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“You have to give up. It is only when you’ve lost everything that you are truly free to do anything.” -Tyler Durden

Tyler’s voice has been bouncing around in my head for the last day or two, repeating the same few phrases over and over again. It’s in that part of the memory you usually have a song repeating in. It got there by being part of a “song” for a “video” on the Fight Club DVD that I’ve seen probably a hundred times (I used to put it on repeat). It got there recently because (get this:) I recently redesigned the Beer Club Merchandise, which got my brain going on all things Fight Club.

Feeling pretty low and having a voice repeating “you have to give up” over and over again in my head is maybe not the best thing that ever happened to me. Not the worst, either. I really hurt the last tow on my left foot late last night when trying to get to the washer/dryer to more some laundry around, and it hurts quite a bit. Did you know you can’t limp on a bike?

I also seem to have stopped shaving (my face, my head) a couple of weeks ago. Something about feeling this way makes me feel too tired to go through those motions. Like my arms are too heavy to lift all the way to my head to drag a blade across it.

There’s always a good excuse, too. Well, maybe just a ‘good enough for me’ excuse. Last night’s Drawing I left me physically exhausted. We were creating gestural art which requires thousands of large, whole-arm & body movements, and I was using charcoal that was a bit too hard, so I was having to press pretty hard to get the right effects from it. Not sleeping enough lately may have helped. Tonight, I think I’m going to skip Beer Club in favor of sleeping as soon as I get home from class. Which means I won’t be shaving then, either. Maybe next week.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to actually get your hands on human adipose?

Take a look at The Onion’s Home-Buying Tips, including such helpful tips as this:

“The first step in buying a new home is having much more money than you do now. “

AND

“Make sure the neighborhood has a good high school, one close enough to see with a telescope.”

PLUS

“Avoid purchasing a home that is on fire or underwater. “

I’ll certainly keep tips like these in mind when shopping for a home next year.

Continue reading Check the basement for dead hookers

Today was my second day of classes, which meant that today I found out whether I would be able to register for both classes or only one, and what art supplies I would have to buy just to take the classes. It also meant that i had to scramble to try to get all the art supplies before Drawing class tomorrow, despite my lack of transportation and the bulk of the materials required. So tonight after class I found an open, local art supply store (Wet Paint on Forest just North of University) and managed to get all of my art supplies for the low, low price of $303.58. I had to split it between two cards because of recent overspending and poor choice of credit cards for certain transactions. When I came home freaked out about spending so much money, I opened up quicken and started playing around. Assuming that the rent payment that I plan to make Saturday or Sunday doesn’t clear before Friday (not unreasonable, considering how long they’ve taken to clear rent checks in previous months (not less than 5 days past the first)), I won’t even have to activate my overdraft protection. If next month’s rent payment doesn’t clear until at least the 4th, I will have plenty of leeway to apy all outstanding debts without going below zero or above the credit limits of any of my accounts at all, accoring to currently understood debts and incomes. If I get bonuses every month (expected, to a certain degree) I will be able to do things like spend a little more on the vacation I will be taking in Hawaii next month (airfare and hotel covered by a prize package, food and incidentals covered by me and Angela) and pre-pay on some of my accounts sooner.

Anyway, I came home from class and from shopping and was feeling pretty stressed out and awful (worse, considering the near-migraine I had right before leaving work (subdued by a few appropriate pills)) and realized that I still had 5 alcoholic malt beverages (approx. 5% alcohol by volume, each) in my refrigerator. I started with two twisted teas, and then by the time I was halfway though the Captain Morgan Gold that followed, I finished finessing my accounts into a reasonable balance and didn’t feel as bad. I’ve had the DNA Incredi-blu and part of a regular DNA since then, and I’m somewhere past a buzz now. I’ll be going to bed soon, and we’ll see how I feel in the morning. Right now I mostly feel numb. Not worried about money, and whether that’s because of the alcohol or because I made some graphs look like I would have enough money for a while, I don’t know.

I haven’t been posting in the last few days because I’ve been feeling a little down. I worry that if I say anything about feeling down, people will want to ask what they can do or offer advice or suggest therapy or something, and I don’t really want to feel like I have to turn comments off again, but I don’t want to hear about it. You may not want to hear about what I have to say, either.

I guess I don’t have much to say. I have no justifiable reasons to be feeling down right now that I didn’t have a week ago when I was feeling fine. Or maybe I do, but I don’t think of them as good reasons. School started today, which is not only an incredible burden of time, taking up every Monday through Thursday afternoon entirely and dedicating me to quite a bit of work outside of class as well, but also a financial one with tuition at around $800 and art supplies probably additional hundreds of dollars. Beer Club looks to be going the way of the dodo, with Zoe giving up drinking coinciding with my classes pushing even the possibility of my availability back several hours, some regulars moving out of town, and others long gone. Maybe I’ll buy the new T-Shirt in the December/January, when I have a few weeks off school and Zoe’s started drinking for the holidays. The Mac event that I had hoped would lighten my spirits was disappointing at best, and the three extra hours sitting around for my computer to be ready ‘any minute now’ I could have done without. I haven’t started working out yet on the Bowflex, and that’s looking like a vicious two-step; I don’t work out because I don’t feel good, I don’t feel good because I don’t keep in shape. I guess I could go on like this for a while…

But that really isn’t it. I feel down inside, and feeling down I become introspective and negative and cynical (and I overspend) and I take the time to find all sorts of little things that aren’t the greatest, but when I think about feeling down, none of those things seems particularly the cause. Those things feel like justifications or rationalizations for an emotional state I don’t understand. I don’t even understand it with my heart. I just … it’s just a part of me for right now. Like a guest in my chest (or a wocket in my pocket), I didn’t ask for it but I’m not asking it to leave either, and I certainly don’t know what it is or where it came from.

Site traffic has been going up again the last few days. Unique visitors to Modern Evil broke 100 for the first time this year today. Not as many people have been visiting as did over the entire course of last month, but the peaks are getting higher. What doesn’t help is that the traffic started going up when I started posting less. (Or was it when other people started posting more?) Will traffic start going down again when people see I’ve posted about my emotions instead of about my phone or my exercise equipment? Who knows? Who cares?

From here, I think I’ll start complaining about medical conditions I haven’t bothered to contact a doctor about, so if you’re not interested in that, don’t read on:

Continue reading Feeling a little down

So one of the exciting new features of the new version of OS X that I just bought is that it has a built-in, Apple-designed chat client. Now, this chat client works over the AIM network, but I get to use my existing .mac account name. Problem is, I only ever used MSN IM before, so I don’t know anyone’s AIM names. I have this powerful new software for communicating with people, and an empty “buddy list”. I added my sister’s AIM name, but I’d like to add more. Maybe get an actual list going. So I’m inviting you, all of you who read this, to add me to your ‘buddy list’. From what I can tell, my AIM name is probably tmcclanahan@mac.com. I’d be glad to hear from you. Especially if I’ve never heard from you before.