Lists 10/5/08

Things I Like
-Old people that smoke
-Highlighters
-Those little orange monkeys at the zoo
-Giving people presents
-Presents in general
-Notebooks

Things I Don’t Like
-People who are mean for no good reason
-The sound of vacuum cleaners
-The smell of cleaning agents
-When boys I care about do cocaine
-People who treat me like I don’t have feelings



I can’t sleep and therefore am looking up lists in my notebooks. These lists came out of a lot of things that I was going through at the time. I was having trouble trying to find friends in the town that I live in. I always seem to be having trouble finding friends. That is where the stuff about people being mean comes from. I think that my biggest problem is that I really, really want people to like me and so I make an extra effort to be nice. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in the world who will take advantage of that sort of thing. There are other problems with it as well. It seems that once you start off being really nice you always have to be nice. You never get to have days where you aren’t feeling so great and you need time to yourself. People will always want a piece of you and they expect certain things out of you. It’s not like they always come knocking when they need something. It’s a strange sort of dependence, as though they know they can come to you because you aren’t very good at saying “no.” I need to learn how to say “no” more often. I need to set more boundaries.
I really don’t like the smell of cleaning agents or the sound of vacuums. It makes cleaning things a really tedious job for me, maybe more than most. I have switched to using Dr. Bronner’s to clean everything. The smell of peppermint isn’t so bad.
I still don’t like it when boys I care about do cocaine. It really is a horrible drug that sucks the life out of people. I don’t care what anyone says about it, it’s something that I will never try. I wouldn’t even want to. I’ve seen it destroy a lot of people. I’ve seen it become something that they need. Interestingly enough, I once found an article in a magazine that talked about it. They were doing studies on rodents. There were some rodents that were given cocaine as part of their diets. The other group was given a choice of whether to drink water that either had cocaine or didn’t. When they took the cocaine away from the rodents that were given a choice those animals went through withdrawal. The other ones didn’t seem to mind the change. What the scientists were figuring out was that it wasn’t actually that addictive of a drug. It is one of those drugs that a person only becomes psychologically dependant on. I thought that was interesting. I don’t have enough people to tell these things to.
The list of things I like stays pretty much the same throughout the years. I think that we all find things that we like and stick to them. Old people that smoke became something that I enjoyed after going to Bingo. I used to play a lot of Bingo and, back when they allowed smoking at the Bingo hall, there were always a ton of old people there who knew just how bad it was for them but had been doing it so long that they didn’t care anymore. The little orange monkeys at the zoo have also always been one of those things that make me extremely happy. They are called Golden Lion Tamarins. I like their tails that they use to get from tree to tree. They used to have a whole bunch at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, but then they started having fewer and fewer. Last time I went I think that there were only two or three. It was very disappointing to see the little orange monkey population decrease in such large numbers. (I just found out that they are endangered. I shouldn’t do research on these sorts of things so late at night. It just makes me depressed).
The fact that notebooks are on the list is pretty self-explanatory.