you've got to get yourself together, you've got stuck in a moment, and now you can't get out of it

Procrastination is my soul mate. he's my lifelong companion, the one i can always count on. he snuck into my room one day when Responsibility first introduced herself to me, and i swore my life to him then. we make secret clubs, and he tells me jokes behind Responsibility's back. Being older, Responsibility feels that it's her job to keep us in line, but she can't say anything when, really, we're not doing anything wrong. the fact that we don't do things her way has always rubbed her the wrong way, and that's made it hard for the three of us to ever really become friends. but i've always respected her. it's hard not to.

Apathy and i go way back. i met her when she was still going by "i don't care" and my parents chose all my clothes. most people i knew back then didn't like her, she still hasn't grown on very many, but that's never bothered her. she really couldn't care less. we used to throw rocks at Motivation on the playground - not one of my proudest moments - and i don't think Motivation ever really got over it. she still stays clear of the two of us. Apathy and i have one of those friendships when we can sit for hours together and just do nothing, say nothing, and think nothing without the pressing need for action weighing down on us. we thought about doing something the other day, but we couldn't get excited enough about it.

a couple of weeks ago, Lethargy came over asking for a place to stay for a day or two. at first i thought it was my old friend Laziness just going through a hard time, but i was quick to realize my mistake. Laziness has a charm about him that Lethargy lacks, like the attraction of dishevelment, crooked smiles, and stubble. Lethargy has all the charm of a growing mold. He has not just taken over my couch, but my entire apartment. even the air seems infected with the listlessness the rest of us are feeling. i think it's time for Lethargy to move on, but i can't seem to muster the energy to kick him out.

i'm hoping that november will bring with it Insanity and Obsession. i met them a couple of years ago after deciding to take part in nanowrimo for the first time and they have a way about them that i'm sure will scare Lethargy off. or, at least i hope it will. if they can't help me then i may just have to go play nice with the good habits, and i've been alienating them lately. i'm not sure if they'll forgive me.

*Stuck in a Moment - U2

and i just wanna get mugged at knife point, to get cut enough to wake me up

as i'm sure most of you know, the virginia/dc area had a pretty big earthquake yesterday (a 5.8). i've felt a couple of earthquakes in my life, both here and in california, but nowhere near the scale of this one. i was sitting in my apartment on the third floor going my turn on facebook scrabble games with my sister while my husband played crash racing on the playstation when everything started shaking. i was woken up yesterday by our neighbors downstairs who were getting new carpet put in and felt that in order to do that they should bang around and generally make as much noise as humanly possible. so when the shaking first started i just assumed it was from them. when it turned into a real things-falling-down-walls-vibrating-oh-look-my-chair's-moving sort of thing, i kinda figured what it was. so i sat in my chair, waited a bit for the shaking to go down to vibrating, said, "huh. that was cool," and finished playing my turn.

when i closed out of the games, statuses were of course talking of nothing but the earthquake. everyone was saying how scared they were, how they thought they were going to die, how their life flashed before their eyes. the only thing i felt during the earthquake was a slight annoyance that the harry potter plaque i made in high school had fallen down and i would have to go check if it was cracked again. (laziness at its finest, people.) and suddenly i was so incredibly jealous of these people. most of you probably weren't reading my blog back then, but i remember once wishing for a near death experience to kind of wake me up, if you will. i needed something drastic to happen to pull me out of my perpetual apathy. two years or so later, and i still feel that i could use a jolt that only fearing for my life can give me to really get my act together. after talking to my mom, mother-in-law, and grandma (thank god for voip phones when cell reception is down and you have worried mothers) my jealousy for lack of a better word just increased because here they were scared and worried when two of them are on the other side of the world right now and none of them felt the earthquake. if just hearing/reading about it could scare them enough, why couldn't experiencing it shake me at all?

i started thinking, and you know, i don't think i have ever actually been afraid for my life. i have been in countless almost accidents (my sister can be a crazy driver), a couple of accidents (nothing actually really bad to anyone but the car/bus), i've spent a night on the kitchen floor too sick to get up because all of the tylenol in my system i overdosed on, i ride on planes at least twice a year and haven't worn my seat belt on them since i was ten, my school has had bomb threats, i've had creepy people follow me to my car, and countless other things have happened that might make a normal person a little scared for his/her life... but me? nothing. i mean, sure, i'm terrified of death. i think besides failure and not measuring up it's the thing i'm most scared of. but i have never been terrified for my life, and i kind of want to be. i want to suddenly appreciate this thing that i have always taken for granted. i want to be forced to recognize that it is something precious. i want to be pulled out of this black hole of apathy and depression and realize that there's something worth living for, even if it's just life itself.

but i don't. i let opportunities for near death experiences pass me by. i let chances of fear turn into afterthoughts. i let the apathy win out every. single. time.

*This Week the Trend - Relient K

i don't see just how i can be motivated enough to break a sweat

i have no ambition. really. none. the day humanity was taught to want to improve themselves, to work until they fulfill a goal, to aspire to greatness, i was sleeping in. or ditching class. or too busy daydreaming to pay any attention. i view life as two separate planes, or places, or roads, or whatever other analogy you want to use. one of these is dreamland (i'm not talking about pigs flying or anything, just stuff that could possibly happen if i decided to try and make them), and the other is reality (or what will happen if i go through the rest of my life lazy and coasting on my awesome/awful ability to get by without actually doing anything). i'm caught somewhere in between. i won't work for the first but refuse to settle for the second.

in all honesty, i'm too temperamental to actually do anything with my life. i can sit here and talk about wanting to write, i can learn computer forensics from fbi agents, i can go through all the motions of progress, but at the end of the day none of that will matter. i'm just too moody. i cycle through apathy, cynicism, and optimism too fast. before i have a chance to really get anything done in any stage, i'm on to the next one. it's really bad. i think my writing is best when i'm cynical but write the most when i'm optimistic. oddly enough, optimism makes studying impossible, though i seem to do okay when i just don't care.

i've always been able to do well without really doing anything, and now that school may be ending for real, i don't know if that'll cut it for the rest of my life. despite the dream to do something in this world, i just can't find any ambition to spur me into action. my belief that whatever is written to happen for me will happen and the fact that i've never really worked for anything and don't think i know how have pushed me into this rut of complacency that i just can't get out of.

*Apathetic Way to Be - Relient K

got a short little span of attention

if we were social networks, i would currently be twitter. i am living in short bursts of a hundred and forty characters or less.

burst of studiousness: i do half my assignment well and think of a paper topic for my other class. suddenly, my brain won't absorb or create anything school-related.

burst of energy: lasts as long as one game of pool at mason with my sister and singing our lungs out on the way home. now [then] i am drained. 

burst of writing: as their failure is still fresh, as their hearts are newly broken, as wounds have just opened and begun to sting, he whispers, "why?" "because every time you built a bridge, i built a wall." the end. the only writing i have managed to do sucks and does not even complete two lines :/

burst of blogging: after almost a week of nothing, this is all i can come up with in a sudden desire to blog. 

bursts of happiness. bursts of sadness. bursts of apathy.

but there's no energy, or will, or reason to keep any of them around for longer than that initial burst.

my life: coming in short bursts of a hundred and forty characters or less. 

*You Can Call On Me - Paul Simon 

unapologetic apathy

"I think it’s a Western notion of demonizing inactivity. No one can be productive all the time. If there’s a period of weeks when your imagination decides it needs to take a nap then maybe that’s what it needs to do." -- Elliott Smith on writer's block

no, i don't have writer's block per se, but i came across that quote, liked it, and thought i'd share it with all of you. i am, however, suffering from ennui. *sigh* i feel a little like this:

i think the ennui and apathy is my body's attempt at deluding itself into thinking that it's not nervous to start grad school, which for some inexplicable reason it is. very much so. i think the nervousness may be the result of having the threat of getting kicked out of the master's program if i get three c's shoved down my throat repeatedly in the past few days. now this probably wouldnt have affected me so much if last semester never happened. but it did. and i got a c (the plus really does nothing to soften it) and now my confidence is shot. kinda. i think if it wasnt the absolute last thing i did for undergrad, it wouldnt have been such a big deal cause i wouldve had a chance to do raise my confidence in other classes. my sister says i'm nervous because "i'm starting something new." i cant bring myself to believe that because school is school, you know?

worse is that i cant bring myself to care... and that makes me more nervous. i just want wednesday to come so it will start and i can prove to myself that i can still do this whole school thing.

*Sleep - My Chemical Romance

watch me lose the life that i got but never used

"He lay down fully dressed on his bed, not meaning to fall asleep yet. He just needed to think. About what, he wasn't sure.

So instead he thought about nothing. About things in the room. About the athletic trophies in a box in the closet. How much of his life was that? The shelves of books - so much time reading. Neither of them amounted to anything. He ran. He lost or he won. No one remembered a week later. And the books he read - what did that amount to? University people were always so proud of being readers instead of television watchers, but what was the difference, really? It was a one-way transmission. I read, but it made no difference to the writer. He never knew. And when I'm dead, what will it matter the books I read? My memory is where the book ends up, just like the TV show, and when I'm dead, that memory is gone from the world.

...

After I'm dead, my parents will miss me, sure, but then someday they'll die, and then who'll remember me? Nobody. And that's fine. Because it doesn't matter."

Enchantment, Orson Scott Card (pg 324-5)

you know those days when the fact that your life is getting shorter and shorter with every breath you take just weighs down on you? you know you're wasting your life, but can't seem to do anything about it? yeah, today is one of those days.

that quote from enchantment sums up my feelings of the moment pretty well.

because, really, what am i doing with my life? i've been around for a little over 21 years, and there is absolutely nothing to show for it. i go to college. i'll graduate or i wont. i'll get a job or i wont. i'll get married or i wont. is there any difference?

i think that might be one of the reasons behind my perpetual apathy. because there's really no point in caring about anything when, eventually, no one will remember me anyways.

i always wanted to be an author. that might gain me a few extra years of remembrance. you know, if i had a popular book or whatever. but i don't do anything unless i'm sure i can do it. so of course i'll never try and get anything published. that is if i ever got over my psychotic overreaction to people reading what i write. i'm definitely not going to get my name remembered from any inventions. i can't see myself making any scientific discoveries. ever. i can't make anything arty to save my life.

and in the end, the world is gonna be gone anyways, so maybe i'm going about this the wrong way. maybe i should screw the world and focus on religion. thing is, i suck at that too. there's no reason for my suckiness. i really do believe in everything. i have the time, ability, and resources to be a really good muslim. i'm just not.

i cant make myself care about anything until i start doing something worthwhile, and i can't do anything worthwhile until i start caring. ugly cycle. reminds me of that planet in the little prince where that dude drank because he forgot and forgot because he drank.

And I just want to get mugged at knifepoint

to get cut enough to wake me up

cause I know that I don't want to die

sitting around watching my life go by

and what we take from this is what we'll get

and we haven't quite figured it out just yet

because all of us are all too stuck

strapped to a chair watching our lives blow up.

This Week the Trend - Relient K

these lyrics sum my mood up too. i know you're not supposed to wish anything bad on yourself, but you know those people that have near-death experiences and come out knowing "what's important in life"? yeah, i need that.

*Out Through the Curtain - The Hush Sound