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Depression is Anger without Enthusiasm

2008-03-30 10:07

I’m not sure how much I agree with the above statement. Yes, this is another post about depression, no I’m not THAT much of a whiny bitch considering I still have a self-respecting hero boyfriend who knows NOT to stick with people who will drag him down.

This will be an analysis on my very strange relationship with my parents.

I love my dad, he’s a very good man, loves to tell me stuff about his day, his views on politics, his history, the food he loves to eat. He loves to talk to me, which is nice, and would be nicer if it wasn’t for the fact that I still get intimidated by him. After all, I’ve seen him lose his temper and I really don’t want to again. But I’m sure that’s like all parents.

He’s got a lot of friends, which is obviously due to his friendly, helpful nature.

Which my mom abuses.

I hate my mom’s voice. I still jump at the sound of my mom’s voice. She loses her temper frequently and usually without warrant. She gets upset by something completely trivial and she screams, which does nothing but make things worse, as it completely unnerves my dad. That happening during something potentially life threatening, such as DRIVING AT HIGH SPEEDS – is wholly inconsiderate.

My dad and I talked aside one evening, and he said something along the lines of “Please, don’t get into a relationship.” I hadn’t considered until now that that was commentary on his own marriage.

For the relationship between my mom and I – I don’t talk to her about anything. She has to ask me the questions, and she usually does so at inappropriate times (like when I’m driving “her” $60,000 car at over 50 miles an hour – remember, I jump at the sound of her voice). She knows nothing concrete about my life except that I don’t talk to her, which she thinks is MY fault and nothing of her doing. Which I suppose could be it, but any relationship is a two way street.

She asked me what I was doing all the time in my room. I tend to be vague around her, the less she knows about me the better, you know? So I said “art project.” (read: Avatar, sometimes haha) She asks me if I was taking an art class, I said yes. She gets upset.

Yes, she fucking gets upset that I would take time away from the biology classes I’m only doing mediocre in because I have absolutely no fucking interest becoming what she wants me to be – a rich, successful money grubbing “doctor” with no regards for dreams or self respect – LIKE MY DAD. He’s a good man, like I said, but he is stuck under her thumb for no obvious reason. And he works what, 80 hours a week, bringing in good money which my mom lavishly spends on… herself?

I know, I’m not forgetting that he’s also paying my tuition, so he takes care of me, but you don’t see me going around wanting to get plastic surgery or Louis Vuitton handbags, or a billion pairs of shoes, or a closet full of hideous clothes, or overdone Buddhist shrines (doesn’t Buddhism focus on moderation?), or getting a second kitchen outside so the rest of the house wouldn’t smell like food. I haven’t asked for anything that costs more than my 3 computers, which combined would probably be in the realm of $3000, or the amount of my quarterly tuition. I know that’s a lot, but spread it over, say, a decade.

Okay, I lied, my trip/study abroad in England/7 other countries was about $8000. For two months. Steep, yes. I think it was worth it, I would gladly work to pay him back for it if he asked me.

I don’t tell her about my interest in art, or computers, or anything definite about Jay. It’s not that I’m not proud of him, it’s that she will try to weave herself in my relationship, create a wedge by making sure I believe I am wholly incompetent of having a true relationship by intensifying my own insecurities, which she knows very, very well (because she created them). Sad how I believe that.

She is the woman who crumpled up my art pieces (which are about as holy to me as any religious artifact, considering they’re my emotions and dreams on paper) when I got a C- in history when I was 12. She didn’t care about my art, said I was “wasting my time”, when she never asked why I didn’t like history, never wanted to help me, never really cared about my schooling, just the number on the report card.

She’s always reduced me down to a number.

And I hate her for it. You can tell, I’ve been seething for half an hour on this, and 90% of my post is about my mom.

So if you have any beef with my depressing posts – now you know where they come from.

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BOINC

2008-03-27 08:23

I don’t know why I’m excited about this, but I recently discovered BOINC because I was sort of interested in SETI, even though I’m not sure how much of an impact it will really have on we earthlings.

But, I did find Rosetta@home and World Community Grid. I have to say I’m not much of a biologist, but these projects are really cool. And since I don’t have to interpret them, but still contribute as much as my sad, sad TK-53 processor can calculate, I’ll be happy to do it near continuously.

I got more RAM for myself. I’m not sure what the true difference is, but upgrading from 1 gig to 2 gigs is giving me some weird confidence that my system sucks less now.

Ubuntu’s wireless broke somehow in the last beta upgrade, I’m not sure what to do :( I’d love to run BOINC projects on a 64bit OS.

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Understanding

2008-03-25 18:34

You know what I want to do? No?

Well let me tell you.

I don’t either.

Well, to say that I guess isn’t true. But for this very moment, I am lost in a world of decisions. Do I do this, should I do that? I should really do this but am I even mentally capable of it? Should I drop this class so I don’t have to drive to Irvine on Fridays? Or do I rough it out and take it even if it’s not something I want to do, just so I can “finish early”?

Do I tell him that I’m lonely or does that sound too needy?

Does it even matter?

All these questions, so very few answers.

There’s only one thing I want to do at this point. Besides write this, of course. I’ll see you in the morning.

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ZOMGWTF

2008-03-21 16:19

Wow, I wish I was at the beach with my friends right now. Unfortunately, I was at home, finishing up a paper, missing out on the s’mores and potential fun I could be having elsewhere.

I really don’t want to be anything with Biology if I had to be the professor that has to wade through a piece of crap paper like the one I just turned in.

Man, I am so tired I didn’t catch the typos Firefox told me I had.

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Train Wreck

2008-03-19 18:56

It’s amazing how many thoughts go through my head. It’s almost as if I really AM schizophrenic at times – mostly because these angel/demon-on-shoulders type murmurs keep popping up when I don’t feel particularly upbeat.

For instance, I’ll give you a paraphrased transcript of what happened at say, 10 pm, as I was wrapping up my studying.

Me: Man, this sucks.
Demon: You can’t do this, you can’t possibly begin to understand it.
Angel: What are you saying, “can’t”? You all ready have it all in you, you just have to organize!
Demon: But you can’t organize! You’ve all ready spent most of the day trying to figure things out, and where are you now? Nowhere!
Angel: That’s not true. There’s been plenty of learning going on.

Me: WTF.

Also, I have been listening to like, 9 songs of Sarah Mclachlan (in the geeky remixed versions available!) for these past few weeks. I do that, get obsessed with particular voices and messages.

Three songs are standoutish, of the 9 I’ve currently allotted myself. Links to the lyrics are thus:

Stupid
Train Wreck
Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

When taken in that order, and analysed with Lani Logic™, you get something oddly optimistic. But they’re not always in this order.

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Surrender

2008-03-16 12:56

I’m looking back at my gallery, the tiny one I have up now. I used to love drawing, I used to love being able to take a piece of paper and mark out rough sketches of girls, boys, anything, and have it BE something.

Where did that go? Where did that go?

I know, I know, there’s Avatar. And it’s challenging. But I lack the same amount of passion I had before, when I wanted something to stand out, be beautiful, be something I’d display up on my gallery.

I want to be like before, but better. I want to be who I wanted to be when I was younger, but better. I want to find myself again… where did I go?

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Template

2008-03-16 07:28

I just tweaked the site just a little bit, so that the pages are going to be much, much easier to theme. Yeah, I’m planning on making a new theme sometime soon, because I like playing around with “web design”.

Before, I was using a system where the front page/Citrus sections were one page, the Zest another page, and the About section yet another page. I consolidated the Citrus, Zest, and About pages into one template, using conditional statements, and made a separate front page. I didn’t find a way to make it into one page, but I’ll be working on that.

In other news, not much has actually changed. I just like being a bit tidier in the internal structures you won’t actually see :) I am such a geek.

edit Spoke too soon! There’s now only ONE template for all of the unique sections! YAY CONDITIONALS!

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Hardy Heron - Ndiswrapper wireless and Flash!

2008-03-12 14:02

I’ll try the pulseaudio howto next.

What I’m going to post here is probably going to be irrelevant to about 99% of you, but I’m going to put it here in case it ends up being useful to anyone.

My system is a Dell Vostro 1000, AMD64 Athlon X2, and I thought I should utilize all 64 bits that my processor is capable of, so I installed a developmental version of Hardy Heron (alpha 6). And well, it’s pretty cool. I don’t do anything intensive system wise, but why not put all bits to use, right?

Anyway, the first hurdle was that the wireless did NOT work. I dual boot, so I got into my Win XP and looked at this guide, which helped out a lot, but still left me hanging. Eventually, I found a conflict with the module ssb, but as I said in this post, all I needed to do was:

And bam, wireless working, all 11MB/s, which is all my poor router can support.

Getting flash in Firefox 3 (beta 3) working was sort of confusing, but this guy went through all the trouble of making a script that installs it FOR YOU here. It’s pretty amazing. I just chose the Gutsy install with the older flash version, moved the /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins folder to my firefox3beta3 folder, and yay, youtube!

Umm, I guess in the end tweaking systems is much, much simpler than people give credit for.

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Theology

2008-03-04 14:53

Disclaimer: Before I get started on this, I’d like to point out my beliefs are just that: my own, personal beliefs, influenced by societal and peer pressures alike, sharpened by logic and observation and advice. Also, welcome to my frakkin blog. I am a freelance Christian. There’s not really a definition or a meaning behind it, which is why I call myself that. Christian implies I believe in God and in the words and deeds of this dude named Jesus. And essentially, that’s what I do. Freelance = no affiliations. I love all of the people I’ve met through various networks, but I can’t dedicate my time to schedules. There are people everywhere that want help, and I’ll do my part to reciprocate what you’ve done for me, IV, and that’s to provide some good old TLC.

Let’s get on with the show.

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A thought struck me as I was driving back, after some standard bit of kindness of opening the door for 2 other ladies while I was at the bank. One said “so much kindness on a beautiful day!” And it hit me, I’m missing the point.

If there was such a problem to merit the despair I’ve been feeling, it’s not that I’ve got bad chemicals, or that I’m the problem, the instigator. The real problem is that everyone else will never see what I’m capable of, my God-given gifts and talents, the light inside me for which I was named1.

God, or whoeever it is (if it cared for a name or title I’m sure there would be only one, and not the multitude available today), helped to shape me, to program me as perfectly as a human can be constructed, while adding the spices of flaws and quirks that make anyone that much more endearing. I’m amazing, we all are.

God, to me, is not an overlord, or a father, or this all seeing, all knowing, all mighty being we have to fear. God is empowerment, God is clarity, God is the voice inside that says “Wake up, you’ve got the world in front of you, go and reach it!” (though oddly enough I’ve only had 6 hours of sleep for these past 3 days).

Heaven and hell. Do I believe in the afterlife? Well, I can’t deny how ridiculously appealing it is. But in my head, heaven and hell are just as momentary as anything else. I imagine a Heaven where God says “Congratulations, you’ve finished well. Good job. Would you like to try again?” The overwhelming response would be “OH GOD YES.”

Life is beautiful to those that treat it right.

In Hell, God might say “You screwed up. Would you like to try again?” to which I believe the response would be “OH GOD YES.” If someone were to answer no, I’m sure people get what they want in the end anyway, whether it be nirvana or non-existence.

I am probably creating this hybrid/mutant/chimaera theology, but I think that’s what faith is, to incorporate everything you’ve learned and been exposed to, into one massive personal scripture to remind yourself that you’re only going to get better if you try.

1 The Burmese name my parents gave me translates roughly to “Abundance of Brilliant/Beautiful Light.” Tres awesome.

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