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

there's a little bit of something me in everything in you

when we were younger, my sisters and i read this book of short stories. i think it was my older sister's book? anyway, they weren't scary stories, but they were supposed to leave you feeling slightly creeped out. bits and pieces of them have stuck with me over the years for some odd reason. there was one with fairies i think that skinned this girl's pet cat. one with a girl that pretends she doesn't know her mom at the airport and ends up as a flight attendant for life. (or something.) but the one relevant to my post today was about these two sisters (i think they had just thrown a party their parents were going to kill them for) that were allowed to go into this magical rose garden. in each rose was an alternate timeline that they could go down. they were allowed to pick a rose (i don't remember if they did) but as they searched for one they got to see glimpses of what would really play out in a bunch of different "what if" scenarios. i just finished reading fangirl by rainbow rowell and i feel like i got to peek into a rose of my own.

warning: this post is likely to be too long. i can't help myself. drunk-on-books-pseudo-psycho-babble rambles are my worst kind of rambles. it may also contain spoilers. maybe.

the book is basically the story of cather avery's first year at college. cather has a twin that doesn't want to be part of the "twin package" anymore, a dad who is kinda mentally unstable, a mom who left them when the twins were in third grade, and a huge obsession with simon snow (think harry potter with magicians instead of wizards - like, in terms of how huge the franchise is, not so much the plot.) she is also the writer of one of the most popular simon snow slash fanfics online.

fangirl doesn't just hit too close to home, it is home. or, it could be. like, if the essence of me, what really makes me me and all of that, was put into another person - someone living in a non-muslim, american family with one parent that doesn't commute to college (the girl, not the parent) - i would be cather. does that even make any sense? i haven't related to a character this much in a long time (or, at least not one that i did not also have strong urges to punch in the face more often than not), and it was fun. this wasn't me falling into the protagonist's shoes because she is a hollow, generic character made to have several built-in compartments to fill with your own personality. cather was a well-developed character who i just happened to see a lot of myself in. she is an anxiety-ridden, slightly misanthropic, fanfiction loving, wannabe writer and there is nothing about that that makes me think "well, that's not me at all." reading this book was like like standing in my own rose garden and seeing what could have happened if i had walked down a different path.

it got to the point that halfway through the story i started getting panicky, almost-nostalgia feelings. like that point in a big school year (last year of high school, last year of college, etc) where it's hitting february and you know it's going to end soon, but the thought is terrifying so you keep tying to push it to the back of your mind. i kept putting the book down because i didn't want "my first year" to end and that makes absolutely no sense at all but oh well.

it was one of those books that you pick up without fully knowing the importance of and finish with the feeling of "i really needed to read that book right now" even though you can't put your finger on exactly why. you just know that if you hadn't read it something bad would've (could've?) happened. although that might not happen with anyone else now that i think about it.

it also made me really wish that the simon snow saga was real because i need to read those books right now. fangirl has excerpts from both the simon snow books and cath's fanfictions thrown into it and i have never wanted a book to exist so bad before. i need to know what happens between these little scenes we're given. that is what my life has come to. i have books on my must-read-now list and characters that i care about that that do not even exist. sigh. it also made the harry potter nerd inside of me really sad that it missed out on a lot of fandom things. i never got to go to a midnight release of a book or movie, and i think that would have made my life.

there was one thing that really annoyed me, though. when cather is introducing her twin sister, wren, to her new college friends, this great line comes up: "'Our mom didn't know she was having twins,' Wren said. 'And she didn't feel like coming up with another name'" (pg 76). okay, these girls were born in 1993. (yes, i do feel old, thanks.) how is it possible that their mom didn't know she was having twins? did she never go to the doctor? did she not get a single ultrasound done? all i could think of was the lady on friends who has the kids monica and chandler adopt and her saying that whenever the doctor said "both heartbeats" she thought hers and the baby's. no one could possibly be that stupid. and then what? the dad couldn't think of a name either? the author could have easily said something like, she always wanted to name her first daughter catherine or something, and since she had a c-section (she did) she decided to just split the name between them. because i would rather just roll my eyes at that than go the rest of the book getting angry every time either of their names were mentioned. because, seriously? my suspension of disbelief only goes so far.

***SPOILER***
one thing that i really liked about the book's end was that cath didn't stop being a simon snow fan. the story kind of goes through her process of growing up, and parts of it hint that to do that she needs to let go of this whole simon snow/fanfiction obsession. there were times i was worried that she would come to realize that it was childish and just move on, but she doesn't. i mean, she does realize that other things are important too and she learns some balance, but her, wren, her roommate, and her boyfriend all go to the midnight release of the book and i loved that.
***END SPOILER***

overall, is this the best book ever written? no.
will reading it change your life? probably not.
did i love it anyway? absolutely.

*If You're Gone - Matchbox 20

well i believe i'm just plain tired

can we talk about how my week has been going so far?

monday was spent as usual alternating between the readings for my online class and meetings with my mentees. all i really remember was trying to get in my response to my online class at night, being tired, and thinking about how i would have to wake up super early the next morning.

tuesday i woke up early, went to my weekly breakfast with my dad, went to my weekly pottery class with my mom, and then everything went south. i had a doctor's appointment at one:thirty. (backstory: a little over two weeks ago, my ankle/foot was a little sore. a day or so later i noticed a small bump on my ankle. a day or so after that my ankle was three times its normal size and there was redness covering most of the top of my foot. after a week and a bit of it not going back to normal, i called my doctor and made an appointment. the day or so leading up to the appointment, the swelling went down some and i could actually move my foot again. (it was probably just because it was too fat, but previously i could barely move my ankle half a centimeter in any direction.) i decided to go to the appointment anyway (mainly because my parents told me to) and now you are all caught up.) i don't even remember the last time i went to my doctor's office and they weren't running ridiculously behind schedule. i showed up at the office at one:ten and wasn't seen until two:fifty. the nurse asked me questions and did some tests (like telling me to stand up on my toes) to make me think that i wasn't just moved from waiting in the waiting room to waiting in the patient-seeing-room whatever it's called. when the doctor finally came in, she looked at my foot for like half a second before saying that it was obviously an infection and possibly/likely freaking lyme disease. she takes a million gallons of my blood for tests (or three vials, but it's practically the same thing) as i start to get worried. the nurse tried to reassure me by saying it's only serious if they don't catch it and treat it early (and i'm still not convinced two weeks in is early) and they put me on antibiotics just in case. (as my doctor said, i'll have to be on antibiotics anyway for whatever infection it is so may as well do the lyme disease one until i get the results back. according to her it's totally safe cause it's the same drug they give for acne and that makes no sense to me but i'm not the one that went to med school so i'll try and believe her.) so now i guess i have to wait to see if i was infected, and if the results come back negative i need to be retested in three weeks because sometimes it takes a while to show. and i really do not have time for lyme disease.

then yesterday i had an exam. i could not think of an example to support my idea for one question so i made up some really stupid thing, and then as i walked to the metro i thought of the best example ever but it was too late and that's still bugging me. then the train broke down one stop away from where i needed to get off, and we had to wait twenty minutes for a new train. then i missed the shuttle to take me to campus where my car was and had to wait twenty minutes for the next one. then i got stuck in crazy traffic on the way home. grr.

and then today i was grading papers which is not so bad, but i emailed the professor i work for some questions and he responded with "thanks Sarah Michelle free pass" and i have no idea what that means. i have no idea who michelle is. and so i just graded the papers without taking off for lateness which i'm assuming was what the "free pass" means since that was one of my questions.

but i just... i'm so over this week.

*Tired - Matchbox 20

in fact it's phony as hell

i think that a lot of the rules of good writing apply to good living too. you should live your life the way you write. or maybe it's that you should write the way you live your life. actually, whichever one you're doing right, do the other one that way too.

the number one rule of writing is to "show not tell," and i think that applies to the way you act as well. we all hate it (and if you don't then you should) when an author writes a character and tells us, "by the way, this character is really smart. really. trust me on this. like one time, he got straight a's in all of his classes and didn't even have to work for them. he's just really that smart." and then the character doesn't actually do anything to show us that he's smart. ever. but the author continually tells us that he is. if you wrote a character that acted smart, then we are smart enough to know that he is smart without you telling us. (too many smarts in that sentence. ugh.) if you feel that you need to tell us so often then you are going down one of two paths that are equally wrong. path one: you could think that the reader is not smart enough to make his or her own deduction on the smartness of the character based on what he does alone. or two: you are writing this character poorly and failing to show us that he is smart, so you need to let us know he is in whatever other way you can. both of these are paths that you should probably get off of. right now. forget about the map just turn to the side and walk. you'll eventually find yourself somewhere better. 

along the same lines, if you have to continually tell people something about yourself like, "i'm a nice guy," then you are doing something wrong. you are either belittling the other person's intelligence by refusing to believe that they are perceptive enough to pick up on the fact that you are a nice guy and/or unwilling to believe that they have the mental faculties required for them to make the decision on whether or not you are a nice guy (and by make the decision i obviously mean make the decision that you wanted them to make). (in plain english: you think they're too stupid to see how nice you are.) or you are doing something at the moment (or in a very long string of moments more likely) that make you seem like you are not a nice guy and so you feel the need to constantly remind people that you are, in fact, a nice guy and they shouldn't forget that fact just because you are currently acting like an asshole. in both cases, you are telling not showing. and in both cases i am inclined to think that you are not a very nice guy. you are probably coming off as either arrogant, proud, creepy, pedantic, or hypocritical and none of those are good things. 

so, in life as well as in writing, show. don't tell.

*Back 2 Good - Matchbox 20