I'm going friends only for a bit, as I'd like to know who's reading my journal.

I've always liked to think that there were anonymous people keeping up with me who I've never met, I'm sorry to you if there were and maybe I'll go public again. I'd also like to invite you out of hiding, I won't bite :)

I'll happily friend anyone though, so just comment if you'd like that.

Never anyone around to talk to when I need them the most, I'm just refreshing the same few pages over and over again hoping there's a least something new to read, a substitute for proper interaction at least.

I need all the thoughts to just stop.

My concentration's never been great but it's mega awful at the moment, even the page explaining the @ before people's names on twitter was too much for me. I know you'll all tell me it's the fault of my diet and sleep patterns though, oh and the poppies won't be helping either.

I need some brain sharpeners.

I've created a twitter account, I don't really understand it yet but at the moment I think it's just the same as the one line statuses from facebook? If so then that's the kind of thing I'll be doing with it as I tend to be online a lot and often have "thoughts" I wish I could say to a person were they in the same room.

There'll be no cross-overs from here to there or vice versa. My journal will go on as normal. I'm even installing a twitter gadget for the sidebar (I love the sidebar) and I'm pretty sure I won't be following any celebs even if Stephen Fry does have one.

Oh, my username on there is staindude as stainboy was obviously taken and I haven't used weevil for a long time.

The musical Buffy episode is awesome, I'm gonna keep that one. I'm liking season 6 and find it amusing how Willow overdoing her use of magic is such a blatant metaphor for drug use, like really blatant.

As a life-long (no exaggeration, I was awake late as a baby) lover of this time of night I'm finding it a bit sucky lately as it's where people online disappear and I'm left alone. And alone makes me think, which I can't deal with. I need some new chat rooms or forums. Well, I need to be normal but I'm having a lot of trouble with that. It's hard to work on what you'd quite like to happen when something you want even more won't leave your thoughts.

My laptop seems to have remembered that I like to extend the desktop to the TV so it switches to that while I'm in the middle of telling it to. Creepy.

I slept in my bed last night, had lots of very strange dreams. I'm not keen.

Is it sad that I'm excited now that I'm finally ready to watch the musical episode of Buffy? I downloaded it for someone years ago but never bothered watching it as it wouldn't have made any sense. Watching Angel at the minute, urgh, is Billy going to stay as a new enemy? I'm wishing he doesn't but I bet he does. Just looked, he doesn't, hooray. Yeah, I like a spoiler sometimes.

Just found out somebody who upset me by taking the piss just had a terrible few weeks including his girlfriend leaving him. Is it bad that I'm not really that sympathetic?

That's 2 take aways I've had now where I've ordered way too much and then regretted it. I barely even enjoy them and I'm sure it can't be doing me any good to eat like that and that sort of food after eating nothing. What am I doing? Do I hate myself that much? I haven't eaten it all but I still feel awful.

It'd be so easy for me to order some gbl and sink even further... but I won't.

I can't see me sleeping in one for ages, just a second of silence with nothing to listen to and my mind goes in to overdrive and being in bed with that happening is even worse. I'm so lonely in bed I wish there was someone that would just sleep next to me for a few nights but of course there isn't, so the sofa it is.

Can't remember if I mentioned here that the piercing bits I ordered arrived the other day. I was disappointed in the mixed bag of niobium rings, the biggest size in there is a couple of 2mm rings and the rest are thinner. Never mind, I was going to give some as random gifts anyway. The finger ring fits my little finger so that's cool :) And the 6.6mm earring is awesome, really heavy and chunky, I think I will put it in my right lobe as I don't think stretching it much bigger is doing it any good. It's cool to have a massive lobe on one side, so what, heh. I'm trying not to get obsessed with piercing, I thought about doing a rook piercing as I have some little rings now but I don't want to get carried away and my body can't be in the best mode for healing right now.

CJ should be back off her holiday this week, so I can talk to her and arrange a visit. I'll also make it clear that I'm not looking for her to look after me while I'm down there, I just want the company, not even bothered about the change of scenery. She's possibly in more need of support herself at the moment having much more recently broken it off with her bloke, so maybe I can be there for her. I'd like to prove that I can be there for someone, I always have been but people tend to think you can't when they see how depressed you are and they withdraw themselves from you.

I did watch all of Angel season 2, Willow's turned up because of the events of the Buffy season finale. Why did I think I had 2 eps left? Oh well. Next apparently I'm to watch the first couple of Angel epsiodes in season 3, then the next two Buffy ones and after that it doesn't matter too much as those two seasons didn't interlink much. I've now got a text file on my desktop explaining how to watch the seasons after that.

Read a few accidentally Buffy spoilers, I shouldn't have been looking but I had to make sure that Giles wasn't going to die and I was curious to see if Tara was cured. I'm up to the point now where Willow turns up in Angel so I guess he comes in soon. Willow's great now, she's so confident and powerful, yeah I guess I'm a cliché.

My right lobe wasn't liking being at 12mm too much, it was stretching the back of my lobe outwards too much so I took it out. I may accept a smaller hole there for a while, we'll see.

Because I'm always curious and have a knack for making things worse for myself I had a look at agoraphobia under suspicion of feeling a bit too much like that again. Not enough of it has ever seemed to fit when I've read the symptoms, and I wouldn't class my main fear as being afraid of panicking while out although I don't like being trapped, my fear is leaving my home. I think Separation Anxiety is more likely since I've had symptoms for that from an early age, it's as old as my OCD. I could not relax if my parents weren't home when they were meant to be, moreso my Mum as I was used to my Dad being at work. I hated my Mum even going next door as she'd be there for ages and I'd imagine all the things that could have happened to her on the way back. I hated sleeping over at friends houses, I never slept, it didn't help that their and their parents bedtimes were earlier than mine but I'd lay awake sweating all night. I didn't like my Mum leaving me anywhere, especially short notice so I wasn't prepared for it, even if it was somewhere fun like a friend's house.

I still get it, I felt that way when I went to uni when I was nearly 22. I get it about my cat when I'm living back at home with him, I won't go to bed unless he's back in the house. One of the reasons I don't want to live in Essex is that I think I'd feel bad for not being at my Mum's more if it was possible to just pop round. I've got used to being far away and relaxing about that.

Also explains why I feel so bad isolated on my own and why I'd rather have company in the form of a close house mate than a permanent home or a job.

EDIT: More stuff about it...

When I started secondary school a horrible thing had happened plus I was planning on changing my identity and actually trying to make people like me so my confidence was already down. I had one friend. Because of splitting 2 classes into 3 for CDT and the cooking/sewing and an unlucky register placement I was seperated from this friend in this class. I dreaded this lesson, I absolutely couldn't stand it. I was terrified of being "alone" and went bright red if any attention was aimed at me. I'd even look forward to PE so it'd mean not having it.

And yes, I've always avoided leaving my home, I'll put it off till the very last minute and am always late. I feel antsy when away from it, even after I'd only been moved into this flat for 2 days I really didn't like spending 2 nights at Gemmas and couldn't wait to get back. I was still feeling that was about my home in Essex this time last year when I was staying in Leeds, despite always wanting to escape when I'm actually there. What happened to me this time must have severed the tie finally as I don't yearn to be back down there now.

It's silly, I'm not enjoying myself sat here yet I don't want to leave and when I do leave I can't wait to come back. And even being in an attic with a few flights of stairs makes it that extra bit harder, it's not lazyness of the stairs, I think it's how they make the journey from home to outside longer.

I'm hoping if I can move into this house I saw that living with another person will help inside not feel so drastically different to outside.

I don't really understand, I've spent a lot of time kinda isolating myself on purpose. I hate walking around towns on my own but I've done this more often than not. Because I crave company, but the company I crave is some that makes me feel comfortable and that takes a while to build up so I've chosen to be alone a lot as it's less painful than being with someone you're not yet comfortable with.

And I seem to be okay with meeting new people and talking to them now but I have no idea how you turn that into a close friend. I don't know how it works, the ones I've collected have kinda been the ones to instigate it, or an incredibly lucky environment helped it happen. Like I already new Gemma in the first year of uni but we only got to know each other when she spent a lot of time sitting on the Safety Bus with me, it's a nice long time which I think is better than only a couple of hours but also involved me having to drive and pick up other people so there wasn't ever a lack of something to talk about as you could speak to the passengers or talk about them, etc. And the same thing then happened with CJ before and probably at the start of us going out. Living with Kim and because she started going out with Ian will have helped us get to know each other better than if those two things weren't the case as well.

If you're ever likely to start watching Buffy, having kept completely ignorant of it like me then it's worth me hiding a spoiler ( under a cut )

Thought I'd ad photographic evidence of my recent piercing adventures:



My labrets I did... last week? They went in backwards at first as in this pic. The one on the left as you're looking at the pic is in all fine now but the other one's still a bit too swollen. The post isn't quite long enough so I'm wearing it without the ball and trying to not let it carve out a disc in the inside of my mouth. I had a longer bar in but it had a ball on the inside which was carving out a ball shape in there so I took that out. :)



Right after I pierced a new hole at 2.4mm, that ring I've had since I first had my lobes pierced at that size in 2002. I had 2 but CJ lost one down the shower drain! The other hole has a 8mm taper in it here (which I think I lost when out the other day) but I'm now wearing a 10mm one now (the size it was up to for the 2nd half of last year). I briefly got it to 12mm over a month ago but it didn't like the narrowness of the screw-in tunnel. The 10mm taper keeps slipping out so I may go for 12mm again and leave the taper in for a while since there's a lot more room and it's easier to clean than the tunnel. My plans for this hole had been the 6.6mm ring I ordered but now the stretching is going well again I might wear a tunnel with the ring through it and possibly stretch up the new hole to eventually take the ring. I'd like at least one more hole in that lobe as well but I have no more 2.4mm rings yet and I don't want to make it any sorer for the moment.



Not for the squeamish, the 2.4mm needle, proper piercing needle that comes pre sterilised. I put it on my laptop so you can see the size of it!



My left ear, I've had the industrial for aaages. It was done at separate holes and then a bar was put in in 2003. Got the conch in 2005. I have a 14mm taper in the lobe, I'm awaiting my clear plastic plug which I'll wear a while before going up to 16mm.

There we go for now!

Well, I'm not rich, and technically I have negative money but my scrounging off the state allowance has been paid in so I can now buy food. I might have to order online again as I never get out to shop.

Something just popped into my mind, Jen often reminded me of everything I felt I'd missed out on during my teens/earlier 20s. Not her actually reminding me, but that she did everything I wish I'd been doing at the time. I sat about being too afraid to live while she was actually out there living. She went through a lot of bad shit as well but I'd have rather had that as well. How pathetic am I. But I have a million regrets. The best advice to could give anyone is to be yourself and do what you want to do at the time, if you're anything like me you'll regret not doing something that might have turned out bad a hell of a lot more than actually doing something that turns out bad. I've got a few stories were I've took a risk and it's backfired but I don't regret it at all and it makes a good story. I've been able to fix hating the past before, by simply enjoying the present.

The Hoobs has been on at this time of morning for years now, more than 5. I started watching it when getting home from work at the end of 2004. And talking of that, I started fantasizing about living in Preston again. I had a look at the rent of houses on gumtree and it just gave me that warm feeling to recognise where the addresses were. Then I went on a Preston website/forum and looked at some photos, then a video on youtube somebody made of their drive around town, which goes right near where I used to live. I couldn't even visit on my own though, let alone live there, I need to experience it with someone else.

Just cos I don't do these anymore I thought I would fill out this ( sex one )

My internet was down yesterday, they said Sheffield was in "isolation" which made it sound like there was some kind of disease here. I was really lost without it, at midnight I attempted to put a day's credit on the mobile broadband stick but it wasn't having it, which I guess turned out okay as the internet is now working. I knew it would happen though: I finally notice the green light and instead of jumping up in excitement I just fall asleep. Slept all day cos I was up all night :/ I hate that. I was watching Angel season 2 and had to stop before the last 2 eps as I hadn't seen the equivalent Buffy episodes. Yeah, I'm that sad.

I got a provisional yes to the house I viewed last week, depends on when I can move and if she gets someone else who can move in sooner. So that'll be cool, not that I really want to move only to move again but it'd be much less a strain on money. I started thinking something the other day: "do I really need to stay in Sheffield?". The uni isn't set in stone in the slightest, and there are other unis. Just that there's nothing tying me to Sheffield, I haven't set enough roots here that I'll really be missing anything if I leave (apart from cineworld, but that's in other towns). I'm trying to restart everything in my life from scratch, and loneliness is the most powerful thing keeping me down. There were moments back in Preston that would have been much more disastrous for me had I not been living with Kim and Ian. Must stress that I don't want somebody to try and fix me or look after me, I want them to just be around.

I'm letting myself go as well, I'd like to get out of that but everything seems like so much trouble. I'm taking care of the piercings I created last week but I'm not doing much else. I must stink like an old tramp. At least if I move into a house with someone else it should stop that behaviour. Not eating makes me feel really weak as well, I had one of those dizzy moments you get when you stand up quick only it lasted for ages. Well, if I live with another person I won't be able to pretend I don't exist quite so easily.

Went out yesterday to meet some new people, was good and every time I meet people I'm surprised at how much I talk these days.

Yet this weekend I've felt really down, I'm sleeping loads, I'm lonely and I'm trying to communicate with Jen which isn't helping at all. She seems to ignore me when I ask her to please not post my keys or just post them and I hadn't heard from her so I emailed tonight saying I would pop round tomorrow morning to get them. I thought she was moving tomorrow. Turns out she's not and she replied straight away this time to stop me from popping round. I've asked her again to please not post anything and she hasn't replied, so I'll hope that she might respect my wishes since I'm respecting hers. All I want is for us to part company with respect for each other.

CJ is on holiday and I miss her even if she's not local. I want to get the chance to visit her before she leaves. I wish she could move up here then. I don't have romantic feelings for her but I would love to be able to be near someone I was close to like that. I'm so lonely. I need more than someone to just give me a quick hug.

I don't know what else to say.

I re pierced my labrets the other day, myself. I can't believe I did it, especially both of them. The right one (your left), the one that was always well behaved pretty had most of the hole still there it was just a matter of breaking through the inside. The left one was more of a pain, I had it done 3 times in all when I had it before so I'm sure it must be full of scar tissue in there, I got the needle through but had trouble with the post so had to put the needle through again. Got it in though, couldn't believe it! Since then though it's quite swollen and the post wasn't long enough so the back (which was actually the ball end as I had to put it through backwards) was getting sucked right into the skin. So for now I've put a slightly longer bad in, it has balls both ends but it's a bit longer so should be okay while it's healing. The other one is completely fine. I need some more mouthwash as well, and some sea salt as I only have table salt.

I'd like to do another one in my right earlobe and the 2.4mm needles for that arrived today, can only do one as I only have one 2.4 ring. I've got a 8mm taper in there at the moment, thinking about giving up on keeping up with the left lobe, it's loads more temperamental so I might leave it smaller, have a couple more in that lobe and leave the left one to be massive and on it's own. Last night I got it to 14mm and it was piss easy, just slid right in. I'm waiting on a 14mm clear plug for that.

I'm also waiting for a couple more things that I couldn't help myself on, like this earring (click the pics to go to where they came from):



It's 6.6mm so I'm gonna put it in the right lobe for now, I might eventually get a second hole in that lobe for it but I just want to wear it now because it's amazingly gorgeous - and for £1.73!

I bought myself a ring, I don't wear rings as they've annoyed me in the past but I'm gonna give it a try:



Then there was the 14mm clear plug for my lobe and a bag of mixed niobium rings, I've wanted them for ages, it's 20 bcrs of mixed colour and size from 1mm to 4mm. I'll use some and randomly give others away as presents.

I wish I didn't have to be on my own tonight. Why does one person have the power to send you right back down again?

I really need to get hold of Jen but can't, I really hope she hasn't blocked my phone or something she was okay the last time I talked to her. I want us to walk away out of respect, not hating each other. I don't want to talk about her though, is that healthy? Does it mean I'm burying issues or does it mean I'm recognising there's no need to talk about her and it's just time that will heal?

Edit, she replied to my email, her internet still works so surely her phone must work as well. She was still happy to ask me to fix her internet as well, that's happened a couple of times, she tells me she wants to hear nothing from me at all but has asked me to do something for her.

Anyway, I went to see that house tonight, it's nice I think I could definitely live there for a few months and feel alright. I'd get on well with the woman, she's very laid back and quirky and her cat is very sweet and friendly. I like it more than the houses full of slightly younger people who are into drinking and takeaways, I need to relax more than that. Oh and what was funny was there was the same guy there looking round this place that was there at the other place I looked at, he's looked at loads.