The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So apparently there’s a new season of Haruhi and I was all excited. So I watched the first new episode. It was good! No dance, but how could they beat the last dance? So that’s alright. Then I went back and I watched the first episode of the first season. I laughed. Then, when I got to the end, I was hit with a strong, hard punch of depression. Pow. It certainly isn’t designed that way. I shouldn’t have felt that. But man, did I.

I looked at the core group of the show, together in their prime in the first episode, and it just hit me. I went out this evening and watched Essner’s practicum, his big finale for his film degree, and it was excellent. It was a far cry from us attempting to make horrible movies in Danny Robert’s back yard, or at the park, barely scripted and badly edited, much like the film in Haruhi. It was a real movie, and if it didn’t show his skill as a director, it sure as fuck showed his skills as a script-writer. But that’s it, you know? He made the film. He has the degree. Now he’s got to find him a job where we can use that passion and knowledge to make him a living, and he’s almost certainly not going to get one doing anything vaguely like he loves around here. Hell, there’s a good chance that I won’t, that nobody will. My core group is not together in their prime. We’re about to split up.

This isn’t a surprise. I knew it would happen. Hell, I’ve been thinking about what will happen when I move away from here for a long time. But normally such depression doesn’t hit me until I’m watching something that’s intentionally invoking it. (Say, the end of Azumanga Daioh.) It’s now apparently getting worse. Heh, it’s like back when I was really depressed about my gender issues, and just seeing genuinely happy female characters that I looked up to would punch me in the gut like this. It’s right in my face, and I’m going to have to deal with it, I guess.

I’m strong. I’m going to survive. I’m going to move on. And I’m going to keep in contact with them through the power of internet anyway. But dammit, I know when the first of my friends really move away, I am going to cry. I am going to cry long and hard. Hell, I kind of want to cry now.

I really do hate change. But without change, nothing good can come.
So much change is about to happen in my life. I just have to pass through it with a smile, as best I can.

Whelp, I ended my college career with a 4.0 year.

That’s… definitely something! I’m kind of proud of myself for sticking to it and making that happen. I was stressed out, but I worked hard, and I suppose this is my reward.

Was it worth it? Eh, not really, but whatever. It basically just highlights how fucked up my college path was. I could have, easily, been getting 4.0s the entire time. But I let depression fuck me over, and I ran from things that stressed me out to help me recover, and all kinds of stupid shit happened. Yay for me.
It is kind of a shame, though. There was a twinge of guilt when I saw everyone at the commencement who graduated with honors, and I was not among them, due to said fuck-ups. Still, the guilt was more for my parents. I was worried they would be pissed at me for not getting it. But I think they were just happy that I finally got to that point. Hell, I know I was.

In the end, I know the grade doesn’t really matter. Hell, it’s not like what I got wasn’t decent. I ALMOST graduated Cum Laude. It’s the diploma that counts. And hell, I got that. Or, you know… I will when they send them out in a few weeks in the mail. Heh.

But yeah, everything has past. Does my life feel different, now that I graduated? Nope. Not in the least. I’m still playing the same video games, talking to the same people… it’s going to hit me when people start moving away, which will happen. That’ll be sad times. But life moves on, and I have to move on if I want to be happy.
Have to move on and make things happen.
Have to.

Yeah.

So, my little brother moved out.
Good for him, you know?

He’s got a small, one bedroom apartment at the top of an apartment building in town. He’s also got way, way more furniture that he can ever use for said apartment, as all my mother has been doing is making and buying him furniture for the past… month or so. Still, I hope he gets what he wants out of having his own place. I may still be in school limbo, but hopefully he can really get himself settled to get on with his life. In some way, anyway.

But yeah, my mother… I’m sure at least part of the reason why Jonathan wanted to get out of the house was to get away from the controlling nature of my mother. She’s a planner, and she is a manager, but she is very, very rarely a doer. So, for our entire lives, it’s mostly been Mom coming up with some complicated project and then us having to actually do it while she stands there and commands us to be happy and not be annoyed by having to do useless things in her exact, precise way, especially when we know a better way. Yeah.
Of course, the closer and closer it got to the day my brother moved out, the more and more clear it became that this was becoming a Mom project instead of Jonathan’s show, like it should have been. Jonathan asked me to help, said I could sleep in, no worries. I agreed, of course. He’s my brother. I’d love to help.

Mom woke me up yesterday earlier than I sometimes get up for class. No sleep for me! Then, the entire time, she was angry at me for not being awake and happy. Man, I wonder why that was! I seem to have threw my back out during the moving as well, as it’s kinda in serious pain right now. Still, I blame Mom for that too. Blame: It’s the cure, cure anything. I mean, she seemed pretty angry at me for getting hurt! Yay!

Bleh, I’m just kind of unhappy at the moment. I don’t mean to be quite so down on my mother. She has tried to be better about it, in general, and I have tried to be nicer towards her, and it has mostly worked. It’s just… bleh. Day like today. When I should be happy for my brother for getting his own place and being all supportive and such and she just kinda ruins it.

Bleh, no. No more negative emotions. And negative things.
Ha, we’ll see how long I follow that command.

When you’re feeling overwhelmed, the thing you have to do is break the task into chunks that are not overwhelming.

This is just generally useful advice. Seriously, put that shit to work. Do it.

Still, sometimes when you’re most overwhelmed, you have problems thinking of things in those terms. You’re freaking out and you can’t parse everything the way you need to.

I suppose that was me on Friday of last week and whatnot. I had an entire mental breakdown attempting to finally once again face transitioning head on. In my head, things totally got overwhelming. I couldn’t handle it. My mood crashed hard. Very hard. I was pretty well out of commission there for awhile. I wrote a little blog about it. It was bad times.

However, a completely random bit of rambling in a depressive conversation with Brer helped turn me around. We talked about Health insurance, and how I could get it, and what I could do, and how it would help. Suddenly, a very vague and frustrating situation had a physical, present problem for me to deal with. I started to work on that, and my mood lifted… well, it felt pretty quickly to me. Maybe other people would think otherwise.

I really appreciate Brer helping me to break this into a smaller chunk I could deal with. I don’t know why I found it so hard. Much like I was talking about in the other blog post, I am better at this than I used to be. I used to have these panic attacks just with schoolwork, but I figured out how to break them into tiny chunks of things to get done, and not worry about the outcome, and it worked. But I’m so close to this shit. I couldn’t deal with it straight on, even with this, I guess. I’m not a strong as I thought.

But progress is being made. That’s the important part. It’s not, you know, fast progress. But I’ve got a plan I’m executing. That’s all anyone can ask for.

The way I work is fucking weird, man.

I don’t know. It was but a day or two ago that I had some really great conversations, some really great time with some really great people, and I felt refreshed, not only just in general but in preparing to start on the huge, complicated quest of getting all that transitioning stuff out of the way. Man, I have great friends, great people around me, and I was just going to go do it, you know? Get it done. Make it happen.

And then, the next day, I took a huge downswing.

I can’t remember the last time I took such a horrid downswing and felt so depressed, actually. I really don’t know what is wrong with me. Am I just punishing myself for actually looking forward to the future for once? Does something inside me think that, even though it’s all completely possible, that it’s not completely possible? Or is it just nerves in thinking about it making me weaker and more vulnerable to an already existing condition?

I don’t know. But I felt pretty horrible emotionally Friday, and as I write this, it hasn’t really gone away.

I told Brer the other day that I am a stronger person than I was a year or two ago. That I can make a plan and get things done now. But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe I’m still the same stupid girl who’s hiding up with her computer all day so she doesn’t have to face the biggest change of her life. Certainly the diploma I’m about to have won’t change anything. But I thought how much better I was doing in getting said diploma was a sign that I had mostly put this shit behind me.

Bleh. Blah.

I’m going to work through all this anyway. I’m going to find phone numbers on Sunday before I let myself play what I hope is my treasure trove from raiding Best Buy, and I am going to call them Monday. I’m going to set up appointments, and I will make things happen. Somehow I will afford them. It will work.
Then why does just typing that make me have such a huge knot in my stomach?

I got accepted to the Graduate Assistantship program. Yay!
Yay…

I mean, that’s good, right? A nice bit of money, a free ride to grad school, additional important work experience…
Of course, that means I’m still here.

Bleh, I know I’ve been over this before on this site, but as good of an idea that this all is, I want to get out of here. I don’t have anything against Cape, of course. I think this town is pretty great. But I want the freedom to be able to define my own damn life… transition… find out who I can be if I don’t have family and peer pressures on me all the time, you know?

The real solution here would be to just do it. To stop putting things off. To make everything happen, even though I’m still around here. But goodness, the fights that would bring. I am afraid of them.

Bleh, I’ll just have to. I’ll just have to. I can apply the forced good student thing to this too, can’t I? Then again, this is much scarier than the good student acting…

Ugh…
Sorry to bring all that up again.

Ugh. Arg.

So as I’m writing this, it’s Thursday of my Spring Break. I’ve not even attempted to get anything done during this week, school-wise. I’ve just been relaxing. Dammit, I needed some relaxing! Why can’t the whole break be a break! Grumblegrumble.

But still, now I’m working on homework, and it’s going to badly because I just want to fall asleep and be lazy and check out the Player’s Handbook 2 and all kinds of stuff. But I have to be good. I have to go to work, I have to write these stupid papers, and I have to things as well as other things. But I feel burned out so quickly on them. I couldn’t even get a whole draft banged out before this. I stopped in the middle out of frustration. Granted, I was bothered by providing tech support in the middle there to stop my flow, but still, I should be getting more work done than that. I can’t slack off! It’s the last semester! Ever!
ARG.
ALTERNATE REALITY GAME.
Okay, not really alternate reality game. Just Arg.

Welcome to the real world, me. Breaks are hard to get. You don’t get breaks! Ha ha!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go curl up with my vidjeo games and my nice friends and hide from my homework for awhile longer.

So, in order to upgrade my computer (which is happening Friday. Wish me luck.) I have to save and backup all my shit, and so on and so forth. Makes sense.

One of the things I have to back up is my password vault.

See, back in the day, someone got one of my passwords to Mama’s sites, so I had to change it. I then realized that was my password like everywhere, so I went and changed everything then, to make it safer. But I realized I needed something to store all these passwords safely, so I looked around on the internet for awhile, and ended up with this program, called Password Vault. It worked well! I put all my passwords in there. It was nice, and it had served me for quite some time.

Fast-forward to now, I need to have a copy of this program so I can put it on my newly built compy and still access my passwords. I go and look for it, and find it over at this site. I realize it’s upgraded, and it’s talking about new features. I don’t see the old program anywhere, so I’m like “Okay, I’ll test it.” I download it, and run it. It updates my install.

Then I go to run it, and it says “Oh, input your key.” I go “No thanks, I’m using this the free way like I have been for a long while.” Then it says it needs to update my password vault. Alright. I make a backup and let it go to town. Then it says, for the trial, I can only save 10 passwords, and all the passwords over that will be lost.

What the fuck.

Well, obviously I don’t want to do this… but then it hits me. I just updated the program. I don’t have the old version anymore.

I frantically search online for the old version. Brer and Val both try to help me. We try just about everything we can think of.

Nothing.

My passwords are gone.
Unless I pay this asshole 15 dollars, of course.

I sent the man an angry e-mail, but I doubt anything will come of it. I’m never using his fucking program again, that’s for damn sure. I’m just screwed.

Bleh.

So, back when I got Amazon Prime, I got it because… well, I already talked about that awhile back, I guess. But I was planning on getting all my games through Amazon now.
It’s quickly started to become apparent that the potential for this annoying me is inherent in this plan.

There are people who are already playing Street Fighter IV, and it’s just shipped for me yesterday. I should, today, get my copy of Dragon Quest V, but again, people have already been playing that. I could have a FightPad right now. I’ve seen them in stores. But it isn’t going to get here from Amazon before next Wednesday.

I’m a hardcore gamer. Not having these games day 1 is part of the reason why I was so slow to adopt this sort of thing. I thought the 2-day shipping would make it bareable, but it’s not especially? The wait is still very annoying.
However, I’m not having much of a problem with it overall, I guess, because I’m so fucking busy. I barely have any time to play games at all, it feels like. Getting a game a few days late doesn’t actually impact the time I have to play it too much, most of the time. Hell, I probably have something else I’m playing instead in the meanwhile that I haven’t beaten.

Being busy fucking sucks, though. I feel like I’ve taken on too much, but I’ve only taken on exactly what is expected of me. This is what I should be doing. Hell, I should be doing more. I should be getting myself published, I should be getting resumes out there even though it’ll be months before I should get hired. But dammit, it’s too much. I’m already so burnt out and the semester is barely getting going. Ugh.

Well, I’ll just have to solider on anyway, huh?

Well, here begins my last semester.

Gods, how many fucking times have I typed that sentence by now, huh?

I’ve had such trouble with school, but really, this time, I’m pretty sure that statement is fact. I’m pretty sure I’ve done it. I hope to god I’ve done it. Or there will be so much screaming and so many tears.
But no, this is my last semester.

Back on New Year’s Eve, Essner mentioned that this may be our last New Year’s together. He said we’d probably see each other around Christmas, sure… but New Year’s? Unlikely. We’re all going to be graduating and probably moving away, getting started with the rest of our lives.
That is so fucking depressing, you know?
The end of things is always completely fucking scary. I know this. I’ve always known this. I hate things ending. There are plenty of things I don’t like about my life right now, but at least it’s comfortable. I know what to expect. Past this semester is nothing but unknown. I get overly nervous when I don’t know what to expect. I worry. I’m going to worry the moment that diploma is in my paws, because then something completely new begins, and I don’t even know what the hell that is.

I have no idea.
But I just have to be positive it’s going to be good.
It’s going to be so good.