Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

I've been doing the backwards math for longer than I can remember. All my life, it seems.

"If I fall asleep now, I'll get 5 good hours."

I've been awake for two hours now, lying in bed, curled up and warm under my covers, and everytime I start to relax, my mind starts racing.

I think about how the club has been open for almost exactly a year now and all it has done is virtually put my family in the poor house. I think about how you can work very hard with all your heart and still get nothing in the end. I think about being able to pay for my education, being able to get a job years from now. I think about what will happen to me if I don't get into the art school here.

Sometimes I think in terms of PHP, and my brain fires off a series of "echo"s and "$"s and semicolons. I think about querying databases and writing to text files and trying (though usually not succeeding) at getting my head around the big picture. Trying to remember how it all fits together.

I think about one of the last times he came to see me at school, how he had come on account of my crying fit a couple of days earlier. And I made him go see that movie in the freezing cold theatre with strangers. Because this movie, I thought at the time, was so important, that he should see it. That I needed to see it a third time, and really, I could see him again anytime. I think about my selfish action towards him for most of our friendship, and try to pinpoint the moment he started pulling away, try to see what I could have done to prevent it, and apologizing to him in my head over and over.

I feel my stomach and take note of how it's getting bigger and not smaller, and outline instructions to myself that will never see the light of day. Tomorrow, I'll have a salad for lunch. Tomorrow, I'll do some crunches. Tomorrow, I'll start cutting back on cherry coke. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. It'll be brighter, it'll be better, with my new resolve, anything is possible. Then tomorrow comes and it is all I can do to drag myself out of bed and stay awake in Marine Enviroment.

The really biting thing is, there are so many people so much worse off than myself, and I can barely handle any negativity in my life. The slightest setback—from sleeping through a class to spending an evening out alone to tripping over my own feet where others might have seen—sends me into a downward spiral of melancholy, making me dwell on my flaws, my selfishness, my worthlessness, my social ineptness, even my looks, to be quite shallow. I talk a good game, but if I manage to really get into a gloom, I find it impossible to pull myself up and out of it without a lot of help from external events.

Plus, I have a gift for melodrama. Come online, poor your heart out, get a lot of sympathy. Vying for pity where ever I can get it, as if I had Munchausen, perhaps?

Going to try that sleep thing again. I can still get 4, maybe 5 really good hours in.