as part of my writing every day, i think i'm going to try and blog again. at least semi-regularly. it's weird that so many years of my life went by without a written documentation. most of my life i either journalled, blogged, or both, but the past few years have been nothing. and yes, the brain fog from having 3 kids in 5ish years along with everything else that had been going on is nothing to sneeze at, but still.

i'd be lying, though, if i said i was writing this right now for any reason besides the fact that my phone is being screwy and my kindle app won't work and so i can't read. i feel like kicking myself for not reading earlier when i had the chance instead of scrolling facebook. yes, the book i'm reading is a reread from earlier this year, but i listened to the audiobook then and i wanted to read it read it, and now i can't and i'm annoyed. (side note: the audiobook of oona out of order is fantastic. the narrator was excellent. she's definitely one of my top audiobook narrators and that was the first book i heard from her.)

while i'm trying to focus my writing energy on novels (although the one i've first drafted is a beast i'm not sure i really want to tackle right now), i did decide that i would try some flash fiction/short short fiction competitions just to get some more rejections under my belt. i have this block when it comes to poetry or prose poetry and i'm honestly just avoiding it altogether right now.  

this is choppy and disjointed and i just want to go to bed to read but my book isn't working and people keep talking to me. so it is what it is. 

hey look! a new post!

while you take a minute to pick your jaw up off the floor and dust off your memories about who i am and why you liked to listen to me ramble (through your eyeballs...), let me catch you up on what i've been doing since the last time i checked in here.

[one] i am still dragging my feet on this whole phd thing. (surprise surprise.) but i changed my topic for, hopefully, the last time, and as long as i can manage to carve out some me time to work on this, i should actually be able to finish this stupid thing. fingers crossed.

[two] i am pregnant again! yup, in a few months cricket will have a brand new sibling, ducky. we still don't know the sex. we still can't settle on any girl names. i have complete confidence that cricket will be an amazing older brother.

[three] i tried this recipe for pumpkin banana bread and i was so excited for it and it was such a disappointment. like, i don't think i've been that disappointed in food in such a long time.

[four] i actually did manage to finish that poetry chapbook a couple months back (all the surprise from before with none of the sarcasm) and submitted it to a couple of contests. (that's a lie. i submitted it to one contest. my dream poetry publishing place, which i will likely not win, but i didn't want to risk any slight change chance i had by simultaneous submissions and by some miracle getting picked up by somewhere that is not my dream. so.) when i lose this one contest then there are a few edits i want to make to the collection before sending it out to other places (which are already carefully chosen). if (read:when) i don't get it in anywhere from the list then i have a mass list compiled of places that i should just start sending it to to cover all my bases.

[five] the past few months have been straight out of a sitcom/movie where the main theme is "what ELSE could go wrong?" the answer: everything. i have so much stress overwhelming me these days that i don't even know what to do with myself. except to keep moving. i must keep moving, or else i will be buried.

so i'm sitting at mason, just like the good old days that never freaking ended and turned into the good lord what am i still doing here days, and i was meaning to write this fabulous amazing blog post (because i should be reading a technical article but my brain has given up on life), and just as i started the floor i'm on got SO. LOUD. like, i'm not sure what happened, but i would really like these dudes to shut up. they are disturbing my peace. and my day was super long (and included being drenched in the rain walking around DC for over an hour) so the steam that i had coming into this thing has completely fizzled. so instead of a fabulous amazing post, this pathetic catch up post will have to suffice.

but i have mason days where i need to work, so i think i may be hanging around here a bit more than i have been. gotta say, i've missed it. i always do. 

all of our plans have fallen through

i used to sit in the same spot in my apartment for days, barely moving, staring at a screen of some sort nonstop, and if a bird flew by my window i would think, "wow! a bird! just flew past my window! this must be magic! something has happened! i should blog about it! amazing!" now that is obviously an exaggeration, but at the same time, it really isn't. how many blog posts have i written that ramble on about nothing? dropped contact lenses and boring grad school lectures and lunch dates were all things that, at one point, deserved to be preserved in writing. and now... nothing. things happen and all i do is get through them and never look back. i don't like it.

one of the points that i seem to whine about repeatedly is how much i don't like the hype about new year's. i just... don't like it. it's always my birthday that feels like the fresh start for me. that deserves resolutions and looking back and a clean slate. new year's has always just been the sign that the vacation is nearly over, that projects need to be completed and work needs to be done and oh my god how did i let myself procrastinate this much? 

but maybe i need a stupid day that has been given a false sense of importance right now. maybe i need a january first to get myself back into writing.

(but, really, i may have a lot of posts about new year's and even more posts about nothing, but those are nothing compared to the number of posts i have where i declare that i am going to do something and then never do it. a lot of those declarations have to do with writing. and who am i kidding? what makes this any different? although, i would like to say here officially that despite the fact that my word count tracker didn't appear on my blog this year and i didn't blog about nano, i did write consistently every day for the month of november (better than any other year) and ended the month with over fifty thousand new words of fiction to my name, but that's neither here nor there.)

i feel like i am overusing the word "but." 

in the spirit of writing about what happens in my life, even if that "what" is nothing, my siblings minus the one living with her family halfway across the world all came to stay over at my house for christmas break (basically wednesday through this morning). we had a bunch of plans for the weekend. we were going to have fun. and then two out of three of my siblings were hit by a stomach bug (i'm guessing the same one that cricket and then my dad suffered from in the past couple of weeks) and suddenly the weekend turned into delivering gatorade and chicken noodle soup and doing laundry. the best laid plans and all of that... 

*The Way It Was - The Killers

okay so blogging is hard with a baby. more specifically, blogging my usual rambling posts is practically impossible. here is how all of my attempts at blogging have gone so far:

1. baby falls asleep
2. tensely wait for fifteen minutes to see if he's really asleep or just trying to drive me crazy
3. go wash and boil bottles
4. search the house for dirty diapers and take them all out to the house
5. do a load of laundry
6. shove handfuls of cereal in my mouth while gulping down some water and going to pee
7. check my email/grade papers/do whatever computer stuff i need to do for job/scholarship/whatever else
8. decide to write a blog post
9. start said blogpost
10. get halfway through
11. hear the baby start crying and stop writing

after a couple of days i'll go back to finish the post, realize that it is completely irrelevant by that point, start a new post, stop halfway through. rinse and repeat. 

when i sat down to the computer today to try and figure out why exactly my husband was saying that our summer flight reservations had disappeared (it turns out to be because our summer flight reservations had disappeared which means another frustratingly long and pointless thing to get sorted fun.) (side note: do any of you realize how awful it is to get an infant a passport? it's worse than waiting at the dmv. seriously. whoever thought it would be a good idea to have an infant wait five plus hours in a crowded, stuffy room off of the post office was either really stupid or really sadistic.), i realized how much i had missed typing. i never thought i would miss typing until my fingers were clacking away at the letters after too long. 

the past few days cricket has been going through a wonder week which means he is fussier than usual and has forgotten how to sleep. i either have to deal with an overtired baby or sit and rock him in the rocking chair for hours so he'll stay mostly asleep. at first i was like, this is not so bad. i can just sit here and read books on the kindle app on my phone. a couple days of that, though, and i am cramped and restless and all i want to do is wash clothes or make the bed or boil bottles without a crying baby with me. i am going stir crazy and cannot wait for this to be over. of course, then cricket goes and does something like laugh in his sleep and reminds me why it's all worth it, but still. i just want an hour for me. i am exhausted from doing nothing. i didn't even think that was possible. 

i am making changes to my blog. i felt like it was time. (plus, procrastination!) i want to clean it up, get rid of all the clutter, make it lighter. so there will probably be a lot of messing around in the next few days. the changes may be temporary. i have my old code safely stored for reverting back to and may decide to switch it up completely again in a few months. but for now, it will probably just be some variation of what you see. (i decided to go with a blogger template instead of building something from scratch because of laziness.)

to tie up some other loose ends, i wrote about one hundred twenty thousand, three hundred and sixty-seven (120, 367) words last year - not counting any form of correspondence or anything that didn't have my "voice" or anything that i forgot to add to the total count. that's only a little more than twelve percent of what my goal was (one million words) so... i guess i failed? i wasn't trying too hard, though, to be honest. and one million words is way more than it seemed like in my head. i have become very zen about failure lately. (okay, maybe just when it concerns failing pointless self-made goals.)

the number of posts i write a year seems to be declining every year, so my new goal this year is to write at least a hundred posts. i'm hoping that at least half of them will be more than thoughtless rambles. (in two thousand and nine i wrote over three hundred posts. i was ridiculous.) 

quick updates about what's been going on in my life slash proof that i am alive and have not given up blogging:

• we have been living in the new house for a week, now. we still have no couches which means our living room cannot be set up which means there are still boxes of stuff that cannot find homes which means we are still technically not moved in which kinda sucks. 
• we do have internet and tv now, though. so yay for that, although i really haven't used either very much.
• aside from not having couches or a living room (or a dining room. we are basically living on the floor) half of my books cannot find shelf space. i need more shelves, but it's not a high priority at the minute so my library is also filled with boxes of stuff that still need homes. 
• i am doing nano, slowly but surely. very, very slowly. i have only been able to write three days so far which sucks. i have just over 4500 words. i will put up the word tracker on my blog eventually in case you care. i will make it to fifty thousand by the end of the month.
• i have a blog post that i am halfway through and another one that is just barely started that i will finish and post as soon as i'm less behind in my nanonovel. they are both a lot sappier than usual. i think my pregnancy hormones are getting to me. 
• due to panicking, some poor planning, and stupid apartment policies, we still have our apartment for a bit and i have been making sure that the almost four years of living there (more like three and a half for me, my husband lived there alone for a bit) is wiped clean. this involves a lot of cleaning, obviously, and carrying last minute things down three flights of stairs. in really small batches. because i am pregnant and not supposed to be carrying heavy things. i have spent more time at the apartment this past week than i have at the house.
• apparently it's deer mating season (or so i am told) and the other day a stag came running across the street and sort of almost got hit by us, and my first thought was, "god, james, look both ways" and i think i have a problem. 
• i am itching to have some down time to start crocheting/knitting. i will crochet so many baby blankets. and sweaters (i found a fast and easy and still adorable sweater pattern that i will make a hundred of.)

so last night was the kind of night that you wake up at three:thirty in the morning really needing to pee and then go back to bed and toss and turn and toss and turn but just can't. fall. asleep. and after playing candy crush and checking instagram and putting down your phone to try and go back to sleep, you're still staring at the ceiling then the wall then the ceiling then the back of your eyelids just to look at the ceiling again. and then you grab your phone every fifteen minutes to find answers to extremely pressing questions like, how exactly do you pronounce fondant.

apparently this leads to the kind of evening where you sit down to write a blog post because you have stuff to say but then you keep getting distracted because your husband is watching dennis the menace and you haven't watched that movie in decades and oh look it's the tying the robber up scene and suddenly the movie is over, you've barely written a paragraph, and you've forgotten what you have to say.

but anyway.

the past week or so has been filled with the most perfect summer days. like, seriously, think of a good way to spend a summer day and we have spent it that way this week. do you like to sit outside eating frozen yogurt while kids splash in a fountain? did it. do you like to spend your day at the farm looking at baby animals and taking hayrides? did it. do you like to laze around the house playing video games and watching old disney movies? did it. do you like to gorge yourself on pizza and hot fudge sundaes? did it. do you like to eat half a chicken with your hands while you watch knights on horseback engage in fake battles to the death? well, that's tomorrow.

ideal as this summer is at the moment, though, it's reaching that point where thoughts of school and responsibility and everything else that i pretend doesn't exist during the summer months are starting to creep in. it is not fun.

also, remember how excited i was for landline? and how upset i was that i wouldn't get it before i left on vacation? well, as soon as i came back, it was the first piece of mail that i opened. and then i carried it around for the day. and then i threw it in my tote bag and carried it around for the next two weeks. and now the dust jacket looks worn and i still haven't even opened the front cover. two thousand fourteen really sucks as a reading year for me. 

sometimes in life you drop little innocent hints about yourself and your location across multiple social media platforms that in and of themselves are neither too revealing nor harmful, but if you put them all together then they maybe just might be if you squint and tilt your head slightly to the left. other times in life you spend years taking classes in cyber security and grow into a very paranoid person that is hesitant to even look at a computer without first putting a paper bag over your head. and then there are the times where the first and second overlap just so and you end up leaving the country for three weeks but scheduling blog posts so that no one will know on the off chance that you have a crazy stalker waiting to break into your apartment the second they learn that it's empty. (granted, i mentioned on here that i would be leaving the country ahead of time so really, the whole effort was moot but whatever.)

anyway, i'm back! (i was gone as of july tenth, just in case you were wondering.) and i am exhausted. it feels like i spent a ridiculously large portion of those three weeks on airplanes and in airports. (i will probably calculate the exact percentage of my vacation that i spent in the air because i am a nerd, but it will have to wait until tomorrow because of that whole exhausted thing.) another large portion of that time was spent without the time/internet access to blog. (which i had planned for, hence the scheduled posts, but i was still supposed to write something last week.) i'm sure there are stories from my vacation that will seem blog-worthy in the morning, but at the moment, the only thought in my head is how delicious chinese food would taste right now. 

also, i definitely remember spending a lot of time before i left cleaning my apartment, but when i walked in today (after a taxi ride that i could not keep my eyes open in after the airlines didn't send one of our bags after we had to suffer through an annoyingly not-direct flight because we made reservations really late this year) and thinking, ugh the apartment looks so effing cluttered. because it is, of course. because there is really no other way for it be. i mean, there are only so many places that you can keep things in a one bedroom apartment. add to that the fact that i have an unhealthy addiction to yarn, regularly make and bring home pottery pieces throughout the year, have more books than i have room for, and a very bad habit of keeping everything "for memories" and, well... i'm sure you get the picture. i am able to block it out for most of the year, but the second i go to saudi arabia, where my room (in both families' houses) is sparse and neat and empty slash big enough so that even some things thrown on the floor doesn't make it look too messy, that ability disappears and i come back and just see small and cluttered and junk. but at the end of the day, it is my small and cluttered apartment and i love it. which is why i am the worst at house hunting fyi. 

i'm perfectly aware of what i'm yet to know

hello, and welcome to another edition of sarah blogs instead of doing work. *theme song plays* *fake studio audience claps* today we find our main character very much not working on writing the first chapter of her dissertation despite having said that she was definitely for sure one hundred percent going to spend her office hours researching and writing because she completely failed at doing that on wednesday when she was also definitely for sure one hundred percent going to get that first chapter done. she is seated in one of the comfy maroon chairs in the third floor student lounge of the engineering building, singing the vaccines "under my thumb" in her head. her legs are crossed one over the other and james, her laptop, is resting on her thigh. her hoodie is just two shades darker than the chairs, and she has the sleeves rolled up in an effort to fool her head into thinking that it is time to get down to business. she refreshes tumblr for the fifteenth time in three minutes and sighs when nothing new pops up on her dash. she switches to the browser window that has the tabs of research related work open (using a different window was her way of making sure she actually got work done) and her eyes immediately glaze over. she goes back to tumblr. refreshes the page. resists the urge to fall to her knees, throw her hands in the air, and scream "give me something to reblog!" to the heavens. she goes to check her email - again - and sees the blogger tab. her eyes light up. yes, she thinks, the perfect distraction. she clicks the "new post" button, takes a deep breath, and begins to write. cue voiceover.

so the other day i had the meeting with my adviser that i had been putting off for longer than i'm willing to admit because i didn't want to have to say, "i know it's been basically an entire semester since i last saw you, but nope. haven't done anything in that time. not a thing. what was my project going to be about again?" the thing about meeting with my adviser, though, is that i walk into the meeting panicked, lost, and ashamed and i walk out of the meeting confident, hopeful, and ready to work. he's magic. you cannot convince me otherwise. (because i cannot resist being a complete embarrassment, i told him during the meeting that his office is my happy place. i am surprised i have not been arrested for creepiness yet. if i suddenly disappear, that is why. well, that or laziness. one of the two.)

anyway, in the midst of suggesting great suggestions about methodology and committee members and the like, he said, "this part of the phd process is where you are designing the class. in the next part, you actually take the class." and i had a perfect moment of clarity. the skies parted, and a ray of light shined down on his office bathing us in a heavenly glow, and that "aaahhhhhh" angelic music filled the background. because of course i'm supposed to be designing my own class right now. i mean, duh. some part of me knew that, i swear, but it hadn't registered. see, up until that point, i had felt like i was taking a class that i didn't know the rules to. i showed up every week to an empty classroom because there was a room change and i didn't get the memo. i had never gotten the syllabus, either, and there were assignments i was supposed to be turning in i just knew it, but i didn't know what they were. or how to find out what they were. and i probably wouldn't know how to do them anyway.

but now i can take a deep breath and figure this out. a new perspective was all i needed. i mean, at least until this adviser-high wears off and i realize that a new perspective does not change the fact that i have no idea where i am going or how to get there and that i probably should have gotten off this education train one or two stops ago.

voiceover stops as our main character looks up to stare out the window, contemplating her feelings on this whole post-grad thing she got herself into. the ding of the elevator can be heard and a babble of voices draw our character's attention until they fade down the hall in the opposite direction. her stomach grumbles loudly. she looks around the now empty lounge, glad that no one is left to hear. she's starving. she glances at the clock on her laptop. just over one hour left. she takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. she can do this. she opens the tumblr tab and hits f5.

*Under Your Thumb - The Vaccines 

i had the photo album spread out on my bedroom floor

i have been feeling not the best lately. hence the break from blogging. (although there are some hastily jotted down thoughts in drafts, like "why are audiobooks so freaking expensive?" and something about books to movie adaptations this year. it's a good year for those, if you like that sort of thing. also, a rant about the phrase "the only thing to fear is fear itself" which you can now read in all its unedited glory:

you know what i never understood? the phrase "the only thing to fear is fear itself." and how that supposedly makes you some super awesome above everyone else human being. but... and maybe i'm understanding this wrong, but wouldn't that really just make you really, really weak? like, if you are afraid of being afraid then doesn't that make you afraid of everything? "people are afraid of spiders. hmm i wonder if i'm afraid of spiders. ahhh me being afraid. i must never see a spider because then i may be afraid of it." and like, you are only brave when you do things in the face of your fears. if you are not afraid of dragons then petting one does not make you brave, it makes you a good pet owner. if you are afraid of fear, how are you even supposed to overcome that? do you get scared? because doesn't that defeat your whole endeavor?)

and the fact that this post has taken me literally over half an hour to write so far (and the majority of it was copy-pasted from a draft) makes me want to take an even longer break.

anyway, the point of this post is to have a post. and also to record for the future that i was alive. that my parents were in CT with my grandma for a while, and that now they're back. that they took a break from CT to spend ten days here with my grandma before going back up. that they brought back boxes of family history that i've been going through, looking at old pictures and marriage certificates and diplomas and phone messages and notes on napkins and craving the stories that go along with them. that's the problem with being a voracious reader who blurs the line between books and reality just a bit too often. you start to need the stories. all of them. i want to be the omniscient narrator that sees everything, from every time, and knows what everyone is thinking, always. i  see a picture of friends on a beach with "junior prom picnic" scribbled on the back and i want to read an entire book about it. i want to know what they were talking about, who took the picture, what day of the week it was. i want to know what they ate, who went to the prom with whom, and what the decorations were like. i want to watch a movie of their lives. i want the stories.

i'm one of those people that could look at old pictures for days without getting bored and listen to my grandmother tell stories for years without getting sick of them, so i'm kind of in my element right now.

if nostalgia was a drug, i'd probably overdose on it.

and really, though, why are audiobooks so expensive? (please don't comment with something about how the voice actors need to be paid now too instead of just the writers and publishers and whoever else which obviously means the price needs to be jacked up because i know that.)

*Photograph - Nickelback 

ask me your questions

okay so i dunno what goes on in other majors, but in computer forensics - especially on the intelligence side -we are taught over and over again about the different sources of information. (like, really. over and over and over again. i cannot stress enough the number of times i have learned about where to look for information.) anyway, one of these sources is scholars and academics. it seems obvious enough. if you think that a terrorist is planning a stegosaurus attack on the white house and there is a person that has spent nearly his or her entire life studying stegosauruses (stegosauri? why are neither of those giving me a red squiggle?), well you'd obviously go talk to that person. i mean, duh.

i always thought that the whole "spent nearly his or her entire life studying" part was pretty important. i mean, you'd want to go with the tried and true experts, right? apparently that is not always the case. apparently you can use a paper that a student wrote for an independent study as a reference and talk to said student about the finer points slash clarifications slash whatever.

if you are not seeing what i am getting at, here's the short version: the fbi (yes, that fbi) called me today (well, an agent of the fbi obviously. not the whole organization.) to ask me a few questions about things i wrote about in my independent study paper. (cue dropped jaws. i know, right?)

earlier today, this was my thought process:
god i should really write another blog post.
i could write about the crazy weather.
oh my god no one cares about the weather. you write about the weather way too much. get a life.
yeah, but rain and hail and snow one day followed by gorgeous sun the next? crazy.
no. one. cares.
oh man i hope the clay in my trunk didn't freeze like last week.
at least i'm at home so i don't have to wear rain boots when there's not a single puddle on the ground like an idiot.
ooh sunny weather means flip flops.
ugh, but flip flops mean lyme disease.
it would suck if i got lyme disease again. those antibiotics were the worst.
talking about potentially getting lyme disease is just as bad as talking about the weather.
ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
i'll give myself to the end of the day. and then i will blog about the weather. again. gah.

and then the fbi called and i didn't have to write about the weather anymore. but i did anyway.

*The Scientist - Coldplay

sometimes i look back through my blog and am amazed by how i can know exactly how i was feeling or what i was doing on a specific day because it is all here. recorded. forever. well, forever-ish. forever enough. my sister will ask about a vague comment one of us wrote on the other's facebook wall and i'll just come here and be like, "oh yeah. we were talking about this." that really isn't the case anymore. i blogged on the first day of this month and now here were are, smack dab in the middle of it. everything in between? in three years it may as well not even have happened. and when i do blog, what do i even talk about anymore? not about what i'm doing. not about what i'm thinking. there are no more posts on current events. absolutely nothing tech-y. and maybe it's just my mood at the moment, but that makes me ridiculously sad.

(looking through my blog just generally makes me sad most of the time. the way my voice changes. like, i went from hopeful to angry to resigned. not about anything in particular. just about life in general, i guess. and i suppose that that's what growing up is, but... i dunno. i mean, i still have yet to fully grow up and doubt i ever will completely come out of my cocoon of childness and find myself transformed into a new adult, but the evolution is still there. documented on here for anyone to see.)

as usual, though, where there are no updates to my blog there are drafts lurking behind the scenes. i have been starting a lot of lists lately. and posts about things that i just cannot figure out how i feel about. and so. much. about. school. ugh. and books. but starting things are not doing things and i don't think i ever really learned how to do the latter.

i want to give this blog a complete redesign. part of me just wants to get rid of my sidebars, get rid of my clouds at the top, get rid of all the colors... i want a blank white background and grey sans-serif words and nothing else. i will probably not do this. mainly because i am lazy and useless.

just in case future me decides to read through this post, though, here's what's going on with me at the moment: my parents were in ct, my grandmother is now in va, my parents and my grandmother will be back in ct by the end of the week for a bit. my grandma is moving. school is going nowhere. i've been following the youtube community sexual abuse thing. i no longer write. i rarely read. and any moments of quiet-aloneness end with me being in a mood that is a mix of blah, disenchantment, and nostalgia for a time and place i never knew.

(earlier today i couldn't decide whether to write a happy/excited post or a ranty/happy post and twelve hours later i end up with this. i will be back tomorrow with one of the posts that had a slash happy. i mean, maybe. i have every intention to.)

let's take it easy

i think i have finally reached that point where my brain has decided that enough is enough and it is time to take matters into its own proverbial hands. its way of doing that is to make writing anything that is not "productive" extremely, extremely difficult. and i mean, i know that i need to do dissertation work. i really do. but i just. don't. want. to. i'm standing on the edge of a precipice and any forward movement - even a breath - will send me falling off into real phd territory. where i won't be able to throw up my hands and say, "oh well, i tried. i have to quit because of all of these reasons that have nothing to do with me. at least i didn't put any actual effort into it." where i won't just be a "phd student;" i'll be a phd student. i will need to pull my obsessive tendencies from my fictional worlds for a bit and focus them entirely on the government's intercept techniques and whether or not they are effective in increasing the success rate of prosecutions in this age of new technologies. (and also maybe a little on the erosion of civil liberties although i am told that is a dissertation on its own and i need to calm down and learn to limit myself.) and ugh. i like my fictional worlds and my little bubble i've created where i'm not responsible for anything. i really do.

you may have noticed my quotations around the word productive up there. they exist because apparently, writing a little fanfiction is doable-ish. like, only at times when dissertation work is really not feasible. i think maybe because my brain knows that i need to do this. it's the first time that i'm writing fanfiction not because of love for a character, plot, or world. this is fueled by pure anger at lazy writing and cheap endings. i was told to care about two characters over the course of three books, and though they never made it onto my list of favorites, they deserve a real ending. and i can't rest until i give them one.

blogging, though, that's been ridiculously hard. like, i'll be marathoning a show online (because tv is the only thing that will numb my brain into shutting up about being productive) and i'll think, "wow. british commercials are so weird. i should write a blog post about that." and then i come on here and realize, "well that's a stupid thing to write about. i should write about that really cool person i met. no no that's stupid, too." that in itself is alarming because you all know that writing hundreds of words about a stupid topic is kind of my thing. but then comes the really scary part. my brain, trying to be subtle, will slip in little things like, "well, i mean, since i'm already online i may as well get some research done." and that is when i know that something is wrong. that is not how i work. there is no "might as well get some research done" in my life. it is all "oh my god i need to do all of this research by next week or i will fail out if life" or nothing.

*When You Were Young - The Killers

so the crazy semester ended crazily... as was expected. the last couple of weeks found me so busy with classes and meetings and grading and knitting baby blankets and making t-shirts (more on those later) that i had to take a break from the internet, meaning facebook, tumblr, and blogger. it was only supposed to be for a day or two, but that bled into a week and then two and now three. and now i have so many facebook notifications and so many unread blog posts that i have been afraid to jump back in. there is so much to catch up on that i feel like it's too much work for a vacation. so... winter break has found me still avoiding the internet.

speaking of work in a vacation, that's exactly what i got to do the first few days because professors can do stuff that really freaks students out and sends them running to me for help. things like changing when a final is due and deciding last minute not to accept an assignment that a student worked on for half of a semester. so i got to handle all of that. and now i get to focus on the party my sister and i are throwing. tomorrow. that i'm still not entirely ready for. yay.

but come sunday, i will get the relaxing break that i have been counting down to for the past month. i hope.

anyway, this was more of a post to get over my fear of returning to the internet and let all of you know that i am still alive than anything important. this coming week i will read all about your lives that i have missed and go through all five hundred buzzfeed articles my sister posted on my facebook wall, and then hopefully be all caught up and back to my normal spot in cyberspace. and next semester i will have no classes (!!! i don't even know how i will handle that) and hopefully be back to blogging regularly. 

time goes by so fast

have you noticed that this is the fourth day in a row that i am blogging? just like old times, right? i have a theory about this that correlates with my state of mind and outlook on life on other things that will probably sound really smart and insightful eventually, but i don't have the time to really get the words right just now. but take my word for it, if it was more than a wisp of a thought than you would be amazed at my amazingness.

it's kind of funny (but also kind of terrifying) to think of how little time i have these days. i mean, there are just so many things to do and people to see. an old friend came to town over a week ago, and yet i still have not found the time too meet up because apparently i spent the beginning of the summer wasting time not from the present but from the future. if that makes any sense. it does in my head at least. (the fact that she came the same day as my sister and that school is starting soon may also contribute to the fact that i have not yet seen her. but i like my theory better.)

speaking of school, it may be starting next week? i honestly don't know, and i'm too afraid to check. my schedule is still up in the air (though a lot closer to the ground than it was last week) and i think if i just don't think about school maybe it will just wait for me to be ready for it. with that great sense of logic it's not hard to believe that i am working on a phd at all, is it?

yesterday while my sister was out fulfilling her childhood slash teenage dream of seeing backstreet boys live (of which i'm a little jealous of, i must admit) her sons and i made stuff out of clay. (i had wanted the clay you bake in the oven, but apparently they don't sell that anymore? there's only the air dry stuff that takes for-freaking-ever to dry and smells horrendous. the stench gets caught in the back of your throat and won't wash off of your fingers and next time i am getting crayola instead of this icky fancy stuff.) my nephew and i worked together on an elephant that i think he made adorable and as soon as it's dry and painted i will post a picture. because, really, you guys need to see this thing.

*Ordinary Day - Nick Lachey

roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer

so it's been a while. and by that i mean that i may have forgotten how to blog even though, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't even really that long. but i have been busy. super duper forgot that facebook was even a thing and actually went days without spending more than ten minutes on a computer kind of busy. the kind of busy that means that i only ever washed eighty percent of the dirty dishes a morning (if that) and ran the same load of laundry through the washing machine three times. (i have this thing where i have to rerun the wash if it sits wet in the machine for more than a couple of hours. i also have something else that's less of a thing and more of a phobia slash neurosis slash possible ocd symptom where i cannot have the dryer running unless i am in the living room and able to watch it because i seriously think it is going to start a fire.)

but anyway. we had out of state guests (my grandma) and out of country guests (my sister and her family -we still have these) and basically a list of things to do that prevented me from being my typical couch potato self. but leave it to me to actually get a life and then continue to blog about nothing. but after a very busy week, possibly the worst night of sleep ever, and a really early start to the day, my brain is pretty much fried.

tomorrow is going to be a day completely devoted to my nephews which means blogging will once again be pushed to the back burner, but after that i will come back to talk about how when some things start going well school-wise, other things completely fall off track and maybe talk about what i've been up to for the past week. my novel has also been nagging me so i might move up the next editing step because why not. also, if i do not start knitting again, i won't have my blanket done until it's too hot for it.

the lazy summer days have officially become a memory.

*Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer - Nat King Cole

could be a good excuse

so i had to turn on captchas for comments, and i'm really sorry. i know how annoying it is to prove that you are not a spambot every time you want to add your two cents to a topic, but the number of spam comments was getting a little ridiculous. too many were tricking the spam filters and getting through. just this morning i had to delete at least ten spam comments from past blog posts. and while ten may not seem like a lot, it's still super annoying. so, captchas on.

this past weekend my cousin and his family (wife and daughter) came down to visit us. he's been getting his master's in new york at columbia for the past year and decided to see dc before he leaves the country again in december. we've developed a sort of expertise in touristy stuff around virginia and dc because of all of the relatives who decide that it's a cool place to visit. usually, though, they stay more than a couple of days. since this cousin was only here for the weekend, and we didn't want him to feel jipped of his tourist experience, we crammed a lot of stuff into those two and a half days. we did malls because for some reason they are always popular with the visitors, the zoo, old town alexandria, the air and space museum, all of the main monuments in dc as well as the capitol and white house, a trip to skyline caverns, as well as taking the time to do art projects and seesawing with the kid and watching soccer matches on tv. it was busy and required a lot of walking in the hot sun, but fun.

and his daughter is adorable. in the beginning, she could not seem to remember my sister's and my names for anything. for a while, she called me sammy and my sister musa (because apparently guy names are easier?) and then she started calling me yellow and my sister pink (because of the color shirts we were wearing). that seemed to stick the longest and so on sunday we decided to wear the same colored shirts so as not to confuse her. monday, though, the day they left, i wore pink and my sister wore yellow to see if she had learned to tell us apart. turns out she had and somehow managed to learn my name in her sleep and called me by it from the second she saw me. she still had a bit of trouble with my sister's, but most kids seem to have trouble with anisah. but yeah, she was definitely one of the most behaved kids to come visit us.

anyway, that was my weekend and why i was not blogging. i actually have a good excuse this time.

*It Could Be a Good Excuse - The Used

let's waste time

finals week. and i do not want to study. so obviously it becomes imperative to find time to blog because blogging is super important and neglecting my blog is just awful. blogging is so important, in fact, that it is my number one priority. really. who cares if i pass another batch of classes if my poor blog goes unupdated? (let's pretend that once a week updates has not become the norm here. let's pretend that these are the days when i would update daily. or better yet, the days that i would post multiple times a day.)

so my grandma is in town again, and that is always fun. of course, it would be more fun if it was not finals week, but that's what next week is for. familial gathering and enjoyment of the schoollessness of summer. (except that i have to figure out a bunch of school related stuff this summer and get my act together, but that can wait until the week after next week.) my grandma is awesome, and we share some sort of telepathic connection, i swear. for example, remember way back when when i said i wanted those novel posters that reproduced the text of a work into some design? well, the delivery man just delivered the pride and prejudice one to my house. it was a gift from my grandma, and i never even told her that i wanted it. this isn't the first time that she's done this, either. one of the teapots she got me when i got married was one that i was drooling over online for months.

i am still reading cassandra clare, and she and her editor should be stoned. there is not much that i can not tolerate in writing, but inconsistencies make me suddenly want to do strange things like drive my fist through a wall and egg people's houses. i'm not talking about those inconsistencies like when your super clumsy protagonist suddenly moves with all the grace of a ballerina when the need arises. i'm talking about when you make a big deal about a character's bright yellow pajamas and then somehow forget that he's wearing yellow pajamas and describe him as wearing striped pajamas in the next scene. or when you spend a paragraph talking about how a character was not wearing makeup and how she looked younger and her eyes looked bigger and blah blah blah, but somehow in the process of her moving from the window to the bed, her eyes become smudged with mascara making her look like a french model slash actress. things like that distract me. they pull me out of the story and ruin any momentum that you were building. i don't like it, and someone should catch them before the book becomes a best-seller. there are other things that have started to annoy me about clare, but if i started with those i would never stop typing. and i do eventually need to get to a final exam. maybe even study for it.

also, reading all the stuff about the harry potter fandom has made me really want to read fanfiction, and i am adding hours of fanfiction reading to my summer to-do list. another thing, netflix kind of really sucks. a bunch of the titles that i was planning on watching over summer were suddenly taken down in their recent "let's lose 1800 titles" thing. i mean, i know that it is less netflix's fault and more the fault of the stupid copyright holders who want to start their own streaming services and charge us directly to watch their titles so that eventually we'll be paying for twelve different streaming services or watching everything illegally, but it's easier to blame netflix. so netflix sucks.

*Chasing Cars - Snow Patrol

i think i could need this in my life

i've been staring at this blank page for almost an hour, starting sentences and deleting them, but there's too much to say that i can't say. not yet. and it's getting in the way of everything else. i think that writing in my journal and my ability to blog are somehow connected. around the time that i first started blogging (here), i also started journaling. i'd had a diary when i was younger that i went back to a few times as i was growing up, but i don't think i could ever write anything serious that started with "dear diary" and all of the entries that i remember either started with "dear diary, i've had a bad day" followed by whatever paltry reasons were behind the bad day, or with "dear diary, i have a crush on..." i was obviously not the deepest of rivers. there are only two entries that i think have any kind of realness to them, one mourning my cat that ran away/got left behind and one detailing my feelings about our move across country. but then again, my diary was often read by half of my family - a lot of the times because i would give it to them to read - so i knew that i couldn't ever write anything in it that i wouldn't say out loud to them.

and then i started this blog, and shortly after turned a notebook that was meant for genius stories and poetry that would be snatched up by publishers everywhere because it was just so amazingly great into some kind of safe haven for whining that shouldn't be seen by the public ever, and it all just worked. i didn't write in the journal regularly, but i did it regularly enough that half of the stuff in my head was poured out into a journal and half was poured out in to my blog, and this was about the time that i was starting to take hermitdom really seriously so there was no need to save any for social interactions because i was just not having very many of those. and then a while ago i got journal's block. every time i would go to write in it i would do something else instead until i just didn't go to write in it anymore. not long after that, i stopped writing in my blog regularly. and i think that they may be connected.

and when i don't blog regularly i get out of the practice of writing regularly. and if i don't write regularly then i forget how very badly i want to be a writer. and that is not good. so my new plan is to restart journaling which will hopefully restart regular blogging which will hopefully restart writing which will hopefully help with editing because editing is the hardest thing i have ever had to do. and i know i have said that before, but seriously. how do these people find the motivation to edit?

*If You're Gone - Matchbox 20

there's so much i need to say to you, so many reasons why

before i get right into this blog post that will be jumping from point to point like an ADHD kid with a sugar high, i'm just going to give a quick explanation (i will never not write an i after the first a in that word and then have to go back and delete. i've resigned myself to that.) about why my blogging, which has become more sporadic that regular lately, pretty much became nonexistent for what felt a lot longer than two weeks. see, my parents went up to CT to visit my grandmother and ended up staying longer than they expected because of nemo. (if you do not keep up with the weather of the east coast, there was a big snow storm up in new england recently. it was named nemo.) since i am no longer living in my parents' house and since we had to balance a bunch of things (like school, office hours, tae kwan do, feeding and homeworking the boys, etc) between the three of us (my sister, husband, and i) there was a lot of time spent in the car. time which i could not spend blogging because i was too busy singing along to the same four songs that the radio decides to play over and over and over and over and over and over. times that i was not in the car were spent in class, doing homework, preparing to get into the car, or not feeling like blogging. but my parents came home yesterday so regular programming will commence.

i had a moment over the past two weeks when i thought about how writing (blogging, editing my novel, writing anything new) was automatically pushed to the end of my priority list the minute things like this popped up. and how could i consider myself a writer (or even a wannabe writer) if i did not write? the one thing i know about writers is that they write. but then i thought about how pretty much everything gets pushed to the bottom of my priority list when things like this pop up and i felt okay again. (i have this possibly unhealthy tendency to put my family's needs, wants, and errant thoughts above my own that has been viewed as both a good and bad thing depending on who you ask, and something that i don't plan on changing either way because it's just who i am.)

another light bulb moment over the past two weeks was when i realized how much i hate people who walk on the wrong side of the sidewalk. there is a side for coming and a side for going, and if you don't know which is which then just follow the crowd. stop trying to be special, because you're not. you're just annoying. (i am not talking about people who need to cross over to get to a building and end up walking on the wrong side for a bit. i'm talking about the people who insist on being idiots.) 

also, i decided that contacts are the devil's creation and possibly the worst thing that i subject myself to on a daily basis. seriously. they get dried out three seconds after i put them in, they are scratchy and annoying seven times out of ten, and they give me the worst possible headaches if i keep them in for over five hours. so why do i keep wearing them? a mixture of convenience and self-acknowledged stupidity i guess.

there is an almost finished description of the thought process that goes into choosing which shoes to wear when it's cold and slushy outside in my drafts from last week, to which i say... really self? really?! that's what you decide to write when you have three minutes of writing time? you should be ashamed of yourself. 

some good news for the week: i finally got someone to agree to be a member of my phd committee! he doesn't want to be the head because he doesn't think he could help much, but he also didn't laugh me out of his office or tell me to drop out. in fact, he's the one that suggested he become a member. i also may have fallen in love with him a little bit. i think it's a combination of the fact that he was the first nice guy i talked to outside of my forensics family and that he's intelligent and passionate about what he does. oh, and his looks are nothing to sneeze at. 

i also got an email last week telling me that one of the fanfiction authors i favorited in high school had written a new story, and i kind of got really excited because i remember loving her back in the day. i still haven't had the chance to read it, and i'm slightly surprised that she's putting up a story seven years later, but i thought it was kind of weird that it happened shortly after i posted about fanfiction. (no i don't think that it was written because of my post. weird in the way that i said i would probably have another fanfiction phase eventually and then she pops up to lure me back in.)

anyway, in case of any future absences from blogging, i think it would be a good idea to go buy my book so you can have a dose of my words on standby. do it for yourself. also, my grandma has had a hard couple of weeks and feb. sixth was her birthday. a great present for her would be to buy her granddaughter's book. she'd love you for it. (as would i. forever.) do it for the elderly. 

*Against All Odds (Take a Look At Me Now) - Phil Collins