2003-12-09

weight: 174

what I ate: 4 cookies (remember, testing the theory), McChicken Sandwich and McValue fries. (It's cheap. It's hard to resist), 3 diet cokes, 1 water. That's so far. May or may not change.

What I've done: finished a novel!!!!!! Got rejected by Avon again. I should take a class on writing pitch letters because they haven't read the book and they still reject me. I must not be pitching it right.

Oh, and I reorganized my closet and found some crazy stuff in boxes. I should have thrown out a lot of it, but I couldn't bring myself to.

I found some cool-ass stuff. There were cards and letters from high school and little bad poems I wrote. The more fun stuff was from college, though.

There was all these kickass notes and things from or to Evil T, my old roomate/current best friend. There was this paper with some random paragraph I wrote expounding on the many ways Evil T is a whore and why she should be destroyed before it is too late.

Then there was a very organized analysis of my handwriting (which I think was why the paragraph was written. I mean, it started with "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs"). The analysis was in Evil T's writing and ended with "Further analysis would show that the subject is a dirty slag." Hee! I wish I could kidnap Evil T and make her move out here. We had some times. Most of our other notes consisted of similar torture and MST3K quotes. We thought we were so cool. And we were damn right!

There was even this pshychological evaluation of me from Junior year of high school (otherwise known as The Year of the Pregnancy of La Nikki and Similar Distressing Events). The thing made me sound a little nuts. The first paragraph says:

"April impressed as a bright young woman with dark shadows under her eyes and a striking pallor. Her speech was pressured, and when uninterrupted, she talked at length, moving without pause from one subject to another."

Okay, Teen April was a schizophrenic vampire.

"As she spoke, her eyes wandered constantly, scanning or reading everything within reach. Her speeches remained coherent, however, unaffected by whatever she was scanning and suggested an unusual level of self awareness. For example, she made direct reference to her significant difficulty in making eye contact, saying, 'You are probably noticing that I don't make eye contact very often. Yeah. I have a lot of trouble with that."

Teen April is an easily distracted, schizophrenic vampire with something to hide (hence the lack of eye contact

You might be wondering why Teen April needed a psych eval. Well, Teen April was an A student all her life. Suddenly, Junior year, she slipped to a C, bypassing B completely. Her teachers became frustrated and she was sent for counseling. Because she was a little bit psycho.

Honestly, I won't transcribe the whole report, but it does make me sound a little crazy. I think it was because I hadn't been watching enough TV that year. In fact, I hardly remember watching any. I think, once I started using entertainment as therapy, I became a little saner. The scary thing is that it might be true. The even scarier thing is that I hardly remember even being evaluated. It's like another terrible, dark secret I blocked out - like the Disney fixation thing.

I guess I don't like to think of myself as depressed. Just borderline nuerotic. Because everybody's nuerotic. But, looking back on that year, it was a hard year. Nikki was pregnant and rebellious, Dad was angry and confused, Sean was doped up, and I was... When I went to that counselor, I seriously never mentioned anything that was going on at home and acted as if there must be something terribly wrong with me. But, in retrospect, it was the situation that created the problem. And what did I do? I talked to the counselor as if everything was rosy and it was just me that was problem. It wasn't me. I think half the reason I have trouble with self-esteem is because I refuse to get angry at others. Just take it all in and say it's my fault. Yep. I have a long way to go before I'm whole.