I'm already giving myself therapy-related homework. Tonight I wrote and sent a letter to Jarred telling him about me starting therapy and that I was going to need his help and here are a couple of things I wish he would work on. Thinking about it now it seems nuts and I wish I hadn't sent it, but the letter was honest and true and I hope he is helped by it. I hope we can grow together in this, and become closer.

A wise friend once said, "You have a great capacity to give love, but you seem to lack the ability to receive it." My mother tells me, "You get to decide if you're in love. Not fate, fate just sets it up. You get to call the shots." I know that Jarred is a decent, kind, incredible man who wants nothing more than to love me for the rest of my life. I love him inarguably, and so now I'm working on "choosing" to be in love with him. This, unfortunately, involves learning to recieve love.

I'm not really very good at it yet. But I could see myself living a wonderful life with Jarred if I can figure it all out.

[I got this idea from =http://livejournal.com/~sarawrSarawr in an old journal entry she posted.]

These are my faults;
I am manipulative. I like to see how far I can go. I don't finish what I start. I procrastinate, quit, give up, give in, or just plain stop without telling anyone. I think the world revolves around me. I yell at service employees when I'm frustrated. I smoke weed and cigarettes to quell my stress. I hold things in, and I hold grudges. I never stand up for myself. I let other people push me around. I am afraid of men. I ramble. My fingers are too short and my head is too round. I like to wait until the last possible second and then make everyone else around me bend to my urgent desire. I lie to my mother a lot. I always have an excuse so I don't have to be accountable for my actions. I make bad decisions a lot. I cave to peer pressure. I forget to shower. I am nosy. I am loud. I gossip. I say really bad things about my boyfriend behind his back and then tell him how much I love him to his face. I am terrible at math. I slept through most of high school. I never return library books. I have poor dental hygine. I don't know the first thing about fashion. I beg for deadline extensions just to see if I can. I make up things and say them as fact and other people believe them. I depend on unreliable people. I am a kiss-ass. I like to cheat at Uno. I lie to my customers a lot. I keep clothes that I borrow unless the owner asks for them back. I don't understand silence. I don't understand artsy movies about drugs, sex, or rock 'n roll. I have a hearing loss. I have to talk myself out of bed every morning. I snooze a lot. I forget to do things I said I'd do. I eat too much cheese. I sing loudly and off key. I am absent-minded. I am clumsy.

These are my strengths;

I have a good poker face. My boobs are perfectly sized and shaped. When it comes to big projects, I'm dependable. I am a good listener. I like to give advice. I am good at decorating and jujing. I am a good friend. I take nice photographs. My taste in art is okay. I know a lot about a variety of subjects. I retain what I learn when I learn it, except math. I am thoughtful. I make people laugh. I like to dress up sometimes. My heart is almost always in the right place.

This is unfinished.

I have the chance to drop my flailing ASL class, which has caused me the most trouble as far as homework contraints and time management skills are concerned. I can withdraw it between now and tomorrow at 5pm, and only receive a W on my transcript.

There are several problems with this. The first and most important to me is that I just finally finished paying for this class, and if I drop it, I'm out $1200. That's a little excessive, even for me. The second is that I'm only five classes away from the final, and it seems a little ridiculous to throw away all that hard work. Why not suck it up and take the damn class, and get the foreign language credit? It sounds so simple on paper, but less so in action. The third reason dropping ASL is a problem is because I'll feel like an lazy fucking slacker. Which I sometimes am, but that's not the point. No one wants to feel worthless.

But I don't think I'm going to do it, and that's where the surprise is. A year ago I dropped out of two classes two weeks before the finals because I didn't want to write the term papers. English and History. Both classes that would have been happily transferable and would make my life now a little easier. And I really fucking regretted it because it made me feel like I wasn't good enough yet to go to school. But now I am, apparently, because I'm not going to quit this class. It's a ton of playing catch-up, but I can't let myself slack on this. Finishing my degree is priority one, and I can't afford to waste any credits.

I've been really really focusing on self-care this week. Lots of time to myself at the gym, extra hot baths, stretching before bed, and I bought a new lotion to help my dry feet. I really don't like that I'm spending money on "frivilous" things like that, but I guess some sacrifices have to be made. I've been going to bed earlier and falling asleep faster; maybe the caffine is finally out of my system and I will rest more peacefully. My cigarette smoking has exponentially increased, but I have a chain-smoking buddy at work, Linda, so at least I'm making friends. We're mutually depressed and it makes for nice companionship.

I'm worried that I'm focusing too much. By picking that one area, I think I've overdone it. I've been to the gym for extended periods of time every day this week (2 or so hours average, three days in a row). I didn't go to class the other night, which I rationalized away as "taking some time off to take care of myself." I'm also nursing two big projects hoping they'll grow legs and create themselves. By trying so hard to make sure this self-care thing is covered, I'm missing other important parts of my life.

And I'm pissed, but it seems to me to always be an extreme. Either I do it all the time, every day, or I forget and hardly do it at all. (That's what I'm worried will happen to my involvement in politics.) Or I do it every day for a while and then never do it again, which is more likely given my history with commitment.

I'm gearing up for next Tuesday. I don't know that I can say it all in an hour, but I'll be damned if I'm not going to try. I want this to be as brief as possible, really, but something in me finds comfort with the fact that this is not the only hour that will ever exist.

Instead of giving up smoking [weed + cigarettes], I've decided the gym at school is my new best friend. There's a bike machine, a stair-stepper, a row machine, a track, racquetball courts, and a pool. It's totally free now that my tuition is finally fucking paid. Yesterday I biked 4.5 miles and walked up 25 flights of stairs, plus a quarter-mile run. Today I biked 6.5 miles, walked 35 flights of stairs, and played racquetball for 20 minutes. I'm going to try to loose thirty pounds. Maybe by my birthday, but probably not. It's better not to have a time limit on these things or I get discouraged and quit. Right now all that is important is I'm doing something good for myself - exercising.

Other things I'm considering doing to help bring myself back down to earth include cutting back on my marijuana intake, buying several bottles of vitamins and taking them daily, and watching my diet at work [cheap, sugary food with little nutritonal substance]. They're all things I should do anyway, and I feel like shit right now, so what can it hurt? I'm also going to spend a little money on stocking my apartment with food and planning to take lunches to work at least a couple of days a week. I'm scheduling time to use the gym at school, which I finally have access to thanks to my aunt, LeeAnne.

My $.25 raise went into effect on Sunday, meaning the 40 hours I'm putting in this week will all be at my new salary. Swank for my paycheck, and even though it meant working six days straight, I'm glad I worked on Thursday. Holdiay schedule came out and I've got a few 40 hour weeks with lots of the 730am opening that I love so much. No time off for the holidays, but I didn't request any; I can't fly between Thanksgiving and Christmas because seats are too hard to come by. I'll go home sometime next year; maybe take advantage of the vacation hours I'm acruing.

I had a really awful dream about my father last night, that he was by some strange circumstances set to be executed by the state. I can't really sort out what I'm thinking about it because the feelings are so strong. I woke up in a pure daze and tried to out-sleep my snooze button in order to "save" him. My mom and aunt LeeAnne, his sister, were both there. I remember the despair and gloom, like we were very sad to see him go. What I remember most though is the visual image of him actually lying there dying; it's haunted me all day. I can not say that I like my father, or that I approve of his choices, or that I condone his lifestyles, but I love my father dearly.

There is this old Karaoke tape in one of my boxes that he and I and my sister, and our best friend Melissa, and The Guy made when Incredible Universe was alive and had a Karaoke recording studio in-store. My dad's song was Blackbird, and I've listened to it over and over again. Tonight I finally uploaded my Beatles files onto my new laptop [which Jarred bought for me]. I was rummaging through them and I started listening to Blackbird. I haven't listened to the tape in a couple of years, but the first thing I thought of was my father. He was a different person then; that was before the alcohol, before the discrimination. Before the divorce. I like remembering him that way.

I quit drinking caffine three weeks ago because I thought it might be contributing to my insomnia, and just recently I've switched to decafinated teas completely. Still I lay awake for an hour or so every night trying to calm myself enough to sleep. I ran out of alcohol long before I could become dependant on it to fall asleep, and weed only makes me lay awake and think of the different ways to fry a porkchop. Over and over, and over again.

I can tell the nights are bad, are worse, because every night I make my bed, and every morning there are pillows strewn in all corners of the room, blankets on the floor, and I wake up in the fetal position with my arm asleep and just the sheet covering part of my body. I haven't been this anxious, this weighted, in a long time. Not since Before Jarred.

I don't really know what happened. Maybe the loan went through and now I'm sitting on top of $5,000 worth of debt for school. Maybe I'm pissed because a couple of the guys at work have shown what we will call "interest" in me, but I'm so much more comfortable remaining in my complacent relationship where we never really talk and he knows I can't won't put out. Maybe it's something to do with this damn city, and the fact that we never filed papers with the court to change my address, so He could be living down the street, around the corner, or in the next neighborhood over and I wouldn't even know it. I could probably find out, but I wouldn't know where to begin.

Things are spectacular, despite the fact that I'm a glutton for punishment. By setting lofty goals of finishing my degree quickly and getting the hell out of dodge [read: move back to Sacramento because Jarred won't leave it], I must have set myself up for failure. I feel like anything less than full-time school, full-time work is less than normal. Less than perfect, less than my potential. I don't have a choice but to work full-time; my minimal bills demand nothing less. And the fact that I have a full time job with an excellent company that I enjoy is unparalelled. That leaves me with school as the thing that's got to give, and if I budge, it seems to me like failure.

I'm working almost the hardest I've worked in my life [the hardest was when I worked for Dean - 18 hour days for 30 days on end], and I feel like I'm getting nowhere with it. I'm considering leaving Barnes and Noble next year to take a job in the chemical dependancy field [believe it or not, I have job offers now], but I love who I work with and what I'm doing. Do I want to take a gamble on a higher paying job where my style and attitude are not yet appriciated? Or do I want to stay where I'm underpaid, but have a lot of fun? Such tough questions plauge the soul.

Which brings me back to November 23rd. One day and seven long years after I chose to be baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist church, I'm going to pack up and take all these problems [and many more] to someone who might be able to help. I'm zapped emotionally from turning that thought over in my mind - I've played out the session a hundred times in my head. Almost all of them end in me trusting too soon and getting burned or being called a liar, or the therapist being some middle-aged republican with "her own career." None of them end well, but I won't let that stop me from going. I have simply become too complicated for myself.