I may not get sick often, but those rare times I do I act like the hugest baby. I use it as an excuse for everything. I just want to lay in bed watching movies all day.

Tonight I'm going to this Ladies Night at a low-class club that I don't want to be seen at, but I have to go because it's Kate's birthday. Even though I'm sick and so tempted to use that as an excuse. I actually have to work tomorrow morning too, and I really feel like just chilling tonight, maybe even doing a little homework. I hate feeling so obligated.

I've always thought that I have an obsessive personality, but I'm realizing that Anna is the most obsessive, paranoid person I have ever met in my entire life. I'm not exaggerating when I say that one of my best friends has a true disorder. I actually think something is wrong with her, and I want to help her but I don't know how. I suppose it isn't incredibly harmful, but still...it's not normal.

This is the most unbelievable story, and one hundred percent true. First of all, you have to understand that Anna is paranoid about germs. I can't even stress how paranoid she is, she's annoyingly paranoid. So last night, Anna had to take a cab home from work because she didn't have a ride. She said the entire time she was sitting in the seat, she kept thinking about how dirty the seat must be and how her pants were covered in germs. She was counting down the seconds in her head that were left until she could get off the seat in the cab. When she got out, she went to go to the washroom. Okay, you know how when you pull your pants down sometimes they fall lower than your underwear so your underwear can touch the outside rim of your pants a little bit? So when she pulled down her pants, the edge of her underwear barely brushed against the part of her pants she thought had touched the cab, so she threw her underwear away. We were at Shell's house, and she took off her underwear and threw them away because they had touched her pants. This was her expensive and favourite pair of thong underwear, and she threw it directly in the garbage. I still cannot believe it. Then she complained the rest of the night about going commando and how it felt gross, but that it was better than wearing that underwear.

About the counting, too - she counts everything in eights, obsessively. When she's eating dinner, she'll count to eight before taking a drink of water, or before taking the next bite. She's paranoid about everything - she just called me the other night having a fit because she was forced to use a public washroom and thought that maybe her skin had skimmed the toilet seat, and was asking me if she was going to get AIDS. And she was completely dead serious. She also doesn't trust anyone, not a single person.

I love Anna and everything, but that really isn't normal, is it? You can be concerned about germs and diseases to a point, but throwing the underwear you're wearing in the garbage? At first I thought her little paranoias were cute. When we were in Victoria and she called us from Vancouver to say that a little bit of eyelash glue got in her eye eight hours earlier, and even though her eye felt absolutely fine now, was she going to go blind? We laughed at her, but ever since then she's only been getting worse.

I saw Danny last night and we had a good time. He suggested that next weekend, we get a big bottle of wine and discuss religion for hours on end until it turns into a bunch of drunken babble. Why God why can't he be straight?

I'm trying not to look for a boyfriend, because everyone says that love comes when you least expect it. But it's hard! Every new guy I meet I evaluate him as boyfriend material or not. I had this totally random daydream the other day of Cody and I in a couple years, having lunch together. We were 21 or 22, and hadn't talked in a very long time. He asked me if I was seeing anyone and I was like, "Nooo...".

Then I snapped back to reality. I can't be 22 and not have a boyfriend, there's no way I will allow that to happen. I turn 20 in less than six months. I'm having such a huge panic attack about my future. Every girl my age I know is terrified of turning 20 this year. We all had these childhood dreams of getting married in our early twenties, having babies, and leading perfect little lives. The high school sweetheart thing didn't exactly work out for any of us.

I always thought I knew exactly how my future was going to unfold. Cody and I were going to go to the same college, and we'd be popular. He'd be the track star and I'd be his smart pretty girlfriend, and we'd go to parties and have lots of friends. He'd ask me to marry him around the time we were finished our degrees, and we'd have a big, beautiful wedding in one of the Baptist chapels downtown, because he's Baptist and we'd agreed once that we'd get married in his church. So then we'd be married for a couple of years, and he'd get his PhD and make a lot of money, and I'd be a teacher. We'd have babies and be happy for the rest of our lives. That's how my life was going to turn out.

Now it is all screwed around, and I don't even know if I want to live here anymore. I go through phases where I want to move to the US. Everything is so up in the air, and I feel like I'm running out of time. I wish I had some stability again.

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