Physical and emotional report first: No anxiety. Slept shitty, but got a lot done, including cleaning and exercising. Started off mildly lightheaded, but after 5 hours it intensified (not to the point that it got scary and I felt all weak in the legs or anything like that) and I also became more fatigued.

Stacey told me that I should not only tap every day for anxiety, but that some people do it for pain, too. So I tried it and it worked on my headache! Yeah, I had one of those intermittent, “moving” headaches, but after two rounds of tapping it diminished. I just wish the dizziness wouldn’t be an everyday thing, even when it’s mild. God, I miss more and more aspects of the old me the older I get!

YES! My book Shane is finished! It’s not quite a short story and it’s not quite a novel. More like a novella. Next comes the boring part… editing the 16011-word story. It’s 19 chapters, including the epilogue, and 50 pages long at point 12 Cambria font.

I wonder if something bad happened to either Bob or Virginia because, at just 5am, I saw a car pull out after I heard a series of door slams. I had just gotten up and was like, you’re kidding me. It’s 5am and the traffic and door slamming has already begun? I first wondered if they were going on vacation, but realized they probably would have told us, as well as the fact that they usually go in the winter (except for last winter). At least one of them was home by 8 o’clock.

I was browsing some YouTube videos on EMDR therapy sessions, and wow. The brain really is a fascinating thing. We may not know everything there is to know about it, but what we do know is pretty amazing. The technique seems pretty straightforward. The client is told to focus on their most disturbing memory while they follow the therapist’s hand movements with their eyes, and the therapist may also tap alternately on each forearm. Our memories basically get filed into little folders, and sometimes a traumatic memory doesn’t quite get filed away in the proper folder and gets “stuck” on one side of the brain instead of on both sides where memories are supposed to be stored. You have your artistic side of the brain and your intelligent side of the brain, with memories being stored on both sides. This technique files the traumatic event on both sides thus disallowing the memory to have such an impact on a person so they can cope with things easier. So I guess that when “smile,” “think positive,” and “don’t dwell on old shit” doesn’t quite cut it, then it’s EMDR to the rescue.

Aly has been haunting my dreams lately. I don’t remember the particulars but there were two different dreams. In one she didn’t look like herself and was considerably bigger than me, even though I knew it was her.

In another dream, she commented and “liked” something of mine on some site (I don’t know which) and so did Kim. I was delighted that they had reached out to me in a kind way and I looked for something on their pages to “like” in return.

In real life, a part of me misses Aly. Why, though? Why? She was nothing but a phony liar. Yes, I was overly brash, blunt and brutally honest with her. Some people just don’t want to know what you’re thinking if it’s not something they’re going to like or agree with, and she was one of them. But that’s just the thing; I was honest with her while she bullshitted me left and right. Having learned my lesson on how forgiving people often backfires, I hope I will be smart enough to ignore her if she ever contacts me, and the same goes for Andy and anyone else in my past.

Now that I have this sculpting clay and all these tools here, I may as well go YouTube hunting for demonstrations on what the tools are best used for.

Later…

So I go through one of Kim’s fan sites out of curiosity (never contacting either one of them), and find Aly’s latest and obvious account. IDK, I guess the dream has caused her to be on my mind. Although I know it’s silly, pointless, stupid, immature and all things negative, I still miss the little liar at times and a part of me wishes she’d contact me, knowing I’d be dumb enough to accept her back into my life, if only with a lot more caution on my part (I doubt she’d ever contact me, though).

Yes, she’s clingy, she puts guilt trips on you if you don’t practically smother her, and yes, she’s a true liar at heart with poor taste in friends and no ability to handle the truth from others if it’s not what she likes/agrees with. But she was smart and we had some good talks.

I went through her 120 tweets, both to see what was up and to see if I was mentioned. Well, when I saw “Had a couple of strange dreams overnight. One that has me fearing for someone I shouldn’t be” posted on the 15th, I wondered if she was referring to me.

This tweet, however, was obvious. “Sometimes I think about a former friend. Wonder what she’s up to. But wondering is all I’ll do.”

So as cold as she was by dumping me, she’s thinking of me, too.

I KNOW her and I KNOW some of the tweets about being misunderstood and feeling ignored were aimed at Kim. She would always tell me how selfish Kim seemed and how much she lacked empathy. Part of me has been hoping Kim would dump her to give her a taste of her own medicine. Kim is the only “real” friend she has left. But Kim doesn’t tell her the truth, something Aly can’t deal with, so Aly wouldn’t dump her, though you never know with Kim. As soon as I called Kim out on the “anonymous” insults on Ask, I got dumped. If Aly ever gets fed up enough with the lies and phoniness, Kim will dump her too.

Then there’s the usual, “Don’t want to bring anyone down so I’ll suffer in silence” shit that really means she wants attention or else she wouldn’t have publicly tweeted such a statement.

Again, I still have mixed emotions concerning her as much as I wish I could say I was 100% totally over her. Someday, though. It’s only been a few months.