Nothing particularly prosperous happened today, except my sisters and I met our old preschool teacher when we went out to eat lunch. She remembered all of us, but she only recalled my older sister’s name. (I blame my parents for giving us obscure names — and they’re not even “cool” obscure names; they’re just obscure.)

She was a lot shorter than I remembered, which makes sense because I’m guessing I last saw her when I was five or six. And I’ve definitely grown several feet since then. She smiled a lot more, too, but that’s because she used to be the “mean teacher.” It was nice to see that even though she didn’t baby us while we were kids, she still cared about us. I wouldn’t have understood that when I was little.

I decided to become apathetic in sixth grade.

Looking back, it’s easy to see why I started in sixth grade. Sixth grade was the year I entered middle school and started to doubt everything about myself.

Prior to sixth grade, I’d never cared about self-image. I didn’t have to — because I was smart. And in elementary school, just being smart can give you a dangerous edge. If you have brains, you have respect.

When I started sixth grade, however, I discovered that I couldn’t depend only on my brains because — surprise! — there were other smart people in the world. In fact, some of them were even smarter than I was. And for the first time in my life, I began to notice the stuff on the outside: they were prettier than I was, they were skinnier than I was, etc.

I was neither hideous nor overweight, but I was also neither beautiful nor thin. I was just kind of normal. But, ironically, by being normal, I was being different.

I don’t think anyone ever explicitly said anything to me about being different. I just felt different. I felt like I didn’t belong, and I hated that feeling. So I learned to suppress those emotions whenever they arose. It was easier to lie to myself and say everything was okay than to feel sad because I felt left out.

I didn’t expect it to work. It did. It worked so well that I soon turned Project Apathy into a full-scale project. Anywhere and everywhere I felt left out, I would manipulate my emotions so they would all say the same thing: “I don’t care.”

This was probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I traded away all of my emotions — even the good ones — for temporary security. While I could argue that this was beneficial because it kept me from blowing up over little things, I see now that I didn’t stop my anger. I just bottled it up until I couldn’t take it anymore and blew up, usually over something ridiculously petty.

It’s taken me four or five years to finally admit that I’ve been participating in and supporting a project that’s really not good for me. Project Apathy may have made me feel safe, but at a deadly cost. And looking at the person I am now, I see that it all wasn’t worth it.

I want my happiness back.

A lot of the appliances in my house seem to be malfunctioning. The water heater isn’t heating water. The freezer isn’t freezing. One of the faucets isn’t faucetting.

These three started breaking yesterday. Ironically, yesterday was the day I finished Catch-22 (the first of two books on my summer reading list), decided to start Frankenstein, and gave up out of boredom after the first page. Yesterday was also the first day all summer that I woke up after 12 noon. Obviously, when I’m unproductive, the appliances in my house decide to follow suit.

In other news, I discovered that I had a Katbot at Petshopgirls Reviews. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with it, but it is cute, so I’m sticking it in this entry. :)