flannel lovin'.

I think I just realized why I always had a crush on Luke Danes from Gilmore Girls when I was growing up. It's because of the flannel! That is exactly the reason. I love flannel. Plaid. Any shirt along those lines. (Like this expensive hunk of amazingness, *foams at mouth*) I used to wear them a lot in 7th grade, but then this kid made fun of me and called me George Lucas, and I didn't want to be made fun of so I stopped wearing them. I shouldn't have, but I cared too much about what other people thought of me and this boy was outgoing when I was shy, so I stopped. Which makes me really mad at my past self, because I totally just remembered this green and pink and light blue soft one that I only got to wear one time outside of school before I swore against it, and I remember climbing a fence with it on with my best friend and feeling super boss. I just really regret that. But I'm bringin' it back, baby!

That is a picture of me last night at like 2am, posing for my friend Zach cuz I was telling him basically what I just told you guys, about my droolage over flannel and all that. I don't know what it is, they just really work for my body type and are comfortable and warm in the frigid Wisconsin winters and… *gush* I love me some flannel.

I adopted a word today. Nidifice. It means nest. I was on tumblr this morning (when I say this morning, I definitely mean 2am) and I think it was my friend Marina who reblogged the link from Liz to this website where you can "adopt" words in the English language that are dying words of sorts. It's pretty much the coolest thing ever. So, nidifice. Noun. It means nest. Owls, lizards, many different kinds of birdies, they all live or hang out in nidifices. Is that not the cutest word on the planet?

It's my official last night of summer. The last night I'll be able to stay up late and not feel guilty. Stay up and go on Tumblr and talk to my friends on Skype and take silly photobooth selfies and blog and watch ABC Family shows like Pretty Little Liars and The Secret Life (both guilty pleasures all the way) and make latenight snacks and all of that completely summer, confident in not worrying about fucked-up sleeping patterns kind of way, and I am really going to miss that. Going back to school certainly has its pros and I really feel like I'm ready but… I'm going to miss the nights. And I think I'll try and make this last one count, and try to go to bed earlier. It's 10:55pm and I'm already pretty tired, maybe I can be in bed by 12. Just to make sure getting up at 9 on Wednesday and then 6 on Thursday won't be too hard.

You know what I don’t get? Please, people who have had to get over someone before, enlighten me. How in the world is it that one day I’ll hardly think of him at all and am happy being with myself and my friends and then some days, like today, all of the wonderful times and wonderful smiles just keep popping into my head and haunting me? It’s terrible. Why today? Why was yesterday better? I just don’t get it. This is so frustrating.

make me a sandwich, woman!

Let me just start off by saying thank you. Thank you to Liz and Amelia and Annabel, thank you guys for commenting, and anyone else who has in the past, and Ashley for texting me and seeing what was wrong, because seriously, reading those comments completely makes my day. Every day. And it makes me like, regrow those silly seeds of happiness and all that.

Also: Annabel, I am so glad you commented and I promise, it was absolutely not creepy at all. I wish you would've introduced yourself sooner! I hope I don't come across as someone who seems cliquey or unfriendly or something, I love meeting new online friends and talking to new people and something I hate about blogger is how it doesn't give you an email address so you can send them an creepy email back or something. But seriously, yeah, I'm so touched that you like my writing and we should become friends. Not like creepy friends. But friends.

Okay, so, redeeming factor to starting school: I can start putting things into an "11th grade" folder. For example, I don't organize things by year, I organize them by grade, and the summer after them is considered that grade as well. So starting Wednesday, I can start putting screenshots into an 11th grade folder. Or anything in the photography folder. (Not good or professional photography or anything, just folders called myself, objects, people.) And, of course, a whole new school folder. Oh man, how I love file organization. /nerd

Funny phone conversation of the day: My dad called me from the kitchen, which shares a wall with my bedroom, and asked, "are you shuffling in there?" I just started to laugh, because yes, I have a deck of cards on my desk at all times and in between writing and skyping and tumbling, my card-game loving self just shuffles. And the fact that he called me to ask me that is further proof of two nerds living under one roof. Oh! And he also told me that tomorrow when we go to Goodwill, we can get some poker chips and play with my aunt and uncle sometime. Which my toes just tingle at the thought of.

Speaking of blogger being difficult and not really allowing for private contact or anything like that, I made a page for links and stuff, so anyone who wants to can 1) stalk me or 2) talk to me, cuz really, people to talk to are like my crack. So that’s in the sidebar thingy? It was fun to make. :)

I've gotten into the very strange habit of calling girls or women "woman!" when they're frustrating me or I'm just being silly. Like, "woman, you crazy" or "woman, get out of my face" or "woman, gimme some of your cheesecake!" Tonight, my dad and I went out to dinner (mexican, enchiladas, they can have my babies) with my Nana and she was talking about this loud train or something and I almost said, "woman, it's a train!" because she was complaining about it being loud but I caught myself. Because that would be bad. You don't call your Nana woman, even if she is one. Plus I say in in the same tone as someone would say, "woman, make me a sandwich!" so it's disrespectful on so many levels. But that's me, ya know, awkward and inappropriate and unintentionally hilarious at all the wrong moments.

happiness equates with gardening.

I think he chased the happiness out of me. I think he chased it out and it fled and now it's hiding somewhere and it's up to me to find it again. I don't want to find it again! I just found what I believed to be this special kind of confidence-induced happiness. It was everything, the new clothes and the closeness with my best friend and the games and the hard work of being individually motivated and it was him, him, him, but it wasn't, and it was, but it was me too, and now it's gone. It's like I finally opened up to someone and I gave it to him and I unrealistically expected him to water it like a figurative tomato plant and then he never did and it died and the seeds floated away and planted themselves somewhere else. And I have to find them or I have to grow new ones, and it took so long to grow those damn figurative happiness seeds and I don't want to do it all over again.

It's a good day and then it's a bad day for Team Dig. It started off with a headache, but then I got over it and I bonded and felt incredibly close to my dad and replaced my lost temps for driving and now I can drive and I ate at my favorite restaurant and tonight I get to see my family, my favorite uncles who I haven't seen in ages, since Christmastime, and there are a lot of things to be excited and happy and positive about but… Leave me alone in a new, crowded place with headphones full of music and a book full of sorrow and a head full of thoughts, and things start to happen. My eyes start to slip from the book and look deeper into my own mind and I have all of these introspective thoughts, and they're really lovely for that good deep dark writing I've loved since 8th grade (ha! dudes! remind me to share some of my 8th grade poetry sometime ;)) but at the same time, it really bums me out and my eyelids start to feel heavy and I know they're looking dull to the passersby and my legs get twitchy and cold and I realize things I wish I wouldn't and I start to understand things I wish I couldn't and it's just more than slightly uncool.

It's many many hours (maybe 24) later now, and I just read back what I wrote and jeez… that was really sad. I was really sad. I mean, just reading about the fact that I felt that someone had chased my happiness away really just… ugh. That's terrible. I don't feel that way right now, that my happiness plant or whatever the crap that is has blown away or what have you, but that's probably just because today is a really good day. I went to bed early last night (midnight, considered early, ahhh, school is gonna suck) and this morning I woke up around 11 and made lunch and watched tv and worked on my mini wall project some more and tonight I get to go to this fest with my friend and sleep over at her house. Getting out and moving on, that's what I'm doing.

I didn't really have any funny text conversations yesterday, I was pretty busy, but I did have a very cute text conversation! My friend got a new guinea pig and I get to meet him in about a week and a half and when I asked if the new pig was a boy or a girl he said, "A young boy named Pepper." Cutest sentence ever. I love how he talks. I am so excited to meet his new pig. Eek!

Bye for now, amigos!

hell to the yeah!

Text message conversations at 11pm, sitting at a really uncomfortable desk with really low lighting are almost always melancholy. Especially if they're about topics that make you sad with people that make you sad. I should turn off the lights and take the laptop into bed with Lucy and the darkness and a poster of Emile Hirsch in Into The Wild looking behind my quizzically, but I just redid my room today and my sheets are still in the dryer, so I have to wait a little bit. I really like the way I redid my room, although I probably would love any redone room, cuz it's really the change that I crave. Or craved. Well regardless, it's pretty snappy lookin'.

I'm going to make a room tour on Saturday for thesexymacaroni (my collab channel), because I was supposed to on Tuesday and didn't have a chance to record at my mom's house and I'll probably link it here in case anyone reading doesn't watch thesexymac or I want to see it later on a readback or something. I'm pretty excited. I'm also going to start a mini wall project (link is to my last, very long-running blog where I had this epic/epic fail wall project in summer 2009) surrounding my desk area. It's gonna be BEASTY. …remind me never to use that word again. Hehe.

Funny text conversation of the day:
"Randomly, from a friend: Go!
Me: Go? Go fish? Go green? Go vacationing in Guam?"
Is it boastful if the alleged funny part is on my end? *ponders*

Eek, I love how you guys liked that Cap'n Crunch snippet. I mean, I'd be lying if I said I hated it, it was kinda cute and weird. I like writing. I mean, obviously, if I didn't like writing, having this blog which is heavy on the attempted-well-constructed sentences would be pretty pointless. Eek! Your comments made me happy, as they always do. My favorite part of the morning is checking my blog folder in my email on my iPod.

You know what? Tomorrow I have to wake up at 9am, which is a hell of a lot earlier than 11:30am, which is when I woke up this morning and it was really hard to do, and yet I have just decided that I am NOT going to go to bed early. Just, seriously, I don't want to. It's fucking summer (pardon my french) and I have five nights left of being able to stay up late, and I don't care. I want to stay up late and read blogs and watch videos and talk to my friends and I can sleep in the car on the way to the DMV to get my temps renewed. Tiredness until I drink some tea will be worth it for just one more of these priceless nights. Can I get a hell yeah? (HELL yeah!)

cereal inspiration

I am excited to turn 21, not for the alcohol drinking age or anything, I'm not all that interested in alcohol and it's not that hard to get if you're underage (if you know the right people, I mean, or have super oblivious parents). I'm excited to turn 21 so I can legally gamble. I'm pretty sure on my 21st birthday, I want to fly out to Vegas and play Texas Hold 'Em and Blackjack and Slots and… yeah. My mouth basically foams at the thought of that. I think I'll ask my buddy Nina to come with me, her birthday is one day after mine, and she is equally obsessed with casino stuff. Eek!

Funny text conversation of the day:
"Dad: Can you open up the back door for Sars?
Me: Scariest typo ever. I did."
Cuz I really don't want to willingly let SARS into my house.

I think Wednesdays are my official lazy day of the summer. On Monday and Tuesday I was up, showered, read, and dressed by 2pm or so. It's now 4:45pm and I'm still wearing pajamas and I haven't read my pages yet. But I'm okay with that, I mean, it's my last Wednesday of the summer. I can be a little bit lazy if I want to.

I have a pet peeve. I actually have many pet peeves, but one of the biggies is when people say, "how was your day?" and you look at your day and it's 6:14pm and you're like "wtf, today isn't over, I still have six hours until the day is over, and besides, it's not really over until I go to bed!" Basically when someone says that I get this sinky-heart feeling that the day is over and that it's the end of the day, end of the summer, end of the good times and then I get all panicky. I do not appreciate that phrase. Or when someone asks how your weekend was and it's like 2pm on a Sunday. Seriously? *clings desperately to any time left in life before actual production must be done*

I was thinking about Cap'n Crunch today, and what if I wrote my NaNoWriMo novel about Cap'n Crunch? I mean, think about it, like, so many things you could do with that. Besides eating it by the box during the duration of November, that is.
It was 6:55pm when I answered the door to find her standing there, plain as day, wearing some crumpled old camp tshirt and shorts and she was looking at me. With those green eyes, she was looking at me, and I was looking at her, and before I could ask her why she was there, she opened her mouth and said, "Who answers the door with a bowl of Cap'n Crunch?"
She asked me this and I didn't answer, I just stared at her, I stared at her and I stared at the bowl of cereal balanced in my hand, and I didn't answer because really, who answers the door with a bowl of Cap'n Crunch?
Dumb. I'll write my novel about Kix or something instead.

melancholy around the edges.

I just got off of the phone with my best friend in the whole world, Nora. N-Dawg. She moved away in March and I miss her a lot. A lot a lot a lot, like something is sort of missing from the inside of me. But when we talk on the phone, we talk on the phone for hours, and when I hang up I feel for half a second that everything is falling apart and that the world is too quiet but then that feeling goes away and I feel like everything is wonderful and beautiful and that I'm incredibly blessed. So I'm in a great mood because of that, all smiley and dancey to Glee music.

I wasn't feeling so happy earlier, and actually blogged a little bit. It's kind of scrambled and has no real point, so I don't think I'll paste it onto this new entry. Basically I was just feeling melancholy. Which is a bit how I feel all of the time these days. Ugh. Combine that last bit with the entry from yesterday (today, 2am, really) and it makes me look like I'm… really sad. In life. Like I'm really sad in life. Which I guess isn't true. I'm a fairly happy person. I have my best friends, the ones with which I play poker and giggle and eat guacamole and the ones with which I talk to on Skype and text silly things to. I have my iPod and my deck of cards that I continually am shuffling and gut-busting tv shows to watch. And I have that strange ability, as illustrated yesterday, to find beauty in the ugliest things. And thus, I am happy.

But I think… I think my heart is broken. A little bit. That phrase is impossibly corny and cliché and all of that, but I mean, a phrase is a phrase because it often makes sense. And I think it does. I don't think my heart is broken in that whole all-consuming, shattered pieces everywhere, crying, unbearable pain sort of broken. Thankfully. Just a little bit cracked on the sides, enough for a decent amount of melancholy to seep in. And it just stays there with me, every second of every day. I can still function and I can still smile and I can still have a really good poker face but I'm just… I'm a little bit melancholy around the edges.

Maybe someday I'll go into what happened a little less vaguely, but for now I'm content to live for the moments when the happiness completely envelopes and disguises the melancholy for just a few moments. The moments where I win the jackpot in iPod slots or that first sip of Diet Coke or the satisfaction of finishing my required reading for the day early or even eating a banana. Cuz I mean, when it comes down to it, it really is all of the little things that make you happy, right?

the golden light of night.

Earlier this evening, something set me off and I found myself wandering my neighborhood streets at 2am, looking for some sort of solace, some sort of peace. From all of the swirling thoughts in my head. I walked and I walked, starting off fast and angry, with large steps that echoed in the dark roads and conjured neighbors' garage lights to flicker on, nearly blinding me.

I kept walking and after a few blocks of taking a route that I have grown to know quite well this summer, I grew less angry and more thoughtful, and so I turned around. Heading home, or maybe just in the direction of it, in case. It was little bursts of anger (pun, maybe, for those of you who would know) after that, but no foot-stomping ones, and I was feeling less angry and disgusted with myself and the world and more in awe of the four or five bunnies I saw having their own nocturnal parties in the streets as this human intruder crept by- this human intruder that should really be cuddled in her warm bed.

I paced around a bit more, until I found myself on the edge of my street, where it crosses with a usually very busy street. With no cars and the sky pitch black and all of the signs still lit up (Tia's Nails, for example, was shining brightly at 1:20am) but no activity. Just me, pacing around poles and poking at a pot of overflowing flowers- lazy Susans, I think, and I was just in awe of this street corner, with so much light, so golden and bright, yet dark at the same time. No one there to appreciate it but me, the crazy summer insomniac with few safe days left, and the handful of cars that would drive by occasionally. But they weren't noticing the way the street lights morph the color of your skin into something close to beautiful, no. They were thinking of their tired, aching bones, or climbing into bed with their wives or husbands or the things they did that day or the things they'd do the next day, or anything. Anything but what I was thinking.

Which is how I feel a lot of the time. That I'm the only one thinking these crazy thoughts, these bizarre and yet so wonderful thoughts, full of imaginary places and imaginary people that are actually all too real. I think that I'm the only one thinking these things, when really I'm not. So many of us are the same, or at least the people I tend to associate myself with. We may be occupied with a lot of the same thoughts, but these thoughts are so very pure and so very secret to us that we dare not speak them, even if the person next to us may be thinking the very same thing. The more I see and the more I hear, the more I realize that when you strip away all of the layers, many of us are very similar. Which is very scary in a world of people who are trying to be their hardest to be their own person, unique individuals who are really all the same in the end.