GAH!

A few days ago, I was feeling frustrated by the impossibility of communication with certain people in my life, and felt the need to vent a bit. So I wrote this post, with, by my count, six basically positive comments, two negative, and one neutral. Of the two negative comments, one was in reference to food left out by a housemate to rot--not sure which housemate, which frustrated me because I would have loved to have spoken with them directly. To the best of my knowledge, none of the housemates has a LiveJournal. Which leaves one and only one negative comment anyone on LJ could possibly even think was in reference to them.

Look--if you are my friend, if you know that I have a high opinion of you, why would you read

"You think nobody notices what your real obsession is? Dream on, honey. People become what they focus on, and what you're focusing on isn't pretty. You haven't yet become the thing you hate, but you are closer to it now than you were a year ago."

and think it applied to you? I can understand having a paranoid attitude, and having as your first reaction to a negative the thought that it was a negative reference to you. I can understand that a first reaction is something over which you have little to no control. I get that. But afterwards, when you have time to think, anything you believe after that is your choice. Why would you choose to believe negative things about yourself?

The post was never meant as "One of those posts about people on my friends list--let's see if they can guess who I mean, ha ha!" It's not about you at all. It was a journal post. This is my only journal, and I had a really desperate need to say a few things I could not, for one reason or another, actually say to the people I wanted to talk to. Even the positive things aren't always things you can say directly to people, or at least they're not things I could say directly to the people I wanted most to speak to that morning. I felt if I couldn't say them to someone, somewhere, I would explode.

It wasn't about you. It was only a page in somebody's diary.


All this reminds me that pronoia really needs to get more active.

Happy notes

The National Cherry Blossom Festival is going on now, and the cherries are verrry close to peak bloom. The weather in DC is expected to be a bit cooler than normal, but it looks like there will be some good days for visiting the cherry trees this week.

For those of you who love to cook (or maybe you just love cherries), some DC-area restaurants offer cherry-blossom-inspired recipes.

In personal news:

The mouth is vastly improved. I have had three dental visits so far, with my fourth (last? I hope?) this coming week. Gums still iffy, but pain is greatly lessened and I can eat most foods now. Yay!

New housemates. I like 'em. I'm still trying to remember all their names (especially since one of them reminds me very, very much of a friend of mine, while having the same name as a fictional character she doesn't resemble at all), but so far we're all getting along (aside from a few kitchen-related incidents, which one hopes were anomalous and will never happen again).

Oh, from a post I began last week but never finished:

For DC-area travelers, WMATA's website has a very useful feature that enables you to easily plan a trip from A to B without having to juggle half a dozen bus & train schedules all by yourself. For just about every combination of places, times, and preferences you feed it, it will give you three possible itineraries to get you where you want to go. But when there is only one obviously good way to get to someplace, sometimes the site has to stretch a bit in order to give you any alternatives.

What was the site's third suggestion for me this morning? From the Metro station, walk about 1/3 of a mile to catch a bus to take me back to the Metro station before continuing along on the obvious route.

I shall end this with a quiz gacked from cowboybud:
( How happy am I? )