not much to say

Thank you all so much for your good thoughts and prayers. It helps to know that there are people who give a bleep about me even though they have never met me.

I'm still kind of sad and kind of stressed. I recognize this because I cannot watch the news without either screaming at the television set or starting to cry. I cannot watch "Law and Order" or any of the other crime dramas I normally enjoy because they just seem proof of how evil and screwed-up people are. I can't even read mystery novels right now, because - well, someone gets killed in them. I get like this sometimes - it's like all the individual difficulties of humanity build up and threaten to crush me. And I look around and go, you know, why shouldn't the human race be wiped out and intelligent life on this earth be started over with, I don't know, the capybaras or something?

Maggie, especially - thanks. I think part of the reason this hurts so much is that these are people who OTHERWISE don't seem to have those blind spots. They do an awful lot of outreach for "not the right sort" of people. But because it's kids - or because they're right there in the church - or because there's an interpersonal conflict between one particular person and my co-leader, it just all blows up in my face.

Sadly, I often find myself thrust in the role of "peacemaker" between two people who really don't WANT "peace," or I find myself tugged between two people, both of whom want my loyalty, only NOT to that other person. (It happened in 5th grade between my two best friends. They hated each other and each didn't want me to be friends with the other. It was truly horrible. Now that I think of it, that was probably the beginning of my disillusionment with the concept of "BFF." I love the idea of BFF in the abstract, but it's just not something I can do, concretely. Because people change too much and are too unpredictable, and "forever" really doesn't mean "forever, especially when you're a 10-year-old girl.)

I don't know. Right now I'm just very down on humanity. (Didn't Linus van Pelt once say, "I love humanity, it's people I can't stand"?) It's the reverse with me. There are very specific individuals that I love to death and would fight to the death for if I had to. But humanity as a whole big puling mass just gets me down - the wants, the needs, the infighting, the self-absorption, all of it. It makes me want to run away from everyone and go live as a hermit somewhere.

I have youth group tonight. I'm prepared. One of the things that was said in the meeting was the realization that I needed more help. So I'm sort of dreading that fifteen people will show up tonight wanting to "help," and it will be more "help" than I can possibly stand. (Actually, I suspect that it will be a "let George do it" situation and no one will show up, thinking everyone else is doing it.)

I don't know. I don't want intermittent help. I want someone, the same person, every single week to come and help. Or two people the same. I've found that having people drift in and out almost makes it worse, and it's a lot of stress on me to wonder who, if anyone, is going to show up in a given week.

I also don't know what to do to get back into people's "good graces," if such a thing is possible. I contemplated going in and writing a check for the time the custodian had to spend cleaning things up, but somehow I don't think that would help. It doesn't undo what was done. I don't think my writing a letter of apology will help one bit. I'm not sure forcing the kids to write letters of apology will help.

It's like something got broken, and I'm afraid it's permanently broken.

I just hate dealing with people. I mean, dealing with them face-to-face. Everything's screwed up, everything's broken, it's like no one is really capable of either understanding others or making themselves understood. Maybe the capybaras really would do a better job of it than us.

Part of the problems I have is that I probably give TOO much of a damn about things - I care far too much about the success of things I'm involved with, I care too much about what people think of me.

Every time I have ever let myself care about something or someone, I've wound up getting hurt. If I could just learn how to not give a damn...maybe then I'd not have these periodic issues with the human race.