From Another Life:
Thursday, July 24, 2003
Stillwater, OK

I woke up this morning feeling a bit more like myself- gritty eyes - check, head ache - check, pissed off lazy ass attitude - check..ok I am almost all back! I feel like the real me - the grouchy, mean, basically unhappy me - had gone on vacation and this silly school-girl type had taken over my body for a few days there. I was pea-brained and giggly and did incredibly demented things like painstakingly put *shudder* pink nailpolish on and then promptly take it off - a couple of times a day. Oh! the shame of it...but it was cathartic in a way...I was purging my inner 'princess'...never to return I hope.
Sometimes I feel like I was shelled to smithereens and there's parts of me strewn all over. There's a part of me that exults in a new pair of shoes and a good haircut. A part of me that reads the Ayn Rand and Paulo Coelho and the unabridged works of Shakespeare and wants to write to newspapers about the crimes of religious intolerance. A part of me that loves to party and dance in abandon all night. A part of me that prays every morning and has maintained her thursday 'vrath' for over twelve years. A part of me that is still so in love with my first boyfriend. A part of me that is most probably getting engaged this December to mama's choice of good Nair boy. So many parts of me, but none of them match, none fit together - like a bad jigsaw. A bit like Humpty Dumpty, except I dont think I was ever a nice complete whole. Every time a new facet of my existence branched out, it just grew - independent of the rest of me, shunning the other parts.
Perhaps the most galling thing about pain - my personal variety - is its ability to rob me of all powers of expression. I fall back on the trite, the obvious, the viciously unsatisfying. The frustration, the fear of mediocracy builds with every paltry word that fails to scoop in it my great deluge of unprovoked, irrevocable emotion. Listen to me now. Ugh. I cannot inflict any more of this demented rantingon you poor souls. Adios!