Oh, dear. Again.

I've been a bad girl and there one is no one around to reprimand me. I hate being my own moral compass, because I'm just getting away with murder here. People don't really notice what I'm doing.

I have this talent that, if I were to roll around in nuclear waste, would morph into my super power. I can either say exactly what someone wants to hear, or, I can say exactly what can make them cry. It's a talent, I guess, and also a curse because I know how to hurt people, and I do. I play people like instruments. I'm manipulative, and very few people catch. Someone needs to put me in my place.

I'm upset about this now because I did this today a couple times, in different situations, and now I feel like a really bad person. The first time was on the phone with someone that I actually do like when we're not working together on a film, and we were inevitably fighting and she said something nasty, and then I just let it rip and said exactly what I knew would hurt her, but kept it relevant to the conversation we were having. Conversation. Fight. Whatever. I feel bad. In that moment I knew exactly what to say to her to make her hurt, and I did it, and I shouldn't have.

I just. I play people. I can play people's sympathies, but without throwing a pity-party for myself and inviting others. They think that they are each the gatekeeper to my secrets and my pains, but what they don't know is that THEY ALL KNOW EVERYTHING, but they are each sworn to secrecy. They don't know what each other actually knows.

So my friends, my loved ones, walk around, carrying my burdens alone, thinking they are the sole inheritor of my trials and tribulations. They each think they are special, the chosen one to bear my burden. I don't know why I do this.

I'm a horrible person. I'm really manipulative, and for no reason. If I play my friends, then what relationships are real?

Que fait tu...

Day 1 of the daily grind here. Today marks the beginning of yet another semester when I wake up at 7:15 am exactly, curse, and roll out of bed to commute to work, then classes, then back home again where I will either do homework or find some other way to waste my time until I fall asleep and begin anew. Ugh.

It smells like maple syrup in my office. It really bothers me, because I particularly hate the smell of maple syrup. I don't like it.

There's a bunch of grey, slushy snow out right now. Winters on Long Island are not attractive. There will be about five minutes of a winter wonderland out there before it all just turns into grey snow and black ice.

At least I can play my music as loud as I want here. I'm always the first one in the office, and I do that on purpose, so I can take over the front computer and stereo that's up here, and subject all the dawdling teachers and bleary-eyed students to my music at stupid o'clock in the morning as they wander in for their morning education.

I do the same thing in the car during the summer, actually. I love pulling up to other cars with my windows rolled down, blasting, Francoise Hardy or some such.

As much as I whine about it, I secretly love my morning routine. I love being here this early. I take over. I blast my music, make coffee, clear out yesterday's paperwork, chat with the engineers, and catch up on e-mails all before my boss wanders in, messy-haired and with sunglasses on. (He always drives with the top down. Always.)

I feel like I've been at this a really, really long time. I feel like it's always been this way.

Dear, me.

I abhor winter. It's pretty through a fogged window, but actually being in it and experiencing WINTER is not as fun. I feel like I'm shriveling. I'm drying up and losing parts of myself and when I crack my spine because I sit in the same chair for too long, staring at the same pixels, I can just imagine the little icicle fissures that are forming in my spine.

Being this miserable takes a lot of work, y'all. You have to constantly, and consistently, be unhappy about life, without ever saying anything to anyone. You leave that to steep in your own internal whining, and pretty soon, you'll have your very on wintry depression ripe for those long, cold, evenings when you can't sleep even though you know you are getting up at 7:30 am to be on set by 8:30 am. And, as an added bonus, you'll be so annoyed with your own petty self-righteousness and self-imposed martyrdom, that it will add a nice little edge to your sadness.

Get me out of here.

 

Clint Eastwood is my hero.

I kind of feel like we're the first generation struggling with consciousness. In recent interview, Clint Eastwood talked about how back in the day you could hit a bully without worrying about possible psychological ramifications, whereas now, my generation is the first to be implicated in the former wrongdoings of our parents and their parents, when they taught their children to quell feelings and emotional outbursts. Especially males. So now, my generation is emotional and conscious, and very sensitive to world events. I mean, okay, some of us are enormously stupid and not worth the astroturf I walk on, but still. Metrosexuality? Young people voting in record numbers? All related to our accidental, generational, enlightenment.

Ummmm.

I'm feelin' like a breakable antebellum dream lately. I think it's being back in Texas.

I also unearthed old pictures from a Mac I had thought long dead and gone (original iMac, guys. What is that, circa 2000?) so I found myself looking at pictures of myself make-up-less and wide-eyed with flowers in my hair and looking a heckuva lot happier.

I also spend the day making phone calls wheedling strangers to do stuff for films. Not my films, mind you, but others. I'm practicing my negotiatin' skills for when I'm in the real world, tryin' to produce. Oh, I forgot to mention that when I make these phone calls I make sure to turn my southern accent dial to "high." It helps to be southern and female, I think. People are always tryin ' to save a damsel.

Working without merit gets very, very tedious. Especially when there is a boy involved. Yeah. With eye-talics, even.

There are two pictures of me here. One is when I was fifteen. One is the most recent picture.