My laptop apparently can't find its primary hard drive, so now I have to work from the HBLL until further notice. I also have a 3rd presentation due in 2 hours for my Anthropology 490R class (Refugees and Relocation), and I'm pretty well screwed there... =___=;;

This is what happens when prescription decongestant medication completely throws my circadian rhythms out of whack and I get headaches from trying to fall asleep. (attempted to fall asleep for 3 hours and just felt really sick from attempting to do so) My guess is that the BYU clinic is handing out illegal stimulants in pill form and giving them out liberally.

Well, I've noticed a pattern with my winter semesters. I always end up playing a (Namco Bandai) Tales game all the way through with Kristina and Jenn, whether it was Abyss which took the entire semester, or Symphonia, which only took a month. I also have now set up three couples, one of which is now married, another which has an engagement date, and another couple which is taking it slow. So far, I seem to be a good matchmaker as well as being good at staying out of the way.

For all of you that can't stop hearing about my screw-ups in my love life, I have none right now--thanks to the fact that no one in the Provo area really has my attention. I've got Matt (a friend in Chicago) for emotional support and flirtation, and he's got me for hearing violin performance and promised lessons. Otherwise, that's pretty much it. As for music, has anyone ever heard of the hang drum before? It's Swiss in make, and it's one of the most beautiful percussion instruments I've ever heard. It reminds me of a Rastafarian drum I heard once made from a metal garbage can lid. The sound reminds me of something in between metal chimes, a regular drum, and...strangely enough, water. The sound is just very fluid to me.

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As for Asperger's Syndrome, a growing trend that I've noticed that I hope just cycles out and doesn't stick around is sensitivity to sound and stumbling on my thoughts/words a lot more than usual. My usual depression has relatively faded for the moment, though. I credit that to not having any crushes and helping a certain couple out instead. (makes no references to Erich whatsoever)

I've decided that I've narrowed down my specialty in anthropology down to sociocultural-psychological. I don't want to be a tenured professor; I'd much rather be doing fieldwork. Maybe teaching a class here and there would be great, especially ANTH 101, but I'm really set on my senior ethnography. I want to study high-functioning Asperger's Syndrome/autism/etc. from a cultural standpoint. It really hasn't been examined that way before, and I think an ethnography could work, thanks to the internet. I have said that I wanted to do work for Tibetan refugees, but I don't have as much of a drive for them as I did. I think there's enough work being done there. I still would love to learn Tibetan/Nepalese and go help--it's just that I can personally relate a lot more to the psychological ethnography.

Man, it's nice to not be feeling a thing after 25 hours except for a slight headache from trying to sleep again. I'm seriously wide awake and I have no freaking idea why. So I'll stop here and get ahead on homework.

Eh, excuse how depressing my last entry was. ._.;; So, today still feels like Friday.

First happy thing of the week: Me and Glyf were roleplaying from 1 AM to 9 AM, resulting in one of the most intense battles we've had. It was just plain awesome. I have never been so psyched in a while (and neither have I ever slept from 9 AM to 6 PM, attended a party half an hour after I got up, ditch the skits and random entertainment of the ward party and went to the store with Glyf and Bosque, go to Hollywood and pick up some movies, and then watched Airplane! and Nightmare before Christmas.) That was really tight, no lies.

I look at myself in the mirror. I'm not sure what to say to the person I see.

She's completely unpredictable, a bomb waiting to go off or trivia waiting to be uncovered by simple curiosity. She's seen a lot of things. You can tell by the sorrow in her eyes and the smile she tries so hard to keep on her face. You can tell by how she dances and how she speaks. She's seen enough to know that it's pointless to be anyone else besides the person in the reflection. She's a Rosetta Stone. Who has heard of an autistic that can flow into the world without it being known? A right-brained savant?

Her fingers are begging to strum a violin, a guitar, or dart on an ocarina's keyholes. They want to draw whatever fancy passes through the mind. They are begging to write, most of all. They want to write about the feelings that people can't seem to express correctly, like how nostalgia has as many different ways of feeling as taste has flavor. They want to write about the memories that people hide deep inside themselves and do their best to forget, even when they are unearthed by an unknowing comment or other things.

I wipe away the shower dew on the mirror, and see more. Glasses. Despite how much she wants to see other people clearly, she can not do the same for other people, not without her writing, as her tongue has failed her since she can remember. Once the words stumble out of her mouth, they don't stop tripping until she writes down the question or answer. But the reflection laughs.
"Despite everything you have done and trained yourself for...you have done your best to be able to understand the world, and the world is no closer to understanding you. In this darkness of ignorance, all men are blind, even the victims."

"Only we are the victims of our own misunderstandings." I laugh back. There is no one to rescue either of us. I wipe away more shower dew, seeing clothing hiding shame and memories. I see hair, a face framing the glasses, a nose, mouth, eyes, freckles, zits, ears, and everything else that belongs to a face.
"You're an idiot. Every action that you make belongs to everyone. No man can possibly sever himself totally from reality. His absence of action and his action can change the game for eons." The reflection lectures.

I turn away, and ask, "Are dreams the escape, then?"
"There is no escape." I am answered. "Your own dreams depict your death and the death of those you love most in every way possible. You're a soldier, an operative, a warrior, a taker of life, at heart. It is what you become every night. Always another battlefield, always another trench. Will you finally let yourself see that? No matter what your world, you will always find conflict. You will always be looking down the barrel of a gun, aiming for a goal, finishing that goal off with the spray of blood that resonates as glory through your heart."
I slammed a fist against the reflection. She hates me as much as I hate her. "Why do I have to be this way? Why do I hate people, life, this world so much?"

"You're covered in blood, dear. Your own." The reflection laughed. "You attempt mutilation once and also attempt suicide twice and try to growl this in my face? You let your best friend rape you because you were so afraid of losing his friendship? You fight so much because you never want to see me. A whore that screws because she can't face her own lust, a glutton that eats because he can't face his own stomach. You're just as bad as them both. You can not observe your own reflection."

The mist and dew cleared to show the blood on my body and the cuts on my skin. My own cuts from the fencing and the broadsword fighting, the bruises from my own practiced kicks and punches of marital arts, the broken bones from the self-defense I memorized, the deadened limbs from the pressure points I had learned to never use. I was naked now, stripped of all security.
"Overworking your body to protect yourself from men past mental and physical breakdown when your body and psychology craves male presences. Overeating, knowing deep down that this would not attract men, along with your outgoing personality that intimidates men often past friendship. Fear of your father, servile obedience to the alpha members of the family. Your sick, twisted habits of freaking out and turning away the people that would love you most! Continually running faster and faster just to prove to yourself that you can't keep up with your mind! You autistic whore, you piece of worthless shit, you don't deserve to be my body! I may cease to exist the moment you drop to the floor, but I would rather not exist than be you!"

I wake up again, and roll off the bunk of the barracks. Turning to Sgt. Lee, I report the time, 5 hundred hours, and grab my rifle. I'm fully dressed. I always am. Sent along with a different squadron to take out the pillbox at the top of the hill, I snipe a man sitting on top of the pillbox, who was trying to snipe my own men. Not a chance for Corporal Bell and her raggedy team.
Yet, so is my life. I run about the hillside, moving through the foxholes made by old artillery. One of my men blows up from an unactivated shell, thinking it was a dud.
We infiltrate the side, nicking down green-tinged gray uniforms, boys in front of me turning to ash because of trip-wires. By the time the pillbox is secure and the black, red, and white flag is lowered, I laugh, taking the time to spit on a dead soldier's swastika.
I almost laugh. This is my life. I take out the wallet from the dead man's pocket, and see a mirror inside. The reflection grins at me, and I toss aside the leather wallet. It's not good to steal from the dead, anyway.

I heard something the other day, a list of things that people with concentrated talents were prone to do. One of them was that the person would automatically think that their talent was their calling in life, and the writer commented that one's talent necessarily didn't have to be their calling in life.
I completely disagree with that comment. In the last week, I realized that anthropology, creative writing, and film were definitely callings in life for me. Oh my goodness. I saw Eragon at the dollar theatre here, and I couldn't believe how horrific it was. Being told the budget they worked with, I shut my mouth and totally evaluated and analyzed the movie. Holy goodness. I never felt so alive taking apart that movie mentally, by plot twist, by frame, by script, and by notes in the soundtrack. I felt equally alive in laying waste to my beginning of Eladria. It begins from two different viewpoints now, and Matthew isn't at home dreaming, he's at a club performing in a band, sneaking out of his house. The story is way more alive this way, and I love it. Third, I feel so alive when taking apart the reasons for the actions of people. I've got a mad obsession for learning why people do what they do, why people won't look each other in the eyes here, the ideas of privacy, pain, relationships, even why we feel awkward, for even the most 'basic' reasons.
I also found something else out this week. I really don't like it here that much, but it's not as if it would be any different at any other college. I guess I just want to be over with college already, and I'm only half-way through my first semester. I was in such a rush to get out of high school that I want to do the same thing with college, walk in, walk out, end of story. One would ask then, "What do you want to do?"
I want to write. I want to write until my wrists are aching from carpal tunnel because I type so much. I want to scream my lungs out through a character, I want to release myself in the worlds that I construct for myself. I love writing. I've been told for a long time that my writing is fantastic, publishable. I want to prove that to myself so badly, but school and work are always in the way, it feels like. I research what I want to learn in the library, usually taking one to three books home a day in order to learn something more, whether grammatics, for a language I'm trying to invent, Quechuan culture, in order to learn more about Peruvian culture, which I'm not familiar with at all, Japanese and Indian architecture in order to produce a magnificent temple or government building. I can take a book and absolutely suck out all the information in it if I'm given the time to read and research. I used to be able to read so quickly, but I haven't been able to read so quickly since I started writing so intensely.
I feel so restricted by the classroom setting. Why is that? I've felt that way since I can remember, since I could talk, my parents put me into pre-school and onward to elementary school after getting kicked out of one pre-school after another. Man, I was such a bad child before I turned six. Then I completely changed again when I was twelve, when I made friends with most of the people I'm still in touch with in Dallas. It's been gradual changes for me since, except for some things here and there.
Ah yes, and my sister is getting married. ^_^ I'm really happy for her. It is an excuse for my family to get me back to Dallas, though. x.x;;
This has been the source of a lot of my depression lately. I don't ever want to go back to Dallas, ever. I don't want to be here. I don't want to be anywhere at all. What do I do with that? The only place my mind would like to live, not just be is Scarborough Faire. Why? So that I don't look absolutely ridiculous for wearing what I think is comfortable? I love a cloak with a dress and a walking staff. For my lifestyle here, that would be very nice, even practical. Medieval clothing, as warm as it is designed, would be perfect for Provo this time of year. I also realized that I hate humans in general, and when I was regularly getting fainting spells, I never really felt like I was anywhere at all. I felt as if I was somewhere else entirely. Two morning this week, I half-woke up to the option of staying in the dream-world or go to the world of the living. Both times, I stayed in the dream-world, because I didn't want to have to face the world. I'm an assassin there. A soldier, a government agent, a magic user, a swordsman, a skilled marital artist. I think I'm always those things in my dreams because I feel so powerless in real life. It can get infuriating.
I've also gotten addicted to Tales of the Abyss, thanks to Karu-chan and a new friend here, Bosque-chan, who is ten years older than me. XD She's awesome, an illustration major.