Confession #18

I forget about this blog every single week.

Seriously. You'd think after four months, I would remember my self-imposed obligation, but no. As soon as I hit [PUBLISH POST] each Saturday, it completely leaves my mind. Luckily, I always remember it again, usually just in the nick of time. Of course, by the time I do remember, it's late at night and I'm too tired to think of anything good to write, which is why so many of my posts are silly superficial things. And I'm OCD enough that I must post on Saturday, so composing a thought-out and well-written post on Sunday is not an option. (I'm also OCD enough that using OCD as an adjective bugs me... but such phrasing is apparently socially acceptable, and it's faster to type. And no, the irony is not lost on me. I realize that my parenthetical comments are taking much more time to type than it would to simply rephrase "I'm OCD." Oh well. Too late now. This is what happens when I wait until late at night to type a confession. I feel rushed and begin to type faster than I can think, and what should be a nice, organized post turns into my rambling internal monologue, typed up for the world to see.)

Next week I'll try for something with substance!

Confession #17

I have a nasty habit of starting projects and never finishing them.

Artwork for my bedroom walls. Various cross-stitch patterns. Learning to play the guitar. Learning to play the piano (keyboard, technically). Countless stories on my hard drive (most of them not even having a complete first chapter, let alone an ending). My first real knitting project (though I've completed two scarves, two pairs of leg warmers, and one and a half tea cozies since then). Organizing my music collection. At least six books sitting on my shelf. The list goes on...

Confession #16

Some updates first: Wednesday I had my appointment with the nephrologist. Good news! He said that the people in radiology were just reading too much into the ultrasound, and while my renal cortices are on the thin side, he isn't worried about it at all. He said he doesn't see anything wrong with my kidneys at all, but I'm going to have some more lab work done to check one last hormone, just in case. After crossing out the kidneys, we're left back at square one when it comes to finding the cause of my wacky blood pressure. It's been a few years since I've had my heart looked at, so the doctor wants me to have an EKG done. That's no biggie. I've had at least three done before.

In other news, it seems my obsession with t-shirts may actually be good for me. I wore this on Sunday when my mom and I went shopping, and everywhere we went, people commented on it. I would have never spoken to those strangers otherwise, so I guess my shirt collection is providing me with a much needed swift kick in the rear.

And now for this week's confession...

I sometimes think that, given my age and romantic history (which is literally nonexistent), I will wind up being a crazy old cat lady.

You know the type. 

But, sometimes when I find myself thinking that, I think Pfft, what do I need a boyfriend for? and revert back to the grade school belief that boys are dumb.

Confession #15

I introduced my little sister to my favorite shows (and movies) just so I would have someone to fangirl with.

(Yes, I'm using fangirl as a verb.)

I told her that it was because I wanted to show her some quality programs (kids' shows these days just keep getting dumber and dumber!) but for the most part, I just wanted somebody to watch TV with me and squeal and aww over the same things I do. Most of my favorite shows have a cult following, so I know I'm not the only one that enjoys them, but most of my favorites are also no longer on TV. (That or they're British and not on basic American channels.) This means that most of my friends either haven't heard of or just haven't seen most of my favorite shows. I could turn to the internet to find other fans to fangirl with, but it's so much more fun to do it in person! Enter my little sister.

My little sister has listened to me obsess over this and obsess over that for years, so she knows how wonderful I find certain things. Impressionable eleven-year-old that she is, it wasn't hard to get her to find all those things wonderful too. 

She now wanders around the house singing songs from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Slong Blog* and quoting Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She laughs and rolls her eyes at Edward because she knows that Spike would eat him for breakfast. During spare time at school, she doodles characters from Doctor Who, and reenacts scenes from Firefly despite her friends having no clue what she's going on about. If I walk into a room and ask "Who ya gonna call?" she shouts "Ghostbusters!" without missing a beat. She sings odes about Star Wars and pities those unfortunate enough to be wearing a red shirt. She even knows how to properly greet a visitor from Ork. In short, I have turned my little sister into as much of a nerd as me. 

And she loves it. So, despite my sneaky selfish motives, it really is a win-win situation.

*Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is one of the few things that many of my friends enjoy as well. I'm slowly but surely converting all of them though. Given enough time, they shall all see that I'm not just loony and obsessive... I actually like great stuff!

Confession #14

I am a little embarrassed to be starting my freshman year of college this fall, at the age of twenty.

However, had I started last fall, I seriously doubt I would have survived. I spent most of the winter on antibiotics for sinus infections, and my allergies have only gotten worse since everything started blooming outside.

But what can you do?

(Hey, look at that! I can be concise!)

Confession #13

I may not always speak my mind, but I express myself loudly through my t-shirts.


I think it started about the time when my mom stopped helping me pick out clothes. I have very little fashion sense, you see, so I tend to find the nearest clever t-shirt and say "This one!" then head for the registers at the front of the store. Over the years, I have amassed quite a collection. In fact, I have more shirts than I care to count. I can't bear to give any of them up though, because each one says something about me. Well... Some of them say something about me. Most of them advertise television shows or music or movies that I love. But those can say a lot about me too.


Just a few of my favorites:

• The Beatles (x6)
• The Who
• Superman (x2 at least)
• Batman
• Mighty Mouse
• Where's Waldo
• Alice in Wonderland
• Forrest Gump
• Soylent Green (Unprocessed, Free Range, Life-Size, 100% Organic!)
• The Wizard of Oz (x2)
• Firefly
• Doctor Who (x2)
• Fisher-Price Little People (Classic style, not the newer ones with hands and feet and everything)
• Lite Brite
• Hungry Hungry Hippos
• Pac-Man
• The Phantom of the Opera (Souvenir from the musical!)
• D.A.R.E.

Confession #12

Superman changed my life. (No, really!)

When I was about ten, I woke up from a bad dream one night and was scared out of my wits. Thinking some light would help, I turned on two nightlights and a lamp. (That was all I dared due to my little sister, who had the nerve to continue sleeping, perfectly calm on the bottom bunk, while I was shaking in my boots.) No such luck. I was still utterly distressed. I then got it in my head that music would be comforting, or at least distracting, so I hobbled back down the bunk bed ladder, tiptoed across the floor with ninja speed, jabbed at my stereo to turn on the radio, then flew back up into my bed. Unfortunately, in the process of turning on the radio, I had pressed the seek button and abandoned my favorite preset station. What I was now listening to was a report of a UFO sighting.

If I were to hear the same report today, I would snicker or maybe roll my eyes and blame a weather balloon, then take just a couple seconds to ponder the existence of alien life before forgetting it and going on my merry way. Back then, though, I was too young to discern UFOs (that is, any object up in the sky that cannot be identified but in the end is more than likely a very common and perfectly explainable thing of Earth) from alien spacecrafts. Being that I was already scared from my nightmare, I assumed the worst and was sure there was an invasion and we were all in terrible, horrible danger.

Naturally I ran as quickly as my little legs would carry me and didn't look back. When I skidded to a halt at my parents' bedroom door, I knocked and begged to come in. When my mom opened the door, I caught sight of the television. By coincidence, the show was talking about aliens, and the screen currently featured a still image of a very grotesque little gray man. The gravelly voice that crawled from the speakers was rambling about alien sightings, which I immediately believed was connected to the radio report I had just overheard. This solidified my belief that the world was doomed, but rather than stay in the safety of my parents' room and have to listen to the TV talk about it, I allowed my mom to convince me to go back to bed. Once there, I tossed and turned and shook and probably whimpered a little.

Before you laugh this off as a kid just being a kid and being overly dramatic about a bad dream one night, you should know that the fear didn't stop there. From that night on, I was terrified, terrified by the thought of aliens. I couldn't sleep at night because every time I closed my eyes, I saw that creepy gray thing from the TV. When I finally did fall asleep, I would dream about them. In addition to plain old bad dreams, I had severe nightmares two or three times a week for months, and my parents stopped letting me watch anything even slightly creepy on the TV because I tried to crawl in bed with them so often.

I was afraid to be outside at night, or even look out a window, because I just knew that the blinking red aviation lights atop transmission towers, or the small but constant beam of light from an airplane were really flying saucers coming to get me. Just the sound of an airplane flying overhead made me shudder, even in the daytime. I started insisting that my mom leave my bedroom door open at night so I could see the light coming from the living room and hear my parents moving around, and make a quick escape if need be. When I was in bed, I pulled the covers up so far I could barely see out from under them and refused to let so little as half a toe hang off the side of the bed, because I was convinced that if the aliens couldn't see me, they would leave me alone.

At one point I decided that it wasn't safe at all to be alone at night, and that I had to be with somebody at all times. Obviously my three-year-old sister couldn't offer me any protection, so I started hanging around my parents once the sun went down. Around eight or nine o'clock my parents would go to their bedroom to watch TV and unwind before bed, and I would beg to watch TV with them. At first they obliged me a handful of times a week, but after a while (I don't even remember how long it was, but it was probably at least a few months) they started turning me away more often than not.

When that happened, I would sit outside their door, flat up against the wall, as low to the ground as possible, because if I couldn't see out the front door in the nearby mirror's reflection, nobody and nothing outside the door could see me. For a while I would beg and plead over and over until they got aggravated enough to yell at me to go away, and when that happened I would just sit there silently until it was my bedtime. (Then I darted to my room and jumped under the covers as fast as I possibly could.)

 In the seventh grade I made a new friend, and I spent the night at her house often. We both enjoyed hanging out outside and roaming around her neighborhood (I think we actually spent more time outside than inside) and she enjoyed being outside after dark. I tried to play it cool, but I was petrified most of the time. It literally made me shake with fear. (Luckily it was dark, so I don't know if she ever noticed.) Once we got really close, I broke down and 'fessed up about my fears. She then took it upon herself to cure me. This involved more playing outside after dark. I didn't like it one bit, but I slowly got to where I could at least enjoy myself most of the time without constantly glancing behind me every time a tree's leaves rustled in the wind.

This excludes, of course, the night we were playing make believe in the drainage ditch (one of those really deep concrete ones, deep and steep enough that I had difficulty climbing out) and she brought aliens into the mix. Lots of aliens. And a mother ship. And eggs and spawn. That night, I was silently (maybe semi-silently) flipping out the entire time. We were as far from her house as we could possibly be without actually leaving the neighborhood, and I just knew that real aliens would hear us talking and swoop down and snatch us before we could flee to safety. My voice kept wavering and cracking because I was so scared, and she kept telling me "Calm down! We're fine! Nothing is going to happen!" I didn't calm down until well after we went back inside for the night.

After that she tried fixing me with a different approach. "Why are you afraid of aliens?" "I... I don't know. I just am." "No, that's not good enough. Tell me why." Well, I really didn't know why, and her attempt at finding the root of my fear failed, and I continued to be frightened.

I really can't express just how scared I was. This fear haunted me daily (and especially nightly) and made me nothing short of miserable. I can't tell you how many nights I woke up crying or how many nights I just didn't sleep period. For a long time, I was even afraid to look at the moon! All because of aliens!

And then I saw a rerun of the show Smallville on ABC Family.

Once when I was eleven, I was home alone on a dark, stormy, cliched night, and I scared myself watching it. (Pete almost got eaten! Ack!) I never tuned in again after that, but I was thirteen now, and after finding it while channel surfing, I decided to watch and see if it was as scary as I remembered it being. I was rewarded with a sweet scene between Clark Kent and Lana Lang up in the loft of the Kent farm's barn.

It was just minutes from Clark's birthday and Lana presented him with a tiny cake. He got all angsty because it wasn't really his birthday but rather a date his adoptive parents had chosen from the calendar, and Lana murmured, "Maybe some of us want to celebrate the day you came into our lives." Awwww. Hopeless romantic that I am, I watched on. "I never thought of it that way," Clark grinned. Lana told him to make a wish. "I've been wishing for the same thing ever since I was five," he said, looking deeply into her eyes. "And now?" "Now I don't have to. She's standing right in front of me." They kissed and I squealed with glee because they were just so cute. I decided then and there that the show was worth watching.

As it happens, I had jumped in during a marathon. I got sucked in and watched it all. The first two episodes I saw were the two-part finale of the second season, where a bunch of stuff happens, but mainly Clark learns more about his alien heritage and defies his dead-but-still-controlling alien father. It should be noted that at this point, I had not yet realized that I was watching a show about a young, pre-Superman Superman. I don't know exactly where I thought Clark had acquired his superpowers, but it certainly never crossed my mind that he was an alien.

 Upon learning this, I faltered for a few minutes, shifted uncomfortably in my seat, then kept watching. The more I watched, the more I loved the show, and after the marathon ended, I tuned in every weeknight for a rerun so I could catch up on the whole series. I grew more and more addicted until it didn't bother me at all that Clark Kent was an alien. Some bizarre logic in my mind must have decided that if he was an alien, then I didn't need to be scared. Just like that, four years of sheer terror and sleepless nights were undone. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!


I haven't been afraid of aliens for six years now, and it's all thanks to Superman!


Side note: Unfortunately I grew to dislike the show's writing, and after sticking it out for three years, I forced myself to quit watching in the middle of the eighth season. I bawled like a baby with my last episode, but I never looked back. (Except that one time I turned my TV on just a little too soon, and instead of a new episode of Supernatural, I was greeted with Clark and Lois kissing, and it made me want to puke. Don't tell me Superman belongs with Lois Lane because I don't want to hear it. Any other time I'd agree, but with Smallville's writing in the first several seasons, and the chemistry between Tom Welling and Kristin Kreuk, Clark jumping into Lois's arms the minute Lana is gone just isn't believable! Especially since Clark and Lana never wanted to part in the first place! </rant>)

 Side note #2: Looking back, I have come to the conclusion that my parents were watching a show on the History Channel that night when I was ten. They run programs on aliens and theories about aliens and whatnot fairly often, and my dad frequently watches that channel for hours on end.

Side note #3: I entered all of this into OpenOffice.org Writer to check the word count, and this post is longer than the minimum daily goal for National Novel Writing Month, but it took me less than half the time it would have taken me to write that many words for a novel. So not cool.