A dream within a dream

Before I say anything, I have to first note that I just saw someone cough up blood right as I was crunching down on a pretzel m&m... Ew. Ok, moving on...

This summer I am embracing my paleness and am actually going to make an effort NOT to waste any time laying out, but only being in the sun while doing something active and or productive. Like gardening, or picnicking, or swimming, etc. Don't get me wrong, I love just laying in the sun, but I am going to make a conscious effort not to just be doing it for the sake of getting tan, but for the sake of enjoyment. I will be working a lot this summer, so the last thing I need on my mind is the constant pressure of feeling like every spare moment I have needs to be hopping into a bikini and coating myself in tanning oils. Thus I will get the most out of whatever little free time I will have over the next few months. Thank you and good night.

The best medicine... wedgie cream?

Today I decided something: I wanna laugh more.

Laughing is my favorite thing to do in the world. Seriously, if you bump into me in the street and ask me what brings me the most joy and what I love doing, I will say "laughing" without even thinking about it. I've always loved to laugh. I think everyone does, but it's weird how I don't really think about being pro-active about laughing these days. I mean, when you're a kid you kind of base your whole world and life and every decision on what will bring the most laughter to yourself and your family and friends. Why isn't that still my mantra?

Rest-of-February resolution: do more funny stuff and laugh more. Be silly. Learn how to be more funny. Practice laughing in every situation (restrictions apply. Funerals? Common. Not gonna do that). Figure out what makes people around me chuckle and do that more.

I gotta loosen up. Get free and live like I'm free! And heck, I'm jobless right now too so I think I have no excuse not to just be crazy happy all the time. What's the sense in being stressed about being UNemployed until I get a job and am stressed about being EMployed? Dumb.

As first act in my new silly self, I declare that I will make it my mission to get at least 3 people to really belly laugh at/with me in the next 24 hours. Am I biting off more than I can chew? Probs. But, even if it fails miserably, it could potentially be a success later. For, as my wonderful boyfriend states confidently, "tragedy+time=comedy." (He first used this little number to pacify me in the aftermath of giving a "girlfriend wedgie")...

...And yes, I am still waiting for that equation to come to it's full expression... *fingers crossed in a sarcastic manner*

Random thought of the day

Breakfast is the best thing that ever happened to this world. Sometimes as I'm falling asleep I'll think about what I want for breakfast and I'll get so excited that it takes even longer for me to drift off. Is that something I should share on the internet?

Today is week two of the job search. In trying to get the most out of my current unemployment, I am determined to embrace everything that comes along with all this (hopefully) short amount of free time.

Things on the agenda include but are not limited to... get a haircut, buy new underwear, blog (check!), renew inspection sticker on van, etc... a.k.a. my life is awesome right now in a "got nothin' going on" kinda way while also being lame in a "no excuse gotta run this errand" kinda way.

I've been cooking more things from scratch, which has been great because I forgot how much I love the process from beginning to end. Ingredients all separated out, mixing things step by step, multitasking, tasting, sharing what you've created with someone AND last but not least (and surprisingly my favorite part) washing the dishes and putting things back in order afterwards.

Also, it's kind of fun to send out an application to something you're actually excited about maybe doing. In my case I'm looking for more of the "we'll pay you oodles and oodles to file your nails" kind of thing. OK, I'm kidding! I wanna work! I want a challenge! I want to contribute to society, dangit!

You guys are awesome for reading my blog and I really am going to try to write more and keep thangs real.

She'll be comin' 'round the mountain.. again.. and again..

Every three months or so I complete and restart a cycle of asking the Lord questions. Every time around I'm a little older and a little wiser, but the questions remain the same: Who am I? What am I doing here? Why do I matter?

Every time I go through this, the Lord is faithful to show me that I am His, that I am serving His purpose and that He loves me.

I think it's important to keep asking these questions, even though I battle feeling like I should know the answers after all this time. But, I think the Lord wants me/us to ask Him often. He wants to show us that he cares deeply about us specifically and especially.

I don't have much to add beyond this thought. I felt like it was worth sharing. The end.

Why I never wear lipstick:

Because when I was 3 I ATE MY MOM'S LIPSTICK and then spit it out in the toilet. And it tasted TERRIBLE. Why would I ever put that near my mouth again?! It was an awful experience and actually during the same covert operation I ended up cutting off my pony tail at the rubber band along with any bangs I had hanging in my face.

Do you ever have thoughts like "why is God keeping me alive?", in a genuinely curious way. Just wondering what plan He has going on in his head for your life and why he spared you from the many close calls you've experienced in your life? Here are a few of mine:

Germany. 1989. I am 1 year old. We lived in a square 4 story house that had spiral staircases running up all over the place. I crawled away from my mom and ended up hanging by a foot (which was wedged between the rungs of the banister) over a set of steep marble spiral stairs dropping 25 feet into the basement of the house. Talk about a close call...

Germany. 1990ish. My brother Eddie (3) and I (2) were sitting on the floor playing with scissors. He was doing the whole open shut open shut game with me while explaining how truly dangerous scissors were when all of the sudden, open SHUT! as I stuck my chubby little index finger in the middle of all the action. Finger= almost gone. BUT after some swift maneuvering on the autobon by my mother straight to the hospital, my finger remains intact to this day and looking a little cooler and wiser with a scar.

Florida. 14 years old? With the family at our yearly cousins beach club extravaganza and I'm painting my nails with all my aunts and girl cousins. As I go to set the nail polish remover down the bottle hits the table hard and some remover splashes out of the bottle and into my left eye. 2 hours of eye-water-flushing later and my eyesight recovered. It was only a few years later making soap alone in a bike shed that I splashed lye-based liquid (has been known to eat through flesh in seconds) out of a container and into both my eyes (mostly my right) and thanks to more endless eye-flushing and a string of "oh Jesus please not my eyesight" ejaculations AND perhaps it helped that I wore contacts that took most of the heat (they were almost completely melted/disintegrated), I survived. Anyway, I've always said that the Lord must have some special purpose for my eyes because the enemy is always trying to sabotage them. (I just love the word sabotage, like, sooo much. I want to say it all the time. "Sabotage, sabotage, sabotage," say it with me!)

And then there was 2003. Louisiana. Hurricane Katrina. Sitting in my uncle's living room and thinking "oh my, this might be how I die" as I watched trees snapping in half outside the window and an especially ambitious tree went careening through the house and came to rest on the sleeping bag I had just crawled out of an hour before. (At the time I was more concerned about the fact that my cell phone was by my sleeping bag and I might not be able to text my crush back for a while)(didn't think about the fact that cell phone service was impossible anyways).

There's also the morning I woke up and tried to step out of bed only to collapse on the floor and feel pain shooting through my right leg. I pulled myself down the stairs (sound dramatic? it was.) and was brought to the hospital that night to have surgery on my right hip where a staff infection had been festering and (completely unbeknownst to me) close to crippling me. Sweet memorial scar: check.

So, what I know so far is... God has a plan for my life involving my eyesight, legs, index finger, and the ability to hang from great distances by my foot while avoiding falling objects. Sound like a great movie, anyone?

I'm not too concerned about it as long as He knows I'm not going to be wearing lipstick for any of it...

Ode to a Stinkbug

I am a lowly stinkbug. And this is my tale.

I go where the wind takes me, which happened to be- one fateful evening- the attic room of Lindsey and Amelie.

On that cold, dark night, the wind howled and the clouds gathered so that I could scarcely flap my wings. I was at the mercy of the night sky and all alone in the world. Suddenly, I hit a house and quickly clutched my little stinkbug body to the brick, crawling further into a crevice in the wall.

The crevice went deeper and deeper and I followed it, glad to be farther from the night air, until I was creeping through the wall and into the attic room of the house. Warmth washed over my little legs and feet and my eyes drank in the light from a lamp. I surveyed my surroundings: two beds, two couches, some dressers, a shining lamp. My little beating heart began to warm inside my shivering exoskeleton. "Is this heaven?" I thought.

I shimmied up the side of the window by diving onto a curtain and hid myself in the folds of the fabric. And there I hung for many hours, defrosting my stinkbug brain and little stinkbug toes.

What came next was all a blur. There was a scream, hustling and bustling... more lights, more screaming... Lindsey and Amelie had seen something on the window, something right next to me! I was instantly on the alert! What had they seen that scared them so? Why were they screaming at the window in one second and at each other the next. Tossing a Kleenex back and forth like they were fighting over who should hold it. Yelling at each other and then without explanation rolling on their beds laughing. It was all so confusing.

Finally, some sort of strategy emerged out of their baffling interaction and the two tormented girls crept closer to the window, alternately whimpering and giggling. They crept so close to me that I began to realize how close I was to the danger they were going crazy over. My little feet that had been frozen in fear now clicked into survival mode. Whatever was waiting for me on that curtain-that thing that had Lindsey and Amelie so upset- I would be ready to stand my ground from it.

I skittered further into a fold the curtain (thinking a surprise attack was the best option, obviously). When you're a stinkbug, there isn't much you can do physically besides, well, stink. So, you don't have to be like actually giving the old one-two, you can be hiding at a distance. But, for some reason, as soon as I moved, a new wave of hysteria came over the humans and they could scarcely breath they were so undone by either my daring courage or my fearless protective in'stink'ts, maybe they were undone by both, who knows? All I do know for sure is that their little minds were taken over by this sudden confusion and without even looking at what they were doing, one of them (Lindsey) reached out with a Tupperware dish and knocked ME into it as the other (Amelie) slid the lid on top, trapping me inside this plastic prison.

Amid screams and such (were there tears? It was hard to tell from inside my circular jail cell), I was whisked down the stairs to the lower level of the house. All the while I was squealing and crying out, trying to get their attention. "You have the wrong offender!", "I am only a lowly stinkbug escaping the cold and damp", "the true danger is still on that curtain surely!" But to no avail.

Before I could even make out where they were taking me, the wrongful victim, I was suddenly being held only a foot above a giant swirling lake, a vortex of whitewater sloshing and being sucked down and away out of sight. My life flashed before my eyes (hatching, feeding, mating, curtains, betrayal) as Lindsey dropped the entire Tupperware into the water. The top came off and I fell out and was swept away, down, down, down... into darkness.

And it is from darkness that this story is written. A message written to you as a ghost. A forever haunting ghost. My destiny is to torment Lindsey and Amelie for all eternity, leaving a stink or an old leg here and there. And late at night as they sleep I whisper my final words to them on this earth "Not I! Not IIII!".

Even now as my little ghostly stinkbug body is jumping from computer key to computer key, typing this "anonymous" post on Amelie's computer, I am reliving those last moments with a shudder and reaffirmed in my resolve.

So, let this be a warning to all those who hunt Stinkbugs in this life: If ever ye be unkind to a Stinkbug, think on this tale of woes of Amelie and Lindsey, the accursed Stinkbug Murderers, and be ye kind to all stinky things, lest ye be haunted by "The Stink." Ahem (that's me).

The End.