Maybe I am being foolish, maybe what I think is direction and motivation is really just another hopeless distraction pulling me in a random direction temporarily until I see something new to pull me in another. I am, and probably always will, be an immature child in an continually aging body.

This body, however, is, indeed, rapidly aging. In less than two months I will be 23, and it felt like merely days ago that I turned 22. Where has this year gone? What happened to me in 2007? A lot, I will admit, a lot of things that opened my eyes to the things that I am capable of and to the things that I want for myself. The truth seems to be this: I want very few things, but the things I do want require a lot of work to get to them. Work that I am scared of, work that costs more than I have ever been willing to give in the past. I have wants and desires that stretch far beyond anything I have ever tried to achieve before.

So, then, I think it is truly about time that I stop floating through life, and start taking steps toward the things I desire. Is this growing up? Maybe, I just don’t know.

I guess I will find out one way or another.

She wanted to lie on me while I write about us, but she’s in the shower. I find myself with very little to say, which is why it hasn’t happened yet. I felt, and told her, last night that I did have something to say, I had some mammoth post all thought out in my head, but now that I sit down and think about it, it doesn’t seem valuable or important to write about. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, this utter lack of words.

I’m happy. I feel that I love her, more truly than anyone else I’ve been with, and I guess when I look at it from the perspective that she lives 400-some-odd miles away, it becomes somewhat heartbreaking, but I don’t feel that way. Being with her makes me feel like all my other failed relationships and horrid emo break-up sessions were just the opening act to this, to her. Everything else was just a test, preparation, to weed out all the parts of me that would ruin the time Sarah and I share together. I feel good about this week, about the fact that I haven’t gotten stupidly upset over something, that I can truly appreciate her presence here and value the time we spend together and not worry about other things.

She told me that last time she was here, she was kind of fighting the urge to like me, she didn’t think this would be something that would happen again. Now that she’s here, again, she’s not, and maybe that is what is different. I feel different. I guess last time I also felt like this was all tentative and, sure, now it’s not 100% certain but it certainly feels like it. I am in for the long-haul and I think she is really starting to realize that I am not going to stop fighting for all this, which is nice, and makes me feel better about my continued attempts to get us together.

Before she got here I was filled with dread, that we wouldn’t get along, or it would go badly in parts like last time, or that taking her back to San Jose would be a sorrowful experience unlike any other. I don’t feel that way now. We get along splendidly, nothing has gone badly at all, and I don’t dread taking her back. I already plan on going up to spend the weekend after Valentine’s Day in San Jose. And after that? Her birthday, the second to last weekend in March. I tell her this and she smiles and hugs me and I feel good, like, yes, this isn’t completely crazy, and other people have done it, and eventually everything will work out fine when I can make them work out better.

I am going to miss her, but it wont be for very long, and that is a relief. I hope that the stability we’ve found over these last three days persists for the rest of her visit and across the internet and phone until the next one. I hope she knows and understands how deeply I care for her, especially now that I see that I am able.

It is 2008 and I guess my new year’s resolution is to be good, to her, for her. There’s nothing else I need to resolve that doesn’t fall under that umbrella statement. ‘08 will be lived month to month, visit to visit, until it ends or visits aren’t necessary. This is the first year I walk into with clear motivation, a path to be traveled, and it feels good, it feels nice.

I got shoes: One, two (in brown), and three. Gift cards. Pretty cool.

Sarah will be here in three days. I should be writing about that as it happens.

Everything is a blur. Busy, cleaning, working, seeing people, watching movies, listening to blues, catching up on Pushing Daisies, driving around, thinking of Sarah, wearing shoes and clothes, breathing, being happy again, being lonely only occasionally, feeling lucky, no longer reeling from the week from hell, alive.

Why is it every time that I meet someone or something, they have to be so indecisive about me? Three relationships, now, where the girls were like, “Yeah, I like you, but… Uh… Let me think about it.”

All the arrogance and self-confidence in the world can’t prepare you for how fucking shitty it is to be tossed around, back and forth, back and forth. One minute you’re worth the whole world, and the next you’re a piece of crap. Each person likes you and dislikes you for different reasons, so you never know if it’s really you that is fucked up, or if it is them. Are relationships just like this for people these days? Is it such a high stakes game that there needs to be days, weeks, months of negotiations and deliberations? How does it make sense?

Do people just not fall in love anymore? Is there no such thing as head-over-heels? Or, do I just chase after women who are so broken they don’t have any concrete concept of love? And even if they did feel it, for me, it is too scary or foreign or impossible to deal with that they can’t cope with it?

It’s not hard for me. I talk to someone, I get to know them, I run my hands over their hands and then it’s done. Either I like them, or I don’t. Either I’ll fight for them, or I won’t. There is never any gray area for me, no deliberations or negotiations, no hemming and hawing, nothing. I don’t need days, weeks, months to decide whether or not I want to be with someone.

Why can’t I just find someone like me? Someone who can just decide, solidly, that I am worth being with?

I asked Trista if I was just too fucked up for someone to like. She was with me for about a year, so she should know.

She told me, “I’m sure there is someone out there able to tolerate your amount of ass.”

Not very reassuring, but at least there is someone.

Fuck.

I’m just… tired. I just want to curl up in bed with someone and fall asleep. I can’t deal with this sort of thing. I naturally spiral up and down over the course of months, I can’t take doing it multiple times a week. It’s as if small pieces of my heart are broken, mended, and broken again, ad infinitum.

You, you need to come here and spend time with me, in bed, sleeping, now. I wish I could look over my shoulder and see you there, waiting for me to finish clacking away at the keyboard so I can climb into bed next to you. It is unfair that you are not.

Matthew wanted to hang out with me today, which I haven’t really done with anyone for a few days, and I hesitantly agree and head out the door pretty much with the idea in mind that this would be me learning to hang out with people again. I had no desire to, my thoughts ran: why go out, when I can stay home, I only end up bored at other people’s houses. I am bored here, though, I know, and feel like I’m crawling out of my skin.

I go, and I get up the street facing his drive way and I see that someone’s car is there. Might be Everett or Evan, or maybe someone entirely different, I don’t know. All I know is I see that other car and I think: why would Matt invite me over, but not tell me there are already people there? While normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, in that moment, it was. It took a lot for me to even get out of the house to hang out with Matt, and I prepared just in case Alex, or Robert, or Mike were there, but not for anyone else. I drove off, I didn’t stop, I just drove back home. I didn’t message or call Matt or anything, I didn’t know what to say. Texting him something like, “You didn’t tell me there were other people at your house, I’m going home,” seemed so… stupid, petty. You can’t put something so irrational into words and not recognize it for what it is. He called me some time later and I told him, I’m sorry, something came up, I have to go take care of something with Becca. He says, so you’re coming over after? I say, I don’t know, probably not, it’s Becca. He says, OK Brad, and hangs up on me. So, now Matt—the one friend who actually is bothering to try to spend time with me—is all pissed off at me.

I don’t have any urge to smoke cigarettes. I don’t get cravings. Becca asked me earlier, “Why, again, did you quit smoking?” I hemmed and hawed before eventually saying, “I don’t know, I just felt like it.” “Really fucking weird,” she replied. It’s true, I just made up my mind. The last time I did this, it was to woo a girl. I figured, if I quit smoking, that’ll be one last bad mark on my record and she’ll want to go out with me. It ended up that my quitting attracted the attention of another girl, which eventually ended my stay in San Diego when things went south. (When things went south, I had to go north. Ah ha, ah ha.) Even then, though, there were cravings, and up until about a month I felt pretty insane.

It took me about two weeks to start to feel insane, and it’s only building. I’m becoming so irritable you might as well just say I am always on edge, just waiting to get upset and explode about something. There’s really not much to say about it, other than the absurdity of it all. The whole physical dependence despite the lack of an psychological one is ridiculous to me, absolutely ridiculous. I quit the fucking drug, asshole, leave me alone?

The most sensitive part of all this is that, naturally, my face broke out right before all this started. Sure, it’s mostly all done now, but I am left with this cystic zit on my forehead that might as well be a small tumor, or dog, because I feel like it’s just sitting up there plotting against me. It’s not often that I feel embarrassed to go outside, but with all the other shit I have going against me (my hair is ridiculous! my eyes are all blood shot! i’m skinny and white and all sharp angles and i hate myself and holy fuck am i a teenage girl or what!! someone pass the fucking concealer and razor blades!), it feels like this is an unsurmountable obstacle.

Every time someone calls me I try to talk their ear off but think better of it. They don’t want to hear about the small pursuits of my day, and besides, I get to tell Sarah about all that shit anyway… But, now I can’t, or I don’t. I feel that I can’t. I’m in that state where I feel like I am just some random internet loser harassing the far away pretty girl. It doesn’t matter that we’ve actually spent real time together, have woke up next to each other. I feel like that connection between us has been severed in some way; now we’re just text printed out on screens 400 miles apart. I feel ridiculous, clingy, and entirely dysfunctional.

It’s hard when things change, period. I just don’t understand why things have to change right now. Sarah and I send, combined, at least 60 to 80 emails a day. Just menial crap, nothing really important, like I said above, we just end up sharing our days with each other like any couple does when they’re actually face to face. Since I’ve stopped hanging out with people, I kind of rely on her to be there to talk to. I can tell her pretty much anything, even if I know it’s unimportant to uninteresting to her. Now, though, not so much. I don’t feel like I can tell her anything. I just end up feeling like I’m bothering her, and it doesn’t help when she makes it clear that I actually am. Today there were only ten emails between us… and only two of them were from her. How does one not feel like a goddamn loser in the face of something like that?

I want to tell her about how I pissed off Matt, bought scratchers and won a free ticket I haven’t claimed yet, drank copa de oro and milk and ate fritos with easy cheese and passed out for a couple hours. I want to tell her that Greenleaf is significantly more enjoyable to me than Everything That Rises Much Converge but if the whole collection is old ladies being emo I am not sure if I will like it, but O’Connor has a great voice and writes things that I just want to steal and claim as my own to people who don’t know any better. I want to say, hi, i’ve missed you. I realize, though, that everything I say and everything I get upset about and however I manage to make her feel bad about not talking to me is just me saying, over and over, fuck, girl, I wish you were here, and I can’t deal with the fact that you aren’t.

I don’t really know what to do. If I could just sleep, continuously, for a couple days, I guess I’d do that. I’ll just leave everyone, myself included, alone, and hope it’ll pass. When I wake up, hopefully Sarah will have missed me, and hopefully my friends will call me to make sure I’m OK, and maybe everything can just go back to normal.

This sucks, though, because I’m not tired.

I recently got a laptop and I figured that for school and writing uses, having some sort of encyclopedia and dictionary/thesaurus application would be incredibly useful to have on the laptop. I access wikipedia on a nearly daily basis from my Sidekick, but having it on the laptop would be great for those times when I really just need to look up something quickly and easily. I only tried Microsoft Sudent with Encarta Premium 2008, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite. Talk about long software names.

Let me say, first of all, that I am surprised at how cheap these applications are.

Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2008 – $40

The interface for this is ugly, ugly, ugly. It is also slow, slow, slow. These two reasons were why I sought another product. But, Microsoft Student comes with a lot of other things that more than justify the $40 price even if you completely overlook the lousy encyclopedia portion of it.

Microsoft Math alone is nearly worth the price, as it is a full-featured graphing calculator as well as a database of every formula you’ll probably ever need. It doesn’t look like it does Calculus, but it has everything you need for algebra, physics, chemistry, trig, etc. It has a full equation solver which actually explains each step when solving the equation. When I finally take my next math class, I am sure this will come in very handy. Honestly, this is the first part in many great things about Microsoft Student.

Encarta Dictionaries is another sore spot for Microsoft Student. While it is a full featured dictionary, thesaurus, translator, and a whole conjugation database, the results are somewhat lacking. My test for this part of the product was running a thesaurus search on the word ‘curious’. Encarta Thesaurus displays:

inquisitive
inquisitive, inquiring, snooping (informal), interested, questioning, probing, nosy (informal), prying
antonym: apathetic

peculiar
peculiar, odd, strange, unusual, intriguing, remarkable, bizarre, weird
antonym: ordinary

...which is totally suitable. The dictionary part of it features pronunciation sound files as well, which is a big draw.

Microsoft Student also features a whole suite of learning tools. There are pages on improving your writing, how to critically analyze a character in a work of fiction, summaries of hundreds and hundreds of books as well as author biographies, all sorts of crap that will probably end up being useful to me at some point. It’s impossible to overlook the bevy of useful stuff within Microsoft Student.

It’s a shame Encarta Premium 2008 is a load of crap. My test for the encyclopedias was to search for Charles Manson. Encarta 2008 does not have an article dedicated to Charles Manson, only mentions of him in other articles about crime and Roman Polanski. It also has a quote: “Death is psychosomatic.”

The format of articles is actually really attractive, probably the only positive interface thing within Encarta 2008. The Atlas is also very nice, featuring an artistic 3D globe you can freely spin around.

There is a really nifty “timeline” feature that stretches the entire encyclopedia across, well, a timeline. It’s awesome, and awesome looking.

You do not need a key for Microsoft Student, and you do not need to register to receive Encarta updates, which there are already at least one hundred of. It is a safe product to download illegally, if you so choose.

Encyclopaedia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite – $40

Britannica 2008 is pretty, and fast, fast, fast. As a dedicated encyclopedia, it is miles ahead of Encarta in almost every way. Charles Manson has his own article, even if it is short. For the same price of Microsoft Student, however, you get much less. Britannica is basically only an encyclopedia, there is not much else here.

It comes built in with Merriam-Webster dictionary and thesaurus, but no translator or conjugation list. Here’s what the Britannica thesaurus spits out for curious:

curious adj
1

syn inquisitive 1, disquisitive, inquiring, investigative, questioning
rel searching; analytical; prurient
ant incurious
2 interested in what is not one’s personal or proper concern ‹a curious old woman prying into her neighbors’ affairs›
syn inquisitive, inquisitorial, inquisitory, ‖nibby, nosy, peery, prying, snoopy
rel interfering, intermeddling, meddling, tampering; examining, inspecting, scrutinizing; impertinent, intrusive, meddlesome
idiom consumed (or burning or eaten up) with curiosity, curious as a cat (or monkey)
con aloof, detached, disinterested, indifferent, unconcerned, uninterested; apathetic, impassive, phlegmatic, stolid
ant incurious
3

syn strange 4, bizarre, odd, oddball, peculiar, quaint, queer, singular, unusual, weird

Wow! Talk about exhausting!

However, the Britannica dictionary does not feature pronunciation sound files. Lame! Why can’t anything be perfect?

The timeline feature in Britannica sucks, it is ugly and hard to navigate.

The atlas is a flat and boring 2D map, not nearly as fun to play with.

Britannica doesn’t come with anything else. I thought it was supposed to be an “ultimate reference suite”.

You need a serial key and need to register to receive updates, and even then it doesn’t look like updates are downloaded permanently like they are with Encarta.

Summary

This is really a tough call. My initial thoughts are: since I assumed encyclopedia applications would cost upwards of $80 a piece, you should get both. They compliment each other really well, in the sense that neither does anything perfectly.

Microsoft Student is a great piece of software, and the Encarta Premium 2008 attached to is a very nice, but ultimately relatively useless, bonus. All the student related tools in it will probably be invaluable to me at some point, and for $40 I almost feel like you’re ripping someone off. There is at least $3,000 worth of college text books within Microsoft Student.

Britannica 2008 is a good encyclopedia, and that is about all it is good for. The included Merriam-Webster dictionary and thesaurus are good references, as long as you aren’t too put off by the lack of pronunciation sound files.

If you’re looking for something to carry around on your laptop as a quick reference and for school/college, get Microsoft Student 2008. If you’re looking for an encyclopedia with nothing else, get Britannica 2008. I feel that Britannica should take a cue from Microsoft and improve their product with an actual “reference suite” like the title suggests.

If you have internet access, Britannica is rendered entirely useless by Wikipedia. Microsoft Student is not.

I got a job, which was a surprise to me. I posted something on Craigslist saying that I type really fast and that someone should hire me. I got a single email by an old guy who runs his own small business, consulting on BIDs. I’m his first employee and the laptop is so helpful with that it is insane. I’m doing a lot of data entry/database management stuff, or something, I don’t even know. I do whatever. I’ve got my first paycheck and I can say I am happy with the work I am doing. It’s nice, after two and a half years of being unemployed, a good job with a lot of potential falls into my lap. So nice, really, all these things coming up roses.

Sarah is going to be here Tuesday night. She’s going to be here for nearly a week, and that is… something. I miss the ‘o’ key on this keyboard all the fucking time. It’s weird. Need to get used to it, I guess.

See, nothing much to say.