Finding buried treasure on an unmapped isle.

I feel confused and yet my mind is so clear.
I am neither happy nor sad, perhaps simply content.
I wonder where I am going, but my mind is preoccupied with where I have already been, especially lately. I have never really been one to dwell on the past, but as the nights come I find myself staring up at the stars and thinking about what once was. It’s unusual for me. Foreign, but not necessarily unwanted. I know that no amount of thought can ever change the past. Maybe… maybe I can learn something new by analyzing, remembering. But change? No. I cannot change what has already occured, I can only change how I perceive it.

I feel so different and yet so the same.
I haven’t changed, but I’m not me.
I’m me, but I’ve completely changed.
Trying to make sense really isn’t my forte, I suppose. My mind is everywhere and no where at the same time. I can’t even really explain how I feel; I do not know if I have actually ever felt like this before. I saw people today and I wasn’t needy for their attention. I did not care much one way or the other. They could choose to talk to me, they could choose not to talk. I find that the less I care, the more people seem to enjoy my company. Probably because I am calmer, more sane when I am not in a fit of worry? Can others feel that? I did not care, and I simply appreciated when I did get their attention. It was… nice, for lack of a better word.

My day was normal. I went to art history class and learned about Gustave Courbet. Unfortunately, I find his work rather dull. The realist style of painting seems so utterly pointless to me. I see realism every day when I walk outside. When I see a painting, I want something fresh, something beautiful, something that I can’t see in everyday life. Why would I want the profane to be in a painting? I digress. I went to English and finished my outline for my Affluenza essay before the rest of the students in my class. I fear that my English class is too rudimentary for me; I am just floating through the class without being challenged. However, that’s an easy A for me, so why should I complain?

I floated today. Like a cloud. A lax, easy-going cloud with no feelings one direction or the other. And while there was a very real emptiness lingering in my chest, I realized that the emptiness was due to the fact that somewhere along the line, I have lost a part of myself. That missing piece isn’t someone else that I need to find, it’s me. I suppose that finding that piece of yourself that you lost is like trying to find mythical buried treasure. You don’t know what the treasure is, or if it is even worth the effort, but you know that you’ll feel unaccomplished if you don’t try to find it.

Maybe that is the reason that I have been looking so much into the past as of late? Maybe I’m just trying to retrace my steps, trying to remember when I lost that little piece of my heart.

A lucid dreamer is complete.

I’ve been having a lot of dreams lately.

I’ve always been taught that looking into my dreams and making an attempt to decipher them can help me figure out what is truly bothering me. My parents talk about their own dreams with one another all the time, and I often find myself eavesdropping on their conversations when I’m washing the dishes, or passing through the kitchen while they’re down in the den. Sometimes, I tell them about my own dreams and get their opinions of what all my abstract unconscious thoughts mean.

Usually, they feel pretty accurate.

For the past few weeks I have been having one to three dreams a night. Vivid, colorful dreams that I can remember for a decent amount of time. Bad dreams. Not, OH NO EVIL MONSTER CHASING ME AHH! dreams. More like, “That dream made me so uncomfortable because it felt so real, like it could really happen in my everyday life,” dreams.

I found a bomb in one dream. Yes, I know that it is slightly unrealistic, but it’s still plausible. I found a bomb in my messenger bag. I touched it and it sent a painful electric shock through my arm. It is so strange how you can feel pain in your dream, even when nothing is actually happening to you. I suppose it just shows how powerful the mind truly is. So I found this bomb, and I ran into the nearest house to call 911. The house that I had gone into happened to be a senior citizen type place. There was a old woman who offered me cookies, but I told her no and asked her if I could use the phone. She directed me to the phone.

I remember being worried. I didn’t know if it was like a school or office building where you had to dial 9 first before dialing out. But then I realized that you shouldn’t have to do that for 911, it should just work. So I dialed, but instead of getting an operator a recorded message began to play. The voice of a very tired and irritated man was speaking, explaining how the home had “disabled” 911 because too many senior citizens were dialing it unnecessarily.

I remember feeling helpless, afraid. I knew that the bomb was going to go off at any minute. I felt like everyone was going to die, and it would be all my fault because I had been unable to do anything about it. I woke up before anything truly bad could happen, of course, feeling uncomfortable and slightly out of place.

It wasn’t what I would call the most realistic dream of all time, this is true. But there was more than a droplet of reality lingering in the dream, which was the most displeasing aspect of it all. I do not like feeling helpless, I hate feeling like there’s nothing that I can do to fix a situation. I would not go so far as to say that I am a control freak, I just want to be able to help those around me and when I cannot… Well, as you can imagine it is not the best of feelings.

I find that my most unsettling dreams come to me when things seem to be going fairly well in my life. When I think that I have no problems to address, no weaknesses to overcome. It is when I feel fine that these dreams enter my head and it makes me wonder: Am I in denial? Is there something that I’m missing? Am I really miserable and I just don’t realize it?

What have I let slip through my fingers? That’s what I’m always asking myself.

What have I forgotten about?

Where in the world is Ty?

My name is Ty, and I have a confession to make.

I am utterly incapable of reading a map.

No. Seriously. You don’t understand. Maps are the most confusing pieces of evil I have ever had the honor of grappling with in my entire life. And I’m not talking about the simplified, user-friendly MapQuest maps that make finding whatever it is you need to find so simple that you’d have to be high not to know where you’re going (actually, I think you could find your way around even if you were high). We’re going to excuse for a moment the fact that MapQuest has the tendency of being evil every now and then and giving completely wonky directions and making you panic as you’re late for that get-together with your friend that you haven’t seen in five years at that fancy Taiwanese restaurant that you’ve never heard of merely for the sake of my post.

Yeah, I know. That sentence was ridiculous.

Anyway. Back to the point of this whole thing: I am so inept at reading complex maps that I really shouldn’t be allowed to go anywhere without a skilled cartographer at my side. Or just someone who’s really good at reading maps. Part of my inability has to do with my terrible sense of direction. I would not be able to tell someone what direction is west to save my life. Oh, sure. If the sun were setting, I may be able to give a somewhat less-than-pathetic guess, but other than that I am useless.

In order for me to confidently get anywhere, I have to have a set of written directions by my side. Turn left here. Turn right there. Left, right, left, right, left. Step by step, easily understandable written words. Not to mention perfectly correct directions. If I happen to have written words, then the map is optional. I prefer to have both so that I can check my progress on the map, so that I can physically see that Maple St comes before Clarence Ave. So I can anticipate my actions. But a map by itself?

Consider me done for.

Because of this monumental flaw of mine, I’m still wondering why my mother felt it absolutely necessary to provide me with the Thomas Guide that presently rests in the backseat of my car. Sure, it has actually helped me a few times to figure out where I was going when I was lost, but at the very high cost of time. It takes me forever to figure out where I am when I’m flipping through the hundreds and hundreds of pages of maps. Yes, I know there’s a street index in the back. Oh, I’m fucking fantastic at using that index. Not to mention turning to the page where the street I am currently on is located. But after that? I don’t know. I freeze. I look at these maps as if I’m looking at a page filled with ancient hieroglyphs that no one could possible decipher. It takes me about a good ten to fifteen minutes of just staring at the page to finally figure out which direction I need to go.

It’s infuriating enough when I’m by myself. But when I’m with friends who also don’t know where we are and I cannot read a “simple” map? Then it’s nothing short of insanely embarrassing.

I ended up being five minutes late this morning for my fun day at traffic school. (Yes. Ty got a speeding ticket three weeks ago, because I’m a SUPERSPEEDDEMON.) Not only because of my terrible map reading skills, but also because the written directions that the website gave to get to the place were incorrect, and because my mother (who went to the exact same traffic school just a few months ago; we all have lead feet in my family) forgot to tell me that they were incorrect. Thanks, Mom. Don’t get me wrong. I’m taking most of the blame, since when I actually found the place it was in an area that I had driven through a million times and should have known where it was to begin with, but still. The other factors really weren’t that much of a help.

So, because I was late and not allowed to join all the other speed demons, my mother rescheduled me for another fun traffic school date on May 4th at a hotel that’s only about seven miles away and right next to the movie theater that my friends and I frequent. Not only did my mother reschedule, but she printed out specific written directions and a map on which she drew my path for me in red ink. And she printed out a picture of the hotel so I wouldn’t like, you know, get it mixed up with all the other millions of hotels on that street that all totally have the exact same time.

Once again, I have completely given my parents a reason to have faith in my capabilities as an adult.

Travel by telephone.

Communication. How can a concept so simple and so basic and necessary for human existence, for animal existence, be such a difficult concept to master? You would think communication would be so elementary. We are taught how to speak, we are taught how to write. If one is unable to hear or speak, we work around that and sign language is used as a means to communicate thoughts, ideas, feelings between people. It sounds so easy, doesn’t it?

And yet, every day it seems as if all we are doing is struggling, trying to figure out how to communicate with others. The problem with communication is that everything communicated is completely and utterly symbolic. A symbol that may one thing clearly to you may mean something completely different, or nothing at all, to the person with whom you are trying to communicate. If someone asks you how you are doing and you say, “Fine,” to you it may actually mean, “My day has been fucking horrible, I’m miserable, I just don’t know how to express that.” While, to the person who initially asked you the question, the word “fine” might mean just that. Not terrible. Not fantastic. Just fine. Your body language–the way you cross your arms over your chest, the way you turn your body ever so slightly away from everyone who approaches you, the way your eyes droop–may be screaming to the world that you need to tell someone something, anything. You need to let out all your negative emotions. But, because you’re not using blunt clear words, it is cannot be assured that your symbolic cries will be understood.

These thoughts manifested inside of my head yesterday after having to endure a rather upsetting event that hurt me a lot more than it should have. And the reason why it was more painful than it needed to be was all because of communication, or a lack thereof.

On Saturday, I called a friend, intending to ask when I could drive out and meet with her. Saturday was a lovely St Patrick’s Day celebration in my city, and since I had never been to the St Patrick’s Day celebration since moving here, and I knew that a lot of people were going to be there and it would be good for me to get out and, you know, not be such a hermit, I figured that I’d get together with her and hang out with everyone. So, I called. No answer. Okay. No big deal. Waited an hour. Called again. No answer. Called a third time, left a message, asking her to call me back. She didn’t. I called her again maybe once or twice, but by seven o’clock in the evening I knew that she was ignoring my calls on purpose and obviously did not want me to join in the festivities.

I was hurt. Not just because she was ignoring me, but because I thought that this would be a fantastic time to hang out with people and show them that I’m not as cold as I appear. I don’t have many friends, and I thought then would be a good time to try, to talk to people and attempt to improve my relationships with them. But because my friend wasn’t answering her phone, I was being shut out, and I spent the rest of the weekend by myself in my room. I expected her to call on Sunday, to give me some explanation for the terrible way that she treated me, but nothing. No phone call. I just got more upset.

When Monday rolled around and I saw here again, she said nothing to me. I expected her to give me an explanation, now that my face was before her. Nothing. I did not say anything to her. Not because I was really upset anymore, but simply because I’m stubborn and I believed that she owed me the first word. But Monday went by and nothing.

Tuesday. After my sociology class I confronted her, because she was pissing me off with her avoidant behavior. “So are you going to give me an explanation or are you going to continue avoiding it?”

“I was waiting for you to bring it up.”

That made me so angry. Why should I have to bring it up when she was the one who slighted me? She owed me an explanation, but instead of giving it to me because she realized it was necessary, I had to drag it out of her. She explained why she ignored me, it wasn’t anything personal. She just goes through habits where she doesn’t want to talk to certain people. I told her that was fine. But she shouldn’t have let me call her a million times and let me seethe in anger for four days without knowing why she did what she did. She should have answered her phone on the first call and just told me the truth. Told me that she didn’t want to see me. It would have hurt, sure, but at least she would have told me something, communicated with me. How the fuck am I supposed to know what she’s thinking when she doesn’t tell me? I’m not telepathic, for fuck’s sake.

She didn’t mean to hurt me, she explained. I understood. She never really goes out to hurt anyone; she’s a good person. She asked me if we were okay. I told her yes after a moment of silence. I’m not sure why.

The weird thing is that I usually get over anger very quickly. Very, very quickly. Mostly because my feelings don’t get hurt, so I find that there’s nothing to linger on. But as I write this I find that I’m still extremely hurt. My eyes burn slightly; I think tears are trying to come out but I won’t let them. I don’t know why this entire situation has gotten to me. Is it because she was ignoring me? Because I feel like I was robbed of the chance to show people that I’m not cold, jerky, reserved Ty? Not really.

I think the reason why I am so hurt is because I honestly believed that she would never do anything to hurt my feelings. Ever. I had so much confidence that she would never do anything, intentionally or not, to really make me feel this way. And now that she has? I don’t know. I kind of feel like I can’t depend on anyone now. This feeling probably shouldn’t overwhelm me, it should not choke out whatever ounce of reason I have. I can still depend on her. I always could. It shouldn’t be any different now.

I’ll get over it. I will. I always do. Just… returning to my normal disposition is taking longer than usual. And I wonder if, perhaps, there is something deeper that is affecting me. Something that is making me feel so… unwanted.

All this could have been avoided if she had just said something.

Fuck, people. Just say something.

A little bit shameless.

I am not a short story writer. I never was, and I probably never will be. Story writing is a completely different kind of writing than the kind that I do now. At least, that’s the way that it feels. With stories, there has to be structure, there has to be some kind of line that brings you from point A to point B. A line that makes a relative amount of sense to the average reader and doesn’t cause him or her to mentally run around in circles trying to figure out where the fuck you’re going, let alone what the hell you’re even talking about. A story is a creation that must have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the reader shouldn’t have to make ludicrous leaps of faith to go from one to the other.

When I write in this pretty blog, my mind is never about linear organization. I am never really trying to make sense. I just write with some vague shadow of an idea in my head and let my fingers do the talking for me. Sometimes I digress, sometimes I ramble, sometimes I end off going into another topic completely. But that’s okay. Because this is my blog, a reflection of my thoughts and the way my mind works. And, honestly? Not many things about me are all that linear to begin with.

So when I sit down and try to write a story, I feel like I’m being forced to adhere to a formula that I don’t quite understand. It’s like trying to make cake when the only recipe you have is in Icelandic (this example only works if you just happen to not be among the Icelandic speaking population. If you do speak Icelandic, insert another language in there that you are unfamiliar with. Like Swahili). The more I try to write the more frustrated I get when I realize that nothing I write makes any kind of sense. The plot is all wonky and the characters are extreme and perhaps a tad bit unrealistic… and eventually I just give up. That is the way my attempts usually go.

Lately, a story has been eating away at the back of my mind, begging me to release it from its cage and let it roam free. I have been reluctant, mostly for the reasons stated above, but yesterday night I decided that I might as well try to write something, even if I end up failing miserably. After all, it’s not like I plan on making money as a writer, I just do it to soothe my raging soul (haha), so if I’m keeping words cooped up inside of me, well, that’s not very healthy now, is it?

So, I have decided to start my story writing in a little side project I call “Shameless.” I encourage the three or four people who visit this blog to check it out, leave random comments on the sections, tell me that I’m a terrible writer and crazy and all those other nice things.

I don’t know what I plan on accomplishing with my story. In fact, I don’t even know if I’ll ever finish it. However, something about it feels right. Probably because in some abstract, metaphorical way I’m just writing about myself.

And we all know just how much I love me.