she believes that life is made up of all that you're used to

tuesdays smell like iced peach and violet and taste like scrambled eggs.

routine hangs heavy around us like a fog that we forget to look through, and when it rises it's as if it was never there, but when it falls it becomes all we ever knew. my alarm shrills its wake up call at five:forty am and my body, the same one that protested just yesterday that ten hours of sleep could never be enough, is already awake and responding to it. the panic of forgotten to-do lists and appointments that need to be made, meetings that need to be had, reports that need to be written, and emails that need to be sent crawls up my spine and swims through my veins.

my feet grow heavy and find the familiar paths that they walk down every day from september through june. my eyes forget to wander. my chest welcomes back the sense of unease that hangs just under everything else. i start missing the people that i haven't even said goodbye to yet, and my skin yearns for the warmth of the summer sun that is shining right outside.

i loved summer vacations as a child, but i did not crave them like i do now. i did not need them like i do as a twenty-something year old that is still trying to find her way. it is within these three months that i can turn my head away from everything "i should be doing" and just be me. it is here in these three months that hope can be found. that promise is still alive. that possibilities are real.

and so i hold tight to them. i scream out for ice cream and fountains and lazy days in the sun. i close my eyes tight for one more day where i can eat burgers and drink lemonade and not think about the growing list of things i cannot do.

but fall is coming. it is unavoidable.

and tuesdays smell like iced peach and violet again.

*3 AM - Matchbox 20 

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. 

and we softly surrender to these lives

we are now on the fifth day of july, and i think i have to come to terms with the fact that i will not be doing camp nano this year, and that makes me sad. i just... can't do it. i mean, i can, of course i can, but i think there are things that i need to do instead of it. i think that's what's making me sad. the fact that i know i could carve out an hour or two from every day this month to write, but that i'm choosing not to. i have been waiting for july since december so i would have something - albeit something pretty arbitrary - holding me accountable for my writing. i have seriously been thinking about my characters a lot over the past few months. i really like them. and i really want to write down their story so that other people can like them, too. but i've only been able to do little snippets here and there. there hasn't been that daily push through a couple of thousand of words since november, and i miss it. and i was looking forward to it. and i am actually choosing not to do it. gah.

(i think my problem started when i was debating whether to use camp nano to work on my dissertation, and i have zero problems ignoring that kind of writing, and so my brain thought it was okay. or something.)

i still plan on writing this summer, though. i really do. i want to. the only problem is that planning and wanting are not doing and while i have never had any problem with the first two, that last one has always seemed to trip me up. maybe instead of twenty-six being the year of deep breaths, i should have made it be the year of getting my act together and getting stuff done. or maybe the year of discipline because i need some of that as well. 

*Bed of Lies - Matchbox 20

exciting things that are going on this july:

• july 1st: camp nanowrimo starts
• july 4th: freworks probably
• july 8th: summer session of pottery starts
• july 8th: rainbow rowell's new book, landline, comes out
• july 8th: the new part of the wizarding world in florida opens
• july 30th: leakycon starts
• normal summer fun things that are fun and summery 

things that i will be doing this july:

• not those things

ugh. 

why do all good things come to an end?

i don't know what came over me, but i just spent the past hour waking up from my academic hibernation. i sent out emails to several professors asking if they'd be a faculty reference for me because i suddenly find myself applying to be a mentor to international students in this special program mason has. i emailed the lady about the mentor position just to clarify exactly what would be required. i emailed people about renewing my job as a GTA for the computer forensics program next year. i emailed a student asking for information on his committee because a professor told me that he was doing a policy related dissertation and if they'll work with him without programming they might work with me. i emailed another professor about the new hire for the computer forensics program that everyone has been talking about, and not only did i get his contact information and set up a meeting with him for next week, but i also ended up in an email chat conversation with the professor i reached out to and am meting up with him early august. and suddenly, i find myself right back in the swing of things. i feel both relieved and slightly panicked. i kind of liked my little bubble of no responsibilities. oh well. deep breath.

of course, that took up time that i should have been noveling so now i need to go start on that. i have a little under nine thousand words to go before i call camp nano a success. i kind of feel too accomplished to do anything right now though (and i still need to clean the apartment which i have been finding reasons to postpone for the past few days).

in a couple of weeks my sister and her family and my grandmother will all be back in virginia to visit. looks like my summer of laziness and isolation is coming to an end. a little over a month of knitting, reading, writing, and tv. it was good while it lasted.

*All Good Things (Come to an End) - Nelly Furtado

i have been in jeddah for about a week now (which means internet yay!) but just have not found the time or will to get back into blogging. there are so many blog posts that i have to read to catch up on the blogs that i'm following, there are so many posts that i have written in my head that need to be translated to pixels, there are so many visits to make and people to see and chess games to play (my brothers - especially the eleven year old - are newly obsessed with the game), and my i key is hardly working so i have to pound on it seven times every time i want to type an i. you just do not realize how many i's you use until something like this happens.

anyway, today is the first day of ramadan, so happy ramadan to everyone. i'm going to get into summer stories later so i guess this post is just a tad bit pointless, but i thought that seventeen days without any sort of update was a bit ridiculous. so here i am.

oh, and  cut my hair. it's the shortest it's been since i was probably seven (and now i'm twenty-four). it was the result of a semi-mix-up and resulted in a mini heart attack immediately after, but it's grown on me and i kind of like it now. so yeah, that's my big summer news. 

i am in misery. the silence is slowly killing me.

so i've been in the desert for a few days now with no internet connection (i find it ridiculous that junior can't find a connection to steal when every other computer can) and no time to bum it off of the cousins. though my sister has found ample internet opportunities in the midst of her complaining about the lack of internet. it doesn't make sense. i feel so cut off from the world.

anyway, i am so dreadfully behind on wedding preparations that i'm not even going to get into them. i did horrify/deeply offend a make-up artist yesterday by saying that i wasn't going to do my eyebrows for the wedding which was fun. i just don't do them. it's not like i killed anyone. according to her, though, there's no way the make-up could possibly show without me doing them. considering the amount of stuff they cake on over here, i highly doubt that. oh, remind me to document my saudi wedding rant sometime in the next few days.

since it kinda looks like the whole internet situation isn't going to be fixed anytime soon, feel free to go back through my posts about saudi arabia from last year and the year before if i don't post much now. it's pretty much the same here minus spurts of panic about the wedding and pangs of annoyance. fun stuff.

also, i have been walking around all day singing maroon 5 because of my nephew that has been singing the same three lines of the song all. day. long. i also just spent the last hour reading up on all the blog posts i've missed since i left america.

anyway, i'm exhausted and going to sleep. hope your summers have all started off swimmingly (it never seems like summer starts till i reach the desert) and hopefully i'll have time and internet to keep you updated on the countdown to the wedding (which is july 6th in case i forgot to mention that).

*Misery - Maroon 5 (i dunno if this is the song's name or not, but i don't feel like looking it up or getting my ipod so let's just pretend.)

and long weekends without regrets

so this weekend my family and i went to visit jamestown/yorktown/williamsburg. when we got to the inn we were staying at, we were told that they didn't have wifi. okay, we thought. we can go three nights without internet. when we got to our room(s), we noticed that we could barely get phone reception either (you were lucky to get like half a bar near the window). in fact, we could barely get phone reception most places we went in the area. we were happy to get a few minutes with one bar at a time. now me, being an unreliable phone answerer at best and a complete ignorer of all things telephone related at worst, struggled little with my sudden inability to contact the universe. to my sister, on the other hand, it was the end of the world. most of the weekend saw her walking around in circles with her hand up in the air trying to find reception.

anyway, our days started with breakfast, went on to visiting one of the historical towns, and ended with me reading an old story a friend and i wrote years ago that i recently downloaded onto my kobo. this made me feel like i was living in a bubble of a world that consisted only of muffin tops, the american revolution, john smith, and fictional characters (who were a lot more arrogant and a lot worse friends than i remembered them being) completely separate from the rest of the world. somewhere classes were being taught, people were going to work, and my wedding was coming up, but none of that existed to me then. it was sort of peaceful.

overall, the weekend was fun. there were times when i could swear i was being cooked alive by the sweltering heat coming from a sun much too hot for may, and i can't say i'll miss sharing the bed with my younger brother, and we were stuck in a traffic jam for way over an hour on the way back because they decided to close down an entire highway, but it was an awesome pre-summer-vacation vacation nonetheless.

this could have been a better post, but i'm actually really tired and the trip has inspired a couple of posts for the next few days so it's okay that this one is a little pointless.

*Rain Delays - Crash Parallel

and now, the end is here, and so i face the final curtain

sometimes, i get majorly anxious about this summer. i've always had a big peter pan complex and this summer is like taking the dream of neverland that was always hovering just out of my reach and throwing it in the trash. in zimbabwe. a hundred years ago. so far away that i can never even think of it anymore.

it's like my entire "childhood" or whatever you can call this extended childhood of mine that has lasted into my twenties is just ending. at once. all together. it's leaving and forgetting to take me with it.

this all started earlier this year, with things like my sister moving away and all the other stuff that was going on. but the culmination of it, the dramatic dropping of the curtain on my life so far happens this summer.

first of all, i'm getting married. that's obviously a very un-stay a kid forever kind of decision.

second of all, harry potter, which has been a defining part of my life, is ending. that's it. done forever. the funny thing about harry potter is that it always coincided with major events in my life. graduate from elementary school? the fourth book comes out. start middle school? the first movie comes out. i move back from saudi arabia when my brother gets super sick? another book comes out. start my senior year of grade school? sixth book and fourth movie come out. graduate from high school? i'm more torn up about the end of my friend's and my story we were writing than the end of school. my sister gets married? the fifth movie and last book come out. i get married? the last movie comes out. i realize that with a book and movie coming out every year, this is not really an exceptional thing, but it was a big part of my life. so to have it end is like, really having it all just end.

that's it. this summer marks the end of everything. i am coming up to the last page, the credits will soon start to roll, the actors will take a bow, i'll close the back cover... and then i will be an adult.

*My Way - Frank Sinatra

driving slow on sunday morning and i never want to leave

it is 12:55 pm jeddah time on friday. do you know what that means? it means there are less than two days left of this vacation. 8:00 sunday morning, i will be watching the desert fall away as the plane (which i've been told has gone on a diet and gotten smaller and more squished) begins the 12 hour flight back to america. sad, isnt it?? kinda scary how three months can fly by so completely unnoticed.

you know what's even scarier, though?? the fact that monday (yes, the day after we arrive) school starts up again. and along with the normal college drudgeries to look forward to, i have part two of my senior design class. before the end of every class the last month of school last semester, my professor told us, "work on your project over the summer. it'll be near impossible to build everything in three months when you have other classes to worry about." sound advice giver that man. unfortunately for us, we (my group and i) are apparently the very worst kind of advice takers. we heard the advice, we commented on how smart it was, we promised to email each other over the summer to get stuff worked out, and then we did... absolutely nothing. none of us wanted to be the instigator of the work, so we all avoided sending that first email.

main problem(s): we are a group of 3 instead of 6 because two weeks before final presentations our professor split our group up to accomodate all the "brilliant" project ideas he had come up with that none of us wanted to use. not only do we have a half-size group, we also made a ridiculous amount of suggestions last semester. so while group A has six people and only has to work on getting an ocean current guide distributed online, we have three people and get to deal with so much more. we have to syncronize the software on the network of their computers, get firewalls up, connect all computers to the network and fully secure it, install a server, work on the advertising of the company (we're basically focusing on web advertising though i think), and fix the website. besides fixing the website (which is a daunting task since it's crap and will have to be completely rebuilt), the rest seem managable... alone. put them all together with the work of four other classes and the stress of getting everything ready for graduation and applying to grad school, it seems a little much.

*sigh* i'm not gonna lie, at times this summer i did want the day of our return to america to hurry up, but at the moment, i'd kinda like to freeze time over here for a while.

*Sunday Morning - Maroon 5

and it's beginning to get to me

remember a couple days ago when i said i had blogger's block?? understatement of the year. it's more like thinker's block.

i think the strain of the summer is beginning to get to me. yes, the summer is a bigger strain than the rest of the year. theres just so much to do and so little of it can be blown off. in the beginning, i gave up getting enough sleep as i couldnt give up anything else. my body is getting back at me. to make up for the lost sleep, it has given up thoughts. of any kind. all thoughts. big. small. pointless. important. they dont exist for me anymore.

creativity is a distant memory.

i'm trying to help my cousin write a personal statement for a grad school application. i edited her husband's statement in ten minutes, and it was awesome. but that was in the beginning of the summer. with hers, the information is all there. it's typed up in word, sized and double-spaced. but it's dry. it's boring. it's a laundry list of facts. and i cant do anything about it. i cant spice it up. i cant make it flow. i cant make her jump off the page. if i was in the admissions office, i probably wouldnt even get through the whole thing before moving on to the next applicant.

i need my thoughts. i need my concentration. i need summer to be over. i may not want it, but i need it.

*It's Beginning to Get to Me - Snow Patrol

lately the weather has been so bipolar and consequently so have i

this whole raining one day and being sunny the next is beginning to wreak havoc on my life. okay to a less dramatic degree, but still, it is screwing around with my moods - not the only thing doing that, but whatever. and so one day ill feel like being all social and love people (to an extent) and want to go hang out with what few friends i have managed to keep this long and the next day i'll be a complete sociophobe with less technological skills than the unabomber. because, really, who needs people?? my family is more than enough for me.

and then i start to think about how in a couple of weeks i'll be half way around the world where i will be forced to be social every day for three months. and while i know that once i get there i'm sure i'll have loads of fun, the prospect of that forced socialness does not seem too appealing at the moment. plus i have so much cleaning to do before i go which is never something to look forward to. and i needa lose some weight so that i can gain it back once over there. ugh.

anyways, on a less morose note, it's summer yay. i'm not sure if i mentioned that in an earlier post, probly did. and there are so many things to waste my days doing that i dont even know where to start. and there are so many books stacking up on my bed that i have to read this summer - some borrowed, some just forcefully recommended - but i havent really gotten into any of them and i rarely ever have time to read over in saudi arabia. there's also this project thing i'm working on and while the end product is going to be awesome the getting there is a headache. i have to work with this program that freezes for a full minute every three keystrokes. its psycho.

ok so i apparently suck with the happy tonight. so while i go off to do something cathartic, i'll leave you all with words of wisdom taken from a bookmark my brother abdullah made for me: read, it's what big people do.


*High of 75 - Relient K