Porcelain and PTSD

Two things I feel like talking about:

1. I have really, really smooth, white skin, and so when I get even the tiniest of blemishes I feel like they're HUGE and stress over them and touch them all the time. It's a serious problem. I literally have two teeny tiny red dots, not even pimples, one of my cheek and the other near my chin, and I keep flipping out because I know that they're there and I can't do anything about them. It's so sad. I even tried putting some hand sanitizer on them to dry them out. I doubt it'll work.

2. So, I'm looking at PTSD in Hurricane Katrina victims for my psychology paper. I feel like it's a good thing I'm not going into psychology anymore like I used to think about in Louisiana because I would just spend all of my time on PTSD and thinking about how it's almost exactly like my life. It's a problem. But with PTSD and thinking about it and everything, I'm getting little flashbacks all of the time of things that I just forgot or purposefully blocked out of my memory from that year or so after Katrina. Like I just recently remembered about how I had a stalker in the spring of freshmen year. I totally forgot about that until Julie kept reminding me how AC only shows up when I'm there, but I had a guy basically stalk me my freshman year and I'd forgotten until now because I was still in such a haze from Katrina. He came up to me while I was walking home from school and he asked me about my life and I told him I was new to Maryland because of Katrina and everything, and he asked me if I wanted to go see a play or something and I told him no, and we went our separate ways a couple of streets down from my house. Then I went to my house. But about an hour later he shows up at my door, somehow knowing which house is mine all of a sudden, and for some reason I'm hiding (I think my mom already knew he was a creep or something when I first came home and told her about him. I was kinda dazed.) He tells my mom how I told him my entire life story and how I promised him that I was going to go to the play with him. I think he said something else about how we were dating and he'd known me for a while? And I for some reason remember him trying to get inside of my house or something, and my mom just said "No, I think you're mistaken. She declined your offer." and shut the door. I had to have two friends walk me home every day from school after that because I was afraid, and my friends were freaked out too. It was so scary. I'd see him in the hallways and avoid his gaze. I'd purposefully dress in blah ways so that he wouldn't notice me, hoping I'd just fade into the background. I'd avoid him at all costs, even if it meant being late for class or having Mom pick me up from school. I never realized why I felt so creeped out by AC until I remembered this because I do the same thing with AC. I try to avoid him, but it's so hard because he's in one of my classes and I live on campus and there's no real way to get him to not sit with us at dinner because there's only a certain amount of time that I can eat dinner because of my schedule. I constantly dress down, which is partly for comfort but I find myself not ever wearing even slightly low-cut shirts because I don't want him to look at me. I want to just fade into the background, but it's not in my personality. I just wish I had a shield or something. And I would bring it up with my friends (I did tell Julie. She felt badly.) except I don't want to make it this big thing. He doesn't know where I live. He doesn't know where Carlo or Julie live. I'm safe in my room or their rooms. I'm just nervous and jittery and scared everywhere else I go. And I know that AC isn't actually a threat (although sometimes I worry that he's going to shoot up the school one day). He's not violent and he's not a big guy. It's just nice to know that this isn't a completely mean or irrational fear - I've felt incredibly threatened before, and this is just that bleeding through into another part of my life.

I just wish Will were here to protect me and make all of the bad people go away. He'd keep me safe no matter where I was.

Come to think of it, I have been having a lot of flashbacks recently, or at least more than usual. Weird.

Roommates

Yeah, I thought of something better and more relevant to talk about. I didn't want to blog about it tonight because I didn't want to get angry, but it's just a problem.

I hate my roommate.

She's obnoxious and terrible and inconsiderate. She's on the phone constantly with either her boyfriend or her mother. She talks in baby talk to him while playing online Facebook games while I'm genuinely trying to get homework done. Why doesn't she hang out with her friends? When I'm not doing work, I'm always hanging out with my friends. But no. She's on the phone constantly.

It is just so frustrating having such an inconsiderate roommate. She even asked me earlier in the semester if her being on the phone bothers me, and I told her yes, and yet hardly anything has changed.

Of course, I'm too considerate to say anything about it usually, so I just go on bubbling and seething inside, getting dangerously close to snapping and yanking the phone out of her ear.

But so goes life. Hopefully next year I'll have a single and only share my room with Will, and then everything will be okay. I'll sleep when I want, do homework when I want, invite company over when I want, and everything will be fine.

Oh, that will be one blessed, glorious day.

Some Family Time

This weekend I went home to see Will and the family, and it never ceases to amaze me just how weird and bizarre my family is and how bizarre I am, too. I feel like I have such a crazy history and ancestry, and I am just another crazy person in my already crazy family. I feel like writing about it.

I tried writing about my grandparents and ancestry and everything, and maybe I'll do that later, but for now I'll just stick to my immediate family and how they've impacted me as a person:

1. My dad - My dad is the happiest man I have ever met, which is really weird to think about because he had to kill a bunch of people while in the Navy for 22 years. He retired as a commander when I was 6. He was a straight up pimp in high school, dating an unimaginable amount of women, including sisters and best friends and the only Jewish girl at his private, Christian school. Dad went to the Naval Academy on a soccer scholarship, got mad at the soccer coach, went to play some football, and got offered a spot as kicker on the Navy football team by the coach in the same day. He got kicked out of the Naval Academy in his first year because he failed so terribly, but the officials liked him so much that they told him to bring up his grades in a civilian college and he'd get re-appointed, something that had hardly ever happened and has very rarely happened since then. When Dad was busy bringing his grades back up, he met Mom while coaching the soccer team Mom was a cheerleader for. The first night he really met her, he took her away from her date and stayed at her house until 5AM. When he went home, he told my Grammy that he'd met the girl he was going to marry. My dad says that he's only been truly sad twice in his life: when he and Mom had a miscarriage (Chisolm) and when his dad died. That's it. Other than that, my dad's always happy. He made me the hard-headed girl that I am today. He told me I'm never allowed to give up on myself or my studies. He had the requirement for me and my siblings that we must be eligible to go to the Naval Academy when we graduate(d) high school. Most importantly, though, my dad taught me to be random and commanding. His thought process is as crazy as my own, although his thoughts are much more logical. He taught me how to be a leader and how to manipulate and lead people to get what I want.

I guess this will just be a post about my dad because I am tired as anything right now.

Maybe I'll have a post for each of my family members. Maybe I'll delete this in the morning. We'll see.

Counting them down

I'm ready ready ready ready ready for some Will in my life.

(side note: I totally just heard someone burp incredibly loudly out in my hallway.)

He just makes everything better and more manageable and okay, and I want what some of my friends here have in their boyfriends or girlfriends: a super incredible all-the-times back up system, someone to rejuvenate you when you're down and help you out whenever possible, someone to make you smile all of the time, someone to nap with and to bring you food when you're sick and to spend time with you when you're stressed and overworked and sad. The tough thing is that I have this person - Will does all of that for me and more. There's just a hundred or so miles between us that's keeping us from being able to run at 100% capacity.

I guess I'm just looking forward - really looking forward - to having my man around so I don't go back to my dorm room alone every night only to get more and more down because of my obnoxious roommate and lots of work.

Skipping Class

So I'm skipping class for the first time this semester tonight (my Intro to Lit class). It's funny because I really shouldn't be going because I'm so sick and I've overworked myself so much today, but I feel like such a bad person for skipping. I don't know if it's the teacher in me, the student in me, or the disciplined daughter in me that makes me feel the way that I do, but I just feel terrible skipping class. I feel like I'm wasting the tens of thousands of dollars my parents are spending on my education; I feel like I'm letting myself down by not opening myself to every possible available opportunity to learn and grow. However, it's also difficult, seeing as I don't feel challenged in any of my classes but one (my Shakespeare class) this semester. The other three of my classes are intro level, and I just really don't feel like I'm learning anything. Psychology is interesting, but I've already learned a lot of it in Psych AP last year. I'm not learning anything in sociology seeing as my professor is too smart in the field and thus just rambles on about unimportant things that only vaguely pertain to the class and hardly ever pertain to the tests we take. Although my Intro to Lit professor seems like a sweet guy, the entire class is discussion based, and so when the class isn't interested in the book we're reading or in the class itself, the level of education suffers and I don't end up learning anything about literature except that some people just don't understand it and some people just like talking about how they see themselves in literature. Shakespeare: Sex and Gender is the only class that I really feel challenged in. It's both discussion and lecture based, allowing us to explore our ideas about certain Shakespeare plays but also allowing us to learn from a Shakespeare scholar who has worked with these plays for many years and learned from many other Shakespeare scholars. I feel like I'm accomplishing and growing and learning in that class.

Wow, am I a nerd. I'm definitely not a good college student. I guess I just don't understand people who don't try to learn, try to get the best possible grade that they can and to do the best possible work. We're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in this education. Is it really just to get a certain slip of paper so that we can work in jobs that most of us probably won't end up happy in, or is it to learn from people older, more experienced, and wiser than us so that we can take their knowledge and mold it and apply it to our own lives and the experiences that we see and face every day? I like to think it's the latter, although I know too many people who find it to be the former.

I guess this is something I'll have to battle later on in life in my classroom.

Oh, Mardi Gras

It really shouldn't surprise me much that I'd be sad and sick on Mardi Gras. 1. It's a holiday, and I'm almost always sick on holidays, and 2. it reminds me of Slidell, and how I'm not there, which usually makes me sad. Luckily, I'm not as sad as I usually am because I'm realizing how much I love my friends here at St. Mary's and how much they love me (and also how much Will and I love each other, which this weekend really helped to prove).

These people are the first group of friends that I've actually believed I can stay friends with and will want to stay friends with for the rest of my life, and it feels really good and really weird that I can think that soundly. I'm only still friends with one person from the Dell (LG, obviously), and, although I'm still friends with a few of my Atholton friends, most of them generally never saw more than a couple of sides of me, and thus I can't really talk to them about my life in its entirety. My SMCM friends understand me and tolerate me and like me. They think it's cool that I'm insane and bizarre and creepy and loud. Although I haven't really shown my sad self to most of them, I know that I could if I needed to and they wouldn't really change their minds about me. It's so relieving to be able to know that my friend actually like me and to not have to worry about impressing them or constantly being funny or constantly being motherly or constantly being the nerd. My selves and my feelings can just flow wherever they want like the tide (or like a huge ginormous wave, as they are wont to do) and my friends will watch me and engage with me and love me.

I'm really thankful for that on a day like today.