why is it always me? i feel like i'm caught in a huge riptide.

Happy Holidays to you and yours!!!

...gah, just realized...I start student teaching full time in a week and a half! I am so freaking excitedddddd!

I hope some of you out there are getting a white Christmas...although this 56 degree weather is okay too.

Holi-haze

i am having one of those weeks where there are so many words exploding inside me that it is utterly impossible to sort them out enough to write them down.

i haven't been sleeping. i haven't really been eating healthily either. i'm overwhelmed with inner conflicts that i knew were coming, that perhaps were even inevitable. i just didn't think it would be this hard.

i prayed last night. a lot. for so many people, and for so many things. it's one of the only things that has been getting me to sleep at night, an emotional drain that unclogs this mess long enough for my mind to drift into this weird blank unconsciousness. i can't remember the last time i had a dream, good or bad. instead all i can recall when i wake up in the morning are the fervent pleas i've been sending upstairs.

instead of looking forward to the new year, i want to go back and relive this one again.

i am using this Christmas to recharge and reevaluate. i think that reworking my perspective may help things a lot. i just hope it isn't too obvious that i am running around with my tail between my legs.

nothing feels normal. i'm either putting too much thought into things, or i feel restless, like i'm not doing enough.

i want the world to right itself. but i know nothing is going to happen if i sit around waiting.

i hope i get the chance to change.

People who drive plow trucks are INSANE.

I can't get Taylor Swift's new song "Love Song" out of my head. This may be a bad sign...because after last year, I stopped believing in the cliche. I am afraid that I am expecting it again.

At dinner last night with my roommates, one of our mutual friends asked me if I had a boyfriend. When I said no, she replied with "but you always have one!"

Have I really become that girl? The one who needs to have a guy around so people will recognize me? Is it so impossible to accept my identity without someone in my life?

I am too afraid to even talk about the person I am interested in. I can see it in their eyes...they'll shake their heads and say "Here she goes again..."

I am just trying to find the magic I used to have. Maybe they just haven't loved the way I once did, because once you have had that, you want it back. Bad. But maybe it really is my logic that's fucked up.

Man's Best Friend

I know that I should have been prepared for this...he was 15 years old, lung problems, Lyme disease, athritis...

We put him down tonight because of something completely random and sporadic. He got bloat, which in dogs is very lethal. My brother was home when it happened, and we almost lost him right when he got to the vet. They were able to bring him back but the surgery it would take to save him was just as iffy. He was part of our family...and I guess I just wanted to verbal diarrhea some of my favorite memories of him...

• Running headfirst into a tree in the backyard chasing after a squirrel

• Walking him on a leash around the backyard when we adopted him (he was 2, I was 7) to show him the house. Then my brother and I giving him the grand tour of his new house.
• The way he would curl his upper lip and smile at us when he was really excited.
• How he couldn't run in a straight line...he always looked lopsided
• The way he would purr when you pet him and rub his head on you and the furniture. I used to joke he had species confusion disorder.
• How much it helped having him there when we lost our Golden Retriever
• How he could tell a story with his barks
• How he used to lay under my bed at home
• Such a wuss...would climb into bed with me during thunderstorms, afraid of small dogs and puppies too
• His love for chicken jerky...and how he figured out that if he drank more water, we'd let him out more, and if we let him out more, he'd get more chicken jerky as a reward for coming inside when we called him
• The way he would look carsick in the back seat on long trips
• The doggy ice cream we'd give him on his birthday
• All his little doggy girlfriends in the neighborhood....my boy was a STUDMUFFIN!
• His UMD Terps food bowls, leash, and collar
• His stocking at Christmas, filled with bones. He would get so excited by the smell that he wouldn't know what to do with himself.
• He couldn't swim. He would just walk into the water, and then sit down.
• He didn't like playing with toys but if you got him excited the right way and the right time, he'd chase a tennis ball one time. Then he'd bring it back to you, looking at you like he was saying "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?"
• How he'd knock me over when I'd come home from college to visit, and then try to climb in my lap.
• How he'd come find me when my mom asked "Where's sissy?"
• Curling up at our feet when we watched tv.
• Running and barking in his sleep.
  

It only seems fitting that my last memory of me and my dog are traipsing through the woods together in West Virginia. He loved it up there.

Rest in peace, Hershey Duke. You will be missed, so. fucking. much.

Before the chaos

The last two weeks of the semester. 4 final papers, to be followed swiftly by 4 final exams. It is tortuous to be a college student this time of year, really. I have to hammer out a twelve page research paper on the trope of the libertine in eighteenth century English literature. Joy. I've barely started. December 19th is my last final...and you better believe I am LIVING for that Friday.

My reward for getting all this stuff done comes in the form of nine books I am going to try to read over my short winter break (my spring semester is the beginning of my full time student teaching internship, so I have to go back when my students do...Jan. 5th). I had started Jane Eyre over the summer but couldn't finish it before school started, so it hit the backburner. I celebrated Bookseller Appreciation Week where I work by purchasing eight others. The stack of books to read on my nightstand may just be the most prominent structure in my room at this point! I also bought JK Rowling's new book, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, because I wouldn't be a Harry Potter fan without it...along with Persuasion by Jane Austen, Such a Pretty Fat by Jen Lancaster, Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (woohoo Bargain section!), The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (which I have heard is A-MA-ZING), The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl (brilliant mystery writer....also has The Dante Club which I highly recommend for fans of Dante's Inferno), Michael Cunningham's The Hours (because I read Mrs. Dalloway this fall), and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse for a modernist challenge.

Okay....no way I can read all these by the first week of January. New goal: By the time I graduate (May!), I will have all these read.

Now, I have to write. Kill me.