I wish I knew right now what I was feeling. My emotions are this tightly knotted mass of disjoint and tangled threads that all interleave into a Gordian Knot, matching the lump in my stomach that refuses to settle.

Shay moved out this morning. Like when Tanya left, I didn't get to say good-bye. I'm not sure I could have. I don't even know if I wished I could. I wish I'd had the option, but if I had could I have not done it? I feel at once like I failed her as a sister, like I failed myself as a protector and guardian, and like she failed me as a friend. Buried deeply beneath the mask she wears is the person I invited into my family, but that person is so deeply hidden that I sometimes question whether it existed at all, and I hate saying that because that can only lead me to question whether asking her to be a member of my extended family was worth the effort at all, which means so many months of wasted effort and so many resources poured into a black hole.

I feel a bit like a failure towards my mate, as well, in spite of the assurances to the contrary. It's not my place to discuss reasons or details, but the short form is that I got very pushy about something that I didn't need to push, then caught the brunt of an emotional blast caused by many more things than just the moment's excess. Things just slowly seemed to slide from there, until finally Jessie and I sort of crawled into bed and I fell apart.

Usually, a good night's sleep is all I need to recover from these kinds of divots, but today I find myself no better than last night. If anything, I feel worse because now I have the sense that I should have gotten better and didn't, and I don't know why. I've had Elton John's "The Panic In Me" off of the El Dorado soundtrack stuck in my head since I woke up, and it certainly hasn't helped.

I'm having a horrible time controlling my weight right now. My height is still upsetting to me, and I have trouble believing that it will ever be "acceptable" to me. At best, it will be "tolerable," but that's hardly the same thing. Unfortunately, at least partly because of this immutable and unwanted truth about my physical form, keeping the
rest of the things I can control in check has been much harder than I would like.

I haven't dilated in months now, again. That, like my weight, is one of those things that I wish would just happen but that I can't seem to make happen by myself, a fact that bothers me even more than before. Jessie used to complain about the effort involved in hair-removal, and I always said that if zie really wanted it badly enough zie would find the will to make it happen, but that's not true and recognizing that makes me feel even more out-of-sorts. I have so many things that, if I had the will, I would simply do, but that never get done for one reason or
another. It certainly isn't that I don't want them. It's that I can never make myself stick with them.

Today is the one-year anniversary of my surgery, not counting differences in timezones and other negligible details. I've only ever made love with Jessie once, and despite how desperately I want to be able to do it again, I can't seem to spend the effort it takes to stay on top of what I have to do to make myself ready for it. I should be happy that it's been a year since I did this. I should be ecstatic that my surgical scars have all healed according to every medical text. I'm only disappointed in my own inability to live up to my expectations.

I still don't have a job. My creative endeavors are all languishing in pieces. One of the players in my weekly Werewolf game won't make it this week and may have to drop out, which might end up killing the story. I
couldn't even look at the scale this morning. My unemployment checks haven't arrived yet this week, and I've got a pile of bills I need to pay. 

It's very hard for me not to feel like a failure right now.

---

It's now 19h00 by my desktop clock, and while I can't say I feel better than I did this morning, I'm not suffering from it in any immediate sense. More than anything, it feels "behind." It's no longer an immediate and crippling sensation but a painful memory. More than anything, right now I just feel sort of blah. I fell back into bed as soon as I stopped writing this morning, and I didn't get up until five minutes ago. I woke up several times during that period, but I never managed to overcome inertia enough to actually go do anything.

I really didn't feel like there was anything to do, I suppose. I had no reason to leave the bed. I'm sure I could've found semi-productive things on which to work, like the renown backlog for my Werewolf game or any one
of a hundred different stories that I have pending for one reason or another, but likely if I had gotten out of bed I would've spent the day spodding with Xenosaga, trying to get chaos to level fifty to see his last deathblow (I
know the game calls them Tech Attacks, but I agree with the people at GameFAQs that say that's a lame translation). 

Spod is a powerful thing. It's any activity that's a timewaster, that you know is a timewaster, that you can do with minimal effort or concentration. By "timewaster," I mean an activity whose goal is ultimately unimportant. Ship-in-a-bottle building or writing JAPHs are not spod; they have some sort of vaguely tangible outcome. Playing pick-up sticks with yourself is spod, unless you're deliberately trying to build your hand-eye coordination.

The typical example of spod is endlessly levelling characters in a console RPG long past the point of being able to beat the game, and I excel at it. Most of the games I've played, I have a save-state somewhere on a memory card or floppy disk that's designated my spod state, and I've likely hit the final boss but have backtracked to some area of the final dungeon or another and just sit and take on fight after fight to pick up stuff and gain experience. Usually, this is to see just how high I can push the experience point counter or the HP counter or some other numerical statistic. 

I've been spodding with Xenosaga a lot lately. I beat the game five days after I got it, but the ending was so phenomenally unrewarding that I keep playing it because I feel like I got no closure out of it. That and, frankly,
I'm tired of everything else I've got at the moment and nothing else new will be out for a while that interests me, and so Xenosaga has been my drug of choice during the long, empty stretches of day while Jessie's at work and I
don't feel like I can be productive at a jobsearch. 

I got Master of Orion 3 when it arrived, as well, but it was a huge disappointment. I like empire-building, but I hate political games, and MoO3 took all the empire-building factors in MoO2 and stuffed them behind a wall
of AI, and took all the political stuff that had been secondary to the previous game and made them the focus, which meant that everything I enjoyed I couldn't do, and everything I found tedious was now the point. It's the
first PC game I've ever returned out of disgust. Not the first game ever, to be sure; that was Legend of Mana. I think honestly I disliked this even more than that.

I keep saying I have things I should be doing. I could be dilating. I could be writing. I could be out walkies. I could be managing my free time in some sort of useful fashion, but I never have. When I've got sixty things I
must do, not only do I get them all done but I manage to squeeze in ten things I want to do in the same time because I turn into a blizzard of productivity, and I can keep that up indefinitely; I did for three years at the end of my stint in college. When I've got nothing I have to do, or only one or two things, they never get done because I turn into a perpetual procrastinator. "I've got all the time in the world to work on it" because my excuse for everything, and then nothing ever gets done. The stuff I should be doing gets delayed because I don't feel like doing it right now and I know I can do it later. The stuff I want to be doing I feel guilty doing because I have things I should be doing that hang over me, but never get finished.

I'm a horrible time-manager, and I recognize it, but I'm never sure how to fix it shy of just doing things, and that doesn't happen, even though it should. I'm such a joyful bundle of neuroses. It's a wonder I'm not in a Happy Coat somewhere singing to my socks.