May 12, 1979

(I posted this yesterday, May 12, but blogspot had issues and my post was deleted. So much for my effort to post every day!)

At 18, do I feel that life has passed me by? No, I just feel that there were so many things I could have accomplished had I but tried...I could have at least tried! Maybe I'd have had a few things published by now. Two poems, and they don't really count, do they?...

I'm in the middle of writing a paper for my Christian Life class, but obviously my mind is wandering...I'm going to the May term...

I'm renting a basement apartment from one of my professors. She and her husband are on vacation right now.

I get more nervous and jumpy as the days go by -- too many murder mysteries, I guess, but some nights I'm just rigid with fear, and I even have to get up and turn on the bathroom light so I can sleep. I'm always ashamed of myself in the morning. But it sure seems real in the night...

This basement is a gloomy place. I'm lonely. Of course, it seems like I only write in a journal when I'm lonely. I haven't been too lonely since 1977, except for last summer. Then it was too violent. I was always sad and I was always crying...

I just pulled off my longest fingernail. Which isn't saying much, but we'd grown to be quite good friends.

I want to call someone. It's terrible to be paying for a phone with no one to call and no one to care enough to call you. The phone rang this evening while I was working on my paper, and I jumped so much my pen scratched down the paper. It was a wrong number, of course.

At times I long for home. For a T.V., for a good home-cooked meal -- real food -- but then I remember how things are at home and I change my mind...

Sometimes I think I'll only be published posthumously. But I'll probably never be published.

I need to work on my paper some more, but I have no motivation. That's my problem with everything....