The Best Part About Being Royalty

Since Kate Middleton married royalty and became a Princess (or, a Duchess... or Lady... or whatever) it was socially acceptable for her to wear a tiara at her wedding.

But if I wore a tiara at my wedding?

I'm not hoping tiaras become fashionable any time soon.  I'm just stating the obvious differences.

I will continue, however, to wear my plastic tiara in private because I think it makes me look classy.

DROP EVERYTHING, DO SIT-UPS

Mike and I spend a lot of time on the phone because I am at school four days a week (but not for long!).  There are always a variety of things that interrupt our conversations: work, class, sleep, sit-ups.

Yes.  Sit-ups.

The other day I was in the middle of telling Mike a story when he said, "Wait.  I didn't do sit-ups today.  I gotta go."

When Mike has an idea in his head and thinks to himself, "I must to do that," it is not an eventual action but an instant one that needs to occur.  In a lot of ways, Mike is impulsive.

This is not too different from the day he spent telling me he had to "clean his blender." I thought this was a joke the entire day until he took an hour to douse his dumb, red blender in comet.  Mike was so fixated on cleaning his blender, it was all he cared about.

I hate Mike's blender. 

So, Mike filled his head with the idea he needed to do sit-ups, got off the phone with me and did sit-ups.

That picture actually makes it look like he is choking himself, but he is supposed to be doing sit-ups.  I promise. 

The moral of this story is to do sit-ups before you make a phone call.

And that blenders are evil.

Attention All Male Customers Over 30

Some of you stare a tad longer than I would like, and some of you awkwardly say nice things to me that come out a lot creepier than intended.  To help you understand the dichotomy between what you perceive in your mind and what is actually happening, I've drawn this for you. 

Think of it as how-to guide, in not being creepy.  (If how-to guides gave no actually how-tos about fixing the problem in question).   

I hope this little information session has been informative.  Please stop being freaky now.  

 

Please. 

Dresses: A 33 Syllable Haiku

I have to wear a dress tomorrow.  For, like, a billion hours.  (Or however many hours might be in a day).

So I Made a LinkedIn

I've decided that I need to start being super professional and work hard towards getting a job since I'm really close to graduating.  The first logical step towards responsibility is getting a LinkedIn, so I've heard. 

I'm not exactly sure how a LinkedIn profile works because no one has yet explained it to me and I refuse to read any information that the website might helpfully provide.  But, I have one. 

I spent a good portion of Easter telling my mom to scoot out of the way of my webcam so I could take a picture that makes me look respectable and ambitious.

But taking pictures for the professional world got boring really fast.  As did asking my mom "How 'bout this one?" after every picture and then having her ignore me because she was making sandwiches or something ridiculously mundane like that.

So after a while, this is what happened:

 
I honestly think I only look good when I am making a face that makes me look like an ass.

But I have a solution for my LinkedIn profile picture that will make me appear to be "down with the cool kids" and also super competent!  (Because I lack actual competency, so I need something to make me appear that way).

Yup, I went for a hipster joke. 

For any jobs requiring a comic book hipster, I have this photo that will surely take me where I need to go:

BAM!

I just made an entire blog post comprised solely of my face.  What up, lazy? 

But, seriously, I need a job.  And, I'm not sure things like this help my credibility.

I'm Not Good at Being a Girl

I was raised by a mom who worked full time and a dad who stayed at home to take care of me and my brother.  So, my gender roles have always been confused.  To me, men stay home to baby the children and women bring home the bacon.  I have never felt pressure to conform to being a "real woman".  I was never taught how to cook, I was never given a baby doll and if I was ever coerced into wearing a floofy dress it was purely for a family event. 

Thus, I've never understood how to be a typical girl.

I was never interested in makeup, and my mom didn't really teach me how to do it. So, I wear minimal makeup as to avoid looking like a skank. 

But it's not like I'm a tom boy.  Boy things are just as foreign to me as girl things are. 

I guess all of the things I like are gender neutral, but leaning heavier on the girly side.  

By the way, my felhunter's name is Drooroon.  But, as a Warlock I do not get to pick my pet's name.  If I could name him, I would name him Friend.

Graduating

I am feeling really overwhelmed with the fact that I am graduating in three weeks and have things due every second of every day and I actually have to do these things.  I think this is ludicrous!  I concentrated for four years and was a ridiculously good student, I did my time.

I made that sound like I'm an inmate who's getting released on good behavior.  I may as well be.   

I have to be done with school right now.

In the illustrious words of Stephen Jenkins, whom I named my car after, "Can I graduate?"

Maybe a Third Eye Blind post will be in my future.

My Boyfriend Doesn't Watch TV Right

I am very serious about my television.

Television is to me what fine wine or expensive handbags are to other people.  I'm not sure that analogy makes any sense, but just keep in mind that television is my favorite thing ever.  Nothing surpasses it.

Not even people.  Except maybe the people on it.

Besides independently enjoying television, my favorite thing is to share my joyful experiences with those I love!  (Yay!)

When I show someone an episode or a clip I am no longer watching the monitor, but their reaction.  I am obsessed with gauging how much people like what I am showing them.

I like watching people smile.

That came out a lot creepier than intended.  Let me fix this.

When I show a person a clip and they look away briefly, I become very agitated.  

My boyfriend, Mike, does not understand my necessity for him to keep his eyes glued to the television while the awesome video I pull up is playing.  He is not a careful television watcher, which I find one of the most disgraceful things in the universe.  Time spent with the television on, but with eyes not on the screen, should be time spent thinking about how you should pause what you are watching because it is gravely important to your life.

I am not joking.

 Except, Mike does not normally get scared.  Mostly he gets annoyed and tells me he was watching the whole time.

Lies.

What makes this so hair-tearing-ly irritating is that most of the things we watch together are things I have already seen.  So I know all the good parts.  And somehow, he instinctively knows when said good parts are coming up because he chooses these moments to get up and make a bowl of ice cream or talk over the video or turn his head into the couch so he can't see just to annoy me (because he knows I get irritated when his eyes are not on the screen).

Constantly, he is talking over major plot lines.  

 
This is not a joke.  Inattentive Television Watching (I.T.W.) is an unquestionably devastating disease and those suffering are a burden to their friends and family.

My suggestion is opening their eyelids A Clockwork Orange style and sewing their clothes to the couch.  I think it is our only option, besides death. 

Then, Mike and others with signs of I.T.W. will finally experience every, precious drop of genius imbued in the most important medium ever invented. 

The Rain

I find the older I get the more unacceptable it is to like certain things.  Or rather, it becomes an obligation for adults to hate unchangeable conditions.

When you grow up, I don't think you're supposed to like the rain.  And while part of me falls into the uniform dislike of dreary weather, I still find myself hoping it won't stop.  Secretly, I'm glad when an entire day gets eaten up by clouds.

I know what I'm supposed to think.

But I can't help but feel I should go run around in it.

I guess my point is that it's okay to still play in the rain.


Especially if you are trying desperately to avoid becoming an adult.

UPDATE: I totally spun in circles on my deck today after work because it started drizzling after I asked Mike if he wanted to go for a walk, and then he locked me outside. So, Mike is a jerk.  And, playing in the rain?  Officially achieved.  Hoorah!

My Dumbest Moments

Sometimes I do things that are really unintelligent.  Or just a result of me being uncoordinated.  Here is a short, yet comprehensive, list of dumb things I have done.

1. The green stuff.

Sometimes I forget the words for things, and one day during the winter in high school while at Catherine's house I could not remember the word for pool cover.  Catherine was walking her dogs, and I was staring at the pool cover and an idea came into my head.

"Hey Catherine, can I walk on the green stuff?"

Catherine was understandably confused as there was plenty of green stuff in her backyard.  She said, "Yeah, sure."

I then started walking on the pool cover.  Catherine looked over and screamed, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

I was confused why she was so perturbed.  She just gave me permission.  "I'm walking on the green stuff."

"I thought you meant the grass."  I would like to point out that I definitely know the word for grass.

So, Catherine shooed me off the pool cover/green stuff and I was very sad.

Over last summer at my friend Nicole's house I asked her if I could walk on her blue pool cover (so, essentially, this is blue stuff; a completely different breed).  Nicole is nice so she said "YES!"  (I told her my green stuff story).

This is me being really happy I finally got to walk on some sort of stuff, even if it was the wrong color.

I'm a pro.

2. Pouring sprite on a fire.

In high school we used to have a lot of bonfires and play manhunt.  One night the fire was not as big as I wanted it to be.  It was actually starting to get pretty good and I thought to myself How can I make this fire get bigger?

That's when I pissed everyone off by pouring my can of sprite on the fire thinking it would go up in flames.  It just put the fire out, instead.  Kind of the opposite of what I intended.

  "Why would you do that?"

"I thought sprite was flammable!" 

"No, Serena.  That's alcohol.  Sprite is just sugary."

"Oh."

3. Rope swinging into a tree.

I really, really didn't want to rope swing.  And I didn't want to land on rocks. My fear of landing in shallow water and hurting myself on rocks sent me hurtling towards a tree. 

There's a video, I swear we didn't plan this.  My friends Arielle and Rose went first and we have videos of them, too.  You can watch it here, probably.

My injuries could have been much worse. 

 

I still have a scar on my hand from that.  It's almost faded, though. 

I'm really lucky my face didn't end up meeting that tree.

Honestly, not much can top the rope story and I am drained of creativity right now and have to leave for work in ten minutes.  Maybe I'll post the awesome picture I made of a dragon tomorrow.  He is cute, and blue!

And, I lied.  This was not a comprehensive list.

I am Actually Not That Negative

So, I realized the majority of my posts are spent picking apart the things that are inconvenient in my life.  I think the easiest things to write about are things that irritate me.  However, I am a really positive person.

While dwelling on things that annoy me and ruin my day is really fun, most of the time I bottle up that aggression and just stick to what I know.

I enjoy complaining, but it is all in good fun and my life is mostly filled with rainbows and sparkles and cheetahs.  Cheetahs everywhere.  Would you like another picture of a cheetah?

YOU'RE WELCOME!

Why Teachers Should Stop Assigning Group Projects

1. If you are the group leader, you have responsibility.  And responsibility is an evil sea monster that swallows you whole and spits out the spare parts, like your dignity. 

2. No one has the same schedule.  Attempting to get four students in the same room for an hour, that is not normal class time, is about as impossible as trying to force feed a cat medication without the skills of a licensed veterinarian. 

3. Inevitably, someone does not know what is going on.

4. No matter how much you prepare, someone is going to go off topic or totally misinterpret their section.

5. Almost always, one of the group members will have a nervous breakdown.  And it's usually the leader.

What Is This Alien Exploding?

I was going through my old photobucket because I decided to post pictures I've already done instead of drawing new ones because I am lazy today.  Also, I am supposed to be working on a group project but apparently no one decided to show up so I'm occupying myself while the only girl in my group who is here reads the chapter.  She's actually really nice, I shouldn't talk about her.

Anyway, I found this picture and I have no idea what this alien is supposed to be exploding.  Maybe he's being a nice alien and just destroyed an asteroid that was on a collision course towards Earth?  Probably not, I remember distinctly making him a mean alien.

Here are a bunch of other pictures I found in my photobucket that I feel like posting because I can't think of something today worth writing about except my dumb group project that is slowly ruining my life and eating my patience and sense of self away.

I'm almost positive that's irony, because the class this is for is Nature of Self.  I don't know anymore.

I still think this one's hysterical.

This would be a self portrait if I were a beat poet

Possibly my first robot rendering on a computer. (Most likely not)

I will always feel sad for this octopus, he was supposed to be pie shaped but I failed.

All of these pictures were done on my mac when I used to draw all the time and I used Apple Works instead of MS Paint.  I really miss Apple Works.  R.I.P.

Speaking of R.I.P., I also made a picture of Pikachu with a noose around his neck and the text "Kill" but I don't feel good about posting that.  Just know it exists somewhere.

I Wish I was a Mermaid

When I was little I spent an extensive portion of my life pretending I was otherworldly creatures.  I had a group of friends that I role played as a witch with, a few people with whom my choice race was alien and the first incarnation of it all was the mermaid.

I was in second grade and my friends and I created drama about all the complexities of being mermaid princesses.  I remember actually having conversations with my friends so entrenched in this fantasy world that my awareness that this was reality and the mermaid was the farce was not clear to me.

There were always evil forces working against us on our quest to become mermaids.  So, we often ran around the backyard working against the enemies in our collective imagination.   

I tried to do little, mini ceremonies and chants that would turn me into something mystical.

I cannot be completely sure that it didn't work, because I stopped trying.

Eventually, I resorted to drinking salt water because I thought it would turn me into a mermaid.

I poured salt in my water because I desperately wanted to swim in the sea and have talking turtle friends.  I did a bunch of other weird things when I was little, mostly pertaining to being a witch, but this is what I wanted to express to you the most.

The salt water I drank was out of a Little Mermaid cup, too, as to increase the probability that this act would work. 

I drank salt water until my parents informed me that it was just making me thirstier and not giving me a fin.

How Genetically Modified Foods Soil Birthdays

Yesterday was my boyfriend's 22nd birthday.  This is what my boyfriend looks like:

Despite that cartoon, he is a real person.  His name is Mike.  He's good at games, he'd want you to know that.

Recently, Mike and I have stopped eating meat.  He still eats fish, but I have become a one hundred percent vegetarian.  The reasons are varied on my end and maybe I'll get into that later in another post, but Mike's reasons are mostly health related.  (Part of my reason is because I just want to prove I can do it).

Anyway, Mike has been all hyped up about soy and other protein supplements.  I came into some very unfortunate news, though, the day before his birthday that a lot of soy is genetically modified.

This sent Mike on an explosive google rampage where he taught himself that a lot of places that claim to be organic started out that way but have since changed.  Mike was very sad and began saying very crazy things.

What the hell does high fructose corn syrup look like?

We had originally planned to go to the Cheesecake Factory for his birthday, but he was so distraught that he said things like, "I'm going to lay out in the sun and try to become photosynthetic."

I ended his misery-saturated (he would like you to know that the word "misery" is a huge hyperbole as he had a fun yesterday) birthday by bringing him to a health food store that guaranteed (to the best of their knowledge) they had no pesticides, no genetically modified foods and no high fructose corn syrup in any of their store.

Later that night I saw him eat ice cream and salsa with maltodextrin in it.  He's calmed down significantly and has since become distracted with the MMO mouse I got him. 

And tonight, we're even going to the Cheesecake Factory.  I'm not sure if this is compromise, or if he is surrendering himself to an inevitably unhealthy lifestyle.   

*Sorry if this post felt rushed, I did it while waiting for Mike to take a shower so we can finally go to the Cheesecake Factory.  Don't count this as a real post.

Why I Love Reading (My Biggest Childhood Fear)

My fondness of reading did not begin because of some innocent love affair with words.

No, it was prompted by pure fear. 

The reality I had constructed as a child was very complex.  When we began to have vocabulary tests in school, I realized I had never heard any of these words before.  Now I know that I probably had heard those words but because they were unfamiliar and did not pertain to me I ignored them.  However, my belief was once I successfully learned these words my classmates and I would integrate them into normal conversations because that is what adults did. 

I believed that adults did not actually speak the way they spoke in front of us, kids.  I thought their vocabularies were much more advanced and so complicated that if I were to hear their true voices, it would sound like an entirely different language. 

To me, civilization was a club.  And I did not want to be rejected.

What I feared most was not being able to be a part of this future society I built up in my mind where all the smart adults used big words and talked about big, important things to solve big, important problems.

Maybe I didn't have the capacity to memorize all these words.   What if by continuing to speak the way I always have and mimicking the way my parents are speaking to me (which could not be the correct way to form sentences) I would end up in a never-ending spiral of dumb?  What will they do with me if I turn out to be incapable of functioning in society?

I thought that if I did not memorize all these big words (like gregarious) then I would be put on some island for dumb people and not be allowed to rule over my own life. 

Thinking about it now, I realize that being stuck on an island with a television instead of being a productive member of society for the rest of my life is not exactly something I should have been afraid of happening.  But, the idea that I might not be able to keep up with the world was incredibly terrifying to me.

Getting a tan is still pretty terrifying, too.

So, I began to read books and skim dictionaries so that there was no way my future would be spent on Dumb Island.  Somewhere between compulsiveness and fear, I found myself enjoying books and continued once the version of reality I had taught myself proved to be a lie. 

When I finally realized that all those years my parents spoke with simple words they weren't talking down to me, but speaking the way they always do, I was sad.

I did all that work for nothing!