all is calm, all is bright

I don't play music unless I'm driving, I don't have the TV on unless I'm watching my specific shows (and usually alone so there aren't any interruptions), and I don't use an iPod unless I'm running.

I prefer the soundtrack of my life in most situations. Whether that be the zrrooom of my iPhone alerts, or the typing sounds in my office, or the voices of those I love talking to me and near me and about me. My ears are always open, ready to receive intel.

And when there isn't noise? When the zrroom is quiet or the DVR has been emptied or the people I love are busy doing more important things than entertaining me? Then it's quiet and I don't mind it. Does my mind ever quiet? No, not really. But that's okay too.

Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!

 This week's Collective topic is: Does silence make you uncomfortable. Which: Ha! Ha ha ha! I don't even remember what silence sounds like on account of living with this little beast for the past three years.

I wish someone had told me

Back up your computer files often and always. And then make back ups of those back ups. And then, when you start hearing that clicking sound--that sound that is not unlike if a grossy bug was inside your computer--to get it checked out (and backed up some more) right away because soon it will be dead due to a crashed hard drive and with it years of photos and important (yet embarrassing now) emails and papers and chat logs.

What about you guys? Tell us what advice you wish you'd be told years ago.

wibbly wobbly

  Everyone learns the same rules before they go to college. Don’t go barefoot in the shower. Buy a hot pot and as much ramen as you can afford. Beer before liquor makes you sicker, liquor before beer, you’re in the clear. But no one tells you that you don’t have to have everything figured out right away. Or maybe they do, but you don’t believe them because you’re 18 and you think you know everything.

I wish someone had told me that I didn’t have to have everything figured out before moving forward on something, that I was allowed to make mistakes, and that even if when I made mistakes, things would be OK. EARTH TO JENNIE: it’s OK to make mistakes IT IS PART OF BEING A NORMAL HUMAN PERSON. Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck standing still, because I’m trying to plan the perfect course of action before I take the first step.

I was talking to a coworker recently who just finished a writing class. I asked him if he liked the class, if he thought it had helped him write more, write better. He was unsure. He said he likes hanging out with other writers but that, at some point, he needs to stop taking classes and just write, that he needs to stop hiding behind writing classes. He told me about his friend who wanted to be an actor, who took class after class, but had never been to one audition because he thought he wasn’t yet good enough.

And it comes down to a matter of confidence, really. At what point do you decide that not only are you good enough, but that you’re also good? Eventually you have to stop worrying about if you’re really ready and just DO. Just write, just act, just design the shit out of some Star Wars koozies, if that’s what you want. You’re never going to become an expert at something by reading everything ever written about the subject, you just aren’t. You have to get in there, get your hands dirty, give yourself permission to suck. Because, guess what? You’re going to suck for a while. I don’t care if you have the greatest ideas ever, your first attempt is going to be terrible. And that’s OK. The next one will be better. IT’S OK TO MAKE MISTAKES.

This is something I still struggle with so, yes, I wish someone had said this to me sooner. If only we could harness the power of the TARDIS or a DeLoreon or even Calvin’s cardboard box and create PastMe, the opposite of FutureMe. I’d spam the shit out of Past!Jennie with so much advice, you have no idea.

WE HAVE TO GO BACK!

You're too smart to remember; you're too smart.

Forget the advice I wish I'd received earlier in life; what I need is advice RIGHT FUCKING NOW. About what? ABOUT EVERYTHING. To wit:

Am I really expected to wait until TWENTY FUCKING THIRTEEN for new episodes of Downton Abbey? HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DO THAT? I will literally explode without more Downton Abbey. DOWNTON ABBEY.



What am I going to do if/when The Hunger Games sucks? My entire future happiness depends entirely on this movie. I'm serious. If it sucks, I will never be happy again waaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Should I give Winston a baby sister? What if he doesn't like her? What if she stresses him out and into an early grave?


(this one is for Arlene)

How do I stop showing up to work looking like a hobo?

How do I make that fancy apricot kugel everyone keeps talking about?

What should I read next?

Who's on first?

Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope.

a wretch like me

When I was a little girl, I was scared of everything: thunder, snakes, math, mice, the laughter of other kids when I turned my back, the dark outside, the dark inside me, sleeping, waking, shouting, silence, burglars, vampires, latex balloons, and most of all hell. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," said Franklin Roosevelt, who had never been to a Baptist church apparently. There were lambs at church, lots of lambs. And other fuzzy animals, two-by-two. There were superheroes like Moses, who parted a whole sea. And villains like Judas, who sold his best friend for thirty pieces of silver. And there was Jesus, of course, who loved children even more than lambs. But mostly there was hell.

I was born believing I was a fuck-up, that everything terrible within my vicinity was precisely my fault, from my crossed left eye to my mother's tears to my parents' fights to the tractor-trailer crash on the railroad tracks on Old Bogdon Road. So when my kindergarten Sunday School teacher said I was separated from God because of my own sinful nature, I said, "Well, obviously."

But here was a solution: Confess my shame to my Heavenly Father; then, walk down the aisle on a Sunday morning and ask the preacher to ask Jesus to live inside my heart, to keep me safe from hell.

Oh, I prayed! For years and years, every night I prayed: God, I know I am bad and I don't deserve your love, but please don't let me die until I can be brave enough to get down that aisle. God, please, I don't want to go to hell.

I was five when I started praying it. I was twelve when I walked down the aisle. Seven years of Sundays gripping the back of a wooden pew, white-knuckled and singing, Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling. Calling oh, sinner, come home!

For another decade and a half, I let the church tie in me in knots, teaching orthodoxy over virtue, obedience over love. It was bad enough that I was human, falling from grace simply by being born. But I deserved worse because I was a woman. And worse even still for being a woman without a husband. I sat through sermons condemning my gender, my political leanings, my belief in social progress, my dreams, my hopes, my very (queer) biology, my (studied) understanding of the Bible.

And then one day I left.

I left church.

I got up and I walked out.

And my life got so much better.

A birthday or two ago, an old friend from so many years of so many sermons sent me a Facebook message that simply said, "I'm sad." And when I asked why, her answer was that she'd Googled me and found out I'd come out as a gay lady. She continued on in her passive-aggressive vein for a while, and then I removed her from my friends list. It was my birthday, after all. I saw that friend last week, when I was out doing some shopping. Her voice, full of derision; her eyes, brimming with fury. It was as if she'd never stopped typing that Facebook message. But there was worry there too. Real worry. It was a fear I recognized because it was a fear I'd known. She saw, in me, a person headed for hell.

I wondered how long it had been since I'd seen her. Years, for sure. But more than years. How many books had I read since our last conversation? How many countries had I visited since we last sat beside each other through an invitation hymn? How many essays had I read on other religions, services had I attended in other languages, prayers had I uttered (finally!) full of freedom? Thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands maybe. She was standing there, forever the same. And I, alone, had changed.

When I was younger, I wish I'd known that hell wasn't a lake of fire, but a cage of dogma. I wish I'd known that evolution wasn't a scientific attack on religion, but my own personal chance to grow. I wish I'd known that I deserved to hope, and that I could be courageous enough to live inside that hope. I wish I'd known that I was good.

I know it now.

I once was lost, as they say. Blind — but now I see.

I’m especially good at PROCRASTINATING!

   Here are five things I'm good at blah blah blah TV blah books blah poop blah WHATEVER. 

1. Watching TV

I know this sounds like a weird thing to be good at but I think I’m really good at it, you guys. Like, if there is something I’ve spent my entire life training to be good at, it’s watching and talking about TV. I love it. I don’t watch as much of it as I used to, and I’m not as passionate about some of the shows I used to really, like, triple heart love (Oh, The Office, this hurts me) but when I love a show, I LOVE A SHOW. Like with my whole being. I was just telling Joe the other day that sometimes I worry about my level of obsession when it comes to shows like Community and Friday Night Lights. I feel like those shows are EMBEDDED IN MY SOUL, along with so many others. (Here, I will list them: (early) The Office, The X-Files, Buffy, Party Down, Arrested Development, Veronica Mars, Pushing Daisies, Friends, Sports Night, LOST, DOCTOR WHO OMG.)

Because, you guys? If Community was a person, I would be stalking it. I’d pitch a tent on Community’s front lawn, steal buy the most expensive binoculars I could find, and write love haikus to it in my own blood.

Same goes for all those other shows, too. I’M GLAD THEY ARE NOT PEOPLE OR I’D NEED A BLOOD TRANSFUSION RIGHT NOW. DO YOU SEE HOW MUCH I LOVE THEM? I ABUSE CAPS LOCK, ALL FOR THEM! I DO IT ALL FOR YOU, MULDER SHOWS!

So maybe it’s weird to think I’m good at watching TV, but if it’s good enough for Adam Scott, it’s good enough for me.

2. Picking out books

The other day, I was reading through some Cannonball Reads reviews, looking for books to add to my To Read list on Goodreads (THERE ARE SO MANY BOOK WEBSITES I LOVE IT), when I noticed that there were people reviewing books that they hadn’t so much enjoyed. Maybe they even hated them, who knows? I don’t remember. Sorry.

It was at that point that I realized I hardly ever finish a book and think, “Oh, wow, I hated that.” It’s only happened a handful of times, when I finished The Devil Wears Prada (OK, I did not finish it, I threw the book down in disgust after only a chapter or two), some book by Paulo Coelho (that, in retrospect, I maybe only hated because it was about love and I was maybe not in a good place in my life at that time to be reading about love?), and Atonement (sorry, Ashley). I’m sure there are other books I didn’t like, but I do tend to really enjoy the majority of the books I read. Maybe it’s because I have low expectations, I don’t know, but I prefer to think that I’m just really good at picking out books that I’ll enjoy.

Or I just enjoy all most books. IT’S A MYSTERY.

3. Replacing the words of a song with different words

See post title.

(This one might be cheating because I mostly just replace the words in songs with things like “butt” or “poop” or “buttpoop,” but I think it still counts.)

4. Buying gifts for people

Just...here:

FLASH!

5. Memorizing useless information (mostly in relation to pop culture, to be completely honest)

Like I said, this is mostly in relation to movie quotes from the late 90s/early 00s and TV quotes from always, but I also contain random factoids about orthodontics, even though I haven’t worked at the orthodontist office in five years, as well behind-the-scenes X-Files information, where to fast-forward to if you only want to watch the Elizabeth Bennet/Mr. Darcy googly-eyes scenes in Pride & Prejudice* (this is because I first owned the miniseries ON VHS), and that the inventor of the brassier was Otto Titzling (not, as one might assume, Mr. Titspervert Fitzherbert).

*the real one

We drink and we dry up and now we crumble into dust.

Five things I'm good at? Gosh, I don't know. I'd say I'm pretty adequate at a lot of things, but actually good? I guess breathing would probably be one of those things. Heck, I don't even have to think about it yet there I go on, continuing to be alive.

Writing my Collective post is definitely not one of those things. I can't ever seem to think of anything to write about, or on those increasingly rare occasions I do come up with an idea I can never actually put any meat on those bones. Oh! Putting meat on my bones! I've very good at that. In fact, I've eaten THREE DONUTS in THREE DAYS and managed to gain, like, thirty pounds in the process. Go me.

My nose has been just a continuous snot faucet for almost an entire year now, which means I must have gotten very good at creating mucus. In fact, I am probably the all-time world record holder in boxes of tissues used in a single day.

It's pretty well documented that I am the exact opposite of a champion sleeper, but when I DO sleep, I excel at having very specific nightmares (there's the one where I'm in trouble with someone at work, and then there's the one where I realize at the end of the semester I've skipped all my classes and have no idea what day I have which class, where said classes actually meet, and how to speak, like, French or whatever). So that's been fun.

And jigsaw puzzles. I'm very good at those.

Dinosaurs is fine.

I make a pretty big deal out of only doing things I'm good at because success rate is key to my daily happiness. In order to avoid all the millions of things I'm bad at, I keep a mental running list of comfort zone activities. So when I asked my friends tonight casually to help with my post, I was curious to see what they would come up with. Some might call this fishing, but I'm so shameless about it that it's obviously no plea for a confidence boost. Plus, this is what they came up with:

"Guys, what am I good at?"

"Excel spreadsheets"
"Bossy boots"
"Better at everything than your brother"
"Vacations"
"Planning in general"
"Steps, dude"
"Sleeping on the floor"

For the most part, that hits the nail on the head. I would say:

1) Getting 10,000 steps a day. Nothing had motivated me to exercise more than a pedometer. Numbers for the win.

2) Both knowing the right thing to do and telling other people to do it.

3) Planning things.

4) Using technology to maximize efficiency.

5) Procrastinating. Ohhhhhh yeahhhhhhhh. It took me two hours to write this post. Also during that time I read all of Pinterest, tried several times to beat a really hard level of Ponon Delux (and failed), managed to get 200 steps walking to and from the kitchen where I tidied here and there but mostly just picked at a block of cheese, planned how to get the rest of my steps for today and where to gather tomorrow, and mostly did a lot of alt-tab hemming and hawing. It's truly amazing I even have a job (especially considering my penchant for vacations).

Of course, I don't consider myself much of a blogger (NOT FISHING PLEASE DON'T CONTRADICT ME) so that could contribute to the hemming and the hawing. Best wrap this up before I shoot my success rate.

OH. SOMETHING I FORGOT. Taking pictures of myself on my phone. On that note:

Feast your ear tongues on these memory pops!

This week's Collective topic is: List five things you're good at, which is kind of a conundrum for me. For one thing, I have a really hard time in general talking about things I do well. But in this weird way where I weave a lie about the opposite thing being true. Like, my family spent their whole lives thinking I was the kind of person who burns down the house every time I step into the kitchen, until one day at a family dinner, Amy was just like, "Oh, my God, you guys, Heather is a really good cook! I don't know why she pretends like she's not, but I can't listen to this nonsense anymore!"

And if I'm not concocting stories about sucking (which: I do suck a pretty good bit of the time), I just won't tell things because I don't want anyone to think I'm bragging, My ability to say nice things about myself is inversely proportional to the successes I'm having in my life. If my career is going swimmingly, you won't hear a peep out of me unless I'm doing twatty social media business. It's like I feel like I need to apologize maybe? Because I know so many more people who deserve the success more than me? Or I just don't want to come off as some kind of arrogant prick like the Heather Hogan basketball player of yore? I don't know. And also, another reason I have a hard time talking about things at which I excel is because I'm really, really hard on myself and I know I could always be doing better. (Unless I do my very best. In which case I'm like, "Oh God, that was my best. I'll never match it no matter how hard I try. It's all downhill from here. WAAAHHHH!")

Even now I'm stalling because I don't want to tell you five things.

OK, here I go.

Deep breath.

1) I am a really fucking excellent sister.

2) I am pretty funny TV recapper.

3) I make delicious homemade pizza and brownies.

4) I have above-average hand-eye coordination (even though I'm very clumsy).

5) I'm awesome at pets. My pets. Your pets. Anyone's pets. Children and animals love me.

Hey, look, an animal who loves me:



LOL, Nala, what are you doing?

deja vu is usually a glitch in the matrix

  I couldn’t remember exactly when we got the internet, so I had to consult my high school journal. You might think it weird that I would have written extensively about the internet in my journal, but I did. Along with descriptions of every interaction I had with my HS crushes, I wrote at length about my favorite TV shows AND how much time I spent on the internet talking about my favorite TV shows. Basically, my high school journal was my blog before blogs existed.

From what I could tell from my journal, before I cringed so hard that my face fell off, we got the internet sometime in 1996 or 1997. And by internet, of course, I mean the kind that came on a CD in the mail...AOL! We started with AOL 3.0 and I think...I think (?) it went up to 7.0 before I moved out and was introduced to the wonder of network internet that you just plugged into your computer from the wall! No dial up! What?

You guys, though, remember dial up? That ksssh kssh wiiiiirrrrrr noise? It brings back so many pleasant memories. It gives me chills, just a little. Shut up. 

 

Remember how sometimes it wouldn't connect right away? And so it would dial over and over and over and you'd just sit and wait, getting more and more anxious that it wouldn't connect, until finally (FINALLY) you heard those magical words:



I swear that early adoption of AOL is why I love You've Got Mail so damn much. I spent so much of my time on AOL, not JUST talking about The X-Files, but chatting with friends and creating terrible websites and lurking in chatrooms. 

Unfortunately, when we first got the internet, we only had one phone line so, you know, if someone was online, that meant no one could use the phone. WE WERE LIVING LIKE SAVAGES. I think I was limited to about an hour of online time a night, which I completely adhered to. Until my parents went to bed and then I'd sneak downstairs and sign on, typing as quietly as possible and SHH-ing the modem.

My internet journey, such as it is, looks something like this:

97 - 2000: AOL

2000 - 2004: Went to college, got fancy fast internet for quick Napster downloads. YES NAPSTER.

2005: Moved out on my own, had to use Netzero or some nonsense dial up because I was super poor and it only cost like $10 a month. 

2006 - Present: Moved in with Heidi, then Joe, suddenly everything was wireless and magical.

Or I suppose it might look like this:

1997 - 2000: Used the internet to talk about TV shows, primarily The X-Files, made nerd friends, and messed with people in AOL chatrooms by entering and saying things like, “the cat flies by the window at midnight with milk for the baby.” The a/s/l people did not like me.  

2000 - 2004: Used the internet for homework/studying, illegal music downloads, and drunken IMing. Started a Diaryland blog that still exists and yes I will link to it because I have no shame. Moved to Blogger for reasons I don't remember. 

2005: Used the internet for blogging. Constantly. Sometimes several times a day. I think I used my blog as a Tumblr before there was Tumblr. "Met" Kat, who (I think?) was sort of my gateway drug to quite a few of you here on this internet (and even some people OFF of this internet...did you know those people exist, because they do).

2006 - Present: I currently use the internet to start and abandon projects and blogs. And like Abigail, I now use the internet for everything. If I don’t know the answer to a question or want to know how to do something, I ask Google. I babble to you all in several different arenas, but not as much as I used to. I use Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google Reader, Google+, GOOGLE EVERYTHING, and even Vox, before it went bye-bye. 

I’m not sure what my life would look like had I never become so enraptured by that first AOL disc, the suspense I felt as the modem connected, the deep contemplation that led to username changes, the obsession that led me right here, to a place in my life where not only do I, pretty much daily, express my thanks that the internet exists, but I’ve met the internet. I invited the internet to my wedding. And I can’t wait to see what the internet has in store for me in the future, even if it involves my consciousness being sucked into the matrix. 

The Matthew Crawley penis situation.

My family's on-ramp to the information superhighway was opened in 1995, a year you might remember as my junior year of high school. I, however, remember it as the year Mike Krzyzewski (spelled entirely from memory, after all this time) took a leave of absence from his coaching duties following back surgery. And I remember this because I used my internet driver's license for one thing and one thing only: scouring the Duke University men's basketball message boards.

There is literally nothing else to say about this.

I'm hardly online at all these days; I try to catch up on the day's news, read (if not comment on) whatever you all have written, skim the recaps of whatever television programs I happened to watch the night before. Mostly it seems I just want to build a blanket fort, crawl inside with my Kindle and hide out for a while. Which, of course, I can't do; I've got hockey tickets and dinner reservations and parties to attend, not to mention that Winston would likely destroy any blanket fort within minutes of its construction. What a tiny jerk.

the internet is just another way of being rejected by women.

I was eleven years old when my dad installed an AOL free trial disk. The year was 1996. My internet use was absolutely uncool--I didn't make any friends over X-Files forums.

In fact, I don't recall having any interests at all to research on the internet. I was interested in the internet for the internet's sake. So much so that I went into chat rooms and essentially harassed people by demanding that everyone in the room participate in trivia and typing contests. I was an extrovert game-lover with a single sibling who never indulged me. I thought the internet existed to finally give me a million brothers and sisters to play games with. (This dream wouldn't come true til 2005.)

In 1998 I got my first Yahoo! account (redroses_me@yahoo.com) that I used to sign up for email newsletters and play Yahoo! games. I'm pretty sure the account is gone forever because I tried to get back into it several years later and was completely shut out. Boo.

In 1999 I got an account with gURL.com which was a website run by a clothing catalog. Because that is how the internet worked then. I never got into TeenBop magazines or trends and I only started caring about legitimate magazines like Seventeen when I was 17 and decided I wanted to be editor of Poise. But man was I interested in their internet equivalents with clever names like gURL.com. That site is still running, by the way, if you've got any questions like how to talk to a boy you like or how come you're always mad at your parents.

In 2000 we had to take a class in high school called Cyber.Comm where we learned how to do research on the internet. Alta Vista and Dog Pile were the leading search engines and you couldn't just type in your brain mush and get results--you had to write actual queries and boolean-y things with parameters and junctions and complicated word equations.

In 2002 I started my very first blog with Blogger (which hadn't yet been bought by Google). It didn't have comments (Web 2.0 and Social Media were still a ways off) and it featured such publishable sentiments as:

So now I have a blog. Isn't that cute? I'm not exactly sure why I got one. They sounded kind of fun. I keep a journal but thats kinda private. Well, not always. Sometimes I let certain people read it. But I can't really monitor this that way.

In 2005--the same year I got a Facebook account, thanks timeline--I realized there were other blogs out there written by very talented people. I started commenting and linking and making friends. I bought my own domain so I could teach myself html and CSS and design a site. I started posting nearly every day. I became a much better writer. And I met the Collective.

These days I use the internet for just about every single part of my life. Email is how I do my job. Social networking is how I connect with my friends. All my interests run into and out of the magical satellites in the sky. I carry in my pocket a device that gives me the internet at all times so I can stay connected with those I love, get information that I need, and learn things I hadn't heard of yet.

I've had it nearly my whole life, but it looks so much different now than it did then. It looks so much different today than it did two years ago. And I've loved nearly every revelation and generation it ages. With the obvious exception of Facebook updates and Google Reader changes. God bless the World Wide Web.

I only use my sick days for hangovers and soap opera weddings.

 

It boggles my brain to realize I know people -- am, perhaps, making out on the regular with a person -- who have never not had the internet. I was the first person out of all my friends to get the internet at my house and I was a senior in high school when it happened. I remember my English teacher going, "Anyone caught using the internet, or 'World Wide Web,' for their term papers will be punished!" Now days I'm pretty sure kids just print off Wackopedia entries and turn those in for automatic As.

The thing I remember about the early days of the internet is that my sister and I stumbled across this place called Dustin's Days Page late one night and it was like finding hidden pirate treasure. Dustin's Days Page was a website where a dude watched Days of Our Lives every single day -- just like me and Jenn -- and wrote hilarious summaries of what had happened during the episodes. I think they may have been the very first TV recaps in the history of the world. There was a whole year of archives by the time Jenn and I found it, and we spent weeks staying up all night reading them out loud to each other and laughing until we hurt ourselves.

Last night I Googled "Dustin's Days Page" and found some soap opera forum posts from 2008 saying he retired to go to grad school. Apparently he was everyone else's first too:

Dustin's Days Page was virtually the first Days fan site on the web. His site was one of the first sites I began visiting when my family got the internet in 1996 -- twelve years ago! Everybody knows Dustin's Days Page!

Dustin's DAYS page was seriously the first DAYS site I got spoilers from when I started finding out that you could get spoilers from the internet.

Isn't it funny how all of us Days fans pretty much started out with Dustin's Days page in the late 90's. I remember when you would search on HotBot for Days, Dustin's page would always come up first on the list.

I had a Geocities fan site dedicated to Dustin's DAYS page!

Gee. I kinda feel left out. I don't think I've ever been to Dustin' site.

Clearly, you are not human.

You guys, a Geocities fan page! The very first spoilers!

1997 was when I got the internet. NINETEEN NINETY SEVEN. That was the year Kate came back from the dead for the second time.



She's lucky Vivian didn't bury her alive like she did to poor Carly.

and is there a cure?

There are a lot of things that make me crazy. In fact, I spend most of every moment talking myself back from various rage-fueled warpaths and cliffs. (Cliffs suddenly seems like the wrong word. I think it should be clives. Ryhmes with biz. One cliff, two clives.) Sometimes it almost feels centering when I can shift my rage from one of the gopher-like things that creep up on me as I try to manage them all (think whac-a-mole) to the things that are always making me crazy.

Like marketing decisions made with no research at all unless you count a (probably) old white guy saying something like, "Billboards! We should try billboards!"

Like the quests on FarmVille which I can't even quite describe beyond this bullshit:



(The game is forcing her to collect feather gel.)

Like what they did with Booth and Brennan on Bones at the end of the last season. And also this season.

Like when my drink can't be made correctly at Starbucks without me having to use my annoying condescending voice to actually make sure the barista is listening to my wooooords. (They guess my words a surprising amount of times.)

Like when I read a post on Google Reader and go to click share and then throw myself in front of a train.

Like when anyone I love does something they know is stupid.

Like when I do something stupid.

Doing the actual thing myself that makes me crazy? That really really takes the cake. Because in addition to pissing myself off, I've taken myself down a notch or two in my book making it harder to get away with my indignation the rest of the time. Like how I got sick this week. And then like how I forgot what day it was. So then I had to post late on Friday like a dope.

So what makes you guys crazy?

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together...mass hysteria!

   You know what really drives me crazy? When I completely lose track of what day it is and forget to write my Collective post. I lose track of what day it is almost every week, though, especially toward the end of the week, when my brain gets mushier and mushier. I’m usually OK on Monday and Tuesday and then by Wednesday, I’m all, “It’s Friday, right? It feels like it must be Friday so it has to be Friday because if there are more days in this week, I don’t know what I’ll do. DEAR GOD WHY ISN’T IT FRIDAY.”

So get ready for some crap, internets, because I have about ten minutes to write this! I wrote a little bit about this on my blog earlier this week, but the weather here in Ohio has been balls out crazy all winter. It was 60 yesterday. In February! I was outside, walking around with no coat on! What is happening? Is this the end of the world? I mean, that sucks and all, but if the weather is going to be this beautiful, I’m kind of OK with it.

What worries me is that today is Groundhog Day and the groundhog saw his shadow and got scared (pussy) so we definitely have six more weeks of winter (I mean, it’s science) but does that mean six more weeks from now or six more weeks of ACTUAL winter? Because I feel like we’ve only had a couple of weeks of actual winter so far. If that. I think I’ve only cursed the snow and ice once this winter, which is about ten times behind schedule so I’m not sure what’s going to happen. THE FIRST RULE OF WINTER CLUB IS DON’T TALK ABOUT WINTER CLUB OH JUST KIDDING WINTER CLUB POOPS ON RULES AHHHHHH!

You guys, if winter lasts until April, I really will go crazy. Like FOR REAL, set-my-name-on-fire-on-the-front-lawn, make-sculptures-out-of-my-own-hair, paint-the-walls-with-human-waste CRAZY. And I don’t think Joe wants to clean that up. We’d have to move and we just did that and if we had to do it again I’D GO EVEN CRAZIER.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Happy Groundhog Day.

BING!

DON'T TELL ME WHAT I CAN'T DO.

“I’ll be back. You sit there and insult yourself,” she said. But to that point I had not been insulting myself, nor was I planning to.

Nor have I ever.

And later, “Well, thanks for the compliment.”

“You’re welcome! (And I’m amazed you took it!)” she said.

“I’m not THAT stubborn,” by which I meant, “sometimes it’s easier to agree than disagree.”

“You are indeed complex,” she replied. “Many layers. Much intrigue.”

But even I am not that stubborn.