SNIKT!!

Despite my annoyance at her constant presence in our house, I’m glad my dad found a girlfriend. He’s been pretty lonely the last couple years, and I could tell he was dreading my brother leaving for college. My dad’s happier now, and even though he constantly feels the need to impress her, I’m happy for him. He talks to her more in a day than he talked to my mom in an entire year. I’m thankful for that.

Today we studied the neurology of speech and hearing, and I’ve always had a soft spot for neurology. I find it so poetic. Our brains are designed to be so in sync with our surroundings, and it’s only when something goes wrong that we realize how harmonious our functions are. Plus the terminology of it all is so nice. (Agnosia: being unable to recognize and assign meaning to an object while being able to perceive it. Same root as “agnosticism.” Just thought that was cool.) 

A side note: I found a new phobia on par with my fear of snakes. Any surgery involving the brain. I would hate it if I knew that people (fallible people) were messing around with the most complex organ in my body. 

A friend of mine recently told me he prefers movies (and pretty much everything else) to reading because “no matter how descriptive an author’s writing is, you’ll never be able to see EXACTLY what they wanted you to see.” To me this is indicative of a terrible and underused imagination and a complete misunderstanding of the reasoning behind the written word. So what if you don’t see exactly what the author meant? So what if you have to fill in some of the blanks yourself? Doing so makes reading a personal experience. It infuses what you know of the world into a fictional situation so that you may better understand reality. Does what you see in your head excite you? Is it thought provoking? Does it make you want to cry? A good book has the potential to do all these things, but only in the right hands. If your intent is to see one person’s view of a given situation, you never really learned how to read.

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I ended up driving through my old neighborhoods. It’s weird to see other people’s cars parked in my old driveways, kids shooting basketballs at hoops my dad put up.

Then I went to the tiny library I used to frequent as a kid, and I found the only book I remember checking out from that place (aside from all of their Dear America books). The Iron Ring by Lloyd Alexander, same copy and everything. It’s about an Indian prince who’s bound by his honor to go on a journey to pay his life debt after losing a dice game. I would have checked it out but I no longer have a library card there and it was closing.

So much nostalgia in a little over one hour. Now I’m at my grandma’s for a family dinner and it’s weird how I’ve never looked forward to one until today.

It’s been almost twenty years and my cousins still don’t understand that my parents aren’t as well off as theirs. 

It’s been almost three years and they still don’t understand that some divorces aren’t as amicable as their parents’.

Yeah, I’m going to stop whining. It’s not getting me anywhere, so fuck it.

I said I was having a bad self-esteem day, and I am. Right now, I’m looking at these pictures and I hate them. Right now, I hate my hips and my waist isn’t my ideal. But tomorrow I will love myself. If not tomorrow, maybe the next day. So I will post this and maybe it won’t make me feel better now, but if in the future I look at these and think, “I’m not so horrible after all” then I will have succeeded. 

Looking back, my logic during my freshman year of high school was something along the lines of, “Don’t fucking label me, but if you want to label me, call me emo, NOT GOTH OMG GROSS!!1”

How embarrassing.

She seems nice enough, but I’m scared to get to know her because what if I don’t like her? If I never know, I’ll never have to formulate an opinion. 

My mom found out about her from someone else, and I regret she didn’t hear it from me. Too late for that, though.

My mom has absolutely no concept of moderation. Or she simply believes I’m incapable of it. And she also doesn’t believe in rational arguing. She told me I can’t drink tea in the morning because “that’s just how it is.” Somehow that turned into “you never study, you’re always on your laptop or out with your friends wasting gas.” Right. Okay. Because I totally didn’t just study my fucking ass off for the majority of the past 2 weeks. Silly me.

I wonder if this guy keeps flirting with me because he thinks I’m anything like the friend we met through. Because he’s gravely mistaken and someone should warn him. 

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When people call the elderly cute. Especially when there’s a senior citizen in your class. I feel like unless you’re directly referring to one’s appearance, the word “cute” is super condescending. Last week my stats professor was talking about the “cute” old woman in her psych class, and the girl sitting behind me jumped on the “cute old people” train. Eye rolling for days.