at twelve o’clock last night.

then, at six this morning, at work:

“ugh, my fucking teeth hurt.”
“how come?”
“it’s probably all the grinding. from last night.”
“…”
“teeth grinding! you know i grind my teeth in my sleep!”

man, my poor fucking brain…

this exam is too big. i can’t do it.

i’m so scared…

i work very early. very very very.

there i am, passing out at the computer, trying to get the inputing done. hawksley workman is singing a nice, soft little song in the background, something off his new album apparently:

hawksley workman: I want to make love with you/spread you so wide like the bluest of nights.
me: w-? jesus christ…
ray: hehehe, yeah.

things apparently very few people know about sloths:
-sloths are strong (if slow) swimmers
-sloths bite, and their bites are really bad. they have a very high rate of serious infection, because of their dirty, dirty mouths.

so james and i found a video of these people who were waving down traffic while a sloth was crossing the road at all of two inches per minute. james says, “why not just pick it up?” this is where i mention the whole biting thing to him.

the next video i found was of this chick in a boat, who comes across a sloth swimming towards some mangroves. she pulls up alongside this thing, talking to it in a happy high-pitched voice. it looks up at her, and is like, “nnnno, i gonna swim that way now…” it later cuts to her “saving” the sloth, pulling its rigid, molasses in january bum out of the water and holding it up for the camera. the sloth kinda keeps paddling in mid-air for a sec, before realizing what’s going on. at this point james is making fun of me, saying, “i though you said they bite…” right on cue, the sloth turns its head, craning its neck towards the lady’s hand. but sloths are slow, and not very flexible, so it just stares at her hand until she lifts it into the air to hang it awkwardly on a random branch. she then lets out a vapid yaaaaay and wanders off, totally oblivious.

actually, you know what, i’ll find the link. you have to see this.

kill me
kill me
kill me
kill me
kill me
kill me
kill me
oh my god i HATE MY LIFE

today i got to turn ian, the absolute queen of all things videogames, onto ben “yahtzee” croshaw, the funniest game reviewer i have ever heard. i love you, yahtzee. and i pwn you, ian.

look at that, we’re both winners!

i win six points, and you win the “i have no idea what i missed out on” award.

holy yay, batman!

“well that’s a secret if i’ve ever heard one.”

disorganized ramblings:

i’m getting my bachelor’s degree in psychology, and i’m mostly enjoying it. as it turns out, you can be a practicing clinician in quebec as soon as you have your masters degree. so that means that if it takes me two years to get my masters, in four years i can be a therapist, treating patients while i get my phd. that would probably mean i would never be a filmmaker, which is what i’ve always wanted to be, but maybe that’s ok. maybe this is what i’m meant to do.

i could also get a job in psy-ops, working for the government, doing all kinds of strange things. i think it would be fantastic to do some of the things my parents have done in their lives, i think i could actually have an impact, small as it may be, on the world around me.

for reasons we won’t get into, my mum’s recent trip to lay a wreath for her department to mark the anniversary of armistice day has also made me think of something. i’m very good at few things, and lying is certainly one of them. the problem for me with lying is not that i get caught, but that i get guilt… so if i had a reason to lie, one that absolved me from that guilt, i think i could do a lot of the useful things in life that require a person to be a practiced and inveterate liar.

i’ve also been told that i have something that can’t be taught, an ability to read situations and people that would make me a well suited individual for a postion in negotiations. when i asked what a negotiator actually does, like what kinds of situations would require a negotiator, i was laughed at and told that EVERYONE needs negotiators, from the police force to the army, the government to the corporate world, and that if i got the right training to compliment my innate abilities, doors would be open to me pretty much anywhere i wanted to go.

so that has been my food for thought this past little while, and it looks like no matter what i do i have some choices when it comes to what i’d like to do with my future. my issues right now involve actually feeling, as opposed to just thinking, that i really do have a future. while my brain knows that i have to get this degree, that i WANT to get this degree, all i really feel is that i need to get away from this place, that i belong somewhere else. sitting here at work, waiting for peter to bring me the last little bit of work i need to finish before i can go home, i found an unfinished post i’d abandoned months ago:

i swear to god, there is nothing like flipping through hundreds and hundreds of facebook pictures to make you feel like getting completely tanked and fucking or blowing your brains out…

i suppose i shouldn’t say shit like that, what with my trying to sanitize not only my image (sophie, you dress like a hobo, take that scarf off, why do you wear those pants all the time?) but my entire personality and lifestyle… but i’m trapped at work and thinking of freedom, and i have alot to miss. tiny turkish girls teaching me about dancing like a gypsy, and various ways of using one’s body to express profanity. nights of immoderate consumption of alcohol, cigarettes and dancing.

this disconnectedness is something with which i’ve been dealing for years, and i think that this urge to cut and run, this need for freedom that nags at me day in and day out, stems more from me wanting to get away from myself than get away from anything around here, or even get to anything anywhere else.

i miss my cousins, who’ve drifted so far from me it makes no difference whether the drive to see them takes two hours or two years, i’ll see them about as often either way. i miss my brother, the only other human on the planet who speaks “sophie and alex” fluently. i miss all these things because i feel so far away from all of the important people in my life, and even further away from the person that being close to them makes me.

relationships in which i used to feel a security and intimacy that made me strong and fierce, now serve only to make me feel isolated because of a loss of that intimacy, and the fear of never regaining that closeness makes me want to turn my back and not even attempt to bridge the gap.

so the question becomes, as always, how do i fix me? how do i get freedom from myself to become the self that i want to be? and how do i do this in an environment that not only doesn’t promote change for the better in me, but actively hinders it?

…

wow, rereading this actually made me sigh at how whiney and emo i am. i think i should just go and try to study or something…

i won’t get good grades for the good i did tonight (in fact i might get bad grades for not having spent the time studying…) but i feel good that i saved a day from being wasted on anxiety and immobility, which is where it was headed. that, and i gave my cranky old man of a turtle a reason to get up in the morning. i look around and almost everywhere around me is work that i have to do, responsibilities to be taken care of that are so long overdue i am ashamed. but calvin will be warmer and healthier from now on, so i can feel proud of myself.

so at least there’s that.