im so our od practice doing the morning sessions i don’t even know if i can do it anymore or if i even want to what’s thepoint? nothings going to come of it i’m just basically wasting time in the morning that i could be sleeping i’m not a writer i have basically no self discipline i don’t know if i can or have ever managed to chip away at anything long enough to get past the stage where a rock still looks like a rock i still think and try to be clever when that’s not even what’s needed i still sit here and castigate myself i still have these dark, sticky, oozy, crawling feelings of--what? despair? emptiness? decay? poison? dread? my shoulders and torso and neck are cold; i need another blanket i wish i could just give up. why can’t i? who am i doing this for? who am i doing this forL>::?”::”??? i feel sick and weak and defeated and out of energy sad and tired and i don’t smell so good still talking about myself still talking about myself after -- and i should have known this was going to happen -- after i gave that boy my whole “this isn’t your personal whorehouse” speech -- after the initial doubts, the initial self-congratulation, the brief check3909834098in with megan later about whether it was all good or not and she said it was -- after all that, a few days later, after i had basically settled on yes it was good and i’m glad i did it -- she undermined the whole thing by telling me, oh by the way, i don’t know if i ever told you this (i’m pretty sure she knew full well she had never told me this) but you know when he had a girlfriend, and i was so upset about that, and i was hoping he would break up with her for me? yeah, well, i didn’t just talk to him about it. i also sucked his dick. and then he said, yeah, i’m definitely breaking up with her. ok, megan. ok fantastic. so basically (and of course i didn’t say this to her out loud because i’m pretty sure she already figured it out) you acted like a whore to get him, and then a few months later I’m supposed to sit with you in the kitchen and berate him for treating you like a whore. ok. i kinda feel bad for the little shit now. i mean, not completely, he still needed to hear the stuff about how you’re a real person, and the whole thing had some good bits in it that any boy should hear, and i don’t know if it was ever my job to tell him that, but what the fuck the world is weird, why not. but. the thing about megan is i want to trust her so bad that i end up trusting her more than i should and that makes me uneasy, off balance, manipulable, unfair to the other girls, and sad. she’s just a kid, but i have this ideal of her as something more than that, and somehow she manages to appear more than that (or to live up to my expectations at least in appearances) often enough that I start to get lulled into believing it, or maybe i’m just too lazy to act like a real parent sometimes. but sometimes i do. just it’s harder to remember to say no to her than it is to the others. i am so tired my bed is right there i have a shit ton of grading to do i’m gonna lose my fucking job god i feel like i’m always just THIS CLOSE to getting dashed back to square one. lose a turn. tripped over a log. go back three spaces. go back to start. i feel like it’s always THIS CLOSE, and i’m sitting here doing this, and why? If i lose my job, how is a bunch of journal entries going to help me? I’mnot working on a novel. or anything i can sell. what am i working on if i’m not doing a good job at my job? what the fuck is this? time when i could be sleeping, that’s what. it’s only five nineteen and i said i was going to do this for a half hour now, but i truly can’t for the life of me figure out why. maybe that’s cuz i’m sitting here trying to figure out why instead of just doing it. i just feel like i’m all out of fresh ideas. like i used to think i had some and now i just wonder where they come from. i used to be a child in other words. now? I don’t know what i am. it’s tempting to say the internet ruined me. I sort of survived adolescence, sort of, and just about the time i was getting strong, that woman came into my life and i became a victim again for ten years. and just about the time i was getting strong, phones and the ubiquitous internet and surveillance came into my life and i became a victim of that. and a victim of so many other things. and a victim of having kids speaking of which the shower just hooshed off which means millie’ll be down here in a few minutes, which means the lights will come on, the clanging will start, the thousand-decibel sound of her dropping ice cubes into a metal cup. why the fuck does it have to be a metal cup, millie? so yeah, so nothing’s my fault but somehow everything is. everything is. here’s one thing i was thinking of in the llv yesterday: you know how a mirror inverts things left to right? why doesn’t it invert things up and and down? Wait, does it invert things left to right? Yes, words appear backwards. but not inverted in the sense that what is by your left hand in the mirror is by your left hand in real life. it’s just that it’s like backwards. WHY? do you really understand why? I don’t think i do. but that’s not all. how come what’s closer to the mirror looks closer to you, and what’s farther away looks farther away? Could you have a mirror that inverted distance too? And I was thinking it would have to be a three dimensional mirror. not two-dimensional mirrors wrapped around a three dimensional space, but truly a three dimensional mirror. that would mean as you moved your hand closer to it, your hand in the mirror would appear to get farther away. and that is all very well and good, but i still don’t understand how the words can-- well, picture it. you’re facing the page and words go left to right. to make that page face the mirror, though, you have to turn it around. so naturally it makes sense that the words are now going right to left. the mountains and stuff in the background that are on your left are on your left *as you’re facing forward* but if you turn around to look at them, now they’re on your right. ok, fine. so a mirror is basically an inversion of what you would see if you were turned around looking backwards? kind of? but then why isn’t up and down inverted. Because if you turn around, up is still up and down is still down. But. but. how can a two dimensional reflective surface selectively only invert one dimension? I know i’m looking at this wrong, and it’s likely the question itself that doesn’t make sense. but. but. jhvcjkljklkjhghjkl;lkm,,,,mn not a lot was resolved here today. i still don’t know why i’m doing this, why i can’t give up, and i still want to go back to sleep even though i’m afraid people are going to start complaining about their stuff not being graded. ok, i will lie down for exactly fifteen minutes and then go. oh god why is it so hard to change anything.