I’ve been mainly working on my main website and there have been a number of changes. I changed my hosting from Wiredtree (excellent host, I do recommend them) to Linode and basically created my own server without CPanel, the usual suspect. It’s been a real learning experience and I’ve worked so much through the command line that I sometimes got sick of it. I’m far from good at it but it’s been fun and it’s been a change.

I’ve also started work on phpFan 4, which has almost all new code aside from the basic functions. There are going to be several new modules and instead of making phpFan and the fanlisting mangagement script separate like I first imagined I’ve been combining them.

On the mental health front I’ve had some setbacks but have always bounced back to a better level of functioning, which to most people would not be saying much but to me it means the world. My sister had a big seizure — not the typical sort, something that I’m only giving that name because I’m not sure of a proper term for it — that lasted two hours. My mom says she was moving so violently she thought her head was going to come off. It’s been an uphill battle towards getting well again for her and she’s had to take leave from school. She’s still not free of the seizure activity. She’s been a real inspiration to me, makes me want to do better with my own health.

I managed to upgrade my computer to Windows 7. It was nightmarish and HP told me they wouldn’t support it even though they have upgrade instructions on their website. It was the drivers that were giving me such issue. It took me a couple of days but I downloaded updated drivers and did a few other fixes so now the CPU is not at 90% and I’m connected to the Internet. Heh, hardware and drivers and all that aren’t my strength.

A friend of mine is going to school to become a programmer and it made me envious. Design isn’t my strength but I love working with code. Prior to upgrading to Windows 7 I tweaked a script and got single-sign on working for my IPB forum and Drupal install on a website of mine. I’d waited for months for the script that would do this to be released but I figured I could do it on my own since the developer stopped working on the project. So, maybe, just maybe, I should do the same as my friend. I guess like tons of other people I really don’t know what I want to do. I know I don’t want to be a pharmacy tech for the rest of my life. I know I love working with code. I know I want to learn more about programming.

My license still has not come in and my teacher is MIA. The money for the school was a gift but I still find it upsetting. I know I don’t want to be a pharmacy tech forever but I still want to work part time using my license for a while.

So, I’m relieved that I’m going to be doing something productive again. I tell myself it’s only 15 weeks, which isn’t bad. Clinicals can be arranged to be a lot closer to where I live so that’s not an issue. I’m nervous but I think this will be a good change. I know I dropped out of the workforce against my wishes (had to do with medical insurance, which I couldn’t not have, and my disability) but I really want to try to get back into it. If I fail the first time, I’ll try again, again, etc.

Wish me luck!

This is the first year I was not hospitalized since before I turned fifteen. I never even came close to it despite one slight downturn over the summer. So slight I nearly forgot to mention it to the doctor. I’m back to seeing him every three months instead of every month.

It’s funny. It’s not through my own doing that I’m well or not well. It’s just medication, nothing more, nothing less. I’ve accepted it’s a chemical imbalance and not something I can force myself out of. Not that I’m helpless. I just don’t know how to word it. Responsible for my behavior but unable to stop the feelings that motivate that behavior is the closest I can come to it.

This is also the year where I end my career at my current school. I’m planning on further schooling but in a field not related to my major (Creative Writing). I love to write but I don’t feel I have the drive or desire to make myself write every day. It would become a chore and I also don’t think I’d make much money as a short story writer and poet.

My cumulative GPA is 3.455. Not fantastically high but not the 3.2-something of two or three years ago. I looked over my grades and I did terribly in the more science/psychology-oriented classes which is funny considering I used to be a psychology major. I hate statistics.

Well, a happy new year to you all! I hope your year has been as good (at least, decent) as mine has been.

I finished wrapping presents today. I’m such a procrastinator.

I’m thinking of delaying graduation to May so my parents can see me walk. I’m not sure if a delay is possible this late, though. I just want to give my parents something since they did help me through university and helped me get this far. Without them I’m sure I would not have gotten here.

If I can’t delay it, I can’t delay it.

I went to Vegas for two days. It was so much colder than the other times I’ve gone. There was snow on the sides of the roads on the way there. However, it was pretty nice. I didn’t drink much (to my friend’s chagrin) or gamble. I got a cute bag and matching wallet. The bag was my Christmas present and I got the wallet myself. :happy:

I can’t believe it. Finally going to be a university graduate. Took me longer than I’d hoped but understandable because of all of my hospitalizations and everything.

The professor lectured and it took about half an hour to get everything done and my brother was waiting outside in the rain because I thought it was only going to take five minutes. I’d invited him inside but he thought it’d only take a short time and when I went to look for him he wasn’t there.

Been busy the past few days. Met up with some friends from grade school yesterday. It was a really nice time, no awkwardness.

Almost forgot to say. I’m the proud owner of sleepwalking.nu. Haven’t set it up yet but I’m happy with the name. :sqee:

The semi-incestuous story and the rest of the portfolio was turned in today. Seven page essay, a 2591 word short story, my reading journal, my writing exercises, everything. I have one more class (a different one) and only just to turn in my final project. After that I should be a graduate! I really hope I don’t flub this up somehow, I keep getting worried.

I’m thinking of going into IT. I love writing scripts. I think with some schooling I might be worth employing. Perhaps. It’s a big leap for me since I keep going back and forth. Half a year I’d decided on it. A month later I’d decided against it again. I think it would be the best choice for me, though. The medical field is for my family, it’s not for me. I’d be rubbish at being a respiratory therapist. I don’t have steady hands so being a surgical tech would be a disaster. I feel that I should do what I love. I am worried that I will come to hate doing what I love because it becomes a job but I have to take that chance.

I need to edit ten pages of poetry for my final project. Not quite sure what I should do with them. I’m afraid they’re not good enough. I know they’re not good. Really, only a three to four page essay left to do. I can manage that in six days, right?

I find it a bit amusing to what lengths people will go to to fix poor grades. We got our first paper back from the professor and a 4.0 GPA student threw a snit fit. It was tense in that classroom! She apparently wanted to kill him, she was going to go to her counselor and the head of the English department. I’ll admit I put more effort into the paper than usual and managed to scrape by with a B but nobody got below a C. It’s not as if half the class failed. Still, if you’re going to follow through with a PhD in English you need good grades. I can understand the shock of getting a poor grade but don’t quite understand going so far as talking to the head of the English department when it was not entirely impossible to get an A. It was only difficult.

Entitlement issues? I have a 4.0 so it’s impossible for me to be anything but perfect issues? I’ll be happy to get my BA and move on, fuck the 4.0.

Maybe the lack of ambition is at the heart of my problems. I still don’t have a clear idea of what’s to come after I get my BA. I don’t want to go further in Creative Writing – MFA – because that leads to teaching and I have absolutely no interest in teaching.

I’m alive. That still surprises me. It would have been expected for me to die but I’m not. I think I’ll find myself repeating this at every milestone. I’m a quarter of a century, I’m going to graduate university (haha, so late it’s embarassing). I might just have a future.

I’m not sure where the road is leading me.

Moving on. School is proving challenging. About four hundred pages (it seems) of reading for the whole of next week. That’s just one class. I still don’t know what to expect.

I’ve been writing steadily. Prose instead of poetry. Not all with the same idea, the same characters, the same tone. I wrote a story about her and I keep sneaking around when I print it so that it will not be discovered. I know she would be very angry if she knew I wrote a story about her. It’s taken a story I know about her and created my own ideas, my own take, my own ending. It’s not the story, it’s a different carcass on the bones of something that has been secret and shameful. I wish I could do more with it, make it more successful.

I finally finished Atonement by Ian McEwan. I enjoyed the read far more than I expected to, this was sort of a snap judgment based on the reception of the movie by people I respect. Good to know that it’s almost always true that the book is better than the movie. I really enjoyed how Briony, though older and wiser, never really lets go of her need to atone. She may be dead by the time it happens but she won’t give up on it even though it would not have made a bit of difference in anybody’s life. The images, especially in the first part of the novel, are beautiful. A languorous life upset.

I think I need to get back into working on phpFan, revamping the scripts for my artwork and writing sub-sites has taught me more, it’s given me a different idea for templating, at the very least. That’s always been my stumbling block, unfortunately. I still need to work on the Gallery of Pain (yeah, the name, wince) members database/submission system.

I haven’t been writing much, the last of any good was a short story/fanfiction. Here is a poem I wrote that sort of calls attention to my annoyance with making glamorous and sophisticated speakers in poetry.

sophisticate

i could sit at a cafe
and smoke calmly,
my ribcage expanding
to hold thoughts tumbling
from each steady breath.

lipstick smeared teeth and all,
just fuck me now and get
it over with.

the vagina dentata, it swallows
men down like a fire and spit.

i could play the sophisticated city girl,
you know, being from the suburbs
and being stuck smack dab in los angeles.
the cholos smiling, their teeth yellowing
like the wallpaper in my little apartment.
flower print and the heavy trails left
from the rum i lobbed at the wall in rage.

maybe over an old boyfriend,
could have been the phone bill, you know.

i play the sophisticate,
smoking cigarettes from white and red packs,
going to poetry readings where my upheld fist
holds my head to attention.
cooing over name brands that
won’t be here in one hundred years.

remember godey’s?

you know i stomp cockroaches just as
well as any woman living in the slums,
going down there where babies
are another government check,
at least my uncle told me so.
i didn’t know because no live child
has ever passed these thighs.

i don’t pee rosewater.
the women in their condos
and nice apartments sweat into their
shoes on hot days.

i sweat into the cloth of your shirt
and you won’t take your pants off
because i never existed in this busy city.

i slip below the feet of the crowd,
all marching towards some unmet stranger.