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I’ve lost people close to me before this, but losing E just feels WRONG. With my grandmother and other family members, it wasn’t a shock, and even when a friend of mine from college died last year, we had the knowledge that she had been born with heart problems. E shouldn’t be dead. I cannot fucking wrap my head around this at all.

I feel like it should have completely sunk in by now, but still I catch myself picking up the phone to call her and expecting it be her when my phone rings. All day today, I wanted to call her so bad it was killing me. I want to tell her how fucked up it is that she died, and the thing is, out of all my friends, she would have been the one that got the absurdity of the situation.

People keep calling me and asking about the funeral arrangements, and I don’t want to talk about it. My mom keeps checking on me and asking if I need to talk, and I just don’t. I want them all to leave me alone, and I don’t know how to say that without sounding insane. I don’t want to talk about the funeral. I don’t want you to ask my opinion on what flowers to send. I don’t want you to call me just to talk about her. I know she’s gone, but having to talk about it makes it so real. I can’t deal with the realness of this shit at all.

I know my friends are there for me and I know they’re hurting too, but goddamn it, I wish they’d call somebody else. Today, I almost blew my lid when someone talked about her in the past tense. She still feels present to me, and talking about her in the past tense feels like a slap in the face.

On top of feeling like I’m getting punched in the gut every five minutes, I just feel so damn guilty about not being stronger for everyone else. I’ve always been the one that you could call and talk through stuff with. I’ve been the shoulder to lean on in times like this, and now I just can’t. I’m failing everyone around me, and I don’t know how to be the person they need right now.

I know they mean well, but I just can’t deal with the people around me. I feel like I’m going to snap. I’m just so fucking MAD about this whole situation, and every conversation is just making it worse. I want to scream and break things and punch holes in the wall, and when I listen to my friends being so calm and handling this so much better than I am, I just want to lose it. No, I don’t want to go shopping so you can find black shoes for the funeral. No, I don’t know if you should take food to her parents’ house. No, I don’t know if it’s normal for an autopsy to take this long. I don’t fucking know, and I wish they’d stop asking me!

I really am thankful that I’ve got such great people around me, but I am not dealing with this like they are. They’re huddling closer to each other, and I want to be left alone. I just don’t know how to tell them this. I feel like I should be stepping up to the plate right now, and instead I’m letting everyone down.

How do you tell people who are hurting to go the hell away?

It’s been so long I’m not quite sure where to begin, which is funny, seein’ as how not much has really happened.

While I’ve been away from 43Land, I’ve actually been (believe it or not) working on a few of my goals pretty fiercely. I’ve dove headlong into my family tree, begun actively pursuing careers in a field that I’m passionate about and pretty much gotten a handle on my runaway emotional state.

It’s funny how a change in outlook makes everything so much easier. What’s even more amusing (to me) is that I’m not that much different than I was a year ago. I’ve just started to accept that this is me, I am how I am, I do what I do and everything else is just details. Jesus-tap-dancing-christ-on-a-bicycle, I’m growing up, which considering I celebrated my 29th birthday last month, is a pretty damn good thing.

Over the past few months, I took a good hard look at myself and realized that journalism is just not for me. Yeah, there were days when I felt on fire and I really enjoyed what I was doing, but for the most part, it was depressing and it totally made me feel like a vulture 99 percent of the time. I stopped telling myself that it was just the paper I worked at that made me so unhappy. Sure, that was part of it, but a bigger part of it was that what I always wanted to do with my life (make a positive impact) is pretty much the antithesis of today’s (even small-town) media. I don’t want to be a part of that kind of degradation, so I closed that avenue off. It’s amazing how much of a weight that took off my shoulders. I don’t have to do something that makes me unhappy. Before I thought that if I gave up on that career, it would saying that I wasted my time going to college. That’s totally not true. I learned a lot about myself and life while I was in college. In theory, it was a great idea. In practice, it was soul-sucking. Lesson learned.

Speaking of lessons learned, I put my binge-drinking days behind me. I’m too old for that, and it got to the point where I was a sad drunk, and NOBODY likes a sad drunk. I have enough trouble dealing with reality when I’m sober. Alcohol makes me slightly less able to deal, and slightly less able is TOO less able, you know what I mean? A few nights ago, I went to a bar to see a friend’s band play and I had my first Crown and Coke in ages. Halfway through it, I was like, “My head’s getting fuzzy,” so I gave it to a friend and drank water.

I also quit smoking weed. Totally. Completely. It’s been about 10 months since I smoked, but for a few months there, I was on the fence about whether I’d ever start again. Now I know I won’t. I’m fine without it. “Strange Wilderness” is still hilarious, taffy tastes just as good and Bob Marley sounds just as sweet. It’s also nice to not be throwing down 40 bucks a day on something that’ll be history in a few hours, but that’s just an added bonus.

I guess I’ve just become a control freak to a certain extent. A lot of the things I’ve done that I’m not proud of have happened at times when I wasn’t quite in control of myself. I don’t want to be THAT person. You know, that person that’s a little too out-of-hand? I’ve never been good at temperance, so I’ve opted for abstinence.

Abstinence of all kinds actually… A certain ex-boyfriend managed to weasel his way back into my life, because I kept telling myself that forgiving him and helping him made me a better person. No, it didn’t. It made me a weakling. Haven’t spoken to that jackass in MONTHS. He still calls, and every time I see his number on my missed calls list, it feels like a tiny victory. I’m not angry anymore. I’m just OVER IT.

The other day, my bestie J said, “You know, things started looking up for us when we stopped dwelling on shit so much.” So true, brother. So true.

Me: “Hey, look at that guy laying in the road over there! What is he DOING?”
J: “Uhhh…Melissa, I think he’s dead.”

Yeah… Upon further investigation (meaning we stopped in the street and eyeballed the small crowd around the guy), J and I came to the conclusion that we were, in fact, looking at a dead guy. And then I feel the overwhelming urge to get the hell out of there before I got a REALLY good look.

I’m so glad I live out in the sticks where I don’t see things like that, you know, EVER.

This past winter, I had the grand idea to start a “small” garden in our backyard. I figured it would give me something to do, so why not? Well, my “small” garden somehow turned into a LARGE project that takes up more of my time than I’d like to admit. OK, I’m cool with that. I’m loving having fresh vegetables to cook with, and I think my family’s kind of amazed that I haven’t just let everything rot on the vine.

Since the squash and the zucchini started coming in, I’ve been getting at least a full basket (10 – 12 squash and almost as much zucchini) off my plants EVERY DAY. Last week, the okra finally started showing, and yesterday evening I noticed so many pods that I knew today would be a really big harvest. (Ha! I’m harvesting things. A year ago, I was doing my best to consume as much of a different kind of green as possible. Now I’m productive. It’s a nice change.) So anyway, this morning instead of carrying out one bucket to get okra, I carried two ‘cause I knew I was going to have a lot, right?

There’s NOTHING out there, and by nothing, I mean I finally found about 15 pods when I was planning on at least 7 or 8 times that much. Weird. So then I go to get the squash and zucchini that I was planning on cooking tonight. Instead of 10 or 12 of each, I found 2 squash and 1 zucchini. Plus, I’ve been keeping an eye on my tomatoes, and I had plans of getting at least 5 or 6 ripe ones this morning. Nuh uh. So I’m thinking, where the hell is my stuff, right?

I called my mom just to make sure she hadn’t gotten up super-early this morning and gave all my hard work away (I’m seriously territorial about this stuff now). Nope. So I called my brothers to ask if they had told someone to come down and get whatever they wanted. We give away a lot of stuff, so that wouldn’t have been out of the question. Nope again.

So I start looking around, and one of my sunflowers is TRAMPLED. This does NOT happen. I was planning on those flowers being my pride and glory, so everyone steps lightly around them. Everything’s in rows, so it’s not like someone just accidentally bumped into it. And this wasn’t some stray dog’s doing either. This flower was BROKEN and STEPPED ON and basically looks like someone with big boots decided to take out all their childhood trauma on it.

THEN…this is the kicker, folks…I found a squash on the far side of my house. You know that side of the house where nothing really goes on and you never walk over there unless you’re cutting the grass? Yeah, it was over there.

Now I don’t want to sound all paranoid but SOMEBODY IS STEALING MY VEGETABLES! What the hell? I called my mom back and she interrupted my angry rant saying, “If they need it so bad they’re willing to steal it, just let it go.” But I’m pissed, OK? If someone saw my plants and came up and asked for something, I’d be thrilled beyond belief to give it away. What’s the point in STEALING it? Plus, there’s the whole thing about how someone was apparently creeping around my yard AT NIGHT while they were STEALING my vegetables.

Because we live on a road where people apparently think the speed limit is only in jest, we keep my dog in an enclosed area in our backyard. When something like this happens, normal people might hear their dog freak out. Well, you see, my dog is…well…scared of people. So if someone was in my yard that he didn’t recognize, he was hiding in his house. (Great watchdog, huh?) My cat, on the other hand, was probably raising holy hell, but I can’t expect her to come in the house and wake me up. She doesn’t have thumbs.

Who steals from someone’s garden?

(On a brighter note, this picture is my cat and the giant-ass zucchini I left growing for weeks just to see how big it would get. It got pretty big, huh?)

Netdisaster? I just wreaked havoc on John McCain’s web site.

I just posted a new entry under a goal, but it’s not showing up on my home page thingy, BUT when I go look at the goal, there’s that entry right up top where it should be.

Has the cheer goblin started messing with other parts of 43Land, too?

EDIT: OK, this is freaking weird. I just refreshed the page, and the last two entries (the one that didn’t show up and this one) are right where they should be, AND a cheer that it at first showed I received 8 minutes ago, now says it was received 20 hours ago. What the hell? I don’t stay signed in or anything, so I can’t imagine what caused that to happen.

I don’t like it when 43T is out of whack.

After a short little break, I’m feelin’ ready to start tackling some non-life-changing goals again. In the past two months I have quit my job AND moved in with my boyfriend. I left my lame-ass, soul-sapping job on a Friday afternoon, decided I was never going back, and that was basically that. I just couldn’t do it anymore. Living on the verge of a bona fide nervous breakdown just isn’t my cup of tea. The moving-in-with-the-boyfriend thing took a little adjusting, but all in all, it’s going pretty well.

So yeah…that’s me.

I was fine with all the changes that came a few weeks back (or a few months, whenever it was), but you know, I miss the old colors. They just seemed more friendly, like colors you’d want to hang out and have a beer with on the porch. This darker blues are kind of like IRS jerks or disapproving parents. I’m sensitive to colors, and these new ones are hurting my feelings.

I just heard some news at work that pissed me off beyond belief, so how did I handle it? I went with E – the chick I work with – and got drunk. Not just tipsy. No, sir, I am drunk.

I just spent an hour and a half drinking Irish Car Bombs and Red Stripe and various fruity drinks, and we followed that up with sitting in my car singing along as loudly as we could to the Beastie Boys.

Wow.

You would think at some point some lesson would have sunk in about this, huh?

Well…not yet. Obviously.

Green Porno? Isabella Rossellini explains the mating habits of insects. This has to be one of the most bizarre things I’ve seen in a long time.

The bee is my favorite. :)