06.19.10
Posted in Recovery, Vents at 11:00 pm by TheShire
I was speaking to a friend today. She said she had terrible social phobia. It was odd, because really I haven’t heard anyone use that term outside of the therapy setting. I thought, damn someone I can relate to, until she got talking. Now I don’t mean to sound judgemental, but really it probably was very judgemental of me. What she spoke about was being shy around new people. There was none of the phobic reactions, no avoidance, no internal messages. She just took some time to settle around people. Yes that’s tough but having an anxiety issue is a different situation. Seems she read an article in “The Listener” about panic disorders and suddenly decided her shyness was one. It was amusing, but at the same time disheartening.
It’s like words are losing their power, when they become common use, or a trend. It’s like calling someone bi-polar because they have mood swings. Sometimes a mood swing is a mood swing, not a debilitating disorder that can wreck your life. It’s like how many times do you hear someone saying “god I’m so depressed” when really they are just down, or blue, or having a fuck awful bad day. Yes those things are terrible, and can be horrible at the time. But depression, to me that’s something different. I’ve had bad days with terribly sad defeating moods attached. They were awful and I just wanted to curl up until I felt better. Then I’ve had episodes of depression when the idea of ‘feeling better’ was a vague concept way beyond my reach, when even curling up was too difficult.
Maybe I’m being picky and pedantic, but I’m kind of possessive of the terms. As someone that has to deal with three diagnosed anxiety disorders, bouts of depression and medium level OCD, I get annoyed when those things are minimised or treated as some sort of fashion trend. It fucking sucks to live with them, to learn how to have a reasonably good life while endure the ravages. The same friend that declared herself socially phobic, laughed and looked at me like I was crazy when she found out that I can’t ever drink the first glass of water I pour from the tap. It’s not a choice, or at least it isn’t a choice I can make. I have to tip the first glass out. Sure as symptoms go, it isn’t life threatening, but it’s a compulsion I can’t stop, not really a joke.
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Posted in Just Stuff at 12:15 am by TheShire
After 10 weeks I am smoking again. I’m so kicking my own arse. I’ll have to give up again, there’s simply no way I can afford it. Stupid me doing stupid things but starting up again. Me all bitchy at myself over this.
It’s the staying stopped that’s hard, not the actual stopping
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06.10.10
Posted in Just Stuff, Study, writing at 4:36 pm by TheShire
I couldn’t find any rhubarb in the supermarket. That makes me sad. I have such a craving for rhubarb and custard and was going to have it for dinner.
I’m still sick, it’s still bloody cold. But at least the heater is working again.
I’m starting to freak out about school. I’ve been hidden away from people for so long, and the idea of being around so many it just making me freak out. I’m scared I’m going to be ridiculed and laughed out. I’m scared I won’t do a good job. I’m scared that I’m not intelligent enough. All the crap that usually sits in my brain is screaming out again. Oh how I love being fucked in the head.
Recently my cat has decided my forearms are her cushions. She gets up on the table, climbs over me, then annoys the crap out of me until she can get into place and then simply lies down, resting herself on them. I drink coffee, type on the computer and she’ll just lie there until she’s bored and wanders off. Now I’ve pushed her off and dumped her on the floor, but she just looks at me in disgust and climbs back up to settle down again.
I opened up my livejournal a few weeks ago with the sole purpose of getting back into writing fiction. Since I opened it, well I haven’t been able to write. I think I’ve scared myself with the idea of actually letting people read my fiction. I love writing. I really do. Sometimes when I’ve finished a piece I can actually, very momentarily, allow myself to feel some pride. But the thought that others will read it, judge it as being awful, think I’m crazy, I just suddenly am bombarded with being a loser, with having thoughts of grandeur. It’s the same thing I used to talk to Sean about when it came to school, that I’ll be discovered as a huge fraud and hurt for it. The sucky part, I’m missing writing.
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06.08.10
Posted in Relationships at 3:35 pm by TheShire
A few months ago I met this guy. He was young but seemed interesting. We considered starting a D/s relationship but at the time family problems with him got in the road and nothing came of it. It wasn’t a big deal, I just set it aside as something that didn’t work out, without feeling bad about it.
Then a couple of weeks he got into contact with me. He told me that his parents ended up getting a divorce and his mother moving back to Germany. He said things had settled down for him again and he’d like another opportunity to develop something with me. We talked a lot about that. I had concerns, I always have concerns, it’s me after all. One was his age. He’s only 25. But he’s also got a double degree in Law and English, and is going to start his Masters in Law. So intelligence wasn’t an issue, and he seemed mature enough. In the end, it wasn’t going to be true love, I didn’t even see it lasting for years. But I thought it could be friends who had a sexual relationship.
We spent a lot of time setting up the terms of that relationship. It was going to be a BDSM foundation. That’s part of who I am, what I like from a relationship. I take it seriously, and he seemed to as well. We set up rules, safewords, expectations. A time was made for Monday for him to come up and sign a contract and that seemed good. I got a quick message from him that morning to say something had come up and he had to go to a meeting with his Professors so we’d have to postpone. Again, I didn’t think it was a big deal. I had always said his education should come first and I would never interfere with that. So we arranged to meet this Monday, because both our weeks were going to be hectic.
Monday comes and goes and no sign. There was no email, no message, nothing to say he couldn’t come. He just didn’t show.
Now looking back I see the pattern. Every time we arrange to begin, to make it real rather than theoretical discussion he fails to show. There seemed valid reasons, and maybe there were, but the suspicious paranoid part of my mind begins to wonder. Was he even ever serious about beginning this relationship with me, or was it some fantasy in his mind?
And of course, that sparks the joyous memories of the Holly/Brian saga. What is it about me that attracts people that speak of desires but fail to act on them? Is it that I’m just really unlucky? I don’t know. I wonder if there’s something that is me, that is wrong, unlovable, not worth the risk. I wonder if I am still just flashing the sign of victim, someone to play with, to twist and turn and build up just to tear down.
I also know I suck at relationships. My friendships seldom last. I think a big part of that is I don’t know how to really do friendships. I never learn that growing up. I never learnt how to maintain that closeness with others, because the world I lived in was so dangerous, people shouldn’t be trusted, and even if they were good and trustworthy I couldn’t let them in too close incase the darkness that was my family touched them. I have a few people I consider friends, but none of them live in Dunedin with me, and even those friendships have been through times when there was little contact.
And as for relationships, the sexual intimate ones, they all ended badly. Which isn’t unusual in its own right. People don’t generally find one true love and live happily ever after, relationships generally come then go. I get that, but all I can see right now is patterns of disintegration and rejection. This could be my attitude, I don’t die I’m a negative pessimist. I’m just sick of it.
I want to be lovable. I want to be able to share some of my life with someone. I don’t think I’m asking for too much. And then when I write that I hear that voice in my head that sneers. The one that reminds me of how unlovable I really am. I’m ugly and opinionated. I’m cold and serious. I don’t trust, I don’t make myself available. I know my faults. I can spend days listing them if I decided to. I just… I just want for someone to look at me and say I’m worth it. I don’t think it should be too much to ask, I just wonder why it isn’t something I seem to be entitled to.
I remember talking with Holly when I was still believing she was sincere. She was saying how none of her relationships worked, so she wasn’t going to keep trying. I said something like, I’ve had so many failures, but since finding someone special is what I want, really want, then it was worth it to keep looking, to keep taking those risk and meeting people. Yes there will be failures, yes there will be people that reject me, that I won’t be what they want. That’s life, that’s how the whole dating thing works. But if I want something it’s not going to come knocking on my door, I have to get off my arse and do the work. Today, well, I’m just not so sure I want to keep doing that work, I think maybe it’s time to resign myself I won’t find it.
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Posted in Family, Relationships at 3:08 pm by TheShire
I want to write something about my fucked up intimate/sex life, but I’m sick and grumpy. My nose has decided to clog up and I’m struggling to breath. The electrician still hasn’t come to fix the heater so the house is icy cold. So basically I’m miserable and my brain is really foggy.
Just, it’s this big fucking mess, and it seems I keep getting people in my life that want to play with me, treat me as a joke. It triggers all the crappy stuff from my family and their inability to love me, and all the friendships I failed to get to work, and I feel unlovable, and more than that, someone that is just seen as a joke to everyone, someone to play with so they can sit back and laugh at the stupid girl that thinks she’s worth loving.
How much of this is because I’m miserable from being sick, or how much is how I am reacting to yet another kick in the gut I don’t know.
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06.07.10
Posted in Just Stuff at 11:46 pm by TheShire
About 2 weeks ago I got drenched. There were major flooding in Dunedin and it was, well basically miserable. I would have liked to stay at home but I also needed to get stuff done down at the University. Long very wet very tiresome story later I got soaked to the skin. But the time I got home my jeans were clinging with waterlogged heaviness to me and all my bones hurt. I ended up finding out my boots weren’t water proof when I had to make it across a broad flooded puddle that ended up a lot deeper than I thought. So I get home, cold miserable and as grouchy as all hell.
Now ten days later I have the most horrendous cold. I had two days of a throat too sore to swallow, let alone talk, and the feeling that knifes were being pushed into my sinuses. I couldn’t sleep with it all. It was not pleasant, but hey a cold’s a cold. Even now when the pain parts gone and I’m in the phase when I have to blow my nose every 5 minutes, because its constantly dripping and I’m sneezing all the frecking time, it’s more annoying than anything else. I don’t just give into sickness. I would probably get healthy quicker if I actually went to bed and took care of myself, but you know, I have issues … go figure.
So yesterday I have a cold, its so fucking cold weather-wise, and the bar on the heater chooses that time to flare. The day that’s crappy and I have no heater to keep me warm. And its also the day before Queen’s Birthday, so I can’t even get them to fix it today. I’m hoping it will get fixed tomorrow because the cold really does suck.
I thought I was going to write something about a relationship tonight, but it seems my love life still seems to be of soap-operatic levels of fucked-up-ness. I’ll write about it when I can stop shaking from the cold.
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05.22.10
Posted in Study at 3:51 pm by TheShire
I just got accepted to Masters… I just got accepted to Masters… I just got accepted to Masters…
This is the letter I just opened.
Dear Shire
I write to advise you that you have been admitted to the Master of Arts course in Education, by thesis
Congratulations on your successful application and best wishes for your studies.
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05.17.10
Posted in Fandom-Doctor Who, Fandom-Supernatural, geekry at 9:47 pm by TheShire
I watched the final of Supernatural. I’ve heard they have all signed on for another season, but it felt more like a series finale. I also felt, well cheated. I had high hopes I have to admit, big battle, great angst, but in the end it was another ‘I’m the good son, I don’t question Daddy, you’re the bad child, you destroyed the family’ bullshit. It’s like they realised that keeping that theme going with Dean and Sam wasn’t going to work, so they brought in the angels and made it a Michael and Lucifer deal. I never liked the theme when it was about Dean and Sam and their relationship with their father, I felt it made Sam look terribly hypocritical. And except for the scene when Dean basically ripped Gabriel a new one for being a coward when it came to his family, the whole Lucifer as the spoiled brat was irritating.
I liked the subplot about the Impala. I’m not one for big classic cars, but the Impala has always been beautiful and it did feel like a third character. So I did love the story told in terms of the Impala, although I did feel they could have gone further with it. I absolutely loved the holy-fire-molotov-cocktailing of Michael. But besides those things, I was left feeling blah.
I was one of those that instantly thought god when Chuck vanished. I hope I’m wrong, I hope he wasn’t God all the way along. I love Chuck, with a passion, and the idea that he’s been God all the way along is kind of cool, but it creates so many plot holes, so much has to be swept under the carpet for it to work. The amulet never burned in the presence of Chuck. None of the Angels recognised him as God although I accept that might not be a big issue. But Castiel says the names of all the prophets are seared in his mind, so either Chuck’s name is there and Chuck is a person, or Castiel knew early on there was something about Chuck that wasn’t making sense and just ignored it. I also believe the events in The End were real, another reality but not a faked vision created by Zach, like he did in It’s a Terrible Life. So Chuck sticking around once everything was lost seems a little incongruent if he was really god.
Castiel, oh how they broke my heart with him. I loved his initial defeatism. He’s newly human, pain hurts, he has to eat and sleep, he’s used to being all powerful and suddenly that’s gone. He gets that first glimpse at what it took for Sam and Dean to fight and he fails to measure up to that. I loved him stepping up, attacking Michael even though he knew Lucifer would destroy him. I even loved God rebooted him. I’ve always preferred Angel!Cas to human!Cas but loved them both. I could never buy into the idea that Cas would fall like Anna did. Even in his grief at God’s neglect and rejection he still loved his Father. But for him to return to Earth, to just go back to being God’s muppet. I don’t like it. Castiel spent almost 2 years thinking for himself, challenging archaic rules, and questioning God’s choices. Lucifer goes back in the cage, Michael falls in as well, and God reboots him back to Angel goodness and suddenly he’s on team Angel again. Nah, don’t buy it, and hate that they did it.
And what I hate with even more passion that Castiel God’s Muppet, is Dean the Family Man. It was never Dean’s dream to live the normal life. Lisa and the kid (whose name I can’t remember) were never his true love, his ideal. Yes when he first thought the kid was his, it gave him a glimpse of what he might have missed out on, but there was not enough there to hold his interest. Taking him back to Lisa was a cheap trick. It felt like they put the list of Dean’s past girlfriends in a bag and randomly plucked one out. This ordinary life, wife, kid, job and house, that was Sam’s dream, that was the future Sam wanted, and it was almost like Dean forced himself into doing that for Sam’s benefit. Sam couldn’t get it, so Dean would do it for him. If anything it was Dean’s punishment, not his reward.
Onto Doctor Who.
First, I have to say, I hope Amy sleeps in underwear, because if she doesn’t have knickers on under her nightie then the Doctor got a really good, pervy eyeful when she was out in the gulf of space.
There are things I do love, and in a lot of ways its still my Doctor Who. But that doesn’t stop me being critical, in fact I believe my love for the show gives me the right to be critical. I won’t go back over how damn awful the Dalek episode was. I love how the Doctor calls his companion Pond. In the first episode he hated that she changed her name from Amelia to Amy, so perhaps that’s why, either way, I just think its adorable, and speaks of a connection, the relationship between them. I’ve already written about the things I’ve come to like in general, and I am thinking of doing reviews for the episodes screen on NZ tv (so I don’t spoil anyone).
But the main reason for this rant. I hate the sledgehammer approach that’s coming with this series. Now Russell wasn’t someone I thought of as subtle, but damn compared with Steven he was downright cryptic.
In the first season ‘Bad Wolf’ was so damn subtle and inconsequential for a long time. I heard RTD say that even in the beginning he had no idea what it meant anyway, and it wasn’t meant to be a huge deal, just a little nod to fans who get obsessed by those sort of things. Spotting ‘Bad Wolf’ became almost a game amongst the fans, and it continued well beyond the first season. In the following seasons, ‘Torchwood’ and ‘Saxon’ became the same thing, less original, less subtle, but still kind of fun. Now in the last season, or the four specials, the whole it’s returning and knocking four times premonition thing felt over the top and rather annoying after awhile. It was smacking us over the head with that sledgehammer that the Doctor was going to die.
Now with season five, and the cracks and the silence, its like, enough already. There’s nothing subtle, nothing intriguing about it. Bad Wolf got me inspired, I loved discussing what it meant, hell I even loved trying to work out what it meant after it was all explained. Well explained might not be the exact term. But this, its only about half way through the season and I’m already over it, I just don’t care about the silences coming, I don’t want smacked in the head by, well I can’t even call them hints.
I might be weird… ok I know I’m weird in general, but I mean specifically in relation to television/movie entertainment. I don’t like my stories handed to me, I like to have to work for them. I like to be pushed hard to grasp onto a story. And it may seem odd for me to say I expect that from Doctor Who. I mean it’s technically a show for children and families. But often I got that, I got depth without it being handed to me on a plate. But there hasn’t been that with this show, not yet. Everything has been so signposted. It feels condescended to, like we need it explained to us.
Also I want to say, please don’t turn Rory into the TinDog, don’t do to him what they did with Mickey and make him a big joke, the butt of the joke. I know Mickey eventually found his own place, stood up for himself and stopped being Rose’s buttmonkey. I don’t want Rory going the same way, I want him to be a companion in his own right if he comes along. In the original series there was nothing unusual about having more than one companion along for the ride, and indeed, shock and horror, male companions.
Also I have to say, I miss Russell’s Queer Agenda. I remember him in an interview saying he wanted to just have queer characters placed in his stories, without fanfare, without it being ‘oh my god he’s gay’. It’s actually a wonderful thing to go for, to make queer characters as common place, as ordinary as the straight ones. Queer becomes common place when it is no longer pointed out. Russell was good at that, although he was also working against the idea in society. It was known as his ‘queer agenda’ because people couldn’t or wouldn’t see it as common. It became ‘oh look a gay character’, which defeated the purpose. Being gay, bi, or straight in Russell’s Who World wasn’t the point, it was the character. People bitched because it seemed so shocking, but it wasn’t that long ago that as person of different ethnicity would get people’s attention and horror, then it became ok as long as they were the villain or a waste of humanity. Now we don’t, well most of us don’t instantly think race. When Rose’s boyfriend was black no one commented about Russell’s racial agenda. Although that said Russell’s approach to race issues was nearly as bad as Kripke’s of Supernatural fame, and man there’s so much I could say about how race is portrayed on that series. But yes I do miss the randomly placed queerness that used to be part of Who.
Also last point. Matt Smith can do arrogance and crossness really really well, but he so can’t do angst. I’m glad he’s not eaten up by his angst the way 10 was, but still, a little convincing angst would be nice.
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05.15.10
Posted in Recovery, Relationships at 9:37 pm by TheShire
I finally called a couple of friends on their bullshit. Actually I’m getting closer to thinking that the friends are actually one person. Either way I’ve been played for a while, I knew I was getting played and yet I put up with it. I put up with it because, well I kept feeling contact with people playing a game with me was better than no contact with anyone. I was lonely, hell I’m still lonely, but tonight, I just thought, fuck it, no more.
I don’t know how it’s all going to play out. At the moment I’ve just decided not to talk to either of them. They are too entwined. Whether it’s true or not they both feel like they have been playing me. Maybe Brian wasn’t a part of it, but it still feels like he was. Unfair, perhaps. I don’t know. I let myself get hurt because being hurt is something I know, something I can handle. And it feels better than being alone and abandoned. I know in the grand picture it isn’t the same thing, but it comes down to something I’ve always said about abuse. Being physically, sexually abused as a terrible hurtful thing, no one should deny that, but I believe living with rejection, living with neglect does more damage to someone than anything physical. It says, no matter what, you aren’t worth it, you aren’t even worth the effort to hurt, you don’t exist. And yes this situation is different, but it comes back to me saying I’d put up with being played with some I didn’t have to feel not good enough, didn’t have to feel left out in the cold alone and unnoticed.
As I said no idea what will happen. I think unless I see Holly and Brian together I won’t believe him. And until I see Holly, well she’s got her own issues, she played me for so long and I let her because the fantasy she was selling, well I wanted to buy it, even if it was just smoke and mirrors. Yes I’m glad I finally said enough, finally stopped me being the butt of their joke. But it’s left me feeling, well, tossed aside.
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Posted in Just Stuff at 7:24 pm by TheShire
I love hummus….. just thought I’d share
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