To Stand Still

That last post wasn't supposed to end on such a low note, but I guess low notes are just what I do.  No matter.  I'm going to try again.



My music taste has been undergoing a major overhaul as of recent.  Really I'm just re-exploring an avenue that I left behind years ago.

In early high school I went through I short phase of listening to bands like Tiger Army and The Horrorpops, which sound like this:





If I remember correctly, this is also when I began reading comics like Hellsing and JTHM.  It kind of makes me laugh to think that I was so stereotypically angst-ridden as a teenager.  Of course, I am, perhaps, still just as stereotypically angst-ridden now.  Depression is always en vogue.

Anyway, most of this stuff got left behind as I got older, except for JTHM because it's funny, not to mention contains one of the more interesting non-fire-and-brimstone versions of hell I've come across (I could do a whole separate entry on media interpretations of hell.  Maybe I will).  But the past few months I've been using Pandora to find music, and since I've been on something of a nostalgia fest, I made a Horrorpops channel, which led from one band to another, to another, and so on.  And you know what?  It's been awesome.  I've found stuff like this:







I'm not sure why these things in particular are resonating with me right now.  Maybe because I'm back home, which has been triggering all sorts of nostalgic fits regarding everything from books to dressing habits.  I really want to leave, to move somewhere else and try life over, I guess.  But that's something else I wish would change.

For about a year I was moving every couple months to an entirely new place.  England to Naperville to Akron to Oxford... I had been some of those places before, in fact, was quite used to them, but the transience of it was nice.  Actually, the past four years of my life I haven't been in once place for more than four months.  Any problem I had, whether it was with a research paper, a person, or myself, could be pushed aside in favor of going back home, going back to school, studying abroad, and so on.

I have been living at home now for seven months.  To put it lightly, I think I'm losing my mind (as if any of the previous entries hadn't already alerted you to that).  Every fiber of my being wants to bolt, to desperately dig for any chance of getting away, to go somewhere else.

The problem here isn't in the physical picking up and moving.  I have always been restless and prone to wandering off, and this was never discouraged by anyone in my life so long as I was careful and promised to come back.  The problem is why.  Dealing with my problems is difficult, and I've pretty much managed to avoid it all for quite some time.  However, no matter how many times I bounce between locales, I can't get away from myself.  Whatever I left behind at school or home is still there whether I am or not, and just because no one around me knows who I am doesn't mean that I've become a different person.

So I'm going to stop it.

I'm embarrassed that I've been conducting myself like this, running away so obviously without even noticing.  Like I said before, so stereotypical.  My inner hipster is horrified at how common I am.

For right now, I'm going to stay put.  The things I want to accomplish can easily be done from here, and if I find that to be somehow less interesting, then I've completely lost my imagination and abilities as a storyteller and there are much larger issues to be addressed.  I will save money and energy.  I will push through the restlessness and hold myself very still.  I will pay attention to my own heart and mind instead of shuffling back and forth from place to place, and when the signs of complete system failure start to present themselves, I will notice them because I am not so incredibly busy with other things.

I don't know how long this will take.  What I do know is that, until I can say with certainty when I move it is towards and not away from something, I will be living in Akron, Ohio.  This makes me sad, because I really want to go somewhere else.  Anywhere else.  But I also want to really enjoy the somewhere else I end up someday, so I know I can't go there just yet.

An Evolution of Self

Life Stress Test

Your Results

You're highly likely to develop a stress-triggered illness due to everything that's going on in your life. However, your coping skills and the efforts you make to reduce stress can minimize this risk. Talk to a mental health professional if you need treatment. Support groups and convenient online forums can be beneficial, too. Common stress-related illnesses to watch out for include:
Back pain
Common cold
Ulcers
Asthma
Allergies
Migraine
Insomnia
Chronic fatigue syndrome
Anxiety
Arthritis
Diabetes
Autoimmune diseases
Depression
Hypertension
Obesity
Heart disease
Heart attack

I got this quiz from OrganizedWidsom.com and I know I just talked about this last post, but I thought it was interesting just how many illnesses are related to stress.  The common cold?

Anyway, this isn't supposed to be about stress.  This is about something else.

The low I was experiencing has largely subsided, which is nice.  I feel much less likely to implode than I did earlier this month.  The urge to blog during this low was strong, but I know that my thoughts tend to take a turn for the weird (not the good kind) at those times, so I felt it best to keep them to myself.

Again, anyway.  A song.  I don't feel like a post is complete without a song.



I've had the past couple days to myself, no work, no friends, no whatever else people usually have occupying their lives.  So I decided to spend this time trying to clean out the room I've been using since I was twelve and try to put all the stuff I own now in it so everything's not just scattered around my parents' upstairs area like so much dust in the wind.  Of course, this hasn't happened, mainly because I found a bunch of old pictures and ended up spending all my time on those.

It's odd to look at old pictures of myself.  I feel like I've changed so much as a person that it's like looking at pictures of someone else, or a series of someone else's I vaguely recall from some point in my past.

Anyway,

I thought I'd put up a few of them, partly for amusement, partly to try and sort out what it is I really feel about them.  Here we go:

This is me around five or six, maybe?  I have no idea.  Either way, I like this picture because I seem kind of really happy in it, which I've found didn't happen much throughout my life.  Usually I'm not smiling at all, or the smile is fake, and maybe I don't have the best smile here, either, but I am clearly thinking something along the lines of "Yeah, look at this spread.  I made out this year."  Good for me.

Fun facts about this picture: that weird little white scraggly thing on the table above my head is an Easter tree.  It had little ornaments of things like bunnies and colored eggs my mom and I would hand on it before we set it out a few days before Easter each year.  My basket of goodies was always sitting under it on Easter Sunday.  I can't remember when that tradition stopped, but I remember that it was fun.  Also, that little doll on the bottom right?  I remember that thing.  It was two-sided, and you could twist the head, middle, and skirt portions to mix and match the designs/faces on both sides of it.  I played with that for years.

In the end, though, it probably got chewed up like most of my other toys.  I've always had a bad habit of chewing on toys, pens, the inside of my mouth, whathaveyou.  That's part of why I have a permanent jaw problem.  Next picture:

Again, I don't know exactly how old I am in this one, but I'm going to guess around nine.  This is around when my "chubby phase" was starting, which lasted until around Jr. High.  The weird thing about this "chubby phase" is that I was made to feel as if I was so fat.  I don't remember who, if anyone, ever implied I was fat or said anything mean to me, but I know I felt different from everyone else and eventually altered (i.e. stopped) my eating habits in order to slim down.

Looking at pictures now I don't think I was very fat at all.  Maybe I was a little bigger than kids my age were then, but why did I feel so bad about myself?  You were fine, little-kid-self, I wish someone had told you that.

Those two other girls in the picture (if it wasn't obvious, I'm far left) are interesting for two reasons.  One, I don't have any idea who they are, but I do know they are older than me.  Two, the distance between me and them, along with my incredibly bad posture, go a long way to explain my failings as a social creature far better than I could ever try in words.  Next:

I am eleven in this picture, and it is the year 2000, if you couldn't tell by that seemingly ghostly image floating behind my head.  It's actually Disney World's Epcot ball with a giant light-up 2000 sitting on top, but it's too dark for you to see the ball itself.  This was taken during a family vacation, and we are waiting for a parade to start.  I had only gotten those glasses within a year or so.  When I was in fifth grade we were learning some math skill using time, and whenever the teacher would call on me to tell her what time it was, I couldn't do it.  She thought I was messing around and verbally chastised me in front of the class on more than one occasion.  However, my parents figured out that, when they pointed something out to me and I said I couldn't see it, it wasn't because I didn't turn my head fast enough.  They took me to the eye doctor and found out I was incredibly nearsighted and could only see about six feet in front of my face.  At school the day after I got my new glasses, I remember the look on my teacher's face.  She was the first adult I had ever seen look so guilty.

Those glasses looked awful, and they were pretty thick since my eyes were so bad.  And that hair looks disgusting, even though I know it was always clean and brushed, and even if I eventually got it cut and sent it to Locks of Love, I can't believe my parents let me look like that.  Gracious.

This is me just a year after that playing Foosball with my brother on Thanksgiving 2001.  My hair is still recovering from the disaster of a cut I got earlier that year.  Around this time is when I started losing weight, and for some reason I know I got that shirt from Marshalls.  This Thanksgiving in particular a lot of family was together (somewhere around forty-fifty people, I think) and the cousins all got together and played a huge game of RISK, which I had never played before.  It was crazy intense, and people stuck around until after midnight to finish it.

My grandfather had died that May.  His death was long and drawn out, which taxed everyone's patience and strength.  The will he left behind also caused some degree of controversy and arguments.  These problems, along with the fact that we had basically just lost the patriarch of our family, caused most of my family to lose contact and drift apart over the years.  Thanksgiving 2001 is one of the last big family gatherings we ever had.

Not at this point exactly, but somewhere near it, is when I started having panic attacks.

This is 2003-2004 during another family vacation.  I saved the picture as "2004" but now that I'm thinking about it I'm pretty sure most of the red had gone out of my hair by the time I started high school, and in this picture it's clearly still visible.  At some point in eighth grade I wanted to dye my hair red.  Fine.  Good for me.  The problem came when, after dyeing it, I didn't wash my hair thoroughly enough, meaning that some of the dye actually sat in my hair over night.  What I ended up with was an alarmingly red mess on my head that practically glowed.  There was little do be done unless I wanted to redye it, so I just left it that way until the semi-permanent dye slowly faded out.  In this picture it's actually starting to tone down.  When it first happened the harsh red coupled with my pale skin made me look kind of ridiculous.

That's my mom with me in the picture, by the way.  We're standing in front of the Dukes of Hazzard car which is kept outside Cooters Place, located in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  My parents are fans of country music, so we've vacationed in Tennessee numerous times.  Around the area of Gatlinburg in particular are fun things like DollyWood, Dixie Stampede (both owned by Dolly Parton), The Comedy Barn, and possibly one of the funniest experiences of my childhood, The House of Knives.  I couldn't find a website for this place, and it might not even exist anymore, but man The House of Knives was crazy.  It was right by our hotel one year, and I made my mom take my inside just because I thought the name was funny.  Inside was basically a giant hunting goods store, specializing in terrifyingly huge and intimidating blades that I'm not even sure you would be allowed to take outside.

The funny things about The House of Knives, though, were the animals.  Lots of hunting stores have stuffed animals mounted on the walls, chilling in corners, etc., but this place didn't just have your run-of-the-mill deer and moose set up.  They had zebras and peacocks and all kinds of weird stuff.  All real.  How on earth did this backwoods paradise for serial killers get a hold of exotic animal corpses?  I thought the whole thing was hilarious.

Maybe my mind has exaggerated somewhat the deadliness of the weapons I saw there, but I know the zebra was real, and the experience took a boring vacation and made it somewhat less so.  More pictures!

Christmas 2006, I think.  This is what I looked like through most of high school, minus the glasses.  I wore contacts almost constantly in high school, except on days when I slept in, like Christmas.  Every year my mother takes pictures of my brother and I with each and every gift, making us hold it up and pose.  Neither of us take it too seriously.  What I'm holding there is a necklace with a dragonfly pendant.  If I recall correctly, I quite liked it and wore it quite a few times until I went to college, at which point I pretty much never dressed up for anything.  Those two strips of hair that are hanging in my face... those have always been a problem.  If you look back up at the picture from 2000 you can see them, one on each side of my head, straying ever so slightly from the rest of my hair.  It doesn't matter what I do with those things, they just don't want to be incorporated into the group.

Though, to prove I did at some points clean up and look nice, I've included one of my senior pictures from high school:

That's about a respectable as I can get.  My ability to smile at this point as been stunted, I think, by years of dealing with blind fear and anger that I could never properly understand or explain to anyone else.  I've been able to learn about what's going on, articulate myself, and cope with my problems better over the years, but those smile muscles still don't work the way they're supposed to.  I can only smile properly for a picture if someone does or says something to make me smile or laugh right in that moment.  Learning how to be happy was very hard, learning how to look like I'm happy might not ever happen.

Maybe it's too subtle for anyone else to see.  This is my with my brother and my father some time in 2007, and this is what I looked like through most of college.  See that little strip of hair separated just a tiny bit from the rest on my head?  See it?

Anyway (last of the entry, I swear), I got bangs a little over a year ago, maybe longer.

I still can't figure out if I like them or not.  This was my profile picture on Facebook for a long time, I just changed it about a month ago.  A couple weeks ago someone commented on it to randomly say they liked it, which made me laugh, because the person in this picture doesn't exist anymore.  The person in this picture has no idea what's going to happen to her in the next year, no idea what she's on the verge of.

This one does:

This is what a person looks like six months after they have a nervous breakdown, I guess.  I genuinely thought I was smiling when I took it.  Oops.

The problem isn't that I'm unhappy.  Almost every day I get to laugh at something and talk to people I love, in fact, I feel happy much more now than I have at most other points in my life.  The problem is that it's impossible to wipe the past off your face.  I'm not trying to say that my life has been difficult, it hasn't.  I am the one who has been difficult.

...

So there's that.

This, On the Other Hand, is No Fun at All

I looked up this video, "Panic Attack", to start out the entry, as most of these seem to start out with music videos, and this came up in the results:



I get you, Mark. I totally get you.

That being said, I'm pretty sure I don't have schizophrenia. Pretty sure.

Anyway, this isn't about schizophrenia, this is about panic, which is back on the rise in my life.  For a while I was trying to figure out what the problem might be, so even if I couldn't fix it I would at least know what I was reacting to.  Then I remembered that, way back in the day, back in jr. high and high school, this happened all the time.  Most of my college career I've had so many things to worry about that I forgot my panic goes on whether there's actual worries to be had or not.

Things really had to calm down for me to panic like this.

Now I know I talk about high school and below a lot, but here's why: my college years are stupid and generally not fun to talk about.  Freshman year was potentially the worst year of my life.  Transitioning from a tiny school I'd gone to my whole life and known everyone to a still-small-but-still-larger-then-where-I-came-from school full of strangers was hard for someone with next to no social skills, and it basically took me the whole year just to find someone I could talk to and genuinely smile at (a friend, so to speak).  Sophomore year was dramatic as all hell because I had friends during it, and a decent portion of it was spent going through withdrawal from escitalopram because I'm a great decision maker who stops her meds cold turkey without consulting her physician.  Junior/senior year (I graduated a year early thanks to PSEO and overlapping humanities majors) was all about finishing my thesis and getting into a grad school I shouldn't have been getting in to once I got back from my term in the UK.

I did blog about studying abroad, and you can read that here if you want to.  The last week or so of the trip isn't on there, though, because I went to Ireland with some friends and immediately after getting back had to fly home, and thanks to layovers and a cramped plane seating I some kind of crazy-intense superflu on my way back and pretty much just laid around stuffed up and helpless until I went back to school in January.  Good times.

And most of what happened after undergrad is on here, so there.  But back to high school.  I will stay on topic here, no matter what.

Disorganized thoughts and "jumpy" thinking are, by the way, symptoms of schizophrenia.

So, high school.  I panicked a lot in high school.  The first panic attack I can remember having was in church, which is perhaps a bit telling, but at the time I had no idea what was going on and it was awful.  I tried telling my mother what happened afterwards, and she identified the episode as a panic attack.  Then I started having them all the time.

If I could describe one, for anyone reading this who doesn't know, a panic attack is like when someone turns the television or radio up so loud that nothing can exist in your mind anymore but the sheer sound of it.  You can't process anything except that there is loud and it should stop, so you pound helplessly on the remote buttons (which under any other circumstances you could operate perfectly) until you by some fluke hit the right one and turn the volume down.  A panic attack is exactly like that, except instead of noise it's fear, and there's no remote.  There's just yourself.

Sometimes I had situation-specific attacks (read the entry on Barbara Walters if you want an example of that), but more often then not they came on randomly when I was doing things like eating lunch or drying my hair.  I got really good at having panic attacks because I had them so often.  It got to the point where I would feel one coming so I'd just find a quiet place to have it out, then get right back to whatever I was doing before.  Once I hit college things got much worse and I had them so often that I was almost always trying to get away so I could panic privately and freely, but there was a difference.  I was panicking for a reason.  Things were stressful and difficult, but knowing the why behind something can make it a whole lot more bearable, so I was almost happier since the attacks were no longer seemingly baseless.

Fast forward four years.  There's nothing going on anymore, and I'm back to the old style out-of-nowhere panic fest. 



So far I haven't had a no-holds-barred, death-feels-imminent-even-though-it's-not style attack, and for that I'm grateful, but that doesn't mean one isn't sitting in the wings just waiting to pounce.  In fact, I'm sure one is.  Life is lived inside one's head, and mine it seems is not wired to sit quietly, even for a second.

In either jr. high or high school, I can't remember which, we learned about depression, along with some other psychological disorders.  The symptoms list for depression was so vague and all-encompassing that lots of people in my class started feeling like they might have it.  Anyway, I think I've just done the same thing with myself and schizophrenia.  It started as a joke but now I'm really reading about it and freaking myself out.

Paranoia is another symptom.

Even More Fun

So, that poem I thought of as fun that I sent to the people who thought the not-fun poem was fun?  I got a response.  They loved it.  To clarify: they said they loved it, but would pass on it unless I took some of their edits into consideration.  Which I did.  It's not like they wanted to change anything major, basically I used the word "that" a lot and they wanted it gone, and I really do think the poem read better without them, anyway.  When I reworked it a bit and sent it again, they took it.

Really.

It was interesting to have the poem sent back the first time with notes on it, like back in my undergrad poetry classes when I would get critiques from my fellow students.  I miss having the input of others in my writing.  Whether I would always do what was suggested is beside the point, I just enjoyed making something and seeing what someone else would do with it.  Most of the time.

FUN!

When I'm having a bad day, this song always makes me feel better. When I'm having a good day, this song takes that day from good to great.

I've been having something along the lines of writer's block recently.  Obviously I've gotten over it to some extent, but I still feel like something is trapped or blocked off somewhere in my head that needs to be gotten at in order for things to progress.  Letting go of the issue entirely sometimes helps things to surface, like when I used to do math homework and sometimes the answers to hard problems would come to me if I stopped working on them.  That's where all this music comes in.

Distraction







That last one is kind of old, not to mention awesome.

The writer's block started, I think, when I got something published.  Of course, the issue I was supposed to be in was late, and for a while I was convinced that my writing had somehow driven the whole operation to shut down.  It usually comes out on the 20th of every month, but the May issue was delayed until just a day or two ago.  If you want to read a few of my poems, along with some other really good stuff, click here.

Anyway, at the time I found out that someone, no matter who, had read things I produced and liked them, I thought I could send things elsewhere and have similar results.  Not the case.

Being rejected is not the worst thing ever.  However, having that rejection contain something so odd you can't even process it makes you kind of want to give up.  I'm sure whoever wrote this particular rejection letter was just trying to make me feel better, and I know it's really hard to give someone bad news with some sort of positive spin, but they really could have done better.  I might be overreacting.  All they did really was call my poem "fun" but essentially not right for their publication.  That word "fun" is the problem.  What I sent them was not "fun".  It was very painful and personal, as most poems are, and I was hurt by what I'm guessing was either a complete misunderstanding or complete disregard of my work.

So, being a person who is all too easily impacted by every minuscule event, I began wondering if anything I write makes sense to anyone other than me and if that other website who took my poems was only being nice and etc. etc. on until all manner of depressing thoughts had been explored.  Then I couldn't write anything.  I try to get out a poem a week, just to keep up some sort of schedule and because I now have the time for such things, but almost three went by and nothing was happening.  The word "fun" had totally destroyed me.

Then some nice things happened.  My friends came home from school, so I had some people to talk to, interact with, and places to be at other than my house or work.  I also found the music I used to listen to back in high school, the punk and the hip-hop stuffs I had been shamed out of keeping around by my cooler hipster college friends.  Now, I've always held on to music like what I mentioned earlier, but that's mainly because it's supposed to be stupid, lighthearted crap for laughing and jumping around.  "Fun" you could say.  What I'm talking about now meant a lot more to me than that.

What I've found out from re-listening is that it still does









And I started feeling better. I am, dare I say it, having fun. There's still that feeling of not-quite-ness in my writing, but at least I am, in fact, writing.

I've taken all this new found energy and put it in to a fun poem.  I've sent that fun poem to the same publication that mistakenly took the other to be "fun".  Maybe they'll notice a difference?

On Wolves

Biology prevails!


This whole video is bonkers, but that line is probably my favorite part of it.  That being said, though, I really do like this song.  And TV On The Radio in general.  And wolves.

Since there is something else that I really want to write about, but I don't feel able to do it just yet, so I am going to talk about this for a while.  Bear with me.

I was obsessed with animals when I was little.  I would often pick one and then research it mercilessly for weeks at a time until I had essentially mastered it, then move on to another.  When I was at a pretending age I almost always pretended to be some sort of animal, usually a dog or a wolf, as those ended up being the types of animals that really held my interest.  Wolves in particular were my knowledge strong point.  I stopped reading and largely caring about wolves around when I entered Jr. High, but I still remember some things about them, like how intelligent they are and how well structured wolf packs really are.

So, when most youngsters where in to Harry Potter, or whatever else kids my age were supposed to be enjoying, I was reading Julie of the Wolves and its sequels.  Again I don't remember much about this, but I know I loved these books and that they fueled my imagination for several years.  My uncle found out about this interest and fueled it further by gifting me on every applicable holiday with little gems like this one:

Note that this is not just a disembodied wolf head, which would really be bad enough, but this is an entire disembodied wolf torso.  I'm not even sure you could call this a disembodied wolf shirt when most of the wold is in fact shown, but they still had to fade out that last bit, as if they cannot make wolf shirts without the wolf fading out to some degree.  You could also consider this shirt to have a bonus because you don't only get the one running wolf, there are more wolves running inside of it.  If only they were fading out as well.  This shirt seriously boggles my mind.

Anyway, I've had this shirt a long time time.  I don't wear it outside anymore, but I'm pretty sure I did at some point, which I think shows that my parents really didn't protect me as well as they should have.  I wear it to sleep now, as it has that perfect amount of wear necessary for a shirt to feel fantastic.  Its also really funny.

I actually had lots of these when I was young, but most of them either wore out or were thrown away in a fit of sensibleness.  Can you imagine that I had trouble socializing as a child?

Like I said before, the wolves were put away around when I turned twelve or thirteen and have largely stayed put locked up in my memory.  However, every once in a while I see something like that TV on the Radio song, and I remember what now feels like a weird dream I had where I thought I was a wolf.  I remember how much I used to know and care about these animals, and how my kid-self had a whole little world built of and around them.

It's interesting for me to find out that wolves factor as symbols into other people's lives as well, and what they mean for them.  One of my poetry-writing friends has a series about wolves that I react to on some core level because of her chosen image.  Any song mentioning wolves appeals to me on some level beyond my own comprehension.  There's really an interesting mix of music here if you click each link.  That last one is some German band I found while looking up these other videos and typing "wolf" so much.  I think this paragraph had intention when it started, but I got so caught up in linking music that it turned into mush.  Ah well.

The point is that I am now permanently set up to feel towards the image or idea of wolves some fundamental emotion stemming from my childhood preoccupation with being something other than myself.

I just figured that out now writing this post.  So at least there's something.

This Ended Up Being About Grammar. I'm Not Sure Why.

Today really was a good day, though I'd have trouble explaining why.  I worked for most of it, and there was definitely the (perhaps even worse than) usual group of bizarre and demanding people, but the point is that I was able to cope with it, which is both new and exciting.  More often than not I am completely unable to gracefully withstand the odd and slightly cruel way sales people are treated.  Of course, I am slowly becoming notorious for relapses, so I'm not expecting myself to respond this well every time, but knowing that I'm capable of doing so will certainly help me along.

If I haven't mentioned this before, I work in a department store now.  In the shoe department, to be exact, which is pretty much what I did back in high school, though I'm not at the same store.  It's a little bit sad to have gone through so much schooling, to have had as many good experiences and opportunities as I've had, just to end up right back where I started.  I'm trying to treat this like a launching point, like a return to zero before going off in a whole new (and hopefully more successful) direction.  In any case, this job is reintroducing me to the non-academic world, which I had almost forgotten existed, and giving me enough funds to keep from defaulting on my student loans.  I'm content with that for now.

Every sentence in that paragraph begins with the letter "I".  A couple of them also begin with the same word, which is somewhat bothersome.  Around 6th or 7th grade, I was told by my English teacher not to start multiple sentences with the same word in the same paragraph.  I'm sure she said this only to prevent the "This happened.  Then this happened.  Then this happened," style that many youngsters are prone to, but this rule had lorded over my writing forever since.  In academic papers, in poetry, even in my own head, I am always aware of what words I'm starting off with and how often they're being used.

I have a similar issue with commas.  If I write a sentence with one comma, or maybe two, the sentences both before and after it must have some other amount of commas.  The sentence structures must be appropriately varied within a given paragraph, so as not to sound monotonous.  Each paragraph would also ideally have at least five sentences.

That one does not.

On one level these rules have done a lot of good for me.  They've forced me to think carefully about what I write and how I write it, which has probably helped make me into a better writer.  However, I know full well that most people do not notice or care about all these little details, and I'm starting to feel like I'm holding myself back by sticking to them so strictly.  In any case, this nothing-alike-too-close-together way of writing is so ingrained in my system that I have to make a conscious effort to go against it.  Maybe someday I'll be able to just type and not over think so much, but for now all I can do is just be aware of my over thinking and over think about it.

Did you count the commas in those last two sentences?  I know I did.

You know, I always start out these blog entries with one idea in mind, only to wander off on some crazy tangent.  This was originally supposed to be about the Jung/Meyers-Briggs personality types, can you believe that?  I've spent so long on this other stuff, though, that I'm not sure I still feel like talking about what I meant to, or that I even remember what I wanted to say.  Maybe next time?