i don't belong here

i was born with two ears, two lips, and ten toes.
i was born with eyes that are not great with long distances
and a mind that grows infinitely inwards.
i was born with a propensity to blush and two hands that i never quite learned what to do with.

i was born without my sense of belonging.
i have spent my whole life searching for it.

i have tried to belong to countries, but my soul is spread too thin over the continents
and there is not enough of me in any one place to
hold on.
and anyway, land never needs you back.
i have tried to belong to ideas, but
i am too abstract to belong to something that is not concrete.
and anyway, my tongue does not stop whispering why and how. thoughts don't like doubts.
i look for it inside every person i meet,
but the poets tell me that i can't make homes out of human beings.
and anyway, people always belong to someone or something else.

and so for now i turn to books,
because they cannot turn away.
but i find myself searching behind every letter and hoping that
i will find it with the turn of the next page.

*****
attempt number three to write chapter one of my dissertation failed. i wrote poetry instead. still unsure about this piece. i will probably move the lines that i like into a piece without line breaks one day. there is something freeing about prosetry, but my thoughts today were not flowy enough. oh, and the not making homes out of human beings is from the poem "for women who are difficult to love" by warsan shire. it's one of my favorites. you should read it.

*Creep - Radiohead

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Under Your Thumb - The Vaccines 

the television's on, i turn it off and smile

so remember a little while ago when i complained on here about the price of audiobooks? (this is where i'd usually link to the old post, but i don't feel like it so you're going to have to just trust me on this one. despite it being just barely past nine:thirty, i am exhausted. i have been having this weird exhaustion-insomnia thing going on. like, i will be super tired but i just will not go to sleep. and i'm not even sure if i'm not going to sleep because i can't or just because i don't want to. even though i do. and because i refer everything back to books, it's kind of like this scene in enchantment (which i have told you all to read several times already so you should know what i'm talking about) when princess katerina is finally going head to head with baba yaga (the evil witch). the princess draws a pentagon (hexagon? octagon? i think i'm due for a reread.) to keep baba yaga trapped in, but she does it by making baba yaga not want to leave the pentagon instead of actually trapping her, effectively using baba yaga's own strong will against her. once baba yaga realizes what's going on, she makes the floor fall out from under her and comes back outside of the pentagon. i kinda feel like i am trapped in an insomnia pentagon, but i don't know yet whether i am trapped because i am trapped or if i am trapped because i am under a false impression that i want this. will i be able to drop the floor? and is trying worth the risk of losing the hope i have that i can?)

anyway, audiobooks. sometimes (like when i am knitting or driving or doing similar hands busy but head not activities) i will want to read a story. and because i can't, i will want to listen to an audiobook. and since they are so expensive, i will end up listening to music or watching tv, which i love i really do, but it doesn't really scratch the itch. i want a story. and one that will play out in my mind.

i think i finally found the solution the other day. one that had my comic-book-loving-thinks-batman-is-cool-majored-in-economics-willingly-and-on-purpose husband to call me a dork, but i'm okay with that. apparently after i stopped reading fanfiction on mugglenet, they decided to turn some of their stories into audio-fanfiction. which you can download and listen to. for free. (the benefit of learning about this five years after it started is that i now have over two hundred episodes (it's set up as a podcast) to pick from.) i was super excited when i found out about this. i mean, it's the perfect solution. my harry potter nostalgia that's been hounding me lately gets fed and i get my stories without emptying my back account.

i haven't listened to very many yet, but i think i may restart my neglected knitting just so i have an excuse to listen to these more.

*Leave the Bourbon on the Shelf - The Killers

so i lied

so remember that time in october when i wrote part one of a post and then never actually went on to write part two? yeah, i'm really good with procrastinating. (actually, i have come back to this multiple times since december. it is now may. i just cannot finish or post it for some reason. you guys, i think i may have found some dignity. who would've thought?) just in case you don't feel like clicking the link, part one basically said: i have an issue with attention. when i am put on the spot, suddenly the center of attention, asked something directly, have too many eyes on me or whatever, i panic. like real, hand sweating about to throw up panic. my usual response is to say the first thing to comes to mind that will take the attention off of me the fastest. this first thing usually does not have an immediate effect, and i end up having to answer a few questions. this first thing is usually a lie. well, it used to be. i've gotten a lot better at handling this and while i slip up sometimes, i am more likely to tell the truth these days. (this habit made me into a really good liar, though. a topic i can talk about in another post maybe.) after i say the lie, i'm pretty much trapped because saying just kidding i lied would make me look like an idiot and explaining the panic would just take too long.

and now that you are all caught up, let's go back to high school, shall we? when i was decidedly less successful at this whole not panic-lying thing. *cue memory wavy screen thingie*

it was my senior year. i had recently been turned onto fanfiction full force by a friend who shared a novel-length fic that was so much better than any of pieces i had seen before. it was really good, you guys. i was reading fanfiction regularly and had started writing it a bit, too. in secret, of course. (like, i had a password on the word document just in case. one to open it to read and one to edit it.) the first chapter of my own work was just posted on mugglenet, and i had plans of sharing that with my friends. (maybe not immediately, but definitely before the third chapter was posted. who would see it before then anyway? i had a plan. it involved a lot of stranger-validation and teenage insecurity. i'm not exactly proud of it.) the morning after it was posted, though, before it had more than twenty hits or a single review, i walk into school and my friend asks if i wrote it. (it was actually more of a "i know you wrote it" sort of thing.) the familiar wave of panic crashed into me and i felt a slight breeze as my plan flew out the window and i did what i always did, i lied.

she didn't give up that easily and would casually slip leading questions into group conversations. i remember her asking about a title of a movie and i said it was wicker park and she thought that was solid evidence that the fic writer was me because it was listed as a favorite movie in the author profile and who even knew that movie existed. i argued that the reason i knew it was because i had just watched it on a friday night friend get together thing a few friends and i used to have. which was true. but that was also why it was listed as my favorite movie. because it was in my head. (every time i see/hear anything about the movie - even now - i suddenly feel ashamed and sometimes it takes me a minute to remember why.)

anyway, i continued writing my fanfiction and posting it to mugglenet and making friends with amazing fellow fanfiction writers (one of whom i actually just had a brief catch-up session with online the other day, after eight years of radio silence. it was cool.) and improving my writing and lying about it, because i was too far in to stop. it was pretty awesome because i had some loyal readers and i got a bunch of reviews and some friends and i used to email each other whenever a new chapter was posted on one of our stories because we didn't want to miss anything. it kinda sucked too, though, because although there were great people online, i sometimes wanted to talk to my real life friends about it, and i couldn't. i couldn't even mention the name of the story just in case it blew up in my face. shortly after that, my friend and i started working on a story of our own which i have mentioned on this blog a few times. i wrote both. my online life was so far removed from my real life that they never even bled into each other. i don't think anyone ever conclusively found out that it was me, but really, they could have known the whole time.

and then graduation happened and i got busy and abandoned my story. (not the one i was working on with my friend. that one got finished.) i sometimes feel guilty about it and think that maybe i should go back and write an ending for it. any ending. but i'm not the same person i was at eighteen and i don't really want to corrupt it. besides, i only have vague memories of what was happening in the story. i haven't read it since the first semester of undergrad and am not sure that i want to. anyway, this is my compromise. i may not ever finish my story, but i will acknowledge it as mine. it is no longer a bastard, and that's about the best that i can do for it.

(also, yes, i do realize that i was - and probably still am - quite pathetic.)

*Here's to the Night - Eve 6

get this weight off my shoulders, i've carried it well

sometimes i will have procrastinated too many things for too long, taken on one too many responsibilities, bitten off just a bit more than i can chew, and at first it's perfectly fine. see, i am very good at balancing. i was an excellent block tower builder. i know how to stack everything just so. sure, it may wobble a bit, but then, what doesn't? as long as it doesn't go crashing down, everything is just fine. do you know what block towers go crashing down? those built with jenga blocks. and do you know why they fall? because you mess with them. you start pulling pieces out from here and then putting them back over there and sooner or later you've tried to move the wrong piece or you've moved the right piece too many times and then you find yourself with a pile of fallen blocks. i used to play jenga a lot.

maybe that's why i find myself completely paralyzed at the moment. i am incapable of doing anything. really, anything. from research to grading papers to watching the newest episode of new girl or replying to that birthday facebook message. i can't do any of it. because there is just too much for me to do. if i try to take one thing out from the tower of duties, it will all come crashing down.

but that's not the worst of it. i mean, if this tower was just sitting on the table then that would be fine. i could turn my back on it and let everything just sit there indefinitely. but it's not. it's sitting in the palm of my hand. which of course makes the whole wobbliness factor greater, but it also does something else. have you ever heard of that talk-giving lady who asked the audience how much a cup of water weighed and then went on to explain that the weight was relative: the longer she held it up, the heavier it got. she was talking about stress and stress-causing things in life, but the analogy can be applied here as well. (mainly because i am also talking about stress-causing things in life.) the longer i hold onto this tower, the heavier it gets. if i try to take off a few blocks, it will fall. if i don't take off any blocks, it will eventually fall anyway. i am stuck.

a normal person probably wouldn't have spent so long stacking the blocks. they might have dealt with a couple as they came along instead of just focusing on how best to add them to the tower. they may have stopped accepting more blocks when they realized that they had reached their limit. they might even now deal with the blocks instead of spending their time and energy making block tower analogies. they might ask for help or let it crash and then deal with the pieces or take the least amount of risk and pull out all of the center blocks first so as not to damage the foundation. me, though? i just keep adding to my tower and trying to keep my hand steady.

*Sweet Talk - The Killers

deadlines and commitments every morning and in the evening, they can suck you in

i've been reading a little bit of harry potter fanfiction recently. a really little bit. they're more snippets and glimpses of the marauders than actual stories, but they have me so nostalgic. along with other things. i've been doing some serious life-changing thinking these days and that has nostalgia splattered all over it. (actually nights, because i've been making up my mind while i sleep because when i am awake i can remember that i am deathly afraid of any change, but especially life-changing changes, and my best tactic is to continue along the same path i am on while doing my best to ignore the fact that anything except what i want to do in this very minute (usually nothing) exists at all. and if you know anything about me, it should be that when i try my best at something i usually succeed. the problem is that i tend to not try my best at the things that i should probably be trying my best at.)

i feel like i maybe need to take a break from my life. sign myself up for a year long retreat or something. nothing but sandy beaches and not watching what i eat or feeling like i should exercise. reading books and binge-watching tv shows and not having to think about school at all because it will not exist. (so basically continue doing what i am already doing (or want to be doing) but without all of the guilt and self-shame that accompanies it at the moment.)

since the likelihood of that happening is pretty slim (and by that i obviously mean it's never going to happen), let me instead talk about the weirdness of saved urls. the other day i started to type in a url to get myself a belated birthday present (i usually wait until i have all my gifts before i buy myself something. it's a moot point this year because the money i was going to use for it went to something else yesterday and i am trying to be very budget-conscious and save my way into a house. oh well.) and a url popped up that i could not even remember visiting. huh, i though, i wonder what other weird urls i have stored on here. and so i went through the alphabet and saw the top saved url for each letter. of course i will share my findings with you.

a: amazon.com
b: blogger.com
c: courses.gmu.edu
d: delicatepoetry.tumblr.com
e: ebay.com
f: facebook.com/home.php
g: google.com
h: hotmail.com
i: imdb.com
j: jeromeasf.spreadshirt.com
k: kickstarter.com
l: lukeconard.tumblr.com
m: mtb.com
n: nanowrimo.org
o: olyusha.tumblr.com
p: padfootdidit.tumblr.com
q: N/A
r: retailmenot.com
s: shouldbestudyingman.blogspot.com
t: tumblr.com
u: ughsocialjustice.tumblr.com
v: N/A
w: www.tumblr.com/tagged/the+lizzie+bennet+diaries
x: xcytech.com
y: youtube.com
z: zanzlanz.spreadshirt.com

at the end of this experiment, i found that most of my visited sites are only weird in how absolutely normal they are. (although i am a little surprised that google beat out goodreads as number one g.) too many are tumblrs. there are a few that i went to literally once but i guess i don't use that letter ever and so it stuck. there are also a few that i never went to at all but my brother did, and either i don't use that letter or he's on his sites more than i'm on mine. this was thrilling, i know.

also, this post is longer than i thought it would be and i think the title only fits if you're in my head.

*Deadlines and Commitments - The Killers

and for a second there we'd won

but only for a second because life sucks and being "a child full of promise" weighs you down with an unending amount of pressure and an incapability to handle the crushing weight of failure and you can't even appreciate the good things and the deep breaths when your incompetence is screaming at the top of its lungs and never seems to need a breath of its own and i am so ready to just be ten years younger already and my constant whining may very well be driving me insane and run-on sentences make me angry but really what doesn't these days. ugh.

*Miss Atomic Bomb - The Killers

with one deep breath, and one big step, i move a little bit closer

as you may or may not know, today is (was?) my birthday. i mean, technically there are still a couple of hours left in the eighteenth, but it's not really the day anymore and i'll probably be heading to bed in an hour so i guess the day is over. or something. anyway. last year i turned twenty-five and that felt like a big birthday. i mean, a quarter of a century. that's big. this year i turned twenty-six (obviously) and despite the fact that the only noteworthy thing about this birthday is that it marks the start of a year-long countdown until the day i am an odd numbered age again, it's been hard. i think it might be the first really hard birthday i've had. like, ever.

i've had moments of "oh my god i am (insert age here) shouldn't i have accomplished (insert appropriate milestone or life goal here) by now?" but i have never felt such soul-crushing failure at the approach of a birthday as i did with this one. i was not ready to be twenty-six. because i am essentially stuck in the same place that i was on my birthday last year. only last year it felt like a step up. this feels a little more like having the rest of the ground rise up and leaving the one square i'm standing on right where it is. (i am not going to dwell on this fact any more than that. also, i started writing more than one piece dealing with this, and every image and metaphor i started sounded tired and hackneyed. the whole experience was kind of a metaphor of my life at the moment and that was just meta enough to piss me off.)

anyway. i always write a birthday post. always. whether it is a huge (or brief) recap of the past year or just a little note saying, "i was born on this day and here is what i did," something is written. but i was really thinking of not posting anything today. (fun fact: one of the main reasons there was a post a couple of days ago was so that i could post on my birthday without feeling like it had to be something big and worthwhile after a dry spell. i didn't want to give myself that excuse to not post. i still didn't want to post anything today.) this morning, feeling like i had to write something, i had a post that consisted entirely of one word: ugh. i later added, "let's just not this year." i didn't post it, though. acknowledging the fact that an entire year had passed without me even noticing felt like giving up. maybe if i didn't blog about it, i wouldn't be a year older.

i mentioned in one of my other birthday posts, though, that my birthday always reminds me of the wonderful people i have in my life. my family. my friends. my people that i sometimes forget exist but then come out of the woodwork offering me a smile. and this year was no different. i really am blessed with some amazing people. and by doing nothing but being themselves (and that includes throwing a bratty tantrum when i didn't play minecraft like i said i would) they have given me the (insert appropriate word here because i am tired and can't think of it) i needed to take a breath. to pause and look around. while i still have the taste of failure sitting strong and bitter at the back of my throat, and i still have the vague sense of panic churning in the pit of my stomach, there is also a small ray of hope. or faith. or something. all i know is that i will take a moment really soon and think through everything i have been shoving onto the proverbial back burner all year, and maybe that will help. maybe the thinking will be enough. maybe it will kickstart me into some forward movement. maybe. and at the moment, maybe feels like heaven.

twenty-six will be the year of deep breaths. i am ready.

*For Reasons Unknown - The Killers

i had the photo album spread out on my bedroom floor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Photograph - Nickelback 

ask me your questions

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

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

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

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

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

*The Scientist - Coldplay