Heyyyyy, they're letting you try out this Journal Skins thing for a limited time, and I must say it's pretty wicked cool. I just looked through the most popular journal skins of all time and WABAM! There was the Deathnote staring me in the face right at the top of the page. I should have known....
Man, it's late at night, and I stayed up to watch Sunday Night adult swim for the first time in ages (Metalocalypse~! 30 minute episodes~! Orgasm....) and I'm sort of angsty and ranting to myself with no aim in particular because I just finished Catcher in the Rye and anyone who's read it can imagine what kind of effects it has on one's psyche. Not that it's a bad book.... It's a great book! It just gives you an acute awareness of being an angsty, jaded, disillusioned teenager at odds with the world and unmotivated to go anywhere in life and terrified of the future.
But I'm trying my best not to leak that all over my DeviantArt journal, or else I'll sound like some angsty blogger kid....
Man, am I seriously worrying what I'll sound like? Really?
.....Anyways.... I think what's getting me down is college. You know....
Well, you know how I have a Deathnote parallel for every aspect of life, because it's easier to talk about fictional characters than to rant about yourself?
Well, I'm imagining how B and Mello and all those other kids at Wammy's house, all those child prodigies, must have felt. Their whole academic life they were fed that they had to grow up to be detectives, to be like L, to be really good in their areas. And their whole lives that's what they wanted. But what if they weren't good enough to be L? What if they weren't smart enough, or didn't do things exactly the right way that L would do them, or they simply slacked off too much in the past and it came back to haunt them? Those kids, when they hit about graduation age, must have had their ENTIRE FUTURES weighing on a few steps, a few decisions, and if they found out they didn't do something fast enough or on time or right they'd essentially flushed that future down the drain.
No wonder A killed himself. No wonder B went crazy.
Don't get me wrong peeps; I ain't the suicidal type. Personally I think it's cowardly bullshit, and I would never resort to it. Too many people that would get mad, that would be hurt. I really hate hurting people that I like. I'm just feeling weighed down by ten tons of pressure from every direction. And the thing is, I KNOW what I need to do. I know I need to sit down, fill out applications, pick out plan A and plan B and plan C, etc.... But every time I start to do it, or think about it too much, my chest gets tight and I feel like i'm going to have a panic attack or spontaneously combust or something.
What I need is someone to baby me. Someone to hold my hand and say, "Okay now Aubrey, let's apply to another school, okay?" Which is downright ridiculous... Because this is supposed to be the step towards my independence. The first in a long flight of stairs I take towards adulthood. No-one can escort me up that; I have to do it myself. But... I do everything else on my own, dammit. I mean, every other high school senior in America is probably sitting down with Mommy and Daddy right now talking about college majors and scholarships, payment plans and new laptops. Well, I don't have that, do I?
I sound so whiny. No-one has made it to this point in my journal, surely.
In which case it's okay to continue bitching.
I just.... I'm almost nineteen years old. I'm almost not a goddamn teenager anymore. What happens when you hit twenty? Twenty used to seem so old. It used to seem like the age of people on TV, people I'd never be as old as. I remember being a thirteen-year-old and thinking the high school kids, the sixteen-year-olds, were so wise, so mature. Holy hell. Those are just children to me now. And here I am, two years away from twenty, and bitching about anxiety and fear on the internet with a damn ANIME wallpaper as the backdrop for my emotions. I'm still just a kid. When DO you hit adulthood? I know some people who, at thirteen or eighteen or twenty, are far more mature and wise than I'll ever be. I know people like my mother, people like my grandparents, who have lived two or three times as long as I have and still don't understand anything, who are still kids thinking the world will wait for them. When do you become an adult? When do you push aside the crutch of support and tell the world, "Okay, I can handle this on my own"?
I don't think... ever.
I think I should stop; I think I should quit typing before I make someone feel as angsty as I do. It's just late at night, I'm just emotional, and I'm just eighteen and stressed out.
So there. Goodnight, DA.
Oh, and this Journal skin is way awesome.


-Aubrey Palermo
11/23/09
Immolation by gasoline and matches