Divided
Saturday, April 25, 2009, 8:52 PM



I am a child of tomorrow. But here I am in this moment. There is no where else to be. Even if ever since kindergarten, I've always imagined life two years or more ahead.

Still, I realize looking ahead can be a good thing if I have goals in mind: concrete things to work my way towards. (Which I never had, aside from being a best selling novelist by the age of 30 because I figured by the age of 30, enough interesting stuff would have happened to me and I could write about it all convincingly.) What a joke that turned out to be! The last person I want to write about is myself. Like le gag.

The thing is, though, I've been telling myself just wait til you're 16, or 18, or 21, or 30 ... for too long now. Yeah, I could have died painlessly-romantically-tragically at the age of 23 and someone (probably Oogie) would have written a wonderful whatchamacallit that would be read at my funeral), but obviously that never happened.

Besides, the waiting-for-experience part hasn't worked. Nothing magical has cast a golden net across my body, wracked me from the soul inside-out, or taken my heart by storm. I always thought it would, too. Something or someone outside of my shy, rather boring self was going to explode and make a difference. I was going to make a difference. It was the one idea I clung to growing up, because surely there was a reason why I had been born, right? (Searching, searching, searching for anything outside of me, I know this, I know this. The answer is only to be found inside.)

Lots of people think moving across the country after my divorce was a brave thing to do. In retrospect, I agree, but I didn't feel brave at the time and I sure don't feel brave now. Leaving everything and everyone I knew was terrifying, but at the time, I didn't see any other option. I was terrified to stay and I was terrified to go. So I chose the option that might help me grow. And it has. I wouldn't trade the last few years of my life, although the first year after moving here? Awful, so awful I couldn't really talk about it. Or blog about it. I just skimmed the edges, always conscious of who was reading, who could be hurt, who could be angered.

Things have changed, though. I've changed. I have to fight to believe in Peter Pan, Santa Claus and The Tooth Fairy. I cling to the feelings of those memories with everything I have, and I rocket-stomp across the sad little bitch inside. I fight hard. I don't want the bitter cynic to win. Ever.

It'd be a lot easier if I didn't feel torn in two, though.

13 Did the Unhingey Jiggy Engage in Unhingenosity
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Placeholder
Thursday, April 23, 2009, 7:28 PM

More than one person has told me I should do a drunk blog post. (Sinners! Sinners!) And so I give you a three-sheets-shaking post.

So far, all I'm really doing is going back to fix all the damn typos. Frick to the oompth.

And yeah, my last post about control was about control, was about control. No commenting allowed on purpose. (Sorry. But Ye Sneakers worked around that, heh, heh, heh.)

~*~*~*~

When I was young and my toes curled at just the scent of vodka (aka Aqua Net hairspray, it smells the SAME), I used to asked my mom: "Are you lucid?"

And she and Nancy and Nancy (yes, there were two Nancys) would laugh like I was a stand-up comedian feeding them a line. It was probably because it was an unusual occurrence for Oogie to not be lucid. She was all about control. She had to be--she had two hooligans to raise.

Still, it was my favorite question for her, soon as she stepped in the door. I like to make people laugh.

Oogie had another successful surgery today. Stints, balloons, staying flat for six hours. That kind of thing. And she she sounded good. Perky. (But she's being watched by a 22-year-old with a 1-1/2-year old.)

I hate being so far away. The word helpless doesn't even skim the edge. But I'm working towards ending that part of the deal and that's what counts. It's something.

9 Did the Unhingey Jiggy Engage in Unhingenosity
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Random observation #2
Sunday, April 19, 2009, 8:24 PM

Control is that thing I do when I pee, especially when I really-really-really have to go. When going is all about ah and the relief of it all.

I stop the flow.

I go against the instinct to let go, even when it's hard.

(Especially if it's hard, but that's the point.)

Because I can.

It's a form of control.

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Autumn Tiger lily here
Wednesday, April 15, 2009, 6:18 PM



This is one of those crazy memes I found god knows where. I laughed myself into a runny nose when I played along. I also started sweating because I was laughing so hard--I laugh at the dumbest things.

If you're reading these and like 'em, I challenge you to pick ONE (or more if you want to) and leave me your "whatever" name in the comments.
Because I want to laugh myself silly over your name, I do, I do, I do.

DiAnne, you better do this. One fricking name, thassal. You can do it, I believe in you.

~*~*~*~


1. Your rock star name (first pet/current vehicle)
Goldfish Feet
Hah! Get on back, Whoever's Famous Now

2. Your Gangsta name (favourite ice cream flavour/fave type of shoe)
Chocolate Mary Jane
I know, pretty skeery

3. Your Native American name (fave colour/favourite animal)
Red Cat
Snort

4. Your soap opera name (middle name/city of birth)
Lorraine Fort Wayne
This is the name that had me damn near falling off my chair...

5. Your Star Wars name (first 3 letters of last name/first 2 letters of first name)
Kinan
Me like

6. Your Superhero name (second fave colour/fave drink)
Purple Coffee
Me don't like

7. Your dancer name (favourite scent/fave candy)
French Vanilla Hershey Bar
Good thing I only do the herky-jerky at the small town poe-dunk bar

8. TV Weather Anchor name (5th grade teacher/city that starts with the same letter)
Klopfenstein Kalamazoo

Um, yeah, who remembers 5th grade?

9. Your spy name (fave season/flower)
Autumn Tiger lily
Sign me up, 007

10. Your cartoon name (favourite fruit/article of clothing you are wearing)
Grape Turtleneck
Figures

11. Your hippie name (what you had for breakfast/favourite tree)
French Fry Weeping Willow
Yeah, sounds just like me

12. Your porn star name (first pet/first address)
Goldfish Hoover
Hey, they already did the first pet thing--but I bet I'd be laughed at for such a name before I ever set a naked toe on stage

~*~*~*~

Your turn.

9 Did the Unhingey Jiggy Engage in Unhingenosity
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Radomosity, part the uberzillionith
Monday, April 13, 2009, 7:28 PM



The world, it be fractured
Some time today around 3:00, gravity-times-twenty came to rest on my eyelids. It was all I could do to keep my nose from nestling in between the cracks of my keyboard. And I'd just like to say eyeballing a computer monitor in this state should be this-side of illegal. Surely, someone should've been close enough to snap photos because I bet I looked hilarious slow-blinking like an owl...

hoot

Twilight much?
For a short while, it was toss-up between my Twilight movie-to-book comparison (my favorite hit so far is why girls are physiologically attracted to Edward Cullen), and my window display post from last March. But alas, Twilight has it.

It's just crazy how popular this series is right now.

Just CLICK it
Every day, I click this button. It takes five seconds, tops. Today's wee Rescue Story was about Claude, an orange kitty. He just showed up at a shop one day and claimed the place as his. (I have such a soft spot for orange kitties.)

This is me urging you to just clickit, clickit, click the button now.

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How I get my groove on
Sunday, April 12, 2009, 5:11 PM

Ever suffered a near-death experience?

Email me.



Okay, so I'm still writing Twilight saga fan fiction because I have no life. Also, because I love vampires. One in particular. Edward's so jam-packed of angst, feels like he's the worst thing ever born on earth, which understandably blinds him to his own worth. On top of this, he's in love and fighting bloodlust for the one he loves, and he's sexually untapped.

Quick, pass me a Hershey candy bar before I pass out.

I don't know why this particular character has affected me so strongly. (Quite a change from Michael Samuelle of La Femme Nikita, but they are both dangerous, beautiful inside, enigmatic, tormented and inhumanely sexy.) I've thought about it and I have some ideas, but that's not what this post is about.

ahem

I am a tender fuzzy peach being thrown against a brick wall--bruising, bruising, ow, bruising. I painfully-slow rip-roared through the dying scene (hah! a contradiction, yet it fits), but the rebirth is com.

Pleee.

Kated.


I've never fought through agonizing pain of death to be reborn as a vampire. Yeah, you might as well be surprised! Trying to imagine it--to imagine fighting through all that crap to be reborn in an alien body--is giving me a not-so-wonderful complex. I thought this part would be child's play next to writing about death and watching someone you love suffer through it. Either that, or I'm doing something wrong, trying to imagine and feel something too hard or too much.

So far, the best analogy I've been able to come up with is the time I woke up from one of my knee surgeries. It doesn't really count, though, because an anesthesiologist poked a needle into my spine to numb me the waist-frick-down, so I didn't feel any agony--just funked out confusion. But I still think I can still run with it because there was that sense of twisted pseudo reality I'm trying to convey.

Wow, was it weird. And funny (but it can't be funny, the piece I'm writing can't be funny).

Writing about a twisted kind of reality is hard. Writing well is hard. More than one person has told me this, but lah-lah-lah, I can't hear yah! I never wanted to believe them. Frick, writing was never HARD when I was growing up and didn't know diddly.

Yeah, that was then.

Writing is more than just spinning thoughts into words (it's gold-plated hell, okay?). I have to put myself into a certain dark frame of mind, which makes my body feel like the day after I've done 150 crunches and then chewed an entire pack of gum at once.

It's nuts, especially since I'll never get paid for doing this. Can't stop loving it or doing it, though. Won't. Cant-wont.

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4 Did the Unhingey Jiggy Engage in Unhingenosity
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5, 4, 3, 2, 1
Saturday, April 11, 2009, 6:47 PM

Ach, I'm a sunuvagun. By the time I remembered to post last night, it was after midnight and that was that. Not that I mind too much. I was here. I was this-close.

Actually, I was friggen upset yesterday, about a matter I can't post about here but wish I could. Basically, it boils down to the fact that, after being accused of something (indirectly or not), I am not convincing at all when I am speaking truth. And I hate that. I need to find out why I'm like that and change that facet about my personality posthaste. Maybe it's just in the heat of the moment--when I am being accused of doing something--that I'm just too taken aback by the surprise of it all. I don't know.

Thing is, I'm giving this upsetting idea more weight than I should, but damn. It pisses me off. Just the thought of it kept me from falling asleep. I have to stand up for myself and I've never been good at that, but if I don't do it, nobody else is.

I didn't do it.

That's all I have to say, right?

I wish.

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Obladi Oblada
Thursday, April 09, 2009, 9:30 PM

Well, I figure I gotta give this a shot--blog at least seven days in a row or something--before I break another promise to myself and let a day go by with no post. Can't have that.



Because I really didn't want to blog tonight. My head's still on top of my neck, but my brain isn't here. It's...lessee...my brain is somewhere in the past.

There was that day at church camp when a bunch of the kids there just started talking in tongues. Scared the crap out of me, but it wasn't long before I wanted to talk in tongues. Supposedly inviting the light of Jesus into your soul would do the trick! Fitting someone else inside of me seemed a tricky thing, but I was game. All the cool kids were doing it.

And I tried my hardest--my entire body was tense with focus and concentration--here I am, God, come on in.

Nothing but nothing happened.

It's still just obladi oblada for me.

Life goes on.

5 Did the Unhingey Jiggy Engage in Unhingenosity
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Flashback photo!
Wednesday, April 08, 2009, 6:45 PM


This was my visual orientation of sorts--a string of graphics visitors found when they visited me at my AOL Journal.

I miss it. (The photo string, I mean.)

Clicking the photo makes it bigger, not as big as I want, but exporting it in a larger fashion is going to take more time and effort than I want to spend at this point.

I'm really lazy.

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About fear
Tuesday, April 07, 2009, 6:50 PM

My biggest childhood fear, not including spiders or the dark, was my dentist. A week ahead of appointment time, I would start counting down the days with dread. It felt like being on Death Row, not that I know anything about being on Death Row, but I do know something about that awful sucking black hole in the pit of my stomach.

Every appointment time--every time I went--I was more nervous than I had ever been--ever. As soon as I caught my first whiff of that office, my internal organs shrank and I felt like barfing and taking a poop right then and there. I never fainted from this fear, but I don't think it would have exactly been a horrible thing because it would have been better than quaking and crying. Surely The Powers That Were would have taken a child hitting the floor unconscious more seriously than a bawling one.

I'd whine as soon as my butt hit the dentist's chair (which I always thought looked like a beetle without legs). The light above my head was The Evil Eye. It never had to blink. It saw every tear, every muscle twitch, every look of horror on my face. I used to pray to it.

Please, please, please let me out of here, amen.

Once my dentist (Dr. Dawes) said to me, "I haven't even done anything yet, there's nothing to cry about."

Only I thought he said, "You’re a rotten kid and I'm going to feed you to The Boogieman," because then I was really really crying and they had to get my little sister to come and sit with me. Crap, was I the biggest boob. I think it's hilarious now, but it wasn't back then. Sometimes I want to go back in time and just hug me to death. Couldn't hurt.

I think...I think I was so awful skerred because I was unlucky enough to be born human and not as a crocodile or a shark. They said I had too many teeth for my mouth. (Well, who put ‘em there? Not me. Why was I being penalized?!) And so Dr. Dawes had to pull my baby teeth. I forget why, I was just a kid. All I really remember is the fear and the injustice of it all.

Well, and Dr. Dawes and the embarrassing crying thing.

I won’t even mention the cavities.

Okay, maybe I will. Just the sound of the drill was enough to make my pulse do the funky chicken, but the cavities are what really got me. Just the sound of the drill was loud and unrelenting outside of my head, and when it was inside my mouth, there was the ow-ohmigod-ow-fricking-ow factor. And tears. And fear. And adult anger. And embarrassment.

I was traumatised. More than once. Not that it took a lot to scare me.

Leaving Dr. Dawe's office was always a huge gasp of relief. It meant I’d survived, that I’d live another day, and I really really liked that part.

~*~*~*~

In case I wonder what this post is about a year or so from now, I wrote it to illustrate that I was not beaten down (ultimately) by this fear. By the time I entered my senior year at high school, I'd been through it all: braces (the BAND kind that necessitated wearing spacers for a week beforehand--TWICE--and over a period of SEVEN years), a root canal, wisdom-tooth extraction, and pseudo-suffocation (bunch of times) by mint-flavored rubber (because mint tasted the most like oxygen). Plus, I discovered that I hadn't really experienced life until my mouth was forcibly held open by a plastic and wire contraption wide enough to fit the barrel of a hair dryer inside, and I'm sorry I don't have any photos of that.

Or not.

It's not like fighting through cancer, but it was horrible enough. Gawd, etc.

BUT. I am not that afraid of dentists any more. I cannot be held in a perpetual state of fear. It gets ridiculous after a while. It gets old. Bravery doesn't negate the fear--standing up for myself isn't a bad thing (yeah, it can be scary, but it doesn't have to be all bad). I should be able to be who I am without making excuses.

Read that part over as needed, Andi.


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Voila
Monday, April 06, 2009, 9:44 PM

My mornings consist of me getting up, showering, blow-drying my hair, doing my make-up...and looking in the mirror and giving up. But by then it's usually too late.

(I just read that back and see that I forgot to mention the part where I also get dressed. Pretty funny, so I think I'll just leave it like it is.)

I have decided to try and force myself to blog every day. And since this is my blog, I am going to give myself permission to blog badly. Maybe that will take off the pressure and I will blog every day, or damn near close to that. Maybe it will help me get past the feeling that if I don't have anything to blog about, I shouldn't blog--the ain't got nothing to say? shaddup thing.

It was frigging hot outside today and frigging cold inside. So I was hot, hot, hot, then cold, cold, cold, then hot, hot, hot again. And if I'm getting sick, I'm taking the day off blogging tomorrow.

... for Monty (and me later on, because I always come back to these entries and listen to the songs, and I love Bruce Lee and I love this song!):


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Dear Anonymous
Sunday, April 05, 2009, 5:32 PM

Forget my crappy knees and sucky attitude, I want to be like Mulan. Make a man out of me!



Mulan is my favorite Disney movie character. My heart broke more than once while watching her story, but I was cheering hard all the way through. She's one of those I'm never going to quit, never going to give up characters. And yeah, it's just a cartoon, but it was movie magic for me when her time of triumph came.

Now I'm going to go watch the movie.

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