«  Mon.02.05.2001  » 11:04 pm EST        31°F (-1°C) in Dearborn Calendar of Updates I hope to be moving one step closer to actually getting a job today. I put in a number of phone calls to various places today, either checking on applications I'd already put in or requesting information or application materials. Additionally, I took the plunge and put my resumé on Monster.com. I should know more about that later this week, I hope. Lately, I've been looking back on parts of the last month of my life and asking myself, "What the fuck was I thinking?" I said and did a lot of stupid things in January, and I must say that contrary to my mother's frequent assertions, none of it involved the text of the entries in this News section. I am beginning to think that password-protecting this section has turned out not nearly as well as I'd hoped; in keeping the "bad guys" out, I also drove away a lot of good friends I had online. I am considering re-opening the section to public access in the near future. Another stupid thing I did was to get involved with a boy I met via an e-mail regarding this site. He lives 3000 miles from here, yet in my depression, I fell for him, thinking he was the cure to all of my problems. Almost immediately, he began mistrusting me, and it became clear that I had to "be his bitch" (in an emotional sense) to keep the relationship going. What I mean is, I had to tell him what he wanted to hear, not necessarily how I truly felt. Two days after I returned back home, I came to my senses and told this boy it was over. At this point in time, I don't miss talking with him a bit. I do occasionally stop by his online journal (maybe once a week), but that's only because I enjoy reading online journals. Hell, I semi-regularly read probably a dozen online journals maintained by people I've never contacted. I have no feelings for the boy in question, and despite what I might have said in desperate, clingy e-mail messages, I never really did in the first place. I decided the day I returned home that I had to start doing what was best for me, with not as much regard for the wishes of others. That's not to say that I am just going to say, "Fuck you, world" — rather, as long as I'm recovering from depression, I am going to take care of myself before anybody else. If any emotional relationship is to succeed, there has to be a "100-100" commitment — equal and total — from both parties, and I will no longer "be the bitch" to keep a failing relationship going. That will be as true for my immediate family as it is for potential boyfriends or anybody else. To allow things to be any different than that is an invitation for suicidal thoughts to return to my mind. In the coming days and weeks, I'm going to start taking more chances in life. I know that by re-opening this section, I risk having old updates dredged up and used against me. I know that if my mother gets her hands on this journal, she's going to ignore updates where I talk about positive things, and fixate on my depressed updates from November and December 2000 (the ones where I talked about my fears of dealing with them, and justifications for that fear). I can't change her, and I might as well not bother trying. The only thing I really want in regards to her now is to at least have peace in the house — the relationship is probably permanently dead, but as long as we're not constantly fighting, things should be fine. That said, I'm not taking nearly as many chances as I used to. In the future, I'm going to be very hesitant to give the address of this site to co-workers, friends, and other people I deal with "in real life." The fact that random folks from the Internet might read this scares me less than the prospect of my family reading this. I'm more closely guarding important personal information than in the past, reducing the chances that it can be used against me. Basically, I'm trying to take smarter chances now, instead of some of the dumb ones that probably led to my depression.