so before i had cricket, i had resigned myself to the fact that i would spend the next few years of my life without getting lost in books. i had heard, "i used to read, but then i had kids, and you know, you really can't anymore," so many times that i had accepted it as absolute truth. but then i had him and learned something about myself. i learned that a lot of the time, i will choose books over tv. i will choose books over movies. i will choose books over sleep. i will choose books over music (i went from music in the car to audiobooks. it's awesome.) it may take me longer to get through books, i may have to put it down way more often than i like, but i still pick then back up again (most of the time). i had kids, and i did not give up my stories.

so, without further ado, here's a post about my 2015 books. when i realized i was still reading, my goal was to read 15 books. i surpassed that, obviously.

my list of books that i read this year (mostly in the order that i read them in):
bold: favorites of the year
italics: this was a bad book and i read it so that you don't have to
*: disappointing (this doesn't necessarily mean that it was bad)
anything linked goes to my review of the book on goodreads

1. Pwned by Matt Vancil
2. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline *
3. Dragon Run by Patrick Matthews
4. Hey Natalie Jean by Natalie Holbrook *
5. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
6. Six Moon Summer by SM Reine
7. All Hallows' Moon by SM Reine
8. Long Night Moon by SM Reine
9. Gray Moon Rising by SM Reine
10. Falling for Hamlet by Michelle Ray
11. Emma and Elsie Meet Fitzwilliam Darcy by Maddy Raven and Monica Leonelle *
12. The Demon King by Cinda Williams Chima
13. The Exiled Queen by Cinda Williams Chima
14. The Gray Wolf Throne by Cinda Williams Chima
15. The Crimson Crown by Cinda Williams Chima
16. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by JK Rowling (reread)
17. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling (reread)
18. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling (reread) 
19. Home by Clementine von Radics
20. Mouthful of Forevers by Clementine von Radics
21. Healing Old Wounds with New Stitches by Meggie Royer
22. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (audiobook) (reread)
23. Wings of Fire: The Brightest Night by Tui T. Sutherland
24. The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart (audiobook)
25. Love, Rosie by Celia Ahern
26. The Epic Adventures of Lydia Bennet by Katie Rorick
27. A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray (audiobook) (reread)
28. Rebel Angels by Libba Bray (audiobook) (reread)
29. The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray (audiobook) (reread)
30. The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness
31. Deception Point by Dan Brown (audiobook)
32. Carry On by Rainbow Rowell
33. Carry On by Rainbow Rowell (reread)
34. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (reread)
35. Isla and the Happily Ever After by Stephenie Perkins *
36. Anna and the French Kiss by Stephenie Perkins (reread)
37. Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephenie Perkins (reread)
38. Isla and the Happily Ever After by Stephenie Perkins (reread)
39. Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl *
40. Dramarama by E. Lockhart (audiobook) *
41. Stargirl by Jerry Spineli (audiobook)

and i started but have yet to finish:

1. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
2. Beauty Queens by Libba Bray *
3. Emotional Vampires: Dealing with People Who Drain You Dry by Albert J Bernstein

stats (only counting the completed books):

75.6% of the books read were YA or middle-grade books (this year i'm thinking of reading for my age group more)

7% were poetry 

29% were rereads

80% of my favorite books of the year were rereads

43.9% were standalone books

notes:

i feel like i have to talk about the seven realms series (the chima books). i had so many issues with the writing and the consistency and the wasted potential of the characters and the predictability and just so many things, but it took me almost all summer to get through them because i was traveling and mothering and stuff, and by the time i was ending the series, i was legit sad. after spending so much time with these characters, i had fallen in love with them. i read the books on the kindle app on my phone, but i feel like they now deserve a place on my shelves. i just can't bring myself to buy the series again when there wasn't much difference in price between the ebooks and hard copies. anyway, i wasn't sure if i should bold it or not because i did love them, but i also really didn't. 

isla was another one that i was on the fence about. i remember being over a third of the way into the book and thinking "there is no tension!" (which was actually very helpful because that's always been a problem for me (starting the book too soon) and i never really knew how to fix it but seeing it in someone else's work was a very a-ha moment) and then when the "tension" hit i couldn't get over how contrived and stupid the problem was. but i still liked it? i dunno. i reread the rest of the series to see if that changed anything, but it actually did more damage than good because it made me see how problematic things in the other books were, and those were my go-to fluff in times of stress and now they're ruined. sigh. 

overall, though the titles are every bit as embarrassing as usual (and by that i mean you should all wish to have my taste in books), i'm actually pretty proud of the number of books i managed to get through. honestly, it would have been more if i didn't drag out the bad books because i refused to just put them down but couldn't seem to pick them up either. next year i'm hoping to branch out a bit. i'm also planning on getting through the books that i keep buying but not reading. my to-be-read list is getting a bit ridiculous. i think those two hopes may be contradictory. 

baby knows, but baby don't tease me

i went to harry potter world! which was awesome! and included a twelve plus hour road trip! with an infant! please know that i mean every single one of those exclamation points. i am screaming this at you from your screen.

buuut i'm not going to tell you about the trip - at least not right now - because i feel like it deserves more concentration and pretty words than i am currently able to give it. (i mean, harry potter world.) plus, i want to literary rant. it's been far too long since i've done one of those. (i think. honestly i've been away from this blog for so long that the previous post could be a literary rant and i wouldn't even know because i am a lazy bum who won't check.)

anyway, last time we drove down to florida, i reached a point about halfway through the trip where everything on my ipod was making me nauseous or angry or bored. basically, i was sick of my music, had run out of things to say as we sat in traffic, and the car was too quiet. this time, i was prepared. i brought audiobooks! (can i just say that as someone who claims to love libraries and someone who has complained numerous times about how audiobooks are too expensive, it took me a ridiculously long time to check out audibooks from the library.)

we listened to the golden compass first because i loved that series and my husband had never read it and always said that he wanted to. (i remember being mindblown after finishing the first book and immediately going to the library to get the second and third. and refusing to read anything afterwards for days because i did not want to leave that world or those characters. my husband's reaction to the book after listening to it for almost twelve hours? "meh.") but once we had finished that one, on the way back to virginia, we started deception point by dan brown, and oh. my. god.

so at first i thought that this might be his debut novel, and i was willing to cut him a little slack, but i just looked it up and nope. it's not even his second book. it's his third. as in, you had two books to perfect your writing and my slack? you get none of it. he wrote this after he wrote angels and demons, and i read that and did not have to stop in the middle to rant about his writing. at least, i don't remember doing that, and i don't think that's something i'm likely to forget, but that is exactly what i had to do while listening last night. my husband loved that, let me tell you.

my main issue with dan brown was always that reading his robert langdon books made me feel uncomfortable. like i was invited to a dinner party and the host was obviously playing footsie under the table with that guest that he was flirting with while his wife was cooking dinner earlier, and his wife is sitting right next to him and you're not sure if you should say something, but she has to know doesn't she? i mean the way he's looking at that guest makes it abundantly clear that he is in love and there is no way that she could have missed that, is there?

but anyway, this was an entirely different issue. this was a writing issue that even i, as someone with no formal writing education and exactly zero published novels under her belt, know not to do. see, in good writing, you are taken along on a journey with the character. you see what s/he sees, learn what they learn, fall into the story. when you want to build suspense or create curiosity about something then you don't tell your main character about it. they should not find out and then tease us with the information. we should not have to read pages about how he is in total shock about what he is seeing and oh my god he cannot believe  his eyes and this is the most amazing thing ever and he can't stop looking at it and shut up i'm not telling you what it is. i mean, sure, end a chapter with something like that to make sure the reader starts the next one. you can maybe go a couple of pages once every book or two where the reader is left in the dark. maybe. but do not go on for over a chapter with the incessant teasing every single time new information is revealed. it does not make me want to read on to find out what's happening. it makes me want to smack the author with his book and never pick it up again. it makes me hate your characters, lose interest in your plot, and wonder how your editor has a job. it feels like betrayal. and frustration. and just enough annoyance to make me stop and rant. (also, it seemed like the characters themselves deal with this inside the book way too often. for example, the president flies rachel out to tell her something and after what sounded like forever (at least a few typed pages) talking around it, she snaps something about getting to the point already. which were my sentiments exactly.)

maybe it's because i'm listening to the book instead of reading it, i'm not sure. but i cannot handle this writing "style" - if you can call it that - at all, and i think this may have turned me off of dan brown books forever.

*Tranquilize - The Killers

and it hits you so much harder than you thought

don't you hate it when you try to write a blog post but can't get yourself to because you're way too emotional about the topic, but then you can't write anything else because this post is completely blocking the way, so you decide to take a few days away from blogland altogether, but then life happens and you end up leaving the country for a month without a computer, and suddenly it's three months later and you still haven't written anything? just me? well, okay then.

bear with me for one more early days of motherhood post because obviously if i don't write this i will never write anything ever again. it has to do with breastfeeding so if that's an issue for you then maybe you should stop reading and go do some soul-searching about why you feel the need to be an insufferable drama bomb.

the absolute hardest thing i have had to do so far as a mother (and yes this is counting up to today, two days shy of cricket turning five months) was not breastfeeding my baby. it is something i don't think i will ever get over ever for as long as i live. i mean, cricket is turning five months old on wednesday. he is happy and healthy and thriving. he is gaining weight and getting tall and just recently learned to roll over completely. (he got stuck on the back to stomach part for a while.) i know that i am being the best mom i can be for him. and yet, just writing the word breastfeeding has a lump forming in my throat and tears pricking behind my eyes. it should not still be this hard for me, but it is.

i don't think i ever wanted anything as badly as i wanted to breastfeed my kid. but i couldn't. because my body is stupid and failed at the one thing that it was made to do. while i was pregnant, i was preparing for this to be hard. i had heard the horror stories of the early days and was ready to face them. i never got that chance. i simply didn't produce enough milk. i started to supplement with formula after the first week. cricket had lost too much weight and was getting lethargic. my husband had to feed him that first bottle in another room, and i spent the whole night sobbing in my bed.

i tried everything to get my supply up. i took fenugreek until i smelled like a maple syrup factory. i drank mother's milk tea and gatorade and water like i was stranded in a desert. i ate oatmeal and flaxseed and brewers yeast all day long. i ate everything that arabs say up your supply as well. i spent days in bed just doing skin-to-skin and nursing. i power-pumped. i tried every single thing that anyone anywhere said had helped them. i tried my best to not stress about it (which is really, really hard let me tell you. there were many, many tears cried.). and sometimes it seemed to be working. sometimes he wouldn't want formula after a feeding. sometimes i was able to pump more than half an ounce. but those times were few and far between. and it seemed like every day my measly supply kept dropping and dropping. eventually, when he was probably at 95% formula anyway, i gave up. and then cried about it for three days. (i'm pretty sure that everyone was pretty relieved at this point because they were all sick of my nonstop crying and thought that stopping might help that.)

i have never tried so hard to do anything before in my life, and failing crushed me. but i had a baby to take care of, so i took a deep breath and locked the feelings away in a chest in the back of my mind to deal with later. and i ostensibly moved on. or, i tried to. my family knew not to even mention the word around me or i would completely break down, but no one else got the memo. why had i never noticed that it was a thing to ask people how they fed their child? because it is apparently a thing. every single person who saw the baby, even people who i was not especially close to and people whose asking was completely awkward, everyone's first question after "how old is he" was "do you breastfeed?" and every single time i said no i felt the walls i built around the chest in the back of my mind start to crack. and i changed the topic quickly or tuned out if a group started talking about it because i knew if i didn't i would dissolve into a crying mess again. and who knows if i would have been able to pull myself out of it a second time? of course they didn't know that they were killing me, rubbing salt into a wound that i was trying to pretend wasn't still raw. to them, it was an innocent question. to me, it was a knife to the heart.

i cannot tell you how relieved i was when i saw everyone there was to see. when i had admitted to all of them as offhandedly as i possibly could, that i had failed. i had failed, i had failed, i had failed. and it got easier and easier to ignore the chest at the back of my mind. some days i forgot about it completely. there was much to distract me.

until the summer. it took me longer than it should have to realize why i was so resentful of my [extended] family this summer. why just seeing my uncles and aunts put me in a bad mood. it was the fact that they all just assumed i was breastfeeding, the way they would hand me my baby and say "you can nurse him in my room if you're more comfortable." once again, a case of people not realizing that their innocent trying to be niceness ruined my day.

i think what really kills me is that deep down, i know that i did not actually try my hardest. i decided not to stick to the super rigid pumping schedule once i switched to formula. i decided not to take any prescription medicines. i decide to give up. because i know myself. and i know that i was one step away from becoming truly obsessive. because that is what i do. i get obsessive to an unhealthy level, and i try to stop myself from reaching that point. so i stopped. i stopped because i wanted to actually enjoy my first baby, and if i didn't, i wouldn't. but that means that i am left with an eternal what if. and that is the worst.

i realize that i had the luxury to be destroyed by this because i was able to get pregnant, to have a healthy baby, things that other people can't. does that make it any easier for me? not really, and that's okay. i've never been one to believe that your pain doesn't hurt because someone else has more. but the fact that i can look at this with some perspective means progress. and while i'm definitely not ready to open the chest just yet, maybe i can let the walls crumble a bit. soon i might unlock it. and while this may not be the healthiest way to deal with it, it's the way i'm dealing with it.

*Soul - Matchbox 20

i wasn't sure at first if i wanted to get an epidural or not. it seemed like the general consensus with people i knew that had kids was that i should definitely get one and not make their mistake of trying to see if i could go without. but part of me still wanted to know how much my body could handle, to see how far i could push myself. i did some research into the pros and cons, and then someone said something that threw me firmly into camp drugs. 

"your body was made to do this. real women don't need epidurals." 

my feathers immediately ruffled, my feminist senses started tingling, my innate stubbornness flared up. because i'm sorry, but what? "real women?" puh-lease. 

i have nothing against people who want to have a drug-free birth. i completely understand people who are too scared of the possible complications to take the risk. but i take great issue with those who think that epidurals are taking the easy way out, "cheating," or basically handing over your "real woman" card. 

and that got me to thinking. if epidurals and labor and delivery were not exclusive to women, would this even be an issue? has anyone ever said that "real women" don't need any numbing drugs (i am completely blanking on the name) when getting a root canal? are we saying that "real men" don't take nyquil because their bodies were meant to fight off colds? no. because medicine was invented to help us through something painful, and taking it is pretty much the natural thing to do. so why are epidurals any different? suddenly, wanting to see how high my pain tolerance is just seemed like another situation in which i was trying to prove my strength, prove that i am not weak, not frail, not female. 

there are a lot of really good, really valid reasons to not get an epidural. trying to prove that you are a real woman is not one of them. (trying to prove anything is not a very good reason to do something in my opinion.) i ultimately decided to get the epidural for a lot of reasons, but i'm not gonna lie, being stubborn might have been one of them. 

you know you're gonna hurt somebody tonight

i feel like i should talk about the super bowl last night, and how the seahawks deciding to pass instead of just run the ball when they have a player who is basically a human bulldozer that just plows through the entire defense was probably the stupidest call in the history of the sport, but i won't. mostly because i'm actually not that upset about it and wasn't even really rooting for either of the teams. i was simultaneously hoping both would win and both would lose. brady literally jumping for joy at the end was amusing, though. (my mom and husband were rooting for the pats. my dad, who has always hated them, spent all season rooting for them which was kind of really weird, but after the ball deflating fiasco he had firmly turned back against them over the past week.)

but you know what i will talk about? the commercials that happened during the super bowl. there were a few that i liked, a lot that just disappointed me, and then there was that stupid nationwide commercial that traumatized me for life. i was watching the game with my husband and dad at that point (my mom was popping in and out and my sister made a speech about how watching sports was stupid and then went upstairs) who are not the most emotionally reactive people to watch things with. this in no way stops me from making comments about every single thing that happens on the screen (and the backstory that i make up for all of the players). so we're sitting there watching the nationwide commercial after a bunch of other family-focused commercials, and this little boy is saying something about cooties and not sailing around the world with his best friend and never getting married and i mean, he's a little boy so i figure there will be some sort of turning point in his narrative. a plot twist if you will. and then it comes. he stares right at the camera and says that he won't do any of that stuff because he is dead. as in, he died. he died in an accident that his parents could have prevented. i'm not sure if his accident was being left in the tub unsupervised or being crushed by a falling tv, but i just sat there horrified. stunned into silence for three seconds before i could even formulate my comments. i mean, really?! what the hell, nationwide. that is not a feelgood super bowl commercial. that should not be thrown in among puppies returning home and the differences between a father and a dad (though i have to admit we all kind of mocked that one). that is not the kind of thing you surprise someone with at the end of a thirty second ad. especially not someone who is pregnant and hormonal and cries at formula commercials. sheesh.

in other news, i have reached the point where, when people ask when i am due, i can say, "next month." is that not absolutely crazy?

*Playing With Fire - Brandon Flowers

babies are expensive. everyone knows this. and every company wants you to spend all of your money on their products instead of their competitor's. once again, not news. this means that, along with a baby, pregnancy gets you a lot of free samples. everyone wants you to get hooked on their particular diaper, bottle, pacifier, and formula, and spend the next four years handing them your paycheck. let's talk about this last one for a second. you leave the hospital with a bunch of different formula samples, that i knew. but i don't think i was fully prepared for the amount of formula i would get before ever going into labor. as of this moment, at thirty-one weeks, i already have five different eight oz containers of different formulas (different brands, ones for gassy babies, ones specially designed for newborns...). now, at a little less than fifteen bottles per container, this isn't a ridiculously huge amount of formula, but it is definitely nothing to sneeze at. and it is making me anxious. 

because i am hoping to exclusively breastfeed. but, as i have been told over and over and over again, breastfeeding is hard. and frustrating, and not some natural, instinctual thing. (though it really should be. i mean, come on.) i am not great at failure. i have the tendency to quit when i suck instead of working through until i get better. i can only imagine that sleep deprivation and crying babies will make my resolve weaken even more. and having so much formula in the house will certainly not help. 

i know how to make a bottle. i have fed babies formula more times than i could ever count. i know how easy it is. how fast. i do not know how to breastfeed. i have never done it before. cricket has never done it before. i am preparing myself for a very frustrating learning curve. for both of us. and the formula is already mocking me. tempting me. whispering sweet promises of ease and more sleep and a million other things. 

and suddenly, the free samples don't just seem like an obvious marketing strategy. they seem evil. like some big corporation is trying to change my mind about something that i really don't need people trying to undermine me about because i am already worried that i will not be able to do it. i don't know what will happen two months from now, but at the moment, i want you formula companies to know that i think you really suck. 

(similac at least gave breast milk storage bottles and a really helpful guide on breastfeeding with its formula. so there's that.)

as your ship is going down, i'll stand by and watch you drown

UGH. so i'm gonna start this by saying that i realize that i am maybe overreacting a little bit because of hormones and stuff, but ugh.

if you have read my blog for any length of time, you probably know that i am a GTA for the computer forensics program at my school, a bittersweet job. while i have met some really great people through this job, there have also been times when i wanted to smash my fist through the computer screen just so that i could stop reading the crap i was forced to read. i love to help people, which i get to do with this, but on the flip side there are the students that just refuse to be helped. they are frustrating.

and then there are the jerks. (jerks is not the word that i have been complaining about to my husband for the last fifteen minutes, but i'm still unsure what my cussing policy is for this blog. i should probably figure it out.) (for some basic background information: this past semester, i graded the assignments for three different courses and then gave general advice and help for the rest of the program.)

so i just got an email a little bit ago from one of the professors that i TA for asking about clarification about points that i deducted from a student who was complaining about his final grade. so i read through the emails that the student sent and UGH.

the first email starts by insulting the person who graded the final exam. you could tell that he thought i graded the exams because he said that the grader was clearly "following a script," a description he used for me in later emails. he also mentioned that his "homework was graded wrong." then there were a couple of emails back and forth that showed the student to be passive-aggressive and condescending but are not worth quoting because they do not refer to me again. when other topics seem exhausted, though, he comes back to me and how i "unjustly deducted" points because i can't "think outside the script" and i count his right answers as wrong because i don't agree with them. he goes on to explain how he is an awesome professional that can do no wrong and it is frustrating to do all this work and have "an inexperience students [sic] grade [his] work poorly because he/she does not know the material." oh boo hoo.

firrrst of all, i deducted points (literally half a point two times) because your answers were wrong. the information in them was right, but as an answer to that specific question? wrong. second of all, i have had several students email me/come talk to me after i post grades to discuss their grades and question my decisions. i welcome these emails. i sometimes give points back. i am always fair. if you don't care enough to bring up your concerns until after you fail to get the grade you want, then you don't deserve the points in my opinion. and third of all, i know the effing material. jerk.

what i want to do is email the student, tell him he can take his GPA that "does not need padding" and all of his experience and shove it, let him know that i hope he fails and that trying to blame your grade on someone else (who literally deducted 3 points from you all semester) is kind of ridiculous. of course, i know that this is immature and unprofessional and just basically wrong, but uggghhh. i'm so annoyed.

(part of me is saying that posting this is unprofessional and wrong, too, but i read through it a zillion times and there is no way to tell which student out of the hundred some i am talking about and so that makes it okay, right? plus, i need to vent. and i think my husband is tired of listening to me repeat the same things four hundred times.)

*Ha Ha You're Dead - Greenday

and all this in different houses

[one] the thing i hate most about day light's saving and the inevitable ending of daylight's saving is that there are some clocks that do not change automatically. specifically, my car clock does not change automatically. and despite the fact that i have owned my car for going on two years now, and it is basically the same, if updated, make and model of the car that i was driving when i lived with my parents and just slightly different than the car i was sharing with my husband post-parents and pre-reggie (my current car), i cannot, for the life of me, ever remember how to change the stupid clock. and of course i usually notice that the clock is wrong when i am in the middle of driving and glance down at it only to have a mini panic attack about how oh-my-god-late i am before i realize that the clock is just stupid. and while i can press all the buttons during red lights, i can't look through the manual to remember how exactly the thing gets changed until i park. and a lot of the time, i forget when i'm parked and then go days having the mini panic attacks until i finally get my act together. and then i always say, "i am totally going to remember how to do this this next time," but the time between clock changes is just long enough for me to really forget again. (yesterday, though, i was riding shotgun in reggie and i was able to get the manual out and change the clock the second i noticed it was wrong. definitely some sort of record for me.)

[two] it is now the third day of november and i have yet to write a single word for my nano novel. i have yet to even think of a plot or character or even random thought i can run with for my nano novel. it's sad, is what it is.

[three] BUT i do successfully own a house now. which we spent (with the very appreciated great help from the rest of my awesome family) the entire weekend moving into. aside from a few random things in my apartment closet (my wedding dress, graduation robes, a gazillion and three bags), a couple of vases, and the contents of my freezer that i totally forgot about, everything is in the new house. and not just in it stuffed in a box somewhere, but in it and unpacked. it's really pretty impressive.

[four] i probably should have just written these last three points as their own blog post (or at least one point) HOWEVER, when i said that everything was in the new house, i meant everything except for my couches. which would not fit through the door. so they are currently hanging out in my garage while my living room is looking pretty lonely with just a coffee table. so we are now faced with the need to go shopping for new couches. which of course, because i am me and weird, makes me sad because my couches.

[five]  in baby news, my husband and i have narrowed our short list of boy names to the top two boy names. i am leaning towards one, he is leaning towards the other, we'll see who wins at the end.

*New Houses - Two Door Cinema Club

this has got to stop

it's that time of year again when i pretend that i don't just talk about myself day in and day out. yup, blog action day. i had kinda sorta forgotten about blog action day this year, but the topic is inequality, and i was planning on writing something about this anyway, so, killing two birds with one stone or what have you.

the inequality i want to discuss is directly related to the patriarchy, violence against women, and rape culture, and can be addressed with a little thing called feminism. i am not going to go into a long rant about this (because i would go on forever and there is actually a specific story i want to discuss today), but i will say that if you claim to not be a feminist, you are one of three things: lying, misunderstanding the meaning of feminism (which is understandable in this world of media misinformation), or an asshole.

i don't know how many of you know anita sarkeesian, but i think i posted about her on my blog before and she's the creator of the video series tropes vs. women. anyway, she was supposed to speak yesterday morning at Utah State University's Center for Women and Gender. a few days before the event, though, several people at the university began getting threats. a utah state student claimed to have "a semi-automatic rifle, multiple pistols, and a collection of pipe bombs" and threatened to massacre sarkeesian and anyone who showed up for her talk. his threatening email states "feminism has ruined my life and i will have my revenge." it also said that the author "will write my manifesto in her spilled blood, and you will all bear witness to what feminist lies and poison have done to the men of America." sarkeesian asked if weapons would be allowed at the talk, and she was told that, according to utah state law regarding the carrying of firearms, if the person has a valid concealed firearm permit and is carrying a weapon, they are permitted to bring it to the event.

so to recap, the authorities told sarkeesian, who has had multiple death threats because of her line of work (which in and of itself is ridiculous), that despite the fact that there was a credible threat to both her and countless other people (mainly women), a threat which specifically referenced a mass male-on-female attack from the past (the montreal massacre), they wouldn't take the necessary steps to protect these women because it would infringe on people's right to carry weapons. um... what?

we are living in a world where high school football players can videotape themselves raping a drugged classmate, but then she's the bad guy for "ruining their promising football careers." a world where a student kills a girl in his class because she said no when he asked her to prom (she was going with her steady boyfriend, but that shouldn't make a difference) and all the media can talk about is how great of a kid he was and how hard this must be on his parents. uh, the kid brought a knife to school because he knew she would say no, he felt entitled enough to end her life, and it's him and his parents we should be feeling sorry for? how does that make any sense? we are living in a world where the reaction to emma watson calling on men to support feminism was death threats and threats to leak nude photos. a world where women are paid less to do the same job and then fired if they ask for a raise because they are "too aggressive."

but go ahead and listen to the condescending people who tell you that feminism is no longer needed. there's no inequality around here.

(if you're interested, you can find my previous blog action day posts here, here, here, here, and here.)

*Elephant - Damien Rice

time for me to do it

this morning was so productive, you guys. so. productive. and now, when i still have a few things left to do, i just... stopped. my motivation and productivity and whatever else just came crashing down around me and i just spent the last almost hour trying to find a new chrome extension for tumblr because xkit stopped working and i'm not handling it very well. an hour that i was supposed to spend grading the papers that i didn't grade on tuesday so that i could grade them wednesday and then didn't grade on wednesday because i am the laziest, most procrastination-inclined waste of academic space there is. i just... school. ugh.

this morning, though, i was a real functioning adult. i was overachieving. egg salad sandwiches instead of cereal and milk for breakfast. buffalo and ranch chicken wraps instead of pb&j sandwiches for lunch. (my parents are out of town, so i'm pretending once again to be head of the household slash homemaker, and i think this is what i was made for. once cricket starts school, i can totally see myself turning into that overly obnoxious pta mom that bakes homemade cookies for every event, never misses a single excuse to show up at the school, volunteers for literally everything, is crafty in the showiest way possible, and makes sure that every other mom hates me for making them feel like they probably don't love their kid as much as i do. i mean, i am basically that person already. god help us all. (although i can just as easily see myself going to extremes in the exact opposite way as well, like total slacker mom gives her kids a bag of chocolate chips for lunch and shows up to every event in the same hoodie and other moms both feel sorry for me and are slightly scared of me. it will be interesting to see which way i go.))

but back to my productivity.

after making sure the kids got on the bus and dropping the sister off at work and stopping at the apartment to check on the bunny and pick up my vitamins (because yesterday i was still a forgetful wannabe adult), i went to the bank and had an important adult bank meeting. and then i scanned and sent out all the important documents to everyone i was supposed to. and i made a bunch of important phone calls. (have i mentioned on here that i hate the house-buying-getting-a-loan process from the very core of my being? yes? well, there it is again.) and then i went to CVS and got important things i needed and nutterbutters which i probably did not need (but they were on sale! so still adulty!) and came home to pack the care package i have been meaning to seal up for weeks now but never got around to. and this was all before ten:thirty in the morning. and then i got on the computer to grade the papers and suddenly... i am me again.

i have tried to bribe myself with nutterbutters, but it has been going like this:

responsible me (rm): you can't eat any cookies until you grade at least half of the papers.
me-me (mm): i can, though.
rm: okay, yes, technically you can. but don't.
mm: *slowly reaches for cookies*
rm: don't do it.
mm: *picks up cookie*
rm: you can't eat that cookie until you at least start grading the papers
mm: *eats cookie*
rm: okay, that was just to remind you of how good they are so that you can start grading. motivation. and energy or something. but you can't eat any more until you at least finish grading two papers.
mm: i can, though.

and so then i wrote a blog post that probably could have been a lot shorter. just... ugh. school.

*On My Own - Whitney Houston

it sucks to grow up

so i've been trying to write a post for a few days now. a happy post. a look at my good news post. a post that should not be giving me so much trouble god dammit. but instead, all of the stress from everything else keeps seeping in and my good news sounds like overwhelming news. my happy sounds like i am three seconds away from pulling my hair out and jumping off the edge but i think i may punch you in the face first because aaaaarrrrggggghhhhh.

you guys, why is being an adult so effing hard? mortgages. like, why am i even dealing with this stuff? i was not built for it. i was built for fictional worlds and imagination. this is much too real for me. never ending phone calls from real estate agents and banks and mortgage companies and sales associates and i hate the phone. i will avoid phone calls for as long as humanly possible. i have to work up to them for days and practice what i'm going to say and take three deep breaths before i hit the call button and start praying that it goes to the machine the second that first ring starts. and that's when i call my grandmother. it's even worse with strangers. i really hate talking on the phone. and i do it now. all. the. time. and why are banks so annoying? and how can there be income that doesn't count as income when the money is all very real i assure you. and why are some sources of income more reliable than other sources? if the money is regularly being deposited into my account then why the eff do you care where it's coming from? like, i really swear i am not trying to steal your money, banker. i really will pay you back. i promise. just give me the effing loan. and houses. gah. why are there so many of them, and why are so many sucky? and why are the pretty ones the ones i can't have? and school oh my god. any forward movement that was started at the beginning of this semester has come to a screeching halt because i cannot even think about school right now beyond my office hours (and the first batch of assignments are due tonight. does it look like i have the time or energy to start grading papers? does it?) and i need to think about school because if i do not have solid proof of forward movement then the chances of me getting an extension on my scholarship (which ends this semester ohmygodohmygodohmygod) drop to pretty much zero. and mortgages, man. when did i become the type of person to worry about mortgages? and so much stress eating. i think i just paid the little debbie ceo's yearly bonus on my own. so of course i now feel fat and gross and filled with marshmallow cream as well as stressed and lost and like i should not be dealing with all of this i am the wrong person for the job.

AND my trip to harry potter world was effing cancelled because apparently things just need to suck for me right now with no light at the end of the tunnel and no silver lining.

uggghhhh.

see, this is why i never wanted to grow up.

*Still Fighting It - Ben Folds

this is one time that you can't fake it hard enough

i don't understand how people adult. like, how do you wake up every morning and go to work and pay your bills and buy a house? how do you not eat a bag of chocolate chips and stay up too late looking at gifs of tv shows you don't even watch? how do you stop not doing the things you are supposed to do? i feel like maybe i should have figured this stuff out by now. there are only so many times that you can fake your way through things, and i think maybe my abilities will start to wear off pretty soon.

but until it does, let's talk about house hunting. because oh my god it is the worst. i liked all of the houses that i lived in while i was growing up, so i really just want to hand my parents my money and have them buy a house for me. i don't do well with decisions or too many options and i just really want this whole thing to be over already. 

yesterday we looked at houses. most of them were in various stages of suckiness. i mean, they weren't bad but they weren't not bad either. there was this one house that i was in love with online. i was ready to buy it before i even saw it. and then i saw it. and i still don't think i am over the disappointment. and not "being committed" to a real estate agent yet means that i had seven hundred of them wanting me to commit to them and then some of them called this morning and i have no idea which one is which because i am really bad at faces. and names. and people. 

that's another thing about house hunting. there's people involved. people use up so much of my energy. and there's shopping. and shopping uses up the rest of my energy. this was what the internet was made for. get with the program, real estate. i should be able to search for houses online (which admittedly i can) and then add the ones i like to my cart, eventually narrow it down to one, type in my billing information, and have myself a new house. (the disappointment of my dream house yesterday has already pointed out how bad of a plan that is. i know. just.... ugh.) 

i love looking at houses when there is no pressure to make a decision that will affect the next five to seven years of my life. and who decided that money should even be a thing? because budget limitations suck. 

and because i am me and this whole thing is too much adult for me to handle, i am planning to run off to harry potter world in florida early next month for a good dose of fiction. i'm trying to use it as motivation for house shopping. like, c'mon if you make a decision on a house you can go to florida! but i am too smart to trick myself and i know that i will go regardless and think that maybe i can figure out a way to just live in the wizarding world for the rest of my life. who needs a house when you can have a castle?

*The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most - Dashboard Confessionals

remember when i used to come on here and wax poetic about the lies that we were told growing up?  like how we could be anything we wanted to be, etc? (i'm pretty sure i wrote more than one post about this kind of stuff, but got sidetracked into reading my old posts for too long and now have no more time to look for them.) yeah, well my recent complaint against what we are telling our children is "practice makes perfect." because it does not. practice makes better most of the time, sure, but sometimes, it doesn't. sometimes you can practice and practice and practice and still completely suck. and you know, being told that you still suck because you just haven't been practicing enough when you know that there is really no possible way that you could have practiced anymore without devoting your entire life to practice - stopping any and every other thing in your life, including eating and sleeping - sucks. gah.

end rant. 

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 

a long time ago we used to be friends

i have never really had a problem with mondays. like, i know that they are universally known as the worst day of the week, but aside from the occasional, "ugh i don't want the weekend to end" dread during my school years i never had an issue with them. until now. why is it that the universe is suddenly conspiring to make mondays the worst day of the week? i mean, really. i suddenly find myself relating to garfield in a way i never thought i would. i don't know what it is, but suddenly mondays are the embodiment (can a day embody something?) of everything awful and my usual grit or whatever it is that allows me to get through the rest of my life seems to take off sunday night and saunter in tuesday mornings slightly disheveled and looking like it slept in its clothes all the while acting like it didn't completely abandon me the day before. ugh.

but anyway. that's all of the attention that i am willing to give to mondays until they get their act together. they don't deserve any more words.

instead, let's talk about the fact that i really like to introduce characters. like, i love to sit down to an empty word document or compose blog post box or blank sheet of paper or whatever and start writing out a character. i'll be happily typing out their basic introduction, deciding what kind of narrator they will be, figuring out what their voice sounds like, and then, a few paragraphs in, it gets to the point where it's no longer enough to have a character. i need a plot, too. and then i sit there for a minute, realize that i have nothing for this character - who happens to be quite awesome - to do or talk about, and i stop. they'll be in the middle of running away (though from who/what/where i don't know and please don't ask about a why) or they'll be about to tell you about the really cool thing that happened that day a year ago when they woke up thinking that their life was just normal and boring enough to be a commercial for car insurance and then nothing. i close the document or the notebook or go back to my blogger dashboard and never see these characters again. it's kind of sad, but i have hopes that one day i will go back and write all of their stories. (i'm thinking that in the future i will probably realize that a few of them belong in the same one.) that is my new life goal. 

i think this love of developing characters is the reason that i have so little patience for books that are all plot and no character. like, yes it is great that this massive war is going on and aliens are about to suck this guy's brain out with a straw, but i would care a lot more if the guy wasn't a cardboard character that talks in cliches and i'm told to like. i'm still working on balancing character and plot in my own writing, but that is neither here nor there. 

in other news, i feel like i should document the fact that i watched the veronica mars movie. [it is highly possible that you have little or no interest in veronica mars and will have no idea what i am talking about in the following paragraph. if this is the case, feel free to just stop reading here. you won't miss anything. i promise.] i used to watch it on tv with my sister. then it got cancelled. then years went by with nothing. then i backed the kickstarter for the movie. then i rewatched all of the episodes and fell in love with it even more. (my fangirl capabilities have grown so much in the past seven years. i don't think i was capable of being a true fangirl at the time of its tv airing.) and then i finally watched the movie friday night. (and am currently debating whether i should buy the books coming out if they aren't in the library or save the forty five dollars i have left to spend on books for the year for something else.) i was going to write a whole post about my movie thoughts, but i don't think i will. i will say that the first words out of my mouth when the credits started rolling were, "what the hell, rob thomas?" but i liked the movie more the more i thought about it afterwards. i feel like i need a rewatch to properly assess it. no matter how many times i rewatch it, though, i will never be okay with how they dealt with the piz story line. (and this is coming from a person who watched it on her couch wearing a team logan t-shirt because yes i am a huge dork thanks for noticing. i was also eating marshmallows.) 

*We Used to Be Friends - Dandy Warhols

i feel like i'm living the worst day over and over again

so this is a story about how i finally started to hate my apartment that i always refused to move out of even when i think it is too small to breathe in, aka the time i realized how effective torture is, aka why yesterday and the day before were really sucky. (every time i say/think/write "this is a story" i want to finish it with "about a girl named lucky" and if you don't get that reference then i'm not sure we can be friends anymore. except still be my friend, please.)

so the day before yesterday i got on here all quasi-hopeful and talking about sleep and running or something. i was taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly and trying to get out of a funk. i really thought it would work. and then the fire alarm happened. oh, that alarm. you may remember my last real encounter with this fire alarm when i was ripped from sleep and forced to stand outside in the cold with a not-allowed bunny while they tried to figure out why it was screaming. (the alarm, not the bunny.) this time was worse.

i think i should start my story with the email i received a few days ago from my apartment people saying that they would be testing the fire alarms on the seventh, or tuesday. now, i spend my entire tuesday at my parents' house. it's kind of my thing. and last year when they checked the alarms, they turned them on for maybe five seconds, made sure the banshee that lives inside the smoke detectors could still wail, and then turned them off. so of course i didn't give the email a second thought.

tuesday came and passed and then it was wednesday. the eighth. meaning the day after the testing was supposed to happen. i'm sitting in my apartment eating string cheese to spite my stomach that was trying to tell me i was nauseous, feeling nervous for no reason, and trying to work up the will to go out and run the errands that i needed to run. and that's when the wailing started. when you are sitting in a quiet apartment one minute and the next minute it is filled with the cries of the entire world being ripped apart, you freeze for a second to try and process what happened. there's no way around it. after i unfroze, my immediate response was to go and hold a pillow up to the alarm to try and muffle it. (it is still way too loud even when muffled.) my first rational thought was that they were doing the testing and it would turn off in a second.

but it didn't.

could it actually be a real fire? i wondered. on the off chance that it was, i threw on some jeans and went to get darcy in his carrier to flee to safety. of course, to do that, i had to stop muffling the alarm with a pillow. that means that it was once again loud enough that you felt that your bones would shatter from the mere intensity of it. which of course freaked darcy out. he ran into the side of his cage twice before finding the door and raced around his playpen in a panic, barreling through obstacles like they weren't there. (you may remember that last time my husband had to get darcy. this time, my husband was at work.) any time i got near the playpen, he would go crazy. i went back to muffle the alarm and think of my options.

(can i just take a second here to point out that i suck at fire alarms? i remember in school i always knew that if there was a real fire i would be the idiot that stayed behind and burned because i was trying to get all my stuff to safety. apparently, i never grew up.)

as i saw it, there were two possible scenarios: either there was a fire or there wasn't. if there was, i could either try and get darcy in a carrier which would probably result in him being hurt along the way or i could just leave on my own. if there wasn't, well, the alarm would turn off eventually, right? wrong. i decided to stand there with a pillow over the alarm and just hope for the best because i'm really smart. but it. would. not. stop. and you know that anxiety that i was feeling? yeah, it just loved it. so i was standing there trying to muffle the constant keening of the alarm inside as i heard the almost BONG BONG BONG of the alarm outside and i lost it. obviously. i stood there sobbing into the chalkboard that hangs on my wall under the alarm as i had a panic attack on the phone to my sister.

i sounded just hysterical enough that my sister ended up taking a cab from her office to my apartment (even though i told her not to bother). (another brief interruption: i may be a tad biased, but i really do have the best sisters ever.) and the alarm went on. and on. and on. i seriously thought it would never stop. my arms burned from holding them up for so long, but i couldn't let them down or the alarm would kill me, i was sure. it was already too loud, especially since i was standing right under it. after an hour it finally went from the wailing to a staticky gurgle type sound, almost like it was losing its voice. that was when i moved to the couch. after about twenty minutes of that, there was silence. and my nerves were shattered. (that was when my sister showed up, and then we went out for some coffee.)

yesterday i get out of bed after not sleeping most of the night and think, okay today i will pull myself out of my funk. because i'm stupid like that and apparently tempting fate is my favorite thing to do. i was going to run all of the errands i didn't do the day before. i was going to drop something off at my sister's office. i was going to make buttons or something for my brother's sga campaign. but first, i was going to take a shower. i was just stepping into the shower when the effing alarm goes off again. i didn't waste time with any thinking this time. i just started to cry (give me a break, i was tired. and hormones suck.) and went out to hold a pillow over the alarm. i did manage to throw on a shirt first. which was good. because a minute later i hear my front door open and a guy walks in saying, "fire marshal!" (apparently he knocked first but i couldn't hear it because the alarm is loud in case you haven't gotten that yet. my sister found this hilarious and said that it sounded like the start of a really bad porno, so there's that.)

maybe having the fire marshal come into your house when the fire alarm is going off and see you trying to muffle said alarm instead of actually leaving the house is not the best situation to be in, but instead of pulling off the pillow, i just asked, "is this, like, real?" i'm so good with words, and also, i already looked like an idiot so whatever. he probably thought i was on drugs, but he hid it pretty well, and just said, "no ma'am. we're just testing it. it'll be off in a second." only, it wasn't. five minutes later it did turn off, but then a few minutes after that, it turned back on again. and that's how it went for hours: on and off, off and on. and it was so much worse than having it be on for an hour straight. because you never knew when it was going to come back. my nerves were so far past fried. i couldn't stop shaking. i was jumpy. i was tired. if i was being detained i would have confessed to anything just to make it stop. it was awful. and i suppose i could have just taken darcy in a minute of silence and left the house for the day, but what was i going to do with a rabbit in tow? plus, it didn't actually occur to me until later.

anyway, it had been quiet for about an hour and a half, and i was pretty sure that the whole ordeal was over but i couldn't untense myself because what if it wasn't? (it actually was, though.) and then the ups guy came and knocked on my door and i screamed. like way too loud. i think i probably gave him a heart attack. (after which i stuck my head out of the door while he ran down the stairs and called out a thank you.) scaring the ups guy made me laugh, and loosened me up enough for me to finally just shower and leave the house for an hour, but my god it was really the worst.

anyway, it is almost noon now and the fire alarm has not gone off at all so already today is awesome. hope yours is, too!

*Worst Day Ever - Simple Plan

there's a joke here somewhere and it's on me

you know what happens when indecisiveness and forgetfulness get together and make you mess up your birth control pill taking? your body thinks that you stopped taking your birth control. and you know what happens when your body thinks you stopped taking your birth control? i suppose the expected answer here is "you get pregnant," but no. this happens:

body: oh no. ohhhhhhh noo. i'm not getting regular dosages of hormones. WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?!?!

me: okay, calm down. you can-

body: AAAAHHHHHH NO HORMONES!! WHAT DO I DOOOOOO????!!!!! 

me: if you would just take a second and-

body: okay, okay ummm maybe i'll just... umm... HERE! HAVE A FEW MIGRAINES! AND CRAMPS!

me: what the hell body. you did this on your own for twenty three years. get it together.

body: ANXIETY! I CAN MAKE ANXIETY! HERE! HAVE SOME MORE!

me: would you stop screaming? it is really starting to freak me out.

body: THESE ARE BAD SYMPTOMS FOR BASICALLY EVERY SINGLE THING EVER. HAVE THEM ALL. AND MORE ANXIETY! AND ANOTHER HEADACHE!

me: !@%@$%^#$@#!#$%!!#$&#$@**^%##*^%#!#$

body: NAUSEA! I CAN DO NAUSEA! I DON'T REMEMBER HORMONES BUT NAUSEA IS GOOD!

me: *starts sobbing*

body: HERE IS MORE ANXIETY! AND LOTS OF SLEEP!

me: *still sobbing* there is nothing left to feel anxious about! oh no i didn't bake gingerbread cookies this year! why am i such a failure?!

body: DOESN'T MATTER. HAVE SOME MORE! AND INSOMNIA NOW!

me: i hate everything. 

body: I GIVE UP!

i am seven hundred percent done with life right now. 

i have also been up since three in the morning. i found fangirl online and read it on my phone from a site that doesn't have a mobile app so the text was really tiny. yesterday was supposed to be productive but it straight up sucked. maybe i'll tell that story tomorrow. 

having my hormones out of whack has hindered my storytelling ability. it also makes it very exhausting to do normal things (including all of the fun stuff that i said was going on in my post yesterday) because i just want to sit down in the middle of walmart and cry and punch everyone in the face and also eat a soft pretzel and maybe have a chocolate milkshake. but instead i have to be a functioning human being or something. uggghhh. 

*Dancing in the Dark - Bruce Springsteen

many days fall away with nothing to show

it is so very difficult to do all the things you want to do in your free time when your entire life is no longer made up of free time. i'm still working out this whole having actual responsibilities things, but it's cementing in my mind that what i want to do for the rest of my life is read books, knit stuff, and watch netflix. forever. in the meantime, i'm basically doing a lot of stressing out. because what else are you supposed to do? and the worst part is, despite feeling like i'm going crazy doing so much, when i look back at the end of the week, it looks like i did absolutely nothing. nothing ever gets done. progress is apparently something my life doesn't believe in. (side note: remember that time when i was in my last semester of undergraduate classes and basically said that that was the first time i was really stressed? what kind of privileged life was i leading for those first twenty-some years? it has left me totally unprepared for everything.)

in other news, despite having graduated from high school over seven years ago, my most recurring stress dream has always been and still is high school related. for those that don't know, i went to a private school from fifth to twelfth grade. there were uniforms and hour and a half long bus rides to and from school and multiple languages taught to us. part of the whole uniform thing were tights. by the time i graduated i hated tights so much that i have yet to put on a single pair again. seven years tightsless and going strong. i still shudder when i see them in stores.

anyway, the dream.

there are slight changes in it from time to time, but it always follows the same formula: i am late for school. i am back in the bedroom i shared with my sister at my parents' house. the overhead light is glaringly bright and the red numbers on my clock are flashing: too late, too late. the bus is waiting downstairs, but i have just woken up. i am racing around trying to get ready while simultaneously trying to get the bus to wait for five minutes. and it's always those stupid tights. they take way too long to get on, and in my hurry i end up tearing them so i have to get another pair and the panic is bubbling in my stomach and flowing into my throat. sometimes, i'll run onto the bus with my skirt on over my pajama pants and try to finish changing in the back without anyone seeing me. a lot of the times i finally get on the bus and realize i forgot my bag or something. i almost always make it on the bus, but you know when you wake up late and even though you finish everything and get everywhere on time, you have that feeling of panic all day that you're late? yeah, i wake up with that a lot. which does wonders for the stress that my real life things are causing, let me tell you that.

i would really just like my brain to realize that it has been almost a decade since high school and it should stop terrorizing me with it.

oh, and in case you were wondering, look at that nano word count over there. i wrote a lot over these past two days and am kindasortamaybe back on track for nano. i'm still behind, but i have a plan. and you know what happens with plans: they never work out but they make you feel better for having had them. (also, i refuse to think about anything phd related because my body just can't handle that right now.)

*Pompeii - Bastille

time is running out

[one] okay so i have two papers to write by friday and i had planned in my head exactly how much time i was going to spend on both, but i just realized that i might have put in a few too many days between now and the end of the week. this means that i probably should start working on them, like, immediately, but you have no idea how pigheaded i've gotten about school assignments. i just. don't. want. to. do. them. i am five hundred percent done with stupid assignments that only one person cares anything at all about. and even that person (the professor, mind you. i wouldn't want you to start thinking it was me) would probably rather watch the football game than deal with this. i mean, can't we all just decide to shut down the education system until they change the useless assignments policy? the government did it after all.

speaking of the government, the metro is now full again and gas prices went up, and i blame them.

[two] so i like to read. obviously. and i get really into my books. once again, obviously. (i grieve way more over the deaths of my fictional people than the deaths of most real people.) but i think i may have passed some sort of line recently. i was reading a book, and the character in it needed batteries, okay? it wasn't even like a big plot point or anything. she just mentioned that her walkman had none. so a day or so later i was at the dollar store shopping with my sister for useless junk that i did not need because that is just what i do. (she, on the other hand, was trying to find random things to fill her office with.) whenever i'm out i'll pick up stuff for people (usually family) that i know they need. sometimes i'll pick something up and then not remember who needed it only to realize that it was some acquaintance and getting them anything would actually be sorta creepy. on this day, though, i see the batteries, remember someone saying that they needed them, and drop them in my basket. then came the "who needed these again?" moment and a few minutes later the "oh my god am i really buying things for a fictional character?" moment which was quickly followed by the "oh god i am. no one else needs batteries. i need a life!" moment. i put the batteries back, but i think this is a bad sign. i can just see myself slowly filling my house with things for book characters and sitting alone in my living room eating toast with orange marmalade* and drinking homemade butterbeer talking with them and going completely crazy. (and is it bad that part of me actually thinks that that would be pretty awesome?)

*during my obsession with paddington bear (and oh god was i obsessed) i forced myself to like orange marmalade because it was his favorite. i really hated it at first, but it grew on me.

[three] i just noticed that we are nearing the end of october. i mean, i noticed that before because i am counting down to the end of the semester, but it hadn't registered with me that november is next. as in, nanowrimo is starting in less than two weeks and oh my god how can this happen? i don't have time to write fifty thousand words of novel. i barely have time to get my homework and a shower in on the same night. i am busy grading and mentoring and researching (for other people) and schooling and why did i forget to take nano into consideration when i signed up for so much this semester? i didn't finish editing the nano-eleven-slash-camp-nano-novel like i was supposed to (but i did decide that it needs an entire rewrite because if my memory serves me it is pretty awful and filled with data dumps and poor characterization). and do i write a sequel to something i may just end up scrapping? i'll probably just write the mermaid story. if i can get any time in. i'm already super behind on tv and my dissertation stuff, but the thought of not doing nano or failing nano this year is just incomprehensible to me. i think someone needs to come teach me some time management is what it all boils down to.

*Time is Running Out - Muse

below is a very long laundry list of complaints and whining. you probably should just skip it and wait for the next post.

so basically, things have just really been sucky lately. october has not been my month, and if i see one more person post that they are grateful to live in a world where octobers exist, then i will very likely explode. this suckiness is really the reason that i have not been blogging because there are two kinds of sucky moods: ones that lead to good writing and that can pull on other emotions to elevate it and ones that you just can't write in because everything that comes out is bitter and makes people uncomfortable and is too frustrating to even write and you do not need anymore frustrations in your life at the moment so you just don't. i am so far into the second category that they've elected me their queen.

my life for the past few weeks:

i got lyme disease, as you all know, and was put on antibiotics for what feels like forever. the antibiotics are gross and make me extremely nauseous for hours two times a day and i still have a week left of them. extreme nausea leads to irritability and misery in case you didn't know.

it rained for the entirety of last week. and if you try to tell me that rain is pretty or remind me that i usually like rain then i hope you don't particularly like your face. rain makes doing anything and everything impossible. rain calls for procrastination and lazy days and pushing off the papers you have to write until the sun comes back. which it apparently never does anymore. after struggling for a week to write a five page paper, i finally finished it over the weekend only to realize that i did the whole thing wrong and needed to redo it. which i did. probably poorly. i still have two more papers to do which may be due this friday and may be due next friday and i am too scared to check which it is.

i've been having minor shoulder pains that decided to escalate overnight and and result in excruciating pain and me not being able to move my arm the day before yesterday. yesterday it seemed like it was getting better, (yesterday was kind of a respite from everything which was pretty awesome because it was also eid, but now i kind of resent it because it just makes the lows seem so much lower) but sometime around three last night it decided that it didn't want to get better after all and that maybe waking me up from the pain and not letting me go back to sleep was a good idea. i finally fall back into a light sleep around six something, only to be woken up at six:thirty by my husband's old phone's alarm that was going off in the living room, meaning i couldn't just reach over him, turn it off, and go back to sleep. not that i could have done that anyway since my shoulder was killing me even at rest and hurt even more when i moved any part of my body. still does, so that's fun.

(i went to the doctor for it yesterday, and she said it wasn't from the lyme disease which i guess is good because that means the antibiotics are probably working, but also bad because i don't know what it's from and therefor can't really treat it. she was insistent that i just bumped my arm on something, which i am one hundred percent sure is not what happened. since it was starting to feel better and i really just wanted to leave her office yesterday, i didn't really argue. i am now wishing that i did. her entire examination of it consisted her of telling me to raise my arm as high as i could straight up. that was it. she didn't even touch it to feel if there was tumor growing on it. which i'm pretty sure there isn't, but still.)

because of the nausea and the inability to find a comfortable position that does not make me cry from pain and then from the frustration of having wet spots on my pillow from tears, i have not been sleeping well. the exhaustion is actually what's causing all of the tears. i'm just crying over everything because i'm so. effing. tired.

oh, and my doctor also told me yesterday that there's really no way to know if the antibiotics got rid of the lyme disease because i will continue to test positive for it for at least the next few years. i could still get it again, though, and unless i get major symptoms again i will not know that i have it (because of the testing positive regardless) and will probably end up not knowing about it and waiting too long to treat it and having it mess with my brain and ugh. just ugh, okay?

i think i just really need to sleep. my tolerance level would be so much higher if i could just do that.

and my apartment is a mess and i have papers to write and a ton of grading to do and everyone is on vacation except me and i am tired and in pain and annoyed. i bought a pair of rain boots that are too small and the online store doesn't do exchanges. friday my sister, husband, and i were supposed to go out to celebrate and the universe messed that up, too. my breakfast today was gross and i just really want to crawl in bed with a book - not the one i just finished though because that was so, so, so bad - and stay there until october is finished. you can keep your pumpkin spiced lattes and colored leaves. wake me up when gingerbread lattes hit the menu and the trees have shaken off every last leaf.

the only reason i am posting this is because today is blog action day, and i have not missed a blog action day yet and refuse to miss it today. my post on human rights was more like a call for the entire world to die, though, so i thought maybe if i got some of this out of my system i could write a less morbid post. just in case i don't though, now you all know why.