Dorienne's Log

I’ve discovered a new reverence for hurricanes in general over the past week. In fact, it’s almost beyond normal “reverence” and falls into the OCD category and, once I realized this, I quickly switched my focus back on writing lest I discover that my newest life calling is meteorology. This obvious follows in Hurricane Ike’s wake, which still disturbs and intrigues me days later.

With spending as much time in Ohio as I have, I’ve grown completely apathetic to most storms. Tornadoes: meh, I live in an urban area so there’s no reason to really fear them *knocks on wood* Nor’easters: Don’t live in MA anymore so nothing to fear there and quite frankly, I love the idea of several feet of snow and forced solitude. Hurricanes: meh, that’s something that happens to people who live in the south and if they don’t heed the thousands of warnings to evacuate, they deserve what happens to them…or so I thought.

After Katrina, my view on people who “ride out the storm” did a complete 180 as I realized that many people simply haven’t got a place to evacuate. I know what finally drove that home for me, too. There was an image I believe on Time or Newsweek of these two women, one younger, one much older, in the midst of half a mile of floodwater as a rescue copter tries to rescue them. The younger women has one hand stretched toward the helicopter, but her other arm is wrapped around the elderly woman and the younger was is clearly screaming. It takes you a minute of looking at this image to understand the reason behind the younger woman’s scream; the elderly woman, most likely a relative, was dead and there was no way she could simply leave her body to the still rising waters. It was a very sobering image and it was more than anything that changed the way I viewed hurricanes and the people who were not simply “riding out the storm,” but were left behind to see if they could survive the storm. Ike, like Katrina, has taught me something about myself and also changed the way I view the world.

Of all the places in the world I could have imagined as being safe from a hurricane, as of Saturday September 13th, I would have put Ohio at the top of that list and yet after the fact, I’m not sure what still bothers me most: the idea that we had a low-level hurricane, my reactions during said natural occurrence or the fact that there are people who suffered a thousand times worse than me and still must figure out how to pick up their lives after this.

I’d been reading about Ike for days on the BBC (no, I still haven’t learned my lesson) and had even said a short prayer for those who were suffering under the weight of the storm before I’d gone to church Sunday morning. When I got home, however, and began my traditional Sunday ritual of procrastination, I was first bothered and then truly scared to hear the wind howling outside my window. I kept looking through the blinds asking myself “Should I take cover or something?” because of the way the trees were bending and, the real coup d’état, the way the walls of the apartment began to shaking under the pressure of the wind. There is something behind the realization that the building in which you sit could possibly collapse that is more unnerving than seeing swirling clouds against a red sky in the distance. Perhaps if there’d been some rain, I’d have been able to categorized all that wind as simply a normal storm, but without rain, there did not seem to be an explanation. There was only wind and, because I live in Ohio and the idea that a hurricane could ever possibly come across land and reach my midwestern state seemed utterly laughable a week ago, I had no choice but to fear the unknown.

I find myself rather intrigued over how I react to fear. Mostly, I counter it with denial until I receive utmost proof that something is wrong, ie: the power went out and I was forced to react instead of simply ignore. That phrase I always repeat to myself “Well, surely…” tries to disguise the denial, but that’s all it really is. Well, surely the building won’t collapse. Well, surely there’s nothing really wrong. Well, surely this must be just some random wind. When the power went, I knew that surely I’d been sitting in denial just keep myself from losing the proverbial “it.”

What was also fascinating about myself was the actual reaction to a lack of power. My first reaction…my first and only preoccupation was finding an internet connection. I stood in my bedroom for about two minutes staring at the clock as I finally conceded that the power was gone and was not just flickering and then I packed up my laptop to find someplace with WiFi. I didn’t think about getting provisions or making sure that when I returned I could find a flashlight and find my way around the apartment; just finding an internet connection. My mother has been saying for years that I have an addiction to the Internet, but Sunday was the first time I’d lent any credence to the idea. Even when I got to Panera and was able to log into this and that, I didn’t actually use it. It was almost as if the idea that the world was at my fingertips should I need any information that kept me sane.

After I got thrown out of Panera, I made another observation about myself. I had two choices in front of me. On the one hand, I had my cell phone, my own communication device and source of help should I find myself in an emergency and then I had my iPod which plays music and my Futurama episodes. I was down to one bar on my phone and yet, video on the iPod took up a lot of power, so I needed a source of power. The plan was to charge my iPod while I went to the movies and charge my phone overnight so I could have my iPod entertain me whilest the power was gone. Instead of choosing to ensure I had a means to find rescue in an emergency, I chose my iPod and its many playlists. When I realized the stupidity of this decision, I went into a complete state of denial thinking about the music I would later put on my phone to avoid the problem in the future as I went into Walmart to get car chargers for my phone and iPod.

Once in Walmart, the evening became a really interesting glimpse into how low mankind has gone as a society. Aside from the fact that people suddenly could not drive now that they had no traffic lights to tell them to do anything, the crowds in Walmart made no sense to the normal flow of things. The store was vaguely populated for a Sunday night, but that was to be expected considering the number of people with nothing better to do, but the amount of people in the electronics area defied all logic. There actually people standing in the aisles staring at random nature programs/or just an escalated screen saver that was playing on the televisions that were lined around the Wii games and DVDs. This one guy was just standing there and staring at the screen as if he’d never seen television before. Society has fallen to such a low that when the power goes out, we seek out the closest avenues that will bring us television, or simply electronics and the Internet in my case.

Normally, I pride myself as being above the rest of society in only turning on my television once a week to watch SVU during the season and never even knowing when the remote control is during the summer re-runs, but even I fit the bill of the doomed society when I could have easily lost my mind if I hadn’t found an internet connection as quickly as I could. Lord knows what we’ll all do once nuclear war hits and there’s no cable at all!

The most distressing thing out of this entire mess, however, is the damage a hurricane could create in a place not accustomed to receiving them. The tropics are used to having the crap slapped out of them every summer and early Fall, but Ohio was just not built to withstand that kind of thing except in the short bursts of a tornado. It was just too much for me and the rest of the city to take and understand and it was too much for our facilities and trees to take. Some areas were without power until Thursday afternoon and I shudder when I think about in what kind of shape I would be if I were one of those people.

My heart goes out to all the people in Haiti and Texas who have been battered by hurricanes this season. When something like this happens every single year, I know I at least, tend to get apathetic and forget all that I take for granted. This is evening/morning was the first time I’ve had Internet at my fingertips in the comfort of my own home and I’m amazed at how I’ve fared this long. I wish I could see I won’t fall into the trap of apathy and forgetfulness when it comes to this storm, but hopefully the feel of my walls shaking under duress will keep me in check when I’m thinking about how “bad” things are getting in my life.

I’ve been in a weird place mentally these past few days. I’ll say mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Most of this I’ll attribute to the fact that the book is done and I’m trying to remember who I was and what I did before delving so wholly into the book. A week later, it is still difficult. I’ve got about nine or ten beta readers and now I’m just playing the waiting game and resisting the urge to PM, IM or e-mail every single one of them everyday just to see how it is going. Perhaps so much of my psyche is being spent trying to keep that OCD down that everything else is coming out that would normally be held in check.

I told one of my students to “shut up” after she said a sardonic comment. It was meant in good fun and she laughed about it, but I’m still shocked that it came out like that. I hadn’t meant to say it, but it just fell out and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Yesterday, I said something else that was pretty mean without even thinking about it. Again, it just fell out before I could stop myself.

Maybe my “body, mind and soul” are all in recovery after the book. I have handwritten two previous to this one, but neither was anywhere near the length of Flight and I completed them over the course of several years. This time around I wrote nearly 400K words in close to eight months. This last month took a lot out of me and I am still stewing in the consequences. It even threw me off cycle, which had been going like clockwork…

Life slowly, but surely falling back into a place, yet every once in a while I find myself asking “Well, now what do I do?” I suppose it will all work out in the end, but I hope that I can get through this lull without anymore not-so-Christian outbursts.

I’ve just now finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, almost exactly 48 hours after getting it from the very same Barnes and Noble where I purchased Order of the Phoenix a month and four years ago. I think I should be feeling like something truly significant has happened in my life, having completed the entire series, yet I feel more or less, like I do after reading any other book. It was a good read, though I found some errors: they misspelled Hermione’s middle name and there was a randomly capitalized word somewhere in the later chapters. The ending and epilogue did come across as a bit trite, but I liked it, though I’m not sure if I liked it more because the whole thing was over, than enjoying the writing in general. I think I am just satisfied having the plot revealed to me as I read instead of learning about the ending from television or the internet or from some miscreant shouting out the ending to me.

What got me writing however, was not the subject of Harry, but something fascinating that I realized about myself over these past 48 hours: in just two years, I’ve become an utterly different person. It’s astounding really, that I could still be me, yet so different at the same time. Two years ago, Harry Potter was my world and I spent many hours of my day, devoted to something Potteresque whether I was commenting on Potter forums or simply reading the books. I was always doing something relating to Harry Potter. Book 6 changed this. I was so frustrated by what I read that at one point I actually threw the book across the room. Many, and I do mean many, of those same frustrations came about in Book 7, however, there was no anger, real anger associated with them. I just sort of rolled my eyes and kept on reading. I give all this change to Jesus. As an obsessive-compulsive, I had placed so much “faith” in Ms. Rowling’s abilities that, had I remained so OCD over HP as I was two years ago, at this point, I would be ready to collapse, having nothing to ease me from my compulsions. I would be sitting here like, “well, now what do I do.” God, knows me, and knows when it’s time to move me along from one thing to another. Now, more or less, it’s all on him.

I made a decision today that showed just how much I had changed. Actually, I’ve made several this weekend, but today’s was the most…beneficial, I suppose. There was a four o’clock service today at church and I had a choice: I could either go, the way my heart was telling me I should, or I could just go home and read Book 7 all day. I went back to church and I made the right decision. I’m glad I did too, but I’m still just so amazed by how different I’ve become. The obsession is over and I, for the first time in my life, feel like a young adult instead of an overgrown adolescent.

…she’s forever wrong about Ron and Hermione though…

So, every once in a while I hit this sort of event horizon in my own psyche, and it always floors me. Tonight, I’ve been sitting here at four o’clock in the morning and three obsessions have sort of cascaded over one another. I’m simultaneously watching The X-Files, looking for Sailor Moon episodes on eBay and Amazon just to have while writing my SVU fanfiction novel. It’s amazing…

But, more importantly: I took a call tonight and the customer was this woman whose mother had died and computer had crashed, both on the same day, and she was telling me how, when in times of crises such as family loss, I should never make major purchases because one’s mind is clearly in a right state. At her mother’s funeral, people had convinced her to buy a Mac and proof that she was in a bad place was that she actually went ahead and bought one. Of course, she needed it for a business purpose and Macs are crap in generally anyway and the thing didn’t work. So, she was disputing the charges and what not, but the call stuck with me for the rest of the night. She was so clearly still trying to get herself stable after everything that had happened and I can remember her saying she wished she had someone there with her to help her through this, even her ex-husband. All I wanted to shout was, “Go to church! Find absolution through Christ!” but I didn’t say it. I didn’t even hint at it and now, I feel terrible. I rationalize this to myself, saying that I could have penalized at work because I revealing a religious preference and she could have been offended by the suggestion. All this not withstanding, I still feel terrible. I wanted to cry with her and tell her how she shouldn’t feel so bad if she went to church…but, I didn’t. I guess I can only know pray about it and hope for the best, but I still feel bad about it.

**Sigh***
Finally! Back where I belong and everything’s falling into place. For the first time in months, my outlook does not look so bleak. I’m doing what I should be doing and at the end of this quarter, I’ll be taking a long-awaited and long-deserved break. Of course, I’ll still be working, but at least I won’t be working and in school at the same time for a week.

I feel like this over-bearing weight is every-so-lightly lifting off my shoulders day by day, and I really do think that everything will be all right. I attribute 90% of this to going to church this week and making it to Sunday School on time. Everyone was so surprised to see me there, not racing in just before consecration. I start teaching on my own this Sunday and I’m really excited about it. I hope it’s not boring for everybody. I suppose if it doesn’t work out, they’ll either move me somewhere else or fire me altogether, but I’m hoping I don’t let anyone down on this. There’s a Wednesday night service tomorrow and I really can’t wait. I’m half mad since I didn’t get to put my tithes in on Sunday because I completely forgot about it. Usually I just have Mother throw it in for me, but she was busy with her own things and wasn’t there. I’ll have to find someone I trust to put it in on days when she can’t be there.

The written word is in the air and it’s loving me! I’ve been writing everyday and I feel like the well of words just keeps flowing. I’ve never been this in tune with a piece before. I feel like since I’ve completely laid out the plot, writing the details is all the more exciting. I love looking back on my old work and see how I’ve progressed as a writer. I wish this book was 100% my original with all my own characters and such, but all I can keep saying to myself is that this is just my way of proving to myself that I can write; that I can create and stay on target. God Lord! The day I actually finish it, I’ll be singing from the rooftops. I sort of want to delve into some of my other works, but I know I mustn’t. I must stick to this and finish it out; must keep the ADHD at bay! It’s what always kills me in the end. I finally have an idea on what must be done with A Ten-Minute Speech and I’m so excited to start, really start, writing the Luka books, I could just burst into flame. It’s all I want to do and all I want to think about. Sometime last week I found myself daydreaming about my own characters. My characters! That never happens and I keep wondering what it really means. With this fanfic novel, I’ve finally conquered my PC-writing demons. For years, I haven’t been able to writing creatively on a computer, forcing me write everything longhand and spend the next year deciphering my longhand as I type the entire thing. It’s a good thing that I’ve learned this now, because I’ve realized I have the tendency to be quite verbose. I’ve only just finished the first chapter of Flight and the book’s 10,928 words and 20 M$ Word pages. I’m wondering just how long it’ll take me to break my goal of 100K. The first chapter’s just on one day and there’s nineteen days in the first part of the book. I doubt every day will be 11K long, but still…my writing just gets flowery and I while I try my hardest not to ramble, I can’t help but delve into the characters a bit more. I don’t want to just write an episode; I want to create something unique that reads like an actual book and could be taken seriously, were it not actually fanfiction.

So, Dreamgirls…Yay! Jennifer Hudson won her Oscar and I feel oddly proud of her. I guess I just love seeing black women win Oscars, but anyway I’m horribly addicted to the Dreamgirls’ soundtrack. Of course, I’m playing One Night Only to death, but honestly, it’s the reason I bought the darn CD and I’m going to play it until my iPod breaks. I’m also slowly beginning to fall for Beyonce’s Listen, which I really don’t think was worthy of the Oscar nod, but whatever. One Night Only (Hudson’s version, of course), was a far better song, but maybe that’s just me. I’m probably not the most objective person to consider the two songs since One Night Only is currently stuck in my head, but so on and so forth…Obsessions: just the writing and One Night Only. SVU’s even starting to subside, but I think it may have more to do with my not wanting to be unduly influenced by the show as I write. I still need like a crackhead, but I missed last week’s new episode and I haven’t had a break down…yet. Thank goodness for USA network. Keeping SVU fanatics in good health, around the globe.

Adventures in Vegetarianism #2
I’ve been a full-fledged vegetarian now for more than a week and the Wendy’s #6 Spicy Chicken cravings have subsided substantially. I spoke with another vegetarian in one of my classes and she told me I’d probably start feeling weak after a bit, but I’ll stick it out a bit longer before taking a multi-vitamin, especially after that nonsense on the BBC news about vitamins actually shaving off the years instead of adding to them. Oh well. I suppose we’ll all go when we do. But, I’m really enjoying this not-eating-meat thing. Tonight, I made a grilled cheese sandwich with olive oil instead of butter. I’m well on my way to becoming a vegan…except for the fact that I love cheese and yogurt and would sooner cut of my own foot and feed it to my enemies than give up cheese and yogurt. But, the point is, I’m not eating any meat. I wish I could say that I give a crap about cows and pigs and such, but I honestly can’t make myself really care about animals. I just don’t want to like the taste of them anymore and I want to just live healthier. I just can’t see any positives to eating meat, especially since I read something about average humans eating something like six times the amount of animal meat we need to survive. That just seems utterly crazy to me.
Anyway, I haven’t lost any weight to this vegetarian diet, but that’s probably due to the fact that I polished off this entire macaroni and cheese dish by myself as I practiced for the pot luck we’re having at work this Friday. It’ll be Dorienne’s time to shine! I also randomly made a bunch of cookies and frosted them myself. I don’t know where the crazy cravings come from, but they are bizarre. But, cheers to me for not even wanting to eat any meat! And a special cheers to me for at least trying to get back on eating like a normal person should…

Yes! Finally, I have my blog back!

It has been a harrowing few weeks since I decided to leave Acenet and realized that I had no idea how to begin changing my MySQL databases over to the new account at Lunarpages. I have just this instant figured it out and I am more than ecstatic. I have had so many things about which I just longed to write, but I had no venue in which to display these thoughts. I will transfer a blog post I created in my TV.com blog here since it was pretty significant.

The thing is, last Tuesday, I received a rude awakening. Upon realizing that a fanfic-novel I had been writing was about to become yesterday’s news, it finally occurred to me just how much time I waste on forums and the like. Time that would be better spent accomplishing my many projects. So, for the past few days, I have been away from the TV.com cold turkey. I do not expect that my absence will affect anyone, but still I do wonder. I have been focusing on my writing and today I decided I need to start seeing project through to the end instead of starting up new ones half way through the old and never finishing anything in the process. Some may call this behaviour textbook ADD and bipolar, but I can beat this myself sans label. I just have to focus.

I got a job! It is with Chase and we have yet to get into our actual work since we are still in training. I can’t help, but feel that I am the odd one out in the class, though I think that some of this has to do with the fact that I sit directly in the middle of the room and I do not share a desk with anyone in the training room. It maybe because I have been more or less isolated from people, church members notwithstanding, for quite some time, but I feel just odd in comparison to everyone else. I cannot really explain it, but everyone else seems so different from me that I feel that I almost struggle to relate to all the others. Maybe it’s because I keep finding all these errors in the training materials….I am having great difficulty in finding my niche, which just pains to no ends because, like all humans, I am ever-striving for acceptance and belonging. All in all, though, I just wish we could get through the material and get out on the floor. I fee like I am being robbed each day I spend in training because that is another day where I am working at close to a dollar and hour less than what I should be paid. What irks me the most is that I can’t help thinking that if I just had my degree, I could have applied for a position more suited my interests like the company’s IT department or anything else. I see myself truly testing the limits of the “you have to stay at your level for a year before moving elsewhere” idea. I already want to master this information on competitive spirit alone and there’s no telling how I will be once we are out of training.
The good thing to come out of this, however is that I may have my first web design job. It will probably be just a fifty-dollar job with a very small maintenance fee, but it is a job nonetheless. It excites me so much, I could just dance and sing. And speaking of sing, I had been stressing for several days about the fact that since I work on Saturdays, I will not be able to attend choir practices. Thankfully, most of the songs we do, I already know and our director gave us a CD of a bunch of songs that we will be singing in the coming months. Knowing those songs will be enough for when we are to sing. Today, I sang with the choir even though I was unable to practice with them this month and I think we did great. I was worried about our director for a bit, because I can tell that she is still sick and looked like she was about to pass out while she was directing us. In fact, I was very worried probably because I had dream last night, Saturday night, about one of our church members passing away suddenly and I woke up very upset. In my dream, I was crying over her and no one could understand why I was crying and was upset since she was saved and therefore we all knew where she was going. It was one of those sit straight up in the middle of the night dreams that stay with you for a while and I made sure to hug this person extra hard in church today.

Phew! I have managed to clean my room and catch up on my “correspondence” tonight all in efforts to procrastinate major items further. All this behaviour makes me think that I really am not ready to return to OSU after all. I don’t want to believe it, but here I am under the same stresses and I am struggle once more. I think I just need to press forward and just get my stuff done so I can have more time to write and do what I want to do.

….time to work…

I’m just sick of it. All of it.

I’m sick of these “Tired Santa” commercials. Like I need another reason to feel less than festive during this holiday season. All I see on television are countless versions of Santa, completely stressed out because no one wants to sit on his lap and ask him for gifts or Santa being ignored by kids because they are so enamoured by by Best Buy or whatever gifts already under the tree, or the infamous Santa coming home early because “everyone” is giving one another gift cards from wherever. Ugh. I’m just sick of it. It’s nearly December and I am no where near being in the Christmas spirit.

I’m sick of dealing with everything that’s happened in the past four years. I feel like I should just get up and drive to a new state and start over with my life. Just find a new place to live, find a new church and just start over.

I cried today and they weren’t happy tears. I feel like I’m being punished and it doesn’t matter how many times I fall to my knees displaying my sorrow for my actions in the past, these things just keep coming back to bite me squarely in the ass.

Obsessions are heightening, yet depression is coming. I have less than three hundred dollars to my name, yet absolutely no manner of income. I want so little, but need so much. When does this get easy? When do I get to start living my life?

I don’t know. I’m just sick of it.

Some days, the words of The Strokes, while not 100% applicable, can easily describe a day in my life:

What Ever Happened?

I want to be forgotten,
and I don’t want to be reminded.
You say “please don’t make this harder.”
No, I won’t yet.

I wanna be beside her.
She wanna be admired.
You say “please don’t make this harder.”
No, I won’t yet.

Oh dear, is it really all true?
Did they offend us and they want it to sound new?
Top ten ideas for countdown shows…
Whose culture is this and does anybody know?
I wait and tell myself “life ain’t chess,”
But no one comes in and yes, you’re alone…

You don’t miss me, I know.

Oh Tennessee, what did you write?
I come together in the middle of the night.
Oh that’s an ending that I can’t write, ’cause
I’ve got you to let me down.

I want to be forgotten,
and I don’t want to be reminded.
You say “please don’t make this harder.”
No, I won’t yet.

I want to be beside her.
She wanna be admired.
You say “please don’t make this harder.”
No, I won’t yet…

I have long since vowed to shut away the shallow, snobby and overall bitchy side of my personality forever. While I do manage to keep that part of myself in the dark, every once in a while the “other” me rears her head and I am left to face the idea that I will never be able to run away from which my primary education has taught. I grew up with rich, snobby, shallow kids and took on their personalities as my own because I simply did not know any better. It wasn’t until college that I decided that the “bitchy” way was not how I was going to live my life. I want to forget and pretend that I never was that way, and then there are days like today, when no matter how hard I try, it always comes back to haunt me.

First I received a call from someone from church asking for help. The bitchy side of me immediately flared up and I wanted to lie and say that I could not be of any assistance, but I didn’t. I decided that the Christian thing to do was to use the abilities given to me and help others anyway that I could. And so I sat waiting for my two-hour Judging Amy zen-block, feeling rather proud of myself for effectively beating back the snobby bitch-monster and doing so in a timely manner.

Now, I can’t really pinpoint why I’m so obsessed with Judging Amy right now, but that is for another day’s analysis. The point is, I am and for the past few episodes, Amy’s mother, Maxine has been hinting towards starting a relationship with her gardener. While the the gardener part didn’t bother me so much, because honestly, only a tried and true spoiled snob would automatically look down on someone because he or she was “the help,” what disturbed me was who was playing this particular gardener, Cheech Marin, as in Cheech and Chong do whatever ridiculous pot-smoking adventure they did back in the day. So for the past few days, all I could think about was, “Oh God No! Not Cheech Marin! She can’t be dating Cheech Marin!” Not because he was playing the gardener or because he’s Spanish, but because everytime I see his name I can only think of some poor, lowly and loaded, dirty, little, old man. And he was back for both of today’s episodes, well yesterday’s…, and in the first one, after I almost wanted to turn the channel from the ridiculous country music playing through the episode (and it wasn’t even fun country, just people screaming into poorly played instruments), Cheech Marin, the gardener asked Maxine if he could “court” her.

Of course, I was just beside myself at the thought. Maxine was supposed to be this respectable and good woman and here she was parading around with….with him! The second episode started and there stood respectable Tyne Daly, playing Maxine, hand-in-hand with not-so-respectable Cheech Marin, the gardener. At this point, I barely remember what else happened throughout the rest of the episode except the end. Toward the end of the episode, Maxine’s son, Peter is basically spying on her and Cheech Marin while they were sitting on the front porch and all Peter is saying is “I can’t believe she’s dating the gardener!” which, surprisingly, did not phase me in the least, because deep down, I now realize, I was really thinking the same thing. Eventually, Maxine comes in the house to tell Peter to stop spying and he starts to say to state the obvious, that she’s dating the gardener, but she cuts him off and tells him that he, the gardener (I think his name is Ignacio), is a good man and that she hopes Peter wasn’t thinking what she thought he could be thinking.

It was only in this moment that I realized that the old monster was just as prevalent in me as it always had been, and what was worst was that I hadn’t even noticed. I didn’t even see the shows message coming. The whole time Cheech Marin is on the screen, I have my eyes partly covered because I couldn’t bare to watch what was happening and, thus, I could not see what was happening. Of course, the show used Cheech Marin for the gardener, because whoever directed these episodes probably figured that the viewers would have some past reservations about Cheech Marin and the reaction to him dating Maxine would be exactly what they wanted. I didn’t even notice until the last moments of the episode that I was no different from Peter thinking his mother shouldn’t be dating “the gardener” in that, even in a fictional show I couldn’t get past my own prejudices and take an actor, a person, on face value.

….

It just gets depressing to think about how long it is going to take for me actually shake all the wrongdoings of my childhood. At any normal point in my day, I would never allow past snobbery (if that’s a word) to have an effect on my thinking. What’s frightening is that when my guard is down and I’m least expecting it, I revert back to the same old me. And that’s exactly where I don’t want to be.

It’s been 21 days! If I’d waited ’til tomorrow, it would have been 22 days and I’d be turning 22! Xanga keeps me all these changes on me….

None of my goals have been accomplished. It’s the same song of my life. Although yesterday, I did make it to church since I didn’t get to go last week. It felt good to be around everyone. I’m getting to know everyone there pretty well. I really missed it, even though I didn’t like everything he had to say. I managed to hold my tongue when the bulletins noted the sermon “The Gospel According to Forrest Gump” and “Forrest” was spelled with one “r.” It was difficult, but I made it.

As I approach my 22nd year in the world I have been gazing back to the events that transpired during my 21st year. While so many of goals have gone unseen, I still feel like I am a better person. In the past year, I have not made any progress with my education, I have not completed any novels and I have not completed my website. I have not met “the one,” or lost any weight or given up any vices. I feel like I’m turning 38 and so feeling of utmost dispair through my lack of accomplishment sometimes seems overbearing. But…

In the past year, I’ve learned to properly code HTML, which can be another vice, but a useful vice. I’ve applied this new knowledge to create better sites for others to enjoy and it also opens up the possibility for future paid work. I’ve done other things and learned a lot about myself, but the most important of all these things is that I’ve found my way back to Jesus.

I’d been lost, truly lost, for a long time, and now, even with all the things that have gone wrong in this past year, I still feel like I’m a better person than I was last year. My Sundays are now for God instead of recovering from whatever I poured down my throat Saturday night. I swear less, I drink less and I try harder to do things that would make Jesus proud of me. I feel like I know more about who I am, I am more in tuned with my own culture, and I have come to understand why I do so many of the things I do.

….

Thinking about this actually brings me to tears, because I guess I just realized that everything I’d been told about God my whole life is true. He has a plan for me regardless of the plans I have for myself. This year, instead of being depressed that I am growing another year older, a problem that has persisted since I turned 14, I am going to be happy that God has allowed me to grow and learn for a little bit longer.