When You Hear the Call, You've Got to Get it Underway

I was in marching band in college, and we used to play a lot of older songs from the 70s and 80s at the football and basketball games. We used to play this song, and I really enjoyed marching band, and that is basically the only explanation I can come up with for why I nearly cried today when it came on the radio.



Don't worry, it was a happy almost-cry. Maybe someday, when I finally have my nervous breakdown, we'll look back and recognize this as the first sign that I was losing it.

I'm Delightful at Parties, As Well!

In August, I said goodbye to my roommate and moved into a one-bedroom apartment by myself. It's a lovely place, albeit probably a bit more money than I ought to be spending right now. I lived with my roommate for my first two years in town, and I'm glad I did, because it saved me some money and she was a good roommate, in general. She paid the bills on time, she mostly cleaned up after herself, and she never threw any wild parties or brought home any drifters (that I know of). Nevertheless, I am thrilled to be rid of her, and so I shall compile a list of her faults now.

1) She talked to the television, nearly constantly.
2) She would get drunk on wine once a week, and the wine always made her talk to the TV even more.
3) She only drank cabernet sauvignon, which she referred to as "cab sav."
4) She was incapable of drinking wine without spilling it at least once, which then had to be followed by a loud and drunken rush to clean it up.
5) She almost never took out the trash or the recycling, even though it was always full-to-bursting with empty cab sav bottles.
6) Anytime she had a group project for school, she insisted on hosting the whole group at our apartment and cooking dinner for them. (Had these people never heard of coffee shops?)
7) Once, she invited 7 people over for dinner and forgot to tell me, so that I woke up from a late afternoon nap (shut up) to the sounds of a congregation in my kitchen.
8) She always left the pantry door open.
9) She once put cheese in the knife drawer by accident, and we didn't find it for a week.
10) She left the milk out on the counter one morning and it was spoiled by the time I got home.
11) She would always roll around on the couch and jack up the slipcover, and never straightened it when she got up.
12) She never pushed her chair back under the table when she got up.
13) She had all of her phone conversations on speakerphone, with her bedroom door open.
14) Whenever her boyfriend was over, they laid on each other on the couch.
15) She once complained that she weighed 130, which was "the most she had ever weighed," and as a result she could "feel her belly shake when she walked."
16) She liked to watch Jersey Shore, Keeping up with the Kardashians, Chelsea Lately, and awards shows.
17) She got up early to watch the Royal Wedding, and enjoyed it so much that she watched the highlights all over again on E! later that day.
18) She kept her bikes (two of them) in the dining room.
19) She offered to care for her friend's cat all summer, and then took a job in another city, leaving me alone to care for the cat 4 days a week. The cat was a prodigious urinater, by the way.
20) Whenever she didn't understand something, she would repeat it loudly and incredulously, and then declare it "weird."

Some of these complaints are reasonable, and some of them are not. I know that, but I can't tell the difference, which is why I have to live by myself. I would probably be hard-pressed to find a better roommate than this girl. She even gave me a gift when I got my Master's in May. Nevertheless, living with her drove me crazy. It seems that my standards for perfection are too high, my fault-finder too sensitive, my desire for privacy and for people to SERIOUSLY-QUIT-TOUCHING-MY-SHIT too extreme. So now I have no choice but to live by myself in a one-bedroom apartment, slowly spending down my savings in an effort to secure that priceless commodity that I like to call "a dining room that doesn't look like a bike messenger's garage."

I'll tell you what, though: the pantry door is always closed, and I can finally watch TV in peace.

Momentary Joys

I have a weird relationship with writing. Actually, I have a weird relationship with most of the things I love to do. Writing, running, playing music. Almost every day, I feel inspired to do these things. I read Black Hockey Jesus, who is an amazing writer (and a runner, come to think of it), or Alice Bradley's blog about writing, and I think to myself, I'll write something! I'll realize my potential! I'll do what I've always loved to do!

I drive down the road and pass what seems like a Macy's-sponsored parade of runners, decked out in spandex and energetic ponytails, their cheeks and noses pink with enthusiasm, and I feel a vicarious elation. I resolve to start running again, right away.

But before I have even opened a Word document or pulled on my shoes, I've talked myself out of it. I've gone so long without blogging, I reason, no one would read it anyway. I've never finished a story that wasn't an assignment for a 6th grade English class. I haven't run regularly since November, so I probably wouldn't even make it 2 miles. What's the point in starting if I won't finish? What's the point in doing it if I can't do it well? Shouldn't I be spending that time doing schoolwork anyway? I've yet to find a scrap of joy that I can't fashion into a straitjacket.

Instead of doing things I love, I beat myself up about not doing them, or not doing them well enough. I tell myself I'm a failure for letting my blog sit stale for 7 months. I'm lazy and gross because I stopped running and gained 7 lbs over Christmas. I have no ambition, no talent, no perseverance.

Of course, the simple answer is, Girl, you crazy.

It's our choice how we spend our time, obviously. There is no authoritative maniac running up to strangers on the street, yelling, "Why aren't you learning to play the clarinet, you worthless piece of shit?!?" We have no responsibility to please anyone but ourselves. I'm not unhappy because I'm not living up to a street maniac's standards, I'm unhappy because I'm not doing the things I know I enjoy, because as soon as I start doing them, I worry about the street maniac's standards. Does that make sense? Of course not. I know. Girl, you crazy.

I think the answer is to live in the moment. At any given moment, you're either doing something that satisfies you, or you're not. Right now I'm writing, and I'm enjoying it. Sometime in the future someone may read it, or they may not. Hopefully, at some moment in the future, I'll be running and enjoying it, and it won't matter how far I go, or whether I ran the day before, or will run the day after. Instead of coming up with reasons that my passions are a waste of time, I would probably be better off asking myself, "Would it make me feel awesome to do this right now?" Because while my writing and running and generally living may not please the judgmental street maniac, I suspect that coming up with new ways to call myself a failure isn't what he had in mind, either.

In Which I Compare My Vertebrae to Irresponsible Teen Drivers

The 10-mile race I was so excited to run was Saturday. And I wasn't in it.

Let's back up. I've been having progressively worse back pain over the past few years, basically ever since I graduated from college and started spending a lot of time sitting in front of a computer. I'm not handicapped or anything like that, but my shoulders and lower back get really tight and sore. Also, I have had some off-and-on pain in my hip after running that someone once told me might have something to do with my hips being out of whack. (I'm pretty sure that's the medical jargon for it.) Although my Mom swears by her chiropractor, I've always been pretty skeptical of them, what with them being uneducated witch doctors and all. (Kidding!) Nevertheless, when I got a coupon for a free exam and x-rays from a chiropractor who was recommended by some people in my running group, I figured I'd give it a shot.

The week after I got the !GREAT NEWS! from the Sports Medicine doctor that I would be OK to jump back on the wagon and finish training for the race, I went to see the chiropractor for the second time. We were going to follow-up on the x-rays and talk about his recommendations. He sat me down and showed me the x-rays of my back alongside someone else's x-rays. The other person's x-rays were meant to serve as an example of a 'good,' well-behaved spine. It curved in all the right places and had spacious, well-defined gaps between each vertebrae. It was a nice spine.

My spine, on the other hand, was slightly less admirable. It was mostly alright, really, until you got to my lower back and then things started to look a little off. Imagine for a moment that my spine is a highway and my vertebrae are cars. The x-ray looked a little like what would happen if the drivers of my bottom two vertebrae got distracted while driving (probably sexting or applying makeup, as young women are wont to do), and then when they looked up, the vertebra in front of them had stopped short and OOPS they bumped into them. Not real hard, just enough that the flow of traffic is all jacked up. So now my vertebrae cars are jammed and the spine highway isn't all curved and pretty like the one in the other exemplary x-ray, and suddenly I'm in a chiropractor's office feeling jealous of another woman whose skin I've never even seen.

The chiropractor's explanation for this was that either I was born with my vertebrae like that OR I injured my back at some point in the past and it healed that way. In either case, he said that there's nothing that can be done to change the fact that they're jammed together, but that he should be able to help get things better aligned and take some of the strain off my nerves and muscles. Doing so would take at least 4 weeks, and oh by the way, I shouldn't run during those 4 weeks because it would make treatment less effective.

So. After receiving all of this news I was... quite upset. Understandably. I was terrified that there might be something permanently wrong with my back, I was confused that he claimed I'd suffered an injury that I didn't remember having, I was pissed that he hadn't been more delicate and compassionate when he explained all this to me, and I was devastated that the possibility of running the race was slipping away again just when I thought everything was going to work out.

What's embarrassing is that of all these concerns, the thing I was most upset about was the possibility of not being able to run the race. Specifically, I was worried about what the people in the running group would think of me. On some level I was OK with the idea of giving up on the race, since I had just taken a month off training and I only had 3 weeks to get ready, but the idea that people would KNOW I had signed up for a race and then dropped out made me feel like a failure. When I signed up for the training group, I felt excited and proud that I was finally declaring myself a 'runner' who was comfortable associating with other runners. When I hurt myself and had to stop running, I consoled myself by thinking that I'd be healed up and back to training in no time. When everyone saw me return to training and then later run across the finish line, they would know that I was serious and not just a quitter.

But if I couldn't run the race after all, they wouldn't know how serious and determined I was. I'd just be some strange girl who had dropped out of training after 2 months and was never seen again. A quitter, and a failure, and a wanna-be. The idea of 'real' runners thinking those things about me was devastating, as embarrassing as that is.

Unfortunately, once I admitted to myself that the reason I was having a nervous breakdown over this whole thing was because I was afraid people would think bad things about me (and not, say, because I have TRAFFIC JAM SPINE), I had no choice but to do the rational thing and let go of the race. I emailed the handful of people from the running group that I had become friends with to let them know that I wouldn't be coming back to training after all, and whaddaya know, they were all really nice about it. Because of course they were. Because most people are mostly kind and good (I think), and this whole thing was really just about the Asshole Voice in my Head messing with me.

So I didn't get to run the race, and I was sorely disappointed, but I just keep reminding myself that I have a lifetime of races ahead of me if I want to run them, and this isn't the end of the world. As far as my back goes, I'm still a little skeptical of the chiropractor's explanations for why it's messed up, but there's no denying that those x-rays looked shady, and also no denying that my back pain has improved a lot in the past few weeks. I wouldn't say I'm a convert, exactly, but I'm less... openly dismissive, shall we say? At the end of this week he's supposed to take another round of x-rays, and if I don't like what he has to say then I SHALL SEEK A SECOND OPINION. From a real doctor, this time. Meanwhile, I've been cleared to ease back into running again (again), so I'll be working on that. Hooray! Thanks for checking in.

I'm Still Hoping to Get a Doctor's Note Validating This as a Legitimate Medical Condition

Although I am now officially 25 years old, I continue to have the sleeping habits of an unsupervised 12-year-old on summer vacation. I routinely stay up past midnight for no apparent reason, and often take hours-long naps as soon as I get home in the evenings. Most of the people close to me are aware of these habits, and they all think it is HAHA HILARIOUS to joke about how I can't get anywhere on time in the morning, which is not even true, thankyouverymuch. If you want me to arrive on time, you just have to plan your event after 10 am. Otherwise, you should be aware that there is about a 75% chance that I'm going to be late.

Anyway, I've been thinking about it, and I've come up with a few potential explanations for why my sleep schedule is so erratic. It could be any one of these things, but I suspect that it's probably a combination of all three of them...

Reason #1: I just like to be up late at night. To me, there's something mystical about being up late at night, and I've liked it ever since I was a little kid. Even though it scared me a little, I used stay up well into the night reading, the only person awake in my house. I liked to imagine that my bed, ensconced in lamplight, was an island adrift in a sea of peace and solitude and darkness. Being awake late at night, when most other people are asleep, makes me feel both completely independent from and inextricably connected to everyone else in the world. Our differences are greatly attenuated when we're unconscious, and unconscious people can't exert their will upon each other. There's freedom and unity in the dead of night.

Reason #2: I simply don't understand the connection between the time I go to bed at night and the time I'll have to get up the next morning. This is related to the fantastical way I have of thinking about the nighttime. While intellectually I understand that one day blends into the next and that getting up early means I should go to bed early, I think that somewhere deep down I really believe that the amount of sleep I get is somehow a constant, and that whatever I do late at night doesn't really count as yesterday or tomorrow. I have been proven wrong on this point repeatedly, most recently last night when I stayed up until 3 am reading, even though I had to get up at 7:30 and go to work. And yet I persist behaving as though the time after the sun goes down is actually time spent in the Twilight Zone, completely unrelated to how I spend daylight hours.

Reason #3: Procrastination. I firmly believe that the best possible way to accomplish anything is to put it off for as long as possible. I think that my poor sleeping habits might be a natural extension of my tendency toward procrastination. It starts with procrastinating homework, then procrastinating running and phone calls and showering, and suddenly you're procrastinating the start of an entire day. Because part of me believes that if I don't sleep, tomorrow won't come, and thus staying up late is a way to prevent tomorrow from ever arriving. If late-night is timeless, I don't have any responsibilities, and if tomorrow doesn't come, I'll NEVER have any responsibilities. It's clearly a win-win.

... At least, it seems like a brilliant strategy while I'm reading and playing video games until 4 am. But 3 hours later when my alarm is going off and I'm forced to trudge to work and write a grant proposal with only the vaguest remaining grasp of the English language, suddenly it doesn't seem so smart. But what can I do? Twelve hours later the sun goes down, and I'm whisked off into responsibility-free solitude, once again.

Data Whore

Ever the dedicated social scientist, I've found that one of the most rewarding parts of running is the sweet, sweet data it produces. I have a fancy-pants sports watch that lets me keep track of my pace and my time and my time for each mile, and more than once I have managed to work up the motivation to get out the door and run simply by thinking about the satisfaction I'd feel when I got home and entered the data into my spreadsheet.

It's OK, I'll wait while you chuckle at my insanity. Is my spreadsheet any less ridiculous if I say that I only keep track of the ones that are over 5 miles? No? Alright then.

This is the kind of illness that could hypothetically lead someone to make an Excel spreadsheet to track how they're spending their time at work, in order to determine how guilty they ought to feel about their shameless internet addiction. (The answer, hypothetically? Very guilty.) (Also, if someone has a problem with procrastination at work, maybe their first response shouldn't be to make a completely un-work-related spreadsheet. But I digress.)

My compulsion to analyze everything for patterns and meaning extends to just about everything, to the extent that I often find myself mentally composing poetic meditations on the similarities between autumn leaves and adolescence, or whatever. Sometimes the "meaning" behind things is obvious to the point of being cliche, while on the other hand sometimes a thing just is what it is. But what really drives me crazy is when something seems like it must hold a deeper meaning that I just can't put into words.

For instance. I've been running off and on for a long time, and usually when I start back up again I get really bad blood blisters, which are gross and I'm sorry I brought it up. But blisters, when left alone, heal up and turn into calluses over time, and eventually my feet don't hurt nearly as much because they're protected by the calluses. Of course, after awhile the calluses start to wear away and then eventually I'm back down to unblemished, unprotected, youthful skin. And generally the cycle starts again. Since today was the day that I reached that point - the clean skin starting-over point - and I was scheduled to run 5 miles, I thought about this blister-callus-recovery cycle all day long. I really feel like it must be a metaphor for something, but I can't figure out what, and it's driving me a little crazy, like a word on the tip of my tongue, or a familiar fact abruptly forgotten. And then this afternoon, a new wrinkle: I finished my run and I gingerly removed my socks to find... no new blisters. Skin that was sore and red, and a little blistery in places, but not nearly the disaster I expected.

So I just don't know. I feel like I should be able to spin this pattern into a great metaphor for some aspect of life, but it's not coming to me. Either I'm losing my touch, or sometimes a foot is just a foot, even for an analytical Excel wizard.

Oh, Just Shut Up and Say Thank You

I've been in a little bit of a funk for the past few days, and I think it has to do with my birthday last week. It's not because I'm having some kind of existential crisis about aging, though. I know I'm still young, and even if I weren't I think it's a little silly to get all worked up about the process of aging. You might as well cry when the sun sets every day. (Although we'll see how serene I am about it when I turn 30... or 40... or 50...) No, what I have is an existential crisis about something else.

I had a really great birthday week, I'd say. It revealed a virtual embarrassment of riches, in both material gifts and in the form of people that love me. The problem I'm having is that, to me, it is also a literal embarrassment of riches. When you're faced like that, all at once, with an overflow of pitch-perfect kindnesses and love, it's a lot of pressure. I'm suddenly conscious of my great luck, my privilege, my blessedness, to be loved by these people, and fearful that I don't deserve it.

I don't always receive gifts and compliments well, is what I'm trying to say. It makes me anxious and melancholy. What if I don't deserve it? What if this poor person's affection is misplaced? How will I ever thank them adequately? What if I disappoint them, and then they rue the day they were ever kind to me? All of this good fortune can't possibly be a good thing. It might as well be frogs raining from the heavens or blood filling my bathtub, so certain are the terrible consequences that will follow.

You have no idea how much work it is, finding a way to twist a blessing into a curse. I'd make a joke about Jewish guilt, but I'm not Jewish (or Catholic) and thus have no cultural stereotype to fall back on.

Ultimately I suppose I'm just as deserving of a great birthday as anyone else is, and it's not very gracious of me to go around questioning the wisdom of those who care about me. So, just to be polite, I'm trying to accept it gratefully and without skepticism.

Dear Diary: Last week was my birthday and it was awesome. I am a very lucky girl, and there's nothing wrong with that. So there.

Imagine Me, Running Up To You, Breathless

Oh Internet! We have so much catching up to do, don't we??

Filling you in on the last month will probably take awhile, so for now I'll just give you the brief version and then I can fill in the blanks over the next few days. Or weeks. Or however long it takes before I forget what it was I promised to tell you. So... let's see, what have you missed?

I (barely) survived the end of my first year of grad school. Don't worry, I've recovered now, but if I were typing this post 2 or 3 weeks ago !T wo_UlD pro0obly luK &L;Ke ThI$. And then after that there would 3 paragraphs of random letters because I would have passed out on the keyboard. But it's cool, I slept for 15 hours and once I could remember my name things really started improving.

I didn't run at all for the second half of April (or the first half of May, for that matter) on account of the thing where grad school almost killed me. But I did sign up to run a half marathon in September. Because... I don't know, I don't understand how exercise works? More on that development later.

After school was over I spent most of the next 2 weeks with Lee hanging out, preparing for his graduation, watching him graduate, helping him pack/sell/throw away all of his things, and driving (20 hours!) to his new home, which is in Texas. Sunday I flew back to North Carolina and it's no big deal, except for that MY BABY IS IN TEXAS AND I'LL PROBABLY NEVER SEE HIM AGAIN AND ok ok I'm calm. Again, I'll have to write a whole separate post about that ordeal because it was exciting and infuriating and - spoiler alert! - turns out you can't pack an entire apartment in one day, in spite of your boyfriend's most optimistic projections.

And that pretty much brings us up to this week, which mostly consists of me starting my summer job (a research assistantship) and settling back into a routine. Woo!

So, what have you been up to?

Pulling Ourselves Up By Stepping On Others

At the beginning of the month of February, I set a goal for myself: to stop vocally criticizing other people. Then I spent the rest of the month trying to figure out why it was so hard to follow through on that goal. Obviously I knew from the beginning that I had a 'problem' with criticizing people, otherwise I wouldn't have made it a goal to stop doing it. I just wasn't prepared for how often the issue would come up day to day. I kept finding myself about to criticize someone, then stopping myself, then deciding to go ahead and say it anyway because 'this one doesn't count.'

That sounds like I was just rationalizing bad behavior, I know, but hear me out. Does it count if I'm commiserating with classmates about how I've been disappointed by a professor's teaching style? Does it count if I'm telling a friend about what a difficult time another friend has been giving me lately? What, exactly, had I meant when I made such a broad goal?

I wanted to come back here and post about how hard it was, but I couldn't because I couldn't even put my finger on what the problem was. I felt like I instinctively understood the difference between 'ok' criticism and 'bad' criticism, but I couldn't put the distinction into words.

Then, sometime last week, I happened upon a blog post called Why Being Good Sucks at obeymyblog.com* and suddenly everything made sense. You can go read the whole post if you like, but the part that's really relevant is this passage:

"If you consider yourself a “good” person, then that means other people must be “bad.” Not you. Never.

In an effort to prop yourself up as “good,” you will attempt to call out and crucify others who you believe contain the very “bad” qualities you deny in yourself. You will create enemies, point fingers, blame others and get mad. If along the way, other people join you, you can all call yourselves good and others bad – solidified in self-righteousness and in your total denial of ever doing anything bad or wrong."

When I first read it, I thought, "Yeah, that!" That's the problem! That's the reason I'm sometimes filled with guilt after I get done with a particularly satisfying rant about someone else's faults. It's not necessarily the nature or the accuracy of what I'm saying, it's my motivation in saying it. Because I've noticed that a lot of the people I most vehemently criticize are people that... how do I say this? *DEEP BREATH*

...They're people I'm scared of. They're people that intimidate me, or that I envy, or that I believe think they're better than me, which we all know is probably just The Crazy projecting itself onto others. When I find faults in those people, I shout it from the rooftops, and then I feel better about myself. Ha, I think, who's the better person NOW? But of course the joy of establishing myself as superior is immediately followed by overwhelming shame. "Good" people don't spend their time tearing other people down behind their backs. I know this. And if I have to disparage other people to make myself feel better, I'm not a good person at all. I'm just a dirty bully.

I don't want to paint myself as a monster here. I spend plenty of time doing things other than pointing out other people's faults. I have hobbies! I read books! But I think any time spent engaged in petty criticism is too much time. I'm not convinced that I did a great job meeting my personal goal for February, but I have gained some insight into why I keep doing something that invariably makes me feel like dirt. I'm hoping that in the future I can take this information and use it constructively. If I feel compelled to take someone down a notch, maybe instead I'll take a minute to ask myself: Why do I find this person so threatening in the first place? Isn't there something more productive I can do to address my own issues, instead of distracting myself by acting like a character in Mean Girls? I'd like to think so, at least. I'll let you know how it goes.

*I think I found the link to this post on twitter, through Zen Habits, which I sometimes read. With regard to Obey My Blog, I've only read the one post, so I can't yet vouch for the quality of the rest of the blog one way or another.

P.S. I know I need to come up with a goal for March, but I haven't decided on it yet, so I'll have to get back to you in the next couple of days. If you stop by and you have any suggestions, holler!

Come, Look Into the Face of Madness

Do you ever do that thing where Something Major is about to happen, but you don't really feel all that anxious about it? But you feel like you ought to feel anxious about it, so instead of feeling anxious about the Something Major, you start feeling anxious about the ramifications of NOT feeling anxious about Something Major? No? Me neither, that's ridiculous.

Tomorrow is my first day of official grad school business. I am remarkably calm. Yet still essentially a nutjob.

Romanticized Life Fantasy #954

Live on the coast of Maine in a big, old, ramshackle house. Wear high-necked, long dresses, trimmed with lace. Spend my days looking out the windows of my majestic house and/or standing by the shore, awaiting the return of my beloved fisherman boyfriend. Befriend one (1) neighborhood child and teach him how to play the piano, but allow all other children to fear me. Behave strangely so as to feed rumors that I am either a) a witch or b) an actual ghost.



(I have never actually been to Maine.)

Run, Don't Walk, To Your Nearest Mental Health Professional

I ran across this article on The Onion today, and I like it because sometimes I worry that this is what it's like to talk to me:

"Rhetorical Pleasantry Elicits 45-Minute Response"

Some would agree that that is, in fact, what it's like to talk to me. But those people can GO TO HELL AND DIE.

*****

Speaking of extremely inappropriate responses, the Asshole Voice in My Head had a bit of a renaissance this past weekend. Maybe he was trying to help me celebrate my birthday, I don't know. All I know is that on Friday night, Lee and I were supposed to hang out with my friends Cristina and Todd, because Todd was also having a birthday last weekend, but that was all preempted by The Asshole's treacherous muttering. On Thursday, Cristina was originally a little vague on the plan for the evening, mentioning only that we "might go out somewhere" and that she would call me Friday. She really seemed excited for us all to hang out. So my plan was to have dinner and spend time with Lee until I heard from Cristina, and then later tag along for Todd's birthday festivities.

On Friday night, however, it got later and later and I still hadn't yet heard from Cristina. I didn't want to call her and ask what the deal was though, because she had seemed so vague, and for all I knew they had changed their minds and decided to do something that was just the two of them. Finally, around 10 pm, when Lee and I were busy amending our plans to just watching a movie and getting drunk in my apartment, I finally got a text from Cristina saying, "We're going to head to Boozetown in about an hour." I wasn't sure how to take this. Could she not have filled me in on the plan earlier? What had she been doing all this time? Luckily, before I could get too confused, the Asshole in My Head graciously stepped up and offered his own explanation. Obviously, he said, they've been having a fantastic time doing super-fun things with other people that are NOT YOU and you weren't invited along for that because Cristina and Todd don't actually like you and would prefer if you were not a part of their lives at all. Actually, he went on, all of your other "friends" probably feel the same way about you, too. Happy birthday!

(My personal brand of Crazy. It's like paranoid schizophrenia, but without all the excitement of auditory hallucinations and delusions of grandeur.)

I expressed this reasonable interpretation of the events to Lee. He, in turn, expressed some skepticism, but told me that he would go along with whatever I wanted to do. We sat in silence for a little while, as I'm sure Lee wondered just how irrational I planned to get this time, and I listened attentively as the Asshole In My Head expounded on his central thesis of how and why I have no friends. Finally, he concluded with: ...So you see, really all you can do is stay home and feel sorry for yourself, since obviously they don't actually want you there anyway. You should probably also drink half a bottle of wine, to teach everyone a lesson.

"Yeah, that'll show 'em!" I agreed. "What??" Lee said. My eyes narrowed with resolve. "Take me to get some wine."

I texted Cristina back and told her that I wasn't sure if we would join them, but to let me know when they were on their way to the bar. In the meantime, I followed the advice of The Asshole and drank me some wine while we watched the first half of The Day The Earth Stood Still. (The remake with Keanu Reeves. I find him attractive and I SHALL NOT apologize for it.) (The movie, however, was mediocre.) By the time Cristina notified me that they were on their way to the bar I was feeling (thankfully) much more jovial and forgiving, and I think The Asshole was taking a wine-induced nap, or something. "Well, we ought to at least make an appearance," I told Lee. "Just to be nice."

And so we joined them and I celebrated with more booze and even though it wasn't ideal I considered the evening a success because at least I got to get drunk and flirt with my boyfriend. And I didn't throw up. The end.

My main point ('Oh, here it is!' you may be saying to yourself) is that I'm a little concerned that The Asshole in My Head was able to get me so riled up, so long after I declared him to be 84% conquered. I think the reason he got so powerful the first time around is because I was dealing with a major life transition at the time, so I'm kind of worried that he's going to try to stage a coup again soon, since I'll be distracted with all the moving to a new town and getting a new roommate and starting grad school and slowly draining my bank account. So I think that what we have to do is come up with a few ways to protect myself from The Asshole and his Crazy-making monologues. Here's what I've got so far...

Ways to Protect Myself From The Asshole in My Head
1. Tinfoil hat. Duh.
2. Ooh! Entire tinfoil SUIT OF ARMOR. Is someone writing this down?
3. Eating magic mushrooms until I develop a new Voice in My Head that can drown out The Asshole. Preferably one that has the commanding, yet compassionate voice of Mr. T. Or Morgan Freeman. Or Sidney Poitier. I need a distinguished black actor, basically.
4. Counting. Constant counting.
5. Repeated hand-washing. That's healthy, right?
6. Teaching The Asshole to speak in a language that I don't know. Maybe one of the African click-languages.
7. Sedatives. Sedatives that were designed for large jungle mammals.
8. Hitting myself in the face with a shovel until I escape into sweet, merciful unconsciousness.

Ok, so the list so far leaves a bit to be desired. But I don't move until the beginning of August, so I've got a little time to come up with some more alternatives. Feel free to leave your ideas in the comments.

I Don't Even Know How to Explain This

So just now I was reading an interview between The Bloggess and Danny Evans of Dad Gone Mad and one of the questions she asked him was "If you had to lose a toe, which one would it be and why?" and then he responded with some stuff about how his "third and fourth toes on [his] left foot are webbed." For some reason, reading the phrase "third and fourth toes" and trying to imagine which toes those are got me REALLY VERY confused, and all of a sudden I wasn't sure if I have 4 toes on each foot or 5, and I was sitting here trying to rationalize the idea that I only have 4 toes, like, "Well yeah, in theory it seems like it should be 5 toes since I have 5 fingers, but since my feet don't have thumbs, that must be where the 5th one went... it became unnecessary when we started walking upright, and then it just evolved away." But then that still didn't sound right to me so I almost panicked and ripped my shoe off right here in my office (wait! I mean my living room!) just so I could count my toes and settle the whole thing.

And then I realized I was being insane and so I decided to just come get it all out on the blog. Happy Monday!

Impeccable Logic

I really enjoy watching The Biggest Loser. I don't watch it religiously, but when I do catch it I get SO PUMPED. I want to high five all of the contestants and join in on all of their challenges. Half the time, I end up choked up over someone's achievements. It's just so damn motivating and heart-warming. Doubly so if I happen to catch it on a TV at the gym, when I myself am also sweating like crazy.

About this time last year I set out with the goal of trying to lose 20 - 30 lbs. I lost 15 lbs by the beginning of this year, and then for no apparent reason I gained 5 lbs back, and that's where I am now. It's lame as hell, but I'm sticking with the working out and the eating well (as well as I can) and just hoping that I magically lose another 20 lbs.

Anyway, every time I watch The Biggest Loser, at least once I find myself thinking this thought:

Maybe I should gain 100 lbs or so, and then I can apply to be on The Biggest Loser, and then I lose 150 lbs, and then I'll have finally reached my goal!

It's brilliant, I tell you.

Plus, No One Will Arrest Me For Stalking My Own Boyfriend

This morning I had several dreams in a row about wooing Gregory House, MD. In one of them, I tried to cook him dinner. In another one, I was trying to diagnose / cure some kind of disease he had. My favorite was the third one, though, where we just drove around in a car and I took a more subtle approach. You know, just talking to him about his life and trying to convince him that every other woman he's been with didn't deserve him.

(Hint: if a woman starts telling you about how everyone you've ever dated was a bitch, she's probably trying to get in your pants. Or, she just genuinely thinks you date bitches. In order to tell which it is, you should try making out with her. If she enjoys it, it was the former. If she's shocked, sorry about that.)

Now I can't stop thinking about House. I know he's not real and I'm crazy and all that, but WHATEVER. I should probably feel guilty about dreaming about House instead of Lee, but I can't control what my subconscious does. Plus, I'm 99% positive that Lee will one day be a slightly grizzled, misanthropic, middle-aged genius. So IN YOUR FACE, HATERS. I'm pretty much already dating House.

Just For You, I've Resisted the Urge to Quote James Taylor

Around this time last week I went to visit my future graduate school. I hadn't talked much about it before, just in case I went to visit and did something that made them change their minds (like mentioning about my life-long struggle with procrastination) or they did something that made me change my mind (like bad-mouthing Hugh Laurie). Luckily, the visit went well, I sent in my deposit, and now here I am, stuck wondering what I'll worry about now that that's taken care of.

After work on Tuesday I loaded up my car with half my wardrobe (because, as you may recall, I still had no idea what I was going to wear) and headed out of town. I stayed at Lee's place that night, and after we had hung out for a little while I decided it was time to subject him to a fashion show so that I could figure out once and for all what to wear the next day. After several costume changes, we had decided on an acceptable outfit. We high-fived, I checked the outfit out in the mirror, and promptly had a nervous breakdown. These STUPID PANTS were tooooo biiiiiiiig and whyyyyy couldn't I find something better to wear and OH GOD this was going to go horribly. Or something like that, I'm not sure, I couldn't really hear what I was whining about over the sound of a door slamming in my head as the calm, cool, professional part of my mind just up and left me.

Once I'd dried my tears (because OF COURSE their were tears), I decided that I would feel better if I got out of the apartment for a few minutes, so we headed to the grocery store to get an Apartment Guide. At 11pm. (For the record, I told Lee he could stay behind, but he insisted on coming with me, because he's a trooper. See also: dating me in the first place.) So we went to the grocery store and got the Apartment Guide (for future apartment-searching reference). Then I decided to go on and drive out to the Super Target (by the way: SUPER TARGET!!) because I was convinced that they were open 24 hours, and what better time to go looking for a new outfit for a grad school visit than at midnight the night before? Super Target, in spite of being Super, closes at 10pm, so we had to go back home. Nevertheless, I felt soothed by all the needless driving around.

This is my brain under stress. Look on in awe.

In answer to my previous question (What better time to go looking for a new outfit?), let me tell you this: Super Target may close at 10, but it OPENS at 8am. So, since I didn't have to be at the school until 11, I went ahead and got up at 7:15, got showered and dressed, and went shopping. For some reason, even though Ordinary Target didn't have anything to offer me three days prior, SUPER Target made my dreams come true with the first outfit I tried on. (Also, if you want to get you a pair of those paint-splattered shoes I was flashing around the other day, they still have some at the Super Target. Check it out.)

Also, I bought some earrings and a purse. Because if you're panic-shopping at 8:30 in the morning, why not?

Ok, so what else? The visit! Right. I had meetings with two different professors first. They were very cool. Then I had lunch with two students. They were also outstanding. My only complaint about lunch was that we walked a pretty good distance to where we were eating, and my shoes (just about the only thing I was wearing that I hadn't bought that morning) were mangling my feet the whole way. But no matter! Lunch was delightful. Then I met with the chair of the program and talked about how hard grad school is. (She might have said some other things, but "grad school is hard" is the main message I got there.) THEN I sat in on a class, and the professor was a really nice, intelligent, thoughtful man who looked a little like Henry Winkler. I got to hang around and talk with him after class, but by that time I was a little brain-damaged from all of the thoughtful question-asking and attentive listening, so the conversation wasn't as rewarding as it could have been. And then I was done so I went home and celebrated by eating fried chicken.

And that is my story! Things went so well that I went 4 whole days without worrying about the future... until Monday morning, when I realized that I may end up being the youngest person in my cohort, and/or the only person who doesn't already have some kind of master's degree. So if you need me I'll be over here, concerned about that.

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Serious Blogger Is Serious

In general, I try to be all light-hearted and ho ho ho over here, because I feel that people would rather read about fun times than serious times. Also, usually when I find myself being overly earnest in real life, I immediately feel embarrassed that I have just vomited my feeeeeelings all over some poor unsuspecting person. I don't want to do that all over the internet, where there's a permanent record of it that the CIA can catalog and add to your permanent record anytime they like. But hey! What the hell! Sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind, especially when you can't think of anything else to write about on your silly little blog, and your imaginary audience is constantly glaring at you and wondering why you even bothered to come out of the dark backwaters of xanga if you didn't have anything good to say anyway.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, serious business. This week's (month's?) serious business is relationships, specifically the future of. This may surprise you, reader, but I have this thing. This thing where I like to feel like I'm in control of my life. I like to know what's going to happen, when, and why, and what I can do about it. I like to know what and who I can depend on, and what and who I can't. I like to be able to plan for things, prepare for things, map them out and make an itinerary. This makes me feel like things are going to be ok. Nothing can go wrong if I have a plan, because the universe will see my plan and obey it.

The problem is that even the simplest plans depend on other people, and other people are often just blatantly uncooperative. Why people don't understand that they must follow my plan first and theirs second, I will never know. This whole thing gets particularly sticky when your life is all entangled with someone else's. I guess you see where I'm going with this.

I tend to take romantic relationships pretty seriously. I've never dated someone without being pretty firmly sure that I could hang out with them long-term. I just don't have the kind of 'que sera, sera' temperament that I think you have to have in order to casually date. When you're always looking forward, trying to plan your life, it gets kind of confusing not knowing who will be there and who won't. This has come up in a pretty infuriating way in the past month or so, since I'm gearing up for another major stage of my life. Up until now, I had a 2-year plan: live in Winston, work at this job, apply to grad school. Now I'm working on a fresh 5-year plan: move to a new town, go to grad school... and that's as far as I've gotten. Grad school is squared away (for the most part - I still haven't officially accepted, because I've still got to go for my grand visit and all), but that's about it. I'm trying to imagine what the next 5 years will look like, because that's how I prepare for major changes, but I'm having trouble. Where will my significant other (you know, old whats-his-face) be for all this? He's done with his higher education at the end of next year, leaving me locked in to my thing for 4 more years while he does... what? I have no idea. Will he move to another city? Another state? Will we see each other more often, or less than ever? Will we break up? Will we get married? If we got married, when would that happen? How could we ever get married if we're going to be spending 4 years in different states? What's the point of continuing a relationship under those circumstances? If we break up, what will it be like being single again, looking for a new sugar daddy in the world of social work? Are there even any men in the field of social work? (Quick internet research confirms that yes, there are men in the field, but there are only 4 of them and 3 of them are middle-aged and married already.) If I'm not dating a successful lawyer, then who will support my unprofitable idealistic whims?

I HATE not knowing. The urge to just KNOW, just so I can feel secure in the knowledge that I know what's in store for me sometimes makes me think crazy things, like: well, he's probably going to move to another state, and we'll never make it through that, so we might as well just go ahead and break up. And I know it's the crazy that makes it sound like a good idea to end a relationship that you're perfectly happy with, and so I remind myself that it's the crazy talking, but then I'm left with... what? The feeling that I just have to wait and see. That I might be investing all this time and energy into something that will just crash and burn, but maybe not until I'm 30 years old and THEN what will I do?

Then I have moments where I go in the complete opposite direction, moments that I'm even more embarrassed by, when I start thinking, you know, maybe you're just a little too independent. If you're this worried about it, maybe it makes sense to act more conservatively. Just do a 2 year Master's program and then you'll be able to stop and see where your relationsihp is before committing to a longer term PhD. Do you really want to sabotage a great relationship by unflexibly sticking to your own goals when you know it could mean the end of a beautiful thing? Would it kill you to compromise a little?

I hate thinking this way. I know deep down that I would never forgive myself if I gave up the chance to go to a great PhD program just because of some guy. Maybe it's a mistake, but I deeply believe that I shouldn't have to compromise my dreams to make a relationship work. I also know that, in reality, all relationships are an investment, and you hope it doesn't fail, but there's always the chance that it will. It's not that I'm some kind of insecure nutjob that's just in a hurry to get a ring on her finger, no matter what the circumstances. It's just that I hate feeling like I'm over here happily plugging away at something when I have no idea what the end result will be. Like maybe I'm involved in the relationship equivalent of that first scene of a scary movie, where everything is bright and sunshine-y and people are going about their daily business to the tune of a cheerful soundtrack, but it's painfully ominous because as the viewer you know damn good and well that this is the last time the sun will shine for the entire movie.

And in spite of my certainty that I have to follow my dreams, come what may, I'm still terrified that one day I'll look back and realize that things might have worked out differently if I'd been a little more willing to slow down and take a detour in the name of love. But if I'm honest with myself, I know that Lee would never allow me to do something like that anyway, and I guess that's Real Love, right there: pushing someone to be who they are, regardless of the consequences.

/serious

Brushing Past the Tumbleweeds, Ignoring the Sounds of Crickets

Oh, dear readers. I have wanted for DAYS to write something, but there is nothing interesting going on in my life. Well, that's not entirely true. I've been really busy at work, busy enough that I feel guilty trying to write a blog post, but now I'm doing it anyway because I LOVE YOU. (All 3 of you.) (You know, it occurs to me that my blog will never have the worldwide following it deserves if I only post once a month. Perhaps I'll think about that some more later.)

Part of what's keeping me so busy at work is trying to write a paper for a journal, and a proposal to talk about said paper at a conference in the fall. If I get accepted to go to the conference (it's the same one I went to in November), then I get a free trip to San Francisco! So, cross your fingers. I have to submit this proposal by the end of the day on Friday, which, if you're keeping track, is tomorrow. This suddenly occurred to me around 4pm yesterday when I realized that I had just wasted half my day... um, looking up apartments near my new grad school. (I could argue that this was important business, but since I'm not moving for another 5 months and I've already read every rental property listing for the area 9 separate times, I have no justification for my behavior.) So then I resolved to get at least a rough draft of the thing done before I left last night, which ended up being at 8pm. Behold, the power of procrastination!

This episode raises some interesting issues, I feel. On the one hand, once I finally made myself work on it, I felt pretty exhilerated. I actually enjoy the process of writing and all that nonsense, which I think bodes well for my grad school experience. On the other hand, my senseless time-wasting turned a normal day at work into a 10-HOUR DAY. So, I dunno. Either I'm perfectly suited for grad school, or I'm DOOOOOOOOMED.

This is a good segue into something else I've been thinking about over the past couple of days. It should surprise no one that it only took about 4 hours for the excitement of being accepted into grad school to wear off and for panic to set in. (Lee refers to this as my very special ability to turn all good things - compliments, good news, candy, ponies - into bad things.) (What the hell does he know, anyway?) The point is: What if this was a terrible mistake? What if I do not have what it takes to be a PhD student? These people are obviously unaware of my Olympic-level procrastination skills. What if I get there and everyone is way smarter and more grown-up than me and I'm in statistics class and they ask me a question and I'm like, "Um... ketchup??" I checked the list of current PhD students, and there are several Asian* names, and I'm pretty sure you know what that means: no one is going to want to copy my homework anymore.

The silver lining to all this is that later, when I was googling "grad school success tips please don't let me fail oh god" I ran across an article about 'imposter syndrome', or the feeling that you're "fooling the world" about your abilities. This is apparently a condition that affects all graduate students and academics at some point or another. The way I see it, this is great news, because if my imposter syndrome is setting in so early on, then I must be way ahead of my peers. At this rate, I'll be writing books and coming up with new ground-breaking theories of social work by my second year of grad school. Take that, Asians!**

*I'm sorry, Asians, I mean no harm. I know that plenty of Asians don't know shit about math.
**But I'm sure the ones at this particular grad school are much, much smarter than me.

Oh, by the way, I started a twitter account, because it seemed like a fun thing to do at the time. If you like, you can check it out here.

Anxietyville, Population: Me!

Why hello there. Tomorrow evening I will be attending a dress-up-and-socialize thing with Lee and sundry other law school students. Who I haven't met before. And also there will be dressing up, if I hadn't mentioned. So my mind, it is abuzz with extremely comforting thoughts, if you find things like UTTER DISASTER to be comforting. Here, a sampling of things that kept me from sleeping last night...

What if I'm overdressed?
What if I'm underdressed?
What if we don't even make it there because I have to walk across campus in high heels, and I fall down in pain and despair halfway there and I got over- or underdressed for no reason?
What if none of Lee's friends are there and I don't have anyone to entertain me?
What if they're all there but they don't like me?
What if I don't like them?
What if the cash bar is super expensive? (Ha, silly question: that is guaranteed.)
What if I drink too much?
What if I don't drink enough?
What if Lee and I are physically incapable of dancing together, as he is nearly a foot taller than me?
What if I forget to wear underwear?
What if the party is attacked by terrorists?
What if someone is doing drugs and I accidentally am standing near them when the drug bust goes down, and the cops assume I'm involved and they arrest me too?
What if there's some sort of mistake and I get pig's blood dumped on me?

The crazy is at the top of its game this week. Pray that tomorrow night I don't just burst into tears under the weight of my own neuroses. THIS IS NOT AS UNLIKELY AS YOU MIGHT THINK.

By the way, I promised some more pictures of Philadelphia, (or maybe I just promised them in my head, but either way) I plan to follow through. Soon-ish. Well, either that, or a post about how I thought I had a UTI but then I didn't.