what's been going on around here

yesterday i was supposed to catch up on my nano word count, and while i obviously didn't catch up, i am closer to catching up than i was on friday. if i write a few big word days this week (and i'm not even talking super big, just two or three thousand words) then i should be juuust fine. (although i still find myself taking too long to start my actual story and writing around all of the exciting parts, and i never respect my favorite authors as much as when i realize that my story really sucks and i have no idea how to fix it. i can have a good premise but then i realize that my plot is sucky and how does that even happen? every. single. time. you'd think i write a good one as a fluke or something at least.)

and just in case any of you care, the lump on my ankle from the lyme disease is finally going down. like, it's now probably more than fifty percent smaller than what it was a couple of weeks ago, and yes, okay, i'll admit it: i guess my doctor was right. my shoulder pain (which didn't go away with the antibiotics so i was wrong about that, too) is pretty much gone as well. so now i'm going to connect those two in my brain. by the end of this month, i won't only have a fifty thousand word novel sitting in cloud space, but i will also be lyme free and pain free you will (fingers crossed) never have to listen to me talk about it again.

and i finally have a clean apartment. (except for the bedroom, but if you close the door then you can't even tell it's a colossal mess.) i had to clean it for wednesday when my sister, husband, friend and i all went to watch ender's game and then came back to my place for dinner. (i'm going to start off by saying that no, i did not boycott the movie like so many others, and i thought that, as book to movie adaptations go, it was pretty good. neither my sister nor my husband had read the book, and they never felt lost at all. which is growing increasingly rare i have noticed. (yes, it felt a little rushed. yes, the book was better. but that will always be the case.) i also loved both the character and actor of bean. he was the most adorable comic relief i have ever seen.) but the fact that it is still just as clean half a week later is pretty amazing for me. my tolerance for mess is ridiculously high so this almost never happens.

oh, and my professor gave me a ninety-nine on a paper and then spoke to me after about how "your paper really deserved a hundred, but i don't give hundreds. congratulations." and don't you hate that? if my paper deserves a hundred then give me a hundred. i had a teacher in elementary school that was the same way. she used to say, "if i gave you a twenty out of twenty then what would i give a published writer?" and just, what? you should not be grading my work as a fifth grader on how it compares to a published writer's work. you should be checking that i met all of the requirements, and if i did, then give me the twenty. sometimes, i really don't understand teachers.

edited to add: i also got rid of our fruit fly problem! go me!

/end updates.

*What's Been Going On - Amos Lee

writing is hard. which is why my nano word count is pathetic (i'm supposed to be over twelve thousand words by the end of today. yeah. not happening. can i actually be looking at a year where i fail nano? i effing refuse.) and my blog hasn't been updated in days (weeks? i don't even know anymore) and my contributions to classes and group work is bordering just on the edge of slacker student who should probably fail but she answers the questions completely and a minimum word count was never set so it's really their fault.

also, i spend the little time i have for writing thinking great, ponderous thoughts like, the actors who play gandalf and dumbledore are often confused for each other and the actors who play frodo and harry potter are often confused for each other and there must be a bigger meaning for that. but of course there isn't, although that doesn't stop me from trying to construct some kind of essay exploring it. and kind of along the same lines, yesterday i heard someone ask their friend if emma watson was in anything before perks of being a wallflower and just, what?

(for the past ten minutes i have alternated between staring at this page and staring around my apartment (which is finally clean! but kinda still cluttered because i am a hoarder and there is too much stuff for a one bedroom apartment in here) for some inspiration on what to write, and... nothing. i'm telling you, i am so out of touch with my writery self it's ridiculous.)

i think that for the past couple of years i pushed my academic-ness to the back burner to focus on writing, and now i'm supposedly bringing  my academic-ness to the front which of course isn't happening because i diluted it way too much with extra on-campus jobs and responsibilities so you can barely even taste the academia in it, but then i guess the writer-ness got pushed to the back burner, and why is the oven of my mind so stupid? why can't i have two front burners like every other oven in the world? (i realize that there are ovens with only two burners. i also realize that i should be using stove instead of oven and that family and stuff has pretty much taken permanent residence on one of the front burners leaving me with only one available and that i don't actually have a deformed oven.) and wow i completely destroyed my metaphor in that aside. this is what i mean about the writing these days. it's hard.

i just want all of my free time back. why did i ever complain about being a lifeless couch potato? why couldn't i appreciate a good thing when i had it? why can't i just read, write, and knit my days away? why are rhetorical questions my go-to writing these days? (oh, and the word "well." i really think that two thousand of the six thousand words i have written are characters starting every sentence and thought with "well,...")

see the problem with me is that i attribute human emotions to everything. stuffed animals, furniture, animals... everything. now usually i can just go about my life normally, making sure to pick up any toys that fall and pushing the guilt of neglecting things to the back of my mind. but then sometimes my house gets infested with fruit flies and i have to set out traps for them because they. are. everywhere. and then i feel super guilty when i see them trapped and want to set them free again. inside my house. because that is obviously where they want to be and who am i to tell them they can't and my parents taught me to share. and it's really bad because i really, really don't want fruit flies in my house but i just spent the past fifteen minutes watching them trying to escape and i feel so bad. poor, obnoxious bugs.

in other news, the nano word count tracker is up again (over there to the left) so you can all follow my progress over the month. or, however many of you still read this blog of mine. i'm telling you, one day i will be rich and famous (and a published author!) and you'll be glad that you stuck around. trust me.

for some reason, this whole putting words together thing is really hard at the moment. does it show? i feel like it does. do these sentences even make sense?

i'm pretty sure that i talked about this before, but just so it is here on the first day of the month, here is the premise for this year's nanovel in one sentence: the mermaids are fighting a war against the adaro and kidnap humans to be their soldiers because there are not enough of them (mermaids) to fight. my plot will (as of now) follow a twelve year old merboy, angler, who belongs to a family of recruiters (the ones who kidnap, er, recruit humans). his first recruit is a young boy, roger, who will - i think - make friends with angler. maybe. roger is going to try and escape or the humans will try and revolt or angler will smuggle him out or something. the finer details (meaning everything after the words i wrote today) are still a bit hazy.

but i recently found out that adaro exist (in mythology) and they are basically weird shark-mermaid-swordfish-men-evil spririts who travel on rainbows and kill people by throwing poisonous fish at them. oh, and they live in the sun. is that not awesome? i think they may be a new favorite of mine. of course, there is really only the same paragraph repeated about them all over the internet, so i'm taking a lot of creative license and filling in blanks myself. and while people seem a little confused about how they look exactly, everyone agrees that they are evil. which fits perfectly for the bad guys in my story. (no, them mermaids are not bad guys. despite their kidnapping tendencies. at least not yet.)

just saying nothing

okay so i don't even know what time is anymore because i swear actually doing things and having a quasi-life - okay, not really, but at least way more distractions from the fact that i don't have a life - has turned days into minutes and weeks into hours and how is it possible that so much time passes without me even being fully aware of it?

this week was going to be so productive, but there's something about waking up and giving over-the-phone computer help before eating my breakfast (every. single. day.) that really brings out the grump in me. and the grump in me does not do productiveness. but i need a clean apartment by wednesday and i need to be caught up on school stuff by tonight (because nano starts tomorrow!) and don't even get me started on the things i want.

so. moving on. this post will likely be all over the place and generally pointless but really if you expect anything else from me at this point then maybe you are a tad too optimistic and a bit naive and really bad at just accepting people for who they are.

to start with, let's talk about books because, as i mentioned, nanowrimo starts tomorrow and that means i probably won't get much reading done in the next month either and this makes me sad because there are so many books to be read. twenty-three to be exact. because i just counted. and can i just say that this was a pretty bad reading year for me because that is almost the number of books that i read all year. and those aren't even counting the books that i have on my shelf waiting to be read that i probably won't get around to for a while because there are no reviews requested from me or spoilers to be found. (as an afterthought, maybe rereading the same two books for the past month and a half wasn't the best idea. i'm sorry people that are waiting for my reviews, but if i read your books during that time instead then i would have hated them on principle.)

and speaking of spoilers, allegiant is sitting on the floor next to my bookshelf waiting to be read while i see person after person online talking about how their mind has been blown by it and they want to call in sick from work to sit and mourn and i just don't understand. (that is as spoiled as i have gotten, though. i'm actually a little shocked.) i got into the divergent series about a week or two before insurgent came out. i bought it because i had heard so many rave reviews and then pre-ordered the second before reading the first. and i mean, it was okay but i really did not get the hype. extreme let-down. especially because it wasn't bad so i didn't even get to rant about it. (although there were bits of dialog that were added in just because the author thought it sounded cool and they were such breaks from characterization and basic mood and it made me want to hit the editor on the head with the thick hardcover copy i had because you are supposed to kill the author's babies. that is your job. i think veronica roth and cassandra clare had the same editor because they both need to learn the difference between what sounds "cool" and what people actually say in real life.) but anyway. i read the two books and then put them on my shelf and let them start collecting dust. i don't even know how long ago it's been, but i think i need to reread them before i get to allegiant or the hype will be completely lost on me. it's like marathoning reality tv and becoming so attached to the characters after watching them for seven hours straight that you actually care about the arguments between them and forget that you really hated them. so i guess that's twenty-five books that i need to read in december.

also, i think i should mention on here that rainbow rowell has quickly become one of my favorite authors because i love her writing style and her characters and the way that i never feel like she's trying and i just want to move into her books and live there forever. and i know a lot of people do not like her books and hate her style so take that into consideration if you decide to read her, but it has been a while since i have fallen so in love with an author. also, she is on the list of authors that i would also like to be best friends with, and that list is not as long as you might think. (jk rowling is not on that list. make of that what you will.) sometimes i think that i only want to be a published author so that i can be friends with the other published authors, but then i remember that that is wrong.

i am currently reading when we were romans to cleanse my pallet as it were and get out of my rainbow rowell rut (yay for alliteration!) and it's one of those books that's written as if it were really written by the narrator (if that makes any sense) which, in this case, means a lot of run on sentences and spelling mistakes. the narrator is supposed to be nine, and the writing style is spot on, but the emotions and thoughts seem a bit too juvenile to me. i thought he was six for a while. i am trying to remember my brothers two years ago and i am pretty sure that they were over the age of ice-cream-erases-grudges and extra short attention spans. i may be wrong, though. or they may be weird.

in other news, we have a huge fruit fly problem in my apartment and i've tried everything (okay, not really, but some things) and they will not go away. this is what happens when we buy fresh fruit. i have learned from my mistakes, though. it's fruit cups and applesauce from here on out in this household.

if you are still reading at this point then i am impressed. and if you'll listen to me ramble this long, then maybe you'll like my prosetry book which you can buy here. because it has been a while since i have partaken in any self-promotion. and also it has almost been a year since i published that. and if you read it and like it then maybe you'll review it on amazon? that would be swell.

 *Talking Loud and Saying Nothing - James Brown

oh, things are going to change now for the better

okay so my blogging this month has been almost nonexistent. like i said, october just hasn't been my month. at all. but i feel like the tides are turning, people. i really do. because i just took the last dose of the antibiotic from hell and words cannot describe how excited i am. no more nausea! no more esophagitis! (that one is kind of my fault but also i am going to blame my doctor for not warning me. basically a few days ago i took the drug without water like i usually do and went straight to bed like i usually do and it got stuck in my throat like it usually does (just not with me) and burned my esophagus. because it is acid. and that made swallowing very painful for a while and breathing very painful whenever i was laying down (like to sleep) or had been laying down for a while (like in the mornings). but it is all but gone now,  and yay for that.) no more tendonitis in my shoulder! (which, admittedly, no one but me ever thought had anything to do with the drugs, but i am convinced it did/does because those antibiotics hated me and i am looking forward to pain-free shoulders by the end of the day. if this doesn't happen, i will be quite upset.) no more counting hours for when i can and cannot eat! no more lyme disease! (i really hope that last one is true. i still have the bump on my ankle that is kinda tender when touched and when i get out of the shower the rash faintly shows. my doctor says this is normal and it will take a while to go away, but i mean, it's been over a month now. i just hope she's right.)

yay!

and i finished ninety-nine percent of one of my papers yesterday and plan to finish ninety-nine percent of the other one today. tomorrow morning i will go over both to make them one hundred percent done and ready to submit tomorrow evening. (being ninety-nine percent done does not mean that it is ninety-nine percent of the best i can do. it's probably more like fifty-seven percent. i could maybe stretch it to sixty-three tomorrow, but as long as i have words on paper to hand in i one hundred percent do not care.

speaking of nothing that i was just talking about, i have been receiving books in the mail all week. and this is partly awesome because books! and partly awesome because they all surprised me! but slightly less awesome because i had forgotten i pre-ordered stuff and didn't take that into account for this month's budget. oops. and even more not awesome because i cannot read them for a while. (there are seven of them so far. five were pre-ordered in the summer when i was bored and had all the money in the world (four of them came together in a boxed set, calm down), one i received to review, and one was the product of a kickstarter i backed six months ago and mostly forgot about. and i still have some books i haven't read from the library sale in the summer and another book that i got in the summer to review. and i have a feeling that the mailman will bring me some more because it seems like his new favorite thing to do. and i just finished a book i really, really liked (and am currently rereading) so i know whatever i read next i will hate just because so i need a pallet cleanser before i get into any of these.

i am off to write my paper (the topic of which i still haven't fully decided on) filled with renewed hope and vigor. (i couldn't think of a word to put after and so i put that. i dunno.) i hope you all have a wonderful thursday, because mine is starting off really well.

*Dismantle, Repair - Anberlin

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

but it's your right

so, it's time for another blog action day. you can read previous blog action day posts of mine here, here, here, and here. this year, the topic is human rights.

according to the united nations, "Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status. We are all equally entitled to our human rights without discrimination. These rights are all interrelated, interdependent and indivisible."

we had a discussion recently in my public policy class about human rights, using dworkin's taking rights seriously as a resource. we started out only discussing the right to liberty, which dworkin insisted was nonsense. his reasoning was that if something is a core right (or a basic right or a human right, whichever word you want to use) then it would be wrong for the government to curb that right. in order to to rule, enforce stability of the state, and protect a nation, the government is constantly curbing people's liberty. laws may be instituted for the good of the people, but they are still taking away some of your liberties. the consensus we reached in the end was that people use the term "human right" much too lightly. everything these days is a human rights issue, it seems. what we decided was that rights are not about what's given to you but what can't be taken away. and while i am well aware that there are human rights violations going on every minute of every day all over the world, i am equally aware that not everything touted as a human rights violation actually is.

for the real human rights violations, though, here are some ways that you can help:

• be knowledgeable about human rights 
• campaign for human rights in your community. 
• write your representative (in countries where this applies)
• keep aware by signing up for human rights email alerts
• donate to places like amnesty international and others

*It's All Right - Velvet Underground

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. 

[one] okay, so my doctor finally called me yesterday (and by that i mean her secretary called me yesterday after i called her the day before and asked for her to call me and let me know if i was dying at a faster rate than usual or not) aaaand it turns out that i do have lyme disease. so there's that. i'm gonna be on these stupid antibiotics (that i've been taking wrong oops) for a month and i'm already sick of them. i am really bad with taking medicine daily. i will stick with it for a week or so perfectly and then i slowly start to forget and mess up and stop caring. having to take medicine twice daily is just preposterous.

[two] on a happier note, the government shutdown that has thousands of people sitting at home without pay means that the metro was super empty today. like, ridiculously empty. not only did i get a seat from the minute i hopped on (during rush hour!) but there were only a handful of people on the car with me. the amount of people that usually fill up one car were probably spread out over the entire train. i'm not gonna lie, it was pretty awesome. and though i really do feel for the people who suddenly find themselves momentarily jobless because congress can't play nice, i really, really, really like the metro being empty. it's not that i can get used to this, it's that i already am.

[three] on a less happy note, i did really well on the exam that i took last week. the professor thinks i'm a really good writer and liked the bad example that i used when i couldn't think of anything better and thinks i have nice handwriting (*shrugs*). he gave me an A, which sounds just dandy, but then he mentioned that i have good ideas and should share them in class. i do not share things in class. i do not participate regularly unless there are less than five people in the class and i really, really have to. (i have a twenty-three year streak of this, i'm not about to blow it now) this class has twenty-five people in it and i don't have to. except now my professor is trying to force me to. like, he volunteered me to present next week and keeps trying to direct questions at me and if i wanted to participate then i would. but you know what? challenge accepted, dude.

and i know that this is not part two, but i have freaking lyme disease and thought i should record that on my blog for posterity's sake. also, updates are easier to write. 

i know it's wrong, it's a problem i'm dealing

(i started this post a few days ago, but then got sidetracked and didn't get a chance to finish it. i have school stuff that i've been putting off that i need to do today so instead of going until the end of the week postless, i am going to post what i wrote as part one, because i am too wordy anyway and it makes enough sense on its own. i don't even have time to reread it right now, so i apologize for typos and the like.)

so i have two problems (that i will discuss right now): one is a lying problem when i'm put on the spot and one is a problem with being uncomfortable with attention. they kind of overlap. these were huge problems for me when i was younger that i have managed to get under control somewhat. sometimes i slip, though, and end up doing things like telling my classmates that i went apple picking over the weekend instead of just saying that i did nothing. and once you start a lie, as cliche as this sounds, it grows. and though the original one usually comes out as a total surprise to me (i will very often have a second of, "wait, i did what now?" shock when my mouth decides to think for itself and try to get the spotlight off of me), i have to keep adding to the lies because i can't be like "oh haha just kidding" without looking like a total idiot. so i flesh out the story, answer questions, throw in a few details, and usually pick things out from stories told to me by someone else until they move on to the next person.

it's a problem i am trying to deal with, and if you compare ten year old me to twenty-five year old me, you'll realize that i have made tons of progress.

since i started college, most of my lies are given to people that i never see again after the three or four months that we share three hours a week. so it's not much of an issue. (i mean, i still need to learn to stop myself from these gut reaction panic things, but really, who cares if two people last fall think i went apple picking when i didn't?) it's the lies that i told when i was younger that are the real problem. these are lies that the people i grew up with and still keep in touch with think are the truths about me. i really only remember a few of them, though i still clearly remember that moment of panic (that was especially strong when i first moved to virginia and the next few years) that would fall over me when someone would ask me something directly. my brain would automatically supply my mouth with the first thing it could think of to get the attention off of me. a lot of the time, these were lies. (usually about stupid things, though. like, extraneous details about my life and family. nothing at all major, but still.)

i don't think anyone fully realizes the extent of my lying, though. the people who got the lies didn't know any better and the ones that would know better never heard about them. it was a defense mechanism of the best kind. but yesterday, while talking fangirl with my mom, i mentioned one of my lies. and she thought that, as stupid as it would make me look, i should finally tell the truth. so. since this blog is where i am the most honest to and about myself, and since it is also where i document some of the more embarrassing things that happen to me/i have done, here is my confession.

end super long introduction that was supposed to be a paragraph to set the stage. (i'm very wordy these days.)

*If You're Gone - Matchbox 20