no alibis

so i'm stressing. i know i need to not but still...i cant help it. i freak out sometimes. and its not pretty. i miss school...is that weird?

i mean like at first i was just missing being around people who somewhat understood me and appreciated me or what they knew of me. but now, i'm actually starting to miss my lectures. i think i miss the academic stimuli...i mean, i cant really talk to anybody down here about the jihadisation of the chechnen conflict or the emerson's call for a creation of a new american literary identity now can i?

i put on cnn this morning after my run while i was making coffee and nanny saw it. it was one of the many blbs about iraq and she freaked out. she's lost the capacity to understand that the war is going on halfway around the world and not in her backyard. it took me an hour to calm her down. i cant stand not knowing whats going on in the world. seriously. i feel like somthing is missing from my morning routine if i dont catch some cnn...even if its while i'm doing 2 billion other things. it makes me feel connected i guess...wow. we really are a globalized society. sorry realists...it was bound to happen.

the nighttime air here is amazing. i'm out on the balcony now. thank goodness it screened in..the bugs down here are brutal! i love the breeze though...rustiling the palms. its so peaceful and real.

ive been thinking a lot about what constitutes reality and how we face it. i dont really know how well i deal with reality. i think because i feel too much that i have to take little chunks out of the reality block...deal with those...then move on to the rest. if i faced it all at once...i dont know what would happen. no...i do know. because it's happened before. and it's not pretty...

like when i knew my first true crush would never like me back. i was barely 16 and he was 23--going on 24. yeah. huge age difference to begin with. but in my little, teenage mind i thought it could happen. i wanted...needed...it to happen. not even him fall for me...just him to notice my existance. and so what to 16 year old girls do but tell everything to their friends and i went and told meg how much i was into him and she instantly paled. she was older...17...and because of that i thought she would have all the answers. she did. apparantly over the summer, when i was on vacation...the two hung out and got a little drunk. one thing lead to another and they ended up sleeping together. im like...are you shitting me? and then when i let it hit me...it was like no pain i had ever felt, nor wished to feel again. it felt like every muscle, tendon, fiber of my body was simultaniously stabbed with a red hot knife. i went home. got into bed. and just lay there for three days, the tears silently pouring down my cheeks. i couldnt move...but i didnt really want to. my little brother of all people tried to get me out of bed and ended up laying there with me for...i couldnt even tell you how long...just telling me that everything was going to be ok. and even though i couldnt tell anyone what had happened...you could see it in my eyes. i was more than heartbroken...i was simply broken. i had seen the disgusting reality of unrequited love and experienced its sharp bite firsthand. and it sucked.

reality messes everything up. i think honistly, most people are in some way damaged. yup...we're all damaged goods. but we would be far less broken if we hadnt faced reality. i know, the whole idea of "ignorance is bliss" is stupid but it works. how many kids are permantly scarred after seeing their parents beat the shit out of each other or how many women are driven to insanity after walking in on their husbands cheating on them with some filthy skank or how many people have seen reality and are constantly high or drunk in their vain attempt to get away from it all...if only for a little bit.

in a way, i'm almost envious of nanny...she has no idea what is real and what is an illusion. the home health aid this afternoon did a test of her cognative ablility and asked her to point to the phone. the phone is yellow and when the aid told her an bananna is yellow and asked her to point to the bananna, nanny pointed to the phone..thinking the phone and the bananna are one in the same simply because they are the same color. i mean its nowhere near like facing the reality of death or anything but still...somthing isnt real just because you say it is. its just not.

but hell...screw reality. its not that much fun anyways.