Chris is on spring vacation, which means I write a lot less.

Things have been really topsy-turvy, both on the work and home fronts. Tough, really. On the work front, I made $100 mistake today and upset a partner (a partner, however, who I sent thousands of dollars of business to). I've spent thousands of dollars on ad buys, I'm spending about a thousand more on a decent shopping cart and all the toys that go with it, and my whole goal is to make a ridiculous amount of money over the summer so that I can have my house worked on -- an actual office built, actually. I'd like to have pretty things in my house by summer's end, and that means making bank. Installing a complicated shopping cart, installing an SSL certificate, getting a merchant account and a payment gateway -- frustrating. But probably the right direction.

On the home front -- I can't really even begin to describe things, except in a long therapy session maybe. Things have been very tough here too. Tough with Chris, as I change and my perceptions change. (Plus, those weeks he stays home and I work are always tough. Hoo boy, summer vacation.) I find myself attempting to tear down some walls, and in the process, I'm afraid of finding that Chris really isn't there on the other side. And sometimes he seems not to be, but my mind is a hall of mirrors when it comes to things like that.

I've been reading my 14 year old diary. It's pretentious. It's also familiar, and extremely predictive. I seem to have formed some so-called "core beliefs" during the brief but intense time I was writing this diary. It was a damn weird year of my life. I had a freaky dream that predicted my remaining high school and college years to a tee. I could see where I was going, and it scared me.

One of the things I realized, and said, was that it wouldn't have hurt me at all if my mother, father and brother were to just cease to exist. I could care less if they died, I wrote. And I think this was very true. Living in my family was something you survived as best you could. I didn't survive very well at all. At the same time I realized and wrote that the sudden death of my entire family in a car crash would hardly affect me, I decided that also meant I was a monster. A psychopath. And ever since, I have felt like a horrible monster.

When people disagree with something I did, I assumed it was because I was monstrous. When people seemed okay with me, I assumed it was because they weren't very observant. When the various people in my life failed to take on the role of fixing my fatherlessness or motherlessness, I assumed it was because they also thought it was a monster. Occasionally, especially in my late high school years (maybe my counselor told? The one I was always asking for suggestions about how to move out of my house?) someone would be my surrogate parent. The Newspaper teacher, for example, who somehow figured out I was completely alone and took me mountain climbing, and to journalism conferences.

Basically, if you took the premise that I believed I was a horrible monster getting through life by trying to hide it, you could pretty much predict how my life and relationships would go, and the things I did to prove I wasn't a monster, and also to prove I was.