Sometimes I look at pictures of you and my stomach still turns and i get all grossed out.

It's healthy that I hate your fucking guts.

You suck.

I think that some girls are using Plan B too often, and wonder what the effect on their body is...? Bombarding it with hormones too often..

The morning after pill is meant to be used in case of a 'woops' not a cure all for being irresponsible. I am emotionally torn, because I think it's an invaluable tool to preventing unwanted pregnancy, but I wonder if it's giving girls a blase attitude about their sexual safety and responsibility.

Thoughts?

Was he....?

Nooooo...

But,

It seemed...

What the fuck am I thinking?

No. Yes? No.

maybe....

Oh lord. Here we go.

Yes. I am hiding from it because it won't got well.

Avoiding a fight is better right now, trust me.

I'm so disappointed in the person you chose to become, and I miss the person you chose not to become. There was so much potential there. It's really one of the more tragic things i've watched happen in my life.

I used to look at those addicted, haggard and lonely men on the bus stops, and wonder how it's possible for them to get there-- where the path began, and after all this time, and consoling words and helping hands, I see-- when you refuse it, that's what you become.

Good luck.. I miss you.

My eyes are filled with salted water like I want to cry. But I aint got no reason to cry. I aint got nothin but words and melodies and futures in my head-- floating around in a soup of fantastic phantasies and facts.

I like to mix my numbers and my letters to make pretty pictures.

The moment is dark and soft and there are lights falling and traveling along the walls inside where I am. I use most of my peripheral to calculate the distance but it's all guesswork. I'm terrible at numbers. approximating is about all I can do.

Hand me a sound-- a sight-- a word -- a dream and I'll make you something true. The numbers is when I get to lying. They make something new and rare but it's never true. I use numbers like you use booze and dope, they fog you, confuse you, run your brain to an unfamiliar place that makes you scared and creative and confused.

Sometimes I use the wrong words and letters for aesthetic, tonality. You can create comedy with the sounds of words.

Numbers are never funny. They are 4, or 6, or prime or rational.

7 ate 9. Say it out loud. It's funny because of words.

7 8 9 is less funny. it's numbers. But ATE is a word and makes it funny.

There are songs that make my insides flutter, and voices too. There are sounds that make me feel metaphors and similes. Things feel like things. My heart beats differently and it feels like flying. There are physiological affects from music and i'll never understand them. Sometimes a well laid silence can make a tangible solid feeling. Sometimes one single note in the proper context makes all hair on your body stand on end.

Sometimes I feel emotions i'll never articulate and it's so amazingly frustrating. I just want to explain how I feel right now. I just want to say that I feel _____. Except that I dont think this feeling is one with a name. It's fear and joy and inspiration and sadness, it's the welling of tears and the tingle of my blood flow. It's a running nose and the yearning for nicotine. It's the smell on my breath and the light from the street. It's my cold feet and the vibrations from my speakers. it's a sleeping world and a buzzing underbelly. It's a future full of melted glaciers and continental shifts and fossil fuel emissions and artistic exploration and the idea that art can be function. it's the prosperity of the few and the desolation of my bank account on bill day. It's the ravages of alcohol on my past relationships and the ravages of a lack of alcohol on my current relationships. It's a guitar and a keyboard plugged into an amp, distorted. It's the myriad of people who died today. It's the thousands of people who spent the day sweating under the hot sun and spitting up dirt. It's the people who live in regimented sterile blocks of cement and steel and florescent lighting. I's the idea that I am a tiny, tiny cog in the watchtower. You are nothing and everything to me. I am a vacuum of light and sounds and darkness and silence that eats your thoughts like Velveeta cheese-- melted on toast.

Sometimes I think i've got it all figured out, and there are days like today when I see the scope of it all, and i'm humbled to a tiny little cowering mass of tissue and bone and water, waiting to be recycled into the carbon cycle.

This is not a condemnation of people who drink, honestly. Just musing on how I feel.

But jesus christ I am SO glad I don't use alcohol as a coping mechanism anymore. I lose so much life and thought and motivation and MYSELF in a hangover haze. I was lazy, depressed and far more broke than I am now when I drank a lot.

There are a lot of nights when I don't go out and stay in-- and I've been learning how to constructively use that time. Cooking, Baking, writing, art. I don't have to hide from the silence anymore. I used to run to drinking when I was forced to sit alone becuase then I would have to deal with all the shit i was avoiding emotionally.. Now, there's no hiding from my own thoughts and while at first-- it's terrifying, it get easier and better, and more constructive. I'm at a point where I can have a dialogue with myself about troubling things and handle it, REALLY handle it.

I know myself better than I ever have. You can say you know yourself, but it's bullshit if you're drunk all the time. I know for a fact that the person I was then vs now is entirely different. And while it's sometimes very lonely, I'm doing different things, meeting new people, having new experiences and really enjoying the new relationships.

I've been a better sister, better daughter and better me in the last few months than I have been in years.

Sometimes I just need to write this out to remind myself that i've done the right thing when Josh goes out and I stay at home. I miss the bars sometimes, I miss that you never know what's gonna happen, I miss meeting new people.. But if there's two things I don't miss -- it's the sheer shittiness I feel after drinking and the drama. There's always drama. Someone gets too drunk, fights, crying, weird people, awkward hookups, etc....

Maybe some day... But not right now.

I had a lovely weekend for a change-- like REALLY good.

Friday night I saw the Decemberists and it was epic, lovely, theatrical, and perfect. Aesthetically, they made it match the sounds and then they covered Heart's "Crazy on you", which made me smile big. I ran into some old friends and it was super awesome to catch up. I forgot i'm capable of being social and funny and normal. I should do that more often.

Saturday I got my hair cut (A LOT of hair gone, boy howdy), then Steve and I Rummaged all morning. I bought photo frames and a cool little painting of a man in armor. It will become an art project, fer sure. Then I took an amazing nap in the sunlight of my parent's living room with a kitty curled up against my tummy.

After that, My mom, Steve and his girlfriend Sam and I went to see "Up" and I fucking bawled. It was a great movie and I highly suggest it. I want a Kevin stuffed animal because I'm secretly 8 years old.

I fell asleep in a recliner at 11pm and slept straight through until 6:30am, when my body woke me up. I watched a documentary on Hitler and then cleaned my Mom's house while she was out running errands. I went out to her garden and cut some flowering weeds and leaves and put them in a vase for my mom, she thought this was adorable. We made dinner together and discussed why Twilight is the bane of my existence.

This is how life should be lived. Rich experiences and spending time with great people that love me. (and I love back)

Also, my hair is way short and it's weird.

I'm worried enough to have nightmares about it.

For the last week or so, my stomach has been doing the whole hurty thing. It's like the ulcer all over again. I cant eat anything without getting nauseous or crampy.

...So i've must've re-aggravated it...

It's possibly one of the more miserable things, ever. Feels like a constant flu-- Minor to extreme stomach pains and nausea, all sorts of gastrointestinal issues...

It's really bad this morning. I guess it's back to the white food diet, huh?

No more caffeine at all.
Possibly quit smoking? (I have like 3 left right now....)
No more super fatty foods.
No more acidy foods.
No more sugar.

DAMMIT.

There are days that feel wrong.

I panic about my solitude, and wonder if I SHOULD be doing something else, if this urgent need to be alone a lot is something unhealthy..

There is a numbness and detachment in me lately that worries me. I used to feel really passionately about everything, and these days I'm hollow where my feelings usually are.

Familiarity is going through the motions and being who and what I should.

I'm spending a lot of time with an empty head, all of my thoughts closed away.

Today he was wearing a Green Bay Packer's Sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. Yesterday he didn't wear a shirt and you could see the age he has endured in the sagging skin on his chest and arms. He usually spends his time waiting for the bus by picking up half smoked cigarette butts from the cracks in the pavement. He puts them in his tobacco pouch.

Some days, if I'm smoking, he'll sniff the air and I'll offer him one. Some days I don't. I think my Karma is better on the days I share with him, but I also feel like he thinks I'm pitying him with the hand outs. I'm fairly sure he's not homeless, but It wouldn't surprise me if he lived in a Bukowski style flop house in a bad neighborhood.

Today he told me that he gets off the third shift at a factory in Cudahy most days at 6:45 in the morning. He rides the 15 bus to his favorite bar, which is hidden in one of the side streets off of Kinnickinic Avenue, and drinks the first beer the bartender pours, opening up the tap lines to another long day.

"That first drink is important" He told me, but without ever explaining why. (Though I'm fairly sure I can understand why)

Then he rides the bus to National avenue-- the same bus, the same time that I do every morning, to go to "..one of them Mexican joints" as he called it, because apparently, they don't as a lot of questions in those bars, and he likes his silence.

I once watched him accidentally spill half a tobacco pouch onto the curb in a rainstorm, and bend down to pick it up, soaking wet, muttering to himself, "Can not waste it." over and over.

There is a kind of simple desperation in him that is almost literary.

The first morning I met him, his nose was running like a faucet-- dripping, and he was just holding a tattered handkerchief up, catching all the drops. He came over to me with very wide story-filled eyes, and asked me to bum a smoke. I offered him one and he explained to me the social implications of your cigarette brand. He rolled his own becuase it turned his fingers black at the tips, to remind him that he had a filthy godless habit. "There must always be a reminder" he told me, pointing to the sky, and presumably heaven, with his lit cigarette.

"I know they say stereotypes aint nice to repeat, but black folks like Newports. It's just like the old steel-chested men like my father smoked the Luckys-- no filter. It was just what you did. My nephew smokes Newports, that shit is wrong though, fiberglass in your lungs. You turn into insulation on the inside.."

I always smile and let him speak as much as he wants, ask him pointed questions to keep him talking. I asked him if he was from Milwaukee-- if he was at home here.

"I wasn't born in Milwaukee, Milwaukee was born in me, like god is born in you. I've worked in all the crap jobs in this city, cleaned up the lake when the shit flows in, with nets and waders like when you go fishing.. I know what this city shits out, so you can't tell me I don't know this place better than anyone else.."

Now he makes aluminum pipe fittings for nine hours in the the middle of the night.

"Shit goes on airplanes and space shuttles. For all I know I'm making the pipes that keep those people breathing air up there-- I could be saving lives every night in that smelly fucking room. Or.. I could be making the pipes that carry their freeze dried piss out to open space. They hand me an instruction sheet and I pull a lever about 10,000 times in a shift. My left arm aint good for nothing but pulling a press lever no more."

And he showed me his left arm, which had a bight pink scar along from his elbow to his wrist, but it was significantly stronger looking than you would expect from a man of his age.

"The scar is from when I got thrown out a Dodge Caravan a few years back. Fucker cut me off and I hit the brakes too late to stop proper. I went right through the windshield, and the only hurt I got was the big scrape on my arm. I shielded my face with it, I guess. Fucker cut me off, but cause I had a couple beers before and the damn ambulance driver smelled it on me, got my license taken away. 4 year suspension was up a while back but I aint got a car, so fuck it."

When the bus comes, he stubbs out his cigarette carefully on the top of the trash can next to the bus stop, and places the butt in his tobacco pouch. The pouch goes in the back pocket of his jeans, where he still has the transfer from the ride over, it's usually expired and the bus driver either argues with him or smiles knowingly to let him pass. It seems everyone knows his route, and no one seems to mind.

"No need to stay sober if I ain't gotta work again till 9 and and got a couple bucks in my pocket. Hell! The city provides me with a designated driver anyway, huh?

There's a difference between "Last Season" and "Vintage". You're the awkward phase in-between. I may call on you again, but right now I wouldn't be caught dead with you.

I'm going to try and drink some tonight.. Test myself. Keep it together.

Sometimes I see people that used to mean the world to me, and I feel like I simply do not understand them anymore. The things they like, the things they say, the things they do, none of it has changed but I don't get it anymore. It's like the world is the same, just in a different language I don't speak.

I don't feel like i've changed that much, but i'm sure I have.

The things I used to find comfort in-- none of it works anymore.

There's an agoraphobia, Social Phobia, that I feel a lot. I find myself wanting to be alone more than is probably healthy.

People do things that are entirely normal... and It infuriates and confuses me. I almost feel like my brain is devolving.. My ability to understand people deteriorates more and more.

But I feel better than I've felt in years. ...Which is confusing. I feel smarter and stronger and more emotionally healthy than I can ever remember. Physically, sans being a fat lard, I feel amazing. Stomach issues have disappeared, headaches almost never happen, I sleep very well these days, and I'm rarely sick except when Josh gave me the flu and I had an allergic reaction the other week. That was a fluke.

I'm more creative now than i've been in over a year.

So why am I Better, but also worse? There has to be a happy median somewhere.

I've replaced drinking with cooking. This is a fact, and it shows in my big fat ass.

Part of me wants to play the self deprivation games I used to play to make myself skinnier again.. Not eating, or making weird awful rules for myself, or being a cheeto-eating vegetarian, or going vegan, or back to the white food diet, or puking up everything..

None of it ever worked for long and I have terrible will power. There's got to be something out there that works for me. A way to eat foods I wont end up resenting but still enjoying what I eat.

That's the next change. I'm in this weird step by step process in which I'm changing all of my bad habits, one at a time, and i've been doing okay. Cigarettes are next, but GOD do I love the nervous habit. Food too-- It's a habit. Caffeine and drinking and getting stoned have all pretty much been eliminated and I'm just waiting for the reserves of will power to fill up enough for me to take the next steps..

We'll see how this works.

The cake was delicious. I still have half of it-- Josh doesn't eat sweets so much and I can't eat it by myself.

I realized today that I have a super predictable hormone cycle that affects me the same pretty much every month.

Day 1: Super intense sex dreams and thoughts CONSTANTLY.
Day 2: Irrational anger and frustration.

Today my irrational thoughts and things that pissed me off included:

-I decided that the 'H' in the name "Sarah" was unnecessary and it made me mad that people spell it with an 'H'. "Sara" is sufficient.
-Every time the phone rang in the middle of a task I would curse under my breath. It was difficult to be patient with frustrating customers on the phone, too. Stupid questions made my blood boil.
-Transferring written emails to the computer-- people's horrible handwriting infuriated me.
-The fact that no one stood up and let the lady with a walker sit down on the bus today made me VERY mad.
-Josh at a bunch of my leftover Pizza, which I had been planning on eating for the next few days. Oooh, I was momentarily FURIOUS.
-The white kid rapping to himself at the bus stop not only made me angry, but made me uncomfortable. I STARED him down after we got on the bus. I never do that, but for some reason I felt like he needed to know that he sucked.
-The bus driver's mustache was uneven and All I wanted to do was fix it.

But Steve took me out for ice cream, which was nice.

I momentarily thought about going vegan or even just Vegetarian again, and I wanted to for a while-- then I ate chicken for lunch. I just don't know If I could do it again.

IF there's one thing I wish I had, it would be will power. I have ZERO.

..Waiting for my first attempt at a vegan cake to come out of the oven. I'm not going vegan or anything at the moment, but i'm expanding my eating & Cooking horizons.

I think it's funny that I'm a terrible baker, but for one of my first attempts-- I chose to bake a vegan recipe.. Maybe making things more difficult?

I bought the Veganomicon yesterday in my attempts at making new things. I want a wider understanding of ingredients, spices, & flavors. I want to be able to know how to substitute stuff, etc.

I'll know in 20 minutes or so if my cake will work. The batter tastes delicious, so that's a plus, right?

I was supposed to go to the parent's house today to help them out with some stuff, but it didn't work out, so I have a whole day to myself. It's amazing. :)

I feel like today might be a super-duper cooking day.

I Haven't been this filled with brimming inspiration in a long, long time, and my guess is it's due to the combination of sobriety, weather change, and proper sensory perceptions.

I want to write the great American movie, Novel..
I want to make something beautiful.
I want to make people see the feelings inside my guts.
It may seem totally stupid and delusional, but I feel like I see things in a way that I swallow and hide...waiting until it makes sense in some conglomeration of visuals, sounds, words, until I can express it. I'm waiting for the pile of scraps and pieces of the world i've been imbibing to make something worth sharing.

What it means-- we'll see. I feel like there's a lot of potential for beautiful things to happen for me in the next while.

Today, at my Grandma's we looked through old photo albums, and I found a really fun picture of me in my Gwen Stefani Phase-- I was 13 or 14?



I want that dress NOW.

I helped my mom with getting their new house ready for inhabiting this weekend, and yesterday we spent a good 4 hours scraping and peeling the 70's era wallpaper and contact paper from the kitchen, and i got all scratched up. I seemed fine for a while afterwards, but then had an AWESOME allergic reaction the the glue on my skin, and to the fumes. I coughed and itched all night. It was as miserable as i've been in a LONG time.

I'm not really allergic to much, but apparently-- 70's wallpaper? Yup!

I haven't posted in a while cause I've been busy.

Makin' plans.

I'll be going back to school in the fall, and moving this summer to my own place. I will be broke for a while, as any job I have, whether it be Sportz or something else, will be part time. But! My step-dad is going to train me to start booking bands for his Label and Booking agency, which, in the longrun, has the potential for a great deal of money. Theoretically, if all goes well, I should be able to make my real, honest living doing it. This will be super sweet.

When my step-dad gets back from his next tour, we're gonna sit down and get a business plan together and get the ball rolling. Plus i'll be getting a new, nice computer as an incentive to keep me working hard.

In other news-- I have no other news. I'm just working hard on getting myself together and making a base for a really enriching life. I want a future full of possibility, and i'm working on it. It seems to be ok at the moment.

I seem to be ok for the moment.

Also-- I watched "Twilight" The other night and that movie is a pile of diarrhea. It is a story riddled with weak female stereotypes and the idea that women should be useless without a man. It's wreckage filled with unhealthy teenage obsession, female weakness and sparkly god damned vampires. Fuck that movie. Fuck it right in the ear.

Humanity evolves, and I think we are at one of the most inspirational times of our history. In a time in which all facets of humanity are accessible in seconds-- I think this generation will be the luckiest group of people to have experienced Earth. When there was once fear and unknown in the solemnity of being-- now, no matter what question you may have of yourself-- there is a connection. A human connection. Somewhere on this planet, somewhere, a person has felt like you, and you can find them. It is a time of great opportunity for us as a collection of minds to be as good as we can be. It seems more alien to me to separate than to accept.

It seems incredibly impossible to me that people can actually believe and practice blatant bigotry and purposeful hatred in this day and age. It simply does not compute that someone could believe in denying someone basic human rights and civil liberties based purely on their biological sexual preference. People argue that the sanctity of marriage has been challenged by gay men and women asking for their fundamental rights to equality, and it baffles me. Our supposed role models and celebrities are married and divorced faster than the other 50% of american marriages that end in divorce. There is little sanctity left, straight or gay, and if a couple that consists of two men want to join together in matrimony, dear lord, let them. If it means that they can answer for one another in medical, financial and legal issues, so be it! If it means that they are allowed the same tax breaks as married couples, so be it! If it means that they can be sure the lives they built together remain with their partner after they've passed away, so be it! And most of all, if it means that they can legally declare that they love one another, SO BE IT!

I'm not sure if it's the connectivity of my generation, the warm and accepting environment in which i was raised, the more prominent exposure to all facets of humanity, or just a change in the wiring as time evolves, but I think it is the most ludicrous thing on the planet that people think sexuality is a choice, and that they see it as 'subversive'.. It's argued that people fear what they don't understand-- but I think that's silly. I don't understand complex calculous, but I know that somehow it impacts my life in a positive way, and don't give it a second thought.

To deny a person their rights as humans to love, be loved, and live their lives based on who they love is insanity to me, and It seems so important to feel this way. There are people in my life who sleep around, some who are serial monogamists, asexual, heterosexual, straight, bisexual, hyper-sexual, single, married, in open relationships, or just really really bad at dating. None of these things seem relevant to whether or not they are good people.

Some of the most creative, beautiful, intelligent, people I know are people.

Just people.

Good People..