Please someone save me. I don't have the strength to do it on my own anymore.

I've been writing in my journal a whole lot more lately. Nearly every day. I've written some pretty interesting entries. I usually write right before I go to sleep, which sometimes causes me to turn out my light entirely too late. And for the past two nights I've started thinking of something interesting after I've turned out my light, so I've sat back up and written some more. One of my entries was four pages long, which is pretty impressive for me. Some of it's been just about stuff I did that day, and some of it's been more interesting sort of stream-of-consciousness stuff, where I lose track of the time and next thing I know twenty minutes has gone by. I actually wrote stream-of-consciousness about stream-of-consciousness. That was pretty fun.

So, it's the New Year. I haven't made any resolutions (but I never have; the only resolutions I made when I was younger was to read a certain number of books that year (always an impossible number like 100)), but I've been thinking a lot about making changes or bringing a new energy into my life. Wes once said to me that a birthday is the perfect time to make a change because it is the ending and beginning point of a natural cycle. I think it's the same with a New Year. It's another cycle; the earth has just made another revolution around the sun. People feel it's the right time to make a change, and that's why they make resolutions. I've been thinking I should try meditation again tonight. Maybe it's the right time :)

So I've been without a computer for around three weeks now I think. I was devastated when it broke. The computer had been my main source of entertainment since I was like ten. It was my connection to the outside world. When it died, I felt completely cut off from everyone. At first I mourned the loss. I was so bored and spent my time ambling around the house wishing it would come back. But then I remembered how unhappy I'd been with spending so much time on the computer, and I embraced the change. I started with spending my free time either doing puzzles and watching TV. Then I began to read more. I began to write in my journal more and started to become more creative. Now I've added a guitar to entertain myself. Even if I got my computer back right now, I wouldn't go to it. The only useful purpose it has for me now is for homework. I feel almost liberated.

Will burnt me a disc of Bob Dylan songs. I expected there to be maybe twenty songs on it, but he put like sixty songs on the thing. This was my face when I saw it:

Honestly, i'm getting so tired of having to deal with him and his gimp leg every day. I wish the damn dog would sneak into his bed and eat the piece of shit he calls a heart. If i had my way, i'd give that damn amazing dog a congressional medal of honor, maybe even the key to this shithole i live in.

On another note, Merry Christmas.

I don't think for myself.

It's a depressing realization.

I'm not sure what happened. Two days ago I was feeling so great and everything was dandy, and now I feel empty, I'm not alive, I want to sever ties with everyone and go far away. Sometimes I wonder if I do this to myself on purpose. If I enjoy feeling miserable. Maybe I'm just tired. I hope that's all it is.

 What a bad day. I ended up taking a sleeping pill last night to get to sleep, and I guess because of it I was out of it all day. And then I got, I don't know, depressed I guess because I was out of it. I just started thinking about like how I think I'm a boring person to other people, and like how easy it is for other people to carry on a conversation, why is it so difficult for me? Stuff like that. I started feeling lonely, and we went to lunch and I couldn't make myself focus on what they were talking about. Mikie flipped me off, which irritated me, so I was depressed and irritated. In physics I started thinking about my future and how sometimes I really don't think I have what it takes to be an astronomer, but if I don't do that, then what will I do, and how I don't want to be like my mom and end up with some crap job because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life. By the middle of physics I was on the verge of tears, I just kind of got overwhelmed by my thoughts, you know? It kind of sucked because I've been feeling soo good the past couple weeks. But then I started understanding what to do for our physics practice problems, which made me feel a little better about myself. And after school Mikie called to see if I was okay, and that cheered me up a lot. I actually think about it sometimes, like if I'm feeling down at school, how would anybody notice since I'm so quiet anyway? So I kind of really appreciated his call, and I hope I conveyed that to him.

Maybe subconsciously I'm just feeling stressed, and my lack of sleep just brought it all out today. I'm still not feeling quite right, but I'm sure I'll be over it by tomorrow.

"If it is sayable, it is within the range of the word.
If it is unsayable, it is outside the steady grasp of mind.
The real is where the sayable and unsayable meet.
What the real truly is, is altogether beyond comprehension."

-From Sri Gur Granth Sahib, the holy text of the Sikhs

"You can only be free when you lose your identity."

I'm sitting here listening to a steady rain that's been falling all evening, and I thought I'd do another freewrite. "I Want You to Want Me" by Cheap Trick is on repeat. The chorus is so simple but I love it:

I want you to want me.
I need you to need me.
I'd love you to love me.
I'm begging you to beg me.

I especially love the part where he repeats "I want you to want me" over and over.I feel like I need to be needed right now. But what else is new? I love that feeling when someone shares their feelings about something with you. It'd been a long time since I've really experienced that, I'd forgotten what it's like. Like Charles and I were talking the other night and we were talking about marijuana and he told me his reason why he's against it, using a personal experience. He is one person I'm starting to get to know more, which is good. Charles is the type of person who will notice if something is wrong and ask you about it. Today I hadn't finished my project for history even though I stayed up until 1:00 working on it, and even got up early to do it. I was so tired, and when I'm tired I get emotional. So in English class as hard as I try to resist it, I start crying. And Charles...actually seemed to care, which was nice. He talked to me about it, and at the end of class he asked if I was okay. I can't remember the last time someone asked if I was okay. With some people, they don't confide in me about anything, which makes it extremely difficult for me to feel like I can confide in them, and so it kind of puts of a barrier that prevents me from feeling close to them. I don't feel that with Chalres. It's so good to have a friend like that. I think the last time I felt that sort of vibe from someone was with Wes. Actually Charles reminds me a lot of Wes, just in the way he expresses his thoughts.

I'm too tired to even have anything else running through my head now, so I'm going to leave with this quote:

"Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high-mass stars that exploded their chemically enriched guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life, so that we are all connected, to each other, biologically, to the earth, chemically, and to the rest of the universe, atomically. That's kinda cool. That makes me smile. And I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It's not that we're better than the universe, we're part of the universe. We're in the universe and the universe is in us."

Even though I take that one step further and say we're all connected spiritually or subconsciously or whatever you want to call it, "The Mind", that quote basically expresses everything I believe. Actually though, I've been thinking a lot about consciousness or souls or whatever. Like if there was a big bang that created everything, did that also "create" souls? Though if souls are just consciousness like I sort of believe, then it just came about when sentient life did. But there's still the question of that eternal energy that makes The Mind. Where did that energy come from? Did it exist in the bubbling particle that was the universe billions of years ago before the big bang? Just always existing? It's hard for me to concieve there being nothing before the big bang, except this particle just floating in the nothingness. Maybe the multiverse theory is true, this universe is expanding inside another universe inside another universe etc. But it's just as difficult for me to comprehend eternity like that. Maybe there are other worlds in other dimensions. I mean I think I read many scientists accept the reality of 10 dimensions. That leaves open so many endless possibilities.

Okay, I'm too tired to be thinking about this at 12:30. Bed.

VIEWPOINT
Stephan Harding

"Modern humans have lost a vital connection to "animate Earth", says ecologist Stephan Harding in this week's Green Room. Re-connecting with the natural world and the true place of humans in the cosmos is the best route, he argues, to sustainable societies and economies.

We are wiping out so many species that biologists speak of a mass extinction more fatal than any other in our Earth's history

There is now little doubt that our culture is unleashing a vast and accelerating crisis upon the world.

We have set in train changes to our climate that seem certain to become very dangerous indeed during the next 50 years or so.

We are wiping out so many species that biologists speak of a mass extinction faster and possibly more fatal than any other in our Earth's long history.

Our social fabric is also unravelling, and as it does so crime and massive psychological problems increase apace.

As the Earth gears up to pay us back for waging our unwitting war against her, it is critically important that we discover what has made our culture so uniquely destructive.

Some believe that our inherently "sinful" human nature is to blame, that any culture with our technological might and prowess would have done the same thing; but I subscribe to a different understanding.

I believe that we are suffering from a world view so dangerously pathological that it is leading our civilisation to the brink of suicide.

The fatal flaw is this: that for us, the entire cosmos, including the Earth and all her living beings, her rocks and air and atmosphere is no more than a dead machine that we are free to exploit without limit in the furtherance of our own interests.

This notion of a mechanistic universe comes in part from the great thinkers of scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th Centuries, from men such as Descartes, Bacon and Galileo.

There is no doubt that their creation, modern science, is a brilliant and fabulously powerful intellectual achievement that has given us many significant benefits; but it has also deluded us into believing that only pure analytical reasoning can give us reliable knowledge about the world.

No wonder then that we have ended up in a "dead" cosmos, for science has taught us to be deeply suspicious of our sensual, intuitive and ethical sensibilities.

I believe that we must quickly develop an expanded science that recognises the validity of all four ways of knowing in equal measure if we are to avert the looming disaster.

When we do this, we enter the ambit of a different, more wholesome perspective in which our spontaneous, sensual experiences of the world, our deepest intuitions, our sense of what is right, and our reasoning work together to inform us, in the words of "geologian" Father Thomas Berry, that the world is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.

This is no new idea. Plato spoke of the anima mundi, the soul of the world, and many of the great philosophers, including Spinoza, Leibniz, and more recently AN Whitehead, considered matter itself to be sentient in its deepest roots.

Could it be that anima mundi, banished from our consciousness for 400 years, now cries out to be heard in this time of deep crisis?

Within science, she manifests in quantum theory, systems thinking, complexity theory, and, more concretely, in James Lovelock's Gaia theory.

Here we learn that far from being a dead machine, the Earth is more like a living organism in which the tightly coupled interactions between the sum of all life and the rocks, atmosphere and oceans give rise to the stunning emergent ability of the Earth as a whole to maintain habitable conditions on her ancient crumpled surface despite an ever brightening Sun and the vagaries of tectonic events.

When approached simultaneously through our four ways of knowing, Gaia theory teaches us that we live symbiotically within a vast evolving sentient creature of planetary proportions - that we are just plain members of the Gaia community, not its masters or stewards.

What would society look like if we lived according to this more animistic understanding?

We would recognise that other species, and indeed the Earth herself, have intrinsic value irrespective of their value to us.

We would deeply question our mainstream economic model, for the great wild sentient personality of our planet calls out to us to reject the endless and ever-increasing plundering of her material substrate.

Instead we would develop a "steady state" economy in which the things that grow are love, spirituality, creativity, depth of community, simple living, and the healing of the Earth, but in which our use of her "resources" is kept at levels that she can cope with.

We will never know enough about the complex dynamics of our planet to justify a solid pessimism about the future. Fear is a good motivator, but love is best of all.

So the most important task for us all now is to re-discover our sense of belonging to our animate Earth. Only then will we feel our sense of self expanding outwards to embrace the vast more-than human-world that enfolds us.

Just try it. Spend time outdoors - gazing at the sea, or laying on the ground and feeling the great spherical body of our turning world at your back as she dangles you over the infinite expanse of the cosmos.

I guarantee that you'll find an unexpected wealth of happiness and connection in that simple act. Only then will you encounter the most durable motivation for engaging in genuinely sustainable actions."

I need to start going to bed earlier, because everytime I stay up late I start thinking about this and questioning and hoping, and then I get honest with myself and realize the truth and it makes me horribly depressed.

Well today in English, Mr. Rhulman was talking about freewriting and how it's good practice for writing assignments. I've never really seriously tried freewriting before. I mean, I've done it for journal assignments in English, but I didn't really write what I was thinking about because I knew the teacher would be reading it, and what goes on in my head is not something I would want a teacher to know about. So I'm just going to write and write and not stop for a while. But I know that I would just write about my depression and my need for love right now and getting out of here ASAP because that's all I ever even think about any more. Even when I try to think about something else it just strays back to that. And I've written about this stuff a million times so what's even the point? It's the same stuff I've been writing about for, oh I don't know, four years now. I guess just getting it out helps. It's like it all builds up during the day and when I get home I write about it and flush it out to be fine the next day. When I say that, I imagine a like a toilet handle on my head being flushed. I was kind of thinking before I started writing this, that my thoughts throughout the day are almost like I'm writing in a blog. I don't know if anyone else thinks like that. Like I narrarate my thoughts in first person, like I'm talking to someone else. Like like like. I remember this one time in seventh grade, my best friend at the time and I decided to fill a sheet of paper with a bunch of words, just the first words that came to our minds. They were really funny to read outloud. But a lot was funny to us then. You know I just realized that I don't even miss having a best friend anymore. I guess it's not something I really care about right now. I really just care about finding someone to be close to and to exchange care and love and ideas and beliefs and laughs with. I want to feel like someone cares about me. Romantic love just fills something that friendly love can't. I don't have much need for friendly love right now. And I want someone I feel like I can confide in. I mean, there's Joe, and I appreciate how much he listens to my babbling, but not actually being able to see him kind of detracts from the whole experience of confiding in someone. I really want someone tangible to talk to. But I just don't feel like I can confide in anyone. But really, right at this moment I don't care about much at all. I'm not feeling much emotion. But I am pretty tired. I got myself so worked up about Pre-Cal last night that it took me a while to stop sobbing and sniffling and actually fall asleep. I really actually find it amusing that I can think all day long about everything that's depressing me and not shed a tear, but something like not understanding math or a spider in my bed can make me break down. I'm probably so used to it that nothing comes out until something new upsets me. I haven't been going outside very much lately. And it's because of the silliest reason too - because of all the bugs outside. Even in the beginning of summer, I never cared nor even noticed any bugs, I went outside anyway. But now I'm so conscious of anything moving in the yard, especially these small jumping spiders, it creeps me out to be out there. I wish it didn't. I need to work on really realizing that nothing's going to hurt me out there. 'Being one with the insects,' hahaha. But I've actually been feeling alright since yesterday. I'm glad that my little bout of depression on Tuesday didn't last long. Oh, I went to Galaxy Diner with my mom last Saturday, and I noticed around the outside they had painted the Eagle Nebula! That was the coolest thing to me, especially because it's one of my favorite nebulae. It was a really spot-on painting too. It really made my day to see it on there.

Well my dad just got home and interrupted my flow. But I'd say that was a pretty good freewrite :)

 I feel better today. I really enjoy odd days. Photography is okay, I'm the only Photo II student in a group of Photo I people. Being a student aide was great, Charles, Ben, and I were all in a room in the back of the guidance office together, and we did almost nothing but talk the entire time. It was fun. Physics was alright too, Jamie sits right behind me so at least it's someone to talk to. I was worried when she put us in alphabetical order that I wouldn't be around anyone I like, but it turned out alright.

Well I decided not to talk to either of my parents about anything pertaining to my childhood or their personalities or the divorce or anything, because everytime I do I feel like I'm being tugged one way or another. Whatever made me this way doesn't matter anymore. It happened and this is me and this is what I have to deal with. It's on me now to change it if I can.

Well I'm sitting here waiting for a phone call from an aqcuaintence of mine, Cori, who is the big sister of one of the girls in my 4-H club. Since I don't work today, and since Cori has a half-day of work, she, her sister Monica, and I are planning on going to Ben Franklin's to purchase some supplies to decorate our horse's stalls at the state 4-H horse show in September. We actually have a theme this year, "The Road to States", so we're going to kind of put a cloth road across the stalls or something, with photos of us and our horses along the way. Should be cute. They're thinking we should probably have about six photos of each of us. I have two of Dottie and I. I'll have to get my dad to do some serious picture taking when I go to the barn for lessons.

This is the last year I'll be able to go to the state show. The cut off age to be a member of 4-H is actually nineteen, which means I should  have two years left, but since I'm probably going out-of-state for college, I won't be able to continue that. It made my trainer a little disappointed, because since I'm the oldest rider there, she kind of wanted me to be a leader of sorts of our dressage team. It would've been kind of cool I guess, but I'm not staying here for that. It's actually just Monica and I riding at States this year. We have a couple grooms going with us, including Cori, but it should be a pretty small group. What we're all most excited for is having a hotel room above Aunt Sarah's Pancake House. No more Waffle House breakfasts for us! Although we usually get up too early (think 4:30 each morning) to really feel like eating breakfast right then. I'm so hoping though that this year our ride times will be later in the morning or in the afternoon so we won't have to get up before the sun rises. Although it is always beautiful to watch the sun rise in the mountains. That's the main reason I love going out there to Lexington. It's gorgeous in the mountains.

I'm hoping that when/if I go to Asheville, I'll be able to find a place to keep riding horses. Hopefully a place that centers on dressage, since that's what I'm trained in. But dressage barns tend to be really stuck up, so I kind of just want to find a place similar to the place I ride now. I know if all else fails I'll at least be able to find places that offer group trail rides. Speaking of Asheville, I think I have a plan now. I'll be able to go there, major in Physics and minor in Astronomy, and then get a job and get my Astronomy master's and PhD. I don't think I'll have to start over and get my bachelor's in Astronomy, which will save me a bit of money. 

Actually Cori just called, so I'm off.

I've given up on Northland. I guess I've really just realized it's basically impossible to visit there, plus right on Lake Superior, all that snow. I probably would go mad. Instead I'm looking at UNCA - Univerisity of North Carolina at Asheville.




It's another pretty small liberal arts college, about 3,400 students. I know Asheville is a more hippie-ish town, which is one of its attractions. Asheville is actually where Wes is going to school, only his college is smaller. They have nice weather in the fall and spring, and also a decent amount of snow in winter. However, I'd only be able to go there if I decide to get my Bachelors in meteorology, get a job, and then pay my way through night school to get my astronomy PhD.

Then, I have to think, do I really want to spend 10+ years in school? I need to find a good astronomer to talk to, make sure astronomy is worth it. Maybe once I join Richmond's astronomy society I'll find out more. In the mean time, I'm visiting and applying to every school.

I mean, I feel very attracted to Asheville. And they have some astronomy things there with their physics program, like radio telescopes, and they work with an astronomical institute that's nearby. So maybe I could minor in physics.

And there's still a part of me that wants to work on an organic farm or something. That would be fun. Still afraid to take that jump, though.

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