Which is awesome, but totally not what I'm posting about. I just felt like updating, reading over the last few posts was kind of a downer and I felt like saying things don't completely suck on the off chance someone runs across this blog.

My grandpa is getting better now. When he'd finished his treatment for the prostate cancer, he went for a followup (just a formality at that point) and they found a mass in his throat. It turned out to be cancer, and he had to undergo treatment for that as well. During the treatment he lost most of his ability to taste and to make saliva; the taste will (and is, though he can't eat yet) come back, the saliva probably won't. The treatments made it even more difficult and painful for him to swallow so he got a g-tube put in.

On top of that, he had all his teeth removed before he started the treatment. He had to have it done as most of them were rotting something fierce, and they wanted to take care of that while he still had saliva to aid in the healing. So it was all mush while he still could eat, adding to his disdain of eating. He's able to swallow things like mashed potatoes now, though.

It's kind of funny; he first went to the doctors because of issues swallowing and decided to get a general physical because he hadn't seen a doctor in at least ten years. They found the prostate cancer purely by coincidence. Same with the throat cancer while he was recovering from previous treatments. My mom and especially my grandmother are suspicious that the first doctor missed something, but I'm not sure. It could just have been that chemo weakened the other parts of his body and his throat was already weak, so the cancer came from the previous treatment. Guess we'll never really know.

I still can't drive. With all the stuff that's been going on with my grandpa, I've not been able to get much done, and while it's partly my fault for wasting my time, it was also knowing that even if I got all my shit in order, I still wouldn't be able to do anything with it because nobody could bring me to take a driver's test or have the time to teach me.

As far as the future comes, learning to drive should be my main priority. Everything's calming down now, the smoke is falling, and I'm not nearly as worried about everyone else. After that I'll get my GED and take some college classes. I'm also going to learn a programming language; I want to learn C# but I've also found a pretty good python tutorial so I might do that first. I have a big interest in game design, so I think I'll try to get a job in that, but if not there's always the military.

My grandfather was in the Navy, so I'm considering that as well as the Air Force. He says I should chose whatever branch I think I'll do good in if I decide to go this route, but he really doesn't want me to join the Army and doesn't think I'll do well in the Marines; I'm inclined to agree. The Coast Guard is also a possibility.

So, that's really all there is to report. As for right now, though, I can promise I'll spend this weekend playing Skyrim. And, well, the eye exam I have scheduled. My glasses broke and I've not had an eye exam for about three years anyways.

So, this game is pretty boss. It's just about everything Fallout 3 should have been feature-wise, though Fallout 3 was better with the exploring side of things (invisible walls, seriously?).

I've already finished it once, sided with House. I'm playing with a sniper and a scientist, now. The sniper is who I consider my 'main' character, as in the one I generally give the most thought to. He's going to be aligned with house as well, although I'm not going to complete the main quest with him until the DLC comes out, which presumably will be giving us content after the end of the game.

I am going to align the scientist with Yes Man, probably (essentially, with himself). I will also make characters that will align with NCR and Caesar's Legion, though I doubt I'll feel right aligning with either of them.

As for mods, I'm using a few already. The three main ones I'm using are Arwen's Tweaks, Phalanx, and CHEMS. I've also downloaded two houses, one of which I've edited in the GECK quite a bit. I spent about three hours figuring out navmeshes; when I close my eyes I see vertices. But still, I feel like I've won at the navmesh game for now.


When it comes to my real life, they've found out that my grandfather's cancer has not spread. Obviously, that's good news. They're going to go ahead with treatment.

I've been thinking of how things might have turned out had my mom not left my dad.

As time passed and he was becoming more and more of an alcoholic, he was more critical of me. He would tell me how worthless I was, how I'd never make it in the real world, how I couldn't be his daughter. Looking back on it now I can see the escalation.

About two years ago, I was able to come to terms that it was an abusive household. Thinking back now, though, I can see the pattern of escalation. By the end of the year he would have been hitting me.

None of the rest of my family knows this. When we still lived with him, my mom isolated herself in her room. I love her, but honestly she had little knowledge of how we interacted at all. My brother was also locked away in his room, I made sure of that.

Because of this, my mom doesn't think my dad was abusive at all. I don't know if it's that she honestly doesn't believe me or if it's that she feels guilty. She has always felt guilty for many things that weren't her fault at all, and I would not be surprised if she felt extremely guilty about this had she known. Though I don't blame her and hold no ill will towards her, she does hold some blame, as it is a parent's job to protect their kid.

I stopped feeling angry about any of this a while back. It makes me a bit sad that I can't share my feelings about this with my mom (as we're otherwise very close) but I've accepted it.


As for other things going on, my grandfather was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer. It's stage three, and they're testing to make sure it hasn't spread. If it's just prostate cancer alone, there is a very high treatment success rate. If it has spread, we'll see. As of now the doctor is going to have him get seed radiation for it, after they're sure it's just prostate cancer.

This is the first time I've really been confronted with my grandfather's morality. I'm not sure if I can describe how I feel about it. He's an amazing man and one of the main reasons I am the way I am.

Despite this, I'm hopeful. I'm not sure why, exactly. I think that lately I've just been in the best frame of mind I can remember ever having been in. I've always been stupidly hopeful, which is strange considering just about everything else relating to who I am.

I was planning to post every Sunday, but I'm not sure I can now. My computer needs to go in; it won't start up.

I joined an avatar site called Ernya. So far it's a pretty good place, the users seem pretty mature on average which is nice, and I still get a good avatar. My username is the same on there as it is here.

I found a thread in the Life Issues sub-forum called Slow Down & Save A Life. It;s about suicide prevention. I talked about my issues, and I though I'd re-post my post here:


I like this thread even though it's sad. I like how it encourages talking about these things.

I was pretty depressed from about eleven to fifteen. My dad had taken up drinking, and had also taken up telling me what a failure I was. Though I never really thought about doing it myself, did want to die and I would spend the days looking around me and imagining myself dying in those various spots from accidents. I remember one particular day, it was raining. I was looking at some of the concrete stairs slick with water, there was a landing a little more than halfway off them where it branched into two sets of stairs. I imagined tripping while going to the bathroom and my head splitting wide open, how nobody would find me until the next class switch and it would probably be to late, and how pretty the blood would look dripping with the rain over the side.

I was also into self-injury. I cut and a few times I took a baseball bat to my legs. I would also do that salt with ice thing, and a few other things like punching brick walls or slamming my head into things when nobody was looking and I couldn't do anything else. I preferred the cutting, though, it mellowed me when I was sad as opposed to the other things which mostly were done out of rage.

I'm generally open about these things, I'm not too uncomfortable talking about them now. I think the saddest thing about all this is my mom, who I'm really open with. I don't think she believes me at all, and she disregards what she can't disbelieve (mainly the scars on my arm). She has told me outright that my dad was never the way he was. (When I talk about him, don't get me wrong. He was great when he wasn't drunk, which by the end of there marriage was never.)

One night when I was fourteen, I locked myself in the bathroom and turned on the shower. I was going to take one but instead I sat on the floor and started cutting. I went a little too deep, though, and blacked out for a few minutes. That was when I decided I needed to stop.

I wish I could tell you that someone noticed, that someone did something. Luckily for me it wasn't deep enough to kill me without medical care, just enough to make me lightheaded. Even though I got out of this alive, I could see it easily happening differently. If we hadn't gotten out of that house I'd probably be dead now.

I wish people paid more attention. What I went through is over; it can't be changed. I know that compared to other people and other situations I didn't have it so bad. Even so, situations that comparatively 'aren't so bad' can still end in suicide, and I wish they weren't so disregarded.

I'm just thinking of the world around us. The meaning of life, or whatever you like to call the answer to existence.

I don't have much to say about it, really. At least not much that can't be explained well without a shared reference point. I do believe in a higher power, an energy that we all share. I don't believe in one big god who sits on a throne in heaven, I believe in something more alive.

We're all energy. In a scientific way, we're all mass. But there's an energy we can't see that holds us to our bodies, and it doesn't just go away when we die. It's like any other energy, it dissipates, but the question is, does it come back together as a whole?

I believe in reincarnation. I believe we have a soul, I suppose the wildcard, the energy we don't keep when we pass on, is our body.

This is really something better talked about in person, though. I can't be making much sense in a blog post.

I just want to note that I am not dead.

I've been on Gaia for the past couple of days. We've been working on getting me into online classes, however we're past the cut off date for that and I can't start classes until next year if I want them to count towards a diploma. It's tempting to just get my GED and go on to community college, because I don't want to do high school courses until I'm twenty.

Speaking of that, my birthday was the sixteenth. I don't feel any different, however I normally don't. I felt different about a month ago, though. That's probably because I left school though.

I guess I'm a dropout now.

Maybe it was a while coming. I'm leaving for health reasons, so it's not like this is some out of the blue decision. My mom was really the one to decide though, and as I'm not physically capable of attending, I just need to fall into place with it.

Of course, I'm going to get a GED. I still need to learn to drive as well, so I'll do that too.

However, people aren't going to see my plans there. All they'll see is that I left at the beginning of eleventh grade.

None of this would be so bad if my grandparents would look at me. It's just happened now, my mom has just told them, so I haven't interacted with them yet. But my grandma is talking about kicking me out, not that my mom will let her. But I knew I was never going to please her anyways.

I made my grandpa cry.

I didn't mean to be a disappointment, you know? But I guess I am now. I don't see me in the mirror anymore though. I tried to explain this to my mom, but she just wanted to tell me that I have to change that. Of course I know this. I just wanted someone to talk to after becoming the failure of the family, but I don't think she's up to listening anymore. She was in the car on the way home, but talking to my grandparents changed that.

I'm not sure what I'm doing with my life.

The new Freeman's Mind is up.

Not normally, but today, yes. Today would have been spent waiting, had I not fallen asleep from about 1:30 PM to 5:30 PM, another agitating thing when I'm trying to get my schedule back in order.

I'm waiting for some of my beads to show up. I ordered about 40$ of beads from two different websites (40$ combined, not each) last Friday. I know it's the weekend, and I really shouldn't expect them for another few days. But it's still a thought in the back of my head.

Additionally, Scott Ross said on his blog that he has sent the new episode of Freeman's Mind (29) to Machinima.com. They've still not uploaded it, however. Again, I should wait a few days, but I'm impatient and agitated and when I woke up I woke from a bad dream. (Not necessarily a nightmare, but it was really weird, for once in a bad way.)

And I have a new one. (Credit goes to heylove, whom I foolishly forgot to credit when I first posted this.) At LiveJournal or Xanga or Myspace, there were always a lot to choose from, but not here. Normally, I would pick a new one every two weeks or so, not because I no longer like my old one, but because I've found a new one that I just have to have.

Funny, my form of compulsive shopping is on the computer, for free. I am the same with game mods, I feel the need to surround myself with pretty things.

Here, I need to be even more picky with my layout. Some of them don't display entirely correct with Chrome, and I cam't have that even if I know it's displaying right in Firefox, what everyone else uses. Of course, being picky like this leaves me with pretty much only this layout.

I'm okay with that. This one's pretty, and it's just about everything I'd normally look for in a profile. Suppose I lucked out.