he doesn't look a thing like jesus, but he talks like a gentleman like you imagined when you were young

I'm reading 'A Shining Affliction'. It makes me want to cry a lot and it also makes me feel like becoming a therapist is the right choice. At one point the author said this, more as an afterthought than anything. "I wonder if this is a hazard of being a writer: a sense of detachment that sometimes makes the present seem like it is already past."
I sometimes too often ask others what they think of me. I want, more than anything, to know myself and what others think. I do not think that I am particularly insecure, because I do not think I would change myself for someone else. I am happy with the person I feel that I am, I just wonder if everyone views me the way I do. I sometimes wish i could see a therapist just so that someone would tell me who I seem to be. I want to understand myself more. I think it is more vanity than insecurity. But then I guess I am insecure because it pains me to be less than someone else at the things I feel I am good at. It is very hard, sometimes, to get people to tell me the thoughts I want to hear. People are always too afraid of hurting me, I think. Sometimes, when people do say things that are not really positive, though, I am surprised by how much their words can hurt me even though I feel that I should let them roll off my back. The best impressions I get of myself are the ones that come unexpectedly. Yesterday Peter got very upset with me and I knew why, but I felt that he was being irrational. Later he told me some things that I already knew and then some other things that I did not know, that he feels sometimes that I am better than him because I know a lot of words and I am a vegetarian. It was interesting to me to hear because I have never really felt like a good person. A smart person, maybe sometimes. It was interesting to hear those words from someone telling me how they feel and not how they think I want them to feel. I hope.
It has always been difficult for me to verbalize the reasons why I became a vegetarian. I think it started as an attempt to annoy my grandparents, but after I thought about it some more and read some literature I realized that it was because I did not feel good about being indirectly responsible for death. I still ate fish for a while, and I used to tell my dad it was because I did not look at a fish and feel that it had a soul. I don't really believe in souls as I did when I was younger- as a kind of smoke that lived in your chest until it flew into the sky when you died. I used to think about that a lot. (god was a man who lived on a planet. Angels lived on their own planet. Jesus lived on another one. I was kind of like a Mormon in that way. I guess I never thought about how terribly lonely they all must be.) I do, though, believe in the idea of a part of you that makes you an individual. And I think you can call that a soul, separate from our calculating brains. I don't like to eat fish much anymore, partially because my best friend became a vegetarian recently and refuses to eat it, so I feel like a bad vegetarian when I do. But also because all those humane society newsletters I used to read really got to me. I hate the idea of factory farming and I know that it is particularly bad for fish. Without getting into the gory details, I would only feel comfortable eating a fish or any other animal if I knew where it came from. I do not feel this is something that it makes me better than anyone else. Perhaps more squeamish.
I always try to do my best in school because it pisses me off when people are better than me. Secretly, I'm very competitive. 
I think I learned a lot of words from a young age because I wanted to be able to express myself as precisely as I possibly can. I re-read some of the reading responses I wrote to my teacher in fifth grade and it became clear to me that I was, at least sometimes, very unhappy. When I look back on my childhood, I tend to forget those unhappy patches because after all, I had everything I should have wanted. I think my childhood was very happy, but, like everyone else, things were sometimes hard. To my teacher, I described myself as depressed and I was surprised to hear myself use those words. Sometimes looking back I feel like I've forgotten parts of myself like these and it makes me sad. I have never dealt well with change and as time moves on I inevitably lose things. I gain so much, too, though. Just the other day an old friend looked at me and said, 'you seem a lot happier now.' and though I had never thought this, I knew it was true.
I do not feel like a good person, but I guess I try. 
I am at my grandparent's house with my best friend. They live at the beach. We visited a graveyard today at my request. It was beautiful. I also saw some pictures of my parents when they were young.

this is where we are, for miles and miles. interrupted only by a huge house rising out of the swamp along the horizon every so often. a house like the one i am in.

this  is my best friend standing on a surveyor's thing. i don't know what it's called.

this is my best friend sitting on the end of a bridge that we trespassed onto. 

this is a dead tree.

this is that same bridge walking back home.

this is the back of a tombstone. many of the stones were so pious it almost sounded hopeful. some of them were very wistful. others were grand and somewhat boisterous. still others- mostly of kids- were just sad. a lot of them said 'our darling baby'.

there was a quiet kind of peace here. i don't think it would be a bad place to spend forever. my mother explained to me that she never visits her father's grave because she doesn't feel like he is there. i think if she died i would want to go if only because i feel like i ought to.

the graveyard was founded in 1792. what a terribly long time ago.

here are my parents. 

sometimes, people try to convince me not to live where i do. friends who live other, richer places. i used to hate being here but now i'm glad because not everybody gets to help a drug dealer write his memoirs. i'm glad because i feel like i am able to become a better person by being exposed to different, but not neccessarily good people. i feel it's important for me to get to know people who are different than me so that i can view them as people and not, i don't know, gangsters and drug dealers. it helps me developed a more well-rounded world view, i guess.
Anyway. this is a silly and not well thought out post.