Hi Jenn, this is Your Past speaking...

Two nights ago I got a phone call. I vaguely recognized the phone number, but there was no name attached to it. I recently deleted all of the numbers in my cell that I haven't used in long enough to merit their erasure. I had had a feeling that I would get a call from one of them at some point.

I had just finished the last presentation for one of my two harder classes, and Molly and I had come home with two of our school friends to bask in the afterglow of a job done, not necessarily well done, but done nonetheless. I was in a fantastic mood, was surrounded by good people, and feeling relieved. And this phone call sent me reeling.

Molly and Tim had gone to get another bottle of wine to extend the celebration when the phone rang. I answered, distracted.

"Heyyyyyy, Jenn!" Fuck. I recognize that voice. But from where? Its familiarity held in it something foreboding, something that made me wish that I hadn't picked up the phone in the first place. "Hi, who is this?"

"Oh man, you don't... this is Mike! Now I feel weird for calling!"

Mike Bell was a guy from the Springs that I had met in rehab. He was a couple of years older than everyone there, and was best known for buying cigarettes for everyone else in group. He, like everyone else, was there because he was forced, and never had the desire or motivation to quit doing drugs, save for the periodic piss tests that would make him violate his probation.

He was the only person I became friends with in that group of people, most likely because we were the two oldest. He was perpetually unhappy, very quiet, and laughed easily at my jokes. He had a best friend, Corey, that had been forced to live under arrest several hundred miles away. He had no car to visit him. I, in effect, became his closest friend.

We remained friends for a good portion of that year, i suppose partially because going in to rehab, I was on the downhill slope of a long period of time where I disappointed, hurt, lied to, and betrayed many of my friends and everyone in my family. When I hung out with Mike, I knew I made him happy. And it felt good to make someone happy and inspire laughter again. It made me feel real, and grounded, and more like myself than I had in a long time.

I always knew that Mike had a thing for me. We never messed around, or even flirted really, and I never strung him along or tried to play games with him. It was always just something that existed as a backdrop for our friendship. It was obvious, for many reasons, that we were not going to be together, and he was not going to pursue it. That's just the way things were. I was the motivational member of group, I listened to him and gave him advice about his family and Corey and girls, I prepared myself to go to college, he listened as I tearfully apologized through him to myself and to everyone in my family for all of the horrible things I'd done to them. At that point in our lives, he was lonely and needed a friend, and I was ashamed and needed a boost. We played very special parts in each other's lives.

I came up to college my freshman year, and Mike and I didn't talk very much during the first couple of months. I began to make friends, and every friendship distanced me farther and farther from the person I was when I started rehab. I felt loved, and surrounded, and connected, and responsible, and I felt like I had so much power to made decisions for myself, and yet I was still making the right ones. Mike came up one weekend to go to a rave, and bought me a ticket. I was hesitant to go, but I hadn't hung out with him in a while, and decided it would be fun to make fun of the e-tards, since this time I would be observing instead of participating.

He brought pills with them. And he offered one to me. And I'm not saying it was a simple or short decision, but at the end of the night, I ended up taking half of one. Granted, this was about one fourth of the dose I had grown accustomed to in high school, but half of one was more than the none I had taken since I began my journey to being clean. Within twenty minutes, I began to panic. Through some strange powerful force I managed to block out the feelings of being high once they started, and didn't play any of the wild and crazily idiotic games that rollers love to play with eachother during a high, and that I was so crazy about just a year prior. I shut down. Instantly, I saw my fortress crumbling around me, every bit of moral ground I'd gained in the last year disappeared, and I felt like I was right back where I started. Weak, unable to say no, hiding behind a wall of drugs to deal with my problems. I cursed Mike for bringing me back here, I hated him for offering this pill to me. After all of the tearful conversations and all of the anger and struggling, I felt like I had been betrayed. I didn't call Mike again after that night.

I had gotten a couple of voicemails from him, but not an actual conversation. Not until two nights ago.

"Oh man, you don't... this is Mike! Now I feel weird for calling!"

He was wasted. He had filled the void that used to be completely packed with cocaine and meth and ecstacy with alcohol. After a couple awkward exchanges of, "Wow, how are you? What are you doing? What have you been up to?" he began the conversation that I'm sure was the reason he called.

"Jenn, I just wanted to call you to tell you because I never had the guts to before that I have been in love with you since the day we met in rehab. I have always loved you, and I know you don't love me, but that's ok, because I know you've always just been better than me. I have always admired your strength and I have admired you as a person because I think you're one of the best people I know. I have a girlfriend that wants to marry me but that I don't want to be with because she's fucking crazy."

I'm speechless. I don't know how to respond.

"I wanted to tell you all of this because I have been dreaming lately about my death, and I'm not sure how much more time I have here on this earth."

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck what do I do fuck fuck.

"So, I just wanted to tell you that you've been everything to me. And I wish for only the best things for you, because you are the best thing to me."

I've never listened to a voice so hollow, so out of touch, so desperate and so sad. I talked to him for several minutes before promising him that I would give him a call when I go back in town after Christmas, then quietly hung up the phone and burst into tears a few seconds later. My past flashed before me, stripped, raw, searing my eyeballs and burning my skin and making me sigh audibly between the hitching of my chest. I was so close. I was THAT close. I was there, in fact. I remember reading a note I had written to my best friend in the depths of my meth days that spoke of an indescribable feeling of emptiness that had taken over me. I had been reduced to laying my head in my hands through every class period at school, crying for something I couldn't put my finger on, weak from not eating, tired from not sleeping. I wrote that my legs and hands felt like someone had stitched lead weights onto them, and that every morning seemed to start earlier and be more difficult. One more month, one more week, one more binge, and I might have been Mike Bell. I would have been in Colorado Springs, alone, unhappy, weak, addicted, and reaching my hands out for someone to care who didn't exist. I have come so far and could have fallen so hard.

I woke up yesterday morning, thankful to be alive, and once again repeated my promise to myself that I will never ever be that unhappy again.

Great Expectations

Once again, I have been guilty of having strangely twisted expectations for myself, and led myself to believe that I am doing much worse than I really am.

I was afraid for a short time that I was in danger of failing a class. Failing as in C-, which in grad school, counts for zilch. Upon visiting the professor in office hours, I was informed that I am "nowhere near anything like that happening."

I wish sometimes that I had a button that I could push that would make me see everything objectively... Holding myself to high standards generally treats me alright from a motivation point of view, but during times like this final week of school, it would be nice to just

Chill

Out.

Sometimes I think you know me better than I do...

I was talking to someone recently about a phenomenon that happens to all of us, in varying frequencies and magnitudes. Every once in a while, something that seems completely random will show up, in conversation, in an ad that strikes you, on the wall of your doctor's office, that for the next few days, seems to show up everywhere you go.

A recent example in my life is birch beer. I saw it in the fridge at work, after a girl I work with asked what it was. I had never had birch beer, so had nothing to offer her. The next day, I was watching the Food Network, on which they happened to do a segment on... birch beer. So now I knew what it tasted like to some guy on television, but had yet to experience it in person. I left for New York a couple of days later, and while I was there, went to a hole-in-the-wall that specialized in bacon-wrapped hot dogs (don't judge, they're phenomenal). They offered a small selection of fountain sodas, including all of the normals, like some kind of cola, sprite, doctor pepper, and... birch beer. I definitely ordered one. And didn't like it. I think it was just the fact that it came from a syrup and not from a bottle.

Over the past couple of days, another random theme has shown up in my life of a more important nature, and deals in the matter of how we think others perceive us.

Example 1. A good friend (one of my only in Boulder at this point) posted a blog recently that dealt mainly with how he felt the people around him perceived him, inspiring me to leave the following comment:

"One of the most beautiful things about human interaction is the difference in perception.

We present ourselves in a way that we think is consistent with how we perceive ourselves, or at least we hope to, and it is up to the people we surround ourselves with to make up their own interpretations, based on how they perceive us.

When you die, it is most certain that your eulogy won't be the one that you'd say for yourself. But you won't have just one. The day you die, everyone whose lives you've touched will create their own eulogy just for you, and each will be completely different. All you can do is put yourself out there and let the powerful forces of human decision take control and guide their perceptions.

Ultimately, the most important thing is to make sure that you can strip your outer layers off enough so that YOU can see yourself, because it's through understanding yourself that you can help others to truly understand you."

A new entry in his blog references me in a brief, anonymous paragraph:

...She’s waiting on word from people in a large city on the east coast, I’m certain you can induce which one, on whether she’s going to migrate out there and begin her adult, non-university life. This is weighing heavily on all of her decisions, frescoing her conscience of what life might be like, could be like, designing her real possibilities into possible realities where all her dreams just might finally bear colorful and savory fruit...

And so the comment about others perception of us had been immediately reflected, by the person to whom it was directed, in his perception of my life, which happened to be incredibly accurate. And worded much better than I could probably manage.

Example 2. Today I was walking through the mall with a girl that I know is my best friend, and who reminds me of that every time I see her through her amazing ability to say the exact thing I need to hear to put everything in perspective. She was talking about how her sisters perceive her, and how she thinks that it's completely different from how she views herself. She ultimately zeroed in on her inner persona as Audrey Hepburn (which is exactly who I would pick for her). Earlier in the afternoon, I had bought her Christmas present at one of the first stores we went into without her noticing. It was an inspirational life book all about being lovely, based on.... Audrey Hepburn.

And so perhaps true closeness really is achieved through finding someone who sees you exactly how you see yourself, or who can remind you that, no matter how critical you are of yourself, they see you as better than that.

Example 3. When I got home from Denver tonight, I had left up an away message on aim. I had a message from another friend waiting for me when I got home that said:

"Hi Jenners! I just wanted to let you know that you're awesome, and I love you. Hopefully the stressful moments aren't so bad when you remember that there are tons of people out her who think you're great and are proud of you beyond measure."

Perception is a broader field than birch beer I guess... but the past few days have served to lift the cloud that's been hanging over me, looming overhead and reminding me that I'm graduating soon and still don't know what I want from life. No matter where I end up after I walk in May, at least I'll know that I mattered enough to someone for them to form a special interpretation of me in their minds, whether it's accurate or not.

Soundtrack to my life

Every once in a while, I come across a song that touches me so completely and so deeply, I feel like it was written just for the soundtrack to my life. Someone sent me the link to this song tonight.

I listened to this song just a couple of minutes ago, and instantly I felt expansive. I can't think of any other way to describe it. I hear it and in an instant I can feel my energy exploding out of me, extending in all directions above and below and around me, and I feel instantly connected to everyone through it, like being caught in a gigantic spiderweb that is centered on me. I feel dizzy, and I'm noticing as I listen to it for the third time that there are tears streaming down my face.

I hear this song, and I am poetry in motion. I am every tragedy and every comedy and every love story ever written, I am everything and everyone, I am a sea of emotions, keeping everything in its place while flowing underneath it all.

Enjoy it, as I have and am going to do a few more times before I go to bed.

Pay attention to the wrong things I'm telling you!

As a prospective teacher (or at least as a teaching hopeful), I saw this on a friends website and feel obligated to share it.

this is what happens when you don't pay attention in teacher school.

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

I sat tonight on a couch, curled up in a combined ball with a man nearly delirious from sleep deprivation, trying to conserve body heat under a blanket in an apartment with no heat. Maybe it was the fact that there was SUPPOSED to be heat that made it seem colder.

Outside the water that had so promisingly been melted from the snow that lay on the ground this morning had refrozen into thick sheets of black ice, reducing movement speed by about half and increasing bust-your-ass likelihood by a factor of 4. I began the night thinking that I was going to go home after stopping by to offer a few words of encouragement after a day that kept piggybacking upon itself, and ended up making up reasons for most of the night not to leave.

And as we huddled to keep warm and my friend began to succumb to the powerful pull of sleep, I found myself more in tune with the world than I had been all day. It was almost completely silent, save for the increasing volume of his increasingly labored breathing, a sure sign that he had already fallen asleep. As his muscles relaxed, periodically twitching, I was suddenly aware that this was the first time in a very long time that I had watched someone fall asleep, and was struck by how human it made me feel, and how strangely connected I felt with the universe and everyone in it.

The past several weeks have been marked by long periods without any sort of meaningful human interaction, leaving me feeling jaded and distanced from everyone I had grown so accustomed to connecting with. And in one night, in a matter of a few hours, I explained a tattoo, identified the impact I want to have on the world, I reconnected with an old childhood favorite dinner spot, I cuddled to keep warm on a couch, and I watched as a living, breathing person fell asleep next to me on a couch.

And I suddenly feel very warm. And pleasantly surrounded.

So blogspot, eh?

In the hopes that a new blog forum will inspire a bit more enthusiasm for blogging, I have moved here. To blogspot. I'm not sure if that calls for a "Dear Diary, I'm feeling nervous in my new surroundings" type of entry, but what can you do. In the interest of overlapping with my old myspace blog (screw myspace, stupid profile trollers!) I'm going to repost the most recent blog here, followed soon by fresh new blogspot entries.

And now that I'm effectively only blogging for myself, I can't say "I love you all," as was the trend on the other blog... so I'll just leave it at "I love me." Or at least "I feel pretty good about myself at the moment."

Most recent blog: posted, um... about 20 minutes ago.

I am in desparate need of a change in scenery. Or a change in routine. Or at least a change in temperature.

Tonight I spent the majority of the night talking about everything with one of my friends that encourages me to reflect on myself and my situation. I came to the realization after hanging out with him for the first time in a while last week that my self-awareness muscles were dangerously close to reaching a state of atrophy I haven't seen in a while. That's what I get for forgetting to remind myself through conversations with other people exactly how I feel about myself and my surroundings.

I've sat down in this very spot several times in the past few weeks, my thoughts swimming around in my head like a school of minnows, small in size but vast in number, organized and very. very. distracting. But each time, as my keyboard click-click-clicked the first two sentences, I have looked at them and felt the force it's taken to write them, and I've erased them each time. I'm not blogging because I have to. I write here because I want to. And the desire to write how I'm feeling lately has been overshadowed by the inevitable email/phone call that I'm supposed to get about New York. Any day now. Two days ago, in fact. And I've started to think that I don't know how to feel, at least not until I get this email.

And so I'm writing tonight, listening to my roommates have sex in the other room, half naked because I bought a new space heater and I can actually stand being half naked again, either New York bound and with an exciting change on the horizon, or not.... and with absolutely no plan for what happens then.

I've decided semi-officially to move my blog to blogspot, seeing as how I only use myspace these days to write in the blog every once in a while and look at the multitude of un-updated photos of my friends. So. If you're a subscriber, and would like the link (if I move it), let me know. In all you other cases, it's been real, dogz.