Thanksgiving is on Thursday, and I’m looking forward to the few days off it will bring. Today is Saturday. Over the past few days I’ve been going to class, researching/ writing papers, and sleeping a like 14 hours a day. This week was extremely hard, but I managed to go to all of my classes and didn’t skip a single one. As soon as I come home, I usually go to bed and then maybe wake up at 1a.m. to do some research and then sleep again from 3am to morning. One night after class I slept from 5pm to 7am without waking up at all. I’ve been extremely tired lately and I feel so unstimulated. I want to socialize and have more friends and feel a connection to someone. I continue to search and in the meantime I feel alone.

Still, I feel my efforts have been laudable. I’ve been attending the model train club more and the other night I ran my little Amtrak train on the big layout with the guys. Most of the members are 50+ and retired, but there are a couple other guys not far from my age, one who also is a big Amtrak fan and we have a lot of common items in our collection. I kept getting our trains mixed up when they were running, because they were nearly identical. It was fun.

I’ve also been trying to reach out at work. At the end of the night shift, one of my co-workers needed a ride home, so I gave him a ride. He offered to pay me, and I told him he didn’t have to “this time.” He said I was very kind. I felt good I could do something nice.

At first he was shy, but then told me he does drive, but his license is currently suspended, for reasons he didn’t want to discuss. He commented on the teddy bears I keep buckled-up in the back seat. I said, “yea, it’s pretty gay isn’t it?” He smiled and laughed as I told him, “if you’ve had any doubts up to this point, hopefully they’ve now been confirmed.” When I pulled up to his house he thanked me and shook my hand. I mean, I guess this is how friendships are built. I want people to like me, without seeming desperate, clingy, or too insecure. Why is it so hard to make real friends?

but as always, it’s tough.
Sundays are always the busiest day in the grocery store, especially in the deli department, with parents getting the kids lunchmeat for school and all. It was insane. But that’s the typical Sunday.

Besides the usual chaos, there’s this guy in the deli who I used to really like a lot, because I thought he was kind of cute. He’s my age, but definitely straight. Nonetheless, I was fond of him. Let’s call him Dan.

Lately I’ve noticed Dan keeps to himself a lot, and almost always stays in the back of the deli doing dishes and sweeping, all alone. He hardly talks to anybody, only a couple of people. He says very little to me and takes very little interest in me, hardly notices me. One night, he ignored me the entire shift, until he called my name, shoved an empty bucket into my hands and told me to clean up the salad bar area. After that, I pretty much stopped seeing him through rose-colored glasses, as I realized he could care less about me. Besides all that, though, what I notice most about Dan is that he seems really depressed and lonely. Watching him work alone in the back of the deli, I almost feel bad for him, and I wonder how such a handsome guy could seem so sad and lonely. He probably has no idea how much I think about him.

Beyond him, another thing that bothers me is when my co-workers, most of whom are post-college-aged adults, ask me how school’s going. It makes me realize how much I hate being in school and how much I wish I could say it was behind me. I have a few law papers I’m working on, one is on California’s Three Strikes law. Then I have a test on tuesday on state governments, one which I am not at all prepared for. I get upset because the adults I work with always act like I should be savoring the “best time in my life,” and they remind me that it’s “all downhill” after that. When I hear things like that all the time, I wonder why the fuck I’m bothering with school at all, if it’s “all downhill” after it’s done.

When the crowds finally died down and the store grew quieter, a younger couple came to the counter and gave a warm hello to one of the ladies I work with, let’s call her Elaine. Elaine, who I get along with very well, is an older lady, always keeping us updated on her countdown to retirement. She introduced the couple at the counter as her son and his wife. Elaine’s son was very tall and handsome, with blue eyes, dark hair and a wonderful smile. His wife’s stomach was huge, she’s pregnant with her first child, a girl. These two parents-to-be were sharing their excitement as they await the bundle of joy. I could see this look of warmth and pride in Elaine’s eyes, as she smiled at her son. I felt this enormous sense of guilt inside me.

I was thinking, why couldn’t I have been normal? My mother will never see me with a wife, let alone a wife carrying her grandchild. I think of what a shame it is—if my mom isn’t willing to accept me as I am, or to learn to accept me as I am, she’ll never be able to get over the fact that her son is gay. Instead of feeling proud, I know she feels ashamed and disappointed in me as a default.

If Dan has never noticed me, I have to say that something caught my attention tonight as I was leaving the store. This guy who runs a register in the front of the store, has shoulder-length brown hair, quiet brown eyes, and he’s handsome. I’ve run into him numerous times when, on my break, he’d scan any items I purchased, usually a few small cartons of orange juice. I always drink orange juice on my break, so, whenever he sees me around the store, he says something about orange juice.

Tonight, as I was heading toward the exit, I was drinking, of course, a large container, a quart, of orange juice that I had bought earlier. I happened to pass by the guy I was talking about; he was at his register. He looked at me, and said, “That better not be apple juice!” I smiled, and told him it was orange juice. He smiled back, saying, “I know!”

So often I feel like no one notices me. But this guy notices me. It made me feel so good that I thought about it all the way home. I feel so weird, like, I could cry, because all I want is to be noticed and liked. I doubt he has any idea how good his acknowledgement of my presence made me feel.

Sometimes I have to just sit back and realize how truly ill I am. The Prozac got hiked up another 10mg. Maybe it will help.

I sit back and realize how long I’ve been feeling like this, and I just wonder why. Why me? It’s like I’m incapable of obtaining any kind of satisfaction out of life. I feel so robotic, as if I’m being programmed to do the same thing every day. I feel like my depression truly is a terminal illness. Maybe I would be better off seeing it as such, and less guilty about killing myself.

I’m thinking about my schoolwork. I am so bored with school, it’s all I know and I’ve never done anything else with my life. I’m ready to get out of the constant charade. I’m just tired tired tired of my life revolving around school.

I may need to just fall. Maybe my illness is just too much for me to haandle. It’s turned into an incredible handicap, a barrier for me from functioning like everyone else. I could just go into a hospital and stay there a while and stop worrying about school and life for a while.

I could so easily destroy the rest of my life if I wanted to. Maybe that’s why I’m so afraid of trying, because maybe I feel I’m destined for failure. Failure is so easy. All I’d have to do is stab my parents to death with a kitchen knife and bam, I’m on death row. I’d be a lifeless prisoner with no feelings and no cares or fears. I’d be a nobody, a loser, one of the 2 million people in America behind bars who couldn’t handle the ways of the real world.

I hate my life. If there is a terminally ill cancer patient who’d say I’m taking life for granted, then I’d seriously say “let’s trade.” I’d gladly place my life in a donation bin to give to someone who wants one. I guess depression and cancer are more alike than they are different.

My feelings are all pent-up inside and I don’t know how to express them. I feel emotionally constipated. I’m depressed like I usually am at this time of night, thinking about the constant tomorrows ahead of me. I am so lonely. I need to get a dog or something. Anything that could give me a more powerful illusion of positive, loving human contact. I am so unhappy. I can’t figure out why. I feel increasingly hopeless and lifeless, completely dead inside. The things I thought I looked forward to seem less and less successful in pulling me out of bed. I’m nearly ready to give up. I’ve been nearly ready to give up for years, though. I can’t believe I still feel this way. I’m thinking I may have to put next semester’s classes on hold. I’m completely tired of college. I feel like every day is the same, and has been the same for the past two years.

The anniversary of my arrest is in two months. It will be three years.

I think I want to stay home tomorrow, just forget about all my responsibilities. I could spend the day writing goodbye letters to my family and friends, and I could draft elaborate or simple methods for suicide. Just finally say “fuck it” to the entire world, to my past, present, and future. Just fuck it. I’m beyond it. I don’t want any part of anything. I just want to dissappear forever and finally not feel like this anymore. That is what I want to do.

Today was weak.
I spent most of the daylight hours sleeping.
I had a doctor appointment at 10 this morning and I told him I’ve been feeling more depressed and that I’m sweating a lot. He wants me to get some kind of “blood work” done and refferred me to this lab for a blood test. Now that’s one more thing I have to make time for, around my classes, work, therapy, and all the other things on my plate.
Tonight I went with some friends to an amusement park for their Halloween festivities. The sky went back and forth between drizzling and pouring for the entire night. It was awful.

Tomorrow I work an 8-1/2 hour shift at the deli. I’m just tired and worn out and I have a lot of school work to do before then. And after work I’m supposed to meet up with one of my friends, but now I wonder if I’ll have the energy. All I want to do is sleep, but there is so much I have to do and it’s so hard. I wish I had more time. Classes just suck all my time up and anything left over goes to studying, writing papers, and going to work. What kind of life is that?

I can’t stop thinking about suicide. Because this is bullshit.

Tonight was the 1st day that students with my number of credits were able to select spring courses. Now that I have over 80 credits, I get to pick my classes early in the selection period. They go fast, though. After continuously clicking the “refresh” button throughout the first few minutes of Wednesday, the registratin site finally allowed me to enter around 12:02AM to pick my courses. I already had written down a list of the courses I wanted. By 12:10AM my spring roster was complete.

This was the first time I ever selected my courses so promptly. Usually I get so caught up in my current classwork that I don’t have time to think about next semester’s classes, and I end up waiting until the last minute, when everything’s full or almost full.

My schedule for spring looks very interesting. Dimensions of Racism, Women and Criminal Justice, Rehab of the Offender, and Gender in America make up my formal courses. Volleyball and band I picked to have some fun. When spring semester is done, I’ll have 114 credits. 123 are required to graduate.

As for now, my coursework is finally beginning to get heavy. My teachers are handing out the major assignments in each of the courses I’m taking, and due dates are on the horizon. In a few hours, I need to go into the core of the city (Philadelphia) to observe a court case (any criminal case) for a paper in my Criminal Courts class. I really don’t feel like it, but I have to get a move on this project if I want it to get done before the deadline, early next week. I wish I could just go to a local courthouse in my county, but the suburbs simply do not have the volume of criminal trials that Philadelphia has. Philadelphia without a doubt has more murder trials happening on any given day than any of the surrounding suburban counties have in a year.

So I’ll don a shirt and tie and march back down to the city court, which is an absolute zoo. The lines of wittnesses, victims, lawyers, cops, jurors, and defendants who made bail literally wraps around the building as people move through security to their hearings. About half of those in line won’t even have their cases heard due to delays and the enormous caseload of every courtroom.

The criminal justice system is a vicious monster for all who get caught up in its grasp. And I’m just going to watch and take notes as I observe, wondering, “whose lives will be destroyed by the system today?”

A lot of you know I have a thing for trains. When I’m really depressed it’s hard to stay interested in things I know I usually enjoy. I a budding collection of passenger trains with the roadnames of Amtrak and New Jersey Transit. Because I don’t have any place to run them in my house, I did some searching online and found a few local model railroad clubs that have big layouts for running trains. I started attending one located about a half hour from my house.

The clubhouse is an old train station building that is no longer used by the railroad. The building was restored and now houses the huge train layout. When the real trains go by, the whole building shakes, a characteristic which only enhances the railroad atmosphere in the room when running the models.

The club has a lot of hardware requirements for the trains which run on their layout. Each locomotive requires a special chip called a DCC decoder, which allows each train to run via one of the many hand-held remote controls abailable at the clubhouse. None of my trains had a decoder, and I didn’t know anything about them, so it was kind of intimidating and I thought I wouldn’t be able to be a part of their operations on the club layout. But the club president is a really nice guy who showed me what I needed to buy and for less than $10 I got the chip and he helped me install it at his house. DCC decoders are great because they allow for all sorts of special effects in the locomotives. The president installed a front and rear head light for me which lights up depending on which direction the train moves, and he also installed ditch lights, which are a pair of white lights below the front headlight which flash with the push of a button. Real trains flash their ditch lights when approaching railroad crossings and pulling into stations.

Last night was the first time I ran my train on the club’s layout. It was running night, which means about 10 members where there running their trains. The layout is so incredible and large that it’s difficult to know the wherabouts of even your own train at all times, especially in the tunnels. I was having a great time until there was this loud BANG. It sounded like one of the metal fold-up chairs had fallen to the floor. It turned out it was the end passenger car on my little train train had toppled off of the layout after being rear ended by a high speed Acela train. I was mortified, but I played it off by laughing and smiling. Luckily there was only minor damage and the passenger car that was hit only had a small dent on the back of it where it made impact with the floor.

I got depressed, though I didn’t let anyone notice. I kept thinking, why me? Why my train? I thought, see, this is what happens when you go out and try new things. My train would have been a lot safer if I never tried out the club at all.

Then I tried to think rationally in my mind. If I didn’t try out the club, I would have also missed out on all the fun I had running my trains with the other members. My train got a little damaged—so what. I became more thankful that it was only minor damage and was not worse. On such a large layout with so many trains, even though the running is pretty organized with two members working as dispatchers and monitoring the switches and trains, there are still bound to be accidents with so much going on. It’s like part of the game.

In the end, a lot of members complimented my train, my running technique, and my composure after the accident. Most members hadn’t seen any of my trains before, so this was the first time they got to see what I like to collect. As for the driver of the train that rear-ended mine, he also loves to collect Amtrak trains. He and I actually click in a lot of ways because we’re the only two people in the club who like to collect Amtrak. Everyone else seems to like steamers and historical trains more. Also, this guy has a huge collecion of Amtrak items and if I talk to him, I’m sure we’ll work something out where maybe he’ll give me one of his rail cars at a really cheap price.

The photo is my train on the layout from the back, the car closest to the camera is the one that was damaged. The train is beautiful and the car for the most part still looks good as new.

I kept telling myself I was going to get some good studying done today, but I just couldn’t. There was too much other things on my mind. School requires so much intense, constant focus. Trying to do school with such chaos in my troubled mind basically feels like trying to read a book while twenty noisy kintergardeners are running circles around me with scissors. I look up for a moment and then realize how much focusing on the book means letting go of everything else around me, including my worries, regrets, and depression.

I went over a friend’s house today. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that, gone into someone else’s home. I’ve been so isolated…
It was my friend Bobby’s house. Entering his home was entering his world. He has a younger brother in high school, a sister, a mom, and a greyhound named Shane. His mom got home and was trying to make dinner when she realized something was wrong with the sink. She was frustrated and asked Bobby to get some tools from the garage to try to fix the sink. He got the tools and tried to fix the sink but he couldn’t. While the two of them were bickering about that, his younger brother and I played video games in the living room. Then later on Bobby walked me to my car and I left.

I wish I felt more connected within my own family. Their house seemed like a home, with people living in it and things happening. My mother only had 2 children: my brother and I. He is much older than I and is moved out with a family of his own, so this house is very quiet and desolate, lonely. It’s me, my mom, and stepfather. I hardly talk with him, my mother’s husband. It does not feel like a complete family. Ever since my parents divorced, I’ve never really felt like I had a family.

Warm thoughts come back to the days when I was very little, and mom would pack my lunch for me and I’d look forward to what she put in it. I had a mom and a dad and my brother, and our house felt like a functioning home. I remember how much things changed after my mother left and she only got custody of my brother. The house forever lost its feeling of home. Even now though I live with my mom, I never got that feeling of home back.

I had my official graduation review with my academic advisor today. There weren’t any surprises—I already knew exactly what I need to graduate. So, it was a formality more than anything.

But there was one thing that my advisor told me that I didn’t know. She said if I take 16 credits in spring, instead of the 13 I had planned, that would leave only 8 credits remaining for the summer instead of 11. Then she said that students with 8 or fewer credits remaining after spring semester may, upon request and application, be eligible to walk in that spring’s graduation!!!

I did not know this. She said she has to double-check to see if that policy hasn’t changed since she last looked at it. But if it works, and I’m hoping it does, I will walk in my graduation in May. I would jump for joy if I believed it could happen. I am skeptical honestly as to even if I’ll be able to walk in any graduation at all. I feel like something is bound to to ruin it, again. Something I won’t see coming, like last time. Something horrible, like last time. It feels too good to be true.

My brother once told me “if something seems too good to be true, it is.” Since he said that, I’ve found the statement to be a pretty accurate one that has many times held me from getting my hopes up, saving me from being let down.

I’ve had a really hard time finding the motivation to do things lately. I picked the clothes up from the floor in my room, and it looks a lot better. I’ve been deep in depression though and I feel absolutely doomed at times. I don’t believe in anything. I feel very hopeless and afraid I’ll soon find my life as I know it being taken from me again. I feel so angry and so alone. I feel ugly.

I am seeing my therapist twice a week. I’m trying not to give up on myself.

It’s 1am. I’m sleeping all afternoon and up all night and hardly eating. I’ve been depressed nearly to the point of paralysis. I haven’t gone out—I haven’t talked to any of my friends. I haven’t showered or changed my clothes or finished my laundry or taken out my trash: a growing pile of crumpled papers and used tissues and snack wrappers in the middle of my room. This is terrible.

As I continue to talk about my FUTURE and internships and law schools with my instructor, I’m continuously reminded that the felony of threats to use weapons of mass destruction on my record will only work against me. No one can ever believe that I’m for real when I tell them that’s what is on my record, but it’s the truth and unfortunately not in any way a joke.

But my life feels like a big joke at times. Why do I try so hard? Am I foolish in thinking that there is really hope for me? I continuously tell myself to keep going when I know how much I want to stop and give up. Every single day of my life I go against my impulses to give up. Every day. The felony on my record is ridiculous, and were it not for the anonymous nature of 43 Things, I would never have admitted it here. People with records are so easily and constantly judged, and the hatred from society and the lack of forgiveness and understanding for those of us who’ve made mistakes is incredible. It’s as if once you get caught in the system, you are forever marked as “different” from the rest of the good society. It’s shameful and embarrassing, especially for those of us who actually care about our futures and intend to go in a different direction from the past.

How can you ever be expected to overcome your past when it follows you everywhere you try to go?

So in order to get my juvenile record cleared (that single felony is the only item on it) I have to go back to the courthouse and try to get through the hassle of the public defender’s office, because I cannot afford an attorney. I have to pay for an expungment petition—about $30—and then get the information from my case and everything filed into the petition. I have no idea what I’m doing and I feel like it’s just me doing this on my own.

I feel like a kid my age should be saving for books or car insurance, but I’m saving to pay to try to have a felony removed so I can get on with my life. I have schoolwork and readings and papers I have to be doing and I can’t bear to take energy to worry about my record. I’m ashamed to tell anyone about what I’m struggling with so I’ve isolated myself. As I come to finish college, I feel like it’s been a waste of time if this felony can’t be removed. But in the end it’s all my fault anyway, right? I was the stupid one. That’s what lots of people have said.

Sometimes I try to imagine what other kinds of problems I could have. I try to be thankful for what I’ve got and see how things could always be worse. I try to see the bright side—this conviction would be far more damaging to me if it were on an adult record. Still, though things could be worse, they could be a lot better too: I wish I didn’t a record at all. Since it happened, no one’s seemed able to whip out a magic wand and make it go away.

This has been a tremendous burden in my life that neither I nor anyone in my family ever saw coming. I still can’t believe it happened and try to accept it is reality. All I want is for it to be over.