Chapter 206: Behind These Hazel Eyes

After two nights in a row of video blogging instead of actually writing you would think there would be a lot of space to cover, right? Well, there’s not really. I mean, I guess there is but none of it is substantial enough to really discuss in too much depth. To be perfectly honest, I am feeling kind of depressed right now and it is putting a gloomy shade over all of my thoughts. If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know that this isn’t something that happens to me often. What you wouldn’t know from this blog, though, is that it is something that used to happen to me quite frequently – in fact, it would happen to me all the time, on a daily basis. Prior to 2007 I had a tendency to get very depressed very often. Then, in early 2007, I found the cure to this depression. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t find the cure to anybody else’s depression or anything but I did find the cure to my depression. The issue is, I don’t know what that cure actually was. In 2007, I had a bit of a spiritual awakening and suddenly started to see the world in a brand new way – a positive way. Before that time, I had never stopped and thought that maybe choosing to look at the brighter side of life could make a difference. It really does make a difference, though, and even though I have wavered from this whole philosophy a bit it still makes a major difference in my life. Just the fact that I don’t feel this way normally is a major difference. I am just having an off night, I suppose. I don’t even really know how to explain the way that I am feeling right now. I sat down and tried to start writing this blog three hours ago and nothing would come out. So, I distracted myself with random web browsing and experimentation with makeup for two and a half hours then decided that I would do a third night of video blogging. Then I spent about 30 minutes searching for a spot with better lighting than the spot I usually do it from, since the cat is sleeping on my bed right now and I don’t necessarily want to disturb her. Somewhere in this whole process I just started feeling really down. I don’t know why or what prompted it or anything. There are a few different things that I think could be contributing factors in this feeling, though.

First of all, I haven’t done any cleaning this weekend. The house isn’t necessarily any messier than it was when my Mom left on Friday but it isn’t any cleaner, either. I feel kind of guilty about this because I should have gotten SOMETHING done. At the same time, though, I do still have two more days off that I can use for cleaning. In fact, I have two more days off that I absolutely must use for cleaning. My Grandma on my Mom’s side, the one who I went to see back when I had just started this blog, is arriving on Thursday. That means that we have four days to get this place ready for her arrival. I am really excited to see my Grandma, though. After several years of not having seen her, it was really nice to back in November and now to be seeing her again less than a year later is really cool. Then on Friday my aunt and cousin from LA are arriving, which I am also extremely excited about. I haven’t seen them since the last time I was out in California, in December 2007. It is all really exciting. Still, I really need to get to work on cleaning this house up. For me, personally, it’s not that big of a deal but I know it is really important to my Mom to get this place looking nice before they get here. I can understand it, too, because this is the first time any of her family is coming to visit us at our home here in Florida. I can definitely understand wanting it to look nice and make a good impression. So, since she was away this weekend with her boyfriend, it kind of became my job to get that done. I completely failed at that task, unfortunately. Like I said, though, I still have two days off that I can totally use to get everything done that needs to be done. It’s not like there is that much left to do, anyway. I will get it done. Therefore, I have officially negated that reason to feel depressed.

Another factor in this feeling may be money. I was a little foolish on Thursday evening and ordered two new MAC eye shadow pans for my Pro Palette, even though I knew that I would be a little short on money this paycheck. I mean, I didn’t have a short paycheck but I had to put out money on more things than usual, like a gift for my brother’s wedding. Plus, it is the opening weekend of Sex & The City 2, which you surely know based on the videos from the past 2 nights. It was a foolish decision to order anything this weekend. Still, something in my head told me that since I still had enough left to cover it out of my last paycheck I should go ahead and do it. On Saturday, I spent money on the movie, Starbucks and bought some new facial cleansers. After that, I looked at my bank account and kind of came to realize that I screwed up. I screwed up pretty badly, actually. I mean, none of this cost all that much and I did get my brother’s wedding gift covered Friday night. Still, after all of that and once I pay for my piano lessons for the next month, I am going to be left with about $30. I was supposed to go ahead and buy tickets for my Mom and I to see Sex & The City 2 tomorrow night but that would be $20. I really can’t do that. I am considering asking my Mom if we can put off seeing it together until after we get paid again because I really can’t afford it. The other thing I am considering is putting off paying for my piano lessons until my next paycheck. They have a thing posted on the wall at the Allegro Academy that says that there is a $5 charge for each week after the first lesson of the month that you don’t pay. So, if I could pull off paying two weeks late and just paying an extra $10 it would solve a lot of my problems as far as money goes. I think I will call them tomorrow and inquire about that. Or maybe I could pay half this time and half at my next lesson. Even that would be a HUGE help. They seem pretty flexible with things so hopefully that won’t be an issue. If I can pull that off, I won’t have any major financial trouble at this point. Therefore, I have partially, or possibly temporarily negated that reason to feel depressed.

This third thing that may be contributing to this negative feeling is one that is a little difficult for me to discuss. Everybody who knows me can tell that I am a very confident person. I certainly have insecurities but it isn’t often that I let them show. The main reason that I don’t let them show often is because I don’t let them create an issue for me often. What those same people who know me don’t necessarily know is that I don’t have a whole lot of concern with beauty, in the sense of my own physical beauty. I definitely understand that I have my shortcomings and I have my advantages. How those balance out in my head depends on the day, really. Still, more often than not, I have no problem looking at myself in the mirror and recognizing my own beauty. I know what you must be thinking – how can I say I am not overly concerned with my own physical beauty when I wear makeup to work every day and such? The reason I am able to say this is because I don’t really think of makeup as something that I do to enhance my physical appearance. I mean, it does enhance my physical appearance and I love that about it, but that’s not really what it’s about. Makeup does make me feel more beautiful than I do without it but that is not my purpose for wearing it, either. The reason I wear makeup is because it allows me to express myself in a creative way on a day-to-day basis. I don’t necessarily think of makeup as something that I do to make myself more beautiful. It’s more something that I do to make myself more interesting, I guess. It is like creating a work of art on my face every day – it allows me to display exactly what I want to the world on any given day. It does make me feel more beautiful but I don’t harbor the illusion that anybody else looks at it and thinks I am more beautiful because of it. In any sense, as I was mentioning before, I am not overly concerned with my own physical beauty but there are certainly moments where these types of concerns can creep up on me. When those moments come, it isn’t pretty. On Saturday, I happened to get a look at myself in the mirror naked from a very unusual angle, which I am not going to detail here or anything, and I couldn’t help but feel like it looked pretty gross. This kind of catalyzed a whole onslaught of thoughts in my head about my body. I don’t know how another person would feel about seeing me in a position like the one I caught myself in. This got me thinking about sex. I haven’t had it in a pretty long time and I am beginning to feel the desire to partake in it again sometime soon. Still, seeing myself in this way made me start to feel like it is a lot farther off than I initially thought. What could I expect some guy I want to sleep with think of what I saw if I thought it was gross? At the same time, what business do I have presenting something that I thought was gross to somebody else? How can I go out into the world and seek companionship from somebody else knowing that my body is not something that I would find appealing? If I don’t find it appealing, why would anybody else? Still, I am working on it. I have stepped up my workout a lot recently and intend to step it up even further in the coming weeks. I may not be happy with my body right now but one of life’s greatest gifts is the fact that we have the power and ability to change anything that we aren’t happy with. So, I will push forward with my working out until I can manage to change my physical situation into exactly what I want it to be. If somebody comes around in the meantime who finds what I have to offer appealing then I will deal with it when it comes. In the meantime, my focus will remain on getting myself to a shape that I am happy with. More importantly, I will focus on doing it not for the sake of attracting anybody else but for the sake of being able to become what I want out of somebody else. After all, if I try to seek out a person without feeling like what I have to offer is equivalent to what they are offering me it will only end badly. Looking back on many of my relationships in the past, this has been a large issue for me. It’s not one that has ever been communicated to the person I was with but it has always been an issue in my head. In fact, that has often been what has shaped the choices I make in people I am attracted to. I always go for people who I feel are considerably more attractive than I am but also considerably less intelligent or interesting than I am. This always becomes an issue for me. So, I need to focus on becoming the type of person I want to find in life. I need to, like that stupid gay self-help book, “Find The Boyfriend Within.” Therefore, I have kind of sort of negated that reason to feel depressed.

As a matter of fact, somewhere in the process of writing this blog I have managed to stop feeling depressed. It’s kind of a shame it took this long, though, because there were so many fun, less substantial topics I could have discussed like how I recently discovered that I have hazel eyes! I can now sing that Kelly Clarkson song, “Behind These Hazel Eyes,” and totally mean it! I suppose it is good that I did this blog, though. If nothing else, it proves that there is a little something more than the eye can usually see “behind these hazel eyes.” I totally just set up that statement so I could use that little play on words. It doesn’t make it any less true, though. In any sense, it has been a very long day… not because I was doing any sort of work or anything. I basically spent all day finishing off the season of “The Vampire Diaries,” which had an amazing first season, by the way, and doing laundry. I did a bit of piano practice, as well. I spent 30-45 minutes at the piano, which would normally be a really good thing but in this case it was not. I am just having a lot of trouble really getting this new piece. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it is printed so small. I have trouble reading the notes in the first place and, if I am reading them correctly, they are all really far apart, which makes them kind of difficult to play. I don’t know. There are just a lot of factors that are making this one really rough for me. I think I am going to call Viktor tomorrow to see if I can get some guidance on it. I thought about calling today but I don’t know what it is – I just feel bad calling him on the weekend. You know, it’s his time off. Tomorrow, though, I definitely will. In fact, maybe I can discuss the money issue with him directly instead of calling the school. I don’t know, though. It’d probably be a better idea to speak with the school since I make the payments to them, not to Viktor directly. Either way, getting both of these things handled are at the top of the list of priorities for tomorrow. In the meantime, though, it is 4:15am and the first thing on the list of priorities right now is getting to bed. Goodnight.