Literally No Idea What I am Doing

 This post is not about marriage. Very few things of the last month have lined up with my expectations for this period of my life. And before the chorus of "well duhs" come in, hold on a sec and listen to my rambling.  I didn't expect to be in my mid-thirties. I didn't expect to meet on an app. I didn't expect to be in Kansas. I didn't expect my dad to be dead. And I didn't expect that my sister would hate me. Hah! You thought this was going to be another post about my dead dad, didn't you? Nope, sucker. It's a totally different emotional and depressing familial scenario. I mean the dead dad thing still sucks, don't get me wrong. Especially at this time of year. But this is a whole separate kettle of onions, can of worms, giant stinky mess. I know that just by writing this (and inevitably posting on my Facebook), there's a chance my sister will see this and get extremely angry and make yet another post of her own on FB talking about how wro...

  My dad is limes. My memory of a perfect Christmas is a recipe for key lime pie. The limes are all gone. For most of the year, I don't really need or crave limes. Sure, there are times when I think limes would be good, or I particularly miss them, but there are so many other things that fill the need for limes. On a day to day basis, a lack of limes does not affect me too much. Christmas though...Christmas was the time for limes. They are, after all, the key ingredient in a key lime pie. How can one have Christmas without them. There is nothing I can do to substitute limes and still come up with a key lime pie. I have all the ingredients in the world, except for the one that makes it work. No matter how hard I try, I will never have key lime pie again. Does that mean I still can't have something tasty? No, of course not. It just won't be key lime pie. It'll never be key lime pie.  It's kind of a hard thing to accept. Every year, without fail, the craving for key li...

Ok, so first of all, no, not all of these posts will be about my dead dad. This is just a special sort of weekend and it coincided with my idea to start blogging more, so here we are. Second of all, yes, this is supposed to be about stuff I cooked and/or baked and I did NOT make ice cream, but hey, my blog my rules. See above for special weekend. This is also a sort of filler post until my next one, as the food I am making for that takes a while and won't be ready until tomorrow at earliest. That out of the way....here is a picture of the completed cinnamon rolls from before that I didn't add to my last post because it ended kinda abruptly: They were as ugly as sin...namon. See what I did there? I will see myself out... Grief is real weird, y'all. Also kinda dumb, if I am honest. Did I say that before? Don't know, and too lazy to re-read what I wrote. But really, it is dumb and weird. Earlier this week, while at work, I became overwhelmingly sad. For no...

As I saw more and more of my friends joining their voices in the "me too" trend, I couldn't help but think back and wonder if I needed to join them. At first, I brushed it off. I'd never been sexually harassed or assaulted. I don't get guys leering at me or catcalling or bugging me online. Sure, I'd had some creeps when I attempted OKCupid, but nothing really that could be considered a personal attack. Just general skeeviness. It kept nagging at me. There was something. Something that I dismissed at first. It wasn't harassment. It wasn't assault. It just wasn't. It wasn't even physical. But it was abuse. It was slow. So gradual that I didn't even realize how bad it was until too late. And although it never felt "innocent," it definitely didn't feel like it was that bad. After all, it was only over text. How could it be bad if it was only in my mind? Furthermore, it was consensual. I agreed, I initiated, I kept coming bac...

It started with four songs. Over the Hills and Far Away, Wanderlust, Nemo, and Sleeping Sun, mistakenly titled “Eclipse” on the file I had. I cannot tell you exactly when I received them, or the name of the person who gave them to me. All I remember is that it was 2005 (possibly 2004), and it was a friend of a friend I met on Neopets. Wanderlust especially intrigued me because I was deeply into Dragonlance and it reminded me of kender. Over the Hills and Far Away was cool. I have always wanted to write a short story about the plot of that song. I want to say my version of Sleeping Sun was the 2005 version, but I am not sure. Either way, I adored it. I still think of it as “Eclipse” sometimes because for the longest time, that is what I thought it was called. But of course, Nemo is what won my heart. How many of us say the same? There is just something about that song that draws you in. You get lost in it, enfolded in its haunting beauty. It is easily Tarja’s best song and one ...

This is a sort of follow up to my last post. It's not about writing though. It's about my friends. I am going to tell you about four of my dearest friends. For privacy reasons, I will be referring to them as M, E, A, and L. Which I didn't notice until right now spells MEAL. That was accidental. A couple of them do have an online presence, but since I am not telling them about this post, it is not my place to reveal their identities. If you know me personally, you probably will know to whom I am referring when I start talking about them. I will be talking about them in the order that I met them. This means nothing beyond the fact that I have known M longer than I have known L. M So M is first. I have known M for a very, very long time. We met in middle school. For someone who moved around a lot as a kid, keeping in contact with a friend for that long is nothing short of a miracle for me. When I say that M and I have been friends since the moment we met, I am not ex...

A friend and I were texting each other the other night and I told her how jealous I was that she works as a freelance writer and has written novels (or at least a good chunk of a novel) and that she gets to spend so much time working on her craft. This is nothing unusual for me; I spend a lot of my time marveling and admiring my friends and how awesome they are. I’ve told them this enough to probably make them plenty uncomfortable. Like so many of my feelings, it is perhaps best depicted in this comic from Girls With Slingshots (link) THIS IS HOW I FEEL 80% OF THE TIME ABOUT MY FRIENDS. *cough* ahem But really, they are that amazing. At least in my eyes. I have friends who are writers, voice actors, photographers, doctors, etc. They are doing what they love and they are doing it well. I don’t mind it. I love that they are happy. They’re all beautiful amazing people and I love them so much. But this has nothing to do with writing, except that their wonderful accomplish...

Look, I am going to be blunt here. Blunt and honest and completely frank. I have never, ever, openly talked about this, and honestly it is hard. But I am at a time in my life where I am recognizing the things that need to be changed and implementing plans on how to change them. So, here it goes. I am obese. I have been for as long as I can remember. When I was a teen, I was told I'd grow out of it. But I didn't. It's a problem that has plagued me my whole life. Though it may not have been a primary focus or concern, it was always there, lurking. Silent, but present. I know that I have been incredibly fortunate. I was never, as far as I recall, bullied or teased about my weight in any of the numerous places I lived and attended church. I don't even think my sister teased me about it. I have also never suffered any true adverse effects on my health because of my weight. I do not have diabetes, which I am especially thankful for due to my family history. The worst prob...

Now is the time of year when people go off on long, nostalgic rants about the ending year and the one that is eminent. They recant the things they have done, the things they have learned, and their goals for the next twelve months of their lives. This makes sense; one year is ending and another is beginning. It is a time of rebirth, starting over, and getting a clean slate. It is just like how every morning is the start of a new day, but on a bigger scale. It literally happens once a year. Overall, this past year has been mixed, as I am sure it has been for most people. There have been some goods, some bads, and some in-betweens. Should I judge the quality of the year by the events that have transpired? That does seem a bit arbitrary as very often life events are out of our control. Instead, I would perhaps prefer to critique my year based off of a quote from Parks and Recreation : “Are you better off?” Am I better off than I was a year ago? The answer is, undeniably, yes I am. ...

Another Side of Being Female This is something I have wanted to talk about for a while, but a recent post I read helped me decide to sit down and share my feelings. This is not a pity party or an attempt to steal the spotlight and honestly I don’t even care if it gets any attention whatsoever. I just want my voice out there, even if it is lost in the crowd. I have seen many beautifully written and heart-wrenching pieces detailing how difficult it can be as a female and dealing with daily sexual harassment and/or abuse their whole lives. I do not in any way intend to take anything from those stories because those are real people who were really hurt, abused, offended, and degraded. Their emotions are 100% valid and I wish everyone had more awareness of the kind of behavior those brave women have endured and overcome. All I want is to provide perspective from my own experiences, which are quite different from theirs but I feel is underrepresented as far as I have seen, and just ...

If I have one superpower (and lbhrn [lets be honest right now], I probs only have one), it would be procrastination. Proof? Well while I’m writing this post, I am also working on a Christmas card for a friend that I said I was going to be putting in the mail like, two days ago (Moogle-chan, I’m sorry that I suuuuck). Which is I guess less an example of procrastination and more an example of me sucking, except that it IS procrastination when Christmas is in less than a week. I also have a writing job that I should be working on because I said I would have it done before I left on Christmas Eve, but I’m not working on that yet. Why? Well, partly because they don’t pay me enough, BUT REALLY: I have a simultaneous fear of success and failure. Which I guess a lot of people do, but here is how it works into my procrastination. The longer I put off doing something, the longer I have where the thing I am creating still has potential. That might not be clear, so let me explain. I...