Ages ago, I always used to record my dreams in here and analyze them, but I haven't done that in a while. BUT since I had a particularly involved and complex dream last night, I figured I might as well, just to keep things organized.

( The dream... )

---

( The analysis... )

Hooah.

The past couple of weeks have been pretty interesting in our house, for a variety of reasons. And for once, none of those reasons relate to video games or geekery. They're actually normal person problems, which is astounding in and of itself. Normal people problems. Hrm.

( Pondrances within. )

A post on a pastor friend of mine's Facebook page got me thinking. In the post, the pastor talked about how it's "not a good idea to cohabitate before marriage" and that "80% of marriages where the participants cohabitated before marrying end in divorce." It made me kind of scratch my head, because by those statistics, Kyle and I should be heading for Divorceville in a couple of years.

(I honestly don't think that we are)

The thing with cohabitation (which is a MUCH more controversial issue in churches than outside; people find out you're living with a significant other and you might as well tell them all that you're sacrificing small woodland creatures to Satan) is that I don't think it's to blame for the 80% number. I think that the 80% number more accurately comes from the idea of steps.

When it comes to finding someone we want to spend for.ev.er. with, we tend to take it in steps. First you admit to liking each other, then to loving each other. Somewhere along the line, you agree to be exclusive (probably between liking and loving). Somewhere after loving, you talk about moving in with each other and eventually actually move in together. And logically, after you've been living together for a while, you realize that the next step at some point is marriage, so there you go.

It's kind of something that's ingrained in us from a societal standpoint. Life is all about stages: infancy, early childhood, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, job, marriage, family, middle age, old age, death. We've been programmed by societal norms to think "oh, logically, after I finish high school, college MUST happen" and to think "oh god, I've finished college, I don't have a job, I FAIL." And I think we get that way about relationships, too. Whether or not a relationship actually sparks us, whether or not we really understand what forever with this person means, marriage is the next step after living together, so after a certain amount of time, it happens.

This, like doing anything else solely because "you're supposed to," is a bad idea.

The thing with being married to Kyle is that for all the trite sentiments out there, he really is an essential component to my life in a different way than I could ever have understood without being married to him. It's like a new level of completion that I didn't have before. Now, that's not to say that I'd forever be distraught if someday he wasn't in my life, God-forbid, but it is to say that MUCH more than when we were just dating, and even more than when we were engaged, he's part of the making of me. My choice to marry him didn't come out of the "we're supposed to do this" line of thought, it came out of thoughts of "man, I can't wait to see him as a grandfather" and "we are going to be amazing old people together."

In short, and to be trite, I didn't marry him because we discovered after a couple of years that I could live with him. I married him because I knew from the moment we met that I couldn't live without him.

And we cohabitated.

Our cohabitation was one of necessity rather than us saying, "Let's see how it works out." UNT had screwed me over financially, so I was barely able to pay my pre-existing bills and still go to school. An apartment was completely out of the question, and Kyle's parents graciously offered to let me stay with them as long as I needed to. It was rough, it wasn't always pleasant, and I learned a lot about Kyle, but it certainly wasn't born out of the idea of "let's test out the relationship and see how it goes." It was more accurately born out of "I don't want to move back to Massachusetts; I do want to keep going to school."

So I guess the point I'm driving at here is two-fold:

1. Cohabitating doesn't always mean a couple is "living in sin" or just "trying it out" or anything like that. Sometimes, it means that one half is very graciously helping the other half out in a rough spot. And, with that in mind, cohabitating doesn't always mean that the couple is heading for the Alimony Train.

2. Whenever you make a life-changing decision, make sure you're not doing it because you're "supposed to." It's really easy to fall prey to this mindset when you've got people around you expressing their expectations frequently and at top volume, but whether it's marriage or graduate school or any of those milestones, make those decisions because you want to, not because "it's time."

Also, I really wish that pastors would examine the real reasons people do things before throwing statistics like that up there. Correlation vs. causation and all that.

First of all, I'm posting this to my new Dreamwidth account. Yay for free account creation over here! The new LJ comment system is just gross, and I'm not really terribly tied over there since leaving WoW behind. But glory be, Dreamwidth allows for cross-posting, so yay!

It's the 27th, two days after my first Christmas as a married woman, and it was a geeky and wonderful Christmas. Kyle and I spent the whole day watching Every Star Wars Movie except for The Phantom Menace, because that one seemed loathe to understand the importance of celebrating the birth of Christ by watching Anakin Skywalker's transformation from a whiny nine-year-old to James Earl Jones. Still, we got the other five under our belt (mocking Attack of the Clones mercilessly and eventually drifting off to play SWTOR with our headphones off, only to keep getting distracted from that by the movies at hand), so I consider the First Annual Star Wars Christmas to be a success.

...minus the Star Wars pancakes. My mother got us Star Wars pancake molds from Williams Sonoma for a wedding gift (the amount of "EEEEEE!!" that accompanied the receipt of these molds has not been seen before nor since), so the plan was to make Star Wars themed pancakes and eat them while watching Star Wars. Very meta. The problem was that the molds made it hard to flip the pancakes, so we ended up with many pancakes that were black and crispy on one side and barely done on the other. But that also resulted in the best pancake texture ever; i.e., crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. So things worked out.

Gift haul this year was fantastically geeky. Kyle and I decided that instead of trying to covertly spend lots of money on each other, we'd just decide what we wanted for a big gift and then go get it. SO he has a nice new monitor for the computer my brother is building him and my iPhone will arrive in the mail in about a week. We're drowning in stuffed Yodas (Yodae?), as apparently, that was the gift to give this year, and we ended up with some really nice cookbooks and clothes from his parents. My parents sent over a portable hard drive for Kyle, and some nice geek swag for me (namely, an Alliance hoodie from Jinx, because the blue side will always have a special place in my heart). And my sister got me a Sonic Screwdriver. So that's nice.

( Game stuff hrrrgh )

SO. My new job is for a construction firm, where I'm working as a "marketing coordinator." Basically, this means that anything graphical ends up being designed by me (including the newsletter and this year's holiday cards). Of course, that's mostly just the icing on the job--the real big stuff are the proposals. Those are going to start coming with increasing frequency as we move into January, February, and March. My job is to basically make sure that everyone who's working on the proposals (I almost never write them myself) gets their stuff to me on time, edit all that stuff, make sure it's in line with the RFP, and then create a final product with a cover and such.

It's... well, it's paying work. And it's not horrible. During busy times, it's really engaging, and I enjoy it, but I'm also sitting here wishing that I could go back to writing my novel. Like, not even staying home to play video games, turn off my internet, whatever. I was blazing through Nanowrimo, got more than halfway done, and then got this job and it died. And that's frustrating. We need the money, but nngh. I was finally getting there with that dream I've had since I was a kid, and splat. Job has to come first.

This is that adulthood thing that people have been telling me I have to embrace since I went to college. And perhaps, if I was a more determined person, I'd be coming home every night and pounding out a couple thousand words or even a few hundred. Or getting up earlier. But maybe because of my own introversion or maybe because I'm just lazy, working completely drains me of anything but the creative willpower to derp out some RP and mash my hotkeys until I've achieved braindeadness. And for the first time since I got out of undergrad, it's really annoying me.

I know it can't be helped. I know I should be grateful that I have a job. I know that this is part of life and I need to just suck it up. But it is really painful to be approaching your dream and then have reality say "lolno" at you.

Bah. I complain too much, probably.

Kyle finished his undergraduate degree and is looking for work, and I'm praying he finds something soon, not because I'm like "rargh I do not want to be the only one working argh" but because it'll be good for him to have something fulltime and solid. He spoke with the guy who managed him on his internship, and the basic gist of what this guy told him was that if Kyle's willing to relocate, he's going to go really far in his field and really fast. That's good news, no question. I just hope that "relocate" ends up translating to "maybe the East Coast or California" and not "elsewhere in DFW or possibly Minnesota." No offense to any Minnesotans!

So...yeah. Life's a mixed bag right now, but I'm thankful for work, good friends, and an amazing husband. And that's about all I can ask for.

Bluh bluh, sometimes I feel inspired to share about my life, like when it seems it might be turning around into non-suckitude.

Well. That's not completely accurate. My life doesn't suck, not really... being married is amazing, more than I could've imagined. I don't think I completely appreciated it until this week, when I flew up to spend some time with my family in Massachusetts and interview for a really great job (more on that later). And I haven't been in a state of "oh no, what shall I do with myself since my husband isn't here!" It's just been more of a time when I've really wished I was coming home to him, really wished he was there all the time. I think I'd forgotten what it's like to miss him in the last two years, and it's just that much more pronounced since we're married.

Neither of us are really gainfully employed yet--he works at one of the local Halloween costume shops as a keyholder, but it's extremely part time because of his school schedule--but we're working on it. As I mentioned, I'm up here to interview for a job at a biotechnology publishing company in Newton. It's a small company, looking for an assistant editor, and the qualifications are almost exactly in line with my own (I say "almost" because I know very little about biology, but based on what they told me yesterday, it's easy enough to learn what I'd need to know). I really want this job, but I'm not holding up signs saying I got it yet, even though I think the interview went well. I was also pretty sick--Kyle came down with a nasty headcold right before I flew up, and sure enough, I caught it myself on Monday. Yesterday, I drove in for the interview and managed to make it through the entire session without passing out, by some miracle, only to come home and sleep for eighteen hours straight. Go figure.

The plan, if I do get this job, is for me to move up to Massachusetts with my stuff--meaning my computer and clothes--in the next month or so, allowing Kyle to finish classes and all of those fun in school things. And then, come December, I'll fly down to see his graduation and we'll drive up together, staying in my parents' in-law apartment until after Christmas, when we'll move out and find our own place.

If I don't get this job... heh.

In the realm of fake worlds, I'm bittersweetly reaching the conclusion that, after almost six years, two best friends, and a husband, my time with WoW may be drawing to a close. I've been tooling around on the Star Wars: the Old Republic beta, and it completely blows WoW out of the water in just about every aspect. Combine this with the fact that my server's community has become... mm, kind of eh for me lately, and I'm all too ready to make the move. panlaska and I have already started pulling together a guild, and a lot of our friends from WoW are following us over.

It's entirely surreal... once upon a time, I thought I'd be sticking with WoW until the last server closed, but I've been really unhappy with the way the game is going lately, and with the social aspect becoming less and less appealing to me, I'm just really looking forward to a new community where nobody knows who I am and where there are no real politics to be played. It'll be a pleasant change.

Back to married life... I'm cooking a lot lately, which is fun (considering the amount of cookware we got for wedding gifts), and we took a major step a few weeks ago in buying a bed. We had been sleeping on this fancy air mattress my mother bought us last summer, but it managed to spring several leaks in a short period of time, and we agreed it was time for a replacement. $500 later, we have a proper bed that both of us adore. We couldn't really afford it, but it was necessary.

And that's life, I suppose.

Oh. And happy birthday to thinginthetub!

Coming out of psychology class. It was an 8 a.m. class, and for that reason, I remember nothing I learned there, save for the differentiation between the id, ego, and superego, thanks to Allen Hamlin's ridiculous demonstration at the end of the semester. Psychology ended right before A Capella choir began, which meant booking it from the psych building through the student union and down to the arts building (Cove) in less than ~7 minutes. I usually managed this pretty well (running into older choir members on the way and feeling mildly awed at seeing them outside of the rehearsal room), but that day, I got sidetracked.

See, the student union had a coffee house/TV room that everyone called the Colonel's Coffee House. At night and during big games, it was usually full of people watching the big screen TV in there, but that was almost never the case at 9 a.m., since... well, what college student gets excited about watching something at 9 a.m.? If you don't have to be up then, you're still in bed.

But that morning, the coffee house was full of people, so I poked my head in, as most people were doing. At first, I thought it was a movie because wtf, that doesn't happen. Planes don't crash into buildings on purpose in the real world. But then the second one did and I just stood there and stared for a while. I know I ended up being late to choir, but so was... well, half the choir. We all kind of poured in and Prof gave us "the eyebrows" (his eyebrows were a separate entity from himself: bushy and wild and prone to disappearing into his hairline when a note went flat or sharp). I think we all talked at once about what happened, and then things get blurry.

Choir rehearsal must've gone off normally, since I think if we hadn't practiced normally, I would've remembered. It was just like that. And then I remember I went back to my dorm and called my then-boyfriend, Matt. He didn't understand why there was anything to be scared about so I made up something about my aunt in New York City (which I do have, an aunt in New York City) so that he'd come over and give me a hug. Retrospectively, that was a warning sign, but meh.

Classes mostly went on as usual. I had my writing class in the afternoon, and we were supposed to go to Barnes & Noble to buy writing journal things. I remember Theresa, one of the girls in the class, couldn't stop crying, and I remember driving to Barnes & Noble and seeing the ridiculous traffic coming out of Boston. With good reason, too, since the planes came from Logan Airport, which was literally right across the harbor from the school. And it's odd to realize that I probably heard them flying overhead on my way to psychology class that morning.

After that, everything got quiet. There were no planes overhead, not for months after, it felt like. I must've gone to hundreds of candlelight vigils and walked from church to church, holding leftover Christmas candles and singing in harmony with people I didn't even know.

Kind of weird, when you think about it. Not many people experience an event in their lifetimes that changes the entire world into "before" and "after." We all experience that individually (more powerful "before/after" moments for me included England and moving to Texas and getting married), but rarely something so global or historical like that. And that's probably for the best.

(if you are not here because of warcraftsues, or if you're a RL friend or something, I apologize for this entry and request that you ignore it. I'll write a real update as soon as I've something to talk about)

I really like to avoid writing about WoW in my LJ. I've got a lot else going on in my life, what with the job hunt and the newlywed thing and not knowing if I'll be living here in the next six months and what-have-you. What's more, most of the people who read my LJ don't really care about WoW RP, and I don't want to make them care. There's my real life and then there's WoW. I like keeping the two separate, save for when I make good enough friends to meet them in person, and that is awesome.

That said...

( So, you've been posted on Warcraft Sues... )

(if you are not associated with WoW and read all of that, I am really sorry. It's been one of those weeks)

Today was the last day of my internship, and I didn't get offered a full-time position. This had nothing to do with my performance and everything to do with the blasted economy, which has been cheerfully trolling me since 2009. Seriously, I feel like every time I turn on CNN, I should see a trollfase somewhere or someone at the news desk should point at me and be like "lol @ u."

It was the economy that sent me down to Texas and it may very well be the economy that sends me back to Massachusetts, depending on what I find for work. The thing about being a technical writer (and an editor) is that most of your work is going to be in technical sectors and publication centers. The DFW area has a few amazing industrial centers that often need technical writers, but unfortunately, I haven't found any openings for which I'm qualified. So, I'm turning to other places, namely Los Angeles and Boston.

On the one hand, this is pretty great, because (as I've made no secret) I'm not the biggest fan of Texas. Even less the past couple of weeks--my first real summer in Texas, and it's the hottest summer in 30 years. We've had the A/C cranked for the past couple of weeks (I don't even want to think about the bill) and it still pushes 90 in here during the day. My poor New England blood can't take it. So I'm ready for a change, and I'd love it if that change was a move back up to Massachusetts or a move out to Los Angeles. Both places are acceptable and pleasant to me.

But then there's the problem, and that problem is that Kyle still has classes until December. If I got a job in MA or CA right now, I'd have to move without him. I am incredibly not a fan of this, and in fact, it's the only thing so far about this entire situation that's moved me to tears. I know that we could do it; I mean, hell, we didn't get married just to be like "lol jk" when something hard came up, but.

Well. We spent three years commuting and there was never a point at which it didn't suck. I can't honestly think of a point in time where I sat down and thought, "Wow. I am really glad that I only see the love of my life roughly every three to four months." Now that we're married, I'm even more wary about it. I've gotten used to sleeping in the same bed as him. I've gotten used to rolling over in the morning and wrapping my arms around his waist and kissing his shoulder before falling back to sleep. I've gotten used to the way we kind of move around each other in the house, almost instinctively. I've gotten used to cooking with him and to him sneaking up behind me when I'm at my computer to kiss my neck.

And not having that would suck.

In the ideal magical world of my dreams, I'd find a position in Massachusetts or Los Angeles that would allow me to telecommute for the next couple of months and then Kyle and I could move once he's finished with school, since we still have a good six months on our lease anyway. But that's the ideal magical world and reality will probably be very different.

I'm willing to go and provide for us. I just wish someone would invent transporters already. Sigh.

Let me clarify here: I don't honestly have a "one who got away" because I think that implies regret. I don't regret the guys that I didn't end up with because--call me a crazy, sappy newlywed or what-have-you--I'm pretty damn happy with Kyle. If I wasn't, I wouldn't have married him.

But that's not what this entry is about.

Before I met Kyle, I had several guys who I was convinced were the mysterious "one." They had the ability to get me all giggling and wobbly in the knees like a schoolgirl, imagining scenes right out of Twilight taking place between the two of us. Yes, they all dazzled me (I'll say at this point that there were really two or three of them total) and made me swoon, even well into my twenties.

I could go into specific details about these guys, but I don't know what purpose that would serve, save for linking back to old LJ entries where I was a huge sap and didn't really understand how good I could potentially have it--and would eventually have it when I found Kyle. Instead, I'll just talk about a recent encounter I had with one of these guys that made me realize that, at the end of the day, I chose wisely.

It was Christmas break, and I was up in Massachusetts, getting things ready for the wedding. Kyle was there as well, though he was using the laptop downstairs and I was up in my brother's room, using his GARRRRRR computer (that's really the only adjective that describes it. GARRRRRR). My phone rang, and it was one of these guys. As some context, he married a few years ago and, from what I heard, he's been pretty happy since. He's also the guy who had the strongest chance of being that mysterious "one" until Kyle came into my life and blew everyone else out of the water.

We chatted back and forth and caught up, and then he went and told me that he'd been thinking lately and missing being single, missing the freedom of it, and (I nearly choked on my tongue) missing me.

I don't really remember what I said after that, save that the conversation didn't last much longer and I told Kyle about it immediately thereafter. It was pretty uncomfortable, to be honest, but after a while, it kind of made me laugh.

See... okay. Maybe I'm weird. But one of the things I thought when I got engaged was "ha! All of you guys have lost your chance because I am off the market!" This was mostly a personal thing, as I didn't honestly believe that any of my exes or "ones that got away" would really care that I was off the market, but hearing that my biggest "one who got away" was suddenly missing me... well, it tickled me on some level. This particular person had a good five years to step up to the plate and never did. It just echoed back to me that last line of the song:

You'll never know that I was the one.

And ultimately, he wasn't the one for me, and that phonecall just told me that more loudly than a big brass band could've. I don't have, therefore, a "one who got away" because I've caught the prize.

Oh how many ways I could answer this.

On average, the place in the world that gives me the most squee is Disney World. I love Disney World (and Disneyland, to a lesser extent) because it's this amazing fantasy world where nothing goes wrong. The food all tastes great, you ride on the wings of your dreams (corny and cliche, but true), even waiting in line is sweetened by that, hey, you're at Disney World and it's amazing.

(side note: to those more cynical about Disney and Disney World and any Disney park, you are welcome to your cynicism; some of us, however, like to let ourselves enjoy things mindlessly when we're on vacation and not worry about consumerism and whatever horrible wrongs Disney has perpetrated in the past)

But honestly, the happiest place in the world for me is 6 Kingston Lane, Oxford, UK.

It's been seven and a half years now since I flew to England to spend 100 days studying at Oxford University. The idea of it still makes me sound smarter than I actually am. I was the sole English major in a program designed for philosphy and theology majors (we also had a math major, but he actually got to study relevent materials, while I was stuck trying to do literary analysis when really, my tutors all wanted me to philosophize) and I'm 99% sure that I received the lowest marks that semester (my average was a B-minus, which is still pretty good, for Oxford). Being honest, I wasn't there for the educational aspects at all. I was there because it as foreign and new and I needed an escape after several disastrous relationships left me flailing about who I really was.

6 Kingston Road is a brick house, just on the corner of Kingston Road and Walton Well Road, the latter of which leads to Port Meadow. It's not quite spacious the way American homes are (since we have so much more room to spread out, houses tend to sprawl instead of climb; in England, they climb instead of sprawling), but it has more than enough room for nine American college students and their myriad of friends coming and going at all hours.

Each of the rooms at 6 Kingston Road is stacked on top of another, creating tier after tier of living space. The most sprawled out floor is the main floor, which actually is a main and a half floor, down a small set of stairs from the rest of itself. This is the floor where you can find the sunroom, the kitchen, and the largest bathroom. This is also the floor with the paneled glass doorway leading out to the garden, which is charmingly overgrown and contains a magic healing well that's populated with nuclear goldfish.

The television is all the way downstairs, in the far parlor, and everything above is bedrooms, seven in all, and all of them huge. My room was in the very bottom of the house, but it was also the largest room for anyone who wasn't sharing with someone else. I had a view out to the sunroom, so I could see when someone was using the internet or eating breakfast there.

Retrospectively, I'm not sure if it was the place and time or the people that created an ache in me for Oxford that's never gone away. In the last seven and a half years, I've fallen out of touch with nearly all of my roommates from Oxford. We're Facebook friends, but this doesn't completely count, as we rarely--if ever--actually converse. I know that Andy married the girl he told me stole his heart one night (and, in saying as much, he broke mine into a thousand pieces). I know that Kelly recently married. I know that Jason did as well, and that he's one of my Very Republican/Possibly Tea Party friends. I think I'm really the only one among us to really use Facebook regularly.

Maybe it's more me. I keep thinking of the lines from the song "White Houses" by Vanessa Carlton:

Maybe you were all faster than me
We gave each other up so easily

And I wonder if it's maybe just me, if maybe it wasn't as much of a turning point for anyone else as it was for me. But at the end of the day, seven and a half years later, when thinking of it brings back that same flood of memories, things I'd forgotten to remember for so long (like Carl impressing world-renowned theologian Alister McGrath by eating a banana in one bite or the soft, sweet sound of boys' choirs when we went to chapel at night, which happened frequently), I don't think it matters much. Even if I'm the only one, going to 6 Kingston Road, Oxford, UK, will always be going home.

THE MAGIC BULLET.





I love this thing. I love this thing so hard that there aren't words for how much I love this thing. I love the characters and imagine they have their own little story there: Mick and Mimi the hosts, the blonde chick that I'm pretty sure is Mimi's sister and her husband, the middle-aged Midwestern Mom type, the bald party animal, and the Jewish mom with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. They all had this crazy party the night before and they're all getting up and are hungover and then Mick and Mimi cook the entire day's food (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and PARTY FOOD because these people never stop partying) in half an hour of infomercial glory.

It is amazingly retarded. The whole thing makes you just sort of stare with your mouth hanging open the first time you watch it, but then, you start to realize that you have stumbled upon pure genius and glory.

Incidentally, I now own not one but TWO Magic Bullets. I can tell you right now that they don't chop onions and garlic nearly as well as the infomercial suggests, but Kyle is more than pleased at their capability when it comes to making frozen drinks. I need to start using them myself and seeing what I can come up with. My guess?

Pure magic.

I've been trying for a couple of days to write a Harry Potter retrospective, talking about what the series meant to me and all that, but every time I try, I realize that it's not possible for me. It's not possible because I don't believe that this fandom is over or diminished just because the last movie came out, anymore than I believe Star Wars fandom will go away because (please God, considering the last ones) George Lucas won't be making anymore movies.

People keep saying "It's not going away!" as if it's some kind of denial, but I'm just stating it as fact: Harry Potter is the rare fandom that actually falls into the same category as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Star Trek. It won't go away. This isn't because fans are in denial. This is because the world JKR created is too big for it to be confined to seven books, eight movies, a theme park and a website. I don't doubt that there will someday be spin-offs, arguments about the extended universe, video games, MMOs (ohgod talk about things that would be my personal WoW killer), TV series, the works.

The HP fandom really had an advantage when it came to other fandoms: we came of age with the internet. Fandom hit its peak as the internet did, and so we got to see what few other fandoms really do nowadays, and with more fascination. I can't really explain it well; it was kind of like stepping on new snow back then. I think it's fair to say that Harry Potter made the world of fandom more public and less...less stigmatized, I'd say. Along with Lord of the Rings (which came out the same year as the Sorcerer's Stone movie), Harry Potter made it pretty cool to be a geek, and I think that's one of the biggest things you can say about it.

And that's why it's not going to go away. It's not a fandom living in denial; quite the contrary, it's a fandom that recognizes they've latched onto something big, something that's not really replaceable. And though things will diminish--and have diminished--I don't think they'll die at any point.

( As to the movie... )

To start, let's go back five years and think about where I saw myself then. That would bring me to the summer of 2006, probably right around the time my dog died. It was a preeeeeetty shitty time in my life. I'd just lost my job at David's Bridal and started work at both the Disney Store and Bath and Body Works. Between the two, I worked less than twenty hours a week and could barely make ends meet. It would've been a good job, if I'd been sixteen that year. Sadly, as I was twenty-two and had a car and insurance payments to make, it wasn't a great situation.

When you're in those circumstances, it's hard to see a future, and admittedly, I didn't really. For a little while, I thought I was going to get my ME in secondary education, but then I remembered that I don't really like working with teenagers all that much and scrapped that plan. I was relatively aimless, just basically living paycheck to paycheck and hoping that, at some point, inspiration would strike.

And oddly, it was that summer when things started changing, mostly because I met this really amazing guy from Texas. But that's neither here nor there.

Five years from now. Hmm.

It's honestly a difficult thing to say, still, though not because I'm aimless. I really have two ideas of what I want to start doing in the next five years. The first involves going back to school, getting my PhD in creative writing, and then teaching at a relatively small liberal arts college, preferably in California or New England. The second involves taking what I'm learning at my job now and the experience I'm collecting and applying to become a technical writer at Blizzard, eventually moving laterally into the lore and creative writing department.

Either way, I don't plan to stay in technical writing forever.

I do know that I'll still be with Kyle in five years and I do know that within five years, we want to have kids. Once we got back from our honeymoon, we actually had that very brief but serious conversation. "So, when do you want to stop trying to not get pregnant?" "When I can replace your income." Problem solved. We expect that in the next two to three years.

I hope that I won't be in Texas any longer. I mean no offense to any Texans who may read this. You have a state that is very lovely in places and definitely interesting. I can see the appeal! But it's not for me. I'm not a fan of the heat, I'm not a fan of the flatness, I'm not a fan of being the most liberal person I know down here (and I'm only a moderate!). It's the same as if a Texan was transplanted to Colorado; the results would be rather lulzy. Ideally, within five years, we'll be living in New England, Maryland, or California (just based off of where my company has offices and where I have preferred schools).

I don't know if we'll be getting a house or not yet. I don't think we will. We're trying to be practical in that regard and waiting to buy a house until we're sure it's the house we'll be living in for the next twenty-plus years. Neither of us want to buy a house and then sell it and then buy a house and then sell it. We both really want to make sure that we can have stable lives, unpack the boxes for a long time, and call someplace home for a long time. I don't know that we'll be there in five years, but if we are, that's great.

In a dream world...hmm. In a dream world, Kyle will be making enough in the next five years that I can slow down and do a little more creative writing with my time. I've been rereading one of my favorite books (Stephen King's On Writing) and he talks about taking 4-5 hours of your day and just writing. GOD I would love to do that. I really would. Part of me wonders why I'm not doing it now, but then I get home from work and am so drained that I can't think creatively until it's almost bedtime. But in a dream world, I can work half days and spend the first half of the day writing.

Yeah, that's basically what I'm getting at. Writing. A lot. That's where I'll be in five years.

I'm a pretty picky eater, so eating weird things doesn't come naturally to me. If it doesn't look like something I'd usually go for (and that list is comparatively short), I'll usually run the other direction and look for something else, something that's less...icky. I suppose icky is a good word for it.

Back in the day, "icky" referred to most of the foods I encountered in England. This isn't a slam against British food! I was hungry and I ate it and it ended up tasting much better than it looked. A lot of the food, though, looked kind of like it had already been eaten. I was actually caught on film reacting to such a dish once, at Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St. Albans. I don't remember what the dish was, but judging by the expression on my face, it tasted much better than it looked.

Of course, the reverse could be true, too. I've encountered many a delicious-looking dish that actually tasted rather disgusting.

But this is about weird foods. The weirdest foods I've eaten can probably be divided into two categories: Extreme Cheeses and Normal Foods Gone Bizarre.

In the Extreme Cheeses category: Some people get this way about wine or other foods. I get this way about cheese. I love cheese hardcore. All cheeses, really. Even the old ones or the moldy ones. My friend thinginthetub and I tend to hunt down what we call "acceptable cheese" and try it, but I think my palatte is more adventurous than hers. For example, I've recently adored what's called a three year gouda; that is, a gouda that was aged for three years. It did have stuff growing in the holes. It was far harder than gouda usually is. It was...pungent. And it was so good.

In the Normal Foods Gone Bizarre category: I snack on raw pasta all the time. Compulsively. It used to be just some raw spaghetti when my parents cooked it for dinner, but once I discovered that one can eat raw pasta on her own, it became a Thing. I think this at least partly related to that it's kind of good for cleansing palattes after whatever flavorish food you eat because pasta itself tends to be pretty bland.

But that's my weird food story.

Hello, LJ. Long time no post. How are you? I'm doing great myself. I'm at a new job, in a new apartment, and most importantly (and relatedly to this question) have a new husband.

When Kyle and I first met in person, we knew right away that neither of us wanted to be with anyone else the rest of our lives. It's one of those things that until you actually experience it for yourself (if you ever do, and some people don't, and that's okay!), you're liable to be skeptical, but that's what happened to us. The trouble, of course, was that I lived in Massachusetts and he lived in Texas. That's a nearly 2000 mile gap (technically, 1700-something. It's been a while since I looked at Google Maps and said, "How far is it from where I used to live to where I live now?").

(spoiler alert: I did move to another city for someone I love)

So we realized right away that at some point in the future, one of us was going to have to move for the other. For a little while, it looked like Kyle would be that one. I had a job; he didn't. I was done with school; he was looking to get another degree. Sure, I didn't make quite enough by Massachusetts standards to be renting an apartment for us, but I figured a miracle would happen and we'd scrape by.

And then, in February of 2009, the economy put on its trollfase and I lost my job (I say "trollfase" because I lost my job immediately after my car was totaled; my car was, in turn, totaled immediately after I dropped $1300 on a new transmission for it). What's more, Kyle had just finished his associate's degree and was looking to start work on his bachelor's in the fall. Suddenly, he had a reason to stay in one place and I didn't.

The decision to move down to Texas was, actually, a pretty easy one. I decided, after four luckless months on the job market, that I was sick of playing the economy's game and would, instead, play my own game; and, by that, I mean I was going to get another degree. An MA in Technical/Professional Writing, to be precise. I had three schools on my "do want" list: University of Texas at El Paso, University of North Texas, and University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. I visited the Texas schools, crossed UTEP off the list (my aunt mentioned something to me about bars on the windows and $80,000 death threats from drug cartel lords...HUGE turn-off), and was pretty solidly sure about UNT.

UNT, which happens to be 40 minutes from where Kyle lived then. UNT, which meant that we could go from being a long-distance couple to being a "normal" couple, after three years together.

It helped, too, that my parents had just sold the house I grew up in and were planning to move out about two weeks after I did. We were all leaving that little yellow house on a hill; we were just going to different places.

Now, the decision to leave was easy. Actually leaving and living somewhere else hasn't been. The people I miss are one thing that makes it harder. Another is that Texas is like a completely different country than Massachusetts. They even seem to speak a different language! The climate is enormously different, the landscape is enormously different. I almost always feel like a fish out of water.

But has it been worth it, to be with the love of my life?

100% yes.

We're getting married in 286 days. A little less than 41 weeks. A little more than nine months.

The wedding is taking place at Stonehurst, which was the home of Robert Treat Paine, way back in the 19th century. It's all stone walls and ivy and sprawling rooms and grounds that look like something out of a fairy tale. Enormous trees that must have gnomes living in them. Stone walls curling around the lush green grass. Meadows filled with wildflowers and tall grass. Wooden floors and paned glass windows for dreaming out of.

Every day, I look at Kyle and I love him even more. I never thought that this could happen, not when I boil it down. Of course, I've always thought about puppy love gushing onwards into the end of time, but never of this sort of solidity, this committed thing that isn't a feeling as much as a knowledge. It's the knowledge that this person isn't going to make your life a utopia, but that the harder things are easier to bear when you're sharing the load. The knowledge that they're smiling that way because of you and that the reverse is true as well. The knowledge that even if things don't work out, you can handle it because you have each other.

Even today, after we've spent pretty much a month in each other's presence 24/7, I'm not sick of him. The things about him that could annoy me simply don't. I'm sure there will come a day in the next however many years we have together where I'll want him to be quieter or go away or something along those lines, but right now...I can't imagine wanting that because he's a part of me, part of the making of me, really.

Life lately has been kind of sucktastic. I'm so desperately in the red financially that it's terrifying, and I just want to live in Massachusetts again, but I'm happy. I'm incredibly happy...because I have Kyle.

Meanwhile, when not sleeping in and avoiding breakfast, I've been thinking, largely about my faith.

I've never really felt the need to justify what I believe to anyone else. Yes, there is the command to "go and make disciples of all nations," but the thing of it is that you really cannot prove to someone that something (or someone) that exists outside of the physical realm is actually real and not a figment of your imagination. If the person to whom you're preaching doesn't accept the premise that God may exist, then you can talk about love and peace and the way your life changes and all of that until you're blue in the face, and it still won't convince a single person. After all, they might argue, it's all well and good to think that Santa Claus loves me, at least if he actually existed.

I think I'm slightly weird because I can completely accept and understand the atheist position, and I can't really blame a single atheist for holding it...and yet, I don't agree with it myself. I have very strong faith, I honestly do believe in God, the God of Christianity, and I honestly do believe that Christianity comes the closest to getting it right, out of all the religions in the world. And, as you can imagine, this puts me in kind of a weird spot. If I accept that it makes sense not to believe in God when there's no physical evidence for Him, then why do I believe in God myself?

It ultimately comes down to this: I simply do.

I simply do believe in God, whether or not I can point to X in the physical realm and say, "there! That's evidence of God!" I understand fully that this argument isn't one that would convince skeptics, but ultimately, I don't really care. Be skeptical, don't believe in God, that's your choice (or not choice or whatever, I'm not going to get into that). I'm not interested, nor have I ever been interested, in convincing other people that my ideas are the right ones. Making sure that they're understanding those ideas correctly, yes (I'll tell you right now that the quickest way to get me to write a diatribe is to state something completely untrue about Christianity as if it's a fact), but not convincing them to agree with me on (what I believe are) certain universal truths.

In a way, I sometimes feel as if I shouldn't be a theist, be a Christian, or even believe in anything supernatural whatsoever. Confession time: I've never had a supernatural experience, or any experience that could have been called supernatural but explained away with natural phenomena. Sure, I fell over when people would pray for me at summer camp and spoke in other languages, and I'm not going to diminish the experiences of others who have done so, but I understood even then that, for me, it wasn't as much an expression of the Holy Spirit as it was me getting caught up in the emotions of that moment. It was an emotional high, as it were. And I'm fine with that.

I've never had a vision, never seen a ghost, never run into something that went "bump!" in the night. And yet, I still believe, very strongly, in a spiritual world, a world beyond what can be seen and touched, and I still believe, very strongly, that there is a God. I know this doesn't make a lot of sense, because in most things, and for most people, having no experiences with the supernatural is all the evidence they need to disbelieve it. Others' claims can be dismissed with "oh, you're just expecting to see something, so you did see it" and things along those lines, especially when you've not experienced anything for yourself.

So I feel weird, but I'm still a theist, still a Christian, still have a very strong belief in the supernatural. Ultimately, for me, it boils down to certainty. There's a great line in the movie (and, I'd presume, play) Doubt, in which Meryl Streep's character responds to the (very valid) point that she has no evidence of wrongdoing against the priest, and she says, "[I have no evidence], but I have my certainty."

That, for me, is what it boils down to: certainty. As certain as I am of Kyle's love for me, as certain as I am of my parents' love for me, as certain as I am that I'm doing the right thing in going to UNT for my degree, I am certain that there is a God, that Christianity is as close to truth as we've gotten, that there is more to existence than what can be seen and touched. Don't get me wrong--it's a certainty that comes under fire nearly daily, but ultimately, even as I wrestle with questions of faith, it's still there for me, and I have a feeling that it always will be.

I really rather like these Writer's Block things.

Honestly, it depends on what else is going on in my life. Nine times out of ten on a normal day, I'm going to say "sleep in." I adore sleep, and I love being snuggled under warm blankets (sleeping in the summer makes me sad) and not opening my eyes until I absolutely have to do so. Not to sound completely lame, but snuggling up in bed is pretty much my favorite part of the day, and there's not a lot that could convince me to jump out of bed, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, at some ungodly hour of the morning.

However.

If I am traveling, especially if I am driving somewhere (e.g. driving from Massachusetts to Texas with my fiance...or from Dallas to El Paso with my fiance...or really, anywhere with my fiance), I will get up very early for a good breakfast. Traveling is hungry work (even if you're just flying), largely because unlike when you're spending the day at home or at the office, you can't take a five minute break whenever your tummy says, "FEED ME" and go grab some chips from the pantry or hit up the vending machine. When you're traveling, your ability to meet your need for food is greatly affected by where you are, how long you have until you reach your destination, whether or not you have enough cash left over after you paid $100 to check your bags, etc. When you're driving, you're also adding in factors like "Well, I don't want to stop until we stop for gas, so that we can get a good chunk of driving done, so let's just wait this out" and "We're stopping at Rhiannon and Tim's house tonight, and I don't know if they'll want to have dinner with us or just eat on their own."

SO! When I am traveling, I will wake up earlier to eat a good and delicious breakfast, especially if said breakfast involves bacon. Any other time, however, I'd rather just snuggle deeper under the covers and grab what extra shut-eye I can.

ahahaha omg this one was so appropriate that I had to answer it.

Yes. I have had a nightmarish roommate. In fact, the only roommate I've ever had who wasn't nightmarish was Angela.

The first roommate I ever had was a girl named Rachel, and she was nice enough, and we probably would've gotten along fairly well...if we hadn't been complete opposites in an Odd Couple sense. Rachel was a very Neat person and I was pretty Messy (especially after just getting dumped, hoo boy). I liked to get into the room at 1 a.m. and start doing homework then, while Rachel liked to get up at 6:30 a.m. and have fights with her boyfriend on the phone in our room.

Long story short: we drove each other crazy. But fortunately, around the same time, Angela and her roommate drove each other crazy, so we just switched. Angela moved into my room, and it was the best month and a half ever.

...then she moved out :(

The other bad roommate situation is the one I'm in right now.

Now, I don't really care about people's decisions to smoke pot on their lonelies or whatever. As long as I don't have to be near it, I don't care (and for people who would say, "lol i'm okay with gays as long as i don't have to see them," totally not the same thing, largely because being near a gay couple making out doesn't result in me participating in the makeout session whether I wanted to or not, whereas being around pot smokers, well, does). I started out with one discreet pot-smoking roommate, Lizzie. Lizzie smokes pot pretty much every day, but she does it in such a way that unless you're her, you don't know that she's smoking pot and you don't smell it.

She was the only pot smoker until I came back from Christmas to discover that my second roommate, Saran (yes, like the plastic wrap), had also started smoking pot. And she was not doing it either discreetly or privately. I first discovered this the first Wednesday I was back from Christmas break, when Saran and her girlfriend (Kyle's pet theory is that they aren't actually smoking pot, that they're just burning sage and having lesbian orgies...to which I said, "I don't care what they're doing, I don't want to smell it or start staring at my hands because of it") were running around VERY NOISILY at 3 a.m., smoking pot right outside of my room and being so loud that it was impossible to sleep unless you were completely deaf.

It was also impossible to sleep because...well, have you ever tried to sleep when you're high for the first time ever? It doesn't really work.

No big deal, though, I figured. It's an isolated incident. It won't happen again.

WRONG. It did happen again, this time on a Friday night, which wouldn't have been a big deal, except that I had a friend sleeping on the couch that night and Kyle visiting. According to the friend who slept on the couch (which is right outside of Saran's door), Saran and her girlfriends started smoking at 8:30 p.m. and didn't finish until 5 a.m., taking a break to make food (noisily, in the kitchen right off the living room) every two hours. My poor friend got zero sleep, and I didn't fare much better. (though the night did have its highlights, specifically, Kyle and I sitting there and realizing that I was high when I remarked "...my hands are two different sizes!" and realizing that he was high when he responded, "wait, let me measure them")

So now I'm extremely irate about this, and it's only getting worse. Since Saran's started smoking, now Lizzie's stopped being discreet, and just smokes whenever she wants, whereever she wants. As I write this, one of them is smoking a healthy amount of pot, enough to be filtering into my room and making my throat hurt.

AND THAT'S NOT EVEN EVERYTHING. My wonderful pot-smoking roommates are also masters of the Passive Aggressive Note! You know, the note that roommates leave when things should be going down, but isn't because they're too passive aggressive for things to go down? The first one was a note left by Saran, complaining that the kitchen kept getting dirty (guess who uses the most dishes? Saran). The second was my favorite though. This one was also by Saran, who had discovered that I'd loaded the dishwasher without rinsing the dishes. She wrote, in boldprint, "THE DISHES HAVE TO BE RINSED OR ELSE THE DISHWASHER WILL NOT CLEAN THEM." And then instead of rinsing the dishes herself, as would be logical, she just took them all out and left them sitting on the countertop.

This is stupid for two reasons: first, no, the dishes don't have to be rinsed unless there is still literally food on them. If it's just the little filmy "this dish was eaten on" crap (like was on those dishes), you do not have to rinse them. Trust me, I know from experience. Second, if you're going to go to the effort of writing that note and putting all the other dishes in the washer, wouldn't it make logical sense to, I don't know, rinse the dishes already in there, too?

So, in conclusion: roommate fail.

So hi, LJ. Long time no see. I'm not here to update on my life or anything, but just to post this:

( Lost Season 6 Premiere Spoilers )

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Merry Christmas, y'all.

Avatar is probably not the greatest movie that ever movied, but it did, in fact, dazzle me enough for me to want to be a Na'vi. The story was paper-thin and holeyer than a slice of Swiss cheese, but James Cameron will still get enough Oscars to pave his driveway (again) because the moviemaking is very very pretty.

BUT I think he could have come away with even more Oscars (if it's possible) if he'd had someone else (like me) write the story for him.

I've been home for about five days now, give or take a few hours, and I've found that I'm pretty much not doing anything that isn't running around, going to shows and movies with my family or shopping with my mother. It's kind of like visiting Kyle was, back when that was the thing we did. I feel like my time up here with my family is precious, since it's so rare nowadays, and so things that don't involve spending time with them are kind of being cut back. And then, even when I'm sick of them (which I'm sure will happen soon enough...I've come very close even today), there's so much I've missed about Massachusetts that this just feels like a time in which I can't do much of anything that isn't home...stuff.

( Whining within, feel free to ignore )

Sigh. That was a pity party entry. I'll write some happier things, like the fact that Christmas is very soon and it's great being back with my family. I miss Kyle, but that's a good sign, and my cat has completely forgiven my absence, making herself at home at my new queen-sized bed once she became aware of its existence. We're in the midst of a major snowstorm (if not a blizzard, depending on the weatherman you ask), which means that there is no church tomorrow, but a lot of sleeping in and a lot of baking/cooking (my mother is making turkey chilli sweet potato shepherd's pie and my brother is baking gingerbread).

At the end of the day...I'm almost there.

R.I.P., Roy Disney.

So I've been waiting for this movie pretty much since 2007 (or whenever they announced it...I think it may have been before that, and I started dancing in my seat with excitement), and my expectations for it were pretty high. The two-second review is that it met all of those expectations, though it did not surpass them (as was the case with Enchanted, which blew me away, to put it mildly). It did most things right, a few things very right, and even fewer things not so right, but overall, it was a beautifully-made movie that recalled (at least for me) what Disney can be when it's as concerned with quality as it is with cash.

( Love always finds a way, it's true! -- Spoilers beneath )

Overall, I give this movie a solid A. It was exactly what I expected it to be, with a few reaches into excellence that still have me smile. It had its weaknesses, but I'd rank it around probably Aladdin, as far as quality goes. It's making me happy to be a Disney fan, happier than I was before John Lasseter took over the animation department. He and Iger deserve major props for creating this, and I think we can expect great things from the studio in the coming years.

I've been having back problems since my car accident in February. It's not like I'm in constant pain, but every so often, my back just spazzes out and hurts like hell and today is one of those days. I've got a shooting pain to the middle of my back, but I can't tell if it's shooting from my shoulders or from my lower back, just that it hurts like hell.

So this morning, I am thankful for Naproxen and back braces.

Happy Thanksgiving world!

Am spending the day with Kyle's extended family...he and I contributed/are contributing to the feast with box brownies, crescent rolls, and green bean casserole. And we're decorating a tree this afternoon, which will be fun. I'm still more than a little homesick, especially because I'm missing the annual trek to Uncle Tom's house and the fun we have there, but I have awesome future in-laws and so it should be fun anyway. And if it's not, Kyle and I are taking my car anyway

I finished Christmas shopping for Texas people yesterday and now just have to finish for my family and my girls. Which...well, that's being postponed until I'm home and not spending money on groceries and stuff.

Anyway. Happy Thanksgiving! Take a moment today to look at things through a veil of grace and not through one of blame, because it makes the world much better! :)

Dotty Aro makes bad movies better.

The past couple of weeks have been stressful. Well, no, let me rephrase. The entire semester has been stressful; the past couple of weeks have made that stress feel exceptionally heavier. Right before my birthday, I had a manual due for my Advanced Tech. Comm. class, and the night before it was due, the file became corrupted on the school's computer system and nobody could open it. This was several weeks' of writing and several weeks' of formatting, gone.

Or at least so it seemed. Kyle is a miracle walking because he somehow managed to recover all of the formatting and ultimately, I got a 95 on the manual.

I've been making straight-As, which is something I haven't done since freshman year of college, and it's hard work, but it's amazing. I feel more capable right now than I have in a very long time, and having Kyle nearby is just so bracing and wonderful. I love him so very much.

We spend our weekends together, and we've yet to get sick of each other. It's kind of amazing...there's this real completeness when we're together, and it never gets old. I'm sure we'll get sick of each other soon enough, but I'm glad that getting sick of each other is taking its dear sweet time in getting here.

We've been attending a Foursquare Church in Southlake (about fifteen minutes from Kyle's house), and Kyle and I are really attached to it already. The pastor and his wife are marvellous and we've already asked them to officiate the wedding and do our premarital counselling (even though we don't have a date or budget set yet). All-in-all, life is busy, but good.

And also...New Moon...well, the best thing Kyle and I took away from it was (a) that I really like mustard and (b) how to perfect the Edward-and-Bella soulful stare. It's all for the lulz.

So I am now 26 and I have an amusing story to tell.

Most of the day yesterday, I was processing the fact that in four years, I'll be thirty. I'm not afraid of it or really flipping out because age is just a number, but I do think it's really surreal...like everything that's been happening in my life lately. It's surreal that I'm not just daydreaming about planning my wedding, and it's surreal to know that within probably the next 3-4 years, I'll be a mother (Kyle and I have, in fact, planned that far in advance). And it's surreal to know that I am closer to 30 than I am to 20, because up until this point, 30 was something for other people, ESPECIALLY mothers and teachers, to quote Juno. Me being 30 is just like...surreal.

Anyway.

So I've been dealing with this a bit better than the stereotypical way, largely (I think) because I know I'll have all of the traditional worries taken care of well before November 5, 2013 (aside: if the world really DOES end in December 2012, 30 will never be a worry for me at all!...but it's not going to, but it's hilarious to think about). Oddly, though, my body is not coping nearly as well.

Let me explain.

This morning, in between Kyle waking up at 8:00 and me getting up at 9:30, I had a dream. In this dream, Kyle found out that he was royalty, to be crowned king of some random country. Of course, we were both thrilled. His grandparents were there, crying, and I was crying and it was terribly happy. After the coronation, we explored our new royal digs and found that we got the most cable channels EVAR (including one channel that was 24/7 Marlon Wayans doing stupid things). We were settling down for an evening in, when all of a sudden, Kyle's major domo showed up and said (exact quote), "You'd best get that bitch (me) in pup soon. You need an heir, and if she can't give you one, you need to get rid of her."

Odd dream, but significantly less odd when you consider that when I woke up, my period had started. Yes, it's true. Allie McBeal had a dancing baby. And I have my ovaries featuring in my dreams as a major domo.

I've been giggling about it all morning.

If anyone has ten seconds to read, could you give me some feedback on this? It's the introduction to my Adv. Tech. Comm. Manual on writing sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas. I need to know if it communicates why the reader should care, if it would convince anyone to read further (heh, like anyone reads the introductions anyway), etc. It's a rough draft, so it's far from perfect, but I'm definitely looking for some feedback.

( Why you should write poetry with forms instead of just sticking to free verse )

I feel like crap on a stick, but I need to have a rough draft done tomorrow. Sigh.

I would like to state, categorically and for the record, that I do not enjoy editing. I've been told by those who are farther along in the program than I am that disliking editing translates to liking style and design. This, I suppose, is a good thing.

But right now...I am so stressed about editing class that it's not even funny. Sigh.

This morning's was a doozy.

I dreamed that I went straight from Kyle's house to UNT for classes. It was only once I arrived that I realized I wasn't wearing a shirt (or bra or deoderant) so I had to stop in the UNT school store to pick one up (a shirt, that is, and deoderant. They don't sell bras in the UNT store). After doing that, I realized that the brownies I'd baked for a class project last night were still sitting in the Davidenkos' kitchen. Brownie-less, I headed to class, only instead of it being my Principles class (for which I'd baked the brownies), it was my Editing class (which has been making me panic lately because I didn't do as well on the copyediting test as I'd hoped to do, thereby taking my grade for the class from a 98 to an 87). When I got there, everyone was taking out some assignment that was really important...and I didn't have it. I looked through my notebook, but it was nowhere to be found. And all the while, the theme music from Tail Spin was playing in the background.

( Handy dandy dream dictionary, go! )

Graduate school is ever so much crazier than I anticipated.

I don't know why I thought it would be calm or easy or whatever. Possibly/probably because when I started doing my M.Ed. back in 2006, I was somehow able to do those classes just fine and not worry about them, but the difference is that the M.Ed. classes met on a Friday/Saturday schedule on alternating weeks, so I had extra time to get things done. What's more, the M.Ed. stuff was a LOT less labor-intensive. It was a lot more reading and doing things that could be done in one night, not projects that spanned the entire semester (of which I have three currently...I know, crai moar, welcome to grad school).

It's weird because I haven't felt this driven with regards to homework and schoolwork since Oxford, and that was also a whole different ballgame. In Oxford, I was working this hard just to stay afloat, since I'd basically been thrust into graduate-level philosophy studies with nothing but freshman year Philosophy 101 (which I slept through because it was at 8 a.m. ...of course, I still got an A, easily, which tells you a lot about where I did my undergrad work). This is entirely different. I know full well that I could probably scrape by with B's if I relaxed a little and didn't put in as much effort as I am, but I don't want B's. I want a 4.0 average. I want the school to rain down scholarships upon me (because, let's face it, I could use some scholarships). I want my future practicum/employer to look at me and say, "she's someone I want to keep, not just for the duration of her summer practicum, but until she's ready to leave."

For the first time since I was in high school, I feel like how I do academically will have an impact on the future that I want for myself, which is odd to admit. For the first couple of years of college, I was basically there for the Mrs. degree...I was studying something I enjoyed because I figured, stupidly, that I would meet and marry Mr. Right straight out of college and start popping out babies nine months after the wedding bells rang, and everything would be all fine and dandy.

Yes. This is a monumentally stupid mindset to have, and I still wish I could go back in time and shake myself for it. And I could go on a whole tirade about Christian culture, expectations for women, and a person's worth being determined predominantly by whether or not she has a ring on her finger and a bun in the oven (even if it's not stated outright, it's an attitude that is an undercurrent in almost every Christian environment I've ever encountered, which makes it REALLY FRUSTRATING to be a young Christian woman with screaming ovaries facing the extreme lack of what the church deems to be "suitable Christian men"...but I'm getting sidetracked) BUT EXCEPT FOR THAT PARENTHESES I WILL NOT. It hit me around junior year that Mr. Right was probably not going to marry me and reproduce with me within a year of graduation, but I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, so I just finished the degree and started floundering.

Now that I've actually decided to start swimming, it is absolutely the most stressful thing I have ever done, and I adore it.

I'm not even kidding. I adore this kind of stress, though I'll grant that there are some things that make me wish I was back working at AMCG and having more free time and free brain space...like that I can't do NaNo this year, that my RP and WoW time are facing the kind of cutbacks that would make the recession cry, that the words "tuition" and "student loans" cause me to feel like my entire midsection is being consumed by ulcers. But honestly, it's kind of like packing for a great vacation or planning a wedding: I know that all of the stress I'm facing right now is going to have an awesome pay-off, and if I play my cards right, I'll be seeing that pay-off in August of 2011, almost exactly ten years after I started at ENC.

And yes. I have a degree plan. It is awesome...or at least it will be, if I can, you know, get the money to pay for it -__-"

Life is crazy.

I spontaneously (sort of) bought my wedding gown this weekend while I was up in Massachusetts because it's being discontinued soon.

Graduate school is actively trying to give me a nervous breakdown. I'm not even kidding.

But it's good. I feel like I'm actually doing something for the first time since I lost my job. I just wish that there were more hours in the day and more days in the week. Hey, a girl can dream, can't she?