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I open my eyes, I try to see but I'm blinded by the white light..
I can't remember how, I can't remember why I'm lying here tonight..
And I can't stand the pain,
And I can't make it go away..
No I can't stand the pain...

How coul this happen to me?
I've made my mistakes, got nowhere to run
The night goes on as I'm fading away.
I'm sick of this life, I just wanna scream!
How could this happen to me?

Everybody's screaming, I try to make a sound but noone hears me
I'm slipping off the edge, I'm hanging by a thread
I wanna start this over again
So I try to hold onto a time when nothing mattered
And I can't explain what happened and I can't erase the things that I've done
No I can't...

Hi there Bloggers!

Oh dear, it's been over a month since I posted.

It's my fault--once Spring session started and my last semester ended, my brain exploded and I had to struggle through another month and a half of school. My brain said no, but my schedule said yes.

I had my first Spring exam today, and my last is tomorrow. Exciting! I'm currently in the process (the long, difficult, arduous, impossible process) of finding a job. It seems that everyone either only hires part-time, or hired their employees when the Winter session ended and all of the smart people out there got jobs instead of taking extra courses...>.>

My long-standing knee problems have been acting up very severely lately. It hurts to walk, which indicates to me that it may be time to return to physiotherapy. My kneecap apparently doesn't track properly, which causes...pain. And cartilage damage. So, right as I've been starting to exercise and get in shape, I'm being smacked down into submission by my dictator-knee. :(

<3 Love, Caitlin

Hoedown Throwdown

Zig Zag 'cross the floor,
Shuffle in diagonal!
When the drum hits hands on your hips,
One-footed 180 twist.

And then a zig-zag, step, slide,
Lean in left, clap three times,
Shake it out, head to toe,
Throw it all together that's how we roll!

How is my week going?

It's been intensely stressful with the end of classes. Cramming in last-minute chapter studies and trying to breathe at the same time is difficult! My parents' anniversary was this past weekend, so I found myself reciting sociological perspectives while baking a cake and making dinner--definitely not my idea of a relaxing preparation for an exam. Today was my last one, though, and my grades are already coming in! B+ in music (it would have been higher if I hadn't taken an exam sick as a sea creature), and an A+ on my final essay in Greek Mythology (worth 30% of my mark, so it's a huge deal!). I also got a B+ on my final essay in Greek Lit. Overall, it's been going well.

As for my "stalker" (I liked how Hit 40 put that! :P), we're getting along....for now. After the intense freakout that I had earlier this week, she was very, very angry. We had an exam together today and she really gave me the stink eye the entire time! She owed me $25, so she had our Prof clip a post-dated check onto my essay which I was to pick up after class, and we texted civilly about it afterwards. She even told me to "care care of [my]self". I'm not saying that this is the beginning of our newfound friendship--it isn't. But we're being civil, and that's all I'm asking for. I just don't want to be her friend, it doesn't mean we have to be outwardly rude to one another. It just means we can't be close...ever. I'm glad that the civility has picked up so that we can both move on with our lives.

Today was just a weird day, and I was done my exam early so I stopped into work and worked today last-minute. We're short-staffed, so me being there is always welcome. I was in with the grade sixes today, which was fun (as usual). Usually the kids play Connect 4 at lunch, but I decided against it today. Some kids are getting left out and it's causing more of a ruckus than it's worth, so the teacher is going to work out a schedule for the game and until then, it stays away. The kids protested a bit, but when they found out their teacher was condoning this decision they were pretty quiet about it. I suspect he's talked to them about this (and straightened them out!)already, because when he mentioned it they were as good as gold on the topic, and this is something they've been arguing for over a week now. Recess was quiet, but kind of cold. It looks beautiful outside, so nobody dressed for the weather and we ended up with a lot of little kids with their arms pulled inside of their shirts and huddling against each other for warmth. Tomorrow's supposed to be worse, so I'm kind of glad I'm not working! It was just an awesome day overall. I worked in the library, helped out with the kids, and definitely forgot to hand in my time sheets...again. That's a really huge problem. I haven't handed any in in awhile. A long while. But I should...so I get paid. :P

Life's been boring in the past couple of days, really. I'm just exhausted! I'll have something more interesting to post later. Promise. C:

PS: PLEASE forgive the Miley Cyrus song in the title, I watched the movie on youtube out of curiosity and gained some sort of crazy addiction to about three lines in it. I'm going to go crazy, but at least I'll enjoy the ride. :D Anyways, it kind of describes my mood right now--a little crazy, a little relaxed.

<3 Love, Caitlin

Serenity

Take my love, take my land,
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care, I'm still free,
You can't take the sky from me.

Take me out to the black,
Tell them I ain't coming back.
Burn the land, boil the sea,
But you can't take the sky from me.

I'm trying desperately to keep my heart in check, and to stay calm. I'm angry, and I'm worried. The worry, however, is starting to outweigh the anger.

I have a "friend". For months we've undergone some extreme changes in our friendship. It's a combination of our personalities clashing and her doing some stupid, stupid things. To address the first one, I used to be more introverted than I am now. Because of some personal problems, high school was hard on me because romance wasn't really an option for my emotional state, and when it came knocking (as it inevitably does sometimes) I was emotionally fragile. She was a good friend for me because we were in the same drama group together, and she brought out a more outgoing side of me. I was a good friend for her because I was forgiving in the name of friendship, and I appreciated her hyperactivity and over-the-top attitude.

We met close to 4 years ago, in September 2005. And for those few years of high school, things were fine. I found her annoying, sure, but she still fit the qualities of a good friend and so I could hardly just stop. And, making matter more complicated, we were in the same performing arts group which made it quite impossible to effectively end a friendship on good terms. Over the last 8 months or so, though, cliche and lame as it sounds, I've become way more confident, something I lacked greatly in high school. And in that confidence I started to trust myself more. So when she would do something that bothered me--I realized it bothered me for a good reason.

Which brings me to the stupid, stupid things she's done. I could list it all out, but the most prominent ones are recent. The first is my previous blog. I mentioned before that it was intensely more personal than this one will probably ever be, and so because of that I took every precaution to keep TOO personal of information from falling into it. No names, no emails. I didn't even talk about where I was from, my friends' names. But because my school days were so long, I would sometimes update it when I was at school, back (and screen) facing the wall. A couple of times I saw her peeking from the corner of her eye at my screen. She'd done this before, with my deviantart account a month or two before -- she watched until I would go on it, then typed my screenname without looking directly at my screen into a word document and quickly saved and closed. I saw her do it and immediately went and closed my account down and created a new one later when she couldn't see, despite her promises not to go to it when I confronted her. So when I saw her peeking at my blog I carefully noted to her how personal and important it was to me. Having experienced a traumatic event I needed a place to be able to write about it, and because she knew about the event I assumed that she would understand my need for privacy and for her to leave me be. But still after that I witnessed her trying to find it multiple times. She would link me to blogs on xanga that she knew would interest me and wait. If I looked at her screen, I could see her discreetly refreshing in a new tab at the comments, waiting for my comments to show up--luckily I'd noticed her idea before I posted anything. At any rate, my blog picked up an anonymous user from my province using her Internet browser, and I blew up. She spent weeks going on and on about how it wasn't her.

I was googling things the other day when I was bored. Names of my family, my friends, just to see what came up. And I googled a good friend's nickname and a blog of hers came up. A couple of personal things did, actually...and while for a split second I wondered what was in them, I didn't bring the mouse anywhere near those links. I realized that I couldn't betray the trust we have and, even though she wouldn't know I'd been to it--I would. It brings me to the conclusion that this other "friend" of mine can't have valued me or our friendship that much if she was willing to go out of her way to lie to me and go around my back to do something like that.

When I googled this "friend"'s username to find her blog (she'd given hers to me willingly, but I couldn't for the life of me remember the provider she was using, so I googled it) and a different one came up, that I'd never seen. I went into it because something caught my attention in the preview. She'd made a blog posting with a single word in it--my username for that blog, a unique one I'd never used for anything else.

It's always little stuff like this, and she goes to the ends of the earth to blame me. In this situation, she was going on and on about how I needed to learn to trust her, about how I was wrong. But I was right. And it makes me wonder about how many other things she's sworn up and down that she's innocent of that she really wasn't.

Because, more recently, she knew I liked a mutual friend of ours. He was sweet and kind and funny. And so, of course, she slept with him. And then told him, afterwards, that I liked him.

Her excuse was that she didn't know I liked him. Then why did you tell him that I liked him? Oh, well I suspected that you liked him. Why would you tell him that I liked him if you weren't sure? Well I was pretty sure, I just didn't know 100%. Then why did you sleep with him.. ......You just need to learn to trust me, stop being so fucking judgemental!

So last night when she hung up on me when I confronted her about the blog I found last night, and when she continued to text me about how she is done with me and that she cannot see the reason in being friends with someone who makes her feel like shit for every single decision she makes, I just...Her undying repetition, her insistence that she's right, sometimes puts me on edge and makes me wonder if I really am right in this situation. And I have to look back and remind myself that I'm not being unreasonable. I never cared about her other decisions, just the ones that ended up screwing me over--and they got too common for me to handle over the past few months.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

<3 Love, Caitlin

I Have a Dream

I have a dream, a song to sing,
To help me cope with anything.
If you see the wonder of a fairytale,
You can take the future even if you fail.
I believe in angels,
Something good in everything I see.
I believe in angels
When I know the time is right for me,
I'll cross the stream...
I have a dream.

I hate to write two blogs in a day, but something really got to me and I had to write about it.

On the television show Britain's Got Talent, there was a woman named Susan Boyle who came out onto stage. She's almost 48, and physically a little bit "frumpy". As she stumbled through the questions the judges gave her, she nervously told the audience that well, her dream was to be a professional singer. The cameras then clip to a teenage girl who gets a dirty look on her face. Boyle goes on to say she would like to be like a particular famous singer (I couldn't quite catch the name) and the camera cuts to more women giving her dirty, superior looks. And then she sang. She blew the audience out of the park, and got a standing ovation moments into her song.

All of this judgement over her looks, right? It's not surprising by any means. Society, it's judgemental. I just don't think people realize it all of the time. The View had a little blurb on her performance and Whoopi makes a good point when she says that they shouldn't be hypocritical. Joy begins to talk about her frumpy appearance and Whoopi interupts, saying that only a couple of months ago they were "bitching" about how women jump on top of one another about each other's looks, and it wouldn't be right for them to turn around and do it to her. But Joy brushes her aside, saying that Whoopi's not so innocent when she partakes in a show that gives people makeovers. I have friends who go through this same thing. One minute we'll all be talking about society's impossible standards for beauty or for an acceptable appearance, and the next somebody will turn on What Not To Wear and criticize the "ugly unfortunates" who are featured on the show and made over. Their own friends and family plead to two fashionistas to follow their friend/family member around for two weeks and secretly video tape their clothes, surprise them in public and tell them they aren't good enough, take apart their wardrobe piece by piece, throwing almost everything away and then telling them what's acceptable.

Nadya Suleman (AKA Octo-Mom), the one who is spread across tabloids and gossip magazines and the news, is judged massively by people. I won't go into the reasons for her judgement, but when I read those same magazines I really try to remember that they aren't trying to make America love her. A loved Octo-Mom lasts for a couple of weeks. A psychopath, hated Octo-Mom could last months. They write those pieces knowing that. On that same line of thought, I don't think that she's completely innocent by any means (and I really do think that, given the reports, she has serious problems and probably shouldn't have custody of the children she doesn't seem to have enough time for), but people judge her too. What gets me is that she claims that she never judges people. She makes an insightful point, saying that she's not really judging those people who judge her because she knows it's incredibly easy to judge someone that you've never met for things you've never experienced...and then she claims, "I actually don't judge others."

Two points, here. First of all, everybody judges people (looking at you here, Nadya Suleman!). I'm not innocent of it either. We all judge. But that doesn't make it right, and if Susan Boyle is an example of anything it's how not to judge a book by its cover.

So here's fact number one about me: I really try not to judge people. I know I do, sometimes, but I try to be an optimist about people.

On that same note, I'm all about taking responsibility, and I think that it's important to distinguish between being unecessarily judgemental and being honest. Nadya Suleman is judged for her looks, her home, her ____ (hard not to find something that she's judged about), and I think that goes too far. Her apparent behavior, however, such as going shopping all of the time and spending more time on-camera in interviews than with her children is honestly unacceptable. Sometimes it's not being judgemental, it's just being truthful.

Here's to learning new things, being up for a good debate, and trying to give people the benefit of the doubt (when they deserve it!).

<3 Love, Caitlin

Only Hope

So I lay my head back down,
And I lift my hands and pray to be only yours,
I pray, to be only your...
I know now, you're my only hope.

The kids at the school yesterday must have realized how "off" I was, because when I was working with them they all managed to test me! We were working on a voice threading project with the first and second graders, which involved them being assigned a letter of the alphabet. They chose something in our city which starts with that letter (U is for University!) and drew a picture for it. We scanned the pictures into a photostory program, and had each student write a short paragraph about their picture, about what they drew. Then we recorded each of them reading their paragraph into the microphone and threaded them together so that the pictures went through a slideshow, and the audio played when the child's picture came up on the screen. It was an incredible idea, but a couple of them are still really struggling with reading, and so I was taking them aside to have them practice for me. One of them, a girl with very mild fetal alcohol syndrome if I remember correctly, read it to me once and I had to help her on every second word. I asked her to repeat it a second time and she looked at me like I was asking her to break her own finger. "Did SHE have to read it again?!" Pointing at the girl who went before her. "Uhmmmm? Yeah....sure, she did. Yes. Just read it." So she reads it (begrudgingly) kind of shakily, needing prompting again. So thinking quickly, I grab a pencil which is the same size and shape of the microphone we're using, and I tell her to pretend the pencil is the mic and this is it, she's being recorded now! Her eyes lit up and I knew I'd sparked her attention, and she grabs the pencil and almost starts, and then she paused....and I could see the thought process in her head...."....Did she do it..?" she asked me in a kind of small and suspicious voice. I was so taken aback that I just stared at her with an "uuuhhhhhh......." She put the pencil down and decided to do it without. She's very much a follower, and she realized it might not be cool to pretend. At least she tried again. >.>

Another girl was in the library drawing her picture and asked me for help. So I went over there and she was doing F for Farms or Farmers or something. There were some weird shapes that I knew were supposed to be animals, and I immediately started trying to figure out what they were. Then she proceeds to tell me how bad her picture was, and how you can't tell what anything is.

Eep. I could see this taking a turn for the worst.

So she looks at me with some sort of evil suspicion as I tried to wave away her worries, telling her she's silly, it's not bad, she just needs to finish colouring it.

"But you can't even tell what the animals are! Guess what they are, just guess."

That like, my worst fear. Guessing the pictures in kids' drawing. It's terrible. So I look up at her with panic and glance around, making excuses that I'm "not very good at guessing", but she just stared at me! So I told her I'd try. I definitely got the horse before she'd even asked, so I slowly told her it was a horse while trying to guess the other ones. I got them right, but seriously? She knew. She's evil. And adorable. I won't hold a grudge. I'll just be careful around that one--an innocent act, but she's clever!

I've taken forever to write this post because I've been secretly watching A Walk to Remember at the same time--and it's at the incredibly sad and beautiful almost-ending, so I have to go. And cry a little. And then study! Can't forget to study. My exams start on Friday.

<3 Love, Caitlin

We're Not Gonna Take It

We're not gonna take it!
No, we ain't gonna take it,
We're not gonna take it anymore!

What a pretty new blog I have myself here. I'm not going to lie, it was a pretty stressful moment when I was trying to figure out what to name it. Dreaming in Music Notes. It's cute, and I like it...and I'm sure it'll grow more on me.

So here I am, listening to the Twisted Sister version of We're Not Gonna Take It, which means I'm feeling all empowered and...powerful. Before you accuse me of being a crazy-person, talking about empowerment, realize it's a temporary obsession with this song, that's all! I watched Chuck last night and they played this song throughout the entire episode. It drove me absolutely crazy because it fit so perfectly. I won't bore you with the details (or spoil it for you), but it was a pretty awesome episode. With a terrible cliffhanger. I'm not making any assumptions that someone is here reading my blog, but I'm taking precautions here and being careful not to get a reputation for spoiling things. If you've never seen Chuck, see it. Monday nights. Great show.

I usually hate the first post of a blog because I don't usually know what to say, but I'm kind of just letting myself pour out my day. In a regular-blog type of way.

I had a blog on xanga, but it kind of just got depressing. It was one of those "pouring out my feelings" blogs, and now I want an everyday life and occassional rant blog. Much more fun, much more upbeat. I wasn't terribly fond of the xanga format, either. Blogger.com, on the other hand, is sleek and smooth and easy to operate, and I am falling in love with it. I also found a really awesome blog that I'm following right now, called Pacing the Panic Room. He has breathtaking photography, and has a photo series about his wife's pregnancy (with weekly photos). I find it really interesting, and he's a brilliant writer, which makes it worthwhile.

I was at work today, and it honestly lifted that stressed-out-exam aura off of me for a few hours. I'm in my first year of University and in the middle of exams. I'm actually supposed to be studying...right now......My high stress-levels are skyrocketing, and when I found out that I was supposed to work today I flipped out. I always forget how much fun I have there, though, and how calming it is. I volunteer during the mornings and afternoons at an Elementary school in the library in between studying, and at lunch I work in the classrooms monitoring lunch and supervising. My Mom is the librarian, and so I spent the morning studying and volunteering and worked at lunch, and came straight home to work. I ended up stopping at a good friend's house and watching some bad TV with her (she likes Trailer Park Boys...) and mixing bad drinks (rum and cranberry juice didn't taste good. Maybe we did it wrong?) at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. It was good to relax, and we only had one drink (we're not that weird, we don't get drunk mid-afternoon) before I left.

This is kind of sweet. It's saying hello to you all for the first time. I can't help but wonder how to end my post. I know it was a bit random, but I'm sure that my next one will have a little bit more structure.

<3 Love, Caitlin