Notes App Dump

Over the last couple years, I started jotting down my random thoughts in a note in my phone. I'm not sure that I ever really intended to make something of them, but they are exactly suited to what this blog has been/become: a little bit too personal and self-degrading, but hopefully relatable. Before I share them with you, reader, I want to share something else.

119. That's the number of books I read last year. Can you believe it?? I can't. It'd been so long since I even tried to read, I forgot the experience of it. How sometimes you leave the world as you know it without knowing it, and coming to the end of a really good story is like waking up again. The secondhand joy that comes from a moment shared between the two love interests. Regaining your breath (and resting heart rate) after a particularly tense encounter with a murderer. It's incredible, and I hope never to stop doing this ever again. I started reading again in April 2021, and what really hooked me again was a YA mystery trilogy (I've gotten into trilogy's now, and fantasy, it's a little strange) startng with a book called Truly Devious. I recommend it to everyone. Anyway, since I've posted about my grief over losing interest in reading here before, thought you'd care to know. I'd like to try writing again, too, which I guess is why I'm posting this. I've reread them just now, and they're a little all over the place. Because I think it's dumb, I won't provide context. If you know who I am, and you think I wrote about you here, no I didn't and don't mention it. Like I said, they're from over the last couple of years (with one noted exception), with some reference to the pandemic, but I think I'd still like to write up my thoughts on that separately, so you can look forward to that. We'll see, though. As you can tell, I haven't written much in this blog lately. Anyway, welcome to my consciousness.

I don’t remember a time when I stopped trusting people, so I have to assume that I never did, but I trusted you. I believed you when you said you liked me; when you asked if we were friends, I believed that meant you wanted the answer to be yes. You reached out to me when I felt like I was drowning in disappointment. I was being polite, but you were being friendly, and helpful, like you cared. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said you were the only reason I wanted to be here. But now I have proof that at some point you were pretending, and at some point after that, in the thick of it, you lied. You never kept a secret of how I made you feel when we weren’t friends, when I was disposed to dislike you before knowing you, but when it came time to be honest about how you had mistreated me, you chose not to be. You chose to withhold my opportunity to forgive you. And now, when she’s gone, maybe our reason for being friends is also gone, because you are different. I think I won’t ever trust you again. It seems as though you feel our relationship changing. Maybe I’m projecting. I may never have the nerve to tell you it’s your fault. As I have always done, I will just let this friendship die silently. I will leave and never look back and you’ll think I was lying the whole time. It’s only fair, after all. How will I ever trust friendship again? It was a tenuous trust, anyway, but it may have snapped entirely now, and maybe that’s okay. I’ve always loved the idea of being a hermit.

Before this moment, I haven’t seen you for years, but I still think of you when I walk past a smoker.

They make me feel alone, like I am foolish and silly and naive, but I don’t want to be like them anyway, so why do I let their lifestyle choices make me feel something at all. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.

I often miss what she was to me rather than I miss who she actually is. But she’s also someone different from the girl I remember. I probably am too.

It kills me that I’ll never truly know what it feels like to be in a teenage relationship. To think this is it, even though I’m young, and that’s dumb, and the odds of our breaking up are better than of our staying together forever. To fumble through the awkward, ungainly growing pains with another person who takes you for who you’re becoming or doesn’t. All of the romance firsts before becoming an adult. I’ll never wear his letterman jacket at the first game of the year. I’ll never fret over the perfect fancy dress to go with his perfect fancy suit, maybe the first one he ever wore.

A guy may have hit on me today. I reacted poorly. Before I responded, I did think he might have been flirty, so my brain goes “Wait, is this romantic attention?? Nope, sabotage.”

All this time, I knew that I carried pieces of the people I’ve known, but I never considered the opposite. People I knew in high school still have pieces of me, whether or not they ever pull them out for inspection. John has my eyes, Tyler has the poem we wrote together, Daniel’s still walking around with half my teenage heart. They have memories of me, they wrote of their expectations in my yearbook. Yet another group of people I’ve let down.

Ideal living location: Naturally stunning, with a variety of architecture styles, within 20 driving minutes of great shopping, bonus if I can walk around easily.

You know what sucks? When you think you see a guy looking at you like he likes it but then you catch sight of yourself in a mirror and you’re reminded he couldn’t possibly.

Which would you rather have to handle, the potential fall from happiness? Or the inevitability of a wasted life?

This is nothing new. I’ve always wondered why I’ve been single my entire life. Am I hideously unattractive? Do I have a repulsive personality? Because I don’t understand why there are girls who look like me, or act like me, that have many romantic encounters or are married, but I have been rejected by almost every guy who’s ever seen me. One asked for my number at Home Depot. One asked me on a date. Should I have accepted those offers with more gratitude? Thank God I got some attention from guys I’m not interested in, instead of none at all. Is simple flattery all I’m ever supposed to get? Do they see through my smile to my heart, beaten black and blue by the roller coaster I’ve put it through? Is it all of it together? The sum of my parts is a seething monster, with roughly shorn hair, blobby body bumps, jagged nails, ill-fitting clothing, covered in thick black sludge and shrieking, just freaking love me already.

Sometimes when I have a story idea, it comes with many. Like The Midnight Library, each one is the outcome of a different choice. A magical royal family has the power to make it so you find your soul mate with just a touch? One of you is destined to be the next princess. One of you waits your entire life, only to find him in your final days. One of you waits, only to become so bitter while waiting, your soul mate comes and goes without your notice. One of you has already met him in the friend you’d long since written off.

I’m trying not to take it personally that so many men forget they’ve met me. Is it any wonder the one who remembered has stuck around in my head ever since?

Sometimes I like to touch my face in a way that I’d love for you to touch my face. I don’t even realize I’m doing it, and even though the hand is mine and not yours, I can imagine the soft shivers under my skin, as if you had let your fingertips drift across my lips and hold my chin. As I realize and pull my fingers away, I can’t help but hope that when you do as I did, you are pleased with what you find.

I’ve thought lately that what I want may not be the relationship, the daily come and go, give and take, what do you want for dinner, what do we want for life. What I want may instead be simply the beginning, the fluttering heart, the first kiss, the will they, won’t they, the finally, yes, I love you. I want to hold your hand, memorize your features, carry all the pieces of you you give me clutched in my arms as I walk around life and never let them go.

I wonder if it shows just as little trust that I am attempting to convince myself that I will end up lonely.

I am not afraid to lose what I have now because I want to. I am more afraid that what I have now is what I will always have. (Except family, because that would break my heart, and I know that, but apparently not well enough to be grateful enough for them in the first place.)

The more break up songs I listen to, the more I am afraid to experience the inspiration. Instead I get to know a different kind of heartbreak, the kind that doesn’t come from love at all. Maybe it’s easier. Maybe I’ll never know.

I am inordinately pleased by storylines where the guy loved the girl for years before they really begin talking. Maybe because that’s what I’ve always done, and the idea of not having to be the one to go through the heartache while waiting sounds pretty nice.

After all this time? Yes, though not by choice. My heart is unendingly faithful. Even when no one’s asked it to be.

I’ve just realized that I don’t really have a place. When you’re feeling anxious and you just can’t be where you are, where do you go? I just distract myself. I’m not sure I actually know how to deal with my emotions. I always just want them to go away. I don’t think through things and make plans and come out the other side. I overthink constantly, but I don’t actually consider what I’m thinking.

From Facebook 2011: Have you ever read a fantastic book with amazing characters, brilliant writing, and an overall air of fabulousness that completely changed your idea of who you'd like to be, only to get three quarters of the way through it and discover a disgustingly perfect, completely tied up ending that debased your faith in writing?

I think sometimes about what Sarah said. She was telling me how difficult she found dating multiple guys without any of them turning out to be her one. She said that I was lucky, when I finally date a guy, he’s going to be it. I won’t have to worry about the failing she experienced. She could be right. But I can’t help feeling like she isn’t. Like when I finally date a guy, he won’t be it. I’ll have just started the long process of finding the one by failing with many later than anyone else. The process that she has now completed, not long after she grieved over it. I am also afraid that when I finally date a guy and fall in love, he’ll die, like the mother in How I Met Your Mother. And Ted, I guess. What if I am actually Ted? Why can’t I be Lily?

In books, the heroine always feels a spark or something special when a man touches her. For me, it’s simply awareness, oh, a man touched me. Should it feel special? Should it feel as if a man is touching me, rather than a woman? Maybe it’s different when a particular man does it?

Books have begun to seem like lies. Of course, I always knew they were fiction, made up by someone with the imagination to create these worlds. My favorite stories are the ones where the heroine seems like me, shy, uncertain, never knowing what to say, and despite all the odds against this creature getting with the hero (this could be any number of different types or tropes), she does and he wants her in spite of her unease with the attention and her pushing him away. Because I can’t imagine a man who would actually do this. I can’t imagine a guy meeting me, flirting with me, and being rejected by me (which is really my complete lack of understanding of flirting) and soldiering on. But I read these books and I read these men that do that, that want the heroine anyway and pursue her anyway, and it feels like a lie. It feels like a sad author attempting to make herself feel better about her odds. About her loneliness. How can I believe this happens in real life if I’ve never seen it? If it’s never happened to me? Lately it seems that all I read are lies about the way the world works and I can’t stop eating it up. Because I am sad. And I am lonely. And I want to believe that love will come for me. But I just don’t think I do anymore.

The flutter of my heart every time I hear the word “wife” is a pretty good indicator that letting go of the idea of romantic love will be very difficult to do. But the further I go into life without anything remotely resembling a boyfriend says to me that that’s exactly what I should do.

The older I get, the more likely I am to fall in love with someone who already has a kid.

Last night I couldn’t fall asleep because I kept replaying memories of you in my head over and over and wishing I’d done them differently.

I do not know what flirting is. If you think I’m flirting with you, you’re probably wrong. I also think that if I think you’re flirting with me, I’m probably wrong. Clarity, honesty, and vulnerability pave the way to a relationship with me. Also, it’s a one way street. And this is why I’ll die single.

I’ve read so many romantic stories lately that love has started to seem like it isn’t real. But I still want it, so I’ll keep reading them in an effort to feel something as close to love as I can get, even as they make true love more and more difficult to attain.

In books, characters can always read other characters’ emotions by their eyes. They can see fear or love or an indescribable feeling in others’ eyes. In real life, this is not possible. I think I’ve figured it out. Eyes is soft, it’s easy. Face, which is where we actually show our emotions, in the turn of our lips, and scrunch of our nose, the lines in our skin, is hard and grating. And you can use expression only so many times.

It’s such an odd thing, seeing someone you haven’t in a while, and they look exactly the same, but why shouldn’t they, it hasn’t been that long. Though they don’t mean the same to you, though your relationship has changed, become something sporadic and distant, their appearance is not altered by how you think of them.

Do you ever finish something, a book or a movie and suddenly life doesn’t make sense? It means nothing, or maybe it means too much, there are too many people living too many lives and you don’t know any of them and suddenly every single one of them has meaning and matters to you. I’ve learned from TikTok that this may be called a book hangover. Sounds accurate.

I love beautiful books and beautiful people. I definitely judge books (and, unfortunately, people) by their cover. Mostly because I believe, perhaps unfairly, that book covers are given effort proportional to the quality of what is beneath them. If this is true of people as well, I can believe it. I am not beautiful, and there is just as much quality lacking beneath my surface.

I have enjoyed fantasy novels lately for their exceptional difference from anything that could possibly be. I feel nothing.

When I read romance, as the couple come together after a contrived conflict, I feel a breathless excitement. I have nowhere to take this feeling, no one to whom I can give it, do you remember when. So while they feel nice and I love reading them, each one breaks my heart a little bit more.

You were stolen from me again and again, but maybe you were never meant to be mine anyway.

I collect friends like I collect movies. I love them, I love to see them, I love to have them, I think of them often, but I also tuck them under my bed and watch them once every several years.

I’m all for holding people accountable, but this behavior, this constantly calling for an apology for a choice, sure, yes, it could be argued that it was a poor choice, made in essentially a different lifetime, is exactly the reason no one can forget anything. As a society, we need to be more forgiving. Acknowledge that a mistake was made, but let’s not call it something it isn’t. If someone dresses up like Maui, an actual cartoon character, it is not racist to copy his tattoos.

Calling for the normalization of things undermines the inherent and valuable weirdness of things. Why would we want everything to be normal? We don’t. Brides wear black wedding dresses to be different. Instead of normalizing the things that make humans so unique, just take people and the decisions they make as they come.

Guys, this movie is chock-full of Latinos and you’re complaining that it lacks representation? I guess really what I disagree with is the idea that baby steps are poor choices. Every movie cannot have only dark-skinned people in it. We cannot fix racism by reversing it. A movie is worth something if the main characters are only white men. To act as if this is not true is to demean people who were just doing their job. How do you think these actors feel, working so hard only to be criticized for being chosen over someone else? Sure, they could have cast an Afro-Latin person, but then you wouldn’t have the same main guy. Just as when you complain that more women aren’t heads of companies, there may not be the number of black actors who wanted the roles as you expected. Should we simply line up those who are auditioning and choose the one with the darkest skin? Sorry, you’re an excellent actor with a decade of experience and a supporting role in a Tony award winning musical on Broadway, but he’s more black than you? You’re over correcting, and you may find yourself flipped over on the side of the road waiting for AAA.

I remember when high school was ending, and others were considering what to do with their lives, I applied for college. I’d accepted that that was the next step. I don’t remember ever seriously planning anything. I thought about what I wanted to do for work, but once I’d chosen that, I coasted. This got worse as college progressed. I got a job at the college bookstore and never left (but for a brief time in the housing department in the same college). I wanted to leave, all the time. I applied for other jobs, but I never took job hunting seriously, and I never wanted to leave my comfort zone or zip code to do it. When I say I feel stuck here, I mean that I feel like I took the next logical step in my life and the staircase ended. I have no idea why I’m here, what I’m supposed to do now, or even what I want to do now. I feel paralyzed by fear but also resentment. Why has no one ever called me for an interview? Why hasn’t God given me something else? I’m supposed to interpret that to mean that He means me to be here for something. I’m beginning to think it’s because my life is never supposed to be anything more. When I retire at 65, if I live so long, it will be from the GM Manager position at the UNF bookstore. I guess, unless they fire me first.

I am not a person who easily keeps friends. I never forget you exist, but I am so selfish and greedy with my time, I never want to give any of it to anyone. But I want to be better. I want to reach out and be a good friend to you, because you’re important to me. This year has made what was already a difficult process even harder. I couldn’t invite you to hang out, though I wanted to. I keep in touch with people much better when I can do it in person. I am a much better, more interesting and involved friend when I can do it in person. We’re approaching a place where this is possible, but it’s been so long, I’m afraid you’ve gotten used to your life without me in it, and you may prefer it. If you no longer want to be friends with me, I will understand. Our friendship can be a fond memory we look back on.

I’ve been feeling this a lot lately. I’ve had such concrete goals for my life for most of it, but I’ve lost the will and motivation to do those things and I don’t know how to get it back or if I even want to get it back, should I just move on, those aren’t my dreams anymore, is holding onto them being deceitful to myself, have I changed so much that wanting to be the same person is unrealistic and will lead only to ignoring any new dreams I might have if I weren’t still longing to chase the old ones? So, yeah, no idea what I’m doing, no idea what I want to do, and I feel as if I’m coasting, just going day by day, because I don’t know how to do anything more. Also, I think I forgot just how long life can be, and it’s terrifying me, how do I fill 50 more years? It’s a bit presumptuous of me to assume I have 50 more years to worry about filling, but I have to think about them whether or not I get them. Who even am I anymore? I fill my days with the thoughts of others because the ones that are my own just feel like drowning.

I hate myself. How do you deal with that? You tell me that I can trust God with any and everything, but how can I trust that I can be content and happy even if absolutely nothing about my life changes? But if so much of what I hate about my life is how I react to it, would that necessarily change because I would have to change in order to bring about that contentedness? I hate my laziness. If I become no longer lazy, will I be more content? Or can I be content while lazy, or does trusting God require the action of being no longer lazy?

I’ve turned him into a kind of Obiwon. Help me, church guy, you’re my only hope.

My conversation about God is halting, awkward, and at times incoherent. My feelings for this guy are inextricably tangled up in my feelings about God. Thinking about the moments of our shared history, I wonder if I could have done something differently, responded in a more obvious way, or simply accepted the attention I think I now see that he directed at me, without second guessing my appeal. I wish I could see any of those interactions from the outside; would I have come to a different conclusion? When I watch other could-be couples, I think it’s so obvious. He likes her, she likes him, can’t they just be honest and tell each other? And then, the hypocrite that I am gags in movies when they do just that (though there is a distinct lack of honesty in many of these relationships that would certainly avoid the later troubles they have). Would I have thought it obvious, as an outside observer? Did anyone else see us, see what was happening, see what I couldn’t? I could and have gone over and over and over, (way too many times)our interactions to see if I can remember something else, think about it in a different way, but even if I can see, can believe irreversibly that he had even some interest, it doesn’t matter now. It’s been too long, a year since that night we sat next to each other and talked together, but mostly I tried to act like I could have been sitting next to anyone and felt the same, like I wasn’t giving every bit of my attention to the way you moved, the way you spoke, the way you catered to us, and the way every moment thrilled me. You are such a nice guy, and I wish I hadn’t blown it. Sometimes I wonder if I’m good enough. I know everyone is flawed, maybe even flawed exactly how I am, and that doesn’t mean they aren’t good enough, especially to be together with another flawed person. But I’m so angry, and I react so poorly when inconvenienced. I just don’t know how anyone could love me. Though, I guess, I’m not angry all the time. Nikki somehow sees something worth loving and living with.

I’m not sure why I’m always so surprised when you show me hostility. Bared teeth, wide eyes, I’ve seen it all before, like a wild bear, but held back by human propriety, even if barely. When you yelled at me in that restaurant, I was taken aback. What had I done? I had successfully held my tongue, avoided exactly this up to this point. It’s been a long time since we’ve sparred. Not because you’ve changed, clearly, but because it is so much easier to stay silent when I have somewhere to go, when I can take a break, when I don’t have to listen to you all the time. But though I recognize my failure to disengage, I still didn’t understand the level of anger you showed. I cried, hard, partly because of our conversation, partly because it’s been building for a while. I think I was numb, I wanted to be distracted, I wanted not to remember the look on your face, the disgust with which you looked directly into my eyes, and the way I just let you do it. But now I am angry. I see now what I did wrong. I disagreed with you. I asked you for evidence. I challenged your view of things. I thought I knew better. But don’t worry. I’ve gotten the message now. Loud and clear.

I read recently someone taking exception with using “honestly” or “to be honest” in conversation, saying something like, was everything else a lie, why wouldn’t you be honest. But there are different levels of honest. Responding fine when someone asks how are you is a different kind of honesty than answering I’m alive, I’ve survived, but every day is a struggle with feeling gratitude in the face of a job I hate with people who make me angry and feeling a debilitating loneliness that continues to sink down into a why has no one ever liked me deep sorrow.

The many things wrong with me. I hate my job. I am so afraid to find and start a new one that I don’t even look. When I do look, I don’t want to do any of it. I am so lazy I sit on my phone not working all day. I am so lazy I’d rather do no job at all. I can’t talk to people. They either make me so irrationally angry I don’t even want to look at them or I cannot think of a single thing to say. These people have done nothing to deserve either of these responses. I want to be friends but I don’t remember how to care about other people. I have made my feelings clear and he still didn’t want me. I don’t know all of the things wrong with me that convinced each of those guys not to date me. I know that the reason I’m still single is because God wants me to be, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, doesn’t make me so angry I want to scream. But that may be due more to the hurt. I feel like I can’t count on God to make anything, including me, better. I want to be better, but only sometimes. Most of the time I want to feel justified, vindicated, angry. But I don’t. But I do. Even as I do things I know I shouldn’t, I know I shouldn’t and I still do them, and I hate myself every second I do them. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, why I can’t just be content and let those things that are going well for me be enough. I hate so much of myself, and I want to be different, but I don’t know how and when confronted with an opportunity, I don’t want it, I don’t take it, I resent it. There is seriously something wrong with me.

I will always wish I’d had a high school romance. They’re messy, immature, and fraught with insecurity. Maybe adult romances aren’t very different. You learn so much in a high school relationship. How to be in a relationship, for starters. How to be with somebody else, take somebody else into consideration, hold hands. Kiss. You make all of the mistakes for the first time, and you have the chance to learn from them, change because of them. If I am ever in a relationship, I will probably have to be in one with someone who’s done all of this before. They’ve learned who they are with someone else. They’ve already made and learned from so many mistakes. They will have to be patient with me as I am messy, immature, and fraught with insecurity. Maybe they won’t be.


I drove past houses along the street, appreciating the architecture and landscaping. I love those windows, I want that color door, those flowers are beautiful. Then I tried to imagine a life I might have in one of them. I couldn’t. I’ve all but resigned myself to a life of singleness. A life I might have in one of those quaint, charming houses would be a life alone. All decisions would be mine, all responsibility would be mine, all time would be my own. I began to cry, to mourn the loss of a life I’d dreamed of. To mourn the beginning of a life I’d never wanted.