9:25 p.m. - 04/13/03
we didn't light it ... but we tried to fight it.
I'm still not sure how one or two shitty circumstances manage to tip the scale against twenty good ones. I think it has something to do with being overtired, stressed, dealing too much with my family of origin and too little with that of my destination. I need to call Rogers and talk to Steph; I've decided that's worth doing. She matters more than that much. I talked to Shan about it last night, and I was going to try and call this morning, even though I wasn't sure if she was working, and then again Monday if I didn't get her. I didn't call this morning, though, as I was feeling awful. Also, it's harder to call the morning staff, because I have to deal with the switchboard people, who are always really efficient and not-unkind, but are, after all, another unfamiliar voice on the line. Still. I have hard evidence that she wants me to call, and maybe I can hang onto that. Even if it's changed, there's nothing wrong in me for not knowing that, nothing wrong in me for making this call.
I need to just vent out the things that suck, so that I can stop feeling sick on them. My dad attacked my music today, which we know from the past, never goes well. He asked me if Evolve was just an entire cd of Ani ranting, which seriously pissed me off. He told her (through the speaker) to shut up, to calm down, to stop being so darn angry all the time. And I just wanted to smack him. Evolve isn't a rant cd at all, and the man doesn't even hear lyrics, so how the hell can he be upset by them? Plus, he knows I love this music, and he just rips it apart anyway. And telling me not to listen to my music is like telling me not to say the things that music says - instating a silence which is so painful. A silence which is too painful. And granted, we were listening to "Serpentine" which is long and politically-focused, but that still didn't give him the right. I hate this concept that those who point out the problems are those causing them. Like the lyric is the problem, instead of the injustice which inspired it. What sense does that make? It doesn't make sense. We aren't too angry or too sensitive or too vocal. If anything, we're not angry and sensitive and vocal enough. Jesus. Think women for a second. Are women really angry and sensitive and vocal enough? We're just decades a part from a time where we weren't allowed to be angry or to speak out of turn. How can we possibly have gone too far? How can anyone possibly have the right to deem what too far is, not knowing the pain we have to fight against, the centuries against which we must balance? Jesus. There's shit in the world, and in my music, people talk about it. Why is that so fucking wrong? He said she needed to just be happy, and I said he could have her listen to some of his music, as it would thoroughly sedate anyone for a good three days. For Christ's sake, if I never hear another Perry Como song in my fucking life...
And I came home to a message from Dixie which correlates to a phone number logged on the id as a hospital. Someone want to tell me why the fuck she's in the hospital? I know that this is like meds. It's better to be glad that she's there if she needs to be, than angry that she needs to be. (The way it's better to be grateful that I have meds which help than to whine about having to take them.) But I don't know how to be ok with this. Unless you are Shannon, you have no idea how much shit I've endured just in the past three days due to eating disorders. My own excluded, even. And I just want to smash things. I just want to break the world, and then someone comes in and says, "don't fuel the fire" and I just want to smack them. If they were in my skin, they would know how badly certain elements of our world need to burn. They would know how much pain really is possible in this world. But they don't. They just live in their little 50s throwback worlds listening to bubblegum music, without the slightest idea what it's like to go to sleep afraid your friends are dying, to not know when someone you love is in the hospital, or if they need to be, to know that at any second you could lose someone, and if it were to happen you might not even know. I am not minimizing what's going on in the Middle East when I say that I went to war two years and four months ago. I have been at war for two years. I have fought for my own life for eighteen. Fought against society and disease; fought with every fiber, and I just don't want to hear it anymore. I've held girls thinner than mannequins, girls whose clothes can't cushion me against their bones. My friends aren't dying in car wrecks. My friends are having strokes and heart attacks, so don't tell me I can't be angry. My government is more worried about oil than about the fact that its healthcare system has a policy of answering requests for financial support with "no" the first time because few people think to call back. My government is more worried about its imperialist desires than the fact that if they hadn't kicked her out of the hospital prematurely, Tracy might still be alive. My government is more worried about preserving its image than honestly living up to it. This should never ever fucking happen. No one should ever deal with this. I should not be completely disconnected from my family, no clue where half of them are, no clue where I belong without them, or if they're alive...I never gave permission for that to be the reality.
And it doesn't have to be. That's what's so screwed up is that they could change it if they wanted to. If someone in power actually cared, they could change it. The flick of a pen, the vote of a majority, bam, all these lives are saved. But I guess presidents and senators and representatives can fund their kids' hospital stays. I guess they don't have to worry whether their friends are alive or dead. I guess they don't have trouble breathing or sleeping, or hesitate to make a phone call, afraid of who might *not* be on the other line. I'm in a terrorized third-world country, too. I'm being beaten and shot at and "liberated" and lost, too. When will someone step up and recognize this pain? I have all the words I'll ever need. Now tell me. What do I have to do to have them heard? What do I have to do?
I don't know how to live in a world where this continues. I almost understand capital punishment. I want to take this disease and kill it for its crimes, kill it to prevent anything ever happening again. I want it dead and painfully. This fucking menace, this fucking death.
The better I get, the more I see how bad it really is. And I'm scared, so scared, to see it fully. Somebody steady me; I don't want to open my eyes.
chord
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