things come through after that.)

One of the points of interest I was too exhausted to remember last night is that we got our Christmas tree last week, and Saturday morning Mum & the siblings & I decorated it before I went to work. (It wasn't quite right, doing it in daylight, but we had a Christmas open house for members of our little church that evening, so we couldn't wait till after I got home.) Our Christmas tree is always such a fun colourful jumble of unique ornaments, each humming with memories. Of course Leandra keeps trying to run off with them ...  And the fireplace mantle has a garland entwined with fairy lights, and the stockings are up, and there are extra boughs from the tree nestled around the sconces on each end of the far wall: everything is marvellously cosy.

And now for bed... ! (Maybe.)

Today I put fairy lights up all around my bedroom. I have had no end up trouble getting them to stay up there -- the sticky bits on the backs of the hooks keep coming loose and then strings of lights go tumbling down -- but they look very magical, twinkling up there, especially earlier, in the dusk-light, looking out the window and seeing shadowy clouds behind the one great leafless tree that spreads over the panorama out my window. I love the view out my window: it seems so beautifully arranged, like a picture, the way the tree is positioned, and the Presbyterian church across the street, and the pumpkin patch at the preschool next door. Once I woke to find a brightly coloured bird sitting very visibly in the tree, the tree I want to call my tree although it isn't even in our yard and isn't really all that close to the window, just visible from it from all angles.

Speaking of the view outside, and the pumpkin patch -- Bartholomew, our black cat, has become the pumpkin patch's mascot. Because he is a cat, and a particularly vain one even by cat standards, he has been going over there every day, lurking amidst the pumpkins and curling up by the sign and generally looking as though he's a purposeful part of the display. The preschoolers are apparently in love with him. I was told by the lady selling pumpkins that Bartholomew had caught a mouse in the backyard several days ago and was playing with it, tossing it in the air, as he will do (he is a great scourge of wildlife wherever he lives) -- and a whole flock of wee kidlets were pressed up against the preschool window, watching him with delight. Morbid creatures! This afternoon a little five-year-old girl came running up to me as I was getting the last of Mum's groceries out of the car, her curls bouncing, and presented me with a pumpkin: the lady behind the table, who I believe was the little girl's mother, had painted up a pumpkin for us, beautifully, with Bartholomew licking his paws, and the pumpkin patch, and it said BARTHOLOMEW, THE PUMPKIN PATCH CAT. Which may be the sweetest thing ever, and it is now sitting in a place of honour on the front porch. Of course now the ridiculous cat will only get all the more vain. (I have some pictures of him which I will have to put up soon, once I get one of the pumpkin.) 

Anyway, my bedroom is nearly set to rights -- and also nearly ready to be photographed for you eager lot. My very pretty Victorian-wallpaper message board is on the wall, and while it was bare for quite some time, it is now full of postcards. I got one from barefoottomboy two days ago, and this morning two from England -- one from lady_moriel and another from midenianscholar. So I look cheery and cultured and suchlike, and I love having Reminders of People where I can see them. (I have also stuck up the business card my Future Employer gave me, so that just the half shows that says Waldenbooks on it, because I am silly & sentimental. My job training is in three days!!) 

Today was actually Not A Good Day, mentally. I keep feeling restless and sort of wretched and have to keep making myself busy so I don't feel so listless and wrong-headed. And I have this low feeling of dread or nagging worry or something; the sort of awful feeling you get when there is a Very Bad Thing you cannot change, or something that is about to happen that will be a Very Bad Thing, or something very important you have left undone, not a thing that will be Inconvenient, but a thing that will Hurt. Only I can't find the cause, so I keep trying to be busy instead, because that helps a little. I've been trying to work out causes from all the tangle of messy, barely rational emotion lately -- I am beginning to get a little better at, instead of brooding endlessly about something, or brooding endlessly about nothing, trying to find the reason for the bad-feeling instead, and trying to rationalise it away, or do the thing I left undone that is bothering me so. It works sometimes, anyway. So that is why I put up the lights, and finished my closet organising, and did some straightening about the house, and things.

I do need more posters and things however. Must get to work on that collage for the door, only I haven't actually found any magazines yet. Perhaps I can see if the library will give me any for free.

Oh, also, I have a Thing tomorrow -- a church that our church is sort of affiliated with is having a Halloween Alternative (...yes. two weeks before Halloween. sigh.), and I am singing at it, because this one bloke who does music there was at My First Gig and...kind of likes me a lot, I suppose. So he invited me. I think there may be food, and possibly a bonfire? I am sort of looking forward to it -- celebration of autumnery! -- but also it is one of those things that my brain only barely registers until it is actually happening. Odd how that works. Perhaps it is only my brain. Then again it has only been me recently in the last year or two that has been so botheringly disconnected from nearly everything.

I'm working on a post about my birthday, but it's mad epic, and I don't have the energy tonight, or the frame of mind it takes to convey how beautiful any given thing was. I'm tired and all jumbled up and I can't seem to get anything in my head to work right. Bah. I'm going to bed.

(In other news, my f-list continues to be made of awesome. You all contributed a great lot towards making this the best birthday ever, and I heart you.)

I am trying to sting myself back into life. It keeps going foggy round the corners, or foggy all around, and I am tired of being unable to touch anything, of being able to taste, to feel.

Last week I lit all of the candles in my room (only three; I'm running low), threw open the windows, wrapped myself tight in my green knit shawl, and played Sarah Slean's new album straight through, watching the candles flicker and gutter. I haven't got deep into an album in some time, and it took a few songs before my thoughts stopped running hither and thither like a lot of lost sheep, but though the curtain never quite parted I felt the breeze that might someday lift it.

Yesterday evening, I looked out of the window: the sun was just beginning to dip down below the trees, and everything was that vivid, desperate green that comes with rain and early spring and the dimming of the light, and suddenly I had to be out in it. I had Moony in my pocket, and I walked out of the house and wandered a while, not knowing exactly where I meant to go until I got there -- the pond, a block or so away, with the Methodist church on the other side flickering its stained-glass shadow on the water, the sun just low enough to make everything quiet, and I stood by the water, and then on the dock, walking back and forth across the boards and becoming inside the music, inside of my skin, inside of my head; more solid, a compass needle that does not waver quite so much. I sang aloud, because there was no-one around to hear me, and a bird flew down and skimmed the surface of the water, and as the sun went down the church glimmered ever more brightly over the water, the world got quieter and smaller and larger in the strange intimacy of evening: little bats flittered over the water singing to one another, geese rippled its surface, the chill in the air felt sharp and green and awake. I sat on a bench beneath a tree and wrapped my arms around my knees and sang and thought, and didn't think at all.

My shuffle produced an Abigail Washburn reel and so I had to dance, on the grass, which was too wet, and then on the boards, until I was out of breath but alive, with a certain clarity of feeling.

I stood over the water and I sang, because it was quiet, and no-one but the bats and the geese could hear me (and anyway I've just got over a cold and have missed most awfully being able to sing), and then I walked home in the dark.

I am tired of walking dead, but at the same time the world seems so exhausting, and I wonder how much energy I can expend to keep the sting in my blood before it wears me down and I go back.