Ants!

I grew up sharing a room with my sister for the most part. When I was a teenager, my dad gave me my own room by slightly renovating a walk-in closet/alcove off of my sister’s room. I could fit my bed, dresser, and all my things in it, and it had a door to the roof. The house was old, and because of this door, in the summers ants would venture into my bedroom. Big black ants that you see out in yards. While there weren’t a ton of them and for the most part they stayed by the edge of the door, every night I would feel them crawling all over me while I laid in bed. I spent many sleepless nights flicking off invisible ants and shaking out my blankets.

Many years later, I now live in another very old house (100 years old), and as the weather has warmed up, tiny ants have found their way into our bedroom. I don’t know how they got up here, as they always used to only go for the kitchen, but ant traps are not working and I have to vacuum them up every day. These are those really tiny ants that you only see going after food you leave out in the kitchen. I know they are up here because we keep the cat food bowls in the bedroom (for various reasons too long to mention here), and BF tends to bring his meals up here to his computer and leave the dishes sitting for days.

Now the ants are crawling all over me in bed again. Not really, but I feel them whenever I lay in bed and try to sleep. I keep brushing them off and freaking out whenever I feel one crawl up my leg.

The logical voice in my head knows that this is irrational thinking and seeing four ants across the room in the cat food bowl does not mean they want to climb all over the bed. But the crazy woman side of me ohgodantsgetthemoffmeGETTHEMOFFME!!

And now tonight I saw one ant in our bed, despite there being no food near it. Now I can’t sleep because I keep thinking there are ants in my eyelashes.

Movies/TV Shows That I Have Cried While Watching

The Fountain
Lilo & Stitch
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
Battlestar Galactica
House
Requiem for a Dream
Milo and Otis*
A Beautiful Mind
Boys Don't Cry
Dumbo*
Brokeback Mountain
Cowboy Bebop
Samurai Champloo
I Am Legend (which I like to call I Am Will Smith)

Anything marked with a * means I saw and cried at it when I was a small child. Yes, everything else happened when I was a fully-grown adult.

Here's the story on Requiem for a Dream. I was a freshman in college, and my boyfriend at the time lived in the dorm room across the hall from mine. Somehow it came up in conversation that I had never seen the movie before, and he strongly recommended I see it, since it is so good.

So in my dorm room, he gives the movie to me to watch, and then gets ready to leave.

Me: Where are you going?
College Boyfriend: Back to my room.
Me: Why? I thought we were going to watch the movie together.
CB: Oh me? No. I'm not watching that movie again.
Me: >:|

So I turned out the lights and watched the entire movie by myself. When the movie ended, I crawled across the hall to his room, sniveling and covered in my own tears and snot, and scratched at his door. He opened the door a crack.

Me: WHY DID YOU MAKE ME WATCH THAT MOVIE BY MYSELF
CB: I told you, it's a good movie, but I didn't want to watch it again.
Me: WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME
CB: I didn't know you would be this distraught over it.
Me: I WANT TO DIEEEEEEE

The reason for this post is because I just watched A Beautiful Mind for the first time, by myself. I have gone through half a box of tissues and now I just want to curl up in a quilt with some hot chocolate and my cats and watch Super Troopers or anything else that is not so horribly depressing and sad and lovely and beautiful.

Paranoia and Aspartame

I am addicted to Diet Mountain Dew. This started in college when I started buying my own food. It always has to be diet because the regular kind tastes too syrupy for me. I have tried to quit a few times now and the longest I have gone is a month. I think the picture below adequately expresses the extent to which my love for this drink reaches.

I was going through the boxes so fast it became a chore to break each one down and take it downstairs to the recycling every couple days.

I always get an extra something I don't need from the convenience store so the cashiers don't think I go there 4 times a week just for Mt. Dew and judge me.

I also get paranoid when I go to a store like Target, don't find what I need, and have to leave without buying anything. I think the security guard by the exit is staring me down, trying to figure out what I have stolen and I try too hard to make myself look like I'm not a shoplifter which makes me look even more suspicious and then I remember I have a half-full bottle of Mt. Dew in my purse and if the guard searches me he will find it and think I took it, drank some of it in the store, and am now stealing it so I turn around and look for something in the bargain aisle to buy just so I don't go to jail.

Even when I don’t have fake-stolen goods in my purse, I will still hold my purse open in front of me as I pass by the security guard/Walmart-receipt-checker and smile and nod so that they can know confidently that I am simply a disappointed shopper who was not able to find the right kind of cat treats instead of an insidious thief.

I will drive halfway across town to a different convenience store so that the people at my normal one don’t know that I need to get in my car and drive to the store every other day just to buy Mt. Dew. I also don’t want to consolidate all of my Dew into one trip to save time and gas because I tried that once and I walked up to the counter with an armload of about 8 bottles of Mt. Dew and while the cashier said nothing I felt that I had to explain my situation by saying, “I’m going on a road trip.” I can’t go on a road trip every week so this excuse is a one-time deal.

I have to lie to BF about how much I buy and consume. I will take my empty bottles and drive them to a supermarket to throw them out because I am afraid that he will look in the trash can next to my computer and give me this huge look which says, “I AM JUDGING YOU”.

One night we were driving about 20 miles to a friend’s party and when we were almost there I realized that I hadn’t brought any extra Mt. Dew with me so I turned the car around and started looking for a gas station or convenience store. When BF asked what I was doing I said,

Me: “Uh... I need to find a store to pick up something.”

BF: Are you going to buy Mt. Dew?

Me: No! I just, uh, forgot to buy something earlier today.

After an extra 15 minutes of driving around until we found a 7-11, I ran in and got 3 bottles of Dew. Then I realized that I would be a liar if this was all I bought so I spent another 5 minutes looking through the aisles looking for something cheap that I also wanted to buy. I got a Snickers bar. When I walked back out to the car (BF waited in the car because he was tired and a bit angry at this point):

BF: You DID need to buy Mt. Dew!

Me: No! See? I needed something with sugar and calories. My blood sugar is feeling low.

BF: There’s going to be food at the party, which is a mile away.

Me: I don’t want to pass out while driving the car!

BF: You have a problem.

I do have a problem. My problem is that we live in a world where a woman cannot visit her local Walgreen’s every other day to purchase 3 bottles of Diet Mountain Dew without having the cashiers and her BF stare at her like she is a crazy electric-yellow-drink-meth-caffeine addict.

You can bet I snatched this up as soon as I saw it.

When Vampires go to Work

I have been unemployed for about 2 months now, and my schedule and habits have changed drastically. I used to work 7:00am – 3:30pm, which meant I woke up around 6:00am every morning and went to bed around 10:00pm. Now that I don’t have to wake up at any specific time, my body has reverted to its natural nocturnal state. I am writing this at 3:40am right now.

It amazes me how early the birds start chirping. I know there are nocturnal birds, but the daytime ones around here start singing at 2:00am, well before the sun comes up. There is one bird in particular who determines my sleep pattern to a large degree. It is the loudest, most obnoxious thing on the planet, and it sings right outside our bedroom window. I haven’t yet been able to identify it, but I think it’s a Capped Chickadee. If I don’t make sure I fall asleep before 2:00am, then I am doomed to stay awake for many more hours, until I am just too exhausted to keep my eyes open.

Sitting out on the front porch smoking, the entire street is quiet. Then I hear two cats screaming and fighting back in the alley. A neighbor’s dog starts barking because apparently its owners never bring it inside. Another dog answers, and the two converse loudly for a while. A police siren goes off down the road (though really, around here, that happens about every hour). A car parks in front of a neighbor’s house and starts HOOOONNNKKKKK-HONKHONK-HOOONNNKKKKK for 3 minutes.

I grew up on the edge of a historic suburban town and farmland, so when I first moved to the city all of the sounds took a lot of getting used to. Years later, I can easily tune most of the noise out. If I spend the night at my parents in the woods/suburbs however, my ears latch onto every single tiny noise and they keep me awake. For a year I moved back to the suburbs and I couldn’t sleep at all because any outside noise seemed so loud.

My cats seem to be extremely happy any night that I stay up really late. They run frantically all through the room, jump up in my lap, try to push my hands away from the keyboard, and play with each other. At first I was surprised at this until I realized that I’m an idiot and cats are nocturnal. As a side note, I have to mention that one of my cats is sleeping in a cat bed shaped like a cat with a little stuffed cat head on the front right now. It is the cutest and most disturbing thing ever.

I tend to forget to eat food during the day. I can go all through the day without eating anything, and then once it’s dark out I will binge on everything edible in front of me. Right now I have a half-eaten cake, box of Berger cookies, and a bag of pretzels sitting in front of me and oh god this is just so sad.

I keep telling myself that I’m going to force myself into a normal sleeping pattern again, so that I can function properly and not be a vampire. I have tried staying up all night so that I’m tired enough to fall asleep at 9:00pm the next night; I have tried doing hard exercise during the day so that I’m tired when BF goes to sleep; I have tried setting numerous alarms and having BF wake me up when he leaves for work in the morning. It worked for about one day in all of these two months.

The thing is, I fucking love to sleep. When left to my body’s own devices, I can sleep for 14 hours straight on a regular basis. I have always been like this. I also always have a hard time falling asleep, no matter how exhausted I am. I have taken medicine for this, I have tried not eating for 5 hours before bedtime, I have cut out caffeine, and nothing really seems to work. I’m a fucking cat. I just lay in bed and think about everything that happened during the day, all of the things I need to do, how am I going to get another job, I need to finish this one project, I should call back my aunt, BF is snoring now. Oh, when I’m excited about something (like the work week before Xmas, or the day of a job interview), I can jump out of bed immediately in the morning. But those things aren’t common occurrences.

I think I need to deal with the fact that my body is just really damn lazy.

B-more Retarded

Living in the city has raised some important questions/observations to my mind.

Are trash cans a precious commodity? When I first moved in with BF we lost 2 garbage cans to thieves when we weren’t fast enough to bring them back to the house after the dump trucks came in the morning. After I had the [brilliant] plan to spray paint our house number on one, we have not had any more trash-can-burglars, but we just lost our recycling bin this week from the same culprits. Are kids using them for toys, to roll down hills in or something? Or are people really that cheap/lazy to buy their own?

Sidewalks must be made from the same floor-lava we avoided as kids, because no one uses them. The sidewalks in our neighborhood are in perfect condition, are shoveled cleanly when it snows, are wide enough for two people to walk abreast, and yet everyone here still walks in the middle of the street. I can understand the senile old lady who shuffles .0007 miles an hour down the middle of the road every day, because she’s crazy and chews on her sweater while she walks. But everyone else? Maybe there is something insidious and horrible about the sidewalks in our neighborhood that I don’t know about and am slowly getting cancer each time I walk on it.

Do you have a job? Are you well-clothed? Do you have ready cash available to buy small luxuries like soda and lottery tickets? Then you are the perfect candidate for begging for money and cigarettes on the street! Because you are not disabled, you are able to cover more ground in a day, and can make even MORE money than those dirty, wheelchair-bound homeless people!

Segways are to middle-aged men what skateboards are to young…skater…uh, kids.

You may only cross the street when passing cars have a green light, it is rush hour, said cars are travelling at 45mph and a yard away from you, and you are in the middle of the street rather than at a corner crosswalk.

Dog poop is festive decoration for the sidewalks!

I understand that America has the highest rate for obesity, and that trait often goes along with laziness or unwillingness to do extra physical effort. However, if you are driving to a friend’s house to pick them up, is it that hard to park on the empty street [not even parallel parking], get out of your car, and knock on the door? Hell, even just sitting in your car and calling said friend on your cell phone to let them know you are there. Why is this so hard? People around here just double park and honk their horns endlessly until their friend comes out. I timed one person, and they honked repeatedly for 3 straight minutes. That is 3 minutes of HOOOOONNNKKKKK—HONKHONKHONK-HOOOOONNNKKKKK.

No, I will not give you a cigarette. I paid for these with my own money, which I made while working at a thankless job. You look like you can afford a pack; you have the latest smartphone and new Nikes. If I was sitting on the porch and eating a sandwich, would you ask for half of it? Would you ask for one of my cans of soda? Cigarettes are not given to us by magical cancer fairies so that we may hand them out to every stranger on the street.

Here’s another drawing of a unicorn. I made it face the other way, which is why it looks a lot more horrible.

Herro

Sigh. So I have decided to start a blog, because there are a lot of thoughts in my head which would make me sound crazy if I just shared them with people I know in person, as most of the time they are fantastical non-sequiturs.

I also used to have a Livejournal in which I would write at length, but then that format became cumbersome and passé. I update things in Facebook, but not in a fully thought-out, blog format.

So we come to this. I suppose I should start with a quick background, so that anything I reference in this blog doesn’t only make sense to me.

I am a female in my late 20’s, overweight, tattooed, and I own 4 cats. Technically, I own 2 cats, but I live with my boyfriend and he owns two cats as well so in the interest of living a connected life with him I just say I own 4 cats. That sounds like a lot of cats when I write it out. Luckily they are well-behaved and it doesn’t feel like there are 4 cats in our house most of the time. I know I am just trying to justify my owning 4 cats and trying to make it not sound like I am crazy cat lady, but I have to live with the reality that I am.

I am currently unemployed by my own choice and am going through the processes to acquire a new job. BF and I are planning on moving to another state soon, so there are a lot of different things going on in my life right now which are extremely stress-inducing (and probably the reason for me creating this blog—better than binge-drinking!)

My computer crashed while I was typing the above, so I think I’ll just post the rest of this first post in list format. Here are things about me:

 -  I am a regular smoker. I am not quitting anytime soon. It was either this or coke, so I like to think I made a good choice.

 -  I guess I’m an artist. That word holds so many stigmas nowadays in terms of the internet. I am an artist in the sense that I draw, paint, sculpt, make electronic music, and do photography. Went to college for the last one, even. Though every job since college has been customer service. Because I refuse to do wedding photography.

 -  I am a huge-ass nerd. I used to play DnD (Dungeons and Dragons), I play video games regularly (right now Minecraft), and I know how to build a computer. I listen to fantasy metal. I read books with magic and dragons in them. Read the title of this blog again.

 -  I will not censor myself in this blog. I can have a dirty mouth. Hence the adult setting on here.

 - I do not know how to drive a manual-transmission car.

 - I used to write a draw a webcomic which was updated weekly and featured anthropomorphic dragons and gratuitous violence, but then I graduated college and had much less free time to draw.

 -  I knit and crochet. I will most likely post pictures of what I make on here. But this will not be a knitting blog. Oh, trust me, it won’t be.

I think that’s enough for now. Here’s a picture of a unicorn I just drew on some scrap paper to help keep the theme of the title of my blog:

I used to draw horses all the time growing up and they always faced left.