28/12/2002 - 2:41 p.m.

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind-

I'm not allowed to go back to school until at least the tenth. That's two weeks. I'm not going to make it.

My mother wants me to get my license. Never mind that I've not driven for seven months and that I never was taught a damn thing in the first place. However, my permit expires on my birthday and some sort of valid identification is necessary in this godforsaken world (well, actually, the gods are still here, and they're probably as upset about the whole identification thing as I am- they are unable to supply a valid birth certificate). I don't see why it has to be a driver's license. A passport or my social security card should do the job just as easily, but she doesn't see it this way. So I've had to go out driving, and I don't think I'm going to learn anything with her screaming at me in the passenger seat about the curb and the speed limit and loads of other things that I'm doing wrong.

I don't want to learn to drive. I don't want a car. I can understand the necessity, and there are times where my life would be made simpler by the ownership of a car and the license to drive it, but I don't want any of that. I expect I've spelt license wrong every single time I've written it. Ah well.

On top of this, we have the fact that I cannot leave the house, still. I was asked to a New Year's Party the other day, but was given numerous reasons that I was not going to be allowed to go. All of the reasons were absolute bosh.

Then, I've been charged with breaking the computer again. I didn't do a ruddy thing- all I did was put some Sims zip files in the wrong folders, and I couldn't change it because I didn't have the time. I had several people breathing down my neck that it was their turn and I'd been on quite long enough. So fine, yell at me because I didn't get to finish what I was working on so the computer would work. That seems justified.

It's pretty obvious what being here does to me. I need out of here. I need not to be here at all but back safe in my room at UNI. My mother's upset because I've reffered to it as home on more than one occasion. Well, I'm sorry, but home is where I like being. Home was camp, home is UNI, home is not this house with my family. At home, I can take phone calls without a worry whether I'll be allowed to do what's being asked. At home, I can do whatever I please to my own computer. At home, I don't have to justify my mail. That's what I have to do here. No matter what I do, an elaborate justification is required that puts Leonard's questions to shame.

I am 18. Legally I am an adult. I can vote and get married and all sorts of things, except in this house, where I have to ask if I can change the television channel. I can't stand it. Not for two more weeks, I'm going to go stark raving mad.

Emily Dickinson went absolutely crazy, I'll bet it's because she lived with her parents far too long. Her mother was probably forever picking up her poems and asking her to explain each and every one of them, and then getting offended. Her father probably blamed her for breaking the pen nibs, even though as it was she never left her room, so how could the poor girl have done it? Her sister Lavinia was probably insanely jealous because "Emily got her own way all the time, all she did was sit in her room all day writing". And then the whole Dickinson house would swell into an uproar, and Emily would escape upstairs and start writing Death Sets A Thing. Well, it probably wasn't really like that, but I dare say it easily could have been.