Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful --
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath
This poem is chillingly real in its way...the first time I read it, the last line gave me an image of this terrifyingly ugly old woman with mad eyes, swimming upward in murky water towards the woman looking in, with clawlike hands outstretched to drag her in.

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
`I love her for her smile ... her look ... her way
Of speaking gently, ... for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'--
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
8 Be changed, or change for thee,--and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,--
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity.
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Suicide's Note

The calm,
cool face of the river
asked me for a kiss.

~Langston Hughes

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you
~e.e. cummings

I like this poem. like so many others it makes a different kind of sense to me every time i read it, and the things i admire at one time are not what i like the next time around

who knows if the moon's
a baloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky--filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should

get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their baloon,
why then
we'd go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody's ever visited,where

always
it's
Spring)and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves

~e.e. cummings

Someone I have not spoken to in a few months just IMed me and invited me to visit her at her beach cottage in Rhode Island this summer. She gave me her number there and described how beautiful the whole place is and how many attractive guys are running all over the place and how the shopping is great and that I really should come down. The IM is still sitting open at the bottom of the screen with the number on it. I think I'm going to delete it. I always seem to close open IMs by accident anyway, especially when they have something important in them.
I was friends with this girl after a fashion...the kind of friend you make when you and a whole bunch of other people are dumped into a new environment and have to branch out quickly. We met, embarassingly enough, at a science convention at UConn. No, I am not a geek. My physics teacher offered it, and one of my friends was going and didn't want to go alone, so I went. I anticipated boredom, which I got in plenty since most of the people attending this thing seemed to actually have some sort of interest in science, unlike myself. Most of the presenters--kids my age--had done amazingly difficult and complex experiments in college labs. The only one I remember was this thing on acoustic larvacide, using resonant frequencies to destroy the larval sacs of insects like mosquitos.
The whole thing actually turned out fun, since I liked the four other kids from my school and we met three other kids who were a lot of fun. Basically we slouched in the back of the huge lecture auditoriums talking and ignoring the education opportunity. And avoiding our teacher like the plague, since he might have suspected we weren't learning a damned thing. Anyway, it was a marvelous social occasion. One of the girls we met, Katie, even had a fling (a less-than-24-hour fling) with this kid from my school, Dan. We were all pretty amazed, since Dan's a reticent kid even though he's really nice. Dan happens to be our physics teacher's son, and ended up getting caught by him on the floor, in a sleeping bag, with Katie. We were all watching, of course. It was amusing. I'm glad my parents were never called to be teachers.
Anyway when we parted after the weekend was over, we all promised to keep in touch. My friend and I managed to for a while, using the Almighty Internet, and we got together once. Katie I got tired of really quickly since she talked about Dan incessantly after the fact. He had just broken up with his girlfriend; she was an obvious rebound and he didn't really want to see her afterward. But she kept talking about it. Eventually I blocked her. (My friend didn't; she says Katie is still talking about her "relationship" with Dan. The relationship lasted about forty-five minutes by our count, and she hasn't seen or talked to him since. This thing was in March!)
The problem with quickly made, quickly parted friends is that although your personalities may click and you get along, eventually you have nothing to talk about. Especially online. And unless there's a whole lot of motivation to keep things going, it all just dies away. That's what happened with me and the people I met. I had nothing to say, so I stopped talking. Now one of them's randomly inviting me to her beach house? I can smell an uncomfortable situation a mile away. I don't think I'll be visiting.
My friend and I are planning to go back to the convention next year. It's an easy way to get out of school for two days, and it was a hell of a lot of fun. In fact, everyone said they were going back, and moreof my friends want to go this time around, too. I think the teacher may catch on to the fact that we're not actually going for the academic opportunities. Free food, new people, and for some, the chance to make some cheap hookups. Paradise.

Tonight my friend and I watched Fight Club, a movie which is inexplicably popular, especially among young men of our age. I can understand why women might want to see it: Brad Pitt is hot, and that's simply a fact of life. But what sick unconscious urges draw guys to watch, in greedy fascination, as people are brutally smashed into a bloody pulp by another sweaty, hairy and half-naked individual? That had to be the most graphically violent movie I have seen in recent memory. I don't mind blood and guts when there's a point. War movies are fine in that respect. Strange mess-with-your-mind psychological thrillers that rely on weirdos beating the ever-loving shit out of one another are another story.
As for the point/plot of it, it's kind of a headachey blur. There was this chronically messed up girl in it, and the main character has some serious psychosis going on, but what was the point? Some stupid hackneyed message about how we are trapped by our possessions. We are not free. Civilization is evil. We should destroy everything and go back to grinding corn and bagging game. Why do these reverse-the-industrial-age people seem to believe that destroying what mankind has made will make anything better? Things couldn't have been all that fabulous back then or we wouldn't have tried to change anything at all. We would have stayed in our caves happily, clubbing things to death and roasting the occassional gazelle over the open fire. What a pleasant thought. Who decided that there can be no freedom in the middle of society? Aren't they choosing the easy way out by trying to blast themselves a path to enlightenment? It would be far more difficult to live in society and free yourself from it by your own will than to try to bring it down. People who try to change everything at once so often seem to be incapable of changing themselves.

"Home sweet home" is often an applicable phrase only when one is alone. I'm alone right now, and there is a large and rather dreamy smile on my face. What's that sound? My house is full of it. Oh yes....silence. It's a beautiful thing.

Speaking of other beautiful things, my boyfriend brought me a dozen red roses yesterday when he came to say goodbye. No one's ever actually given me roses before(flowers are like kisses: relatives don't count). Of course I'm not the kind of girl to be won over just by a few flowers; but if you're already won, the flowers make it all so much nicer :-) Not to mention that they're gorgeous, just like the person who gave them to me. It's the kind of gift that every time you think of it, you curse the fact that the giver is not presently within your reach so you could give them something in return. And then you get lost in a few minutes of rather inappropriate daydreams. And then you think that you should really look into having that guy cloned, so you could have at least one with you all the time. (We've discussed this before. I think it would be an absolutely perfect arrangement, and it's not like they'd probably being complaining, either.) But then again, separation is great because you're going to be that much more enthusiastic to see them when you get the chance. You're probably also going to jump them at the first possible opportunity, but *shrug* what else are you going to do?
Aside from turning the lights out, of course.

I’m stuck at my grandfather’s house right now. I can’t actually get online to post this after I write it, since for some reason, AOL will never, ever, ever! connect from this place, no matter what access number or phone jack I use. Many frustrated hours have also been devoted to discovering that this home is conveniently located in a black hole—commonly called Massachusetts—where one can’t find a single decent modern rock station on the radio, but can manage to come across no less than seven—yes, SEVEN—whiny, country, I-lost-my-dog-my-wife-and-my-pickup stations. Death to any who find themselves low on batteries or have forgotten their CD cases. Fortunately on this particular evening, I’m not in that uncomfortable position. I’m still uncomfortable, though. This house lacks central air, and true to the proud tradition of old people, my grandpa insists on closing all windows and stifling any possible influx of air, so as to make the place as unbearable as is humanly possible short of a heatstroke. Once, when we came up in the middle of July, we found that the man actually had the heat on. Yes, the heat. In July. We almost turned around and went home.

Amazingly, he’s not actually senile. A little confused, perhaps—tonight at dinner he informed me confidently that my dad died in 1993. He mixes it up with the date of his wife’s death. He also has a habit of calling my sister Janice, my aunt’s name. Still he manages to drive, put on clothing, and bathe, which I suppose is good enough. There’s never any food in the house, not my kind of food anyway, since I have an aversion to things that must be microwaved before they can be consumed. Being a man who lived in the domestic era of the twentieth century, he never troubled himself to learn the function of a stove beyond the burners that make hot water. It’s been nine years since my grandmother’s death, and cooking is still yet her domain. Unfortunately, dead people seem quite loath to cook for the living. Perhaps it’s envy that we can eat and they can’t. Maybe it’s a lot cooler where they are and they just don’t feel like getting all hot and sweaty over a stove. My dad has still not yet answered several requests to return and make me some pancakes. He made the best damned pancakes ever. He probably learned it from my grandma; she was even better really because she used to make little animals out of the batter, rabbits and mice and anything with ears. Those were so fun to eat. It’s a sadistic streak in children that whenever they see something edible with ears, they rip the ears off and eat those first.

You know what’s funny? When there’s been something you’ve known since childhood and never questioned, and only later realized something else about. Today I figured out that the two nice lady teachers who’ve lived across the street from my grandfather for my entire life aren’t just roomies. You should have seen my face. I was like “Dude, they’re lesbians? Really?” I’d never even considered that possibility before; I just sort of took for granted that they were two unmarried women who shared a cute little house. So it goes.

I'm trying to think of some quote about the past coming back to bite you in the ass said by some famous person. Maybe it's "the past will return to bite you in the ass." Short, sweet and to the point, just like those maxims are supposed to be. I guess you either have to cultivate a tolerance for pain or learn to run really really fast. I think I'd go for the running if it were me. My, aren't those fangs sharp?

"If the Devil wore a top hat,
and a black cloaked lined with fur,
would we stop on the sidewalk
and gawk,
bow a bit and call him sir?"

It's hard telling people things. Especially people who aren't always extremely intuitive, even more especially when they don't know that you're trying to tell them anything and change the topic, and most especially when the something you're trying to say is something that's really been troubling you. Something that's kept you up at night because your brain is just turning it over and over, trying to find an explanation or reason or solution, and not letting you rest.
How do you say things when you can't ask anyone for advice on how to say them because they've never had to say quite the same thing? It's hard, very hard, but you can feel that if you let it sit it's just going to weigh on you more and more.
People can be such blockheads! Even the ones you're very close to. No, wait, ESPECIALLY those ones.

Hmmmm....it's not like i'd like to be living in the pioneer days or anything--i have an aversion to dirt being all over everything--but sometimes, ok a lot of a time, i wish i were living in a different era. The advantages outweighed the disadvantages---oh wait, no they didn't! Bad food, nasty diseases, short lifespans, weird fashions, no rights for women, no plumbing....it sucks to want to live in another time only to realize they were probably just as bad for people back then. even if you were living in italy during the renaissance, which is one of the places i would have loved to have been, like florence or venice, you probably would have been cursing all the idiotic nobles with their incessant wars. especially since there was no such place as italy then anyway, just "duchies" *funny word* like the Duchy of Milan, of Florence, of Venice. That reminds me, the guy that ruled venice was called the Doge. (i never figured out what that means, although i will assume it its not another way of saying "dog".)
i guess life in the past would only work out well if you were pretty high up on the food chain, but not high enough that you get killed in all the wars like the kings and whatnot. being a countess would have been nice. i always thought the word "duchess" was ugly anyway. and being a princess back then inevitable meant being married off in a political alliance to the creepy old guy who ran another country. bleh. but then again, most of them probably had a bunch of guys on the side, anyway.
i wonder if there's any society where marriage has always truly been sacrosanct, like people really don't commit adultery. even the old rigid japanese society had all the geishas and prostitutes. they were just very very graceful about it. you can't say that it happened becaue people were in arranged marriages. people choose their own spouses today, and still half of them can't seem to keep their pants on outside the bedroom. maybe human beings lack the emotional intelligence to pick appropriate partners....either you get lucky, or you get screwed. (and maybe not even the latter, if you pick someone who's more interested in playing for the same-sex team.) Marriage is such a chancy business. The obvious solution to the whole divorce issue is either one, don't get married in the first place (hey, living in sin is all the rage these days) or pick your partner very carefully. which is probably why i'll end up living with whoever i'm planning to marry prior to the actual marriage--to the eternal shame of my mother, i'm sure. she always told me that when you get married, part of it is learning to adjust to the other person. i think i'd rather adjust in advance, rather than figure out on my honeymoon that my husband has some weird rain-dance ritual that he simply must perform every night before he goes to bed. or that he sings terribly in the shower. or, god forbid, that he snores. a girl's gotta have warning so she can buy some nice earplugs, or she might have a corpse on her hands. i would, anyway. i may sleep like a log, but getting to sleep is always tricky.
and then there's the sex thing. i remember one of my friends saying very matter-of-factly in freshman year that ouf course she would live--and sleep-- with her husbadn before they got married--how else was she suppposed to know if they were "compatible in the sack"? it made sense, even back then when i was far more innocent, and, well, catholic. no one likes surprises. i also remember some weird story i read about how this mortician guy wanted his new wife to get in a bathtub of cold water before they had sex. *cough* needless to say, that honeymoon was over damned quick.
of course there is the very good chance that i will not get married at all. since i have a tendency to show an aversion for human company from time to time, one of my closest friends prophesied that in my future, my husband and i would occupy separate huts on opposite sides of a vast forest. once a month we would meet "like two ships passing in the night" while gathering sticks or something similar, and otherwise ignore each other. naturally my hut will be more like a mansion, but the basic system is the same. it might turn out to be true. after years of having family members constantly present, the alone-ness of the school year is so very enjoyable, and when i'm forced into an environment with people for long periods of time i show a great desire for them to go away. it's only when i have to live with the people, mind you. i can see people most of the time and not mind, but home is supposedly and usually my space. *in summer, obviously, conditions change drastically, and not for the better.* according to some, this "leave me in peace" attitude might not be optimal for the married life. i've heard husbands are around a good deal of the time, usually not making themselves useful, either. i suppose that's god's punishment in return for the sex, etc.
solution: stay single, get rich, keep cats, keep your options open. egads, watch a ironic twist of fate turn me into a suburban soccer mom with five kids, a dog, and a husband who works in a cubicle!! never!!!
that's my evil omen of the future for now. i really need sleep....maybe my brain is just going into overdrive? it's been a long day.

It's eleven o'clock--do you know where your pets are??
Incidentally, I don't. One six-pound lump of black fur is currently spreading the love, and the fur, all across my newly cleaned comforter. what is it about clean, fresh-smelling things that seems to invite smelly creatures to jump all over them? maybe it's some evil gene in animals, that they must systematically seek out and violate all those things that bring us joy. like this pink heart-shaped inflatable pillow i had a few years ago--don't ask me why i had a pink heart-shaped inflatable pillow, it was a confused time in my life. i happily paid far too much for its Taiwanese craftsmanship and wasted precious oxygen blowing it up, only to have a murderous feline treat it like a personal pincushion in a matter of days. nights, actually; they always attack by night. in my family, since i'm usually the one who gets captivated by some adorable animal in the humane society and convinces the rest of the family that the fuzzball would be a fabulous and entirely cost-efficient addition, i am usually the one to whom the new acquisitions attach themselves for a certain period of time. this suits everyone else because i am thus the one that suffers most in terms of property damages and initial i-dont-trust-you-yet-you-filthy-human injuries.
one of these cat-astrophes *terrible pun intended*, cinnamon, is now the image of sweetness and docility. not so when she arrived. this little she-beast insisted upon inhabiting my room, and insisted equally on wreaking total havoc on my possessions under cover of darkness. it was pure accident, my family claimed, that in her travels she knocked everything fragile onto the floor, clawed the sides of chairs, knocked over the lamp repeatedly, and seemingly took pleasure in making the maximum amount of rustling, cracking and thumping noises possible at ungodly hours of night and morning. it didn't help that i often awoke--angrily, of course--to aim a sock, shoe, or other handy missile at the source of the noise, causing even more damage and never, obviously, hitting the target. they come equipped with night vision, the little buggers. this same cat had an unnatural obssession, in kittenhood, with all things paper. she would be utterly fascinated for hours with a crumpled ball of paper. any papery sounds brought her running, eyes fixed on the prize. and pieces of paper left out unawares were the greatest prize of all, as i learned when i walked into my room one night to find her chewing delightedly on my homework. my cat literally ate my homework--not completely of course; she managed to chew off one corner before my screaming and yelling disturbed her. naturally, everyone besides me thought her behavior was hysterical.
thankfully for me and my sanity, kittens get older and calm down, though that cat will, if she's in my room at night, still untertake adventures to explore my closet or behind my chair, causing the familiar nocturnal cacophany. but after kittens grow older, there is room for a new pet. i wasn't actually looking for a pet, really; i happened to be in the humane society with my mom and my friend who was staying with us at the time, and suddenly i discovered the most adorable black kitty with incredibly piercing yellow eyes. our last three cats had been tortoiseshells, a sort of newfound family tradition, but i had always wanted an all-black cat. so we waited in line for an hour and went into the little room where you're supposed to get acquainted. my mom wasn't exactly fond of her because the cat showed no interest in us whatsoever--she explored, and didn't run, but she didn't purr when we petted her. anti-social from the start, just my type.
and you know what's funny? there was a lot more to this post, but it screwed up and didn't go up right.and no way am i typing the rest of it again! long story short, hell in the beginning, but i always love my cats in the end. same with people, sometimes. technology sucks.

I didn't write that recently. I don't really like it but it says something in there that I've tried to say a hundred other times and ways and never gotten through to my own satisfaction. I was working on saying it last night in a particularly long blog; however, my computer chose that moment to go malicious and shut off my connection. Sometimes I want to throw this little piece of technology into a wall and jump on it until it cracks into tiny, tiny pieces. Grrrrrrr.
Today is proving rather dull. I hate not having a car! At the same time, I also hate being dependent on an inanimate object for security and comfort. Even if the object of my affection is ruggedly gorgeous and cherry red and fills its driver with an inordinate sense of power....Oh dear. Is there a twelve step program for addiction to your SUV???
I should get my mind onto other things. How to resolve India's current economic crisis, or something. All I have to do is look around at some of my friends to see that dependency is not good for the soul. We're all dependent on something, though, no matter how above it we think we are. What am I dependent on? Well, oxygen comes to mind. Really don't think I'd be doing too well without it. What about things like my house, my clothes, my mom, my friends, my boyfriend? Although I depend on them, it's not like I couldn't survive without them if I absolutely had to. Not like it would be pleasant or anything, but it could be done.

Daddy, daddy,
if you came,
I’m sure you would still love me
--but would you know me?
if you saw your little girl now,
grown prouder, stronger
become a woman (almost),
finding her own place in the world?

Would you have changed?
Would you be grown older,
or would death have preserved you
in fifty-year vitality
so that you would come back whistling,
making jokes, carrying the world on your shoulders,
the strongest man on earth?

If you came, would you take me in your arms
lift me up and fly me around the world
like you did when I was little?
Daddy, we both know I am not a child any longer
--but somehow I know that if you came
and knew me, and loved me,
we could fix the past
and everything would be all right.

Did you ever wonder if God gave us stretches and yawns and back rubs just to make up for all the other crap we got tossed into? As I stretch and yawn and try to massage my own shoulders *failing miserably, of course*
Did you ever wonder who I'm writing this to? *anastrophe: addressing an inanimate object, or a person or thing not present. thank you, mrs juda* Am I writing "Dear Diary", or "Dear kitty" like in Anne Frank? Am I writing this expecting that someone, someday will read it and from it draw a picture of me that, while incomplete, might just be clearer in some aspects than the one the people who know me would give? Of course I am. All diarists, all journalists, write with a need to be read, whether they know it or not. They are recording something, not just for themselves, but for a larger Someone. We record to save, so that when we finally corner some omniscient being we can march him back, show him what happened and demand answers. Are we always recording our true feelings, our true thoughts? Hardly. Writers take raw emotion and shape it, from formless yet beautiful clay into something more palatable. They take the basic and put words onto it. What you're reading--because I believe there is a someone reading this at some point in time--is not me! It couldn't possibly be me. There's no way for me to ever capture who and what I am in the few words our language affords us. This isn't me because this is not true, none of this is true. It can't be True because I haven't been able to link my brain with this computer and pour every exact thought, feeling, memory and emotion in for posterity. These words you read were crafted with a reader in mind, and so I know they can't possibly reflect what's real.
Does that bother me? Not really. Will that stop me? No.

Do you ever think that maybe you should write a book? A book about yourself and your past, as far back as you can remember, incorporating all the vignettes and funny anecdotes and jokes and reminisces that made your family and your background unique? Even now, at quite a young age, I have to pause and really recollect to reconstruct some of the most important events of my childhood. They're slipping away....Time is stealing them from me, as he takes everything from everyone.
Should I write a book so none of this ever gets entirely away? Even with words, I know I would never be able to recapture the emotion and feeling and imagery that are present, even in the fragments of memory I still completely possess. Happy memories I always want to remember, like my dad singing his little song about the bird with the yellow bill upon the windowsill, or the hand puppets, billy and bobby, are sort of hazy, like I'm seeing them on a fuzzy old movie screen. Then there are the memories I wish I could forget entirely but haven't, the thousand humiliations of my childhood which return to plague me at various moments. The truly terrible things, like my treatment at the hands of my first grade teacher, are still omnipresent. Why does hurt stick so much longer than happiness? I can't remember the name of that Disney game, it had cars and levels and movable pieces, that everyone would have given an arm and a leg to play with in kindergarten, but I can remember how incredibly ashamed I was after that woman called me a liar in front of the whole class, and how terrified I was when she dragged me into the hall to warn me never to tell my parents on her again.
Twenty years from now, I worry that I will remember the things in life that hurt me and made me sad, and lose the things that made me smile. They seem to be so much more fleeting. This, I suppose, is my one true fear. Aside from my fear of heights and of bugs, I really fear that I will forget anything, everything. What am I without memories? They say the dead live on in memory--if you have forgotten them, or at least forgotten the good things about them, aren't they truly dead then? My dad dies again and again every time I can't recall some memory of him. Yet the memories of all the bad times, all the cruel words and the fights and the times I swore I'd run away and make them all very very sorry remain, and probably will forever. I know life was never intended to be fair, but this seems the greatest injustice of all.
In a few decades, if people ever get my work together and try to determine a theme, they might just notice its the loss of memory. I think I have written so many poems, most of which i will never show to anyone else, on the subject. The majority have to do with my dad. He's gone; we don't have a future together, so all I have of him, all I'll ever have from now till eternity, is the past. If I lose that, where can I go to find him again?

I just read "The Vagina Monologues"....suffice it to say that that my eyes opened a little wider with every chapter until, at the point where a lesbian was describing her private activities with her partner, "Oh my....umm...." was all I could say. Most of it was very well written, a good combination of intelligence, humor, and persistent belief. This is the prevalent liberation philosophy of womenkind--and while I do agree that we should reclaim ourselves, and not let what society has taught us is decent rule what our emotions and actions, I don't know if I'd feel comfortable "reclaiming myself" on a mat in front of twenty other women as is done in the workshops held by Eve Ensler, the writer.
However, this strikes me as something I would love to go see with a group of my friends, whom I know who not be bothered by persistent use of the various terms for vagina. It was empowering simply to read, knowing other women felt this way, like seeing a new light. A few interesting facts contained therein: they used to perform surgeries on women who masturbated to remove most of their genitalia, or sew up the vagina. The last one performed was in 1948--on a five year old girl. Another thing was that the clitoris is the only human organ which has no other purpose than to give pleasure--men definitely don't have that! Additionally, it contains 8,000 nerve bundles, double that in the penis. Sucks for them.

I'm slightly in a better mood now. I still haven't reconciled myself to what I see happening all around me, but I don't know if I can or will fight it anymore. Perhaps it's better to let it go.
On a slightly different note, I've decided to do something that I realized I wanted to do a long time ago, but had tried to keep myself from wanting because of crazy societal taboos, or some such crap. Screw it! I've had about enough of that. I want to know what it's like, and I intend to find out. What an irony it would be if I enjoyed it more than what is normally acceptable! And on an even better note, all the people who are close to me, save one, are interested in the very same thing. I don't feel alone or even irregular. I like this philosophy of going with what you feel to be right.