hilary's Journal

12:27pm: i've got 30 minutes til class, so i guess i'll update. i've made friends this semester, fairly recently. incidentally, they live right down the hall. incidentally, i developed quite an attraction to a particular guy who lives three doors down, and incidentally we've embarked on some kind of day-by-day relationship that occasionally involves the best sex i've ever had, hands down. aside from being an amazing lover, he's interested in gender studies/is a feminist. we like the same music, we like poetry, and taking night walks. he smokes a lot of pot. he's very shy, and sometimes this is difficult. sometimes we're awkward. sometimes i think he doesn't even like me. but as much as i'd like to have expectations, i'm learning not to, and that's okay.

i took a nice walk last night and realized that i can't wait to start a new chapter of my life, post-graduation, post-kidney transplant. i need a clean break. i want to move far away. i want to lose touch with my family. going home is the most self-destructive thing i can do, hence i've only been home twice since september. i'm absolutely dreading christmas break, and am thinking about spending large amounts of time at dan's apartment, or buying a bus ticket somewhere and just disappearing for four weeks. over christmas break i hope to study anatomy, figure out what i want to do after graduation, write a song, and read catcher in the rye. i've fallen in love with a lot of new (old) music recently and that's been great too!

7:38pm: i am the controller of my destiny! knowing this consistently is important. i want to get some poetry published, and not in the umass journal. i'm gonna get something published for real. i read a lot of poetry for writing classes, and sometimes i'm amazed at what i read, and humbled, and sometimes i'm scratching my head and saying "wow, this does not appeal to me." and it doesn't matter, because something appeals to everyone, and that's what's so beautiful about poetry or about art in general. if you want to shit on a canvas, someone will probably buy it. the trick is to think your poetry is good enough to appeal to anyone at all, or a group of anyones, to be courageous or vain enough to send out a manuscript, to not be so humble that your work just hangs out with dust balls under your bed. so that's that. also, because my kidneys are failing, the inside of my mouth perpetually tastes like metal.

9:57pm: i'm a nice person. i'm social and i make jokes. i have made an attempt to hang out with three people this weekend, and yet i'm sitting here eating cracker jacks and reading the adventures of hucklberry finn. why can't i make any friends here? as in people that want to hang out with me outside of work/class? it seems like once people already have an established group of friends they don't really want to recruit any more, why is that? i think i may not return next semester. that is all.

5:22pm: i need to take a break from taking a break from reading beowulf. i hate stories about dudes getting revenge, dudes doing honorable things, dudes in mead halls, etc. i think all of the reading i'll be doing or attempting to do for british writers this semester will be very dude-centric and tedious. wednesday i am going to make the case to frank that i have add and require medication. i feel like this is a pretty common thing for people to do, so i feel sneaky about it, but i really believe that i have add so i have nothing to feel sneaky about. i also believe that my depression and anxiety stem from this, and that i've been treating the wrong thing all along. basically, i've had a revelation! and, i'm no longer on zoloft! i need some kind of stimulant if i'm going to pass my english courses this semester, because i'm supposed to be reading about two books a week and i can't read for more than five minutes without ending up somewhere else in the room, rumaging through my recycling bin for a receipt i might need, plucking a rogue nose hair, eating half a bag of chocolate chip cookies that i stole from the basement, etc. i also can't follow conversations. i never realize this until i realize i don't remember anything about conversations i've had, and when i'm expected to recall something from a past conversation in, say, a future conversation, i get my facts all fucked up and look like a jerk. i also ask people questions and then don't listen for the answer, apparently, because i ask it two or three times. and i can't even concentrate on things that i enjoy. i can't write, i can't be with a piano for more than fifteen minutes, i struggle through movies, i just feel restless and fidgety and irritable all the time, and i've felt this way for as long as i can remember. i guess i've done some pretty impulsive things that have hurt some people too. all in all pretty tragic, but things are starting to make sense and that's the first step.

in unrelated news, there was a big bubble about to burst in the ceiling of mom's living room, and it finally did. the next time it rains, water will pour into the living room. they don't have a working fridge, so no perishables. jackie also told me in secret that my mom owes the electric company seventeen thousand dollars, if that's even possible. basically i'm sad about all of these things and wondering where my mom will go when she's evicted from a trailer park. i think if i can afford a place after graduation i'll invite her to live with me.

10:25pm: alby came home this morning! after being missing for a month, sweet-little-albany-bean scratched at the back door, looking healthy as ever! my heart simply melts.

also had a good if not somewhat disturbing weekend. went to visit jen's parents in saratoga NY; went hiking, letterboxing, got into a fight with a yellow jacket and lost :( , went to random casino (first time! last time!) and lost eight dollars to machines, watched horses run around a track, watched a polo match until it got rained out, listened to jen's mom try to convince me that horseracing/polo isn't as evil as i know it is, learned that peggy steinway only hires black help "because she can", learned that a horse's birthday is always on january 1st regardless of the date of its birth even though this makes no sense, went to the washington county fair and discovered that my tolerance for even the wimpiest rides is embarassingly low, ate fried dough, totally awesome, swooned over fuzzy-footed muppet chicken, saw pretty vermont mountains in the distance, drank really good-for-you mineral water that tasted like rotten eggs, saw cows being forced into small enclosed spaces to have their udders hooked up to milking machines.








for good measure: rudy taking a break from "sting: broken music"

1:02pm: this pretty much sums up how i feel

7:04pm: not feeling bad for myself anymore. lucky to be getting a kidney.

11:50pm: illicit drugz! i'm having a poor-me moment. because:

-Six months of abstinence are required from illicit drugs or from alcoholism before a kidney transplant will be considered, marijuana included.

(either my doctors are idiots, or i'm not getting a transplant in december after all)

-...invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA), a fungus transmitted in the smoke of marijuana. Aspergillosis has up to a 90% fatality rate if contracted by transplant patients.

AND i guess marijuana weakens your immune system / can react really badly with immunosuppressants. i'm going to be on immunosuppressants for the rest of my life, meaning i'll be more susceptible to everything. in fact, 85% of kidney transplant recipients develop skin cancer within ten years following the transplant. do i really want to increase that risk?

this seems so petty to actually worry about and research, but come on. everyone has one vice. and i hate alcohol. i hate what it does to people, i hate how it tastes, i hate how it smells, i hate how it feels. alcohol is worse than marijuana. it doesn't harm your kidneys or your liver if you're a normally healthy person. sure, i might have short term memory loss (for example, i have no recollection of telling brendan he looks like benjamin franklin, although apparently i did and he was none too pleased), but i don't suffer from addiction, hangovers, any of it. i smoke like four times a month, tops. the prospect of having no vice whatsoever is depressing. someone on a forum said she doesn't feel the need to smoke anymore, because it feels so great to just not pee twice an hour, and that's a high in itself! yeah, really thrilling shit, shoot for the stars.

12:01am: i'm on an internet surf tonite! post number 2:

even though i can't speak to my sister in real life for reasons unknown, i can still read her blog, which consists largely of fashion commentary and whatnot. she posted tonight about her boyfriend, and how he's in some nazi army training camp for five months and apparently if he receives letters or pictures from her, they can be seized and read to the entire group of army doods (MAD embarassing!) and he can be made to do push ups and stuff, you know, for being a fuckin' pussy! gay or straight, you can't win in the army!
gotta love that masculine code of honor. emotions might interfere with that blind aggression or drive to kill, or whatever it is they're trying to foster that's at odds with a letter from your girlfriend. it reminds of "the little rascals", when alfalfa's caught kissing lola (?) and he's exhiled from the he-man she-haters club. GO ARMY!

11:12pm: "chup chup chup"
life is funny. this is too: http://perezhilton.com/2009-08-11-what-is-the-point-to-this-doll

shea ran his finger across the blade of my new razor, because he "didn't know what it was." well, he knows what it is now, cuz he just got back from the emergency room. kids do the darndest things! honestly though, i felt awful, just awful. i hate to say that i've chosen a favorite, but shea is my little buddy. sometimes he'll just hug me and say "you're mine!" or "um...hiw-awee? wuv you!" or "are you allergic to bearded dragons?" he's very considerate like that. his shoes are perpetually on the wrong feet. he consistently manages to say things that are unintentionally beautiful. in fact, listening to the worldly observations of this particular five year old, i often hear beautiful things because they're not trying to be anything but what they are. shea will pretend to be a fly but never a butterfly, because "butterflies are too beautiful." in subway last week, he randomly confessed, "i hope you're always you and i'm always me, forever." me too. i need to meet more people who can cosign that. but it's a dangerous thing to hope for, especially when most people don't feel that way, at least not forever. did i mention i never want to be in a relationship again?

also, the harp sounds beautiful even if you don't know what the hell you're doing. my kind of instrument! additionally, i've just applied to volunteer at the everywomen's center to be an educator advocate to come into your lecture hall and brock you about your gender biases. lastly, in twenty four hours i'll be huddled in blankets on the beach, beneath shooting stars that will be visible hopefully, eating some kind of comfort food and smoking a bowl with my friends. that's all.

4:42pm: matt and i have mutually decided to cease our relationship, at least for the time being. you know what that means!!!! yeah, me neither. after shedding some tears, he said, "we've had some good times." why do people say shit like that? why not create the illusion that we're not letting go of anything at all?

9:19pm: my dad just randomly walked into my room to give me an eskimo pie. there's a $3,000 brand new harp in the computer room. jen's renting it. it'll be there for a while. i can use it sometimes. this is an ice cream eskimo pie, i should mention, and it just fell on the keyboard.

1:55pm: there is something toxic about carver massachusetts. this toxic something makes you want to sleep all day and eat all three meals from the pastry case at 711. dan and i explored this strange phenomenon last night while driving around aimlessly (and making a pitstop at 711) listening to music at one in the morning. almost every single place in carver has attached itself to some memory that is crappy in retrospect. it's like the twilight zone. thank god we got the hell out! we also contemplated the phrases "get shitfaced" and, especially, "get shitty." then i drove back to easton at 2am singing at the top of my lungs. jackie still hates me, for reasons i've become hip to, and man, is she ridiculous. it's just comical and routine now: i walk in the door, she sees me, sighs, goes in her room and slams the door like a five year old, then i roll my eyes.

the summer has been really good. i've been to the beach more in the past month than i've been in the last five years collectively. i have some hint of color in my legs and face! and the zoloft withdrawal is going well. i'm more lucid and happy and feeling.

9:39pm: My Day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i go to the beach with jen and the boys. i body surf with ryan and we have a swell time, despite the seaweed. there is something about diving into waves, letting them slam into the back of your head, and swallowing mouthfuls of salt water and other people's piss that is so gratifying and so renewing. it's one of those things i can't put into words. it sounds silly, but i feel like it brings me back to some primal state and i just never want to leave. but when i do leave, i have to stop at the bathroom to pick the seaweed out of my ass. the little sea bug slug fucks that were biting me in the ocean are under my bathing suit and in the vicinity of my vagina; my life flashes before my eyes, truly. on the way home the boys are acting up and being annoying, and when one of them asks if we can play at the mcdonald's playhouse, jen responds, "how about i kill you?" but jen is a good mom, and i'm relieved that it's acceptable to say things like this to your children, because that's the kind of mom i'll be if i'm ever a mom. i go home and get ready to go work. i accidentally overcharge an old lady for a pizza and i think about it and feel bad for the rest of my shift. then i wonder if i would feel this bad if the lady weren't old. when i'm an old lady, will i get agitated at patronizing young people who pity my age? i don't know. i receive a paycheck in the amount of forty six dollars. this makes me sad. i think: hilliard's is having a fudge sale this week, and i wanted to buy some panucci for my mom, but now i probably shouldn't do it. i stop at the atm to deposit my check. the deposit goes smoothly. my car breaks down in front of "hot bodeez" tanning salon. i open my hood and tap the little thing my dad told me to tap when my car breaks down, like it did last week. the tapping does nothing except burn my finger because the thing i tap is hot. i sit for a while and watch girls go in and out of hot bodeez. i can't get inside their heads. the storefront window of hot bodeez bears a depiction of a computer animated city, so you can't see through the window and into hot bodeez. in the sky above the computer animated city there are planets. i think, matt would call this "cyber punk." i don't see the connection to tanning. it just looks fucking awful. without a car, how will i go to work tomorrow and sunday? how will i go to dan's birthday party? i look at my phone. matt hasn't called. we've agreed to not talk on the phone every night because we get on each other's nerves. is that normal, are we a normal couple? he hasn't responded to my email either. the email is a song i like, and i want to know if he likes it too. i just want to find one song that we can love the shit out of together. i have a big painful sunburn on my back. it looks like i went to hot bodeez with a stencil of an amorphous blob on my back. jen picks me up at hot bodeez. i take a cool shower. i wear phil's shirt to bed tonight. i thought i had lost this shirt, but i found out my mom has been wearing it, this bright yellow shirt with "da blankman" printed across the back. i wonder how phil's doing. i take my fish oil pills. the bottle says: "no fish burps." yuck. i feel lonely. i think brianne is on a cruise right now. i'm glad about this because brianne works her ass off. i watch "the house of yes" with parker posey. matt told me yesterday that i look like parker posey. i disagree.

9:09pm: i'm not going to be PC: the people at my new job treat me like i'm retarded. probably because i'm not good on register yet, but that's probably because they give me six hours a week. furthermore, in my humble opinion, there are just too many menu options.

and, relationships are hard. when i express my feelings and concerns, i'm actually being emotionally abusive, and matt is emotionally autistic for months until he explodes on me with all kinds of things i didn't know were wrong. he feels like i don't want him in my life. i feel like he doesn't want me in his life. we both need to spend more time with other friends, and we need to make more mutual friends. i haven't orgasmed in two months and i regularly wake up in the middle of the night humping my bed. but it's love! c'est la vie!

9:08pm: make money money money
just got a job where i get to wear an XXL red sox shirt and a red sox baseball cap. i'm so tired of being broke. i get paid to babysit the kids sometimes but not often enough. the kids are nice. the youngest (6) asks me to spank him pretty often, which is concerning, and he says things like "mommy, what would you look like if you had no skin?" but he's so adorable. i'm pretty sure he'll be a serial killer.

i'm getting a new kidney in december, but i wish it was sooner. i'm down to 102 pounds and i pee four times a night. not cool. jackie hates my guts and i don't know why, nor do i really care at this point..it's just annoying to not be welcome in your own home and to not understand why when you walk in the door your sister hides in her bedroom like you have the plague. brad and i have gotten closer though. my little brother is actually pretty funny.

matt and i have been together for a year. yay! today we drove by plymouth rock and he yelled out to all the tourists: "IT'S JUST A ROCK, SERIOUSLY, YOU'RE WASTING YOUR TIME!" one of my favorite things about him is that he yells at pedestrians.

5:53pm: vent:
i'm really mad right now. i plan on dedicating this summer to getting off of zoloft because strangely enough i want to feel emotions again. and in anticipation of this i've told matt that i want to be relatively alone for the summer because i know i'm going to be a psychotic superbitch. he told me a long time ago that he wanted to be with me even if i become a psychotic superbitch, but when i decreased my dose for one weekend, he couldn't handle it, told me i was acting crazy when i had random crying spells, and made me feel all around embarassed and crappy. he basically confirmed for me my long held suspicion that i'm unlovable when i'm not on pills, which is something that was driven into my head after dave rightfully left me for being cruel and insane and horrible. i'm petrified that i will revert to that (and if i do i want to work on it without meds), and i don't want matt to have to experience that, and he doesn't understand it, and is instead making it out to seem like i want to leave him and i'm trying to hurt him, when if anything i'm doing it in the interest of saving our relationship. he called me this afternoon to tell me he got three hours of sleep last night and he ended up taking six tylenol pm, that i don't understand how depressed he'll be, and this is the exact kind of dramatic immature bullshit that i do not need. i need to be encouraged to do this, i don't need a guilt trip. and i don't like the sort of dependency he has on me. he needs to give himself more credit.

10:10pm: sometimes i like life so very much. this weekend i got a professional massage for my birthday, from and with matt. there is nothing better than having your back prodded to new age music in a northampton basement. then we went to a party with a six foot sub and i got really stoned with ace and some music theory nerd who played the piano ridiculously well, then i blew off work the following morning and went to a nice book sale. last night i dreampt that i performed in a broadway musical with meryl streep, and tonight i read two poems to a semi substantial crowd because these poems were published in the umass literary journal. at 8:16 tomorrow morning i will have been on earth for twenty two years. so, that's what's going on.

9:59pm: i'm always happy to eavesdrop on other people's conversations when they're sitting directly across from me, saying really stupid shit like "dude i heard brian got those girls to whip out their titties" / "no dude, i got them to whip out their titties, cuz i was like, i wanna see titties!"

first of all, how does one whip out a titty? second of all, i love how the second guy had to get credit for the fact that he was the one who initiated said titty whipping. third of all, in what world do these fucking people live?

5:55pm: i had a good weekend. living with three young boys has made my dad realize that he's been a shitty father for the past 20 years of my life, which he finally acknowledged today and which really surprised me. so now he's stepping up to the plate. i spent easter at his house...i was nervous about the kids because i'm never around kids and i don't know how to interact with them. but they basically attacked me with hugs and candy and stuffed animals and it was really adorable and heart warming.

also something really great happened on thursday. ashley knows the executive director at financial aid services, and she lifted my balance and the hold on my account so i can register for fall classes. she also got rid of an unsubsidized loan. she essentially gave me six hundred dollars from random funds, effectively removing the stick that was up my ass for two weeks because of money related stress. hooray!

4:17pm: what a stressful week! i broke down crying in two public places this week. i won't graduate on time, i owe the university money, the university is auditing my financial aid (thank god there's a university IRS to keep an eye on poor kids who might want to take advantage of the system and not pay 19,000 dollars for a degree from a public institution), they need my tax returns and i haven't even gotten my w2s from a certain soft pretzel franchise, etc etc. yesterday i had decided to attend community college closer to home for a semester to catch up and save money, then when i went to write ashley a message saying i won't be able to live with her in the fall, i received a message from her saying she can't wait to room with me again. it made me sad. i miss ashley. i miss her throwing m&ms at me and waking me up five minutes after i've fallen asleep to talk about blowjobs. i miss her asking me how to spell words like "their."
i think i'll hold off on decision making until i actually receive my financial aid results. i have this love hate relationship with amherst and this love hate relationship with my family, and i rarely know where i want to be for more than a few minutes. i do know that umass spends $500,000 a year on its baseball team, and that is fucked up.

7:39pm: i lied, college doesn't totally suck. it sucks after you've been home for a week eating brownies, sleeping til twelve, walking in the woods and talking to cats. i can tolerate home a bit more now because my mom finally kicked her sleazy boyfriend out, after revealing that he had severe marijuana and porn addictions and that when he sat in his living room chair on his laptop all day, with the rest of us in the room, he was secretly watching porn on mute. what a guy.

on our way back from loren's last weekend matt and i encountered a sobriety checkpoint past one in the morning. every car was stopped. it was really invasive, especially because matt had drank and i had smoked, albeit a few hours before. i was the designated driver, and i played it cool when the cop stuck his flashlight in my face, but i was secretly watching my night in jail unfold before my eyes. the point is that sobriety checkpoints are a terrible, scary idea, and it frightens me that they're legal.

walking in the woods is nice. over break i discovered all kinds of paths in the woods behind the park, with little bodies of water and little abandoned camps littered with clothes and couches and needles and cassette tapes. even an abandoned, rotted bus. i also discovered when i was home that i'll need a kidney transplant sooner than expected, in the next year or two, which is actually a very relieving prospect. my first order of business after the transplant will be to go one hour without peeing.

10:50pm: college sucks
college sucks.

3:07pm: (some reflections before my four hour shift shoveling beef onto the plates of many)

i've found that through spending small increments of time in the fine arts center, i've greatly improved my ability to improvise (piano). i can't read music yet (learning) and i don't know anything too technical, but if i sit down and i feel confident i can produce something, even if it is mediocre. on the other hand, if i feel intimidated it turns out rubbish. this probably makes ordinary sense, but i find it really interesting.

my creative writing professor wrote us letters about our work so far and i'm very happy with mine. he said i've written some "outstanding" (cryptic) poetry and it's hard for him to be too critical (hooray!), but he suggested i might want to be more vulnerable in my writing as far as what i reveal. he also told me he delivers pizza two days a week, though not in the letter. i have a small crush on him.

i've noticed that lunch ladies are forced to wear hideous shirts that are covered in depictions of fruit. maybe i'm thinking too hard about it, but why? and why don't any of the guys wear them? can you imagine how weird it would be to see an employee wearing a shirt covered in pictures of meat?

7:57pm: plans
i'm going to be living with my dad at his girlfriend's house this summer. i was going to stay in amherst with matt but i've decided one summer in amherst is enough. i've decided i need to try to salvage some particular friendships. i've been dreaming a lot about being with old friends, and these dreams make me so happy and so sad at the same time. i want to pursue that free feeling again, that closeness. i want to allow myself an unprecedented amount of fun this summer. i'm not sure how often matt and i will see each other, but i'm optimistic. this weekend we prank called almost every member of my family with bill murray/arnold soundboards. dwain stayed on the phone with arnold for ten whole minutes.


i can't wait to be done with this tedious want-to-pull-my-hair-out thing because of having a rigid schedule of things i don't particularly want to do. having a schedule at all is kind of upsetting, knowing everything that will happen in a day before the day happens. today only two things happened that i did not predict. i saw loren at the dc, and i was also led by fate to the only bathroom stall that was covered in poop.