shhhhhh

Pondering for the night: Secrets. Particularly unnecessary secrets. We all have them, but why? Sometimes we think we're keeping someone from getting hurt. Sometimes things become secrets by accident, like if you don't tell a person something right away and then feel obligated to continue not telling them. My personal favorite of those was when I was in fourth grade and I went to a friend's house and her mom forgot that she had CCD class that day so I ended up going with her to the church and reading in a pew. I wasn't trying not to tell my parents, but they didn't ask me much about how the play-date went. A few days passed and something came up in conversation that made me want to say something about "yeah, when I was at Meghan's church," but it seemed like I couldn't bring it up now having not mentioned it before. Next thing I knew I had this weird little secret.

But my real curiosity for the night is when a person keeps secrets just for the sake of having secrets, like he needs there to be pieces of himself no one knows, even if they're completely mundane. I've noticed one friend of mine tends to do this, with different secrets for different people, and every time he admits some deep dark piece of himself, he ends up getting secretive and weird about truly asinine things, like plans to hang out with other friends.

Ok, so I am guessing at motivation here, but this is my blog and I get to be the narrator and within this little world, what I say goes. So this person's secret-keeping is a habit and a way for him to feel like he's in control.

God I love being the narrator.

hate list: the short version

I haven't been writing because I haven't actually finished my LA trip post, but fuck it. I'll backpost later.

I am cranky. I got up just after 8 AM to do laundry. I don't do anything that early, but I have exactly one pair of clean undies left. I avoided laundry all weekend because I figured it would be busy and I could do it during the week. And of course, as I enter the laundry room at 8:40 AM, there's a guy loading up both machines. Stupid guy. Who does their laundry at 8:40 AM on a Wednesday? I thought I was safe, but noooooo. And he didn't even speak enough English to understand "Are you using both machines?" and "Do you have more to do after this?" All he could say was, "I think you come back, one hour." Stupid foreigners and their doing laundry at the time my tax-paying red-blooded American self wants to do laundry. I am now a firm believer that all immigrants should be sent to Mexico, whether or not they came from there in the first place.

I also now hate young people. Yesterday in my fiction class (I'm in the next level for summer school) there was a kid, maybe 19, who spoke in a way I am clearly not young or hip enough to understand. First he was talking about "summer camp" and I thought he meant like "Kumbaya" and s'mores, but no, apparently it is a big concert thing. Then he and another kid in the class were discussing some band that's coming to play at the House of Blues, and Mr. Hip was saying "We've been trying to get them to play [insert local indie venue here] instead." So I asked who "we" was, thinking perhaps he was part of some interesting group of project.
"You know, like, family, like, the family and stuff."
"Oh, is your family involved with [local indie venue]?"
He was kind enough to explain to me that "family" is just slang for the group, like his fellow cooler-than-me people - a truly royal We. Then later in a word game he used the word "Deemster." At this point I decided I couldn't get any lamer, so I might as well ask. Apparently, a Deemster is a person who helps dole out DMT. And what is DMT? "A happy bain chemical/drug."
When did I get so fucking old?
Then last night my neighbors were out with tiki torches, cigarettes, loudness, and half a dozen friends until after 1 AM. Yes, I am usually wide awake at 1 AM, but I'd tried to go to bed before midnight with the intention of getting up early to do laundry.
In conclusion, I hate young people.

Must...stay...awake...long...enough...to...put...in...laundry.............

stupidredeyepieceofshitmotherfuckerwanttosleeeeeeeeep

cray day to come

Date with my improv teacher went fine. Very platonic. No worries. The play was very good and moving and such.

My schedule for the rest of the day:
1-2:15 PM: Find out what the girls are wearing for our show, shower, put on lots of make-up, pack self, pack dog, make sister's birthday/graduation card.
2:15-3: Take dog to super swanky kennel where he will be staying for two days, go to theater where show will be.
3-4: Pre-show rehearsal, run-down of who is in what game and introducing each thing, etc. Pray to improv performance gods.
4-5: Improv show. NBF is actually coming now because it turns out his flight tonight is at the same time as mine so I Will actually have an audience member there for me and me alone. HUzzah. Make 'em laugh.
5-6: After-show time with improv people that I may never see again. Some, that is sad. Others, no loss.
6: Go to airport.
8: Fly to LA. Sleep on plane.
10:50 LA time: Arrive in LA. Pick up rental car. Drive to parents' hotel in Passedena.
?: SLEEEEEEEP

trapped, lost, and angry

My car key is missing. The part that attaches to a key ring broke last week. I was on my way to run errands, including making a copy. I'd been so careful. But it's not where I thought I put it and it's not anywhere else that I would have put it which means it probably fell out of my pants or my jacket and I'm ripping my apartment to pieces looking for it and I'm going to kill something. My phone is dead again, too. That was another errand I was going to do: get an actual Verizon charger. I am very not happy about this. I'm supposed to be at E's in two hours and I had all these other things I needed to do today and now I'm cleaning my apartment, which is good, except I'm still not finding the fucking key and I'm getting more and more discouraged as I go. Why oh why don't I have an extra key?

armageddon on my mind

Really bad dreams. Lots of Armageddon stuff. It was somewhat in the future and terrorists were everywhere and blowing up buildings and trains constantly and they were your friends and family so you couldn't trust anyone. Lots of sneaking out of buildings and getting away from areas and false bombs and real bombs and radiation and trying not to touch bodies of water because terrorists had spilled nuclear waste into them and it was so toxic they called it "razor water." Very upsetting.

fat cat

I went shopping yesterday with my mom and got black pants from the Banana Republic outlet that make my butt look really good and a cute dress from BCBGMaxAzria. I need to get back to the gym. Lots of time trying things on in mirrors made me feel fat. Not that I'm actually fat fat, but I've acquired a belly and it needs to go away. My 54-year-old mother has a better body than I do.

onward and upward

Thank you to everyone who sent me birthday wishes via phone, email, text message, Facebook message, and any other method I'm forgetting. It was a very pleasant birthday. Fizzled out a little early, but splendid while I was being social. My cousin, cousin-in-law, NBF and I went to a late lunch at Bittersweet, which was amazingly not crowded for Mother's Day afternoon, ate wonderful things, wandered over to Uncle Fun, drove to the lakefront where we tried to fly kites but there was no wind so we played frisbee catch instead and shmoozed for a long time. Then my cousinses had to go (who the hell has work meetings on Sunday nights?) and I went to NBF's to watch the long awaited last disk in Samurai 7, a strange but surprisingly good Anime series based on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Then I came home and futzed on the computer for hours on end and now I have some random music in my head that I'm trying to get down on paper but I don't have a keyboard or perfect pitch and it's hard to plunk it out on the violin, especially when it's a two part harmony thing.

Tomorrow, I go to the premium outlet mall with my mom to try to return the skirt that doesn't look great on me.

and I smell like one, too

Happy birthday to meeeeeeeeeeeee. I am 25 now. I am oh so exceptionally old. I saw Oedipus Complex with my family, which was good but not great (I thought the male leads were fairly weak and the integration of the Freud stuff could have been much better, but the chorus was awesome) and then we went for dessert at some random place in Lincoln Park because we found a parking spot nearby. I ate a chocolate moose tart thing that was completely delicious and now I am a complete fartyfartfart-head. My brother was cranky the whole time because he wanted to be out with his friends and my dad was in his super type-A personality mode and a little tipsy from dinner (which is usually more entertaining because he drinks so infrequently). Gotta love family. They gave me presents, including my amazing new toothbrush that I picked out myself last week, a cute shirt from Benetton, and a completely fabulous Kate Spade bag*.

In flattering-but-awkward news, my improv teacher invited me to go see a play with him on Friday. I'm pretty sure in a date way. He's a great guy and perfect on paper, but I am a terrible horrible shallow human being and find him completely unattractive. Not just an absence of attraction that perhaps could change with a date or two, but an actual vague repulsion. Which is funny and sad, because I tend to be attracted to plenty of more portly and homely menfolk, and frequently fall for teachers. He just looks like an old man to me--a scruffy old man with a beer belly and a tired face. Otherwise, he should be perfect. He's brilliant (graduated Harvard Law when he was like 20) and interesting and funny and knows music and culture and understood my dorky econ references and isn't scared of me. But he might as well be a woman for the quantity of attraction I feel. I suck. I will die alone and it will be my own fucking fault. Do not pity me, dear reader, for I have designed my own fate.

After sleeping for most of the last three days, I am not tired. Maybe I will play Wheel of Fortune on my phone until I fall asleep or it is time to get up and have birthday festivities. And did I mention I am farty?


*Sunny, if you are reading this, the bag makes me think of you. In a good way.

Slept about 19 of the last 21 hours, and I really just got up to eat something and drink water and walk the dog. Stupid annoying low-level but persistant migraine. I have a busy day tomorrow, so if a bazillion hours of sleep and tons of naproxen don't kill this thing, it's back to coffee for me. Grumbles.

If I only had a chemise

I want to be the kind of girl who sleeps in a chemise*. I would have $300 curtains that I'd change every season and artful throw pillows everywhere. And when I got a migraine, I would lie among my throw pillows in my chemise, staring at my curtains with a cold compress to my head and sigh beautifully while my understanding and attentive boyfriend (or perhaps fiance, since this scenario needs more words co-opted from the French) tip-toed around me and brought me iced tea and walked my dog and stroked my hair. Maybe as I slept he would whisper things to me in French and Italian--only two of the 14 languages he spoke, having been raised the lonely only child of a diplomat.

But no, I'm in my mess of an apartment, greasy and unshowered, popping pills, having a whining contest with my dog, picking at the zit on my shoulder blade, daydreaming, and reading McSweeney's features to keep myself happy between painful brain stabs.



*Perhaps this $170 Josie Natori number from Saks, or perhaps something more sweet and innocent from Anthropolgie...it is my birthday this Sunday

OUCH.

Stupid head. Today is supposed to be my last class (except for tutoring tomorrow) and my class is going out drinking. I want to be there, but it is very clear I cannot. I need a neurologist. Take care of this stupid crap.

Thing I wrote for my fiction class:

Migraine Monster

His tentacles are long and muscular, covered in suction cups and briars. They wrap around my cortex, through my cerebellum, and down to my medulla oblongata. He entwines himself in my gray matter, weaving in and out of my parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes, lying quiet, dormant, waiting. He can sleep through days, weeks, and the occasional fortunate month or two, as I tiptoe around him, terrified to disturb his slumber. I know what can wake him: changing weather, stress, flashing lights, soy products, red wine, too much alcohol. But some days I can sneak past him with fistfuls of edamame, other days a fluorescent light bulb is enough to incur his wrath.
He first begins to stir, quiet and playful, turning up the volume on all of my senses. I hear ants cough and smell a burp burped three days ago and a butter-yellow shirt can blind me. The world starts to smell like static electricity and the very idea of food makes me sick. The creature is now awake, alert. He squeezes a tentacle around my retina and flashes his tail in my peripheral vision, causing me to see things that aren’t there: a flash in the corner, a halo around the window. All images flatten to two dimensions and spatial relations skew. He hums in my ear like a bad fluorescent light bulb.
He slithers another tentacle down my throat, poking at the back of my mouth like a bulimic’s finger. The gagging queasiness begins, but unlike nausea originating in my stomach, vomiting does nothing to alleviate the pressure. The monster laughs his low, sharp laugh as I run to the bathroom.
If I catch his stirring early enough, he is much more content to simply slink back into dormancy. I search frantically for pills, digging through vials of failed past treatments. Some made him laugh, some made him angry. He demands a louder and louder “FEED ME” and, with a sharp tentacled squeeze, jabs briars into my cortex and frontal lobe. I try not to scream and find the blue pills, swallowing three of four instead of the intended one or two. If I am lucky, the monster accepts the offering, gobbles them up, and settles back to sleep, appeased.
For now.
Some days, blue pills aren’t enough. “FEED ME” he squeezes and stabs, even after the blue pills. He sees the fear in my eyes and jabs again. “I said FEED ME.” I run back to the cabinets for the vials with a 17 letter name. I used to have to draw them up into syringes and inject them at a 45 degree angle into the flesh of my stomach every eight hours. I would scream, “Monster! Do you see? I am willing to do anything if you will simply shut up and go back to sleep! Do you see, Monster? Anything.” Now the vials have the same 17 letter name but a new formula and I screw spray tops onto them and stick them in my nose, aiming for the blood vessels. “If you tasted it, you wasted it,” the nurse explained, and the $50 vials are good for only two doses each if I do it right the first time. And still, the monster is not always appeased. His “FEED ME” becomes a “FUCK YOU” as he squeezes tighter and tighter. He throbs and stabs and presses in every direction. He screeches and tantrums. Every ray of light, every peep of a noise make him scream louder and thrash harder. I cry and beg and crawl into bed, useless and writhing.
Please, please, please let me drill a hole in my skull. Just a little one, on the top right side of my head. Like bullet through an airplane window, the change in cabin pressure will suck the monster out. There will be screams like a boiling kettle, slurping popping sounds as his tentacles dislodge, and with a spatter and a splutter and flop to the floor, out he will come. And as he lies dying on the ground in a puddle of his and my blood and ooze, I will grab the nearest blunt object and beat the shit out of his deflating body. I will scream at him, “Do you like that? Do you? Now you see what it’s like, you piece of shit. Now you begin to know what you put me through. Oh, I hope it hurts, I hope it hurts twenty-five years wroth of bad. I hope you feel every bit of pain and loss of the things you’ve taken from me and kept from me. Fuck you, monster. FUCK. YOU.”

love me or leave me

Newest addiction/procrastination tool: filling out online dating profiles. eHarmony, Match, Chemistry, The Onion. It's a wonderful exercise in self-obsession, answering question after question about me. I still have a tendency to include the most negative information possible about myself to scare off the faint of heart. I parade my flaws with the hope that a Boy will see them and find them charming. It all goes to my fear of abandonment stuff, I think--I'd rather never get to know a Boy than have him leave me after discovering some chunk of my personality he doesn't like. It's all mostly irrelevant, anyway, because I refuse to pay for any of the online services, so the only one that lets me respond to interested Boys is The Onion's personals, and the odds of me actually agreeing to meet any of these people in reality are slim to none. I'm the internet equivalent of a girl who goes to a singles bar, shows everyone her cellulite, and then refuses to give out her number to anyone who is still interested. I am awesome.

My nose is itchy and so is my brain. There is no good food in my apartment but I refuse to move my car because gas is too expensive and my tank is almost empty. I think I forgot to take my pills today. I'm feeling withdrawl-ish, and I've been forgetting shit all day. Tomorrow I'm having Girls Day with my mom. How cute. You look like a monkey.

Why is my dog being whiny and clingy? I am trying to write my big phone sex thing for tomorrow. I need to write and concentrate and write some more. I wrote an outline last night, which I never do, and a big block this afternoon, but I want to turn in a way-too-long version with absolutely everything in it that I can then chop down into something smaller and punchier. Just need to keep spitting out chunks of it until it is done. Chunk chunk chunk.

I had a rough few days last week. A close friend was being a jerk-face and it hurt something fierce. This is why I'm so guarded about people I let into my friend-world and (corny but true) into my heart. I am EXTREMELY sensitive once I care about a person and I've had enough hurtful people in my life already, thankyouverymuch. Add to that this wonderful time of the month and you have one sad, lonely, weepy Annabell. Not good, and not very productive. I need to be productive. Need to write.

Back to writing.

No CIF tonight :-(
Couldn't weasel a ticket. Now I get to stay home and mope.

I do not like it when people feed my serious abandonment issues, particularly as the result of their own drunken mis-remembrance of things. Fortunately, I may be going to the Chicago Improv Festival tonight (assuming I can weasle a ticket, as the show is completely sold out), and that ought to cheer me up.

It's almost that wonderful time of the month again and I'm feeling lonely and weepy. I spent a very long time today snuggling the dog, which was wonderful. If I ever get married, I think it will have to be the job of my husband to sit around and tell me he loves me. My dog can't talk, but he's pretty good at making it clear and it's exactly what I need in these moods. Too bad it isn't 50 years ago and people would just call them "spells" and I'd be considered a bit eccentric in a romantic sort of way. Ay, me!

Inebriated notes on a concert

VNV Nation concert.
I went as a willing tourist. Woohoo! Quite different from Josh Ritter.
"Just because you're wearing black doesn't mean you're dead yet!"
I have a number of new best friends. With a little alcohol and live music, everybody is your best friend.

I stopped two fights. Both involved the same guy. I knew none of the people involved, but get a bit of booze in me and I am the greatest peacemaker ever. It is my duty to maintain harmony across the universe. Obviously.

I was surrounded by androgynous and androgynouser, lesbians galore, couples with overprotective boyfriends and their drunk girlfriends chatting it up, and at least two half-chubbies in my back as I was dancing. Yee-fuckin'-haw.

My stomach has been very cranky for almost two weeks now with no other symptoms. I'm not sure if I'm reacting to the Activia stuff or if I have an ulcer or what. But it's being weird gassy stabby a lot and it is not comfortable.

I've been writing a lot all weekend and even more today. I have a big thing due in fiction tonight that I'm not happy with at all yet, but I also brought a number of other things I've been writing for that class to a place where I am significantly happier.

TUMMY SHUT UP FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

BBC story

I think this is fabulous, though I'm currious about how the goat feels.

wake up

My landlord (or actually and agent of my landlord, since my landlord is a large company) just woke me up at 8 am on a Saturday morning to serve me a written notice that my rent is overdue. I thought I'd mailed it. This is something I have a lot of trouble with: paying bills that require a physical check to be mailed every month. It's why I have everything else set up with direct debit and I rely a lot on my Microsoft Money. When I was working at the theater I would hand deliver the rent on my way to work, which helped a lot, but now I'm never over there and here I am screwing up again. I don't know why this is so hard for me, but it's like there is a piece missing from my brain. Now I've got to go down to the office today to hand deliver it because I think three weeks is late enough. Ugh. Not a nice way to wake up.

I am hanging my little white head in shame. I'm trying to write this "updated folktale" for my fiction class, and it's based on an old Yiddish folktale that I am resetting on the South Side of Chicago. The adaptation is going quite well, but there's a part where I need this wise old grandmother character to tell a story within the story, and I can't get her voice for shit. So I actually emailed a sort-of-friend of mine from my magazine class who is a very decent writer and grew up on the south side and begged for help. From now on, you can call me Whitey McJew-Cracker. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go scorn people with any trace of melanin.

nerding off

Facebook message I just sent the guy who bought me a drink at Nerd Dating last night:

God bless the internet and stalking made easy. It's a little creepy, really. I was sending [Friend of mine he knew in college] an email about a recent run-in with a mutual acquaintance of ours and the fact that I met "a guy named [Guy's Name]" who knew her peripherally at [College]. "A guy named [Guy's Name]" wasn't too specific, so I figured I'd do a cursory Facebook search of [College] grads named [Name] in the Chicago network. It took 12 seconds, and there you were. I feel like a stalker, but I'm telling myself that if I send you a message instead of quietly lurking on your profile, all creepiness will magically disappear. And please pardon the nose prints on the outside of your bedroom window--I forgot to bring my windex.

I think I'm soooo funny.
In sober retrospect, last night was fun. I'm incredibly proud of myself for going a) at all and b)alone after my stylist ditched out on me. I did respectably well but lost twice at Balderdash. There were a good number of non-creepy intellectual nerds, most of which were surprisingly not all computer-science-types. The guys came alone and the girls came in pairs. I'd say the average male age was five years older than the average female age and a number of the guys were lurky nerds, but there were a few who seemed completely decent. All in all, I'm glad I went, even if I didn't end up engaged to someone who legally changed his last name to "Skywalker."

I crashed tonight from around 7-11 PM. Now I have writing to do for tomorrow, so as long as I'm up, I'll try to do it now.

over the outfluence

I'd swear my life over to a regimen of pill-popping uppers and downers if I thought it would make any difference. But a day like today, during which I stayed consistently conscious from 8:45 AM onward and partook of a bit too much tequila starting around 8 PM, proves that my body likes to be awake between midnight and 4 AM, regardless of its activities and consumed substances leading up to that point.

I went Nerd Dating. It was fun. I'll be better able to quantify and quality the fun tomorrow, when booze buzz will no longer be a factor, but I played Balderdash twice and a cute intellectual nerd type boy bought me a drink.

Ok, sleeping is not working, but apparently writing isn't either. I'll just drink my delicious but scary green superfood sludge and stare at the dog until I have to get up and go to class.

If the KKK got its own Ben and Jerry's flavor, I think it would be called White (Chocolate) Supremacy.

Apparently, I missed the internet so much that I had to do stupid crap on it until 3:40 AM. I am a dumbass.

crunchy time

I am taking the Activia challenge, which sounds much more impressive and proactive than it is. All it means is that I'm eating an overpriced yogurt every day for two weeks and hoping it makes my digestive system less fucked up.

I need more hours in a day. I finished my taxes but I have to go mail them and I haven't gone to the Verison store to deal with my phone yet, and my class starts in two hours. Perhaps more would have been accomplished had I not fallen back asleep for three hours this afternoon, but I'm back on the caffeine and haven't had my fix today. And my dog is in uber-whiny mode, which is a shame because he's just so cute and we had several good walks yesterday.

My internet is back up in my apartment, but I'm afraid to say anything lest I jinx it.

Sunny sent me this. Now I have to get married like 7 times.

phoney

My phone is now completely and totally dead. This was the new phone as of Christmasish. The part where the charger is supposed to plug in is busted so it won't charge. Yes, that's the same thing that happened to the last one. It was nice for a little while today, feeling free of the cell tether, but around 8 PM with no internet in the apartment or anything, I had myself convinced there were grave emergencies I'd learn of "too late" with no outside contact. So here I am at the internet cafe, which is brilliantly open until midnight. I need to not stay that long, though, since I want to hit the grocery store and I'm behind in my writing assignments for Fiction I and need to get up early tomorrow morning if I'm going to go to the Verison store and figure out the phone thing. I growl and gnash my teeth.

I should have more to say, but right now, I don't.

invisible forces

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
I think I am being stalked by an invisible force field of electromagneticstaticradio waves that is messing with my head and all electronic devices I use. My phone currently holds its charge for about 30 minutes of conversation before its 12 seconds of warning and then shutting off mid-conversation. My computer refuses to work with any internet inside my apartment (even with the code from my neighbor, it works for about 4 minutes every three days) and also won't hold a charge for more than 20 minutes. The Einstein Bagels by my apartment that's supposed to have wireless also wouldn't work and the manager didn't know what I meant by the "access code," even when I used small, nontechnical words. My brain will not behave itself for more than a week at a time before it thwacks me with yet another spring weather/pressure/stress migraine. These things are making me crazy, and keeping me from you, my precious blog.

Updates on the things that need to be updated:
My magazine article writing professor failed me because I had a third absence. "No exceptions." I could have been in the hospital and she still would have failed me. Cunt. Now I have to see if I can withdraw from the class so it doesn't show up on my transcript as an F. If I take it again, the F goes away in my GPA but not on my transcript. Not that anyone will look at my transcript and one F among many As is fairly explainable, but I'm ticked. Everyone in the fiction department was shocked and appalled at the stringency of her absence policy, but that's why I'm spending the rest of my college career in the fiction department and telling the journalism department to suck it. That and the fact the journalism department is significantly weaker and full of idiots. Suck it, Trebek.

I went to New York. It was much fun. We went to the Met and saw Les Mis and ate lots of good food and I saw Birdy and met Inri (for about 20 minutes before I passed out from food/wine/long day coma) and the airport was full of Jews going to Passovers.

Since New York, my life has been: sleep, write, eat, watch TV, poke dog, repeat.

Yeesh, so many things I must do while I have internet. I am very dependent on it these days. Butt.

Wigging out.

a triumphant return before I go

It's internet! and it's in my apartment! I ran into my neighbor this morning and asked if he'd be interested in going in on a wireless network, and he said he already had one set up and would I like the encryption code? He's saying I don't have to help pay for it, either, but I feel like I should bake him a pie with a $20 in it every month or give him a blow job or something. Ok, maybe not the blowjob. He's a really nice guy, but I don't find him attractive. Maybe I should pay someone else to give him a blowjob a month.

I'm going to New York with the fam' Thursday night through Sunday. Very exciting. My baby brother is turning 18 (sweetmotherofgod) but all his friends are gone for spring break so my parents offered to take him to see shows and eat shmancy food in Manhattan and I got invited. I get to see Birdy and meet Inri, too. My dog will have to stay at the vet's, which has me feeling very guilty so I let him eat Corn Pops.

My apartment is actually cleanerish. Last week was my spring break and I spent a lot of it cleaning, and then Friday I had the service come in for three hours. I still have to go through a shittonne of papers and come up with some method of organization, but you can see 95% of the floor and walk around barefoot and use the sink and stove and whatnot. I even removed the old smelly things from my fridge. I deserve cookies.

Back to bed. So tired, but I have to meet a teacher at noon for my mid-semester conference. Penis.

Internet down again. So lonely, this world without the ability to check facebook 9 times a day.

stupid brain. I'm supposed to be seeing Salman Rushdie right now. Is it supposed to rain tomorrow? My head seems to think so. Grrrr.

Interview and Intraview

I am so turning into my mother, right down to our exaggerated views of our respective mothers. I just spent an hour and a half on the phone with my grandma interviewing her about her childhood for school. I was all worried about it, since she's kind of nuts (like, she's actually been committed before as a paranoid delusional) and she just moved into a "retirement community" and my mom said she wasn't doing too well. But it was great and she was great and very funny. There are some things where details changed slightly mid-story (like how old she was when certain things happened) but one of the perks of doing the interview on the phone is that I can take notes on the computer and I can type almost as fast as she talks. I have to turn in the "transcript" of the interview, but it just needs basic cleaning up.

All I've done all day is write and futz around on the computer. I took my dog for a good long walk around one, but that's about it. Days like this make me feel a little crazy, but that's part of being a writer. It's an important part, really. I was looking at cheap houses for sale in the middle of nowhere again. It's like porn for me, except I'm thinking more and more that if I eventually have enough money and am a writer for real, I'll keep an apartment in a city like Chicago or New York and then have my little house off in BFN. The ones currently catching my eye include: the $15,000 one bedroom one bath house in Glascow, Montana; a cozy 2 bedroom place with two porches in Lemmon, South Dakota selling for $12,700. The cheaper and simpler the better, though I really like the idea of two porches.


I think that, since I've Liked Boys since long before anything could come of Liking Boys, unrequited pining has become my natural default. After doing it for 20+ years, it's the form of "love" I know best. I reciprocal, positive, healthy relationship might make my head explode. Thank goodness I'm not going to have one of those any time soon.

Dogs on the brain

HAPPY 25th BIRTHDAY, HOTDOG SAM!
Wuv woooooo!





Move over, YouTube, I just spent an embarrassingly long time on the White House's pet webpage. Barney and Spot's Winter Wonderland (2002) is my favorite, since it's mostly just the dogs playing in the snow. Why is it I don't give a crap about celebrities unless they are dogs?

And why am I awake at all at 6 AM? My dog's allergies are acting up and he was being very itchy and whiny and woke me up. I don't know if we'll be able to get to the vet until next week (when I'm on spring break) for more allergy pills. If he'd just let me give him a friggin' bath...

significant progress

Tonight, I was a grown-up. Instead of spending the next several years in pining limbo, I forced a definitive answer out of the current object of my affection. I knew it would be a no, and it was a no, but I needed to hear it so I could move on. Of course it hurt and of course I cried, but then again I cry at everything. And I am extremely pleased to say that the amount I feel better and good about myself is significantly outweighing the bad of the formal rejection. So it's ok that I'm sad, and it's much much more than ok that I have made a significant stride in dealing with my emotions. I deserve a cookie.

Kiss me, sunbeam

This warm weather makes me want to listen to Stairway to Heaven and float around on sunbeams and shake the world until it spits out love. No, I'm not stoned, just crazy.

Oh the great mysteries of my internet connection. I was writing a random piece of crap story for my class tomorrow to turn in instead of the story that required the interview I never got when I accidentally hit the email button at the top of the screen and, lo and behold!, I had internet. I'd resigned myself to getting up tomorrow at 6 to get to school in time to check the last bits of things I needed to check and fill in for this story so I could print and hand it in by the start of my 9 AM class. Now, I have no excuse to go to bed without it done and printed, so I am trying to finish and print it. I've tried my internet connection a few gazilion times today, too, but it HAD to be when I wasn't trying that it finally worked. Piece of crap.

I'm fighting a serious headache. Fight fight fight. I'm still functioning and all, but it is not good. I absolutely have to go to my class tomorrow, even if it requires me drinking 12 cups of coffee and taking a cab. I don't like being in that position.

snarf snarf snarf

Sweet mother of annoying, why won't my internet work? I am at school, once again a slave to the public use computers. Meanwhile, freaking out because I can't get my hands on the person I have to interview for the story that I absolutely MUST turn in tomorrow and I'm not sure what to do if I don't hear from him in the next few hours. I had a death migraine on Monday and it's still hanging around and I'm sick of it.

My class today was this ridiculous heavy event, like group therapy. We got into dead parents, dead friends, fighting in wars, and sexual abuse. Crazy shit. When class was over, my teacher (who is not a very touchy-feely guy) wouldn't let us leave until he'd given us each a hug. I felt totally shallow with my phone sex story. Now, I could use a beer, but I don't trust my head not to flare up again.

More to say, but I don't feel like saying it right now. Fluorescent lights make thinking and writing very difficult.

My improv show is Sunday at 2:30. If you are in Chicago, you should come see it.

corset

I'm sitting in my apartment right now wearing a corset. I feel slightly insane, but with my new-found body issues and health regiment, I've noticed just how much I slouch. I look significantly better when I stand up straight. How am I going through this weird image thing now? I guess I just hit the point where I'm starting to hold weight differently and not be able to do things like run up stairs without getting winded, and I don't like it. At least I'm being proactive. My personal trainer (god I love saying that) said some of what we're working on at the gym is to improve my posture, but I feel like if I could just learn to stand properly, that would help immensely. "Inri" (Birdy's boyfriend...he chose that for his own code-name, so don't blame me) suggested a back brace, which might be better, though corsets are more fun and the subtle ones are less embarrassing to be wearing as a 24-year-old girl. And they make your boobs look awesome. The corset I already own and am currently wearing is much more costumey and would show under shirts and such, which is not the intention. I live quite near a number of shops that sell corsets, so perhaps I will hit them tomorrow before going to my parents' house. Don't you love spending money on stupid momentary whim things that suddenly feel super-important like they're going to drastically change your life for the better?

Stupid Gym

I was going in the bathroom at the gym today wondering how anybody drops their cell phone in the toilet. Maybe if you keep it in your pocket or on a belt loop, but I keep mine in my purse in the hidden cell phone pouch on the strap. And quite literally as I'm thinking this and looking for a place to put my purse, my cell phone jumps out of its pocket and directly into the toilet. It was completely bizarre. I guess I hadn't velcroed the flap and shifted in a way that sent it flying, but it was the sort of thing that usually indicates I'm dreaming, except I was wide awake. Now my phone still works but is acting a little wacky, so I took the battery out and left it open to dry out and hopefully all will be well again soon, but it was a completely unreal moment.

Then half way through my workout some guy came in with his video camera and started filming. I asked him not to use me and he said it was just for class and I wasn't on there, but the red light had been pointing at me for a goodly portion of my time on the elliptical machine. I don't really like being filmed, anyway, but this felt way too invasive. When I'm working out, I turn purple and there's flesh hanging out everywhere and I have a few huge bruises on my thigh and these are all things I normally try to ignore and accept because everybody else is in the same boat. Bring a camera into the picture (pardon the pun) and everything becomes too self-conscious and uncomfortable. I decided to end my workout early and found a number of other girls in the locker room had done the same, so I went out and said something to the cameraman and the people at the front desk who'd given him permission to film "as long as everyone in the gym was comfortable with it." They told him to come back later when someone more in charge was around.
On my way out, my personal trainer was on his way in. I mentioned the camera guy and he (my personal trainer) said they actually had a whole policy regarding students filming and waivers and permission and all that, but they hadn't gone over it in a long time so the students working the desk didn't know. So my day's gym time was somewhat ruined, but at least a) it's not that big a deal and b) it won't happen again.

inadequacy

Nasty habit I have to get over RIGHT NOW: refusing to turn things in on time, even if I have a draft of them, because they "aren't good enough."

How much longer do I have to go to the gym before I stop feeling like shit the rest of the day and start looking like a super-model? I like being able to see results. Also, I turn purple every time I do cardio. Is that a problem?

shoot me in the head

Can't sleep. I crashed last night just after 8 PM and woke up just after 10 PM and have been awake ever since. It is now 8 AM. Not cool. I was stressing out about stuff I have to write for school, but I've now done all but the profile of SUC (it's refusing to write itself) and a 500 word piece for my magazine writing class that requires me to do an interview tomorrow night. Or technically tonight now, since I guess it's officially Wednesday. I've even written all the questions for it already. And I read everything I'm supposed to have read for all of my classes up through the end of the week. And I still can't sleep. The back of my throat is all itchy and now I'm getting a little sniffly, too. Perhaps I am allergic to being awake all night. I'm giving in and taking a half-dose of generic NyQuil. I should have done my 30 minutes of cardio like I was supposed to, but the gym is oh so far away and it seems silly to go down there just for a half an hour's worth of activity.

La la la shoot me in the head please. Maybe if I print up my papers and pack my bag for school and pick out clothes for the day I will be able to fall asleep in time to wake up again. SHOOT ME IN THE HEAD.

The Shedd Aquarium is the Greatest Thing Ever

First draft of a piece written for my creative nonfiction class:

For me, the Shedd aquarium has a theme song: “Age of Aquarius” from “Hair,” but the word “Aquarius” is replaced with “Aquarium.” I go bounding up the stairs to the Shedd, singing to my self (and anyone I’ve dragged with me) “This is the dawning of the age of aquarium, age of aquarium, aquariuuuuuum!”

When I moved back to Chicago after an unfortunate five year stint in Ohio, I refused to pay for cable or a land-line phone, but quickly shelled out the $70 aquarium individual member fee. I like going when there is a line to get in. My membership card allows me to march past the stressed-out tourists with my smug sense of ownership and native superiority. I show my card at the desk and they hand me my round blue sticker with that all-important word: “Member.” When people point it out later that night I laugh with mock embarrassment, pretending that I just forgot to take it off. But really, I’m wearing it as a badge of honor.

The main hall of the Shedd is shaped like an octopus with the Caribbean reef is at its center. I like to find Nickel, the resident sea turtle with buoyancy problems. She was rescued with a nickel in her stomach after being mauled by a powerboat and now hangs out under the fake coral to avoid floating upward, tail first, at random intervals.

When I was little, the side halls had giant sea creatures hanging from the ceiling. I realize now that they were fake, but a mean-looking squid and a huge, angry red octopus with suction-cup arms probably started my fear of evil tentacled sea-things. Anemones don’t have mouths but can eat fish, so those freak me out, too. As do the eels, though the huge one in the Caribbean reef tank is pretty cool. The only reason it looks green is that it’s covered in yellow mucus and viewed through blue water.
Nothing covered in boogers can be that scary.

When I moved back to Chicago, the aquarium had an extra floor called the Wild Reef. Some people make the mistake of hurrying past most of these downstairs exhibits to get to the sharks, but they miss a lot. There’s a big tank that has a watery pathway overhead, thus requiring me to stand below it and say “Hey, look, I’m under water.” This is extremely clever every time I say it.

I point out the frog fish to everyone I can. Right before the shark tank and easily overlooked, they are the weirdest, most amazing creatures ever. They look remarkably like coral, with big lumpy bodies the color and texture of their surroundings. Most of the time they sit very still so finding them is a game, but if you are fortunate enough to watch them move, they use their flipper-like fins to push off surfaces in a motion that is simultaneously clumsy and graceful.

And then you reach the sharks. They are huge. Some look exactly how you’d expect sharks to look. Some look like half-shark, half-ray. There’s even a saw-nosed shark, but I have only seen her once. It was my third trip to the tank, and while I’d heard she was in there, she had a tendency to lurk towards the bottom and the back. But one day, there she was, swimming right across the front of the tank in full view. I stood in slack-jawed awe as those around me with better reflexes snapped pictures on their cell phones. I wish I’d gotten a picture to prove her existence, since I haven’t seen her since, but I tell everyone I can that she is in there and I have seen her.

As if in answer to the tank of the “under water” joke, the rays hang out in a tank under the floor with a glass top. Little kids and I run into each other as we try to follow the path of a specific ray.

Back up the elevator and then down the stairs to the back the odd sensation of sunlight welcomes you to the Oceanarium. I remember my first school field trip to the Oceanarium. It was a big deal when the Shedd created this massive addition, and they had a dolphin show, which is fascinating to any 8-year-old girl. It was way cooler than the one at the Brookfield zoo, and they had so many more animals. These days, I shrug off the dolphins to go laugh at penguins trying to jump around their rock formation and squawk at one another before gracefully diving into the water and zipping past in circles.

I never cared much about the belugas until I learned about the pregnancy early last year. Now, the aquarium has a second theme song - Rafi’s Baby Beluga - and I follow the calf’s progress like most people stalk celebrities. I watched it go from a lump in its mother’s belly to a small gray turd occasionally heading up for air to a molting gray turd nursing from its mother to a beluga whale in with all the others, only slightly smaller and darker. The Shedd just announced another pregnancy - same father, different mother. Move over, Britney and Kevin - I will continue to get my gossip under water.

Realizing it was already February and the visiting komodo dragon and lizard exhibit were scheduled to leave distressed me greatly. Sure, I loved the aquarium before the lizards, and I certainly would continue to love it once they were gone, but they were the sprinkles on my happiness sundae. I did a report on the green iguana in third grade and wanted one as a pet ever since. Then I met Faust. Faust is the komodo dragon hanging out at the Shedd. Most people have to pay extra to see him, but I get to waltz past with my member sticker. He is seven feet long with venomous spit, so even if he doesn’t swallow you whole (which he could) you probably won’t survive his bite. Yet he has been raised in captivity and will come rest his head on the laps of his favorite keepers. Move over pet iguana, I clearly need a komodo dragon. And great news! He and his lizard friends are staying at least until summer 2008.

My membership is about to expire, but while NPR and starving children throughout the world vie for my checkbook, my aquarium membership goes in the category of required expenses alongside rent and groceries. Because, really, is there anything more awesome than the aquarium? [sung:] Aquariuuuuuuum!

Freaky-deaky-dog

Things that freak out my dog:

1. People who aren't me
2. Dogs who aren't him
3. Noises that make him think that either of these will infiltrate his space
4. Life
5. The universe
6. Everything else

Those of you who know my dog know that I am not exaggerating. But I love him ever so much, so he is on my lap shaking while I try to finish writing things for class tonight. My fiction story lacks a story and sounds like the same mediocre drivel everyone writes. I'd set it on fire, but I'm better off turning it in.

Now how am I supposed to negotiate going to the bathroom with Clingdog stapled to my lap? Where's my staple remover?

la-dee-da, la-dee-da

Today was a narcoleptic day. Clearly about to be "that time of the month." I had 40 pages left to read in In Cold Blood, but I kept falling asleep reading so it took all day. I have a few other things I have to read for various classes this coming week, and a bunch of stuff I have to write: SUC's personality profile, the rest of the story I started last week in Fiction I, a response to some piece of reading from Fiction I, a front of the book article suitable for Time Out Chicago, and finish up this thing on the aquarium. The fiction stuff is due tomorrow, so that should get priority, but I tend to prioritize based on muses instead of due dates. Maybe not the best idea.

Friday NBF and I went to my parents' for dinner. Beef brisket and egg noodles and shabbat made for a very jewy evening, but considering NBF lived with Jews for awhile (Birdy's family), it was familiar for him, too. And our dogs came. Both of them. They passively accept one another, though we've had to be very careful and vigilant because his normally sweet and agreeable dog gets aggressive when provoked, and my dog is very good at growling when approached by other dogs, people, etc. But it worked and my brother absolutely adored NBF's dog (as was expected) and my dad went back and forth between playing with NBF's dog and taking to, feeding, and sitting with my dog. My dad is extremely cute. Over the years he's "mellowed out" while my mom has gotten more intense, and I've grown to appreciate a number of his traits I used to find difficult and annoying.

It's funny, but for my general pessimistic outlook on life, I'm a bit of an optimistic dreamer when it comes to Love. Mind you, I've got rationalizations for all of my optimisms, but it's one of those areas where I plan to be the exception to the rule. I will be the writer who makes it and the girl who is in a mutually beneficial and love-based relationship with a boy. NBF believes that women are more trouble than they are worth and the best one can hope to find is a relationship akin to a positive merger, love being besides the point. But I will keep jumping up and down and insisting that he is wrong and just bitter due to his still-raw divorce wounds and limited personal experience. People can both love and like one another and even if it isn't eternal it's a good thing while it lasts and totally worth it. Or so I would very much like to believe.

sunshine and soreness

My personal trainer kicked my ass today. I have the weakest arms ever. He's awesome, though. Good at the whole encouragement thing and such. Says I should expect to be "sore but not immobile" by Saturday. I'll just have to play a boulder in every scene for my improv class.

Last night I finally interviewed SUC for my extremely overdue personality profile for magazine article writing. He's an extremely easy interview and an all-around swell human being. I kind of hope that now that I don't work for his girlfriend (and don't work as much in general) we'll actually hang out more often. I've been all stressed out about the fact that the article isn't done and I'm behind in that class. Then I got there today and it turns out most of the class is behind and missed last week, too. Awesome. So I may be a craptacular student, but I'm in good company.

Except in my creative nonfiction class. Everyone in there is very bright and on the ball. It's by far my favorite class. We have actual insightful discussions and hearing other people's work doesn't make me fear the future of humanity. The lowest caliber in there is like the high end of my other two classes. Too bad they can't all be like that.

One of my former college housemates became a father yesterday. It's weird enough to have a peer with a kid, but the fact that it's this particular guy makes me feel preemptively sorry for his daughter. He doesn't understand girls and tends to think of them as second-class citizens. A lot of it is his upbringing. Hopefully having a girl will teach him that the entire gender isn't useless.

Off to tutoring. It should be called "writing therapy." I like it much.

Huzzah!

The dog meeting was a success! Not that they're going to be best friends or anything, but they passively accepted one another and the barking was extremely minimal. My dog mostly hung out under NBF's bed while he kept his dog on his lap. The next great test will be driving out to my parents' house on Friday. Keep your paws crossed.

Thing I really want to say to my mother but won't:
"You know, Grandma went crazy when she went through menopause, too."

Just Do(ing) It

I actually wrote fiction tonight in my fiction class. Like the real made-up storytelling kind that isn't a dream or just me being obnoxious. Though there's no real story there yet and I don't know where it's going and it may be total crap, I feel like I've crossed some sort of barrier.

One of the idiots in my class showed up completely baked out of his mind. What an asshole. You could watch the cloud of stoned-ness slowly lift over the course of the four hour class until by the end he could actually respond to what was going on around him. I hope to hell our teacher has words with him, but I know he won't.

Even though I missed last week's class, I made sure to get this week's assignment and turned it in and did my reading. Apparently a lot of people were sick, but I was the only one who even contacted the teacher. Of the 8ish people who were in class, two did the reading. So now we have to write reading responses every week to prove we're doing it. Pain in my ass, and I actually have been keeping up. You know you're truly at Clown College when I am the best student in class. And a goodly portion of my classmates can't construct a proper sentence. It's one thing to choose to use improper English, but entirely another when subject-verb agreement randomly falls apart throughout the story.

I was poking around the Lean Cuisine website and they have this free fitness and diet tracker thing, so I spent way too much time putting in my information and everything I ate in the past two days and my lovely 15 minutes of treadmill time tonight (thanks to a stop at my landlord's office to drop off rent checks, that was as long as I had before my class). We'll see how long I keep up with entering my info, but my doctors have been after me forever to track what I eat (migraines and weird allergy stuff) and the website makes it somewhat more amusing.

Everything half-melted today. The break from the cold was nice, but this city looks very ugly under a puddle of dirty, melting snow. Worth noting.

The Sads, The Happenings, The Dogs, and The Food

Depression is very strange. It's like having allergies, only triggers tend to be situational instead of tangible and cause persistent sadness instead of persistent rash. It might be funnier if the two ailments switched effects. Like if ragweed, cats, and peanuts made people tearful and removed while unrequited love and frustration with life caused swelling and congestion.

Also interesting to note: when I get like this, all I want to write about is being like this. You'd never know that I was still having a regular life outside of the sulking. Like tonight was the close of the show at my work and my boss's last night before she goes to her new better job. There was a party, with lots of fried food (including the best twice baked potato skin thingies I've ever had) and an open bar that I didn't have to work so I got to actually be a part of the party. One of the bar regulars who's on crew is a notorious flirt and, while I like him, I'm never sure how sincere he is about anything. But he also seemed to notice my fake smile and localized rain clouds and, while I pretended nothing was wrong, he made a concerted effort to cheer me up and provided numerous non-flirty (and therefore acceptable and reassuringly sincere) hugs. It was nice.

Tina quit yesterday. I wasn't surprised, since she's said for ages she only stayed on because of our boss. Still, really sad. She's fabulous. We (Tina, my now ex-boss and I) have tentative plans to go shopping in the next few weeks. But it's the end of an era. Yes, 5 months can be an era. That may be a big piece of The Funk.
Another big piece of The Funk is my frustration with my own terrible study skills. I'm reading all my class material, but I missed two classes last week for stupid reasons and the assignment that was due last Thursday still isn't done. I'm making excuses. I need to just fucking do it. There is no good reason it isn't done. And yet, it isn't done and I'm sitting here mad at myself for not doing it and continuing to not do it. Another assignment has been carried around in my bag for a week. It's not a big deal that it isn't in, and there is a fairly logical reason why, but its presence in my folder keeps hissing at me "You're a terrible student/person." And the pile of shit that is my apartment has grown overwhelming again. As for that, I think I'm just going to call the cleaning service and have them come on Tuesday whether or not I've done any cleaning myself first. Fuck embarrassment. It needs to happen. Perhaps I'll schedule weekly cleanings on my first call (as I was supposed to do when I was given the service as a present last May) until I find some sort of rhythm to the organizing and removal of garbage myself. Because that's something I haven't managed yet in the year and a half I've lived here.

Also in the works: the meeting of NBF and my dogs. NBF's dog is friendly and loves other dogs. My dog tends to freak out at other dogs. My dog will be muzzled. I've been working on getting him used to wearing the muzzle in comfortable situations (for an hour or two around the house, on a walk, etc.), and then perhaps they can meet in my car, where my dog tends to be happiest and least territorial. I would love for my dog to be able to have a doggie friend. I feel terrible that he doesn't. He has me. He sort-of has my parents. That's it. Everyone else he hates and/or is terrified of. It's a sad little doggie existence.

I can't tell if I'm hungry or not. I think I am. I went grocery shopping today and stocked up on Lean Cuisines (they were on sale, so my freezer is completely packed yet again). My favorite soup (Campbell's Chunky Turkey Pot Pie) was not on sale, so I only got a few, but I may eat one now because I feel like comfort food.

If you just read all that, you deserve a cookie. It probably should have gone in my paper journal instead of on the blog, and I'd delete it, but eh.

Gettin' Funky: A Choose Your Own Adventure

I'm still in my funk. But how does one best deal with funk? Here are the candidates:

A) Fight the funk
Course of action: Get out as much as possible. Keep busy. GoGoGo!
Pros: Productive and distracting, could be I just need jump-starting to get away from the funk altogether.
Cons: Problem? There's no problem! I am fine. LALALA don't you DARE tell me otherwise.

B) Live the funk
Course of action: Crawl into bed whenever possible, read and write and watch tv a lot, snuggle dog
Pros: I tend to get more writing done within the funk, and perhaps accepting while it's here is the key to eventually moving on instead of digging myself deeper with the whole feeling-guilty-for-feeling-bad thing.
Cons: Wallowing in self-pity is not generally recommended, could mean I just stay stagnant in the rut

C) Funky waffle
Course of action: Crawl into bed but feel guilty for not doing something else and get mad at myself thus paralyzing me further.
Pros: I'm already doing it, a good use for maple syrup
Cons: Makes me really miserable really fast and oh the guilt the guilt the guilt!

So, what to do? You tell me. Until then, I'll be in bed with a side of hash browns.

oh my GOD it's HIDDEOUS!

Today was not the sort of day I like to have. Yesterday was nice and involved lots of quality time with NBF, but then today was one for that dark nasty swamp-monster of self-hate and self-doubt. He was a very destructive monster, too, feeding off all the things I knew I should be doing while I sat in bed being useless. Weren't we going to avoid the whole depression thing this go-round of school? Apparently the swamp monster did not get the memo. Or maybe he can't read and is too embarrassed to tell anybody. Poor swamp monster. After all, he's born of a sad heart. That's why I can't get rid of him. All my tools are head tools. I am very good with the head tools. But heart tools, not so much. My heart is an autistic child, being beaten by a swamp monster, no less. Poor autistic child. I imagine my innards are going through the scene from Frankenstien where the monster drowns the little girl, not out of maliciousness, but out of misunderstanding.

Thank goodness for warm loving dogs and warm loving friends who even love me when I'm crying and talking about monsters.

!Que terrible!

Why am I such a terrible:

a) student?
b) person?

blergmuffin

Blah. Snowed in and writing things and reading things for school. I'm a terrible student. Yesterday NBF and I spent four hours doing an errand that would have taken an hour tops had I not gone the most roundabout way possible and then gotten us lost. I called my mom for help finding the address and a map online and she immediately started in on her "this is what you should have done and clearly you are a terrible excuse for a human being for not having done such things" shit. I was just glad to have NBF there so I didn't have to kill anyone. The weather has me in a bit of a daze but I'm restless and have so much to do because I haven't done it and I'm trying to do things well instead of just getting them done, which is both good and bad. There are many other things from the past several days I should write about, but instead I'm going to curl up and read for class and/or play monopoly on my cell phone for a few hours break and then re-attempt to write the things that I have to turn in tomorrow.

Brain too boogery to think up title

Sick sick sick. I'd almost defeated The Cold, but yesterday was The Gala at work and 13 hours of stress and smiling did me in. Now I'm dying again and I absolutely can NOT miss class tomorrow and have more I have to do tonight but I feel like total crap. I need to move into a bubble. Why am I such a pathetic sickly person? It makes it that much harder for me to be a good student.

My dog is trying to lick all the germs off of my face. He is very sweet and snuggly, though earlier today he made the worst noise ever when his paws froze up outside and I started to pick him up and he flopped down in an icy puddle. Now I need to walk him to empty him out for the night but he just wants to be a warm little ball of snuggles and is showing no interest in going anywhere.

One of my creative nonfiction classmates is trying to steal my phone sex story. She emailed me asking if she could interview me for a "day in the life" article for her feature writing class. I asked my teacher if I was out of line in saying no, that I was already working on the story myself, and he (my teacher) declared that what she (my classmate) was doing was total bullshit and he'd talk to her about it if I wanted him to. I said I could handle it, and I think I did, but it was good having validation that she was just ripping off my idea and I wasn't being a jerkface in refusing to give her an interview.

Sneeze sneeze snort hack cough sniffle snort.

I am an ass

I woke up randomly at 4 AM with this idea in my head. It's for my fiction class. I guess my motto is "If you can't join 'em, beat 'em." Either that or "If you can't beat 'em, beat yourself."

The Fiction Mine

The walls were thick with mealy-mouthed adjectives. We’d jumped into this dank dark pit together, though certainly not as one, our leader crying, “See the stars and count them! We’ll all go on three! Ready? One…two…three!” I plummeted in with the group, though I’d only counted one star - it was noon and the sun was blazing. It was bright and real and obvious, not to mention the center of my universe, so perhaps that was worth triple.

The pit itself was shallow, an easy downward fall, though too steep to climb back out. Before my eyes had time to adjust to the darkness, my comrades had already started grabbing slimy, scaly fistfuls of adjectives from the walls and stuffed them into their sacks. I felt for my sack. It was full of words I’d brought from home, but apparently the wrong kind. Everyone else seemed too busy with their own harvests to notice, but I tried to squish my personal stash into something that resembled what I thought the walls must look like. The adjectives hissed and gnarled and gnashed their teeth, and a few even sang out in song. I could hear them oozing through the fingers of the others, and their muffled cries as they were forced down indiscriminately into sacks.

I crawled on my hands and knees over to the wall. Maybe I just was being stubborn; maybe I didn’t want to get dirty. I reached out and plucked a single adjective. It was already dead and not going anywhere, so I rolled it around in my hand. It reminded me of the caterpillars that took over one summer at camp. The caterpillars were
non-indigenous parasites and I had a vegetarian biology-nut friend who took every opportunity to kill them with her shower shoes. They weren’t very colorful on the outside, but when you squished them they made a popping sound and oozed magenta and bright green like the aliens they were. Now, I squeezed my caterpillar adjective, and POP! There it went, swirling colors and all.

“Time’s up, everybody!” bubbled our leader, setting up a ladder for us to re-ascend. “Now take out your adjectives and sort through them.”

I looked down at my deformed words from home and the red-green stain on my hand, hung my head, and cried.

Chicago Brrrs

I am a bad person because I am glad the Bears lost the Super Bowl. Not that I have anything against the Bears or for the Colts, but Chicago had gone completely insane. Bars were hiring Lovie Smith look-alikes in the middle of the week as some sort of attraction. The downtown skyline was littered with orange and blue lights and entire buildings lit up to say things like "Bear down Bears." Even the alternative radio station was making Bears comments between songs. Sports apathy is hard enough to pull off in this city when all our teams suck. Any more Bear-mania and I would have had to start wearing pink. And I HATE pink.

I am typing with gloves on. It is not easy, as these are fuzzy gloves, but it is very cold in my apartment (even with the radiators going) and even colder outside. I can't think in this weather. I just want to sleep. Besides, I'm sick and freezingness does not help. I should be writing my stuff for class for both tomorrow and Wednesday, since Tuesday is the big gala event at work and I will be running my ass off all day and night. My nose gets very cold. I should knit myself some sort of nose-warming garment. Or just bury my face in my dog. Yay warm dog.

HealthWatch

In case you were wondering or worried, I am not getting sick. Nope. Absolutely not. Not allowed. And I figure adding vodka to my orange juice means the vitamin C will help my imune system while the alcohol will kill all the germs. Right? Of course right. Now where are my friggin' glasses so I can take out my contacts?

This sucks. Period.

I need to be back on the pill. I am in the process of losing today to my period. It is completely kicking my ass. I'm pukey-crampy and horizontal and I was up and ready to go to class this morning but was having too much trouble staying standing and not gagging. It's too early in the semester for me to have missed a class. Not ok. Not happy. Ouchy ouchy ouch ouch.