Everything is a mess.  My love life is a mess.  My financial obligations are a mess.  Mentally, I’m a wreck.  Physically, I’m killing myself because of some warped perception of “perfect” that I’ve concocted over the past few months.  I’m so tired, so exhausted.  I hate this place, these people, everything I’m having to deal with daily.

I’m just so tired of it all, and the worst part of it all is that I have no one here to talk to about any of this.  Sure, I’m supposed to tell my superiors when I have feelings like these, but that won’t happen.  I’m not just going to tell people I work with that I feel like throwing myself off a bridge most days, or I feel like drinking myself into oblivion.

The worst part of it all is that I don’t know why I feel like this.  

I need to go home, I need to see my sister, my mom, my dad, my friends.

As you all know, or at least if you pay attention to my blog you know, I’ve been here at Fort Stewart for going on a month and a half now.  I’ve made new friends, I’ve learned new things, I push myself on a daily basis to improve my physical well-being.  In short, leaving behind my old life has done me well.  Of course, I haven’t been able to leave it all behind.

I find myself constantly plagued by the thought that I’m going to be alone for a while to come.  I hate being single.  I know I put off this persona that all I do is have sex with a myriad of women, but that’s not the case.  I enjoy sex, I do.  I love it, but I’m also starting to realize that I’m slowing down — in terms of my lifestyle.  

I don’t drink nearly as much as I used to, I’m starting to look more for a longterm relationship rather than a few nights of passion.  I think it has to do largely in part to the fact that I’m surrounded by guys my age (and sometimes younger) that are already married.

I don’t want to be married by any means; I’m not ready for that.  I just want something solid, something tangible and easy.

Nothing gets “easier.”  

I want to start over when I get to Georgia.  Granted, I will by and large.  No one at Ft. Stewart will know who I am, or the brand that comes with my name and reputation.

I’ll just be Specialist Carina.  I won’t be “that one guy who cheated on that one girl” or “he broke me and my boyfriend up, and then ditched me” or “that guy that did this and that, and all of those things.”  I’ll just be another soldier on an Army base in Georgia.  

I won’t have a reputation, except the one I create there.  It’ll be nice.

I’ve also considered creating new handles for instant messengers, a new Facebook, a new Twitter — things like that — just to even further push myself from who I was.  I really want to not necessarily turn over a new leaf but to create a new image that I believe in as strongly as the one I perpetuate as of now.

All I can do is go with the flow of things.

I hate being single.

Most people might find this hard to believe given my track record.  I’m not exactly known for stability and monogamy.  In fact, if you were to ask only a handful of my ex-girlfriends for their opinion on my capacity for fidelity, five out of five would tell you that I’m heartless and emotionally unavailable.

I’ve only been entirely faithful to maybe three or four girls I’ve been with, and I have dated close to 30-some girls (generally speaking, I’ve been faithful to the girls older than me) — but I’m trying to change that.

I want something stable that I can come home to, that I don’t have to constantly worry about.  Honestly, I miss the feeling of falling for a girl, I miss doing everything together, I miss buying her things simply to do it.

I function vastly different single than I do in a relationship, or at least I have all the times before.  I’m trying to no longer be that person — the default setting, as it were.

By no means am I saying that I need a relationship to actualize myself as a person.  I do not need to be in a relationship to function.  I am only saying that I miss it, that I miss having something that works.  

I’ve not had something like that in a good long while.

My life is very much up in the air right now, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it.  I’m not saying that it’s entirely out of my control; some things are very much under my influence, and other things, I play a very limited role in.

For example, my transfer to Fort Stewart was very much my decision.  However, at the moment I mildly regret it.  Not the transfer as a whole, just the transfer to Fort Stewart.  I was offered Fort Campbell (which is in Kentucky), and now I wish I would have taken that offer — only because it’s closer to Ohio than Fort Stewart, which is in Georgia.  However, I had no real incentive up until a week or so ago.

I’m also trying my hardest to fit so many people into such a short period of time; twelve days doesn’t give me long to see the friends altogether.  I feel somewhat bad for saying this, but I’m really having to pick and choose.  It sounds awful, but some people have really not been there as much as I would have liked them to in the past, and I’m bound to burn a few bridges before I PCS.

And then there’s Brandon.  He and Meagan have been together for six months now.  I don’t know why I still want to reconcile things with him.  By all means, I should hate him, but I don’t.  In fact, I’m not even remotely angry anymore - at either of them, but I don’t know if they’ll believe that.  Maybe I’ll call him, or drop by Sears or his house to see him.  I would like my old best friend back, like it or not, but this will be my last ditch effort.  If he’s not willing to bury the hatchet somewhere else other than my back, then so be it.

There’s also the matter of Jamie (the reason why I’d rather be closer to Ohio now).  I’m not very easily intimidated by people.  In fact, I’ve been told I come across as intimidating (which I find amusing, honestly; I’m not a physically large person at 5’9.5”).  And it’s not even that she’s standoffish (though she is bound to read this, lol), it’s that I don’t meet many girls that rival me intellectually, or many girls that can hold a conversation and not get bored or bore me (or many girls that can hold their liquor like her).  It’s attractive.  I like it — quite a lot, actually.

I’m just making up for lost time, since we’ve never been ‘friends’ until recently (by that I mean, we knew of each other, but we never went out of our way to get to know one another — even though we’d act like we’d been friendly for years when we saw the other).

And then there’s the matter of just everything and everyone else.  I’m going to have to burn a few bridges - both because I want to in some cases and because some people just need to be let go.

As much of an asshole as I can be, I really hate to do that.  I really hate hurting people emotionally.

My name is Ryan Lee Carina.

I was born in one-nine-nine-zero, at Iredell Memorial Hospital located in Statesville, North Carolina.  I am 5’10”, I weigh 170 pounds.  I have brown hair and green eyes.  I enjoy writing stories, movies, diner food and photography.  I have one sister, Amanda, and two parents, Thomas and Bobbi.  

In August of two-zero-zero-six, I went crazy.

I will never be satisfied by a woman, I would never try to deny that.  But I’m okay with that, because in truth, I’ll never satisfy a woman (I realize that most of you are going to misconstrue what I mean by that, because most of this website is so sexually repressed that anything that even remotely hints at the act has to be about sex; rest assured I’m not talking about sex).

What I mean to say is that I’m emotionally ‘dead,’ for lack of a better word.  I’m an overall apathetic person, and that apathy has permeated every fiber of my personality.  My emotional range goes from “I’m all right with this” to “Keep that shit up, and I’m going to break your fucking face.”  There’s no middle ground. 

I still find kittens and corgis cute, and I still love the taste of Starbucks coffee, but in terms anything emotional, I stutter and misstep.  

Meagan always referred to me as “emotionally unavailable.”  I tried to deny it for the longest time.  I always told her, “That’s not true!  What about all those sweet things I’ve done for you?”  And I’d list things off, but they were never a token of how I felt about her; I did them to make her feel happier about being with me.

In fact, that’s the way I handle most relationships I’ve been in.  I typically tell the girls I’m with either “don’t fall in love with me” or “don’t worry about making me happy, I can do that; I want to make you happy.”  I really dislike it when people try to make me happy.  I’m not sure why.

And this doesn’t depress me, or even make me remotely sad.  I’m not bothered by it.  If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: “we play the hands we’re dealt; sometimes they’re shitty hands.”  Hah, see what I said about apathy?

That’s why I’ll never satisfy a woman; I really think they expect a little more out of me than I’m willing or capable of delivering.  Granted, I’m a writer; I can spit out the sweetest one liners you’ve ever heard, but I can’t always deliver them with the impact you’d like to hear.

I’m better suited for Hallmark cards than relationships.

I can’t write.

I don’t even know what happened, but I’ve almost entirely lost my drive to put words on paper.  I have ideas, and they’re good ideas - some of the best I’ve had in a long while - but nothing comes out.  It’s like, that light bulb sputters to life, but the moment I look toward it, it dims.  Even starting this blog took almost 20 minutes of deleting and starting over before I was even remotely content with the beginning.

Maybe it’s because I don’t write with the circle of people I used to write with, or perhaps I’ve lost it altogether.  I don’t want to excel at something else; I wouldn’t be half the person I am today if I hadn’t cultivated a knack for writing.

I used to be amazing - poems, short stories, novellas, paragraph after paragraph after fucking paragraph.  Now, nothing.  I sit down in front of a word document and I just stare blankly at it, that flashing cursor taunting me.

I need to rediscover my drive to write.  I’ll be happier as a whole once I do.

A few of you might be offended by this, and that’s fine.  I’m not writing this to appeal to anyone in particular.  I’m expressing what I think, at least more constructively than I would on my @rarararyan Tumblr.

Yesterday was the “wear purple in remembrance” day.  In truth, I neither agree with the concept nor find it at all appealing.  In fact, to me it’s somewhat insulting; to me it’s a joke.  I’ll explain.

I’m quite liberal.  There’s not a conservative bone in my body.  I’ll be the first to sign up for a homosexual rally, and I’ll happily attend.  I’m in full support of equal rights, ofthe gays’ right to marry, et cetera.  They’re people just the same as I am, as you are; they should be treated the same as you and I.  Therein lies my issue with the day.

“They should be treated the same as you and I.”

If you want to be treated as part of a unit, then by no means should you draw attention to yourself.  In a herd of antelope, the ones that stand out are typically the ones the lions gun for.

Moreover, wearing purple doesn’t solve anything.  You can tell me that it raises awareness all you like, but we’ve been aware that it happened for weeks.  Wearing purple simply objectifies them as gay, and that’s not what they were.  They were people; sexuality doesn’t determine who you are as a person.  If I’m going to raise awareness for suicide, then I’m going to raise awareness for the gay kid down the street as much as I am the neo-nazi down the street.  Suicide is suicide, regardless.  You can’t paint it with a label just because “gay is in” right now.

If you want to help make a difference, volunteer at a teen center.  Become a big brother or big sister.  If you care so much about raising awareness, actually do something to raise awareness.  Do something to help.  Don’t just don a t-shirt and tell everyone, “Everything’s going to be all right, the color of my shirt is here to assuage all your fears.”

It’s disgusting how much people revere suicide and loathe bullying.  When did that happen?

You bullied people when you were younger, and you were bullied when you younger.  In fact, you probably still do it, and it still happens to you.  Bullying exists in all facets of life; it’s crowd control.  It’s a functioning system.  We bully as a country.  It’s a natural force of life: we judge and we are judged.

If you want to have a day for gay suicides, what about a day for atheist suicides?  It happens.  What about a day for black suicides?  It happens.  For disabled suicides?  Oh, that’s a snake pit I’m sure no one wants to stick their hands into.  Everyone loves their retard jokes; the moment they start sympathizing, then everyone’s going to be calling everyone a hypocrite.

Everyday I get emails from users on an atheist support-group message board from kids, and they tell me that they are atheists and their parents are Christians or their parents are Muslims or their parents are Orthodox Jews, and they ask me: “How should I tell my parents?  Should I tell my parents?  I think they’re going to disown me if I tell them.”

This is the same kind of fear I imagine gay teenagers have to deal with.  This is the same kind of environment in this country that I’m sure blacks have had to deal with.  

And I’m not saying that being an atheist is equal to being gay, no.  Being gay is a huge, integral part of a person’s personality, and atheism is just a small decision, really.  And I’m not saying it’s equates to being black, because you can’t hide being black, but you can hide being an atheist.

It’s just one little opinion, but it’s one little opinion that can have a tremendous impact on the way people view you: you can lose friends over this; parents will disown children.  You can’t get elected to public office in most states if you’re an atheist.  Certain sects of society view you as a Satanist.  I found this out the hard way when my grandmother informed people in her community that I was an atheist, and to them it was as though she had said, “He worships the devil.”

And you know what else it does?  It makes you the target of bullies, especially in the South.  Kids have committed suicide because of it.

Where’s everyone else’s day?

As I’m sure all of you are aware (and if you’re not, then you don’t pay attention to my blog that you allegedly love as much as you claim to), I’m in the military.  I’ve been a 19D Cavalry Scout in the United States Army for going on two years now.  December 17th of this year will officially be my two year mark.  Under my current contract, I have three years and two weeks left (from December 2nd).

On December 2nd, 2010, I’ll be leaving NC (for what I hope is forever, with the exception of a visit every so often or when I pass through it) for Fort Stewart, Georgia.  It’s the country’s largest base east of the Mississippi, a little less than an hour SW of Savannah, Georgia.

I’m very excited to finally leave this state.  I hate North Carolina.  Well, no, that’s not fair.  I don’t hate North Carolina.  In fact, I love this state.  I don’t love these people.  By and large, they’re all replaceable; the sooner I get away from the people who have plagued the past few years of my life, the better — the sooner I can start over.  

It’s a sad fact, but it’s a fact nevertheless.  The friends I have in this state I can count on both hands.  My family is of little consequence; my sister (Amanda) is honestly the only family I give thought.  My mother, father, uncles, aunts, grandparents — all of them have either been abusive or have barely played a role in my life.  I’ve lost my best friend over the most ridiculous of reasons: an exgirlfriend.  I’ve a reputation from high-school that’s haunted me for years and won’t let me escape.

I’ll be so happy to leave this state behind.  There are very few people from it that I’ll associate with when I leave.  The less I burden myself with North Carolina and the people therein, the happier I think I’ll be.

I’m not used to being happy, realistically, but I know I’ll be happy away from this place.