neurological dryer lint

last night i found myself angry and disappointed. allow me to make a computer analogy.

there are times when my desktop system runs great. apps open and perform quickly, our internet connection isn't bogged down... then there are times when thunderbird crashes three or four times in the space of five minutes, my mouse does that stupid double-click-when-i-just-single-clicked thing for hours, my VGA cable to my monitor budges a millimeter and gives my whole screen a blue-green tint, firebird leaves itself open after i close it and eats up 50MB of RAM, itunes takes over my mp3/playlist file types even though i've told it a billion times not to... that's how i felt last night. the bugs and memory leaks and bad coding and security holes and buffer overflows of my life were evident.

i went to bed early so i could get up for my management 396 presentation... and people downstairs playing poker were just silly loud. like normal. that frustrated me a bit. the frustration connected itself to other frustrations i had stuck in the back of my mind. i started thinking about those. i thought about how bad i wanted to get out of clifton, away from the house, how ready i was to move. how my particular phase of life consisting of college life and living with a large group of people had long gone past medium well, and was now effectively burnt to a crisp, a smoking crater of charcoal.

i thought about how young life has been difficult lately. how badly i wanted club to work. how afraid i am that it'll all collapse, and i'll be buried under the dead weight and feel completely responsible.

i thought about how wholly tired and exhausted i am of school. how my brain scrapes its fingernails across the inside of my skull, screaming hoarse with frustration, every time i wake up at 7am to go to class, walk down that aged, worn path to lindner hall. how foolish and pitiful i feel staring at seven years of a jumbled, incoherent trail of classes i'll never remember.

i thought about how badly i just WANTED TO SLEEP, to escape it all. how my mattress made me angry because it felt like concrete. i had been barely able to stay awake all day, thanks to my allergy medicine, and had almost taken two naps, and NOW i couldn't sleep, when i needed to. and it was gasoline on my fire, the insomnia angering me, making it harder and harder to sleep.

i poured out my feelings to God.

i thought about how my interaction with God lately had been lackluster. and i felt like i was trying, but like the two of us were staring at each other, speaking different languages. i was trying to tell God something in english, and he was standing there, saying something back in japanese, and i was just looking at him, trying to comprehend it. even as i told him about everything i was feeling... i felt like God was sitting on a couch, nodding to me, like a psychiatrist.

i tried listening to music. i'll be clear - finding songs or artists that block out loud poker players and at the same time relax you enough to help you sleep, that's frickin hard. dashboard unplugged didn't do it. good call, justin. songs about heartbreak and loss and disappointment. just the medicine you need.

i put on jar of flies. helpful, in that each song represented an aspect of the mood i was in. layne staley provided a far more empathetic an experience than carabba could provide.

i got into bed around 10:45. B came in at 12:30, and shortly after i fell asleep. probably more from giving up than anything else. maybe my head needed to run that gamut. it certainly sucked this morning. thanks, gamut.

dick alexander said last week at clovernook that lack of patience is a symptom of self-centeredness. it was a concept that seemed familiar but had never clicked in my head before. i'm very, very aware of my self-obsession. it bothers me. it bothers me even more when i see the worst ways it plays out. i guess i still have no idea how to overcome it, to make progress. i'm hoping God will. of course that will require some things to happen, some situations that sharpen me. so far, i feel like i've bombed every single one i've had tossed at me.

listening to: alice in chains - brother