Below are the most recent 8 friends' journal entries.

Thursday, December 24th, 2009
wicked_abandon	7:36p	Where Are You Christmas? It's Christmas Eve. On this day last year, the year before that, and every year before that until you can picture a midget-me learning about Santa for the first time, I was overcome with anticipation and happiness. It's so easy for me to be a child at heart during the holidays. I'm kind of half-way there through the rest of the year already. It's just more prominent - and more acceptable! - when everyone's stringing giant bulbs over their houses without booze involved. I become genuinely excited by familiar holiday things, timed lights, the classic color scheme, apple cinnamon candles and Carol of the Bells. An iconic commercial or two - a little snowman becomes a little boy when he eats Campbell's soup, and Hershey's Kisses wish us a Merry Christmas. I look forward to these things. Do you remember the very first time you fell in love? Did you ever see that person when you didn't expect to? That horrible, intense, amazing feeling you got in the pit of your stomach is the same feeling I get when all of these things return for another season. I look so forward to decorating - I'm one of the first people on my block to bust out the boxes containing my treasured winter collections. I tell David the same stories over and over about each of the ornaments, the one my grandma had, the one that represents my dorky devotion to Sailor Moon, etc. I love the look of a Christmas tree. Especially a tacky one! Designer trees . . .pfft. Give me handmade ornaments and Starbucks freebies and glittery Wal Mart reindeer. I adore the cliched but comforting feeling of sipping cider and staring at the whole collection, trying to guess what's in the packages spread out ostentatiously below. I bake Christmas cookies! All by myself, with no kids or neighbors or anyone I need to serve them to, I bake Christmas cookies. I decorate them, try to get David to help, and if he doesn't, I keep going. Sometimes he does, and it's the best feeling I can imagine. I don't think I have the time or the brain power to detail my love of holiday movies. By the time December 24th comes around, I'm a wreck. I can't wait to shake my husband awake and open things, and hear about other people opening things, things that we gave them, hear that they loved them, that I picked right for their tastes or found something special. So, it's Christmas Eve. I didn't put up a tree this year. I didn't bake a single cookie, or put out my pretty red candle holders. I changed the channel whenever a claymation movie came on and I didn't shop for anyone until yesterday. I didn't feel like I'd fallen in love at all. I felt unaffected at best, bitter and unhappy at worst. Somehow, I've completely lost Christmas, and because David never really had it, there was no one to keep me going. Here's an important point - I don't expect anyone to sympathize over or be able to appreciate how deeply this upsets me - after all, it's really not that important in the grand scheme of things. It's not bankruptcy. It's not cancer. It's not a death in the family. No sense going to pieces over it. Not like you have kids to pass traditions onto, or family coming around to keep up appearances for. And, hey, last time I checked, weren't you non-religious? Yeah, yeah. I know. There's no logical reason to be so profoundly upset about it. But really, how often are emotions logical? What -happened?- What is the matter with me? Why isn't it .. WORKING? I can't believe tomorrow is Christmas. I wasted the whole season. I missed everything. And I still don't care, except about the fact that I don't care. This may be my worst Christmas in that regard, yet I get to spend it with great friends, I live in a beautiful apartment, and I have my man at my side. This is an improvement on some years, when I was the isolated wife of a deployed enlistee who, literally, strung Christmas lights on an OTTOMAN because she couldn't afford a tree. And was fucking -happy to do it,- can I just add? How was it possible I still had my holiday spirit that day, and not right now? WTF, SELF? We went ahead and opened the presents from my parents last night. I didn't want to do it on Christmas - it would've been too depressing, the two of us sitting there with no concern for the season opening 6 boxes from the same person, having not even sent out our own gifts yet. I didn't want to keep realizing that I wasn't excited to find out what was in them. Someone just .. fix it. >. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
wicked_abandon	12:31a	I hope this is a permanent change. I hope the rabid eagerness with which I attacked the GED process is going to continue; one minute I'm weeping in the bathtub over blowing a great opportunity for myself, the next, I'm in a classroom doing the thing I've avoided and chickened out of for 7 years. I'm applying that same disgust with self and hope for the future to my next mission - learning to drive. Tomorrow I'll call the Learner's Permit Office that I just looked up the number for, take the written test, and give this shit a shot. Stay with me, motivation, stay with me. Please. Meanwhile, does everything -really- happen for a reason? Is this what I needed? Was that moment of blinding misery necessary to make myself realize how much of myself I was wasting? I'm scared and hopeful and nervous. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
wicked_abandon	5:09p	Found a place where I can sell plasma, gonna start going there twice a week when David gets on night shift. He'll also be bumped up in pay by a dollar an hour, which'll be an extra $40 a week. This should lead to good things. Small good things, but good things nonetheless. Hoping to save all my plasma money for Vegas! I want $150 to drink with, $100 to shop with and $50-100 for buffer money. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
wicked_abandon	11:43a	http://www.techspot.com/news/37345-australian-government-to-censor-the-internet-by-2011.html .. o.o (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
wicked_abandon	12:11p	Writer's Block: Take this job and shove it ... Have you ever walked off a job on the spot? What drove you to it? Did you regret it afterwards? Submitted By hisensei808 View 874 Answers Ugh, yes. It's funny, I told this story a couple of weeks ago, and I actually told it the way my manager believed it, and not as it actually happened! Time can play tricks on a memory. I worked at a Country Buffet, and to date, it was the most fun I had at a job. We played plate Frisbee, and when all the customers were gone, we'd start singing, and if everyone knew the song they'd sing along. It was Savage Garden once, and not even at my insistence! We pelted each other with cherry tomatoes and I was everybody's "baby girl." The men, the women. I met Kara there, still one of my favorite people, one of the few I was unable to ever fully pull into me - probably because she was completely straight. But we spent so much time together and confided in each other over everything, bonded by my fiancee in the Air Force and her fiancee in the Navy. Anyway. I was planning the Wedding that Would Never Be at this point, and one day, my mother took me, Kara and Brittany to Denver to try on dresses. Wedding & bridesmaid, specifically. We shopped cute little jewelry stores and all the best boutiques downtown, then went to lunch at the historic Canino's house. A picture-perfect day. When I came to work the next day, I was sick as a motherfucker, and I don't remember why. I think it might have been a bladder infection. I was begging my manager to let me go home and he kept refusing, so I called my mother and told her to make up a story, that I absolutely HAD to get out of there and needed her help. So she called, made something up, and came to get me. My manager, Rolf, accused me of being hungover from "partying" in Denver all night, and said he didn't buy the flimsy excuse we laid out for him. His last words to me were, "Fine, go home. We're going to talk about this tomorrow." I was so afraid of what he might say that I never went back, stopped answering their phone calls, and abandoned my mother's $400 leather jacket in the kitchen. I regret it NOW. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
wicked_abandon	2:57p	I dreamed last night that, in a futuristic world where all things a person wants to do are taught to perfection in large groups, I was visiting the room where I would learn how to apply make-up; everyone was beautiful, now, all they had to do was learn the right application for their facial type to make it so. The woman who interviewed me held my face with both of her hands and, after a long while of pinching, peering and poking, listed everything about me that was ugly and then said, "There's nothing we can do for you. Make-up can't make you pretty. If there's any generous soul in the room who wants to make a case of this girl, speak now, otherwise, she'll need to leave." Two women, the daughters of rich men, stood up and said they'd each contribute an equal amount of money to any plastic surgery of my choice, after trying on their own to put make-up on me and failing to see any improvement. I chose to get my lips done. Then my father, played (predictably) by Victor Garber, argued with me over the consequences of my decisions. I told him, "I know what will make me happy. Everyone said that I wouldn't feel any better when I lost the weight unless I worked on my deeper self esteem issues, and they were wrong. So I know that having bigger lips will make me happy, too." He became deeply angry with me and said, "You just don't get it." I woke up. Wtf, self? I thought dreams were supposed to require analysis. Not be literal. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
wicked_abandon	12:11p	Will You Be There in the Morning. ( Read more... ) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 14th, 2009
wicked_abandon	11:11a	I'm kind of sick of seeing people bitch about their finances, adding in that they have children as though that somehow makes it worse, makes them more deserving of stress and poverty. THIS kind of shit is why children need to be a "choice." If you, and not an accidental pregnancy, determine when you're going to have a kid, you're free to give that kid (and your whole family) a better shake at happiness by being prepared financially, mentally and physically to raise said kid. If that time never comes, if you continue to be broke, lacking in stability or unhealthy, here's where -I- would draw the bottom line: YOU DON'T GET TO HAVE A FUCKING CHILD. It's not some cute, cuddly little accessory that you are simply -privileged- to having because you've got the equipment to make one, asshole, it's a human being! And yet it's pro-choicers who are called monsters, when many of us just have the common sense to know when a baby isn't right. A visit by a doctor up the uterus to end a pregnancy vs. an entire life of struggling for money, eating unhealthy food because it's cheaper, or watching your parents scream at each other because, it turns out, they weren't prepared after 1 WHOLE year of knowing each other to handle the stress of raising a family. . . seems like a no-brainer to me. (4 Comments |Comment on this)