The last few days, I've been writing a post about how things have reached high levels of suck, which was taking me forever because it's hard to be motivated about writing down all the things that are making me unhappy, furthered by the fact that most of my problems are of my own making or are not so much problems as just being in need of a severe attitude adjustment because everything is making me sad.

However, I have left that post unpublished for now, because Taylor Swift's new album (which I have already ordered the Deluxe version of) leaked a few days early, so although the ethics of listening to an artists music that they don't want you to listen to yet are a bit murky, I have heard a bunch of the new songs, and since they were always going to be the soundtrack to the next two years of my life, I had my fingers crossed they were going to be good.

Thankfully, they are! My favourite so far is Track 3, Blank Space. It's clever because it is a satire, it's a song based on the personality of Taylor Swift that the media invented, the crazy girl who can't keep a boyfriend for more than a month, but it can also (and I'm sure it will) be played straight. Edit: I can confirm this, on youtube people are bitching that lyrics like 'I can make the bad boys good for a weekend' isn't fit for a role model. Idiots.

The album is completely pop, which I wasn't too enthusiastic about. I wasn't against it, but I love Taylor's ballads the most, and those are slower and more about the guitar, rather than being pop anthems. Plus, so much of Taylor's style is country, and the clever, clever lyrics and hooks. But she managed to do some really interesting things and I'm into it. What also helps is that Taylor has coincidentally managed to be in sync with my life and love stages. Red was the heartbreak album, and this is about being independent and happy and strong, and I like that. I mean, it's all still about love, at least most of the time, but not in a throes-of-agony, forcing yourself not to call them, type of heartbreak that Red was. I mean, my blog is called Mosaic Broken Hearts, because what I got out of that pretty phrase was that when your heart shatters, it stays that way, you put it back together but the cracks are still there.

I just found a new song, ooh. Because it was leaked, they pop up then get reported and taken down so I haven't heard everything yet.

The songs are still about past relationships, but it's more reminiscent than heartbroken if that makes sense. The final song Clean, for me at least, harks back to a very old song, Breathe, where the chorus was 'I can't breeeeaaaaathe without you but I have to' and now, this song is about being cleansed of all that, with the lyrics 'The rain came pouring down when I was drowning, that's when I could finally breathe. And that morning, gone was any trace of you, I think that I am finally clean.'

The whole album is great, it's thrilling. I really like Taylor Swift. Like, when I heard her speak for the first time in person, I burst into tears I was that overwhelmed. Now she's on Tumblr and is just so self aware and funny and in on all the jokes, I love her even more. She's excellent.

I don't like to rest my happiness on celebrities or tv shows or whatever, I know that when people do, it generally is because everything else in real life is shitty, but this is what's making me happy this week while everything else is just drudgery. 

eyyy im growing as a person

So today has been a productive day. I think recently I've mentioned a bit about how me and the bffl have been distant and things haven't been exactly wonderful in that relationship lately. Well, today, I confronted her about it, albeit by text, and we got it out. I'm really glad because it's just been unsatisfying and petty lately, like, she stresses and I don't, so then she gets annoyed at me for not doing my assignments with her because I don't want to do it a week early when I'm not in the mood, and then I get annoyed in turn because she's being judge-y, and then we refuse to speak about it. And all term, I've been dreading her asking me what I'm doing a certain day because if I said I was free, it'd mean she'd want to do assignments with me and I just wanted to hang out with her and eat doritos.

Though it was barely a fight, since it was just a few long texts each, it was actually kind of a 'turn the friendship on its axis' type arguments, when I really thought, well, what if I don't want to be best friends any more? Is this small fight indicative of a larger flaw that would be enough to say, this relationship isn't working for me, and I don't want to be best friends any more, I think this has run it's course."

I think because I have quite a few 'best friends', even though Mia is I suppose the most exclusive, I'm at the point where I could theoretically not be friends with one any more and be okay. Though Mia and I are so symbiotic and she is just like so there in my life even when we aren't together, it'd be like breaking up with my mum or something.

Our relationship isn't like perfect yin and yang, where every part of our personalities match and for a second when I sent her a long text that was basically like 'this hasn't been okay, if this is what our friendship is going to continue being like, I don't want it', I really thought, well maybe this is over, we aren't the same and maybe people just change until all of a sudden you realise that you're completely different and it's over.

But then she apologised and simple as that, I was okay with things again. I suppose I realised that people are never perfect and friendships can't be either. When I went on Exchange, it's true that I did kind of discover a different way that friendships could be, a way that I really liked, and to an extent I suppose that made me question how good Mia and I had it (something I always took as fact) because it wasn't like the friendships I made this year. Instead of being open and kind, Mia can't stand mushy feelings and her type of compliment is 'oh, you look decent for once, where did you get that top?', but that doesn't make it bad, just different and I have to take responsibility for half of our friendship. She can't totally shape it and if we start doing something that I don't like, it's my responsibility to do something about that.

I'm trying hard to be more honest and more direct with confronting these problems when they come up. If I make a New Years Resolution, that's what it will be (am I getting in to early, talking about NYE already?). Because it really isn't like me at all, I finish an important conversation with someone and I am compelled to overthink it, share it with 5 of my closest friends and then blog about it, before passively aggressively dealing with it through strategic cold shoulders. That's not the kind of adult I want to be, not at all, so hopefully this little fight and make up will serve as a positive example of not avoiding all emotional issues in the future.

So... things are going.

I suppose things are good. It's hard to judge when one facet of your life is terrible, how to judge the rest.

Obviously, the content of my previous entry continues to devastate me, but not every second of the day. Lizzy is one of my best friends and her circumstances are confusing and awful mostly because nothing is known for certain. If I knew that she was going to die 146 days from now, then I could make an action plan. If I knew she was going to get very sick but be fine, again, action plan. But as is, she could be fine, her drugs could work and I may never see her so much as cough. I can't put a probability rating on that though. Or things might be terrible or things could get suddenly bad or slowly bad or she might just announce one day that things have taken a turn for a worse and the prognosis is even more dire than it is now. But I don't know and that leaves me in a weird kind of limbo of everything being currently fine but the probability of it not being fine in the future much higher than before I  knew.

I spent the weekend with Lizzy at a debating competition in Sydney, Friday to Monday, which was excellent. I made some friends, improved as a debater, got drunk off my face repeatedly, and got to explore Sydney a bit, a city that I am really quite unfamiliar with, considering it's proximity to where I live. I really like debating, I like that I don't get nervous before speaking anymore at all. The first time I did it I was shaking like a leaf and now it's like, lets get up there and fucking destroy some logical fallacies. I'm still not great and maybe I'm not even good but I'm getting competent and confident and I know that I'm improving.

My friends lately have been weird. I was making my friend list for my birthday and I could only come up with 19 friends. And okay, I do have more, it's just that half of my closest friends are ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD. But I am making more new friends than ever before and that is wonderful.

In terms of specific friends, Mia and I are being weird. Like, we're in different places mentally all the time. And okay, this isn't even a big deal but it hurt my feelings, and it wasn't awful of me because she knew I was on her phone reading her messages, but she didn't want to debate with me last week, at the first tournament we did. Her boyfriend/ president put us together and she went off at him because she'd told him specifically she wanted to be with anyone but me and he changed it so we both had different partners.

It just hurt my feelings, not because there couldn't be a reasonable explanation- like she wanted to make other friends or debate with someone with more experience- but because she didn't just tell me that she didn't want to and instead just made her boyfriend change the line up and not mention it. And I'd been begging her to be my partner for Women's but now I can't help but think, well maybe she just didn't want to go with me, and her excuses were just that, excuses. I just like people to be honest because I can never tell and later it makes me feel stupid for acting enthusiastic when the other person isn't.

I haven't talked to Jen much lately, but I've just been so busy. What I like most about Jen--well maybe not most but it's high on the list, is that I never feel insecure with her. I never feel like I don't matter or that she doesn't care about me or miss me, just as I miss her. I mean, we're both living independent lives but, to quote Kingdom Hearts cheesily, our hearts are connected. I love her, she loves me, our friendship will pick up from exactly where we left it and in the meantime, it remains a great comfort to me. As someone who has always placed far too much importance on 'how much do you love me compared to so-and-so, with Jen, I know she had other close friends, best friends, and that doesn't make me think 'well, what is my place in her life then?' because I know from my own personal experience, that I love Mia just as much before and after I met Jen. I don't love one more than the other, and I don't love Mia less than I used to. Hearts are big, they can do that shit.

Work is stressing me out lately, and it's because my boss has decided to be nit picky and overbearing, which makes me screw up more because I'm nervous from him being on my case and analysing everything I do as a tally against me. And I just don't enjoy working when he's like that, and it's more boring too because I can't listen to music or talk openly. It's just lame. But you know, money.

Other stuff is happening, but I don't really want to talk about it. Maybe next entry. Ttfn.