Contemplations

Yay!  I’ve been so good at updating lately!  I am so very proud of myself.

Yesterday I went back through a lot of my old diary entries.  I love seeing how far I’ve come in the last few years.  I used to be so… unhappy.  I also think that I accidentally exaggerated with my regression– yes, I did go back to the maturity and stability of my junior-high self, but it did not last very long.  I was mostly stuck in that late-high school place.  And I can easily say that I’m out of my regression.

Mark’s parents are being weird.  They do not want him moving into the house with Bryan, Bobby, and me.  Mostly it seems as if it’s one of those "because I say so" reasons.  They don’t have a lot of logic behind it.  They also will not believe that it will be cheaper than living in the dorms (even after viewing the numbers that Bryan and I crunched).  They just…  *sigh*  I guess it’s time to go roommate hunting again.  At least this time it’s not just Bryan and me.  Bobby is definitely going to make it.  But it’s a lot easier to split rent four (or five) ways than just three.  And we might not be able to get a three bedroom house for our price range– we’d probably get an apartment.

Be warned: lots of non sequiturs ahead.  I have been listening to quite a bit of YouTube in the last few hours.  All of it Johnny Cash.  I’d forgotten how much I love Johnny Cash.  I haven’t listened to him in a long time, and also don’t have any of his albums stored on my computer.  I ran across the song "One," which I have never heard before.  I don’t know how that happened!  It is a FANTASTIC song!  U2 also has a pretty decent cover of this song.  I love YouTube.  It gets my music-which-isn’t-on-my-computer fix fixed, without resorting to tons of illegal downloading.  (Note:  I’m not against illegal downloading, but it is very much not an option while using the University’s internet, which I am.)

I’m going to my third Guide Dogs puppy raiser meeting tonight.  Hopefully I’ll remember to bring my camera and get some pictures!  Hopefully Lisa will be okay with me taking pictures and talking about it a bit.  I know that Guide Dogs goes to great lengths to keep their puppy raising manual out of the public’s hands.  Maybe they do not like their puppies or their training methods photographed?  I actually know that the first is untrue– they love pictures of their puppies, especially to give to the blind people that get the dogs if they graduate.  (Mostly for the blind person’s family, I assume; or those who are just visually impaired and not 100% blind.)

There is this boy named Brandon in my Foundations of Analysis class.  He is definitely a smarty pants and pretty cute in that really "I’m an awkward semi-Indie boy nerd who is a math major" sort of way.  I mention this not for myself, but because when Sarah asked me if I knew anyone cute that she would like, he immediately popped into my head.  Now I’m doing that Addie thing where when I think someone will be a cute couple I stop at no lengths to make it work!  Buahahaha!  Actually, I’m kind of hoping that I won’t get carried away with this one…  Just introduce them to eachother and then back off.  That’s right, Addie.  Back off.  Good Addie.  Good.

Have I ever mentioned that I absolutely love turning over pages on my calendar?  I always get really really excited and happy to have a new picture up!  Yes, I go through the pictures as soon as I get the calendar.  I also often am turning ahead to mark future events, holidays, birthdays, meetings, deadlines, tests, and all of that jazz.  It’s still very exciting to get a new picture on my wall.  This month’s is particularly exciting– it’s this girl with fairies and dragons playing in her hair.  It’s so pretty!  I can’t find a copy of the picture online, so you’ll just have to believe me.  It’s a picture by an artist who goes by Ciruelo.  He does a lot of dragon things (I always have a dragon calendar, and it’s often by him because he dominates that particular market quite a bit).  He’s not the best dragon artist; some of his stuff is pretty kitschy, but his attention to detail is fantastic.  He also is really creative in how his dragons interact with their environments.  I like him a bunch.

I checked Facebook today.  (Rare, I know.)  I had written a note a little while ago which discussed how I’m planning on phasing my dad’s last name out of my own.  (I currently have two last names– my mom’s and my dad’s.)  Stephen’s mom (who writes to his friends a lot on Facebook, but it’s not creepy, because we all really just treat her as part of the gang) offered to get Bryce (her husband) to help me with the name change.  I wonder if it would cost less to have a lawyer help me out with it (for he is a lawyer; they both are) or if I’d still have to pay the court fees.  Curse Utah’s needing a court proceeding to change one’s name– it’s expensive, damnit!

By the way, I used a lot of parenthetical statements in that last paragraph.  Huh.

I keep listening to the song One over and over and over again.  Wow, it’s fantastic!  Wow Wow Wow!

Also, I don’t know if any of y’all have run across this website, but it is pretty great:  CuteOverload.com  It is pretty much exactly how it sounds.  A bunch of cute animal pictures.  I recommend clicking on the link that shows only hedgehog pictures and looking at those.  They’re definitely the cutest of the bunch, in my humble opinion.  Also, if you can find the video of the kittens on the roomba, that is maybe the cutest thing on the internet that I have ever seen.

I’m so excited to get a cuddly puppy.

Any of you who remember me from around my 18th birthday (almost two years ago, Jesus!) will recall that I really wanted to get a tattoo for my birthday.  Just to symbolize my independence, strength, growth into an adult, and all of that.  I wanted to time it with my graduation and moving out of my parents’ house and everything, but it just didn’t work out.  I couldn’t find any particular image that I would want permanantly on my body.  I still really want one, to symbolize the same things, but also a healing.  Strength to recover from the wounds that others have inflicted upon us.  And the wounds that we’ve inflicted upon ourselves.

I’ve been thinking about Peter a lot, lately.  Sometimes I still don’t feel as if I get to identify with rape victims for that.  It’s not like he hurt me or touched me or anything–  It was just the threat of it, and it screwed me up so much more than I expected at the time.  It ruined any chances of a relationship I had with Kevin.  It ruined a lot of my ability to have intimate contact with people.  This is something Bryan and I have worked very hard to overcome.  About 90% of the time I can get through an entire intimate session without having any sort of breakdown or dissociation or anything.  That 10% is still awfully hard, but it’s a lot better than breaking down the 95% of the time that I used to.

I love that boy.

When I was going through the archives of my diary, I found a lot of references to Bryan as we were becoming friends.  It’s so funny.  I didn’t want to date him SO MUCH.  I think I knew that at that point I really couldn’t handle a serious relationship, and if I tried, I’d really just end up hurting the other person.  Like with Kevin.  I needed something superficial and temporary.  So I continually said no.  And no.  And no.  And then there was that one day that I said yes.  And we’ve been together ever since.  It’s over a year and a half, now, and we are so… perfect.

But anyway, more to the point, I wanted to mention a specific diary entry called "Warning Labels" that I wrote on the 16th of November of 2006.  (You can go back and read it if you want.  Just be warned: it’s pretty angsty and unhappy.)  When Catie and I broke up, she asked what I would put on her warning label, for the next person that came along.  She got me started on the idea of warning labels.  I always imagine something like a shirt tag growing out of each of our necks.  And I thought a lot today of what I would put on my warning label now.  Most of the things from the last entry are no longer true.  At all.

Without further ado, I bring you my warning label:

WARNING:
 
*Spontaneous outbreaks are loud, startling, and colorful
*Brain-to-mouth filter malfunctions frequently
*Thinks very highly of self, sometimes to a fault
*Is easily distracted by shiny things and young, furry mammals
*Puppy eyes are very convincing
*Uses rose-colored glasses to excess
*Enthusiastic hugs and consequent invasion of personal space may occur at any time.

So there you go.  Now I just need to figure out how to attach this to the base of my neck…