Keep My Words

On Mother’s Day, 1939, Lina Medina gave birth to a healthy six pound baby boy.  But this was no ordinary pregnancy – the new mother was only five and a half years old.

Medical documentation revealed that Lina had begun showing signs of menstruation when she was eight months old, and she started having regular periods at age three.

Lina’s family did not know of her condition until she was already seven and a half months pregnant.  Living in their small Peruvian village, they did not have the technology or money to diagnose the five year old’s bulging belly.  However, as the months passed, the family began to worry that little Lina had a fast-growing, life-threatening tumor in her belly, so they carried her into town for medical attention.

After doctor’s confirmed the pregnancy via x-rays and biopsies, Lina’s father explained that before her stomach started to swell, she was having regular periods that all of a sudden stopped.  Physicians were stunned by Lina’s pregnancy and were not going to pass up the opportunity to study this medical miracle. They transferred Lina to a hospital in Lima, Peru, so she could be observed at all times.

Due to Lina’s small frame and pelvis, it would have been impossible for her to give birth vaginally.  Doctors at the Lima hospital concluded that she would have to have a cesarean section.

In 1941, two years after Lina gave birth, the New York Times published an account of an American psychologist who had examined Lina while visiting South America:

Ms. Kosak said she gave a series of intelligence tests to the child and that on the basis of this study she has no doubt that the child’s age was given correctly.

“Lina is above normal in intelligence and the baby, a boy, is perfectly normal and is physically better developed than the average Mestiza (Spanish Indian) child,” she said.  “She thinks of the child as a baby brother and so does the rest of the family.”

Jose Sandoval, an obstetrician who took an interest in Lina Medina’s case and authored a book about her in 2002 said that Lina was a psychologically normal child, that she displayed no other unusual medical symptoms, and that she preferred playing with dolls rather than her own child.

Lina’s boy, named Gerardo, did not learn until he was ten years old that the woman he thought to be his sister was actually his mother.  He grew up healthy but died in 1979 at age of 40 of a bone marrow disease.  Lina still lives in a poor district of Lima with her husband (who fathered her second son in 1972).

Members of the American Medical Association meeting in 1939 were a bit skeptical of Lina Medina’s extreme youth.  Per a Time Magazine article published a month after Gerardo’s birth:

Most of the members believed that Lina was at least eight or nine, little younger than several U. S. child mothers now living in the South. Baby teeth, said the critical U. S. doctors, are no criterion of age. Lina’s early menstruation, said U. S. pediatricians, was probably caused by an ovarian tumor. Ovarian tumors are not rare, sometimes cause menstruation in children a year old, often produce glandular changes which stunt growth. Concluded A.M.A. spokesman Dr. Morris Fishbein: “It is difficult or impossible to determine the exact age of children born in primitive tribes. . . . It is likely that she was much older.”

The father of baby Gerardo was never determined. In fact, Lina’s father was jailed for incest and rape of Lina, but was let go due to lack of evidence. Lina herself never gave any answers to doctors on how she became impregnated.

I’m getting to that age where a number of my friends are having children.  “Babies having babies,” I always say.  Now when I say this, I’ll always think of little Lina Medina.

Lina Medina, seven and a half months pregnant (above)

Last week I decided to find some of the pianos stationed around New York as a part of the “Play Me, I’m Yours” exhibit.  I met Andrea at my last stop: McCarren Park.  Playing the piano was an old man accompanied by his friend on the drums.

“I really thought there’d be some hipsters rockin’ out on this one,” I commented to Andrea.  “Oh, and I thought you’d like to know that I haven’t washed my hair in a week and two days.”

“You are a hipster, you know,” she told me.

“How so?” I asked.

“Uh, what you’re wearing,” (I looked down at my ankle-high pixie boots, jean shorts, and thrift store tank top), “you don’t have a real job, you don’t wash your hair, and you’re sitting in McCarren Park on a weekday afternoon,” she stated.

The day before she had texted me a picture of some birds.

Sometimes birds don’t die, she wrote, Sometimes they chill on stoops like cool awesome people would if they had stoops.  I mean me.

Awww, I replied, But also.  I wish they were dead.  God.  I’m cruel.  Kill them and send me a photo?

You are the worst person in the world, she texted back.

In other news, on July 14th, 2010, Keep My Words will turn one-year old.

It was around this time two years ago that this guy broke my heart.

And it was about one year ago that I decided to break my own heart before this guy did.

Then this year, only a little over a month ago, another boy broke my heart.

Independence Day is painfully literal for me.

independence – (noun) freedom from the control, influence, support, aid, or the like, of others.

All three of them had new girlfriends less than a month after our dissevering.  The latter two ended up with skinnier, more-tattooed, and I’m sure less-cynical versions of me after claiming to be too commitment-phobic to dare call me their “girlfriend.”

Oh well.

Right now, I am uncomfortably content.  Part of me thinks I’m better off alone, and part of me thinks I just haven’t met the right person.  But it’s fine.  I want to meet a good man as much as I want to win the lottery – it could happen, and it could make me gloriously happy, but it’s not necessary.  And it certainly doesn’t happen for everyone.

I have no idea what tomorrow will bring.  Possibilities are everywhere.  With each second, I am changing.  Those boys don’t even know me anymore.  You don’t even know me anymore, nor do I.

Yet there’s enjoyment in constantly becoming reacquainted with myself.

Andrea’s birds (above), Piano at Thompkins Square Park (below)

Piano at Astor Place (below)

Piano at Greeley Square Park (below)

Piano at McCarren Park (below)

In 1992, Bill O’Neill starting noticing strange tiles randomly embedded in local roads in Philadelphia.  They measured about 6 x 12 inches, and contained some variation of the message below.

TOYNBEE IDEA
IN Kubrick’s 2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER

Many tiles included footnotes consisting of cryptic political messages, such as “Murder every journalist, I beg you” and “Submit.  Obey.”

Bill decided to do some research on the tiles, and he came to discover that this wasn’t just a local incident.  Over time he found that similar tiles had appeared in many US cities, including Washington DC, Pittsburgh, New York City, Baltimore, and Boston, to name a few.  Some had even shown up in South America.

Although these tiles were planted into busy public roads, no one seemed to know who was responsible or what was used to make the them.

“Toynbee” most certainly refers to British historian Arnold J. Toynbee.  According to letters written by the tiler, allegedly uncovered by Toynbee tile researchers in Philadelphia in 2006, “Toynbee’s idea” stems from a passage in Arnold Toynbee’s book Experiences:

Human nature presents human minds with a puzzle which they have not yet solved and may never succeed in solving, for all that we can tell. The dichotomy of a human being into ‘soul’ and ‘body’ is not a datum of experience. No one has ever been, or ever met, a living human soul without a body… Someone who accepts – as I myself do, taking it on trust – the present-day scientific account of the Universe may find it impossible to believe that a living creature, once dead, can come to life again; but, if he did entertain this belief, he would be thinking more ‘scientifically’ if he thought in the Christian terms of a psychosomatic resurrection than if he thought in the shamanistic terms of a disembodied spirit.

The other reference in the tiles is to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was a movie that made implications that a man was reborn on a mission to Jupiter, not exactly resurrected.

There is only one known connection between the works of Toynbee and Kubrick: Toynbee’s writings spoke of a man named Zoroaster who conceived the idea of monotheism (the belief that only one God exists), and this name also occurs in the title of the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme song entitled “Thus Spoke Zoroaster.”

A clue to the source of these tiles came from a 1983 newspaper interview with a social worker from Philadelphia named James Morasco.  Morasco claimed that Jupiter could be colonized by bringing Earth’s dead people there to have them resurrected.

When writing an article on the tiles in 2001, a reporter stumbled upon the original 1983 article and tried to call the only James Morasco listed in Philly. A woman who answered said Mr. Morasco couldn’t come to the phone because a mysterious ailment had required that he have his voicebox removed.  A different reporter writing another story in 2003 tried to call the same man, only to be told that he died the previous March at age 88.

“My husband doesn’t know anything about that,” his widow told the reporter. “Besides he died in March. But he didn’t know anything about it.”

In any case, there are two problems when assuming that James Morasco is the responsible party: (1) He would have been in his 70s when most of the tiles were placed, and (2) Some new tiles have been installed since his death in 2003.

It was eventually determined that these tiles were composed of layers of linoleum and asphalt crack-filling compound.  A Toynbee-tile enthusiast website reported a tile found in Pittsburgh that included deployment instructions, which the reader transcribed as:

…linoleum, asphalt glue (?) in several layers, then placing tar paper over it so that car wheels won’t mess it up, and apparently the heat of the sun on the tar paper will bake it into the street.

There is no public or private agency dedicated to conserving Toynbee tiles. Many tiles now exist only as photographs taken before their destruction.

Toynbee tile at Franklin Square, 2002 (above)

Lately I find myself in solitude, mulling over certain situations while shaking my head back and forth.  Other times I’m on a crowded train, but still very much alone, as my body conveys this physical expression of disagreement.  When I catch myself doing this, I wonder if anyone notices, and if so, what they think of the girl in silent dispute with herself.

One thing upsetting me is how not upset I am.  The repeated heartbreaks I am forced to endure leave me passively disenchanted with love and cynically disappointed with humanity.  There’s cruelty in a world that allows two people to gravitate towards one another, only to be torn apart by disinterest or infidelity.  Oftentimes the bruised half of the equation aches and fantasizes, while the other appears unaffected.

I’ve seen it so many times that I fear I’m becoming indifferent.

Still, I refuse to surrender my naiveté when it comes to love.  Meanwhile, I need to heed the signs so often ignored.  For example, yesterday I was at the duck with Rona.

“One night,” I told her, “when xxxxxx really made me feel like shit – it was the night we were at the bar with friends, and when I went to hug him he told me not to ‘be weird’ – I went home and sat in my bathroom and cried.  And the whole time I kept telling myself that I didn’t want to feel this way ever again.  I kept asking myself why I let this happen.”

Even after that occurrence, I kept on with this boy.  I let my innocence crush my defenses, and with my armor down he unmasked to show me his true face before hurling his flail into my chest.

Tragic, I know.

But don’t allow my melodramatic words fool you.  Like I said, I’m upset about how not upset I am.

“You seem different this time,” Rona told me.

I thought for a moment.  “I guess I’m not as sad, I’m more aggravated.  It’s like when people tell you that you deserve better, but inside you never really believe it.  Well this time, I believe it.”

The shift in self-perception is bittersweet.  It’s a change.

Speaking of change, Mike and I were on our way to see sami.the.great last week.  Somewhere around 14th Street and Avenue A, he stopped and pointed to the ground.

“Uh, Ashleigh, look,” he said.

There at the base of a tree were two dead birds.  They appeared to be holding one another.  It reminded me of a news story I read over three years ago in which archaeologists uncovered the bones of a man and woman locked in an eternal embrace.  The couple was dubbed the Lovers of Valdaro.  Their skeletons were over 5,000 years old.

One theory suggested that the man was killed and the woman then sacrificed so his soul would be accompanied in the afterlife.  I wholeheartedly reject this theory, and instead propose that these Lovers were truly lovers, so devoted to one another that their breaths were in sync.  They could not live without each other.

I do hope that people have the capability to love this much.

Dead birds, 14th Street & Avenue A (above), Lovers of Valdaro (below)

“What else is sacred?  Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.”
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions

It was the winter of 1926.  Thomas “Fats” Waller, the popular jazz pianist, had just finished a spirited performance at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago.  Following the concert, Waller was approached by four men wearing dark suits with wide lapels.

“We want to make you an offer that you can’t refuse,” they told him, as one of the men shoved a revolver into Waller’s corpulent stomach.

The men led Waller outside and into a black limousine.  He was terrified, but knew it best to follow their instructions.

Orders were given to the limo driver to drive to the Hawthorne Inn in East Cicero, a suburb of Chicago.  Inside, Waller found himself in the middle of a huge party.  The kidnappers shoved him towards a piano and demanded that he play. The loudest applause came from a familiar man with an unmistakable scar: Al Capone.  Capone was having a birthday party, and Fats Waller was a present from “the boys”.

The party lasted for three days. Waller exhausted himself and his repertoire, but with every request bills were stuffed into his pockets. He and Capone consumed vast quantities of food and drink. By the time the limousine headed back to the Sherman Hotel, Waller had acquired several thousand dollars in cash tips.

Currently, there is an art installation by British artist Luke Jerram on display around New York City.  Titled “Play Me, I’m Yours”, it consists of 60 newly refurbished pianos scattered in public places among the five boroughs, available for anyone to play.  Following the artwork, the pianos will be donated to local schools and community groups.

Next week, I plan on finding some of these pianos and listening to people make music.  Maybe I’ll even make some myself.

Fats Waller (above)

In 2007, an 18-year old girl entered the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.  She told specialists that for five months she had been experiencing pain and swelling in her abdomen.  Additional complaints included vomiting after eating and an unexplainable loss of 40 pounds.

X-rays revealed a large, dark mass in the woman’s stomach.  Concerned doctors then lowered a scope through her esophagus for further investigation.  What they found was a large ball of swallowed, foreign material nearly filling the woman’s entire abdominal region.  Doctors scheduled an operation to remove it.

When the woman underwent surgery, the foreign material proved to be a 10-pound hairball.  It was 15 inches in length and measured 7 inches across by 7 inches deep.

Upon questioning, the patient stated that she had had a habit of eating her hair for many years – a condition called trichophagia.  Trichophagia is the compulsive eating of hair, usually chewed while still attached to the head and then swallowed.  The hair eventually collects in the gastrointestinal tract causing symptoms such as indigestion and stomach pain.

Five days after the mass of black, curly hair was removed, the woman began eating normally and was sent home.  Supposedly, she has stopped consuming her hair.

For my vacation next week, I think I’ll be curly-haired-Ashleigh.  However, I will be sure to not dine on my hair, but at the greatest restaurant know to humanity – Chick-fil-A.

The (disgusting) hairball (below)

1. Eat Smurf-Berry Crunch Cereal. In 1983, Post introduced Smurf-Berry Crunch cereal.  Smurf-Berry Crunch was a “fruity sweetened corn, oat & wheat cereal fortified with 10 essential vitamins and minerals”.  On the box, Smurfette and two other Smurfs picked smurfberries off of a smurfberry tree while Papa Smurf ate Smurf-Berry Crunch from a bowl.  In proportion to Papa Smurf, the bowl was rather large.  If I concentrate hard enough, I can almost smell the delicious smurfberries.  Oh, what I would give to enjoy some right now.  Unfortunately, Post no longer manufactures Smurf-Berry Crunch.
2. Eat Dunkin’ Donuts Cereal. A related, unsatisfiable desire is to consume Dunkin’ Donuts Cereal.  This delicious treat was unveiled in 1988 by the Ralston Company.  The cereal came in two varieties: glazed and chocolate.  (I would happily accept either one.) The box described the cereal as “crunchy little donuts with a great big taste!”  When I meditate over the flavor of those tiny circles, I can recall the savoriness quite accurately.  They too have been discontinued, torn from my life for reasons unbeknownst to me.
3. Talk to my Grandma. My Grandpa passed away when I was two years old, but the family has told me stories of how Grandma and Grandpa would fight.  There are tales of them screaming at each other, at times even throwing appliances.  It would interest me to ask my grandmother what fueled these intense arguments, and if through it all they truly loved each other.  Supposing they did, maybe Grandma could explain to me why people hurt the ones they care about.

Dorothy: But it wasn’t a dream, it was a place.  And you, and you, and you, and you were there.  But you couldn’t have been, could you?

Aunt Em: Oh, we dream lots of silly things when we-

Dorothy: No Aunt Em.  This was a real, truly live place.  And I remember that some of it wasn’t very nice… but most of it was beautiful.  But just the same, all I kept saying to everybody was, I want to go home.  And they sent me home.  Doesn’t anybody believe me?

I’d been in Oz for months.

Some of it wasn’t very nice, but most of it was beautiful.  Like Dorothy, I thought it was real.  A part of me still believes.  This may be a testament to my foolishness, as I have recently viewed evidence indicating that Oz is nonexistent.

At first, I was enraged with the harshness of this revelation.  Its delivery was brutal, and it evoked in me the filthiest of emotions.  These feelings wanted to inflict as much pain as the heartbreak from which they were produced, so they became alive through graceless acts and piercing words.  It felt like I was led to Oz with gentle affection, only to be notified of its fictitiousness with reckless abandon.

I was also furious with myself for believing such a place did exist.  Although I saw it, many people did not.  Still I assured them that Oz was not imaginary, and I supported this certainty with tales of my time there.  I trusted in it; Oz made me feel safe.  Now faced with the possibility that it was all in my mind, silencing the self-resentment seems impossible.

As this anger bred from adoration is exiled from my body, I am left with a familiar sadness.  It’s just so terribly disheartening, the whole situation.  It pains me to think that none of it was real.

Honestly, I need to find my ruby slippers and get the fuck out of this town for a while.  Otherwise, I might end up like Dorothy in Return to Oz.  (If you haven’t seen it, the poor girl was committed to a psychiatric hospital because of her dreams.  And I have a lot of dreams.)

Actually, I much prefer Return to Oz over Wizard of Oz, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.

“Dude, why are you slacking on the postings?” Justin asked.  “Whenever I’m feeling depressed, I read one and it picks me up.”

“I’m writing one now!” I replied.  “I’ve been busy with school.  I’m hoping to post one today and one tomorrow.”

“Cool,” he said.

I continued.  “Today being less personal, tomorrow being more typical Ashleigh-wah-my-life.”

He was disappointed.  “I hate your less personal ones.  It’s like you’re trying to get into the New Yorker or something, which is dumb.  But the wah-my-life ones make me feel like things could get a lot worse, so I may as well not feel so bad about my shitty life.”

I laughed.  “I’m glad my misery cheers you up,” I told him.

“Well, at least it serves some purpose other than you using us, the public, for your own self-medication,” he finished.

…

On the evening of November 30, 1948, a man and his wife were walking through Somerton beach in Adelaide, Australia.  Across the way, there was a man lying slumped over in the sand with his head against the seawall and feet pointing toward the water.  They saw the man make a movement with his right hand, as though he were trying to smoke a cigarette, and then drop his arm limply.

The couple assumed the man was drunk, and they continued walking.

Later that night, a young girl and her boyfriend were strolling along the promenade at the top of the seawall.  The stopped to have a seat near the steps leading down to the beach.  From their resting spot, the girl saw a man’s left hand lying motionless beside his body.  They commented between themselves that he may be dead because he was not reacting to the mosquitoes.  The lovers remained for about thirty minutes, during which the man did not move.  They concluded that he was drunk or asleep, and thus did not investigate further.

The next morning, the husband from earlier in the previous evening went back to the beach for a swim.  He noticed that the same man was still propped up against the seawall in the same position as the night before.  The police were notified.

Upon arrival at the scene, an officer examined the body and found no signs of disturbance.  The left arm was lying beside the body and the right arm was double bent. An unlit cigarette was behind his ear, and a half-smoked cigarette was lying on the right collar of his coat.

There was nothing unusual about a man dying in a public place, so it was assumed that someone would soon come forward to claim him.

Two days later a post-mortem examination was conducted. Until then it was thought that the man had died from natural causes. Now, however, a mystery began to emerge: despite numerous tests, no cause of death could be discovered.

The body was found to be that of a tall 45-year-old European man in excellent physical condition. Consistent with poisoning, his stomach was found to be highly congested with blood, and his heart had failed.  However, tests did not reveal any poison.

All labels on his clothes were missing, and he had no hat, which was unusual for 1948, especially so for someone wearing a suit.  He was clean-shaven, had no distinguishing marks, and carried no identification.

The police began extensive enquiries to establish the man’s identity. Photographs, fingerprints, and dental records were circulated throughout Australia, New Zealand and all English-speaking countries.  No record of the man could be found.  It was like he had never existed.

A search of his pockets revealed the following items:

• a used bus ticket from the city to St. Leonards in Glenelg
• an unused second-class rail ticket from the city to Henley Beach
• an aluminum comb, manufactured in America
• a half pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum
• an Army Club cigarette packet containing Kensitas cigarettes (a different brand)
• a quarter full box of matches

In January 1949, staff at the Adelaide Railway Station found an unclaimed suitcase in the cloakroom with the luggage label removed. It had been checked in after 11a.m. on November 30th, 1948.  Clothing in the case matched that worn by the man, with identification marks removed. The entire contents of the suitcase were:

• a red checked dressing gown
• a pair of size seven red felt slippers
• four pairs of underpants
• pajamas
• shaving products
• a pair of light brown trousers with sand in the cuffs
• an electrician’s screwdriver
• a stenciling brush
• a table knife cut down into a short, sharp instrument
• a pair of scissors as used on merchant ships for stenciling cargo
• a thread card of Barbour brand orange waxed thread, the same as that used to repair lining in a pocket of the trousers the dead man was wearing

And so the mystery deepened. Numerous people went to view the embalmed body.  Some even claimed that they knew him, but ultimately an identity was not established.

Three months later, further examination of clothing found on the body revealed a secret pocket within one of the trouser pockets.  Inside was a piece of paper with the words “Taman Shud” printed on it.  Public library officials found that the words came from the last page of a collection of poems written 900 years ago by a Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, called The Rubaiyat.

The theme of the poem was that one should live life to the fullest and have no regrets when it ended. The words Taman Shud mean “the end” or “the finish”.

A photograph of the scrap of paper was sent to interstate police and released to the public, leading a random person to admit he had found a very rare first edition copy of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat in the back seat of his unlocked car in Glenelg on the night of November 30, 1948.  The book was missing the words “Taman Shud” on the last page, and tests indicated that the piece of paper was torn from the book.

In the back of the book were faint pencil markings of five lines written in all capital letters, with the second struck out. The strike out is now considered significant with its similarity to the fourth line, possibly indicating a mistake, and therefore likely proof the letters are code:

MRGOABABD
MLIAOI
MTBIMPANETP
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB

Code experts were called in at the time to decipher the lines but were unsuccessful.

When the code was analyzed by the Australian Department of Defense in 1978, they made the following statements:

There are insufficient symbols to provide a pattern.
The symbols could be a complex substitute code or the meaningless response to a disturbed mind.
It is not possible to provide a satisfactory answer.

More recent attempts to solve the case suggest that the letters aren’t random, just some mysterious cipher with which no one is familiar.

The identity of the deceased man and cause of death remain unsolved to this day.

Police photo of the dead body (above), the dead man’s code from the back of The Rubaiyat (below)

I went to see the Reverend last night. Afterward, still highly intoxicated, I arrived home and sat on my sofa, legs uncrossed and arms at my sides.

I felt like I was falling apart. I wanted to cry, but I stopped myself in fear of waking up with eyes swollen and incriminating. So I slept.

My alarm thrust me out of a peculiar dream in which my kitchen sink was clogged with meat. The meat looked like dog food, and dream-me was disgusted by it. As I shoveled it out, it kept seeping up through the holes in the sink strainer.

I immediately pressed the snooze button and listened to my inner monologue. It was distorted, robotic and demonic. The words turned to barking. This frightened me.

When my alarm went off the second time, I hit the snooze button again. I thought about my friend who had checked himself into a mental hospital years ago. I considered this option for myself, but decided against it. They would likely want to medicate me, and I am not a fan of such things. I want to learn to control my emotions; I want to teach myself discipline. Maybe I can never stop caring, but to appear as though I don’t care would suffice.

(On Friday night I drunk-texted the above mentioned friend: I want to beat my head against the wall til it’s bloody but I won’t. I won’t. The text produced no response, yet I know he understood.)

Once more the alarm and the snooze button. This time in my half-slumber I contemplated running away to a place that no one knows. There I would curl up into a ball and die, only to be found 1,000 years later by a team of archaeologists.  They would never be able to see how crazy I had been.  They would only see the bones of an average girl in her late twenties, who had seemingly lived a life of normal mental capacity.

Nine more minutes passed, and a final execution of the snooze button carried me closer to sleep and further from reality. I saw a whale, a giant whale in outer space. The beast was bigger than the entire solar system, and it slithered like a snake through the stars. When it got to earth’s moon, it opened its enormous jaws and swallowed the moon whole. Then it turned towards the sun. I knew for sure it would eat her up next, and everything would be dark forever.

But I awoke. About forty minutes later I was on the L train, mulling over my sanity (as I so often do). The more I convince myself that I’m crazy the crazier I feel, but isn’t that in itself crazy?  And if I’m falling apart, I can just get some glue and slap on a smile and go face the world.  If that means I’m trying to prove something to myself, like that I can control my emotions and have a good time, then so be it.  Still I don’t know what the right choice is and I never know what to do.  I’m pretty sure that all of this pain and sadness is my fault because I am letting it happen, so I am doing this to myself.  And even if I am being tortured does that make me a victim or a masochist or a fool?  But I’m in too deep now so it doesn’t matter…

Currently I am working to keep what I have deemed my “crazy switch” turned to an off position. To do this, I need to determine what activates it. An early theory suggests it is the consumption of extensive amounts of booze, followed by someone’s actions or words that my drunk-mind interprets as cruelty unto my person.

Once the switch is flipped, the dam in my mind gives way and I become vicious and unrelenting, and ultimately sorrowful and crying, disappointed in myself and my actions. The next day I apologize when appropriate. If I determine that my actions are justified, i.e., someone had actually been callous to me, I still acknowledge the situation.  (Not acknowledging it only allows it to be a plague on my subconscious, an often unnecessary affliction since things are always worse in one’s own mind than in actuality.)

In any case, I just wish I could control myself.

I simply want to be a nice person.  Always.

(It looks as though I’ll have to write about snow globes another time.)

In other news, I saw a dead bird today. Maybe a change is coming.