Today I woke up feeling nothing ...

... except a craving for Qdoba. All I want to eat is a bowl of rice and three-cheese queso and chicken and green salsa and sour cream. This is product of the fact that I freaking love Qdoba, and also because I last ate about 24 hours ago. I've been hungry since I got up, but nothing sounds good. Except, you know, the burrito.

Yeah, yeah, somebody's probably gonna wanna bitch at
me about it and tell me how unhealthy it is. Go for it.

Well, for a while I wanted pizza. Then pancakes. Then croissants. If I just ate something I'd feel better, but I don't feel like I could choke down anything I have in the house. So I drank a lot of water, and I read, and eventually -- once Qdoba was closed! Avoidance is key for me! -- I went to the grocery store. Forty dollars of fruits, vegetables, dairy, and such later, I came home and made myself a little pizza on a low-carb tortilla. Honestly, I didn't expect to enjoy it very much. I expected it to be a pale substitute that made me crave the real thing more. But it was surprisingly satisfying. I feel alright now. Will have a peach later on, I think. And my next meal I think will be .... hell if I know. If I even get hungry again I'll figure it out.

I've basically just had this window open all day to type whatever popped in to my head, which has been a lot less than the last couple of days. That's not necessarily a good thing, though, because it's basically because I've been pretty depressed all day. Oh, just low-level depressed, not sobbing or anything. Just sort of feeling empty and nothing. It's actually sort of a break from my misery the last few weeks, but that doesn't mean it's healthy.

If I did more social stuff, I'd probably feel a little better. But it's hard to set anything up, because I feel like it's hard to even carry on a normal conversation. The last time I went out with a friend I hadn't seen in a while, I started telling her what had happened with the ex and I started crying in the middle of the restaurant. Embarrassing. Sometimes people will be in the middle of telling me something and I'll be struggling to understand, not because I wasn't paying attention, but because it felt like my brain had forgotten how to decode their words, usually because some thought about my ex or something had sort of halted my neurons.

I feel like doing what I did the last time I felt like this, the last time my life felt so empty and up in the air. I used to put my little schnauzer on her leash and walk for hours. We'd just wander our neighborhood in the dark, every night, until I finally dragged us home. It felt right to wander aimlessly. Sometimes I sang to myself. Sometimes I talked to my dog. Sometimes I cried. Other times I was just absolutely silent. I don't know if it really helped; it didn't keep my weight in check nor did it tire me out. But I find myself wanting to do it again. Unfortunately, that was about seven years ago, and it's not something I've felt comfortable doing since. The town I moved to after that had a state prison in it, and I didn't feel safe wandering the streets at night when felons were regularly released there. Then I moved back to my old town -- but the opposite end of it, and to get to a well-lit, safe area I had to walk about a mile up a road with no sidewalk and no streetlights. Where I live now, there's enough gang activity to make me uncomfortable roaming at night, even though none of it is really in my area. I wish I could move back to my little wood-floored house in the quiet, safe neighborhood where I used to wander.

Really, I hate the town I live in now. I like my house. It's quirky and has lots of room for me and my pets. It's fairly cheap, and I'm overall fond of it. But the town I live in smells because there's a cattle processing plant, it's weirdly organized and I can't find things, and then there's the gang activity in certain places. There's a reason housing is cheap, is what I'm getting at. If I had the money, I would move. Maybe I should have, back when I had a job and they were still giving us bigass bonus checks. But finding somewhere that I can have the three cats and two dogs I've accidentally acquired is a pretty big challenge. And at the time I had money, I was happy.

Actually, I had an offer a few days ago to move back to the prison-containing town and live for a year rent-free. There were a lot of reasons to do it; money, change, being there for a family member struggling with some emotional issues. But in the end I just couldn't do it. The space I'd be crammed in to would be much too small, and because of the way the house is arranged I'd have no privacy. Plus I'd have to find a job down there, and then after less than a year bail out on it and haul all my things back to this area (100 mile drive), because in a year all reasons to live there would have gone to college or moved away, leaving me alone and without a place to live, in a town I don't really want to live in. And honestly, I feel like I'm just too goddamn old at this point to be uprooting my life like that every year, at least when it comes to jobs. My work history is bizarre enough already (I tended to work a lot of unconnected jobs consecutively).

I suppose because I'm unemployed and applying for jobs all over the place, it's normal that I've been trying to evaluate what my goals really are. In terms of a job or a career, I've never been one of those people who knew What I Want To Be When I Grow Up. Oh, for a while I thought I'd be a novelist. And I do love baking. But I never even knew what to go to school for, because I was so ... unfocused, flighty, whatever you want to call it. And there are plenty of people like that, but those people usually have something else they want. For example, they want to get married and have kids. Yeah ... I don't. I mean, if I were with someone and they wanted to get married, I'd do it for them. But I'm never spawning. Ever.

So I don't want any particular career, I don't want a husband, I don't want kids. I don't want any of the "normal" things society tells me I should. What do I want? I want to be happy. But what would make me happy? Fuck if I know. :)

But hey look, it's late evening (er, according to my jacked up schedule) and I've eaten properly today!