Yeah well, I'm pretty damn lonely! My Boyfriend (or whatever the hell it was we had... long story) dumped me two weeks ago! For various reasons. It's just my luck that I fall in love with someone, and he decides it's not working, and that he doesn't really want to be in a relationship right now cause he's trying to get his life in order (as am I!!!), and that what we had was never really established in the first place! Well, I'm not the one who assumed we were 'together' because we sleeped together... and HE was the one who went after ME. And on top of that, NEITHER of us WANTED a relationship in the first place!!!!!! and now this! But he 'still wants to be friends.' WELL! Make my life complete there why don't ya! Thanks a whole fucking lot Donavin... I swear, I take a risk in possibly getting hurt, and I get crushed... Men suck. How do we live with ourselves?!?!?!? -------- Jeremy (otherwise known as NIHIL)

if you feel lonely, you should start reading all those books you've always meant to get around to.

Yes, I am very prone to loneliness. I do like "alone time" but doing much of anything outside of my apartment, I want to be doing it with a friend or lover. I hate when I tell people I'm lonely and they turn it around to be my fault, tell me I need to learn to love being alone before I can even think about wanting someone in my life. Like there is something wrong with needing other people, like it makes me defective. Hello? Are you out there?

Yeah, we're out here Chris. What's your story? Male or female? Age? Do you get out much? Meet cool people at work or no? After work? I don't think you necessarily "need to learn to love being alone before" seeing other people, but you should learn to love yourself before trying it on other people.

i had an epiphany several weeks ago. i was on the edge, as i often find myself. i had the plan all figured out, as i often do. this time i was sure that there wouldn't be any mistakes. i went down to the pool and put my feet into the water. and i sat there feeling the coolness on my feet and legs, and i felt it. i closed my eyes and let all of the loneliness wash over me. it was intense and uncomfortable, but i sat there and felt every feeling that passed through me. I didn't run and hide. I didn't try to surround myself with people in a fucked up attempt to mask my loneliness. and then it was over. it wasn't so scary it wasn't so bad. i felt the feelings and i lived. so... my epiphany is that avoiding the feelings only make them worse. embrace your loneliness feel it to its deepest and then it leaves you.

Yeah, good point, Bell. I've recently been doing this public speaking class because I am terrified of speaking in public. This class allows you to feel the fear you're feeling and embrace it, and not run from it, nor try to hide it from others. Once you can admit to yourself that you have the fear, it's not so bad.

Lonliness is something I feel when I am either truly alone, or even in a group of people, or even a crowded room. I feel it a lot, and yes, that is the depression talking somewhat. I have been on medication for it since I was in the 7th grade, so don't try and tell me that that is what I need. Anyway, I feel alone when I am with people, because I feel alienated, especialy since my cousin Erin has integrated into my circle of friends. She is the beautiful type, modeling career and all. This guy today asked me if she was the person I had had "lesbian encounters" with (yes, I know, he is stupid), anyway, I said "no, she is my cousin" he then stared blankly at my face, and I already knew what question was floating in his head, and that was "Why don't you look like her" So I promptly answer the unasked question with a, "Well, I know, we look nothing alike" he said "yeah, she is pretty" And to actually think I liked him! Anyway, I have digressed. So, now, I feel even more alien like in my own enviroment, I used to be talking, and stuff like that, but now, I stand there, like I am invisible, as I see myself slowly being pushed out of the crowd. I want to be alone now, because I know that is the only place I will not be rejected. I sleep excessivly, and I am going down into that black hole again.....I don't know where it will end, or if it will....

Hey, I've gotten that line, too! In relation to my mother: "You're her daughter? Wow, you look nothing alike! I mean, she's so pretty..." I've never been able to think of something witty with which to respond. I usually just mutter, "Yeah, I know, I look like my dad." Do you guys know what the left-out feeling is? Let me try to explain. This is the peculiar feeling you get when you're in a social situation, and everyone is behaving in a way that to you seems strange and unheard of, but seems normal to everyone else. So it's like there's a social rule or context or something that you just don't know or never learned or weren't taught. So you can't participate. Example: I remember being in 10th grade...in February...a few weeks after the Valentine's Dance...in homeroom. Everyone (but me...but that's not the point) had gotten their formal pictures back and were showing them to each other. When someone would hand me her picture, I would usually ask about her boyfriend (how they met, how long they had been together, etc.). I noticed, however, that everyone around me would always first say "your dress is pretty, etc" then "oh, he's cute, etc" in that order. It was like protocol or something that they were following. But I didn't follow it, because I didn't know about it...no one had ever taught me or I had never learned on my own. And when I noticed the protocol and my inability to follow it, in a sudden wave I felt weird and awkward and deficient and, well, left out. What's so special about that? Nothing, except this is a discrete emotion peculiar to this sort of situation and it doesn't have a formal name. It's not embarrassment. It's not loneliness. It's not rejection. It's the left-out feeling. Except that's such a clumsy name. I need to come up with a new word. Second thing to say: I noticed something about myself last Friday. I never let myself fit in. When I'm around really proper, refined people, I act obnoxious and rough. When I'm around rough people, I act prissy and delicate. It's like I always have to balance the situation out. But no one ever balances it out with me. It's everyone on one end of the spectrum and lonely me on the other end. That's so annoying, and I don't know what I can do to stop it. Forcing myself to go along with everyone else doesn't help because that increases my discomfort, which makes me act even more awkward. So I just make a point of letting people know that I'm just socially inept and they shouldn't expect me to fit in. That way there are no expectations for me to fail to live up to.

Oh Rhi, you are so like me in that respect. I never fit in. I dont worry about it much tho.

Yeah, I know the left-out feeling. That sense of being in a crowded room and having no idea about what's going on? Sometimes I feel more lonely with people than without.

everyone feels that way, i would argue. at least sometimes. rhi, hang out with me, i'll balance with you

or take a nap and try again later.

I once thought, "One day I'll be dust and I won't be able to seperate myself from the world. Until then, I'll always feel alone." I have an inner life that seems incommunicatable, at least to those I've tried to communicate it. Some thoughts and concepts are largeish chunks that dissolve when I try to shit them out. Others only present themselves when they're unneeded, like the thought of the lime green, exceedingly bright school building I had a dream about two or three years ago. This strange inner life seperates me from others. No one is on the same wavelength, it seems, so it only makes sense that I'd feel lonely, especially when I'm around other people. They just remind me of my fundamental lack of connection. Only solitude and silence (of the "nobody's speaking to me" variety) let me connect to those things that are connectable: the wind in a storm, my body, a computer, my cat, a hot humid sweaty forest.

The thing about the inner life, and this is a function of being human, is that it is by its very nature incommunicable. Wittgenstein actually has a big piece on this in Philosophical Investigations (I highly recommend it to everyone, it is fantabulous and is aphoristic in style so that you consume all you desire in a single sitting; all you CARE to eat). He basically says that the notion of a private language (a philosophical construct he beats the stuffing out of) is nonsense because language is a social, that is shared, artifact. If you are thinking things you have difficulty finding the words for (I do this all the time) then you cannot articulate this interior morass, hence it is for others precisely unknowable. I like this about being human. It is the epistemological and existential divide. It cannot be bridged so that someone else has full access. Nor can you access someone else's interiority. Here's how I like to think of it: think of language as a bridge maker. The good thing about this for me is that there are many bridges I like over bodies of water I find uninteresting. Anyway, so the potential to build bridges exists, but they can't be directly to one another: identity basically means that you can only be fully identical with yourself and, I might add, only at any given second. Narrative provides the temporal continuity. I'm digressing. But these bridges...they just head out from someone into the great beyond. Keep being added to without a discrete destination. Occasionally they intersect and sediment builds up around the pilings and then...then you have an island which is neither the party of the first part nor the party of the second part but which is a place (an atopos since it doesn't really exist) where they meet in language. OK? So the existential loneliness will never go away, darlings, it's wired into you. That you think of yourself as you, someone who is not someone else, all of that, all of this ego stuff in the psychoanalytic and not the pop-psychoanalytic-Freudian-name-dropping-bashing-whatever sense, means basically that you can't get rid of it. I find the Of Lordship and Bondage in Hegel's magnum opus really helpful in understanding this. Althusser's 'Freud and Lacan' is also really instructive. In any case, when you don't like the loneliness you walk down the bridge. And you hang out on some island. The island isn't YOU, the person isn't fully transparent or knowable to YOU...but did you really want the totality of your existence to be the inside of your own fucking skull? The pictures you bring back from those islands actually work like contractors, they redesign the inside of your skull. I have my period and diarrhea and I called out from work but then came in anyway, and I love you guys. Got to go, must make causeways. Where's that confounded bridge?

the left-out feeling... i'm feeling it often... i spent last weekend feeling as if i was left-out from all people. i saw myself from outside of myself. i noticed how abnormal i really am. cognitive disodence (sp?) is the word i think i'm looking for. i feel like i'm like no other, but i know that i am like everyone. i've spent much of my life feeling and knowing two different things, and i never knew there was a word for it. then... i got a call from a girl who had been raped. we were talking about how she felt and how she knew, and she used the word. i thought i was the only one who felt and knew differently. but there is a word for it, i must not be so out of the ordinary.

Cognitive dissonance. This is not the appropriate term for the left-out feeling.

jeezuz Margaret....

I never feel left out anymore. Not in the above sense anyway. I stopped feeling that way when I realized that I would be out of my mind to be "in" with the groups I felt "left out" of. Fuck Them, is my attitude. They're the ones who are left out, not me. At least (at least! and I am feeling kindly so it's a little low) 85% of humanity are scumbag motherfucker pussies who I wouldn't trust to take care of a goldfish, so please please please leave me the HELL out of whatever morass of shit they're LEFT IN. The Doktor has spoken. That'll be a nickel, Chuck.

Okay, so last night, I go to the coffee shop to see my friend's band play, and there are a multitude of people there. Some were the kind I try to avoid on a daily basis, and some were my friends. Well, I felt like I was on the outside of the discussions taking place in every corner of that little coffee shop, and once again, my cousin was the center of attention. I can attribute her emense ammounts of attention to her outfit, which was a way too short prostitute looking skirt, tall, black, lace-up, dominatrix-looking boots, and a skimpy tank top with a stratigicly placed self-made drawing on one breast, and the name of her boyfriend's band, on the other. I was walking around with her, in my baggy pants, and a shirt that said "Texas Big Tits" on the front, and "Eat Me" on the back. I don't know if my decor was greatly admired, or appreciated. Anyway, I was there with her, and my friend Beth (I want her to be more, but that is a different story), at one point, after many drinks of crown royal, I went out for some fresh air. I was followed by her, and we walked off. To make a long story short, there was a drunk guy who tried to get in a fight w/Beth's boyfriend for no reason, and there was panic, we missed it, but after a sort of altercation w/her boyfriend, she ran off towards her car w/me running after her, and her boyfriend going to get some acid. We ended up at the city pool parking lot, talking, and we realized, that we both had the same problem of feeling alone. We talked for a long time, then decided to go back to the coffee shop. Everything was different then....then she and her boyfriend left to go talk, and "smoke", and while she was gone, I was again alienated. But, the bonus was, I got to watch the cops ambush a jeep full of preppy high school boys, and arrest them for under-age consumption, but that is also a different story.

Enjoy this now,you don,t get off so easy when your older,I,m tempted to go to jail again for kicking spawns ass.

While I,m at it I might add that it,s only 12:53p.m and I,m tanked,s/o started painting today at 5 a.m.,made sure I heard him that jackass.I blame him for everything,when we went to a conselor,she said he was an asshole too.Pam,I hope you see this ,parents have to stick together,not let the little bastards manipulate you,be a TEAM.

Daniel, it's Margret. My mother spelled it phonetically.

before I knew you I thought that was the Only way to spell it. I'm starting to get annoyed with the way people are now. It seems like Everyone I know is complaining. about everything. isn't anyone happy about anything anymore? Margret, are you going to wear a white wedding dress when you get hitched? I love wedding dresses. I wish you could wear them to affairs other than weddings.

sorry Margret. I studied correspondence Reuboniks from the Sorbunny at the Reebonks Univercity in Detroit, ya'll know that. Phew! That was a good little rant of yours, I'd say, and I'm still wondering about it all. Somedays I think too much. Other times I can't spell, or roll sushi. I am sorry I'll be missing your big day. I need an excuse to come to NM; yesterday, as I was packing stuff for my pending move to the woods, I found a hundred or so pictures of the Sandia Crest and sunsets and blue sky and my friends at Acoma. It surely is beautiful country out there. So do you think this is an atopos too, this soprabji land we inhabit? a nexus of contradiction and electronic soul meal? Just wondering.

Yes. In the William Morris 'News from Nowhere' sense. Gee: I will probably be wearing a cheomsang in red or gold. I surf custom-made cheomsang sites all day at work.

gee- i'm oddly happy today. i haven't been sad in a few days. i haven't even been taking my medicine to quiet the sadness either, so today i'm happy that i'm not sad. i'm happy that my mother lived to see another birthday (yesterday was her birthday and probably her last). i'm happy that i'm only going to be working one job this summer, i'm happy that my cat didn't bite me this morning, and i'm also happy that i got to see my grandmother for lunch and she didn't say anything about me being overweight. and lastly i'm happy that my roommate and i stayed up until three in the morning last night singing songs that we knew from childhood.

what's a cheomsang? I'm not good with clothing terminology.

Sorry, I'm dyslexic. It's a cheongsam. http://www.chinese-tailor.com/

those are really nice. margret, i have a friend in seattle that makes beautiful wedding dresses, if you are interested.

No shit! Can I get one made?

There's a tailor here who makes them to. They're reach about $80 us. Very pretty.

They are beautiful. Jules wore a gold one to her awards ceremony. I will feel lonely when she moves I think, because we have the same sense of humour/way of thinking which none of our other friends have. We often make the same jokes at the same time, and we seem to know what each other is thinking. Prehaps its a good thing she is moving away. no nonononononoonononono okay better now

when i went to this wedding over the weekend in flat rock NC, i was sorta outta place and alone at first. the bride is a 17year best friend of the wife's. The people and friends, some of whom I have met over the years simply by association ("oh your the husband of nico r..."). anyway, when i first got there, i demanded nico stay close and remind me whom people were. I was very quiet, insecure, timid. The friends are very earthy, good natured people, (disregarading the parental baby boomers here). I thought west coast weed was something to talk about. These kids are all superintelligent chemists and environmental scientists and have found ways to cultivate flavored pot. Blueberry weed is now something to write about. i asked for strawberry but none was available. Point being, in situations like this i try my best to find commonality, and then release my self in timed expressions, slowly but surely, trying not to overload. The fact i had traveled from LA was often the topic. When they saw me at the ceromony in my superfly new suit, when i shaked a leg to the godfather, they all cited it was an LA-thing.....my dancing ability most definitely did not spaw from being in LA, but i let them believe it. They thought i was the wild one, when the lines were cut, they looked to me first....yourfrom LA right, i am sure you are a pro at this......not really i said, your the one with the bag......I did meet one guy from Seattle, he had a "Truck" shirt, and told me a story of this guy with this modified weird looking truck and he abandonded it at one point ...but later made "Truck" shirts to get it back...(looking for seattle-ites who might know this story) anyway...once i find myself at a certain comfort level, i tend to let loose and i often find myself like Rhiannon, intentionally being the thorn...for example, when we were forced to stay in denver overnight because we missed our connecting flight to atlanta, in the smoking bar upstairs, watching the Colorado Avs and Dallas Stars hockey game, i was an ubnoxious Dallas fan, (where am I going with this?) sheeesh......nvrmnd

I'm Never lonely 'cause ALL anyone needs is their blasted Bonzi flippin' Buddy. Don't you know these things yet?