2001-06-26 - 1:09 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini"

Speaking of which, I was looking for the lyrics, and turned up this page. Look at that girl in the picture. For godsakes. Could it be any more inappropriate? She doesn't look even remotely modest, and the whole song's about a girl who's too chicken to appear in her bikini in public! Nice photoshopping on the dots, too.

Well. Today is the one-year anniversary of this journal. I can't quite believe it. The longest I ever kept a diary as a kid was for two weeks, so this is quite an accomplishment. Also, all I ever wrote about in that diary was how much I loved this particular boy, and how it wasn't just puppy love, it was real, blah blah blah.

Snort. There's somebody I'd like to run into today. I'd like to look him up, but his name is incredibly common. He was a "bad boy" in that he was always getting into trouble, but he was always incredibly nice to me. I liked him for about five years, and probably would have continued to like him if he hadn't gone off to another school and disappeared. He was my "boyfriend" in second grade, and I badgered him constantly in the beginning, "When are you going to kiss me?" I was a direct, demanding woman even then.

I still suffer from tremendous guilt for the day I, as a moronic 8-year-old, thought it would be fun to pretend that I didn't like him anymore. I guess I ignored him all day. At that age I think I wasn't able to fully grasp that my behavior could have a negative effect on people. I thought of it like an experiment. At the end of the day when I told him about the experiment, he was immensely relieved and had to ask me twice to make sure it was all okay again. God, just thinking about that, and the sad expression on his face in music class, makes me want to puke. What a horrible child I was. I really didn't grasp it. Children are horrible little creatures sometimes. If I met the 8-year-old me who thought of this today, I'd give her QUITE the talking-to.

Hm ... maybe this is why my crush-to-boyfriend ratio is about a thousand to one. I'm being punished for what I did to that poor guy. Although that seems grossly unfair, since he got kind of mean to me in seventh grade, and it's obvious in retrospect that he still liked me but I was just too dorky for him to admit it.

But, as usual, I digress.

Poindexter says he expected me to keep up ... what did he say? "Keep a record of the goings on", but didn't think I'd be this diligent. So it's all very cool. I don't seem to be bored yet, and still want to maintain a journal for the same reasons, so it'll be interesting to see how far this goes.

Question of the day: What is "crazy"?

The woman who drowned her five children, Timothy McVeigh, a suicide bomber in Gaza ... all of these people have been called "crazy". I'm not talking about "eccentric", which is harmless, but people whose mental state leads them to harm other people.

Over in the Fitzie Lodge's General Blather we discussed this a bit. The woman in Houston has been undergoing treatment for postpartum depression for some time, and the implication is that the depression is at least a partial explanation for the murders. On the HipMama discussion that Gnomie refers to, people even express sympathy for this woman, that she was in such a black state of mind that she was able to kill her own children.

Me, I am sorry that this woman was suffering or that genetics and environment cursed her with depression and insanity -- I wouldn't wish any of those things on anyone -- but that is where my sympathy ends. If she had any kind of reason left, killing those children was a despicable decision, and she should be removed from society. If she had no reason left, she's clearly a danger to others and should be removed from society. The result should be the same either way.

Gnomie herself is worried that this is going to lead people to think that "this is an excuse to de-legitimize mental illness. Which is particularly sad when that may have contributed to the murders in the first place. As we've all now seen, you can't just toss Prozac at the problem and make it go away."

My issue, as I tried to explain, is that it's ludicrous to lump this sort of behavior in with any kind of depression. I see this woman's depression as merely an additional symptom of what's wrong with her; it isn't the defining characteristic or illness.

Something else is seriously wrong with her, something that was exacerbated or brought into play by the depression, perhaps. Something I want to call "crazy", because she seems to have lost any sense of reason or awareness of the world around her. Even people who kill themselves because of depression -- something I can understand on an intellectual level -- don't generally make a habit of methodically drowning five children.

So there should be a term or concept for people who are not merely suffering from mental illness, but people in whom something has broken or has always been broken, is unfixable using current treatments or because the person refuses to undergo or cooperate with treatments, causing them to engage in behaviors such that they are a danger to themselves and others. As I said, you can't lump this woman in with depressives in general.

Yet at the same time, as Gnomie pointed out, it's unfair to lump her in with, say, Susan Smith, who killed her children for her own selfish ends. But I wonder. Wouldn't it be a kind of mental illness or broken brain to do the things that she did? Your average person doesn't drown their kids and then make up a racist story and tell it to the media. She has to be crazy too.

So I was thinking about all this, and then I caught a headline about a "Suicide Bomber in Gaza". What's the first thing I thought? "That guy must've been crazy."

There's that word again. You know, though, among a particular group of people in the world, that man is a hero. He died for something he believed in. Most likely, he believed he was doing the right thing. He probably had the approval of some of his comrades.

Was he crazy?

Isn't it kind of crazy to go to war and kill people, in general? I mean, when you boil that down to the nuts and bolts, that's just plain stupid.

I've tried to think of a way to sum this up, or reach some sort of a conclusion, but I can't. I don't have answers, only questions.

Last week I dragged Poindexter out for a walk, and as we were rounding the east end of the lake, suddenly he grabbed me and pulled me over to his (the non-lake) side of the path.

He scared me, a bit. I thought he was yanking me away from something dangerous and started swatting at imaginary bees and looking for poisonous snakes. But he said "Shh" and pointed, and I looked. And there it was.

The Loch Ness Monster.

It was sitting RIGHT THERE in front of us in the shallow water, munching on some kind of plant. We sat on a bench and watched it for a while. Occasionally it would swim over a few feet to find more munchies.

It was a BIG fucking beaver. It really was three or four feet long, and it was fat, and its flat tail was huge. It looked almost like a seal.

After a while another couple strolling by scared it away, so we followed it along the shore and went past two tiny yippy lap dogs ("They better watch out or the beaver might eat 'em") and their owners. Poindexter thinks it lives in the drain pipe, since there is still no sign of a dam.

Just the one beaver. I wonder if it's lonely.

On the way home we made lots of beaver jokes, because we are immature like that. "The big, wet, hairy brown beaver," that sort of thing.

Also last week, Poindexter found, on a floppy, my old e-mails to him from the first few months of our relationship.

Gag.

I don't know what it is that's so nauseating about them. I remember that period as being completely giddily wonderful, meeting someone with whom I connected on nearly every level and who gave me the tingles, besides. That's a difficult combination to find, it usually being only one or the other. It was pretty magical, really.

Part of the problem is that all the getting-to-know-you stuff sounds weird now. I'm explaining things to Poindexter about myself that he knows without thinking now. I also try to describe my feelings sometimes, and it just sounds gushy and goopy. At the time, Poindexter loved getting those mails, though, and I loved getting them from him.

We weren't very angsty, as relationships go, aside from the long-distance thing being really difficult at times. But you can still see hints of little insecurities there. Not can-I-trust-you insecurities -- we never had those -- but a kind of this-is-too-good-to-be-true-and-I'm-scared-it-will-go-away kind of thing. Also, since we had only seen each other for short periods of time (less than one week) and before our romantic declarations to each other, there was some worry there that it wouldn't work out once we spent time together for real.

Either way, after five years together and feeling rock-solid the whole time, it just looks a little silly.

So, I went to a local shopping center to look for fancy blue sandals to match a dress, and a cleaning brush and fluid for our vinyl records.

(Pop-Pop gave me his record player when he moved into assisted living, and I finally brought it down here and Poindexter hooked it up in the temporary guest suite/movie theater.)

Anyways, I got way distracted and started wandering all around looking for more clothes. I need some nice outfits for work, since the ones I've got are looking a little ratty. But I made a deal with myself awhile back that I would not buy clothes I wasn't madly in love with and fit perfectly, because I had too many outfits that just sat in the closet, unworn. This makes the clothes tried-on-to-purchased ratio really shitty, and so I get pretty cranky, and that's why I don't really like shopping.

Not only that, but I was wearing $1 flip-flops (easy to put on/take off when trying clothes). When I got home, I discovered I'd given myself shin splints. Shin splits, from SHOPPING in flip-flops. One more reason to hate shopping.

If I'm ever rich enough, I want to have all my clothes tailored to fit me perfectly.

I've used the word "ratio" twice in this entry. Can you tell I am a math geek?

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