Samantha

Although almost all of my entries are public, I have recently set up a few filters.

I set them at my own discretion upon creation, but if anyone would like to be added or removed from certain filters, say the word.

( My current filters and how I use them )

So yeah, if anyone wants on - hop aboard.

This journal has been continued over at luxemburger, fyi.

For various reasons, I have begun to resent updating this journal.

The only reason I have for keeping my journal is in order to document the events in my life - the major events, the minor events. But lately, I haven't felt at all free to document what's really going on in my life.

Some of the things I'm not saying are quite positive - most of what falls into this category regards Kristin. It's a strange feeling for me, wanting to keep the details private. If you've read my journal for any length, you'll know I previously documented just about everything there was to document in a relationship. Not so this time. And that's pretty much by choice.

But the other things, the ones that aren't positive. The negativity can't be lumped into one category so easily. Last Thursday, I wanted desperately to write about a distressing situation at school involving a friend of mine, but I couldn't. I've been fighting on and off with my mother lately, and I can't talk openly about that.

I've made another journal. It's all set up. I've friended the people on my current flist that I'd like to keep on that account. The journal is completely public; it is also not hard to find. As a word of reminder, I made the new account so that I could maintain my sense of freedom. Please, please, please don't infringe on that.

As long as we're clear about this, happy journaling, folks.

[ETA: If you think I've somehow missed you in the friending process, feel free to leave a comment here. I'm likely to respond warmly.]

Drifted into consciousness with a panic attack this morning. I knew my alarm was going to go off. I knew that meant I needed to get ready for school.

But I couldn't catch my breath, and I couldn't make my heart slow down.

What causes panic?

What makes my head say, You can't go there today, you just can't go there today?

The Fandom Drabble Challenge

Every person on your flist gets to request a drabble from you. In return, they have to post this in their journal and write a drabble for you. (or not. you choose. non-writers & busy people are allowed to play.) Post all fandoms you're willing to write for. Your friends can pick a relationship, a story arc, a missing scene, or pretty much anything they want, unless the author has previously mentioned that they will not write it. They comment with what they want, and you write drabbles and post it in your LiveJournal.

Rules

1. The author can choose three relationships and three story arcs they will not write, per fandom.
2. The author can set what rating levels they're willing to write for.
3. The drabbles can be no longer than 100 words.

Fandoms - Buffyverse, HP, Law & Order, Popular, Narniaverse, Resident Evil, The L Word, But I'm A Cheerleader, Mulholland Drive, Charmed, RPS of anyone I've gushed about.

I'm convinced there's never been a more beautiful sight.

Her eyes shut, lifting gently open. The freckles scattered across the top of her cheeks. Her mouth at rest, neither moving nor between movement. She is content. She exists. She is lying next to me.

She cries when she tells me what I mean to her. I can see the tremble in her lips. I'm not sure that I've ever looked at anyone so closely. I know the way the lights hits her face when she's happy, the way it fades when she's not. I know the way she breathes when she wants me, the way her words shift when she's upset.

She knows things about me that aren't secrets. They're just observations. And yet, no one else has noticed before. When I close my eyes, I feel her fingers gliding over my skin. I feel her eyes pressing into me, pressing through me.

I feel her mouth, fitting in the groove of my lips.

Have made a couple of changes to my policy on posting entries in my journal.

Reply with your name and I'll tell you something I adore about you.

Then put this in your journal.

(Also, my mom roped Kristin into visiting me this weekend. <3)

My girlfriend is really fucking hilarious, and somehow, loving at the same time.

Yesterday, when I wasn't online in the evening, Kristin decided to start browsing my exes' journals for mentions of me. Then she made an account on Blurty and started reading/commenting on my earliest posts. When I got online, I showed her Jasmin's old accounts. She hacked into her Xanga and left a new post.

She's the best.

[ETA: The post is taken down, but still. Mmm. Kristin.]

A friend of mine apologized to me this morning.

I really didn't see it coming, but she sat down next to me in the fieldhouse before class and said, I need to tell you I'm sorry, but I'm not sure that I have time now. Before you came back to school, I wanted to slap you. I compared what was happening in my life to yours and I thought, 'She has the perfect life, she's just making problems where there aren't any.' I thought, 'I didn't ask for anything to happen to me,' and I saw you as wanting something to be wrong that wasn't. That's what I thought. I'm sorry. I understand a lot better now.

She came up to me again after class. She said she needs to tell me something else.

Came across that picture on facebook a few minutes ago. The boy on the right is the most brilliant person I know, and I spent all of middle school and part of high school in love with him.

His name is Joe. Actually, it's Ruozhou. He's a student at MIT. When I was twelve years old, he won first place in Mathcounts, at the national level. He was a year ahead of me in school. We were teammates. Of the four of us, I think I was the most removed. I wasn't as funny as Franco. I wasn't as smart as Adri.

Princess Leia was the only girl in which I saw him take interest. He wanted a cutout from her scene as Jabba's slave. I remember riding on the back of the bus, watching him in the seat across from me as he paged through a catalog of Star Wars merchandise. My body would never look like hers, and I'd never be as smart as he was.

I think he may have known I liked him. I didn't hide my feelings very well. Adri knew. I created a trick account once to e-mail him with a confession of my feelings. I don't think I ever followed through on the promise to reveal myself after the first couple of letters.

I couldn't.

The year he won nationals, we spent 30 hours together every week for a month. As a team, of course. He was so funny and serious, and hell if I'm not feeling flutters just remembering. Every conversation I ever tried to hold with him was awkward, uncomfortable. We walked home together once, by accident. His house was closer to the school than mine, but in the same direction. He was so caught up in whatever he was saying that he kept walking to me. I didn't think my heart would ever soar so high again.

And there he is, looking more beautiful than I've ever seen him.

Is it ever time for this week to end.

Stress is constant, fluid, tiding. If it's not one thing, it's another. You think you're in the clear and then you're not. You think you've made it through and then you see something else looming. The clouds part only to reveal another grey sky.

But who says grey isn't beautiful? And who says the sun can't shine on a grey day? It is, it can, it does.

My dad and I passed a grocery store on our way to breakfast this morning. I never even knew it existed. I pass that place several times a week. The store is set back from the road several feet. The building is small, dirty, unattended.

We saw a car turning in. No one there is anyone, my dad said. Everyone there is low-life. He frequently categorizes certain people as low-life. Only, he spends time in some of the same places as these people. He earns the same sort of living. He's been charged with the same crimes.

So what sets him apart?

I don't really know. Something does, though. It took me a long time to have respect for my father, but now I have quite a bit of it. He's not one of those people.

Something else he said upset me, though. I was dropping him off, and he asked if I need any money. I reminded him about the remainder of the amount he's supposed to be giving me for my mom, and he said he couldn't give me any more than $20 today. Normally that wouldn't bother me, but I know he had $100 more in his wallet. He said, I have to buy something. What is he buying? What costs $100 that he can carry on his bicycle? That he needs cash for?

Knowing his habits, I don't want to think too much about the answer to that. Unfortunately, I haven't stopped thinking about it all afternoon. I wish he'd have specified. I wish it were likely that he was buying something innocent.

This must be a test. I say that I am finally at peace with my father's nature. But if I'm not comfortable with even the suggestion of a threat, am I really at peace?

Ugh. Feeling claustrophobic and I can't even talk about it.

I love that my mom and I are close, but sometimes I start feeling a need for personal space. I can't explain it.

This week, I've felt suffocated. It's like I have nothing safe, nothing I can count on to be private. She has a journal now. Most of her entries mention me. Sometimes she leaves comments on my entries. She read some of Kristin's fic and some of mine. She sent Kristin a just because e-mail the other day. At night, sometimes, in the middle of the night, she opens my bedroom door, to check on me. This morning she came into the bathroom while I was getting ready for school. She wanted to ask if I was mad at her. If I don't let her kiss my cheek or hug me when she wants, she pouts. If I do it more than once, she starts asking what's wrong.

It's too much.

I'm so frustrated I broke down into tears tonight. I wasn't laughing at my mom and Ali, so they thought they'd dump some flour in my hair. When I was done washing the flour out, I came back downstairs to see Ali had closed all of my windows on the computer and taken it over. Including the long entry I'd been working on for two hours about how frustrated I already was.

I went upstairs and folded myself into the armchair in my closet.

I can't let this get to me. Can't let this get to me. Can't let it get to me.

[ETA: I just posted this in part of a comment to Kali's latest entry -

She won't leave me alone at all. She doesn't care when I ask her not to touch me. I hate it so much. My neck is sensitive, it doesn't know when it's family or a lover kissing it - it just recognizes the feel of lips. I told her and she said, I gave birth to you - meaning it doesn't matter what I want. It doesn't matter. My body isn't even safe. I don't even have control of that.

I want to say, I am not your property. I have to follow your rules, but I am NOT your property. Let me have my fucking self. Let me have me.]

Hell fucking yes.

I got my World Lit test back (keep in mind this is a literature class, a literature discussion class and that I haven't been IN class, haven't had ANY discussion) today.

And what grade did I get?

Ninety-four percent. Hell yes.

And the essay question of which I was so proud?

"An outstanding response, Samantha! Excellent insight and interpretation!"

Has anybody seen Amadeus?

Someone outside my house just did THE laugh.

Browser? You can quit closing on me, any day now.

Seriously.

Want some poetry?

In which I attempt this phone post business over again.

In another bit of randomness, I am inviting you all to hear my voice.

I'm curious what sort of voice people expect me to have. Do I sound like you thought I would?

My love for Shirley Manson is and will remain unconditional, but a few missteps have shown that my love for Garbage itself has bounds.

Version 2.0 was and is utterly brilliant. The guitars and the bass and Shirley's voice get the fuck under my skin and they don't leave for weeks. You Look So Fine can still make me cry. I still sing along at the top of my lungs to I Think I'm Paranoid and Push It. Did I mention Special and The Trick Is To Keep Breathing.

Their debut is classic. Stupid Girl is just about the snazziest song on the planet.

But Beautiful Garbage just wasn't all that, uh, beautiful.

I'm downloading the new album now. It's kind of scary. I really want to like it. Really want to like it. I want Shirley to be brash and vulnerable and have that 'Fuck Everything' attitude. I want the music to be as signature as it used to be. I want the songs to sound like they're re-invented every time I put them on.

I guess that's not fair to expect. I'm crossing my fingers anyway.

[ETA: By the way, anyone want me to upload the new tracks?]

First hour! First fucking hour. What the hell.

As a result of Mrs. Brookman dropping me from Newspaper because of my extended absence, my P.E. waiver has been revoked. So I'll be joining Lift America, the special gym class in which the students wear heart rate monitors in order to establish that their hearts are consistently beating above a certain rate, FIRST THING IN THE MORNING. starting tomorrow, more than halfway through the semester.

I'm not too irritated, but. Still. I'm mostly upset that it's first thing in the morning, and I suppose I should confess that that's mostly because I don't want my hair to look like crap all day.

Fuck, I really am a girl.

Oh well. I still love being back at school. My Government teacher is amazing. She's really young; I think she might be 25 or something. She strolls all around the room during class and doesn't really stop talking at all. I've never met anyone with more energy. I talked to her this morning about what kind of work she needs from me. She gave me a policy sheet, and when we got to the section on participation, she said, I don't think you'll have any problems with this. Two big, big thumbs up for all the participation yesterday.

I like it when teachers can tell I'm excited about their classes.

World Literature is pretty cool too. We're watching Amadeus in class this week, and next Wednesday we'll be writing an in-class essay comparing the portrait of greatness illustrated in Mozart to the portrait illustrated in Félicité in Flaubert's "A Simple Heart." I think I'm going to do really well on the essay. I took a make-up test on one of the units I missed while I was gone today and had to do an essay question about Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave." I managed to convey my thoughts really clearly, I think.

We'll see what my teacher says.

I heard people talking in three (or maybe four?) of my classes today. Basically, what they said was along the lines of God, she's been gone for two months and she's still smarter than the rest of us. Which really isn't true. I mean, I have been gone for two months. But I'm not smarter than anyone. At least, I don't think I am.