We are desperate, lonely, and underpaid.

[That is from a song. It's not me being pathetically pessimistic. Not at this hour, anyway.]

I have been eating spaghetti leftovers all week long. We always have spaghetti on Sunday, and I usually eat it for a few days afterward... but it seems like we've been having leftovers for a few weeks straight now. Which is weird... you'd think that to have leftovers, you'd need to be making food to begin with. Not so. Ever since Mom decided to eat healthier (she also exercises in the mornings. crazy woman.), she's been making her own meals of salad and vegetables, leaving me and Dad to fend for ourselves. I don't mean to say she's neglectful. She would share if we wanted her vegetables. But my father and I are stubborn and stuck in our carb-influenced ways and would sooner starve or get by on whatever scraps we happen to have around. And this we have been doing. It's been going alright, but I came home from school just now and would kill for a burrito. Actually I don't like burritos. Tacos are good, or better yet a taco salad. Apparently it's bad form to crunch up your taco and make taco salad. But I don't understand how to eat tacos, the way they're given to you. If God had intended us to eat a taco without inconvenience, he would have put our mouths vertically and on the sides of our heads.

This has been a strange week. Thinking back on it, nothing really terrible happened, but it was somehow difficult to get through. Seemingly impossible, at times. I suppose I had what Holly Golightly would call the mean reds. "The blues are because you're getting fat and maybe it's been raining too long, you're just sad that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of." All week - yesterday especially - I was slightly panicked whenever I thought about having to go somewhere. Which is bad for me nowadays, considering the fact that I'm always going somewhere. I was talking to Amelia the other night, and I can't remember exactly what it was about, but it was one of those discussions of ours that takes place almost entirely in analogies and often has two or three meanings. I think it may have been on the subject of happiness and "being" where you are. (Only I don't believe either of us used cliches like that.) She said that there are some people who are good at "being there". I found myself saying that that is too bad, because I'm almost always someplace else.

It's an age of extremes. I'm either driving myself crazy because I feel trapped or else I'm terrified of stepping out of the front door. The former is more frequent, but the latter is more disturbing. It's probably a good thing that I'm forced to go as many places as I am, even the places that I don't like. Otherwise I might just turn into a shut-in and be driven insane by cabin-fever but powerless to do anything about it. That is probably the worst fate I can think of.

My head's been in a weird place these days, too. [Not literally, I hope, although it depends on where I am, I suppose.] You know that feeling you get when you've been daydreaming and you suddenly snap out of it? It never takes long to recover, but in that instant, you take in your surroundings and make sense of them to remind yourself of where you are and what you're doing. Your mind does all of this in less than a second, but if you're especially deep in your distraction, you can catch some of the questions that your brain is working to answer. This happens to me when I wake up sometimes. Once, a week or two ago, I actually woke up as I was sitting up and asking myself (out loud), "What day is it?" Which was a little concerning. ANYWAY. There's that sense of snapping out of something and coming to an acute (though brief) acknowledgment of confusion. This has been happening to me constantly throughout the past few days, and not even when I've been daydreaming. Simple things, things that I have known for a long time, are suddenly becoming complex concepts that I feel like I have thought about, but never fully understood. How is it that I made it to seventeen, and am just now wondering what makes the moon glow? Or how languages develop? Or how people discovered that talking could turn into singing? It's like the trailers for that movie, "Limitless", where the guy says that people only have access to 20% of their brains. I feel like perhaps I only ever had access to 20% of my questions. And now somehow I've got access to them all and I can't stop them coming, and I can't answer them, either. Which is annoying, but not entirely bad. If we had all the answers we'd stop asking questions.

I switched out my sad songs CD in Peter's stereo last night and put in Johnny Cash. Sometimes he can be annoying but I'd say that I genuinely love about half the songs on the CD; the ones that aren't completely bouncy and annoyingly countryish. I've noticed that my mood phases usually last about as long as I keep a CD in that stereo, so I'm calling an official end to the mean reds, as of last night. It's the Cash Era now, whatever that means. I will not be driving a truck or wearing a cowboy hat any time soon. But maybe I'll be better at "being there".

Mom just came home and said, "Hi, my Laura. We'll have tacos tonight, if you help me." I love it when people unknowingly make your day.