Closure

My mood has changed significantly since Wednesday. I've gone from feeling capable and optimistic to defeated. I'm having my usual Sunday depressive symptoms, which involves guilt about failing to accomplish half of my goals and anxiety about how to handle the upcoming week. I did a lot of writing this weekend. I should take a moment to feel proud, but instead I feel worthless and lazy because I didn't accomplish enough. Although, I have to believe taking three English classes can mess with anyone's mental health especially when one involves working on my book. Don't get me wrong, I love working on my book, but I take it so seriously that it consumes me. I only meet with my professor two more times, and I'm supposed be ready to submit my third chapter to lit journals when we conclude. I don't even have a full draft of the chapter completed yet, let alone started polishing. I have an entire fiction story due Tuesday. After scrapping two stories and a couple weeks of work, I'm finally working on one I like. Writing a complete short story in one weekend where I'm also supposed to be wrapping up my chapter and writing Victorian literature papers--not to mention reading hundreds of pages. I haven't even thought about final exams. I'm just taking it one week at a time; one day at a time; one breath at a time.

I'm loving having my friend from MN in town again. I felt less depressed after we met up in the coffee shop today. We're both still there, but I'm working while she visits with other friends. She leaves to go home Tuesday and then moves to Mexico shortly. I don't know when I'll see her next. Those type of goodbyes are the worst--not knowing when to expect a reunion. I know I've said it before, but it blows me away how the older I get, the more goodbyes there are to say and the more intense they become. It seems growing up means saying goodbye. It makes sense, I guess. I mean everyone dies in the end, which can be considered the ultimate form of goodbye. We can't escape goodbyes, so it should have been obvious that aging creates more goodbyes. I don't know why I felt struck down by that realization. I suppose I just didn't understand the complexity of goodbyes as a child. Not to mention, I knew less people outside of my family that I had to say goodbye to.

Goodbyes relate to closure, the topic of our staff meeting on Friday. My boss talked about how she struggles with closure in many ways. A group of coworkers gave a presentation on the importance of providing closure when we end our sessions. We all agreed we hadn't thought much about it and that people will remember most how they felt when they left. In the meeting, I realized I have trouble with closure in every aspect of my life, but I handle closing my sessions rather well. I think I use my discomfort from past experiences of awkward goodbyes and closings that I go out of my way to make sure my student feels confident and comfortable when we part. College classes rarely have closure. Either everyone takes an exam in silence and leaves on their own time or stops by on their own time to turn in a portfolio. Every now and then I've had classes that don't have an exam, but we still meet to conclude everything. I like that because otherwise, I go from seeing these professors and classmates twice a week to losing all contact.

Talking about abrupt endings also gets me thinking about how unbalanced life in college can be. It goes from one extreme to the other. For example, I usually go through a little post-exams depression. I attribute that to the fact that I'm so ungodly busy for weeks that I don't have time to think about anything, and then all of a sudden, I have nothing at all to do. I'm usually too burnt out to read or write, which are my normal leisurely past times. Instead, I spend my days sleeping, staring at the ceiling, and checking my e-mail every second, often getting down that no one has e-mailed. I then ruminate on the fact that everyone has a life but me and get into some sort of existential crisis where I wonder my purpose in life. College involves some nights of little sleep and then other times where you can sleep all day. Of course I can't forget to mention the unbalanced, extreme drinking mindset in college towns. I'm usually pretty good about pacing myself, but it can be difficult to handle everyone else getting trashed or people buying me drinks without asking me. Then I feel obligated to drink them, because they paid money for it just for me, and I feel ungrateful if I refuse it. I need to be stronger willed about that. I'm sure it relates to my passivity as a woman in this culture and how I don't know how to worry about myself more than others. This can be observed by my unbalanced eating as well. Not only do I eat an unbalanced diet, but I eat at all different times. I often go all day without eating during the week before exams because I am working so hard I forget to eat. Then at night, I am dizzy and in a terrible mood.

I'm off to work on homework. Although, just to set the mood for what I'm working on, I'll include an excerpt from the bio about Oscar Wilde that can be found in my Oxford Anthology: Victorian Prose and Poetry book. I'm writing one of my class journals about his piece, "The Importance of Being Earnest." The end of the biography's first paragraph, which begins by raving about his accomplishments and talent, reads "At the height of his triumph, disaster befell him: he was indicted for homosexual practices, found guilty, and sentenced to two years at hard labor; he emerged from prison a broken man, bereft of position, hope, and talent. He died solitary and destitute in a shabby hotel ' in Paris." Wow. What a horrible end to life. I hope to never experience anything like that.

Spring Cleaning

I cleaned like crazy this past weekend. Our apartment could have been labeled a disaster zone. There should have been yellow caution tape up around it. We had a mound of recycling that hadn't been taken back since before Christmas. It got to be so big that we couldn't turn that electric heater on due to fear of fire. Dishes were stacked up with dry food on most of them. I had taken over the love seat with my electric blanket sprawled out, books, notebooks, and my computer and chords all beside it. We hadn't vacuumed or dusted in who knows how long.

Calling Leslie's and my bathroom dirty could be considered an understatement. I had jewelry, make-up, and hair supplies (and hair) all over the counter. The toilet hadn't been scrubbed since before her boyfriend threw up blueberry vodka on the side, leaving blue marks. Not to mention, our toilet seat "mysteriously" broke while Leslie and I were out of town. It slides back and forth, and if you're not careful, you might fall right off the toilet. I mean, this place could make anyone depressed and unmotivated due to causing a feeling of defeat before you even start cleaning. I didn't sleep great Friday night. I slept a lot during the day due to having another headache. I also stayed up writing, because I felt unusally creative and seemed to be making good progress on my chapter that I had to turn in today. I woke up with spunk and started cleaning and doing dishes right away. The place looks spectacular, especially considering what it used to be. We normally don't let things get that bad, but this semester has been chaos for all of us.

Sunday, I decided it needed to be the time I finally broke down and cleaned my room. I had kind of accepted that I just wouldn't get it clean before moving out, or at least until graduation with the way my schedule is going. I figured most of it could be taken care of just by doing laundry, which I needed to do anyway. When I picked up my jacket off the floor, a centipede ran out. I can't stand those things. They're incredibly fast, ugly, and they bite. After a mad chase through my dirty clothes, I killed the little devil, deciding to keep clothes off the floor for the rest of my time here. I washed my sheets and put back on my normal ones, taking off the fleece winter ones. I had too much homework to finish cleaning the entire thing. I'm really proud though, because yesterday, on my craziest day of the week,I used my short dinner break to eat a lunch-to-go and vacuum/dust my room. Now, it looks fabulous. It seems strange and calming to come home to a clean room, especially when I get the buddha fountain going with the water noises and different color lights.

I'm burried in homework. I have entire books (yes, plural) to read this weekend, long literature papers to write, and an intense amount of creative work due for fiction and my ind. study. I do not take my creative writing lightly, so the time needed to create something up to my standards feels unimaginable at this moment. I figure now that I have a clean environment to work in, I will have to be productive with homework this weekend. I will do the usual Thursday pizza and beer with Tammy and Leslie, but that will be my only fun night. There is a local folk concert that Tammy and I are hoping to catch Friday night, but that shouldn't be more than 2-3 hours.

Graduation is coming up right around the corner. I need to purchase my cap and gown, which is the least of my worries at this moment. I'm not even excited about graduating because I have such a huge load of work to finish before then, and I'm not sure how it will get done. The good news: I'm handling the stress really well. My therapist seemed impressed with how healthy I am. I just know it will all get done enough for me to graduate and that life won't end if I don't get the grade I want. I'm also getting excited and even a little zen about the whole living a life of mindfullness, writing, and reading next year. I think being given the opportunity to do such a thing requires me to be incredibly thankful. I mean, how many people get to have reading, writing, and spirituality be the center of their life? I realize I most likely will never have this opportunity again, so I plan to treasure it. Don't get me wrong, I understand it won't be easy. Being alone regularly, confronting spiritual issues I've repressed, living with no one my own age, and hearing about my friends going out on weekends will be a challenge. I'm sure I will experience loneliness and confusion to the most extreme degrees. I'm optimistic about who I will become after the life-changing experience. I think I can find a level of contentment that I've not yet achieved. Today my therapist even said that she doesn't think I have to worry about descending as far back into depression as I did, because I've developed such a better sense of identity, love for myself, and a self-awareness that many people of any age don't have. I felt honored to hear her say that. The road sure hasn't been easy or short, by any means. Spring cleaning pales in comparison to the last few years of cleaning out my insides. The thing about cleaning: you get to celebrate for a couple days and appreciate it, then there's more to do.

Colors

I've been thinking about colors lately. My weekend consisted of a variety of activities that brought colors to my attention. It started Thursday. Still weak from my migraine and vomiting the day before, I felt thankful I did not have my 12:30 class. After my 9:30 class, I went home and took some migraine medication. I meant to use that time to do homework, but slept several hours away. I woke up to the sunshine leaking through the bottom of each individual blind, hitting my light blue fleece sheets. My headache was gone, but I was hungry and still tired. I went to my ind. study early, buying a fruit salad and a caesar salad. The greens in the salad and the bright red strawberries in the fruit salad lifted my mood. It helped that my prof then said I am producing some of my best writing lately. It was quite a disappointment when my computer crashed and flashed a gray screen and a white folder with a question mark in the middle of meeting with him.

I spent Friday with a nice group of girls I hadn't seen in a while. We shopped for bridesmaid dresses, which had me thinking about all sorts of colors. There were beautiful purples, greens, pinks, blues, and oranges. I tried on a watermelon colored dress and fell in love with it. If I ever get married, I think that should be one of my colors. Alicia chose navy blue, because all of us looked decent in it. It proved to be tricky with such a variety of shapes, sizes, heights, hair color, skin color, etc... The navy blue seemed flattering on everyone. Now, I just have to come up with the money for it. In the evening, we watched "The Fighter" again. I appreciated it even more the second time. I love the way films use such a variety of techniques to appeal to viewers on a much deeper level. It really is art when done well.

Saturday morning, we left early to go watch Ashlee run her half-marathon. My glasses broke, causing me to see only blurry outlines of objects and colors. Ashlee wore bright green running tights. With so many runners and spectators, it helped me spot her from far away. At first, we didn't even think it could be her because she finished at such a fast and strong pace. She had been worried about even finishing. Seeing her finish strong left me feeling proud of her accomplishment and hope that maybe I can get back in shape. The weather is finally lightening up, so maybe in the next week I'll start running again.

Tammy and I spent the afternoon with Grandma and Uncle Mike. The rest of the family stayed around where the half marathon took place because they had a plane leaving the area for Vegas later in the evening. Vegas lights alter the senses. All of the different colors and flashing lights make me feel invincible. We stopped at the mall on the way home to get my computer fixed. I replaced the hard drive. I hadn't planned on putting anymore money into this computer with it being so old, but they thought replacing the hard drive would give me another couple years out of it, if not more. We shopped a bit while waiting for the computer to be fixed. I found a new pair of skateboard shoes, but they were too much money for me to buy them. Grandma surprised me by letting me get them, anyway. They are a dark denim with pink plaid on the side. The bottoms are bright pink, and I'm looking forward to getting some hot pink laces for them.

Saturday night, some friends came over to get in the hot tub and watch "Black Swan." It proved to be such a nice time and no one really even drank much. It was just a fun night of giggling, snacking, and catching up. Like "The Fighter," I loved "Black Swan" even more the second time. The first time, it's such a wild ride that I didn't notice all of the little things that make it as powerful as it is. The colors throughout the film especially jumped out at me. The costumes and all of the contrast between black, white, and gray. There's an especially striking scene where they are on drugs in a dance club and bright lights and strobe lights flash, creating beautiful pictures. 

With all of the thoughts about colors, I made them a common thread in my latest story for my fiction class. I want the story to be humorous, possess depth, and be visually stimulating with all of the references to color. It got me thinking that growing up can cause bright colored auras to fade. I'm not talking literal auras, but just the idea of everyone being a unique color that starts bright and fades with time seems to ring true to my experiences so far. I'm exploring aging in my story a bit too. It is terrible as of now, though. I'm doing too much in too little of space. I hope to play around with it this weekend.

After getting a new computer, my pictures are all gone. I loaded a close up picture I took of my mom's hibiscus flower a couple years ago during the summer I spent recovering from the hospital. The picture is fiery orange with yellow and for some reason the little background that does show is black, making the flower even brighter. Little water droplets are on each petal, and it looks stunning as my new wallpaper. Every time I open my computer, the bright colors send my mind spinning.