uh

It has been quite a while since I've written in here.

The squalor level of my apartment and of my life in general has not changed much for a couple of months now. That is, I haven't done anything much about it, no new cleaning or organizing, since my last post. I'm too comfortable at this level of squalor. I did have eye surgery a few weeks ago and it took me out of action for a couple days, but my inertia has been high even without that.

A week ago, when I was thinking about someone coming over, I realized that I'd need to put considerable time and effort, and some money, into making this place at all nice, let alone minimally clean and neat. I really wanted to do it, but I'm not going to have a visit from that person after all, so that brief spell of motivation has ended.

Last week was very painful, mood- and life-wise, and very squalid. I didn't really leave my apartment for a week. I've been smoking lots of pot and tobacco, and listening to music, and freaking out and crying and calling the crisis counseling hotline and my two friends, and demanding that my friends come over and bring me cigarettes so I don't have to go out, and calling in sick to work, and just generally not coping. In other words I threw the shit-fit of the year. In other words I've been quite ill.

(I've also been on my computer literally almost nonstop, reading message boards and news and blogs and e-mail and Craigslist, googling scandals, downloading music, playing music, making playlists, loading songs onto my mp3 player, writing in my offline journal, leaving a few friendly / clever / sarcastic / desperate posts, and playing online Boggle for hours on end. Writing and posting this. Internet addiction AHOY.)

What set it off? Some stuff happened. I abruptly saw how fucked up my life is, how many and deep are the ruts I'm in, how stagnant I've become, and how lonely and needy I am. It was hard to stand. I also had a brief sense of a hoped-for future, but it was totally contingent on something outside of my control, which disappeared because I was reacting so intensely, and kind of aggressively, to the uncertainty. (This all came with the experience of sort of falling for someone, but I don't want to get into that here.) And the nonstop pot-smoking MIGHT not be helping. ...I should probably make a list of what to do and what not to do, for future reference, just in case anyone that great should ever appear in my life again, so that I don't fuck it up in EXACTLY the same way that I always have.

I also wrote a lot about what I was feeling and thinking, as I always do in this kind of situation, but when I'm that freaked out my feeling and thinking become incredibly intense and insular -- maybe writing about it feeds that, since I resist any kind of form and just free-associate in fragments and short bursts, making changes on an obsessive theme. I don't know. Maybe writing tends to take the place of really thinking or feeling things through, for me. It seems so lazy and meaningless and escapist and hermetic to me now, the way I do it -- it's just a weird habit. I also do it because I'm bored and lonely and I can't seem to change that, and being way up my own overdramatic ass is all I have to occupy myself with.

As a person of diverse mood experiences, I now know it isn't literally the end of my life, but it still hurts. My dishes and laundry are backed up, and I have about 15 overdue library items, one of which is not mine. As always, I feel I'll be doing well if I can keep up with the most basic kinds of life maintenance. Well, or "well enough." Ugh.

While I was upset last weekend I called another friend, someone I hadn't been in touch with for several years; she'd seemed glad to see me by chance in the grocery store last summer and had asked me to call her sometime. On the phone I didn't talk about my state of mind. I just let her fill me in on her life instead. She said she wanted to get together this weekend, and expressed some interest in my apartment and my present situation. I might have her over. Then again I might want to meet her somewhere else.