I see you on a submarine.

Things have gone downhill with Joey, the roommate. I feel angry at him constantly, I can't even stand to be in the same room with him sometimes. He got some financial aid money, paid two bills (the first time he's really contributed since he moved in nearly a year ago) from when Casey and I were in California, then blew the rest on weed, video games, a computer, and an internet connection that he's probably going to have to cancel soon. A leaky bathtub faucet cost us $750 in water and sewer bills (it always leaked a little bit but got really bad while we were away), so Casey and I are nearly broke. What little money we have left is going towards taking Sirhan to the vet for an injured paw. Joey has food stamps but so far this month he's only use them for soda. Maybe he hasn't gotten his money for this month and is still living off of what's left of March's money, but we're nearly out of bread. He could at least pick up a loaf of bread or some potatoes or something.

AGH

Other than that things are good and we will be getting out of here soon. I've been applying for jobs like crazy for the past three weeks but not a single response yet. I just lowered my standards a bit and applied for some fast food jobs, though, so hopefully I'll at least get a call back for one of those. We found an awesome little cabin in a nice/convenient area and my dad has offered to pay our first two months' rent, which includes water and sewer. We will probably take him up on it as while we'll have $600 or so once we move (selling the fridge and stove and getting our $500 deposit back on the electric account), the brakes on our car are screwing up so we really need to fix that, especially once we both start working and will have to drive it regularly.

I'm really excited about living in the cabin. It was built in the 1800s and the owner moved it onto a lot, fixed it up and added a deck, a tub, a toilet, a propane-fueled fridge, a wood-burning stove and an electric stove. It has a loft bedroom and is just incredibly charming overall, from what I remember of it (it belongs to a friend of my dad's and we visited him there once, a couple of years ago). The area it's in feels rural and quiet but is only about 3 miles from lots of shops and two major highways.

The only bad thing about it is that there's also a mobile home on the lot, which is currently being rented out, so we won't have it all to ourselves. And we'll be paying 1/3 of the electric bill. I'm going to try to talk the landlord out of that as we probably use a hell of a lot less electricity than they do and will use greywater for flushing, a mini-oven (like this) for most of our baking, and the wood-burning stove for heating. I don't know if it's worth haggling over the water, though, as the rent is already very reasonable for this area and the size of the cabin ($425 a month), but maybe he could discount our rent if we do pay 1/3 of the electric? That sounds reasonable and much much less likely to piss off the other tenants.

I'm doing a fitness challenge on this site. I'm not competitive in a traditional sense--when we raced in gym I held back because if I did well then everyone else who did well would talk to me, and when we did team sports I kind of cowered and just hoped that I wouldn't have to do anything. This backfired with dodgeball; I didn't try to hit anyone, just dodged hits, so I was difficult to hit and was often one of the last people left on the court.

But if I can compare my ranking to that of other people and quietly gloat about my good standing, I love it. And I can gloat. I'm in third place, only a couple of miles behind the two crazy fuckers who each ran over 10 miles in a single day. I might even beat them because they probably have jobs and kids and shit while I have all the time in the world, at least for now. This has been really good. I'd gotten kind of lazy about walking--well, mostly because my new shoes really screwed up my legs; my knees still aren't back to normal, after I stopped wearing them 4 days ago--and now I'm determined to go at least 2 miles a day. I've started biking again and I think that's the form of exercise I'll focus on.

2/28/12

Upon returning from California I decided, for no reason that I can remember--perhaps I'd simply reached a sort of tipping point as far as hangovers are concerned--to cut way back on my drinking, to drink one or two nights a week, like a normal adult. It's gone really well. I drank for two nights in a row once we got back, then didn't drink for a week and probably won't drink until this Friday or Saturday. I still drank to excess when I did drink, but if I'm the sort that finds it nearly impossible to stop once I get started, then at least I can restrict that sort of behavior to a single night.

While in California we ate dinner with Casey's family every night. His mom's work schedule is brutal so I suppose eating dinner together was pretty much the only way they could maintain some semblance of a normal family life. I got used to it and have been trying to keep it up. In the past week or so we've had two meals of various vegetable dishes, tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches and breakfast burritos. It certainly helps (with the not drinking as well) that we're very low on cash. In addition to paying the bills, food is the only really justifiable expense, and it's not like we can afford to go out to eat at present. I'd really like to get a kitchen table, though I'm not sure where we'd put it..even a small one.

Thursday, March 1st

Everyone is sick. Joey had whatever it is for a while and for Casey it came on quite suddenly. One moment he was sitting in his chair, the next he got up to drive Joey to the gas station and was overcome by chills. Bizarre. It happened to me in the same way, early this afternoon. I felt perfectly fine this morning, enough to spend more than half an hour walking around the neighborhood at dusk. It was so beautiful out--wonderfully grey, and it felt like it does whenever a thunderstorm's about to hit--that I didn't want the sun to finish rising.

Then I was at my dad's house later, stood up from his couch and suddenly felt sick.
Unfortunately we're out of Vitamin C capsules, but I'm going to run up and get some today (the Dollar Tree stocks a decent variety of vitamins now) as well as some Vitamin A and zinc lozenges, if I can find ones with glycine. Plus lots of garlic.

I've been avoiding hanging out in the living room when Joey is there because the fact that he never goes outside other than to get in or out of a car enrages me. This was the first really nice day of the year and yet he will spend it and every beautiful spring day that follows exactly as he has every rainy, miserably cold day since he moved in--sitting on the couch playing Pokemon and smoking weed and cigarettes. That's another thing..it kind of drives me crazy that both Casey and Joey smoke just as many cigarettes and just as much weed while sick as they do while well. It's just so fucking stupid to not even try to cut back when you've got a cold that affects your lungs and when smoking cigarettes depletes your body's supply of Vitamin C at a time when you really really need it. Their smoke bothers me more than usual when I'm sick. I generally sit about ten feet away from them but of course their smoke wafts over to my usual seat and I can't help but breathe it in. Plus my chest hurts so much already that I don't even want to THINK about smoking anything.

Other things here that have annoyed me lately: I overhead Joey talking on the phone, saying that he doesn't think that me and Casey want him here. Which is true. Well, I don't want him here, at least. He's been nothing but a drain on us since he moved in. He hogs two whole bedrooms even though he doesn't have much stuff, has completely stopped helping out with household chores, hasn't split the bills with us, and so on. But what really annoys me is that he's saying this NOW, after he just paid the bills for the first time ever. Pass on a bit of the financial responsibility that we've shouldered for 9 out of 10 of the months we've lived together and suddenly there's something wrong with this whole living situation.

Also Casey fucking thanked him for paying the electric bill, when Joey's never thanked me for keeping the goddamn water and electricity on, and tried to pay him back for it. GOD. It was the second bill he'd ever paid here and it was for WHEN WE WERE IN FUCKING CALIFORNIA. It wasn't our bill. Thank goodness he didn't take the money Casey offered him. Otherwise I would have had to kill him and we'd have been in a worse financial situation than we are already.

While in California me, Casey, his sister Blakely and her boyfriend Ethan talked about getting an apartment together, but now the prospect fills me with dread. I think they'd be really awesome roommates but I've had so many terrible ones that I just don't want to deal with it any longer. And how old do I have to be before Casey and I can just live alone, before it's as unthinkable as the friend of a married couple with children asking after that spare bedroom on the first floor? Living in a house with three other people was kind of fun..no, wait, it was absolutely awful.

3/13/12

I still only drink once a week and have been walking for at least half an hour a day, often an hour or more. Nice. The only frustrating thing about my having become more physically active is that Casey is averse to..moving. I've become bored with just walking around the neighborhood and so have been driving the five miles to downtown Conway to walk. Which is nice; there are so many lovely old houses and massive old oak trees to look at that I end up walking a lot more than I would if I set out on foot from our house. But I wish it were something we could do together. I'm too paranoid to go walking in the woods on my own, even at state parks..and I want to go hiking, damn it. The weather's gorgeous, everything's in bloom, yet all he wants to do is go to thrift stores and libraries and do things that cost money.

This spring/summer I plan on selling various foods at the farmers' market..or whichever farmers' market within a 30-mile radius charges the least for a spot. Cooking for a profit--making massive batches of various foods--is going to be awesome! I plan on making Goldfish-style crackers in a variety of shapes, fruit rolls (which are incredibly time-consuming but also incredibly delicious), granola and perhaps chow chow (a type of relish that's really popular around here) and kimchi (though I doubt there's much of a market for it, I wouldn't mind being forced to eat it all myself, so it's worth the risk). I think the Goldfish-style crackers could be a big hit. I'm going to buy or get Casey to make tiny cookie cutters in the shape of South Carolina, local school mascots, pieces of sports equipment, etc. After all, what decent Clemson fan could turn down a big bag of cheese tigers? And wouldn't your game day guests just LOVE you for having taken the trouble to buy a bunch of cheese crackers in the shape of footballs? Of course they would!

A while ago we were drunk at 6am and Ethan, Casey's sister Blakely's boyfriend, got back from work and took us to get a paper, then on a little tour of Chino Hills, a fancy suburb only a few miles away where there are actually trees and the only people you see on the sidewalks are joggers. We stopped at a yard sale and found both Under the Mistletoe, Justin Bieber's Christmas album, and the High School Musical 2 soundtrack. Score! Both are so wonderfully cheesy, and I don't know what that one reviewer was thinking when he said that Busta Rhymes rapping on "Little Drummer Boy" was the highlight of Under the Mistletoe:

Lemme get straight to it. Yo.
At the table with the family, havin' dinner,
Blackberry on our hip and then it gave a little flicker.
Then I took a look to see before it activates the ringer;
Came to realize my homie Bieber hit me on the Twitter.
Then I hit him back despite I had some food up on my finger,
Sippin' eggnog with a little sprinkle of vanilla,
Even though it's kinda cold, pullin' out a chinchilla,
Bieber hit me back and said, "Let's make it hot up in the winter."
I said, "Cool." Ya know Imma deliver

A few pictures, as the internet connection here is pretty weak:

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I'm waiting somewhat impatiently for Casey to wake up so we can walk to a nearby cemetery and perhaps go to Goodwill. The sunlight is going to absolutely blind me, I've become so unused to being outside during the day. ALRIGHT, I've been up for 12 hours, it's almost 2pm and he stills wants to sleep, so fuck waiting any longer.

This visit has gone by a lot faster than previous ones. I suppose it's that we have our own room, completely separate from his family's house, and so I haven't been stressed out by a lack of privacy/autonomy this time. I'm also more used to Casey's sister.

Mozzarella sticks!

A recipe for sloppy joes that requires Morningstar "ground beef."

In California. It's been a fairly dull trip so far. Casey's dad lives and works in another town and everyone here in Pomona works. Luckily his sister only works two-hour shifts due to some bizarre scheduling policy. So we've been sleeping for most of the day and spending all night hanging out with his sister and sometimes her live-in boyfriend. We visited the Museum of Death on Saturday, which was pretty awesome. They have such an overwhelming amount of memorabilia that I still haven't really processed it all. They had next to nothing on spree killings, unfortunately, but we did get to see the April 21st, 1999 edition of either the Denver Post or the Rocky Mountain News..can't remember which. The owners and the one employee working at the time were lovely. All of them mentioned hating people.

On Sunday we drove to Covina to look at the former site of the Ortega family's home, the site of Bruce Jeffrey Pardo's Christmas Eve Santa attack. I'd expected a vacant lot and so was pleasantly surprised by the presence of a chain link fence, No Trespassing signs, a swimming pool, a pool slide, some patio furniture and the fake azaleas attached to the top of the fence. We weren't there long, mostly because there wasn't much to see, but also because the people in the house across the street were peering out at us from behind their curtains the whole time.

It's odd being here as this is the most crime-ridden area I've ever visited..by a long shot, given that most of my time has been spent in Greensboro, NC and Conway and Myrtle Beach, SC. They only deliver two copies of the LA Times to the nearest newspaper box as otherwise people will put in enough money for one, open the box, take a whole stack of copies and sell them. That happens where I live but so rarely that the newspaper companies haven't had to alter their habits. In Conway we rarely even bother to lock our doors (it's not the nicest neighborhood in the world, but no one really fucks with anyone else..and our house looks pretty dumpy/not worth robbing). We don't have a peephole so sometimes we don't even check to see who's there before opening the door. While here, I thought Casey was being paranoid by checking the peephole every single time there was a knock at the door. But then I found out that these two guys were going around knocking on doors, and if you opened up they'd force their way in and rob you. So..yeah.

I'm sick now, though I think I'm getting better..and at least I haven't smoked or had any alcohol since Sunday.

Anyway, it has been kind of boring but enjoyable nonetheless. I really like Casey's family and especially his sister, so it's been great getting to spend some more time with them.

Well, a picture post is overdue. So here are some pictures, mostly of our Christmas tree ornaments and the Conway Christmas parade:

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Saturday, December 24th

I woke up after five hours of sleep and drove around for hours in order to buy cigarette-rolling supplies and three Christmas presents. I've spent so much damn money lately. It has to stop. New Year's resolutions are stupid yet appealing, so perhaps one of mine will be learning to fucking budget. Another may be to go different lengths of time without drinking--five days, seven days, ten days, fourteen days. Eventually the number of days for which I must strive to maintain sobriety will grow to encompass a very large portion of the year. A frightening thought. As is the realization that as I often drink every other day and sometimes drink for many nights straight, there has easily been at least one year in which I spent maybe 1/3 of all its nights drinking..or half, even, or multiple years.

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Grammatical and spelling errors and annoying formatting galore! Here is a month's worth of journal entries in a single entry.( Collapse )

Saturday

Casey just left for Paul's and before he left, I was already panicking a bit, knowing that being alone in a house at night makes me paranoid and that I'm tired enough that I'll end up having auditory hallucinations, which will paralyze me with fear. But I told him that I'll be too paranoid to fall asleep while he's gone, so he's going to get Paul to come over here after he says hello and reloads Daily Rotten.

The roommate, Joey, left sometime yesterday. Whenever Casey and I get a night alone, I decide that we should drink in order to pack as much fun and social interaction as possible into a single night, even though we'll still end up sitting in the same room reading or otherwise doing something solitary for as long as we usually would and our conversations are less coherent and more difficult to remember. It was nice, though. We were both tired and so we only had five beers apiece, and we ended the night just as I'd hoped we would: reading, talking and watching a movie in bed followed by our falling asleep at around eleven, ridiculously early for us.

We woke up at sunrise this morning and read the paper in bed. Then I made egg sandwiches for breakfast. They turned out really well, seasoned with salt, garlic powder and lots of pepper. I don't get how people can think that black pepper is spicy. I don't have that high a tolerance for and am not particularly fond of spicy food, but I've never gone running for the milk after eating something black-peppery. After breakfast I changed clothes about a million times before changing back into the outfit I was wearing before, and then we headed to Georgetown for a day of visiting cemeteries. There are a lot of neat old ones in Georgetown, containing tombstones that feature a decent variety of death heads. I love the old marble headstones, especially the ones that have acquired a pink tint with age; they look soft and rounded, like broken-in bars of soap.

We also visited a bookstore that has a room with a bunch of used books upstairs. I love that place. There is an overpowering smell of old books as soon as you walk in the door and it gets stronger as you climb the stairs to the second story. I stole a book called Child of the Dark, the journal of a woman living in a Brazilian slum, and a copy of Dracula that was published soon after the release of Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation. Surprisingly it is not abridged. I feel kind of bad for stealing from that store. I did it because I'm a cheap bastard and $5.50 seems like a lot to pay for one book that will last me a day and another that, classic though it may be, is just a cheap, skinny paperback (with very small text) with a warped cover and worn edges. On the other hand it's an independent store run by an old lady with long, pure white hair, and while they presumably make most of their money downstairs, by selling new books, antiques and crafts by local artists, it was wrong to deny them some income by not buying those two books. Oh well, it's done.

Once it started to get cold and dark we drove back, stopping to eat at a Taco Bell, where we talked about the sorts of things that morbid assholes talk about, mostly school shooters and how dumb people are, and a Salvation Army thrift store. The thrift store turned out to be closed but this particular store has a good dumpster and people frequently leave donations by the back door. There was a bookcase, the most exciting thing I've ever found there, but after spending several minutes noisily trying to cram it into the backseat we decided to give it up. It might have been able to fit in the trunk..maybe we'll go back tomorrow, since we could always use another bookcase. After reluctantly replacing the bookcase, I gathered up four pairs of donated underwear while Casey quietly panicked in the passenger seat.
Now he and Paul are back and I'm about ready to go to sleep. This getting up and going to bed early thing is pretty pleasant. I hope we can keep it up.

Sunday

I finally finally went through my damn clothes and sorted out a whole garbage bag's worth to sell or donate. I don't change clothes every day, sometimes wearing an outfit for as long as a week, so it's pretty dumb that I have so much clothing. At least I'm getting better at not accumulating clothes so quickly. Though right now I'm really into pink and white and lace clothing. Lace is awesome, but up until now I regarded pink as too typically feminine, and I thought that white looked really weird on me, given my skin tone. Now I fucking love pink but own very few articles of pink clothing...so I'm not making any promises. In high school I would only wear black or dark blue shirts and blue jeans, and I am still having a lot of fun with dressing myself in clothes that I like and am not too afraid, for some obscure reason, to wear outside of my bedroom.

I feel so lucky to have found Casey. We really suit each other. Some days are miserable, others are good and some are amazing, but regardless of the overall quality of my days, if they're spent with him then they are still wonderful. He makes awful days okay and great days even better. Whenever we go somewhere and split up to look at different things and then I see him without him seeing me, I like to hang back and just watch him. When I was in my late teens and had no close friends and had never dated or even kissed anyone, I would get really into total strangers--I'd see some guy at a book store whose appearance and mannerisms really appealed to me, and I'd get all swept up, imagining a life that wasn't so lonely and predictable if only I had the guts to talk to him, which of course I didn't.

And that's probably for the best. You get all wrapped up in these romantic fantasies when you're desperate for contact with some human that is not related to you. You're like this raw wound that is over-stimulated by the mere sight of some skinny long-haired dude that, like you, avoids looking anyone in the eye and is apparently really into books. You feel as if you've spotted a kindred spirit, to use a nauseatingly cheesy term . But they probably suck. If you talked to them and drew them out of their shell, they would probably just ramble on about weed, professional wrestling or their massive and undying love for Jackson Pollock before offering to burn you a copy of the latest ICP album. Or they'd tell you they have a girlfriend, which would be even worse--I can't even find someone to hug me and this bastard has a goddamn girlfriend.

I stand back and look at Casey, and he IS that shy, long-haired guy who likes books more than people whom I would still be too shy to approach and would regret not speaking to and would fantasize about for days after my initial sighting of him. My silly depressed teen heart would ache and I would drink cough syrup or steal some of my mom's wine and fall asleep after crying over the loss of the less empty and more satisfying life that I am convinced would have been unfurling before me had I just said hello to him. Instead we get to spend every single day together for months on end. I still find it hard to believe sometimes, and likely so does he. I don't think either of us thought we'd ever find someone who cared as much for us as we did for them and whose presence we could tolerate to such an extent.

Monday

Yesterday we attempted to go to the zoo but the road leading to it was closed, so we ended up going to the flea market instead. I picked up a Latin dictionary and a book on word origins. Pretty nerdy, especially when I spent like ten minutes drooling over a massive old dictionary. I can't really justify getting more dictionaries unless I start reading them. I haven't even read the x or z sections of the sweet two-volume one I picked up a while back.

Something I really like about old books is that they seem to have come in a greater variety of shapes than do modern books. And oh god, that smell. The new book smell is pleasant enough but it's got nothing on the old book smell. If they canned that shit I would drench the entire house in it.

After picking up some trashy DVDs (Kangaroo Jack, Hot Rod Girl, F.A.T.: Fugitive Apprehension Television and The Lucifer Complex), we headed back to the house and began drinking. It was an enjoyable night though I wish I'd had fewer beers and had gotten to bed earlier. Oh well. We watched Mass Murder, a wonderful documentary featuring Colin Ferguson, James Huberty, George Hennard, Patrick Purdy, the Happy Land nightclub fire and Thomas Hamilton, then Kangaroo Jack and Hot Rod Girl. There was far less talking kangaroo action in Kangaroo Jack than I had expected, but it was still ridiculous, and Hot Rod Girl was actually really decent. I'm looking forward to The Lucifer Complex; it's about a nefarious plot to reinstate the Third Reich via an army of Hitler clones.

Today was dull, as befits a day following a night of heavy drinking. I read a bit and ran to the dump. Something kind of cool, though: my dad is getting himself, my sister and her baby and Casey and I hotel rooms at the beach this weekend. It's weird timing for a beach vacation given that it just got too cold to go swimming, and as we all live no more than twenty minutes from Myrtle Beach it seems a bit silly to pay for rooms there. I'm not complaining, though, and am looking forward to three days of heat, internet, free food and hanging out with my family.

I totally gave up on recording the title and author of every book I read. Those I remember from the past month or two: Nickel and Dimed, Malled, Buyology, A Raisin in the Sun, The Lost Boy, The American Way of Death and The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog. Buyology was wonderfully horrifying, but the last two were the best of the group. The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog was so interesting, heartrending and heartwarming that I read it in a little over a day. I was even able to concentrate on it while drunk, which is virtually unheard of for me. Now I'm reading Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everything.

I should really be reading more, given that I have all the time in the world for it. The haphazard way in which I acquire books is no doubt partly to blame. Instead of buying used books online, I get them at thrift stores like Goodwill and the Salvation Army and borrow them from libraries. This is a great way to find books that I otherwise wouldn't have heard of, and I really enjoy being able to wander into a particular section of the library and wait for a book to catch my eye. But as enjoyable as is this method of selecting new reading material, if I just went online and bought books dealing with subject matter that is of great interest to me, I would probably read a lot more. As it is, I often find myself finishing a book, then spending several days looking for something else to read.

Another problem is that I often can't remember the books I read beyond a few particularly memorable passages. Usually I only remember whether or not I liked it, whether it was just okay or fucking amazing, but that's it. This is due to my needing to write things down in order to really absorb them. I could solve this by taking notes as I read, but when I have tried this it takes a lot of the fun out of reading. I feel like I'm either writing down too much or too little, and once I'm done writing I find it difficult to settle back into reading. If I kept at it, it might become second nature. I doubt I'll ever put forth the necessary effort. It seems like a waste to spend so much time reading and retain so little of it, but it also seems like a waste to ruin such a highly pleasurable activity by purposely reducing my ability to fully absorb myself in it.

My surfeit of self-discipline makes me doubt that I will ever accomplish anything of any real worth. Even if I do, for instance, earn a degree in library science, I imagine that I will feel as if I bullshitted and stumbled my way into it. I try to skip forewords and afterwords even though I know I won't feel as if I have actually finished a non-fiction book unless I read every chapter. Though some afterwords are really tiresome. Really, you don't think people will fully understand your book unless you spend an entire chapter reiterating the most important information contained in the main text and spelling out its overall meaning--something which is often readily apparent to anyone who actually thought about what they were reading? Okay, that's enough talk of reading. If something requires a sustained effort I am apt to give up early on. For instance, I often go days without brushing my teeth. This is incredibly stupid, as I can't afford to see a dentist, am prone to cavities and used to grind my teeth, meaning that I've lost a lot of tooth enamel. There are things that I have been meaning to do for years but have yet to get to.

I've also majorly slipped up on not smoking. It's not too bad. I mean, I "quit" at the beginning of July, not bothering to prevent myself from smoking while drunk. While at first I would only smoke while drunk and stop immediately upon finishing my last drink of the night/morning, naturally I eventually began to smoke while sober. I even sometimes drank just so I would have an excuse to smoke. Now I'd say I smoke something like 30 cigarettes a week, about the amount I formerly smoked over the course of two days. Not bad, except my original goal was 0 cigarettes a week. I need to do something about this. I think I'll ask Casey to switch to factory-made cigarettes once our current pouch of rolling tobacco runs out. They're a hell of a lot more expensive, but it would work. Fire-safe cigarettes screw up my heart and lungs even worse than do rolled cigarettes. I refuse to smoke them while sober. While drunk, I will smoke them if they're my only option, but I smoke far less of them than I would machine-rolled cigarettes. I could get myself down to smoking fewer than ten cigarettes a week and then go from there.

That's just temporary, though. The important thing is to break the association between smoking and drinking. I mean, I drank regularly for two years without even thinking about smoking. It is not impossible to do. Not drinking isn't an option..because. A lot of the time I drink because I'm bored and/or nervous. It's unhealthy. But with the roommate here, alcohol is terribly useful. I don't really want to interact with anyone other than Casey, but I kind of have to now and it sucks being shy and nervous around him nearly all the time. At least when I'm drunk I can interact with him normally and am not just sitting in my armchair twitching.

That's another thing. I'm not doing anything to control my anxiety. Exercise was fantastic for burning off nervous energy. It's really what allowed me to go from being an awkward weirdo who never talked to..an awkward weirdo who sort of has friends, can handle making small talk with strangers and is even in a normal, satisfying romantic relationship. But I don't exercise anymore. I went for a walk this morning and it was pleasant but also really weird. It had been so, so long since I had engaged in physical activity purely because I felt like it. I stopped exercising and grew more anxious and now I avoid exercising because I'm anxious--because I like walking and biking and doing either of them means leaving the house and risking an encounter with some friendly bastard who thinks I'm some normal person who welcomes a chance to meet someone new and chat with them for a bit. Agh.That is probably not going to happen, but I'm afraid it willThat's why I went for a walk just after dawn and came home when it grew close to the time when kids start getting picked up for school.

Perhaps I should get a stationary bike. Plenty of people have old ones lying around, the sad remains of some weight loss crusade that lost steam a month or two in, if that long. Maybe I wouldn't stick with it; exercising like that makes it feel like a chore. I would feel like a jerk for spending money on exercise equipment when it is entirely possible to get exercise without resorting to buying some fancy bike or a set of weights. But it'd be cool if I could still bike even if opening the front door makes me feel like curling into the fetal position and sobbing.

Our roommate is intelligent and funny but also batshit. He believes that the Bilderberg Group is gathering together in order to better hone their strategies for quietly ruling the world. I don't really care but Casey's argument that as capitalism naturally leads to exploitation, making such conscious planning unnecessary, sounds much more reasonable. He also believes that HAARP created the tsunami that ravaged Japan a while back, and perhaps he thinks they were responsible for other natural disasters. He regularly talks about how fucked up organized religion is, yet he believes in things that are just as irrational.

I don't mind him too much and I really enjoy hanging out with him while drinking--which doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, but I think I may have even less tolerance for stupid, annoying people while drunk than I do while sober--but once it gets really cold out living with him is going to be irritating. I don't really want to live with anyone but Casey. Eventually I'll end up seeing more of the roommate than I can stand. School will end for him and he'll all be huddling together in one room. Unless Casey and I move, which is an attractive prospect for a number of reasons, so long as we could afford it after getting a used car.