Empathy

Obviously this is an attempt to wonder what might be going through someone else's head


I haven't slept at all in days
It's been so long since we've talked
And I have been here many times
I just don't know what I'm doing wrong

What can I do to make you love me ?
What can I do to make you care ?
What can I say to make you feel this ?
What can I do to get you there ?

There's only so much I can take
And I just got to let it go
And who knows I might feel better
If I don't try and I don't hope

What can I do to make you love me ?
What can I do to make you care ?
What can I say to make you feel this ?
What can I do to get you there ?
No more waiting, No more aching
No more fighting, No more trying

Maybe there's nothing more to say
And in a funny way I'm calm
Because the power is not mine
I'm just gonna let it fly
What can I do to make you love me ?
What can I do to make you care ?
What can I say to make you feel this ?
What can I do to get you there ?
 
 

The Corrs - What can I do?

(AKA the Lloyds TSB advert)

The sky is falling and no-one knows.

I have the feeling I'm gonna end up doing something insanely stupid in the not too distant future that might actually lead me to my first ever genuine regret in life, and a massive one at that.  Ironically enough, because of the very fact I'm so shit-scared of it actually happening to start off with.  This is my whole low self esteem thing kicking in again - I compensate by bravado, and things which scare the hell out of me I meet head-on, and beat into submission by sheer brute force, for better for worse, and with little regard to the consequences so long as it gets me through it.  You might think this would be an admirable quality, but in that case you've clearly never seen the fallout of such an action.

It feels as if it's one of those cases where I'm damned if I do and I damned if I don't.  And in such instances, I prefer to see it through on my terms.  It might not make for the best solution, or even a desirable one, but where something scares me that much its the only way I know how to cope.  To take control, and orchestrate it myself; at least that way I know 80% of what to expect, so its not such a huge shock, rather than having to face all 100% without warning.  Of course it rarely works like that in reality, but it's the only thing I know.  And when you're alone, having to make your own decisions because no-one can make them for you, with little to go on cause everyone else is sick of hearing about it and you're sick of telling them, and missing the support you could do with because its your thing to deal with, sometimes you make a wrong one, even though you're fully aware its wrong, because at least it's a fucking decision.



Mood: Scared.  Duh.

Music: I have returned to the realms of ambient classical compositions to punctuate my mood, thus:
http://open.spotify.com/user/jorgamond/playlist/2uPZ9jryTo041pgbTuGqXD

I'm too scared to know how I feel about you now...

We both know I'm selfish,

We both know I shouldn't,
that I should stay with you,
or take you with me,
or find another way.

But we both know I will anyway.
And you'll sit, and wait, and smile,
like you always have to.



... Sorry for being such a cunt.

Who can say if I've been changed for the better?

Yes I know I have the remaining raw food days to cover, as well as my fun post on health care reform passing to do.  But tonight has been rather more messed up, so its being blogged about first.

So things with me and Chris got pretty fucked tonight.  A perfectly pleasant normal conversation took a nosedive, as they are warrant to in conversations with me and Chris, and for some reason this is near guaranteed if, as I did today, I ring him twice in one day, which really doesn't allay my paranoia on the whole living with him thing next year.

10 odd months of depression is really showing its toll on the relationship, where it got the the point where Chris was the one to ask the "do you need a break from us?" question, which sure had been going through my head a fair amount, but I'd never given voice to it, and I always assumed Chris would never say that, in part because he's more secure with us, and in part because he's in some ways more terrified of losing 'us' than I am, so the fact things have got to the point where he's actually asking that question shows, at least to me if not you guys, just how dire things are.

And yes, part of me could do with a break, I said in a previous post being a depressive and being in a relationship does not work well together.  Hell most depressives I know have broken up due to it being a major contributing factor.  So yeah, in some ways a break would be great, and a part of me needs it, and wants it.  But a part of me doesn't want it, cause a part of me really really wants Chris.  There's a reason I'm in love with 3 guys and stay with him; there's a reason I wear his ring round my finger 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; there's a reason I, with all my disbelief in them, put up with the 2 hour trip that it takes to see each other, the only seeing each other at weekends, the not seeing each other for a month at a time due to exam placement or other issues.  And another part of me (cause there are always 3 halves in every whole, anyone who knows that reference can have instant win points,) knows that breaks simply don't work.  The idea is that you press pause on your relationship, but even with the strongest connection, the best intentions, you don't come back as the same people you were, or even the same people you would be if you'd have been (passive future perfect subjunctive anyone?) still in the relationship for the duration of the break.   You change, you have different experiences and live life differently than you otherwise would have.  And of course there's always the risk that one of you meets someone, and when you're on a break, what are the rules on that kind of thing.  Any kid of 90s TV knows this story far far far too well.  Hell even House agrees they were on a break.  And let's face it: considering I'm already in love with 2 other boys I'm hardly the poster boy for maintaining faith DURING a relationship, let alone in that whole break grey area.  In my experience, breaks don't tend to work, you either drift too far apart to come back together, or you try, but you're so changed you're not the same people, and it fails another 6 months down the line.

And besides which, what are we gonna do, take a break everytime I get long term depressive episodes?  Just like Chris is gonna forgive me when I'm in love with 10 different people years down the line?  And we've been damned lucky it's the first major episode in 5 years, there's been other ones sure, but none longer than 3 months and that's manageable.  But what about when the 2 year period hits when I switch back to some fairly rapid cylcing, going up and down in 2 month stints.  Are we gonna stick it out?  Are we gonna have a 2 year break?  Are we gonna break up every 2 months?  Even if we're living together?

And it's hardly the best time to 'take a break', the stress of exams and finals and possibly moving in together and such things.  DO either of us want to be pining, crying, etc over each other during that period.  Are we gonna see each other, talk to each other every night like we do at the moment, or every week?  Cold turkey is possibly unrealstic, but anything less is possibly not actual letting the break do what it's supposed to do.

Neither of us know what's gonna happen.  Some days things are better, but generally they're not really improving.  If anything they're getting very very slowly worse.  A long creeping death that consumes and drags you down, something like the edge of an event horizon I imagine..  Which means if things continue and their non-rate, within a few months, if not sooner, we'll probably have broken up.  And neither of us want that.  Again, there's a reason I'm with Chris and continue to try to be with him.  There's a reason why in all this depression, I still ring him every single night, and why I hope I get a goodnight text.  But at the moment it's proving virtually unachievable for us to get anywhere beyond where we are, which doesn't bode well.  I'm just glad there's no suspension bridges nearby at the moment....

And now Placebo is playing, just great.

I don't know what's gonna happen, but Chris is fed up, I'm too pessimistic and self-depricating at the momment to do anything other than go "I'm shit, it's my fault, he really *shouldn't* be with me it'd make his life easier", and evenings like this one suggest things are possibly irreconcilably fucked.


In other news, there's a very hot dom guy I've been talking to for the last week or so, with plans to meet next week.  We seem to get on very well, but every so often we hit big stumbling blocks.  Todays was camming.  I really hate camming.  I have a camera, and its nice to talk to people with it, but I really hate the point of cameras, which is sex stuff.  I hate doing anything sexual on camera, even just stripping.  It's one of the reasons I could never earn money out of cam shows.  I'm just too damned self conscious about the whole thing.  I feel like a fucking idiot.  I get nothing out of it and aside from not enjoying it, I spend the whole time feeling very very uncomfortable.  Every so often, as I did tonight, I retry this, to see if I can get over it, and no was the answer tonight.  So as that's about the 3rd stumbling block on some big things that me and this guy have hit, I dunno if we'll be meeting now. 

In other other news, I have work next week.  A day and a half earning £700.  The reason it pays so much is its some pretty hardcore kink stuff.  Their kidnap scenes are only staged insomuch as everyone consents and there's condoms involved.  Aside from that, the pain, rough abuse, and aggression is all very real.  I don't know what my scenes are yet, and it's gonna hurt like hell, but it's gonna be damned fun, and so worth it on many levels.  Then the question is what to do with the earnings.  Half is to refill some of my loan expenditure.  The other half.... I could buy an Xbox with FFXIII for £250, buy a violet wand for me and Chris for about £300 - 350, buy 2 flights and a week in a hostel for me and Chris in Europe, or buy a flight for 5 weeks to the US for me.  I'm not decided on which yet.  I know which I should buy.  I know which I want to buy.  What I will buy, hmmmm.....


Mood: Oh I just don't know anymore

Music: http://open.spotify.com/user/jorgamond/playlist/4eL8aH7a00zOqHgCadwN6X

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Raw-curious

Day 2 of the raw food diet.  I had a 9am lab to get in for, trying to work through a MATLAB tutorial at 9 in the morning does NOT work people.  Don't try this at home (or uni, or work).

Anyway, I had soaked oats in water overnight, and also some almonds in water.  I started off my making a litre of almond milk, and then made a breakfast smoothie consisting of the oats, a banana, about 300ml of almond milk, 2 tbsp of Milo and 1/8 cup of maple syrup.  I'm allergic to a lot of breakfast-style fruits like strawberries and such, and can never get enough chocolate milk so this all seemed like a good idea.  And it was, the smoothie was nice and filling, and will definitely be repeated tomorrow.

I met Vampy at 1000 for breakfast, which consisted of green tea for me whilst craving all the nommy sandwich fillings in the crappy breakfast diner cafe style place we were in.  But I did importantly resist temptation, so go me.  Wierd conversations then ensued, as Vampy and I can discuss things with each other that we can't with other people due to various reasons, and I would share them, but Mr. Vamp is the sort of person that doesn't like people to know who he is, so its unfair to expose him.  He moves back to Aus in about 2 months so we're trying to see each other as much as possible until then.

For lunch I had a massive OD of vitamin C (yes, my americanization this week meant I said that VAI-ta-min, rather than vi-TA-min, again, sorries), in the form of mango, pineapple, orange, apple and banana smoothie (all smoothies contain banana in my world, and the commercial smoothie world, this irrtates the bf).  After a litre of this I think I defninitely covered my 5 a day and vitamin intake in one go.

For dinner I was planning to have a soup, but I also came up with the idea of making live dolmas, for which I needed vine leaves.  I also needed some cashews and have been looking for army boots so off to notting hill I went, and got such, not including the boots cause they were expensive, boo hoo.  Soup was creamed tomatoes, sun dried tomatoes, asparagus, red pepper, garlic, onion, herbs, oil, balsam all blenderized and was nomful.  I could have happily eaten it cold but decided to heat it so I had at least one hot meal this week - you can heat things up to 46C in raw food 'cooking', which is more than hot enough to count as hot soup.  Some bread to accompany would have been ideal but alas that involves a whole baking process and such...

Later in the evening I did indeed make the dolmas.  The filling is a paste of pine nuts, sunflower seed, pumpkin seed, adzuki beans, sun dried tomatoes, garlic, onion, capers and kalamata olives.  It was in fact all very easy to make; the paste is rather garlicky, but that was my mistake, and can be adjusted in future, and the vine leaves could have done with soaking in oil to soften them up a bit more, but there's nothing inherently wrong with the 12 I made, and it means I now have something live and healthy to randomly snack on :)

Tomorrow is the attempt to make live lasagne.  Cashews are in to soak overnight, the portobello mushroow is marinading in shoyu, and the courgettes and other such things are all ready to be sliced and diced.  I managed not to accidently take a compulsory nap today, so yeys.  I was facing massive hunger pangs around 1700ish, as I was yesterday, and this is the point at which I have to get myself to stick to the diet by sheer willpower, as about that time some cheese or toast would go down sooooooooooooo well.  However, both last night's salad, and today's soup both made me think as I was eating them, "yeah, this is why I waited, and this is why I love live food"


No, there were no truthful things to say in today's post, I have two in the backlog to write at some point, but I figured you people are bored enough to read my blog, so you might like to know how the whole live food thing's going.  The weekend is gonna be tough to get through, and I'll be very tempted to get KFC one day next week....


Mood:  "I don't want to run away from this, I know that I just don't need this"

Music: http://open.spotify.com/user/jorgamond/playlist/4LrWSbfCFLP3ynUQYVl7Ei

Adventures in veganism

This week I'm on a raw food diet, not cause I need to lose weight; I'm only 8st after all, but because I've spent the last 2 weeks eating bacon and eggs and I think my arteries might like a break.  The flatmate and I are doing it together in an attempt to encourage each other, and as it's just a week, there's a clear aim in sight.

I was first introduced to raw food by my cousin Cindy, who took me to Cafe Gratitude in Berkeley when I was over in San Francisco for the first time.  What I find so odd about raw food is that I don't like any of the ingredients - tomatos, aubergines, avocados, nuts, legumes etc.  Not even in cooked food, and when highly processed.  I avoid most tomato based pasta sauces for example, or overload them with copious amounts of extra red onion to cover the taste.  And yes somehow in raw food dishes, the texture and flavours all come together to create something I love.  Half or more of my diet when I'm over in CA is raw food based, adn the culture there is so much more geared towards it than anywhere in the UK, with more farmers markets, selections of unprocessed and organic foodstuffs and a climate that encourages it.

I also love the way it forces me to confront foods I wouldn't otherwise go near, because I otherwise wouldn't like them, and every once in a while, this makes me reassess whether I do actually like that food or not.  And it makes you think about things differently.  The nature of the diet means you're forced to plan ahead, to think about what you'll make, and how you'll do it, and how to modify it.  Everything is fruit, veg and nuts.  I have to have breakfast every day this week, as otherwise my food intake is so low and so late that I'll get ill (not due to the diet per se, I just get ill if I don't have a certain amount of substance by a certain time in my day), and I never eat breakfast.  I love things that make you reevalute your perception of the world in little ways; its the same reason my facebook statuses hardly ever contain the verb 'to be'; its the same reason I love travelling, and anthropology, and languages, and religion.  They show you how even just something as simple as modifying what you eat on a daily basis can have a huge change in how you go about your life.


I was oddly productive today.  I got up at 0930, something which even uni can't compel me to do, went into town, got a haircut, came out of town, picked up some fruit for a breakfast smoothie on the shops down my road, and made a pineapple and coconut smoothie to see me through the day.  I had to throw away 1/3 of a stirfry left over from last night, which was a shame, but I figured I'd try and start the week properly, rather than eating it as breakfast and risking jinxing my efforts.  I had to head over to New Malden for 1300 to meet a client for work, but he was young and cute and an escort himself, so it was pretty enjoyable all round really.  And then with the earnings I was able to drop into Whole Foods on High Street Kensington on the way home to stock up on all the nuts, seeds, adzuki beans etc I would need for the week.  The bill was quite pricey, but that's cause I also bought £20 worth of ingredients to make a tapendage I had in Banff in December with - I haven't got round to recreating it yet and figured this week was as good an excuse as any, even if it did mean cheating slightly to buy anchovies, roasted artichoke hearts etc.  But the aim of the week is to eat healthy, rather than eat vegan, so it can be my treat at the weekend or something.  I had switched to my upbeat playlist, instead of my emo one, the sun was out, I was buying healthy; everything seemed to be pointing in my favour.

I even did my good deed for the day by chatting to the little old lady at the bus stop for 10 minutes whilst we waiting for our respective transportations to arrive.  She deplored the state of todays youth, how she had to watch out for muggings and such in this day and age but had her sturdy mean looking metal walking stick with which to fend off anyone.  (The fact I was carrying 2 stuffed full bags from Whole Foods, and had mentioned during the conversation I lived near the canal in Notting Hill probably excepted me from being considered of the commonplace ilk that makes up today's so deplored youth.)

At home, even after another smoothie and crashing out for 3 hours (again, not an issue of the diet, i've been doing this for the past few weeks, seemingly my blood sugar just cant keep me going past 1700 without a 3 hour nap each day at the moment), I was facing severe hunger pangs, but resisted having anything non-raw from my cupboard, and headed to sainsburys to buy other ingredients for the week.  Dinner then consisted of a salad made with rocket, courgette noodles, pine nuts, grated carrots, tamari, olive oil, garlic, red onion, balsamic vinegar, and passionfruit vinegar.  It was fucking nomalicious and reminded me just why I love the whole raw food thing.

In doing the raw food thing, I have however noticed, that my americanizations are coming back in fairly strongly.  It's 'groceries', 'the store' and 'trash' at the moment.  Probably because of a subconscious association with being in CA whenever I'm on a big raw food kick.  It doesn't help that my friend Patrick rang from Boston earlier either.  I apologize in advance for anyone who has to talk to me this week.

Tomorrow I'm meeting Vampy for breakfast after my 9am lab session, and it will be the first time I'm having to eat out raw in this country, so we'll see how well that goes.  I have plans for an oatmeal porridge smoothie thing before I go out anyway.  For the record, my plans for the rest of the week involve a gazpacho style tomato, red pepper and asparagus soup for tomorrow, a live lasange with courgette and cashews on wednesday, nutloaf on thursday, and live ravioli on friday.  I might try and make a raw food cake at the weekend.


In other news, one of the things I follow on twitter today posted a link to The Wishing Well.  For those unfamiliar with this concept, its a way of saying anonymously your thoughts about a certain person, and in this case, aimed at gays.

I always like these kind of things for some reason, sure they probably don't achieve much, but sometimes just saying something to a bunch of randomers who will never encouter the people in your life can be oddly theraputic.  And it's nice to see what kind of sentiments come across, and how different people respond to them.  I love the sense of both eternal hope and eternal despair projects like these can give people.  Some of the posts that particularly caught my eye are here here here here here here here and finally, there.



Mood:  Upbeat, but that's mostly compensatory as usual

Music: http://open.spotify.com/user/jorgamond/playlist/6tr6EcMVJK7F46v5noWBIA