It's tomorrow.

Things are supposed to be better today. Baileigh says that it's a new day and anything can happen. I'm inclined to believe anything Baileigh says. She's pretty smart.

I'm getting fat and lazy. I should probably start working out on a regular basis. I'm tired of not doing anything all day long and going to bed without being exhausted. I need to work myself to death or something. It would probably do me some good. I miss the days when I woke up every morning for cross country practice at 5 AM and choked down a banana and some orange juice before driving to Sean's house where he would hop in, tune to the smooth jazz radio station, and we'd cruise to the school without speaking. Those were mornings well spent. I seriously doubt I can run as far as I did back then.

Maybe if I was exhausted I wouldn't be able to focus on anything but the present. I wouldn't be able to think about anything except how tired I was and how much my muscles hurt. That's how it used to be. Now, when I'm bored and wired on caffeine, all I can think about is the past and all the crap that makes me miserable. I need a break from the timeline. Either that, or I need people to stop telling me things they know will hurt my feelings. I've been asleep for 9 hours. I feel like I need another 4.

The List

I have decided to be more discerning. The list of criteria is as follows.

1] She has to care for me the same way I care for her.

2] She has to be witty.

3] She has to be beautiful to me, if no one else.

4] She has to read a lot.

5] She has to write well.

6] She has to be a total freak.

7] She has to have a slightly crude sense of humor.

8] She has to enjoy video games.

9] She has to be musically talented.

10] She can't like Twilight. She doesn't have to hate it, she just can't like it.

Finals.

Sorry to anyone who reads this. I've been studying for finals, working on homework i should have had done long, long ago, and trying not to get sick on Chartwells food. There's hardly any time to post. I'll post a lot more as soon as this is all over with. Pinkie swears.

Welcome to the Freak Show

I'm such an awful writer.

No really, I am. I don't want to hear any of that crap you roll around inside your mouth. Those placating sounds don't mean anything to me. They never have. So cut it out. Now.

Possibly some of the most infuriating things I deal with daily are the constant reassurances of friends that I am something special. Gifted, would be a good word. I hate that word. Ever since the day my mother tried to buy me a keychain that said "I'm not weird, I'm gifted." That was the day when I realized I was a living joke. So talented, so unique, and so painfully different I soured the taste of the air around me, like lemonade in need of sugar. I'm not gifted, I'm a freak. My talent is making your teeth ache and your tongue feel thick. My writing is the same unsophisticated scrawling of the overconfident author who plasters his molested vocabulary on the page like double aught buckshot.

Don't think I'll mistake your prosaic flattery for an accurate representation of my abilities.

I'm getting older.

I'm 20 now.

It's been two days. 20 years and two days since I was born. An infinitesimal number of instants, events so fast they can't even be said to have really happened, since I breathed my first breath. And yet, only 20 years. Only an afore mentioned miniscule event on the grand scale that is Time, the construct fashioned to make our lives more manageable. To deter madness. Galaxies within galaxies. Forever spiraling inward in Golden Ratio. 1 to 1.6180339887.

I don't want to be older. I don't want to pass out of my teenage years forever. But neither do I want to be a child, clutching to his baby blanket long past the time it was put aside.

I've stopped eating enough. Everything tastes the same. I went to Olive Garden for my birthday. It tasted like the Cracker Barrel breakfast I had that morning. Now, I just hardly even bother any more. I might be sick. I might be dying. I might be overly dramatic.

I think it's the last one.

I thought I was done with letting other people control my emotions. Why is it one word from you makes me feel like I need to die? What is your problem? What did I do to deserve this? You're the one who broke my heart. You're the one who ruined me for months, if not longer. You're the one who haunts my thoughts when I'm with any other girl. Why am I so pathetic for you? You make me ill. You make me want to write black poetry and grow my hair long enough to cover my eyes and never change out of a robe and lie in bed until my muscles atrophy and are replaced with bed sores.

It's a hard fight to write this down, knowing how stupid it makes me sound. Poor little Alan. His life is so hard. No one loves him. Boohoo. I hate it when I get like this. Alex says he needs a catharsis. I say I need my skull tapped and the poison inside drained like maple syrup. Therein lies the simplified difference between the two of us, I think. The psychiatrist's son and the over imaginative wannabe poet.

Maybe when I wake up tomorrow I'll have an incredibly rare case of progeria that only manifests itself shortly after reaching the beginning of the third decade of life. I'll wake up an old man, too old to continue schooling but young enough to use the toilet on my own. Go back to being a child again, if just a tad bit more wrinkly. But that would just be a sorry cop out, wouldn't it? Running away from everything. Something I do too much.

Haha. Baileigh loves me. I know that for sure. Funny how just one little thought like that can make you feel so much better. And suddenly everything I was just feeling seems so remote.

I'm feelin' nice.

I feel nice.

I mean, I just got blown off on a date, but for some reason, I feel content about that. I expected it in that sort of depressing way that I sometimes do in the same way that I expect I won't be getting another girlfriend any time soon, especially not if I stay at Covenant like I'm planning to. For tonight, though, I'm okay with all of that. I'm fine with not being the center of someone's universe, as I've come to understand is what I'm really after. I used to think I was looking for love and acceptance and someone to release all of this pent up affection on, but I was wrong. I just wanted attention. I feel like maybe it's better that I'm denied this for now, like an alcoholic going through a detox. I'm not mature enough to love someone they way I should. I'm just not ready.

It helps that this bed is so comfortable. I seriously need to find out where Mom and Dad bought this mattress pad. It's like I'm sitting on a cloud, as cliche as that is.

I'm writing this blog a few nights before I'll post it. I'm at my home in St. Augustine and I don't have internet access, within reason, as long as I'm here. We have an old Pentium 4 Dell with high speed internet sitting in the other room, but it's so buggy from long use that I can hardly get it to pull up my Facebook page, much less type this whole blog out and post it. So I'm making due by saving this to my laptop until I have a chance to upload it to my blog.

I'm not even sure if anyone reads this. I know Micah and Shelby and Taylor follow me, but I don't know if they actually read any of this. I think they do. I think some other people who aren't actually following me also read it, like Baileigh, maybe. I'm not sure. No one talks about it. I almost stopped writing only after the first few posts because I wondered if there was a point. I realize now that, as public and attention starved as I am, this blog is really just an exercise in thought. I don't think well when I'm speaking. I only think appropriately when I'm writing. This sucks when you're trying to tell someone how you feel without sounding like a complete ass.

I worry that everyone at Covenant thinks I'm a whore. They have every reason to believe this because, in all honesty, I'm the biggest man-whore it has ever been my misfortune to see in a mirror, but I still try to keep up appearances. You know how it is. An honored companion and accomplice in all things criminal once told me, in regards to my thoughts on women, "Alan, you appreciate God's handiwork way too much. You need to start finding some of it disgusting." Is he right? It is true that I think every girl, without exception, has the capability of being absolutely beautiful if they try. Some of them just don't try. Even then I still see the beauty hidden inside them and have a tendency to fall in love with it, even if it never really will see the light of day. Does this make me a softer version of a satyriasis? A man obsessed with women, just not as sexually as the term denotes?

Do I have low standards? Is that my problem? I doubt it, but what do I know?

Why do these things even matter to me? They're so inconsequential in the big picture. Like, what does my taste in women matter to the president of the United Sates as he wields the power of the greatest country in the world at the moment? What starving child in Africa cares about whether or not I get a date with the girl in my history and doctrine classes while he's being forced to murder his countrymen with an automatic weapon? What person outside the small communities of Covenant College and St. Augustine, Florida, even knows that I exist much less cares that I have a sexual preference at all? Surely God cares but what divine purpose could a romance possibly have in my life outside marriage which is so many years away? Sometimes I wish for the strength to be like Justin. To swear off any interaction with anyone resembling a romantic relationship and to promise celibacy for the rest of my life in service to God. I have so much respect for that.

But I could never do it. As often as I tell myself that I'm a self-serving, people-pleasing attention monger, I know that, given time, all this love I'm prepared to give away was placed in me for a purpose. I was designed to love a woman for the rest of my life till death do us part. I swear that, when I die and they run an autopsy, they will find, stamped into my very DNA, the words "Human Being, Husband/Father Edition, V10.9.1" or something along those lines. It'll probably be written in some kind of God-code. Like Python, where you can Import(levitation);

When I'm not wishing I was a eunuch, I wish I could be like the couple at school that met only a little over a month ago and are already engaged as freshmen. Or my friends here at home who dated for a year and are engaged to be married as they graduate from high school. What a gift, to be so in love. I've been searching for that ever since I decided I liked cooties. Even if they don't make it and their relationships fall apart, they will remember these beginning days with fondness and a bittersweet taste. Some people don't think it's worth it and call it a curse. I'm more optimistic. More stupid, definitely, but at least I have my optimism.

Maybe no woman will ever love me. I wouldn't be completely surprised. The thought has crossed my mind several times, usually while writing obscenely dark and pathetic poetry that uses words like "black" and "alone" entirely too often. Perhaps I am unlovable, speaking strictly of the love a woman has for her husband. I am loved by my friends and family, no doubt in my mind, but to this day no girl has ever loved me the way my mother loves my father. Perhaps it will never happen. Unlikely, if I was in fact built to love and be loved, as I suspect I was, but what if? Will I be able to accept it? Will I be able to rest on the love of Christ alone? Perhaps it is my martyr's cause to be a creature devoted to loving someone while entirely denied that right.

But then, I am young. It has only been 20 years, the majority of which I was nothing close to an acceptable subject of anyone's affections. How can I possibly expect something as important as a life long love to just pop up in the first few years of my adult life? Some people don't meet the one they were supposed to marry until long after they've reached adulthood. Besides, who am I to guess at the purposes and decisions of a God I could never hope within reason to understand?

For now I am just a heart-sick little boy that none of the girls on the playground want to kiss. I think I'm tough enough to survive and so, for tonight, I feel nice.

Abba, Father, save me!

I pretended I was a dinosaur today. I pretended that I roamed the campus, eating anyone who got in my way and generally terrorizing both friends and enemies alike.

Not that I have enemies here, but I created some in my mind so that I could eat them.

Then I sat for two minutes holding an empty Nerf pistol against my forehead, pulling the plastic trigger again and again and again. I told my roommate that if the gun were real, I would have blown my brains out weeks ago. I was joking, but I had to convince my roommate that I was. I spoke the words convincingly, I guess.

I'm shutting down. I can feel it. There is a heavy weight in my chest whenever I think about the massive amounts of work I have to do, the confrontations I need to have. I feel so heavy I can't get out of my chair. I'm scared. I'm so scared and I don't know how I'm going to find the strength to keep going. I don't know if I can pull this off. I don't even know if I have the balls to walk into class tomorrow morning with none of the work done that should be. I'm tired and angry and hurt and scared. Father God help me! My own mother doesn't believe in me! She asked me yesterday how I did on my Doctrine exam. When I told her truthfully that I did okay in some places but not in others, she asked me if that meant she'd be saving the money she would be spending on my room and board next semester. She's been threatening to take me out of school here since summer. I feel like all I am is a drain on her precious resources. A damn inconvenience. A waste.

I'm so weak. I'm so broken. I feel like this is the part where God should be stepping in. I've admitted it. I can't do this on my own. I'm helpless. When is he going to step in? There is so much more I could lose, so much further to sink, do I have to go all the way before he'll save me? Do I have to leave this place? Forfeit my education? Lose my friends, my family, my money and my mind? How far is far enough? How broken is broken enough? How much more do I need to suffer before I've learned my lesson? Why am I so stubborn!?

Lord I've never been one for spoken words, so this is my written prayer to you. You are the sovereign king over everything I understand and everything I don't understand. You determine what is and what isn't, who lives and who dies, and the very flow of time itself. You know my thoughts and see my fears. All glory to you, Father, King of Kings and owner of everything that I am, body and soul. I love you, Abba, and I want you to be proud of me. Give me your strength, God, because I need it desperately. I thought I was struggling for so long, but I haven't even put up a fight. I laid down and died the day I thought I could do it without you. Foolish is my name because I've been nothing but foolish since the day I was born, but you call me your child and as your child please save me, Father, from myself. Grant me focus, determination, a bold spirit and a patient heart so that I can do what I am here to do and bring you glory in the process. Thank you for your love, God, and how you pursue me when I won't listen. I beg you to continue and to give me your help. Bless me, Father, and forgive my laziness and cowardice. Amen.