Allie and her Macbook

The Right Things

I think I’m absolutely over-do for a post. This will probably be incoherent, since that’s how I roll and I also have a million things to talk about, and if you’ve read this before, you probably know that I am unorganized, long winded, and usually make very little sense. So here goes.

My life has been contradiction, oxy moron and just moron all summer.

I’m totally aware that I’ve made a lot of mistakes and spent far too much time doing things that should only be occasional recreational. I think it’s quite possible that I’ve let quite a few friends down, my very existance is disappointing.

I am like a Snickers bar with a beautiful chocolate exterior and then just nuts on the inside. I love Snickers but I don’t love myself always.The peanuts in me are guilt. I am absolutely filled with it, and I convince myself constantly that it’s my fault I am always losing friends, or finding that I can no longer relate with people I used to admire.

I hate myself for being in pain. I’m frustrated that I can’t just be a normal 20 year old (normal in the sense that I don’t feel the constant need to annoy people with my complaints of back pain). I hate how sensitive I am; as soon as someone raises their voice at me I lose all of my foundation. Yet I don’t have a problem being mean myself.

I’m never satisfied with my current life but as soon as it’s past I want it back.

I am incredibly flawed and quite honestly, probably insane. I watch movies and when I see the lives of characters who can’t get away from the pain (whatever that pain is), I always think if that was me, I’d kill myself. What makes these fictional character stronger than me?

I obsessively pick my scabs. This is terrible for me. Almost everyone remarks about the gigantic scars on my arms, which no one has ever seen healed. I don’t know how long they’ve been around, but they exist in my senior pictures, so they are at least four years old. Holy fuck. The possibility of me dying of gangrene is real.Do I stop? No. Do I want to? Yes. Can I really stop? Honestly, I do not think so. It’s ingrained in me.

And then I feel like I’m either sick, in agonizing pain, or just plain out of shape. Every once and a while I notice that I simply can’t do what my friends do. People are constantly pointing out how different I am. I like being different but I don’t like being different in the sense that I may just be “the sick one” to some of my friends.

I’m facing a lot of personal horror, and the realization that I may not live a long, healthy life. If I am already plagued by chronic pain now, I can’t imagine what life will be like twenty years down the road.

I’m not pleased with some of the stuff I’ve done (am doing) and I am constantly looking for something better to do. I’m awkward and shy and anti-social before you meet me, but as soon as we have something in common, I can’t shut up.

I’m supposed to be an English teacher and it’s just supposed to work out. What if it doesn’t? That’s why I started writing a novel a few weeks ago in which the main character is a troubled teacher; an imagining of myself if (when) things go wrong.

I always saw myself as someone with the potential to be successful. Now I see how empty those dreams really were, how actually lazy I am, how despite being an English major with a 3.5 GPA, I don’t really know shit about literature because I never did my homework and somehow bullshitted through everything.

Yesterday as I was sitting on the acupuncture table with needles in every section of my body, I felt waves of tears hit and leave me. I tried really hard to relax but I don’t think I know how to. I mean, I really don’t think I know how to relax at all; even when I’m sleeping I wake up with back pain, from horrifying dreams where the people I love are yelling at me, betraying me, my teeth are falling off, or I dishonorably run away from a tsunami that kills my whole family.

Maybe nothing is actually wrong with me, but I know it wouldn’t make a difference because of how I make myself feel. I really want to start making a difference in my own life, so I can stop doing all these things.

The fact of the matter is, usually I feel pretty good about who I am and what my place in this wild world is. We all have these things buried within us, but I think acknowledging and exposing this has already made a difference in the way I live my life now.

I am going to stop this now. I am going to start doing the right things.

I don’t feel close to anyone anymore. The people I want to be close with are all in Littleton or elsewhere in the country.

Fort Collins is an undeniably cool town, and I do really like all the people I’ve met and spent time with here. But it’s not the same as it used to be, and I don’t have anyone that wants to hang out frequently enough to keep myself entertained. I wish that I could just be someone who doesn’t like anyone else… it would make everything so much easier.

That, and it seems that my rats hate me. Rose bites me every single time I put my finger in her cage, and she didn’t use to. She always licked. And she’s chewing incessantly on the bars of her cage and it makes a really irritating noise. Similarly, Rain is twice the size she was last week, has lost her timid stagnancy and has now made it her life’s goal to get the fuck out of her cage. She’s incredibly cute but when I hold her all she does is try and get away from me. At least Rose has a mind to stick around and also to not jump off of high ledges. Unlike Rain, who I am certain has a mental disease.

Words

Fuck poetry.

I don’t know what happened, other than my creative writing class, that made me feel like writing a poem would give me hay fever. Perhaps it was the straight up realization that I’m not very good at it, nor do I understand it well. I used to think that not understanding it meant something… like my inability to understand made me a real poet.

What a fool I was.

So I’m going back into the world of fiction. I’ve missed you, old pal….

I hate feeling like I can’t write a story because I don’t have time. I hate feeling like writing is a waste of time unless it is for an assignment. I finally feel fiction in my fingers again but I feel like it takes too much time to commit to paper. When I have the time to, I don’t feel like writing.

Are you still a writer if you never write?

I wonder what it feels like to fail school because all you did was write fiction. Would I feel like the semester was well spent anyway?

I want a tattoo. I don’t know where or what. But I want one. And I’m not sure if having one in a visible place is worth it or not… I am attached to the idea of getting a tattoo that very simply says, “Words.” What do you think?

I expect you to encourage me now.

Rats!

I feel like a failure.

I got a baby rat who is probably, what? four weeks old. She is the same size as a mouse, and is a dumbo rat. I was told that Rose was a Dumbo rat, which is a fucking lue. Rose has big ears but Rain (the baby) has bigger ears. They are also to the side. Her ears are  huge. very elephantine, much like Dumbo himself.

Actually she looks a lot like this: Same size, same face… different colors. Rain has a black face and a white body. She also has a lightning shaped white spot within the black on her head.

Anyway I didn’t do nearly enough research and I tried to introduce Rose and Rain under ridiculous circumstances. Long story short, Rose hardcore attacked Rain and poor Rain was injured and bleeding. I quickly rushed out to the 24 Hour Wal-Mart to get a 20$ gerbil cage, which Rain is living in until I can introduce her to Rose without violence. Ugh, I don’t know… it feels like it’ll never happen.

I feel like a shitty pet-owner and I am very sad for Rain, who is now not very active and seems really scared. I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea.

Dream Land

I had this terrible dream that Alex was cheating on me. I was supposed to turn in a poem for Creative Writing on Tuesday but I never went to class that day, nor did I write the poem. Today I couldn’t get the dream out of my head. So I wrote this.

Alex’s House

Is the place that sets my dreams
Sets my dreams repeating an image of a beautiful Latina girl
Who nervously zipped up her pants when I walked into the room.
This image of her in the room
With my boyfriend, with my boyfriend
Caused me to look at her, and she looked at me with fear in her eyes,
With eyes that abandoned innocence up her wide vagina ages ago.
The first questions I think of aren’t good enough
I try to forget everything, including the fear in her eyes.
The first question I think of is, “Did you sleep together?” I need to know
My boyfriend stays silent, broods darkly on the bed
(Like he has been lately) He’s been so angry and tired
but I didn’t think he was this angry and tired.
The Latina says, “No,” and Alex says, “No”
And I press my fingers together, killing the ant resting there.
I ask them again, not for dramatic effect, and they say “No”
and she seems nice so not even I could hate her so I say, “Just tell me the truth”
and she says, “I’m sorry.”

Fuck you, little pretentious whore!
You think you can fuck just anyone just because you’re short
While I’m tall and awkward.
I am sickened, sickened
And I go into a blind rage that I always hear about in murder films.
I can hear myself screaming, my forehead sweating bullets
She is cowering, apologizing, and yet Alex is still silent,
Moody, upset, and tired.
I am sure he doesn’t even see me there, even as I am screaming at him
It’s over, it’s over, how could you, we’re done
I wasn’t sure how to break up with someone who didn’t notice
So at the end, I forgave him for his sake and listened to him later
As he told me that the Latina girl was the best fuck he had ever had
As we walked through a field, and I felt the constant waves
of a boat we hadn’t been on yet.

In less than 40 minutes

Jonathan Safran Foer will be sitting 12 feet away from me.

Write Here, Write Now.

I think about Mallory every day, and I can’t express the pain I feel when I simply miss her with every blood cell in my body.

Today, it dawned on me, though. Mallory was such an advocate for a lot of things in my life, some good, some bad. I smoked weed for the first time with Mallory. She asked me to come along with her friends one night and said, “If Allie refuses to smoke, everyone just blow it in her face.”

Mallory encouraged me to lose my virginity. She bought me a box of condoms for my birthday, decorated with a pink ribbon. One time, she came home when Alex and I were hanging out in the room and she said, “So, did you guys have sex yet?” A very awkward “no” was the answer.

But if Mallory did anything, she encouraged me to be who I was. I wasn’t always nice, I wasn’t always reliable, or clean (in fact, I was hardly ever clean), I slept a lot, probably complained more than anyone, and yet she still loved me. I can’t help but remember one time she came home during NaNoWriMo and I was in the middle of a word war. She was distracting me by telling me all sorts of stuff about her day, and I said, “Hey, I’m doing a word war right now, can I talk to you in 7 minutes or so?” and she was like “yeah sure!”

After I was done, she sat down in her chair across from me in our little dorm room and told me that I was going to be successful one day. I think I remember my face getting hot. I can’t remember the exact words she told me, but I remember her telling me that she had never met anyone as passionate about writing as me. She said that she knew a lot of potential authors but that she had never met one who loved the art as much as I did, and because of that, she knew that I would go far with writing.

Tonight, I discovered the magnitude of what she was talking about.

Mallory might be disappointed in me with how I have treated my words recently. This past NaNoWriMo, I had no motivation at all, and finished with an end product that is absolutely painful to think about.

I thought, I’ll switch to poetry.

Poetry too lost its fun, its meaning. Poetry class became a feat, an annoyance. It no longer felt like art and I were one with another; it felt like art was something I once liked in the past, like a pesky ex-boyfriend.

Mallory passed away on February 26, and that beautiful girl fought that cancer with all that she had. She held it off for five years, and was such an inspiration to me and to many others. I feel the importance of writing again, having forgot the day I put off my conversation with a great girl to write. I had forgotten her words.

Now, I am really going to push on. I am going to write, and I’m not going to stop until someone publishes me. And once I publish a novel, despite all the other people who deserve a dedication, Mallory deserves it the most.

For Mallory, my dear friend who taught me who I am.

Why I Hate Verison Wireless

I would never join “The Nations’ Largest 3G Network” because I find their commercials completely offensive.

Here we are, in the biggest economic struggle since the Great Depression. The first commercial that they do that I hate is one where they show a Blackberry Storm in the hands of someone. The narrator says, “You could really go for some music right now. Too bad all you have is your Blackberry Storm…”

TOO BAD all you have is your BLACKBERRY STORM?? OK so now you can download music on the go. America can’t wait to spend their money on music. They must have it. It’s an impulse. Not only do I find the notion of buying anything on impulse like that annoying, I find it offensive that they suggest that owning a phone like a Blackberry is something than can be “all you have.”

You could go for some food right now, too bad all you have is $1.50 and the possibility of your house being foreclosed.

THAT is the correct way to use a “all you have” statement.

There are two other Verison commercials that annoy me. Both have the same premise: who will you list as your favorites and get unlimited calls to? The well-known “Can you hear me now?” Verison man walks alongside some high school jock asshole, who lists all of the people he is going to call now that he has the new plan the commercial is advertising.

I just saw this one, which made me write this post. At the end, the subject of the commercial suggests he’ll put his physics tutor on his favorites for unlimited calling. She looks intelligent, but extremely attractive. There is a kind of assumption that the male character is attracted to his physics tutor, who gives him a sexy glance as she joins the group.

Yet, the other commercial of the same nature is far different. There is a tutor in that ad as well. The ad starts with the jock saying that he’s going to choose his weight coach, his nutrition coach… etc. The crowd reaches a very geeky looking, unattractive boy in very unfashionable attire. The character finishes off with, “and this guy” and the Verison Wireless guy gives him an odd look that suggests, “seriously? this loser?” and the tutor adds, “it’s Gilbert… his English tutor…” and the jock gives a shrug.

It’s impossible to express how angry this makes me, as an English major, and as an usually non-judgmental person. Why is the physics tutor attractive, but the English tutor totally undesirable?  The only way that this would be fair is if the physics major was also nerdy and undesirable. But instead, the English tutor is a laughing stock, who acts awkward as soon as he is acknowledged, and who is obviously acknowledged as a loser.

I see Verison as a judgmental company because of these commercials, despite their customer service and actual company policy. This is why I will never join Verison.

Come to the blacklight blowout!!!

I’m making a cake.