other people's shoes

I always try to put myself in other people's shoes, try to imagine walking a mile or two in their position. I guess this makes me a bleeding heart, or mother theresa, or whatever else you want to call it. I just call it the golden rule.

I remember distinctly as a child learning the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

An unfortunate soul came into my life last night at work. He was beat up badly, in need of the basics, food and shelter. The food I could provide, the shelter I tried my best.

In the end I wasn't able to find him a place to stay. It appears that if you are homeless and happen to find yourself in that position during a weekend night, you are pretty much screwed. It compounds your unfortunateness if you are a young male.

If this person happened to be a young woman, there would have been no problem in finding "her" a place to stay for the night, a week or even a month.

At first this person seemed to have just got down on some really bad luck, a horrible misfortune and an attack on top of it. Life seems cruel to those who need kindness most. I tried my best to give him what he needed at the time. He was kind and thoughtful and you could tell by the way that he talked he was educated at some point, even though he was so young. 23.

Toward the end, I could see the psychosis come through. There was definitely more to this story than he was really wanting to say. He probably didn't know that what he was saying was sounding so outlandish and fantastic. I tried to connect the dots, asked some questions, but the answers never gave the correct sum of the parts.

I did what I could and I had to walk away. I hated that feeling, of not being able to fully help. I just hope that what little help I did provide actually did/meant something to him.

I don't know any other way to be. I tease and say that I'm an ice queen with no heart. And it is true, if you fuck me over you are dead to me. But if I see that you need help, I will be the first one to reach out to you. I still can't tell if this is a good quality that I want to keep or if it is just putting me inadvertently in harms way.

Should I just be like everyone else and just walk away when I see someone that needs help? Every fiber in my being wants to help those who cannot help themselves. It is so rewarding to me to act in altruistic ways. I don't want, expect or care if I get anything back from these situations, all I want is to know that they will be okay.

So who knows what happened to this mysterious son of misfortune. Was he able to get the rest of the help that he needed? Was he able to make it through the night, did he sleep?

a page from my journal

I can't help but feel this emptiness inside of me. I am emotionless, devoid and just feel like I am here, but not really here.

I shed my first couple of tears last night, but I can't honestly tell you why I cried. Only a few escaped their perch upon my lower lid and tumbled down my cheek to be quickly wiped away.

I put on a show, a smiling face (generally) at work. Always have to be happy for the customer you know. And I think I pretend that I can handle all of this stress, and I'm trying to keep lying to myself to tell myself that I can. If I believe my lie enough, then I won't question myself and my abilities to juggle so much stuff at once.

But my facade is cracking, and this could have something to do with the season. The forced season of happiness and joy, Christmas. How I loathe you, how I totally and completely hate you.

But I can't let my mind go there yet, not when there are so many other things to think about.

I have to be perfect: perfect grades, perfect wife, perfect student, perfect worker, perfect perfect. But inside I just feel like running away. Following the road and going to where it takes me. Not knowing where I will be.

I really feel like I have lost myself in this whole process of school. I am so consumed with keeping to the schedule and getting the grades and doing everything right that I no longer am who I was. There are moments that shine through when I feel like myself again.

I'm not depressed, no...I just feel nothing.

I live my happiness and my joy in my head, because that's the only place where it exists right now. So if you see me smiling for no reason, I'm probably on autopilot, I'm not here, so leave me a message and when I have time I will get back to you. The lights are on, but the one who is home is no longer answering the door.

I live my life to the tick of a clock. Everywhere I look I am obsessed with what time it is. Because every minute of every day I have to be somewhere else other than with myself. I no longer belong to myself, I belong to all the others.

But I will keep lying to myself for another five weeks, and after finals I will go insane and finally start to feel like myself again. And then just when I am all better, I will start a new term. Because this is my life.

This is my life.

feel my wrath...

In microbiology I sit near the door as I do with every class. Usually there is no problem with this arrangement. However on Wednesday there was a big problem, the math teacher next door.

Now, I don't know what crawled up her ass, but every time she walks out of her office which is right next door to our room she always glares at us. Okay, fine, your just jealous because we are such a good looking group of people and you hate what you see in the mirror every morning.

So stupid math teacher (smt) gets approached my loud mouth (lm). LM comes over to her office and starts to have this really LOUD conversation about her children and why she can't sleep and how the flu is going around and how there are too many absenteeisms. Then SMT starts up and pretty soon the conversation is really frickin loud. So loud that I can't hear the voices in my head let alone the MY teacher trying to explain glycolysis, fermentation, krebs cycle, electron transport chain... So I get up and give them the ice glare in hopes that they shut the fuck up. And I kick the stopper up on the door, all but slam it shut because the stopper sticks on the ground again. Then go back and sit down. My classmates are scared shitless of me and my teacher gives me a wary glance thinking that I'm going to just kill someone or something.

Then the whole rest of the class hour I'm thinking of what I should have sait to SMT and LM.

I swear to GOD if either one of them opens their big mouth during my test today they are going to get it!

For starters: I pay their salary, I'm a student trying to learn about science not your stupid fucking personal life, and you are also disrupting the rest of the class not just the bitch thats going to kick your ass who sits in the front fucking row!

DON'T FUCK WITH ME BITCH - I'M OUT FOR BLOOD AND I WON'T STOP UNTIL I GET IT!

okay, i feel better now! :)

small regrets

I try to live my life as if there were no tomorrow. Some days I succeed in living this way, and others I fall very short.

I have traveled quite a bit this past week or two. Many plane rides with strangers. Some who talked my ear off and others who didn't say anything at all.

But it was one that still sticks in my mind. It is one that I wish I would have done more. He was young. Sleeping and tired. I was sleepy and tired as well. We both sat in our own worlds for the first half of the six hour flight. I had my earbuds stuffed in my ears to drown out the sound of the plane and the baby crying a few seats up. I wanted to share my music with him. Take one of my earbuds and push it into his ear while he was asleep to see what he would do.

I think of random things like this often. Sometimes I act on them and sometimes I don't.

I know now that after talking to him and getting to know him that he would have enjoyed that. He would have liked to have some random girl sitting next to him push her music onto him. He was young and smart, so smart that I couldn't keep up. I'm not saying I'm the smartest person, but when I meet another person who is smarter than I am and they are not afraid to show it, I'm in awe. I enjoy their flaunting of their random trivia knowledge that really doesn't apply to every day life.

So we talked for a long while and when it was time to say goodbye we gave each other a little wave in the terminal. He went his way and I went mine. I wish I had his name, I wish I would have friended him on Facebook, or something to keep in touch with him. But I didn't, and that I regret. I will never see him again, I will never know his fate.

Maybe the anninimoty is what made it more special. The fact that we didn't share names. He was just a boy and I was just a girl and we were just traveling to different places.

Monica

I just met her once at a party next door and saw her at her sister's wedding a few months earlier. She and I talked a lot that night at the party. She sat next to me by the fire while their dog slept in my lap. I taught her how to shoot tequilla, we laughed a lot together that night. She told me about all of her other attempts, she told me how she felt better. She told me that she moved here to start a new life. She told me that she was excited to start school. She told me she didn't take her medication anymore because she felt worse on it, now without it she felt "normal". Her 21st birthday was on the 17th. Her dad found her, he is unconsolable, griefstricken and heartbroken. His house no longer his house, just empty walls.

I wish I had made it more clear that I was just next door for her if she needed me. I wish she was 21 and that we would be able to carpool to college together. I wish I had realized that she really wansn't okay.

I understood her pain. I don't understand exactly why she did it, or what was troubling her so badly. I've been there myself. I had a plan too. But I didn't do it because I kept telling myself that it "had to get better than this -there has to be more to life than this". And there was and still is. My pain has never left me, it has branded itself on my heart where no one else can see. I cover it well. And I keep looking forward to better things. I moved here too to start anew, to wash away the old and to keep the demons of the past at bay. It helped me immensly, I wish it could have helped her too.

Goodbye Monica.

Space Exploration - the space between my ears...

I really do think that we are visited from others from out of this world. Exactly "what" the others are is still out for debate. I tend to think that the others who are visiting us are us from the future. Yes, US!

Somehow we find a way to completely fuck up the world and we send our best and brightest out into space to colonize. They multiply and over time evolve to the atmospheres and planets that they call home. Ultimately because of this evolution they change shape, color and possibly lack the need for a mouth or a butthole, and maybe that is why they are so fascinated with ours...

In any sense they are curious to their origins, just like we are for a time in our lives. So they take a trip back "home" to the blue planet to see what exactly is happening. And they view the past for themselves. Some try to help possibly, most try to just stay hidden.

As for the butt probing...maybe we are totally underestimating how great a butthole is in our time and maybe they miss theirs. Just a thought. Enough on the butts for now...

My mother-in-law a devout Catholic swears that she has seen an alien craft as well as my sister-in-law. And I really believe that they have seen it. They both describe it in very detailed, precise manner, and they are not the type of people to try and fool you. They really did have this experience.

I don't believe all the alien stories that I hear of course, but some are plausible. And you have to admit that a lot of things are possible. It may not make sense here on this planet, but it may make sense on another. And as for planets there are millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions.

How could you not believe that there is other life out there?

As for us exploring space I can't really decide if it is a waste of money or not. I think that it is wasteful in general. We have created a lot of space junk that orbits the earth and may potentially harm us in the future. If we could find a way to make a space craft that didn't require so many extra boosters that were sloughed off after launch and was reusable time and time again; not to mention reliable. This could create a lot of jobs for people in this economy. But we need to be realistic about where we are going to explore, why we are going to explore and what that means for us here on Earth.

And maybe we should be examaning our butts more often...maybe the butt is the key to the future.

The Moon Landing

So my friend Tiina sent me a link to the Onion about the supposed hoax of the moon landing. In it featured an interview with Neil Armstrong who was acting pretty dickish about the whole thing. Here read it for yourself: http://www.theonion.com/content/news/conspiracy_theorist_convinces_neil?utm_source=EMTF_Onion

Obviously Neil Armstrong is having to create this display of fake emotion because he could possibly be in real danger if he told the truth. The moon landing was faked. But Neil can't very well tell us the truth because if he does he will be rubbed out by the government. It won't be until he is on his deathbed that he will admit that it was an elaborate hoax to fool the Russians into thinking that we were the greater country.

Think about the technological advances at the time of the sixties. A computer was the size of a few refrigerators and at that it could only do very limited functions that any normal brain could do. Add, subtract, multiply, divide and so forth. It had the computing capacity of a calculator we have today. Not the fancy TI calculators, the solar powered simple calculators. It just cannot be done.

Our government wanted very badly to convince not only the Russians but other countries and it's own citizens that we were far superior and had the upper hand in desiging, building and industry. They would have done anything to do this. The simple way: create a hoax of a moon landing, show it on national television and watch the world go bonkers over the fact that we are such a great nation and we did it first!

Of course I don't have any evidence to support these claims, and I am a patriot to my country. But I just don't really believe in everything I'm told. Maybe this makes me a conspiracy theorist - or maybe it just makes me crazy. Probably the latter.