I went to the zoo with Kendel and Ellie today and we had an awesome time even though it was a bazillion degrees outside and I was so sweaty I looked like I peed myself. I got past it though and embraced the fact that I would never see any of these people again so who the hell cares.

After we got back into Salem we went home so I could peel my wet pants off and replace them with some dry ones and then I went out looking for something to wear to my interview. I’m not going to tell you everywhere I went or that when I was at AE trying on size 14 pants, that I was most certain wouldn’t fit, I had a flood of happiness because I was wearing something that fit! I’m not going to tell you all that though, what I will tell you is how much of a dork I am.

I was in the Target dressing room just a mere 30 minutes ago, trying on some khaki pants and this white shirt that was supposed to be baggy but the kind of baggy that only looks good on a super skinny girl, because you know she doesn’t need to wear anything baggy but when she does it just looks super cute. Anyway, I put the pants on, thought they were alright even though the front pockets were doing this funked out thing where it looked like they were trying to leap off the side of my leg, they had cute buttons though, kind of like sailor pants, so I was willing to possibly overlook the pocket problem but my problems were only beginning. The real trouble started with the previously mentioned baggy styled shirt that I was thinking would just kind of be a little more flattering on me considering the fact that I am 6 months pregnant with a dozen cupcakes.

I put the shirt on and right away the cute buttons on the shirt mixed with the cute buttons on the pants are like detail overload and I get the urge to take them both off but then I decide since the dressing room is empty that I will go out and look at myself in the mirror in the hall so I can get a better overall picture of myself. I have been known to only want to wear the same thing over and over so I was willing to get a second mirror opinion and try to be a little more open minded.

I step out of my tiny room where I was only about 12″ from the mirror and I am now about 10 feet from the mirror in the hall. First thing I notice is lumpyness. The shirt fabric is just hanging on every little thing and the pants looked hideous. I tried to laugh off the fact I looked so bad by acting funny and saying Hi I’m fat, can I have a job? all sarcastically to myself but not really to myself because I said it aloud and then I go back into my room and take the outfit off and as I’m putting all the reject clothes back on the hangers I’m saying no, no, no, no and that’s when I hear a lady cough in the room right next to me. I thought I was alone, as if that makes it okay to talk to myself, but I wasn’t and I was being a complete ding dong so I hurried and got out of there so she wouldn’t see my face. Hopefully I at least gave her a good story.

What I realized though is that when no one else is around to cheer me up that I am perfectly willing to step up to the plate an do it, even if it means people think I am insane. At least I’m laughing right?

I normally have a horrendous time shopping but tonight I didn’t. I was buying things that looked good on me right now (well at least more flattering that all my too tight t-shirts that literally show the outline of my last cupcake) and I was feeling good about myself. Who cares if I am bigger than I used to be, I’m still super awesome as I demonstrated tonight in the dressing room.

I just want my body to match my lifestyle, and right now I’m a runner in my soul but not in my real life so I can quit thinking my body should look like a runner’s body and just be who I am right now. I might not even be here tomorrow so I better love myself right this minute and boy I tell ya I do. I’m super happy right now if you can’t tell, it’s probably just some mild mania but I will take it.

Word on the street is that I got a job interview. I applied at Costco a month ago and I just got a call today to schedule an interview which is going to be Tuesday. I’m not sure I would have got an interview on my own since I have no work history for the past 9 years but I happen to know someone who is a manager there and we actually worked together at KFC so he knows I am a good little worker bee.

I have been fumbling around with my life for the past 8 months and I just need a change. I had dreams of running my own business but right now that’s not going to be my number one goal. Right now I just need to do something that is going to make me feel good about myself and I feel that having a job will do that for me, at the least it will supply me with money to pay my bills.

I mean, I have been trying to keep at my own thing but it’s just not working out and I feel like most people look at me and think, um get a job and then you would have money. I mean, it just seems like an easy answer but yet it has taken so much for me to decide to do it. For one I was dead set on not having a real job ever again, you know, just working for myself but since I am lonely and depressed that just is not going so well for me. I just need someone else to be accountable to. I need to shake things up a bit.

I feel like I have been cooped up in a small apartment or house for the past 10 years and I just want out. I want to be out in the world, I want to meet new people, I want to give people service with a cheesy smile and I want to feel connected in some way to something else that isn’t all sad, stale and stinky like my life seems to be. I just want out of my own head!

anyway, thats the scoop for now. I have some juice about my mom but I am much too tired to type it and it seems like it wouldn’t really fit in here, like a side dish of fried chicken when the meal is meatloaf, just too much meat for one meal, it’d upset my stomach for sure.

Yesterday Kendel and I went to the gym in the morning and I left the front window open so the cats could go outside after they woke up and stretched and yadda yadda. Yeah my cats sleep in. Anyway, we get back from the gym and Badger just happens to be in the middle of munching on a bluejay. I was completely grossed out at having to witness this snack.

Badger has the worst gas ever, he can seriously make you go running from the house because you think the strench of his fart is going to soak into your hair and never leave. I know he eats animals, I know he murders on a daily basis. That’s all wonderful but I don’t want to see the dead bodies and I definitely do not want to see the lower half of a bird hanging out of his mouth.

I tried to shoo him out the door but he growled at me. Like I was trying to steal his birdy breakfast from him or something. He didn’t want to go out but I finally got him out and he jumped right back in the window so quick. I think he was more concerned with us knowing that he had caught and was in the middle of eating this bird than he was with just eating the bird in general.

Needless to say I bought a collar with a bell on it for my little murdering baby. I actually really like that Badger is a real cat and is willing to get dirty and kill his own meals. He is an animal after all and it’s nice to see that domestication hasn’t taken everything from him.

I guess that’s what is so lame about conditions of the mind. You want to control them and sometimes you even try to but in the end they are the ones who are controlling you. I like to think that any day now all this madness in my brain is going to just calm down like a pond 5 minutes after someone has thrown a rock into it. I guess my pond is located below a rocky cliff, the rocks just keep tumbling down.

Maybe I am doing something, like screaming at the top of my lungs, which is causing the rocks to rattle and fall but maybe it is just what the rocks were meant to do. I don’t know why I find it so much easier to explain my life in terms of other things but it just is. Right now I am a pond and my water is moving in waves crashing against the rocky edge that surrounds me.

I think about it though. I feel like I want my water to be calm and peaceful but maybe that is boring. Maybe life is all about having waves but just learning how to deal with them. As soon as I think I want something I realize that I don’t. I do think I want my mind to calm down but part of me doesn’t because in all of this craziness I feel like I am really alive and feeling things.

I think I tried too hard to keep my water calm in the past and some sick part of me wants to get back to that but then I remember that it wasn’t a calm happiness, is was a calm madness. Right now I am probably closer to happiness than I think but I will call my current state rapids of change. Change can’t happen without a little bit of crazy splashing.

You know what, now that I think of it some of the coolest people I have ever met have been a little crazy, I think I can make this work for me if I can just kick this infinite sadness that washes over me every other day. That’s easier said than done though I think.

For the past year and a half I have been depressed and I have done a long list of things but none of them have been good. I have said before how embarrassed I am about so many things that have happened this past year but that doesn’t really stop me from sharing them here and I think that says that I don’t plan on being this way forever and also that I am perfectly comfortable taking responsibility for my own failures.

I was trying to think today about the good things I have done since I normally focus on the bad and with each thing I thought about I got a little happier. It also made me realize that if I can change just a few small things about the way I think that I could probably be a lot happier day to day.

I am 28 years old and these are some of the things I am happy and or proud of myself for:

In grade school I got awards all the time because I loved school and I was a ridiculously attentive student but I think the very first thing I am truly proud of myself for is joining the track team in high school. I wasn’t amazing, I didn’t have any friends going into it, I sucked at nearly every event I tried and my parents never came to see me at a meet (my step mom did show up after one once) but I kept at it and I felt good that I did it even though no one else cared. I thought I was awesome. I still think I was awesome. side note here, one of my most embarrassing moments happened when I was on the track team.

embarrassing story: Okay, so the whole track team was crammed into a classroom watching tapes of our first meet and when the 400 meter event comes up I get a little worried because I finished dead last, and when I say dead I mean it. I thought I was going to die. So we are watching the race and at first I am keeping up with everyone but then I start to trail off and I am soon not even in the shot anymore, everyone crosses the line pretty close together and the camera pans back to pick me up and follow me across the line. The fact that my whole team was watching this was bad enough but one of the coaches goes “ooooooh kaaah-moooon!” and proceeds to fast forward the tape, not realizing that person was someone on our team. I almost died and the girls sitting around me who I had made friends with started laughing cause they knew it was me. I was super embarrassed but hey I lived. wow, see how easily I just lost focus there? Back to me talking about how wonderful I am.

The winter before I turned 17 I got my first job and it was at KFC. Lisa totally hooked me up with this one but I had been going out on my own with no help from my parents because I wanted a job so bad. For anyone who knew me then this was huge because I was TERRIBLY shy but I wasn’t about to be broke AND shy. Laycie got her first job and Lisa gets part of the credit! yay!

My next big thing would be graduating high school. I was the first person in my family and the only one in my immediate family. I gave myself a high five for this one!

I got my Associate’s degree from Chemeketa in 2002 and became the only person in my family to have a college degree of some sort. Once again high five!

Okay, I’m starting to feel like a weirdo now so I am just going to quickly rattle off some of the other things I have done that make me feel happy: I learned how to drive a manual and I got my license (even though I was nearly 20 this was a huge event!), I learned how to sell on eBay and then proceeded to sell and sell for many years. I went to WOU for way too many years and even though I have no degree I am still proud of the hard work and good grades I got. I have ran two marathons and a handful of other random road races. I have become a wonderful pet owner, even earning the title of acceptably acceptable cat hoarder of the year, okay I made that title up but hey I deserve it! And it may not seem like it but I AM proud of myself for being able to do what I needed to do after realizing that I wasn’t happy with Michael anymore even though it meant I would be terribly broke and devastatingly lonely… I’m not happy that I haven’t executed the aftermath of that realization too beautifully but I do plan on tying the whole mess up with a pretty green ribbon and that my dears makes me feel alright for now.

My eyebrows are still thinner than I would prefer them to be but unless I want to take the time to invent some magic hair thickening and growing formula which would surely make me rich I will just have to settle with them being what they are, a little over-plucked, or maybe a lot over-plucked, either way I would like to encourage the youth of the world to put down their tweezers and refuse to pluck their eyebrows because after plucking and plucking for years there will be a day when you will want those little hairs back but they will not come and you will cry.

I love to clip my finger nails, I love it more than I can explain but I have never been too fond of filing, you know, with an emery board or whatever. That was until two nights ago when I had a sudden compulsion to file my nails instead of digging around in my random piles of crap to find the silver clippy tool I love so much. So I filed and filed and kept filing and once I got to the point where my nails could not be any shorter without exposing raw flesh I stopped and felt satisfied. I find satisfaction in odd things but it’s just another thing about me that I find so awesome.

I cut about 6″ off my hair the other day and I’m actually a lot more happy about it than I thought I would be when I took the scissors out and did it. I love cutting my hair off, it doesn’t feel as satisfying as plucking out my eyebrows, but it’s pretty damn close.

I must also let you guys know that I am working on one of the most amazing tans ever. First, I have tan knees, yep, just the knees. I know what you must be thinking but it’s seriously going to be the new thing. You just watch. I was in Bend last weekend and Summer said to me “Yeah I knew I was tan when I looked in the mirror naked and saw I was still wearing my bikini” I replied “I knew I was tan when I looked in the mirror naked and I was still wearing a short sleeve shirt and jeans with holes in the knees”.

As always I have A LOT going on in my head and I am working on getting it into some sort of order so I can share it with the Internet. It will be sooner than later, I promise.

I don’t even really know how to word this or form it into some sort of magical story so I am just going to plop it out here. I was at the grocery store today and I started crying. In the store. In front of people. Tears. Pouring.

I was trying to get a grip on myself but you know how when something just hits you so hard that tears just start pouring down your face, yeah that was happening and I was trying to stop it but I couldn’t and then when Kendel looked at me and asked what was wrong I just started crying. Why is it the moment you try to put words to something the real crying starts? I don’t know but when I cry I don’t usually do it in front of other people let alone strangers in a grocery store.

So what got me going was this guy. I saw him when I came into the produce section. He was in a wheel chair. I always try to make a great effort to not stare but I am always curious about disabled people so I was looking at him and I gave him a big smile. He was already smiling but he turned it up a notch for me. I looked down and I noticed that he had both his legs amputated. One was just above the knee and the other was just below the knee.

I don’t know exactly what it was but after he smiled at me and I saw his legs were missing I just felt so bad for him. He was a totally happy looking guy who was pushing not only himself around but also his own shopping cart and there was no one with him. This overwhelming sadness just filled my heart because I realized that all the shit I have going on in my life, all the stuff I think is so huge and so sad and so this or that, is nothing. I really realized standing right there that I have everything to live for and not one single thing to sit and cry about.

I have my legs, I can run and jump. I have everything I need to do anything and a million people would kill to be in my shoes yet somedays I can’t even be bothered to put my shoes on. I just felt so small and vain and ridiculous after I saw this guy. I wanted to hug him and tell him thank you for smiling at me. I truly feel that this small moment in the store today did something huge inside of me.

Even thinking about it again right now makes me want to cry. I just think about the days where I don’t want to leave my house because I feel fat or ugly and I’m all caught up with what everyone is thinking of me and yet here is this guy who people really are going to look at and he’s out there doing his own thing with a huge smile on his face. It really, really made me feel like a pathetic excuse for a person. I was embarrassed for myself.

People just amaze me. I think the strength we all have is so beautiful and sometimes I just can’t even think about it all because it’s just too much and I don’t want to cry all day. I’m going to Bend today and I have been doing my best all week to get my mindset in a positive, happy and open place. I’m not going to let my body issues or anything else get in the way of having fun this weekend and I will do my best to make it continue when I get home.

I read an article this morning about the value of independence and I feel like it kind of shed some light on a few things for me. For one I haven’t really thought about breaking down the different areas of life where a person can be dependent but the article broke it up into financial, social and intellectual. I just globed myself into a pile and told myself I was a dependent little mess.

When I was with Michael I always felt financially independent until I started back to school in the Fall of 2006. I decided not to work and to only study, this made me completely dependent on Michael. I was already socially dependent on him and though I like to think I am and always have been intellectually independent I was easily swayed by his opinions and thoughts.

So that Fall nearly two years ago I lost the last bit of independence I had. It’s weird too because I fought for that independence like it was the last piece of bread on earth and I had a tub of butter hidden in a hole that just needed that bread more than anything. I let go of the bread and just sat by the hole eating butter by the spoonful.

As I said, I knew I was super dependent on Michael but until I read this article I didn’t really realize that I had had one little piece of something that I didn’t rely on anyone else for. I made my own money, it made me feel free and even thought I have never been an amazing budgeter or anything it was something that I never let go of, I never let Michael be in charge of our finances, it was my thing and it was the one piece of control I had in my life. I was the boss of the money.

Michael tried several times to take over our budget but I never let him, I still didn’t really let him when I decided to not work anymore but it all just felt different. There wasn’t anymore power because it wasn’t “my” money. I like to earn my own way and I just felt like I had handed Michael my last little independence coupon and that now he was all powerful and all knowing to my life.

Of course these independence issues are just frosting on a cupcake that was our relationship but they are huge issues in themselves, after all I think most of the calories in a cupcake reside in the frosting. So what I’m trying to get at here is that right now at this moment in time I am finding it hard to muster up the motivation and desire to make money and get myself out of debt hell.

I think it has a lot to do with the fact that right now I am completely alone and don’t have anyone that I have to filter choices through. I’m no longer being carried down the river of dependence while reaching out for a branch to just hold me in place as the water rushes past me threatening to take my shorts with it. I am free to do anything I want and oddly I just don’t feel the need to do anything. It’s like when someone gets an injury and the doctor tells them not to walk for two weeks and suddenly they feel the need to walk everywhere just because they aren’t supposed to. It’s the opposite though, the doctor just told me I can do anything I want in the world and all I can do is sit here in shock.

Even though I am not with Michael anymore I still find myself trying to find someone that will replace him, someone that will control me. It’s so messed up but the thought that I am completely in control now and can do whatever I want is almost crippling.

I thought a lot about the intellectual independence thing too. It’s hard to look at yourself objectively and really see what things are but I feel like I am intellectually independent. I don’t think the same things everyone else does even though there are definitely times I get caught up with thinking the same as other people. I think for the most part I am happy thinking for myself.

I can pinpoint a million times where I didn’t think for myself and when I thought other people’s opinions were my own and its only because after I broke up with Michael I found myself utterly confused and had no idea what opinions were truly mine and what opinions were his that I had latched onto.

It’s really weird and annoying and I have said it before but I will say it again, I feel like a teenager who is just figuring herself out. I feel the same way right now that I did when I was 17 right before I started dating Michael. I feel like because I was at that place when we got together, the place where you are just searching for your place in the world that I let myself fall into his place instead of finding my own. For the most part I was completely fine with that because I wanted to be anywhere but where I was but now I am excited to find my own spot and have a little party there. There will be green balloons on the mailbox, I hope you come.

You can find the article I read over at Scott H Young’s blog.

I am going to Bend this weekend to hang out with my friend Summer and I am very excited. I am excited to see her and her family and to get out of this town, away from this little room I live in. I have had really bad anxiety this whole week and I keep trying to figure out why but I haven’t came up with any solid conclusions.

I think my anxiety is probably do to a nice mash-up of several things, though it always seemingly comes out of nowhere. Like I get up in the morning and it just pops up like hi, it’s me, your worst enemy who is not only going to sit on your chest but who is going to poke you in the eye intermittently also. I was trying to think of a way to describe this feeling the other day, because lord knows all I think about is how to convey every aspect of my life in either a photo or a blog post and all I could come up with is that I feel like I am 5 minutes away from giving a presentation in high school, and I feel like this all day. There never comes that nice moment where I am done and get to sit back down in my desk and watch the other presentations, I am just sitting there all day waiting for my turn with knots in my stomach.

Yeah so there’s that, and while its pretty fun to just feel your thoughts and stresses in a physical manner I am getting tired of it. I haven’t been writing too much because I am struggling with what I do and don’t want to share. On one hand I feel completely okay with just putting it all out there because after all I am just a human like everyone else who reads this and I know I am not the only one who has weird thoughts, or who is going through a tough time but sometimes I just want to get through this all behind a closed door so no one has to know how bad I got.

The other day I wrote about making my sister a cake with rancid oil. um, that’s nasty and I honestly can’t believe I fucking did that but what I really can’t believe is that I shared it with the world. I mean, what the shit? I don’t know what crawls up my ass sometimes but I do and share the most ridiculous things.

If I had made that cake today I would have gone and bought more ingredients if I had the money, but if I hadn’t had the money and I DID decide to just go with it I would not have told the world, I would have let it be my secret because it’s gross and embarrassing. So, besides the fact that I can’t trust myself to write anything here that I’m not going to regret I am just having a problem with just being totally okay with sharing all the stupid shit I am doing or going through right now.

I am so down on myself right now. I do have little windows where I am nice to myself and think that I am doing okay but then I turn the corner and someone has shut the curtains and I am back to beating the crap out of myself. It really sucks being on such a unstable footing or whatever, I just can’t really decide how to feel about anything let alone myself. I don’t know why I hate myself so much but I am trying really hard to get over it.

I have let just about every single thing in my life fall apart. It’s so embarrassing I hate even thinking about it because it just isn’t me. I make all my money off ebay and I accept my payments through paypal. Well, I managed to get my paypal account restricted because I had about 5 complaints in a 2 week time period for non-delivery. Then, I got so many bad comments on ebay that my account got suspended for 30 days. This has never happened to me and I have been selling on ebay for 8 years.

I don’t want to admit any of that, I don’t want to admit that once again every single credit card I have is late and over the limit but it’s the truth, it’s where I’m at and I accept that I put myself here. I have been working my ass of these past few days and trying to just do shit because I need to do it, not because I want to impress someone or have someone pat me on the back or any of the normal shit I do when I am looking for approval or praise because if I haven’t mentioned it, it’s pretty much all I live for.

I have been writing a lot in my journal because I can’t really go a day without writing and I just didn’t trust myself on the blog. Tonight for some reason I just felt the need to sit in my awful desk chair that has a broken height adjuster thing-a-ma jig. I swear everything I own is a broken piece of shit. Anyway, I am already feeling like I shouldn’t share about how I am letting my business run into the ground because I can’t pull my head out of my ass.

I think it’s hard to share how depressed you are when you feel like no one will understand and that everyone is just judging you and wondering when the hell you are going to get a grip on life. It’s funny though because I worry about people judging me yet I keep sharing the embarrassing shit I do and I keep writing and I just keep putting things out into the universe that I think are going to make everyone think I am a loser.

In reality I just think that everyone else is the same as me and I am judging myself, I am wondering when I am going to get a grip and I am sick of listening to my own shit. I was talking to someone the other day about depression though and I was sort of talking about it like I was over it, or had got through it but I haven’t, I am in the middle of it, maybe not the worst I have been but many things in my life just keep getting worse because I haven’t found a certain motivation for living yet.

In a way I feel like I am getting worse. I haven’t had any anxiety attacks like I had before when I was trying to go to sleep but I have just had days filled with the feeling that an attack was going to come. It sucks to just have the feeling of anticipation that you can’t shake and you don’t even know what the hell you are anticipating. Anxiety has really been a weird thing for me because I just think way too much about it, it’s annoying. But as I was saying, I feel that my sadness and hopelessness is just morphing into different things.

Instead of anxiety attacks while I lay in bed trying to sleep, I have no problem falling asleep at all yet I have horrible dreams all night long. I wasn’t remembering any of my dreams for several months and now suddenly I keep having these super vivid dreams where my friends are all telling me off and getting mad at me and it’s just really stressful and doesn’t really help with the negative thoughts I already have about everyone’s perception of me.

I think about so much, I think all day long, my thoughts flow through my head in a perfect narrative like I am reading a book, it’s so annoyingly overwhelming yet completely beautiful at the same time. Sometimes I wish I could shut off my thoughts so I try watching a show or a movie and I just find myself not paying attentions or making a connection with everything I am seeing to my own life. I can’t stop thinking or feeling or trying to figure out what the heck has happened to me in my head.

It’s like I was stuck in this sort of limbo my whole life, not really truly wanting to deal with anything or get to know who I really was but rather just reaching out for some sort of fake life I wanted. I wanted distractions, I wanted to try my hand at being what I thought everyone wanted me to be, I wanted a life that I had made up in my head and labeled “normal”.

Now that I have fallen from the clouds and bruised my ass, I am stumbling all around, knocking shit over and falling into holes and just going on this totally painful dirty adventure. I keep looking up into the clouds and they look fluffy and nice and sometimes I really just want to be back up there but I know I couldn’t survive the fall again and that life on the ground is really much safer.

I feel like this is all so hard for me because I’m not just dealing with losing my first love but I am dealing with EVERYTHING that I had been pushing deep down inside. It’s overwhelming and sometimes I just feel like I am going to die because it all hurts so bad but I just keep telling myself that it will all be okay. Some days I have to say it a lot more than others but I really am trying hard to get through this.

I don’t want to keep up this blog unless I am being honest and just saying what’s on my mind. Some days I write stuff and I am totally just pretending that I am okay and I feel guilty after I post them, like I’m lying to everyone but I just don’t want to be a downer you know. Anyway, thats me for today.