07-16-03 @ 11:03 am EDT

Might as well just title it that. :/

All righty. Entry Number Three. And my fingers have gone numb. It's too cold in here! Summer should be hot. Body-parts-sticking-to-other-body-parts hot. -_-

Anyway...I think my Long Entry Of The Day backfired on me. Not in the sense that such entries tend to backfire on me; so far, nobody has tried to rip me a new one. I don't know, maybe they're...simmering. Or got bored a quarter of the way through and wandered off before I got to the...meat, or whatever. *shrug* This is often a fear of mine, which nearly prevents me from posting entries, and which is why I only tend to post them during extreme emotion (I don't really tend to simmer, myself, before posting)--that I'll anger somebody, they will hate me forever, bla bla bla. I don't know WHY it bothers me so much because for the most part these are people who, beyond a few notes on the computer screen, I will never interact with in any way. We will not be friends, acquaintances, real-life companions, or anything. I can't make the world love me and I never intended to. But I'm always afraid of hurting anybody anyway. And no matter what I say, and how I say it, I always feel that no matter how hard I've tried, I've failed.

Back to the point though...I DID simmer, just a tiny bit, before posting the long entry. But probably not nearly long enough. I posted it, then felt bad; then posted the short entry following it. Then told myself that I had vented about what was bothering me, mission accomplished, go do something else already and leave poor Skew alone for a while.

But...that anxiety was still there. It just had a different source now. Whereas before posting the entry, my anxiety was aimed at other people and how their words were affecting me, NOW the anxiety was aimed at MYSELF and how MY OWN WORDS were affecting THEM. And even though I've made myself sit and simmer for a little while, it still is bothering me. So, the posting of the long entry didn't alleviate the anxiety in the way I had hoped it would; it just transferred it to a different source. I hate this, how no matter what I do I can't win. Anxiety wins out every time. :( I'm hoping sleep will help me like it did last time...*sigh*

Again, I fully understand that this is just something I should not worry about. Usually when I feel I have pissed off people, it turns out they're not nearly as pissed off as I thought, if they even are at all. They're tougher skinned than I am, from the looks of it, and don't mind debate or disagreement. And even if they did, who cares? We're not buddies and I don't have to wait in line with them at the supermarket. What they think about me should not matter. But logic does not work when it comes to emotions and anxiety. I can talk to myself until I turn blue and the fear is still always there. It's just like, I can tell myself that the wind will NOT blow me off of a bridge, that I will NOT drown if I stick my face in a bowl of water, and I can even read up on all the physics and case reports and such to back these things up but should I find myself standing on said bridge, or with a bowl of water in front of my face, all logic vanishes and panic sets in. Reason just doesn't work. I think I need drugs or therapy or something.

Well, I think I should really stop analyzing myself and my anxiety for today...that's three entries so far where I've brought it up, and it isn't even NOON yet. You can tell something's bothering me, when I'm posting this much in my damn journal and nobody has even bitten my head off yet! :(

Completely unrelated, my number of reviewed items continues to drop by the day...*sigh* At this rate I'll soon have NO reviewed items to my name...they could at least keep a record of how many you've reviewed, before purging them. I used to be up around 2000, and would probably be closer to 2500 or 3000 by now...now it's not even 900. How pathetic. Another reason why reviewing just doesn't hold much appeal anymore--why even have the R-to-R stats on your page if they're always going to be growing smaller and smaller, no matter how much you review? (Not that I review nearly that much, I know.)

Anyway, I wanted to comment on something COMPLETELY non-Internet related, so that should come as a relief...however, if you hate me talking about my characters, then you'd probably better leave. This won't make much sense anyway. I just find it interesting how you think you can know so much about somebody YOU made up, yet still have something come along and smack you in the face, completely unexpectedly. (Yeah, I know! I'm using too many adverbs lately! SUE ME!) Let me try to keep this as short and unweird as possible, though I don't think that IS possible.

Example of the moment, in some of the Minot spinoff stories...I can never remember which ones because they all tend to blur together...Kristeva picked up this memory of nearly being drowned in a bathtub. One of the images he remembered was a mandala--which popped up in his thoughts so often that he finally got one tattooed on his shoulder. (In later stories his sister, I think, got him a necklace which looked just like it.) He already had this water thing going on...he is an accident-prone (reckless?) person and many such incidents involve water, he's had some odd water-related dreams, and in one instance when a suspect touched him he went nuts and tried to flush his head down a toilet. (That was the second story he appeared in, I think, and the reason why he was first put in therapy. But bla bla bla.) The images started coming together and he finally remembered that the mandala was in fact the image on a necklace somebody was wearing, somebody who put an end to the attempted drowning and in effect saved his life. Probably the reason why he fixated on the mandala itself and made it his own symbol.

Anyway, one of the first memories he picked up (even before that one) was of being in horses' stables, and...well, suffice it to say that a lot of unpleasantness happened there. Won't bother going into it. So of course in my fiction, such things as horses and stables pop up in the background a lot too--maybe they're just more noticeable because of what they mean to the main character, or maybe he's unconsciously drawn to them--who knows. I'm not here to yap about that. The thing is that yesterday or the day before a sudden image popped into my head and I haven't a clue where it came from or why I even thought it up. It was about the bathtub incident, the near drowning...only now it wasn't a bathtub, it was a watering trough, in or near some stables. It made a lot more sense, and it was very weird, how I hadn't properly connected the two before. In my fiction, I had always MEANT it to be a bathtub in a bathroom. But now something just tells me it was a watering trough all along and I didn't even know it. I am the WRITER of the damn thing and I didn't even know it!

Kristeva's reaction to this when in my head he remembered it too? Pretty much the same as my own. I realize this is all just babble to about everyone who may read this, but it gave me an eerie feeling. A screen memory, and it wasn't even MY memory. Yet I was still the one who created it. What's it mean when you create screen memories for others without even knowing they're only screens and not the real thing? Bizarre.

Well, at the very least, I can say to Max, at least I was just as surprised as you were when I found out! O_o

I feel rather stupid typing up this stuff, so have to go now...tar...