The past day have been very unpleasant. I think I have been emotionally sicker than I have ever been before. I'm not one to really ever worry about anything. So whatever force has gotten into me the past 16-or-so hours is a complete mystery to me. I am the girl who was completely calm when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. This still haunts me. It makes me wonder if I am an unfeeling person. It makes me wonder if deep down, I want my mother to die. She was diagnosed when I was in maybe 6th grade, and I know for a fact that I was a 110% different person back then. So however I acted back then cannot be a good judgement of the person I am today, regardless. Maybe I am thinking of the worst scenario...maybe God just gave me the strength to keep it together. But I never felt even a twinge of panic. Well, dwelling on this isn't doing me any good. When it comes down to it, I probably value my mother's life more than she does. She's dead already.

Anyway, I don't know how I got off on that little tangeant. As for how I've been feeling...I'm not a fan of the feelings at all. Ever since I began Psych 381 I've been feeling a sense of doom, and I've been feeling very trapped. I've gone all my life without ever having to lift a damn finger to do decent in school. That's horrible to say, and it's damned selfish of me to not apply myself more...but I just haven't cared. I've had so many other things that have interested me more. I've always had music as one of the number one things in my life. I've thought for quite some time that my real infatuation with music only really began once I got to high school. But I realized yesterday that it began pretty much the moment I could talk. I would make up the words to like the Price Is Right theme song...and to the songs in videogames, like Mega Man. Fantasy was my other infatuation, my main one. I have ALWAYS used fantasy to escape, my whole entire life. I still do. If I feel stressed, I imagine things being different than they are. My fantasy is usually about meeting the most wonderful love of my life and being loved completely by him. Sometimes I get scared that constantly fantasizing about it will make it never happen. When I was a child, my whole life was fantasy. All my friends and I ever did was play house. When I wasn't playing house with them, we were imagining certain boys liked us or that we looked different or just had an all-together differnet life. When I was alone, all I did was write stories (ridiculous stories about aliens!) or watch TV and lose myself in the characters...or read books and forget that I was on my couch reading and instead think that I was Margaret in Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret or Sylvia Plath going through the stuff she went through in The Bell Jar. I was such a strange child. I had many different roles. My life consisted of hanging out with my sister Ruthie, hanging out with my brother Dan in much of a father/daughter-type fashion, not really having a relationship with Dave (which is strange because he's the sibling closest to me now), being a best friend to Rose, being a big sister to Chris and Matt, using my friends to retreat to a pretend life (as I already said), and taking care of my mother. I didn't realize at the time that I was taking care of her. But now that I look back on it, I supported her. I was kind of her "Jim." Well, I think that in the beginning, I actually was her little girl whom SHE took care of. ROSE was her "Jim." But once Rose felt the pressure of the role and retreated, I became her replacement. I remember feeling a lot of strange resentment toward my mother from age 12 to about 16, and now I'm realizing that this age range was when the Rose stuff was going down and I was being depended upon in ways a little girl really shouldn't be depended on by her mother. I feel really sorry for Ruthie. She and I were talking on the phone yesterday. Everytime we talk, the conversation inevitably leads to our mother. She has so much pain from mom. Mom neglects her so completely. Ruth, much to her dismay, is very much like mom, in terms of having her nature. Now she doesn't use the nature to put other people through Hell, the way mom does. She uses it in the nurturing, wonderful way that I only see in mom every so often, usually when I'm bawling my eyes out because I'm upset about something, and mom is forced to retreat into a motherly nature and not a give-me-give-me-give-me nature. Ruthie is very unselfish. I love her so completely. She wants mom to be a part of her life so badly. Yet she hates her, too. Of all of us, Ruth is the most hurt by mom. As strange as this sounds, Rose kind of took on the role of "mom" to Ruth. Mom is very aware of how much Ruth depends on Rose, but she has been too blind to realize that it's because she, herself, has never been there for Ruth. Mom doesn't care about having a part in her grandchildren's lives. She has this warped perception of reality in which it's her children's duty to call her and invite her over to see her grandchildren. I've tried to tell her, "Forgetting about duties for a second, don't you just WANT to see your grandchildren? Don't you ever just feel the need to call up your kids so that you can go over and see your grandchildren?" She never really knows how to respond to that. I think her mother was a hateful bitch. I've heard horrible things about Grandma Salyer. I'm glad I never met her. She'd hate me. She'd think I'm "deviant." I'm wondering if my father would have been a fan of my lack of adherence to our family's imposed rule system. One thing that never seems to fit my idealistic perception of him is his incredible strictness. Usually people with such a huge heart don't have room to be so structured in their belief systems since such structure generally leads to judgement and, eventually, hate. But I won't dwell. Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this. Oh, mom...she doesn't have a passion for seeing her children and grandchildren (except the strange infatuation she has with me and Rose, of course, because we are "Jim" to her). The only real passion she has is in going to church. One would think that being so "holy" would cause a person to be incredibly loving. Such is not the case with mom. Rose, Ruth, and I have wondered why. Anyway, I really have no idea why I have gone off on yet another mom speech. I was going to talk about my recent craziness.

My recent craziness...I don't know why I've let this class bother me so much. I think it's because I know it's something I can't slack on and still pass. And it's pretty obvious how badly I hate failing. I have busted ass studying for it the past week. I have studied as much as my scatter-brained, unable-to-focus-on-one-thing mind would allow me to. But right before driving to UC to take the final, I lost it, seriously. The room was spinning, I couldn't breathe...it was crazy. Then I went off on my friends and wrote a nasty journal entry, which I have deleted. Then I went into work to buy Cherry Halls (sucking down excess menthol is a calming thing to me...I wonder if it's an alternative to cigarette addiction)...and I broke down to my mom and to my brother. Driving to school, I was surprisingly okay, mainly because I was listening to my song that's helped me survive lately, "Parade" by Garbage. I got a real sense of peace and felt God. When I got to school, I went into the bathroom. My friend was in there reading the Bible...it was good to see someone freaking like me! I just laughed, and we hugged, and she said in her cute little ghetto way, "We've come this far. He [God] ain't gon' let us fail. We can beat that short li'l man [Dr. Warm]." I just love Alysia. Amanda, my section's TA, was giving our section a little pep talk. And she said she had suckers for us for after the exam, which surprisingly made me feel better because it made me feel as though, for a second, I was in kindergarten and taking like a spelling test or something. When we got the scantrons, we had to put our TA's name somewhere and some numerical code somewhere, and I was filling in stuff in the wrong places...it wasn't pretty. I'm such a nerd. The exam book was fat. It had three sections: 1. a research article we had to read and answer 20 questions on 2. 85ish questions from his lectures and 3. 85ish questions from the book. I saved the research article part until last. The lecture part was REALLY hard. By the time I got all the way through it, I think I'd left a fourth of the questions blank. The book part was fairly decent. And then the research article was tedious, but I think I did okay on it. It was just annoying because it was true and false, and it would pick out the most minuscule piece of information and change one word in it to make it false. About 55% of the way through the exam, I became unable to pay attention. I started feeling all ADD-ish and hearing every paper crackle, every person shifting in a chair, every footstep, every sound from the heater...it was annoying. And my head began to feel heavy. One girl got done in an hour and a half, and I don't know how that was physically possible because I was only a little over half done by then, and I'd even been working pretty steadily. I got done in 2 hours and 45 minutes. There were still about 7 people in the room taking it when I left. I cried the entire 40-minute ride home from my scaredness of failing (though I can honestly say that I don't have even a hunch at whether I passed or failed) and from stress between me and a friend. I puked up my own phlegm while driving and was forced to swallow it again. It wasn't pretty. It was the longest ride home EVER. I finally got home, and I clung to my mom. Then I wrote e-mails of apology to my friends. Then I helped my mom find $600 dollars she misplaced. I just love her memory loss, REALLY (sarcasm). Then I ate an enormous amount of pizza, almost enough to make me puke. Then mom and I watched Sister Act II, and I tried really hard to fall asleep, but I couldn't. I fell asleep at like midnight. I woke up maybe three times during the night. And then I woke up awhile ago at 5:30 and couldn't get back to sleep because my heart was beating a mile a minute. I've never let anything get to met his way before, except maybe a guy. I now have a 99.2 fever. I think I've made myself physically ill over this stupid class. Every part of my body right now aches in some way. The back of my neck aches the most, probably from having to hold up the weight of my head at a 45 degree angle for 2 hours and 45 minutes yesterday. This class is really NOT that big of a deal. Worst-case scenario: I fail...I have to take the class again. I'd probably take it this summer. I get to go see my grade at 1:00 this afternoon. If I pass, it will be the happiest moment I've had thus far in my life. Nothing else will matter. And I will have the best Christmas I have ever had. If I don't pass...I will worry about that when it happens.

I am going to learn how to do healings. I want to help people. And I want to heal myself because I have so many ailments I want to get rid of. There are cases of people being healed of life-threatening illness by non-medicinal therapy. I'm excited about learning this. It's going to take a lot of reading. Healing isn't just one of those things you can just snap your fingers and be able to do. I'm going to go lie down now and wait for time to pass. It's finally Christmas break...I should be happy. I'll be happy...or at least relieved at finally knowing...after 2 today.

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