Burlap Soul

I really wanted to sit down and do some positives tonight. I've been compiling a list in my head all day of things I could put on it. There's no shortage of great things going on with me lately. They're small and some might consider them trivial, but still, they're positives for me.

But, dammit.. right now, I just don't feel like typing up anything. My neck is killing me, which is in turn beginning a massive migraine as well. It's been a rough day for me, as have most days lately. I'm not sure if it's winter or the absolute unbearably bitter cold or the constant cloud of uncertainty over this house we want so badly or the never-ending assignments and pressures of school. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but I'm just feeling so damn tired lately. Every day is a struggle against listlessness and keeping my mood up and my motivation going is getting harder and harder. My brain has been so unbelievably scattered that I'm actually surprised. I've always been in somewhat of a brain fog, but it's just getting ridiculous. I'm afraid I may be sinking into a minor depression. I'm reluctant to take any drugs for it, just because I know a vast majority of it is dependant on this damn weather we've been having. I feel trapped, deprived of sunlight, in desperate need of some warm sunshine and fresh air.

Maybe it will be better tomorrow. Maybe not. Either way, I am still doing okay. I have my good moments and my lists of positives compiled in my head. I may not feel up to typing them here, but at least they are still available to me when I need them. It may not seem like much to everyone else, but I think it's better than nothing.

Hell, I've seen this thing everywhere, but I actually copied and pasted it from Nicole. :-)

I have never owned a foreign car.
Half Price Books is better than any overpriced bookstore chain anyday.
I love the scent of vanilla, peach, mango and anything else tropical.
I love my cushioned-grip Pilot pens.
My doggie is the cutest thing ever (and the most hilarious!)
I love it when I am able to utilize my free time and do constructive artwork or little projects that make me happy, so that I don't get too lost in the madness of my own thoughts.
I like making lists.
I like meeting people. (sometimes)
I am very much in love.
I don't wear much jewelry. (one watch, one ring)
I have always had 20/20 vision.
I am a college student. (and a very tired one at that)
I am ten years older than my sister.
I have never been to China.
I don't have a favorite film because I can't narrow them down that much.
I have always hated math and probably always will.
I will never settle on a job I hate just because of a fat paycheck.
I take a multivitamin (with extra iron) every day.
I've only had surgery once for a massive obstruction in my stomach when I was born.
I'm not nearly as good to my body as I should be.
I love my family.
I hope to get married some day.
I love massive amounts of light in a room.
I can sew buttons (and most other things).
I love to read.
My computer is a "frankenstein."
I've never tasted alcohol in my life and I'm fine with that.
I have ungodly amounts of static in my hair in the winter.
I enjoy keeping busy, but I also need lots of downtime to recover.
I would enjoy a vacation to someplace warm.
I like to people watch.
I think I have changed a lot throughout my life.
I should be typing up a Research Methods paper right now.
I need to exercise more.
I thought Pirates of the Caribbean was awesome!
I am learning more and more about cooking everyday and I'm often satisfied with my new recipes!
I don't often IM anyone except for my mother.
My bedroom is painted pale spring-green with an Asian theme.
I love naps in the sunlight on Saturday afternoons.
I love to eat.
I cannot stand the city that I currently live in (cincinnati) and want to move back across the river to Kentucky.
I am still unsure as to whether or not I could ever be a good parent.
I love photography.
I love the fact that my body is real and has curves in all the places a woman's body is supposed to curve.
I love my boy (J.) very much.
I have very strange dreams most nights.
I have mostly learned how to love myself and am now learning how to love others and accept my own mistakes with dignity.
Oatmeal-raisin cookies are one of my favorite things that no one else likes.
I am terrible about returning phone calls (or even making them in the first place.)
I want to see Jamaica, Barbados and the Maldives.
I like to write.
I hope by this time next year, I am eligible for graduation, living in my own home and engaged to J.! :-)

I like this version of this meme much better. So much easier to understand, but then again I'm just a visual learner at heart. ;-)

I haven't been an extensive traveler yet in my life, but I've loved just about all the places I've seen. All the states I've been to are in red:

I want cookies and I want them now... Dammit.

(I'm thinking little snuggly Staz needs a nap, yes?)

Though if you do happen to have some cookies on your person, an offering would be well appreciated and could quite possibly save you from the wrath of the Angry Cookie Goddess. Preferably chocolate chip, Pecan Sandies or anything with M&Ms baked inside. However, macadamia nut or sugar cookies will also suffice. Just don't give me any damn Oreos. All that licking and disassembly combined with a blatantly-fake-chocolate communion wafer. I am not fooled. Those things will do me no good.

Cookies. Now. Capite? Good. Now get to it. ;-)

Research Methods made me smack my computer screen while screaming in frustration. This is not good. We're only on Assignment #2.

My knuckles still hurt from that nice little outburst and all of the animals have decided to nap elsewhere in order to protect themselves from my Methods Wrath. Is it spring break yet?

One more thing: Microsoft Word sucks balls and APA format can kiss my 12-point ass.

This story makes me so sad today. I think somehow it's worsened in our minds because we saw how easily this man grabbed and walked away with her and now we see how quickly her life can be snatched away as well. It makes me angry, but mostly it just makes me so unbelievably sad for that family, to have to watch that footage of her over and over again on every news channel. Knowing she was alive in one moment and gone in the next. It would just be unbearable to me.

This story has me worried as well. J. has family living in Moscow (including a brother and sister-in-law) and many friends there as well so we are waiting it out to see if everyone is okay.

What's going on with this world today? .... Anyone?

Damn. Is it just me or did the Grammy's royally suck tonight? Last year, we had Norah Jones and John Mayer.. people who write their own songs and perform their own instruments. Newbies that actually created some amazing music and blew everyone away with their success.

This year? SnoozeFest '04. Bleh. Sadly, I'm not even surprised. I guess at a certain point you just grow up and realize that the Grammys aren't even all that wonderful and that it's never really about the music anyway. Ads, ratings, ass-shaking, more ads, more ratings, bling, bling, bling, blah blah blah.

Maybe I'm just showing my age here.. you know, twenty-six. (Yes, I've learned in college that I might as well be prehistoric by today's standards.) Then again, I grew up in a time when Jethro Tull beat out Metallica for 'Best Heavy Metal Album.' Man, that was some funny shit. I remember all of my friends going to school the next day and painting "Jethro Tull Kicks Ass" on all of our Doc Martens with white-out in study hall. Yeah, we were that cool.

So... who wants to come over and listen to Led Zeppelin and Nirvana records with me? Yes, records.. um, you know... okay, they were these big plastic cds that had two sides to them and you could put them on a turntable... a turntable?.. jeez, okay, it had this arm with a needle sticking out of it... no, not like the arms and needles you've seen on Behind the Music.. well, the needle, it played the records... and there was this big groove in the record... *sigh* Ah, forget it. You kids these days... never appreciate anything...

When you're broke, Ebay is fun to browse because you never know what in the hell you might find.

When you have a little money to spend, Ebay is crack and should be avoided at all costs.

You will bid on absolute crap just because you can and just because you've told yourself that it's only $3.99 and you deserve it. Then before you know it, you are refreshing the page like a maniac because you know that little punk with the stupid-ass username (I-M-Hot-04 or something to that equivalent) is going to, in all of his last-minute treachery, come back and put some huge proxy bid in with only six seconds left on the item you've been watching for the past two hours. Bastard.

However, I did win a Pirates of the Caribbean DVD for only about 10 bucks. Jumped right in there with three seconds remaining and proxy bid that little punk's ass right back out of the water, I did. Arrr! Here there be Ebayers! Watch yer back, matey!

Yeah, I think it's time to get out of the house. Is it warm yet?

-- Winning Sarah McLachlan tickets on the radio two days before sale, wasn't trying, cracked J. up, don't know what to do with them, not even a real Sarah fan, feel somewhat guilty because I know there's a 17-yr-old girl out there crying her eyes out because she had hit redial fifteen times but still didn't win.. then again, I don't feel so guilty because I was the first one who answered the trivia question correctly and didn't say she was born in Minnesota.. dorks.

-- Italian is kicking my ass
-- Geography is stabbing my brain with its incessant boredom and idiotic professor
-- Methods is making my heart race, stabbing my brain and kicking my ass, but I'm doing okay so far

-- Dream-House '04' is out of the question due to an impromptu stop on Friday night and the discovery that the hole-in-the-wall-cafe across the street is actually the loudest karaoke bar that I've ever heard (every Friday and Saturday night! Come on in!), was crushed for a few days, am doing better now... maybe.

There's something else that I've been meaning to talk about for a while now, but never really had the desire to dig it up again. I guess today just keeps it fresh in my head. February 14th is The Stalker's birthday. Dan. Have I ever told you about him? Really, in any sort of detail? Probably not and that's fine with me if it's fine with you. Let's just say that it was one of those relationships that twisted my head around in more ways than you could ever imagine. I am still dealing with some of the issues he bestowed upon me, but for the most part, I look back now and only see a lonely blind girl and a fucked-up neurotic child in the body of a 45-year-old man. He was the one that was right before J., the older man (older than my father to be exact), the tarot reader that was all talk and no walk, full of commitment only to himself and his delusions, the one that professed undying love and filled my head with such grandiose garbage only to rip it away when I made my own decisions or had my own life, the one that wanted a younger, sexier trophy wife instead of a real relationship. *sigh* I could go on forever really (and I probably have) but let's just say that when I met J. and I finally realized what I had been missing, I was a) tired of being spontaneously dumped and given Dear John voice mails once a month and b) tired of being accused that I was sleeping with every retail clerk/professor/student/anyoneelseyoucanthinkof/etc etc that crossed my path.. Well, it wasn't too long after meeting J. and after all of this madness that I finally grew up and got wise and dumped Dan's ass. Granted, it took two years, but it was a personal milestone nonetheless.

(I'm listening to one of my new favorite obsessions and I keep having an overwhelming urge to just post song lyrics in order to illustrate my thoughts... should be interesting.)

".... Listening, you're always listening, I don't know what to say ...."

So how do you write about yourself and your life when it's being lived but not remembered in any sort of coherent fashion? Simple.. you end up lost, disoriented and not writing. I see on many people's blogs their daily lives in either infinite detail or in just enough detail to be interesting or at least chronological. "I woke up and had some tea.. I went to the store to pick up something really neat... I went out to see a movie with so-and-so.. I watched this-or-that on tv and it started a discussion about whatever..."

I don't know about you, but I don't live days like these. Sometimes I wish my daily tasks and the amount of time spent doing said tasks could be so easily divided into nice little entertaining chunks. For the most part, I spend my days in a massive brain fog, trying my best to keep from either falling apart and giving up completely or just going completely overboard and being nuts with things that need to be done right now or else I will get overly anxious and explode. I've never been very good at finding balance in life. It's always been all or nothing for me. Extremes seem to be a pattern in my life. My dad was the totally practical, always sensible, always grounded, never do anything too drastic or change your routine at all type and I was raised primarily by him. However, the weekends were ruled by my mother. The complete and total free-spirit, do whatever you want to do, fuck reponsibility, fuck acting like a grown-up, live only for yourself and tell the world to kiss your ass and if they don't agree with your decisions, so what? The everyone else can just deal with it and pick up your slack until you manage to get your shit straightened out kind of girl. I guess you could call it bipolar parenting.

".... You were 80% angel, 10% demon, the rest was hard to explain ...."

Despite this constant dualism, things have been good lately. We are looking to buy a house, but we can't seem to find something that's in a good location for a cheap price. We are pretty much always broke, but lately we've been okay, mostly from the residuals from my school loan money back in January. J. is starting to gain a good reputation at his job and even though the pay still sucks, there's the possibility of a raise within a few months and he likes going to work every day and he likes what he does, so we don't complain. I am doing okay in school and even though Methods is starting to really kick into full gear and Italian II is kicking my ass, I am really trying to keep up and work hard. I've learned that for as much as I bitch about school, it is actually finally getting close to an end (December if I'm lucky). For as long as I've been in college and the long, hard road it has been for me, I understand that the day I finally get to leave and move on with my life will still be a hard transition. So I'm trying to really relish it for what it is and not let it slip through my fingers as a wasted opportunity.

When in the hell are they going to catch this guy? He's getting bolder and he's been headed my way for the past month. It seems to me as though the cops are just sitting on their asses waiting for it to get worse or give them another fatality. I don't understand why, with the vast amount of evidence and information they have on him, they are still just sitting around waiting on someone to call 911 before they start to think about getting proactive. There's been a new shooting practically every day for the past two weeks and I don't like it one fucking bit.

So I'm going to try something different with this week's positives. I'm going to post my regular positives list here as usual. However, I'm also going to post photographs to illustrate each and every positive that I possibly can. There will also be a separate smaller list in the photoblog that contains more personal shots that I don't feel like publishing here. (Just email me if you'd like access to the photoblog and let me know something about you; website, favorite color, whatever.. no worries. I will most likely grant you access no matter what tidbit you share with me. The photoblog is for anonymity purposes only, but I like to know who's there.)

Now, you certainly don't have to follow in my footsteps and I wouldn't hold it against you if you didn't... but I'd love to see others try this as well. So if you're up for it, go for it.. see what happens! (or just save up some pictures and post them all next Monday.) If you do try it though, leave a link in my comments and let me know where to find your Photogitives list! I'd love to see it!

Here we go...

If this ain't a photogitive, I don't know what is baby!

I just signed up for Yahoo Messenger because I'm sick of AOL's buggy-pop-up-ad-infested crap.
Username: CrowLuvsServo (same as the old AOL one)
So, if you've got a Yahoo username and would like me to know it, do tell! We'll have IM parties and do each other's hair. ;-)

I am absolutely shaking right now. I honestly don't know why I am so upset about this. The doctor's office called about my blood test results earlier and just left a message for me to call them back. I wasn't here and missed the message and now the office is closed. I have to wait until tomorrow and for some reason, my brain is absolutely panicking and I'm freaking out. My hands are shaking, my stomach has dropped into the pit of my bowels and I feel as though I am about to run an Olympic event. The weird thing is, I absolutely did not expect to feel this nervous about test results. I thought I would be elated, that I would finally know if something is wrong with me. I was told that if nothing was abnormal about my blood test, I would just receive a little postcard in the mail. If something turns out abnormal, then they would call me. And they called.. and I should be relieved because it means that I will finally know if something is actually physically wrong with me and whether or not I can get some treatment and feel better and get on with my life... right? ... right?

So why am I so damn scared? And what in the hell do I do until tomorrow morning? This is madness.

The doctor's office still has not called me back. I have been trying to call them pretty much constantly since 9am this morning... Nothing. First, it was busy for nearly 3 hours straight and then when I did get through, I was kicked into the blood-test-chick's voice mail which told me to leave a message and that it may be 24 hours before I get a return phone call. WTF? Are these people that damn important that I can't talk to real person or even get a phone call? This is my blood test here.. this is my health, people! Answer the phone!

I'm afraid that she will call while I am in class tomorrow morning and that I will call back, get nowhere, and have to wait until freaking Monday before I know anything. This is beyond frustrating. I have a paper to type. I need to take a shower. I'd desperately like to take a nap before class tonight. I can't do any of these things because I either can't concentrate long enough or I'm too afraid of missing this chick's phone call. I want to scream....

Hooooray!! I'm sick!! And I can be fixed!! And I'm not going crazy after all because I'm actually physically sick!! Woohooo!! ;-)

Yes, this is good news. After three years of being constantly told I had depression and not having any sort of firm diagnoses, I finally know what's wrong with me. Turns out I have hypothyroidism and no depression or anemia like some doctors have suggested. (If you follow that link and scroll down to the symptoms, it's eerie. I have every single one of those symptoms almost daily.) Some synthroid will be called in for me by the end of the day (I knew having a pharmacy at the end of my street would come in handy at some point). After all of this madness, it was that easy. In three months, I go back for another blood test to determine if my levels have changed. No worries though, because my awesome phlebotomist made me feel as though having my blood drawn is no big deal at all and I'm actually not afraid to do it again. Ask me again in three months though.. ;-P

I love having someone in my life that respects my opinion and comes to me for advice that they will actually use. I love having someone that comes to me when he needs to cry, only because he knows that I will hold him and do my best to make it okay. I love having someone that feels like my equal rather than a subordinate or a tyrant. I love having someone that worries about whether or not the cats are healthy. I love having someone that thinks the dog is just as funny as I do. I love having someone that gets such happiness out of making me happy. I love having someone that lays in the floor and discusses the psychology of tickle fights with me. I love having someone that blogs. I love having someone that lists me as one of the main priorities on their 'lifetime happiness list.' I love having someone.

I love that that someone is J... (yes, sweetie, typos and all.) ;-)

Of course I am....

Good thing J.'s a chocoholic.

I challenge you to get these out of your head. I've been trying for the past three hours to no avail. Go for it. I'm telling you, it can't be done.

First up:

All I need is the AIR that I Breathe and to looooooove youuuuu!
All I need is the AIR that I breeeeeeeeeeathe!!!

Okay.. well how about this one?

I think I'm turning Japanese
I think I'm turning Japanese
I really think so!
I think I'm turning Japanese
I think I'm turning Japanese
I really think so!

Oh yeah? Think you're a tough guy, huh? How do you like this?

I've had some serious problems lately with being scatterbrained. Though I think the real root of those problems is the fact that it is not my mind that is scattered, it is my life. We don't have the externally chaotic life like some people do (racing to and fro, scheduling appointments, deadlines, kids, schedules, etc..)
So that's not what I'm referring to when I say chaotic. Mostly for me, it's an internal chaos. It's constantly brewing and I can never seem to placate it for very long, if at all.

The memory blog has been created, but I'm doing some tweaking before it's revealed. And to be honest, the memories just aren't bothering me lately, so I'm waiting to get some material in there before I unveil it. I mean, really, aren't empty blog pages just kind of.. well.. empty? Anyway.. it's time for mindless quizzes/surveys/memes/time-wasters.. you get the idea. Rather than doing a bunch of little quizzes though, I decided on two rather long ones. Enjoy... and happy Friday.

The memory blog is ready and boy, is the first one ever a doozy. (Does anybody really know how to spell doozy?) But this memory was ready to come out, so there it is. It's a long one and it was hard for me to write, so I imagine it might be hard for some of you to read. Be forewarned.

I'm not going to password-protect the site.. yet. But some of that stuff is just too personal and I desperately want to avoid the search engines that will result from some of those entries. So I'm not going to disclose the location here.

Just email me or leave a comment if you want to know where it is. I'll send you an email with the location. And if you do read it.. well, thanks for listening. It helps.