Ponderings...

There have been some very important things on my mind lately and I'm wondering if my readers (the faithful 2-hehe) might have some answers. Here goes...
1)Why is it so easy to shave the skin right off your knees but completely impossible to get those blasted hairs? I mean, when the skin is gone, what do the hairs have to hang onto???
2)Why is it that the people with the longest legs walk the slowest? I cannot tell you how many times a day i get stuck behind a GIANT (5'5 and above) who is barely moving! I try to scurry around them, but more often than not i end up getting pinned between the giant and a wall or having to relinquish my position to oncoming traffic. Are longer legs just that much heavier and therefore unable to move at an acceptable pace???
3)I have been watching a lot of shows on Body Dysmorphic Disorder (what, that's not how you spend your friday nights?) and it is an incredibly sad disease that causes perfectly normal people to look in the mirror and see themselves as monsters. They see flaws that don't exist and oftentimes end up housebound for fear that the public with be disgusted with them. The thing is that everybody who is diagnosed with this disease is BEAUTIFUL! Which makes me wonder- if a less attractive person has BDD, is it just called ugly?
4)So I was reading my favorite book (The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne- READ IT! IT'S AMAZING!) and Shane was picking apart the verse where Jesus tells Peter “The gates of Hell will not prevail against you.” He explained that gates are for defensive purposes instead of offense (unless you're talking about some hi-tech electronic gate that smacks the hell outta people who come near- and i don't think that's what Jesus was referring to) and that he thinks Jesus meant something like the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church.
This is where my imagination took over... I pictured everybody lining up for roll call in Heaven on the first day and God is like "Well, I have a surprise for you guys. Everybody gets to go get 5 of their friends out of hell!" And we all line up at the "gates of hell" and God blows a whistle and we all just plow thru the gates and race to pull our friends out.
I don't think this picture is exactly biblically based, but it sure is fun to think about :)

this song is ALWAYS stuck in my head!

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Prone to Excess?

When I was a kid I loved Barbie. I loved Barbie so much, in fact, that when my mom decided to count my Barbies when I was four years old, I had over 200 of them. You read that right- 200. Do you know anyone else who can claim that? Ya, me neither...
Once on a trip to the beach, I decided I needed a hermit crab as a pet, so I got one. Then I got another one, and another one, and another 2 and then a big aquarium and some extra shells and some toys and then a few more pets. At the peak of my hermit crab addiction I think I had 11.
11 hermit crabs are smelly...
When I turned 16 I decided to collect Cabbage Patch Kids (if you dont know this, we prolly arent close enough for you to be reading my blog-hehe). By the time I left for college (when I was 18), my collection had grown to 1000 dolls. I KNOW you dont know anybody else who can claim that...
There were also times of baseball cards, stamps, rocks (collection of champions), and every type of doll you can imagine (well maybe not EVERY type, but you get the idea).
I wrote all this to say that even as a child, I was clearly prone to excess. But as I get older and more mature (stop laughing), I'm beginning to wonder if it was actually an obsession with having lots of things or if it was something else...
I was not a great student. Actually it would be more appropriate to say that i COULD have been a great student and sometimes was. But from as early as 5th grade, I was either a top student in the class or getting removed from class and sent to the principals office with a pink sheet. There was no in between with me- if I liked the class (and at that point it was probably more related to liking the teacher) I would excel, if not I could cause some drama.
The trend continued and probably worsened in high school and by college, I either went to class or I didn't- mostly I didn't. I don't mean that I occasionally skipped my classes, I mean that on multiple occasions I showed up for the first day of class and then didn't return until the final exam- I even skipped my final exams twice.
In the midst of not going to class, I started getting pierced. Most people might pierce their ears and maybe an occasional nose, but i got 14 piercings in 3 years or so. Then came the tattoos. I would argue that I have handled getting inked with plenty of self-control, but I know that my mother feels differently. And to be honest, the self-control comes mostly from a lack of money and not from actually trying not to cover my body in art :)
So this is where I am now. I am looking back at a childhood that seems very all or none and realizing that this tendency has bled onto my relationships. There are only two options with me- we can be very close friends or we can be acquaintances. I will care about you so much that if you are struggling I make myself physically sick with worry or I will barely notice your existence- there is no in between.
And apparently this is a problem. I am slowly coming to accept the fact that some people actually WANT to just be friends. They aren't looking for a BFF and aren't interested in adding another acquaintance- just a friend- and i have NO IDEA how to play that game!
Nor do I know how to only have one doll, one pet, or one pistachio...

Things I Loved Today

~ eating a Tony's cheese pizza with fake sausage- I ate the WHOLE thing yo!
~ snuggling under my covers with nothing to do and nowhere to go and watching it storm
~ seeing the Diamond Heels freak out on Chad Flack when he hit a 2 run homer to take the lead in the 8th- i teared up a bit
~ having a stranger pay my way into the skating rink and telling me "maybe you can pay back the favor to somebody else sometime"
~ skating for hours with eric and catching him watching me and smiling
~ a phone call with an old friend
~ scrapbooking!
~ drinking pineapple juice right out of the bottle
~ having patrick sleeping by my head as i type this
~ watching the Diamond Heels win the game as i type this :)
Happy Saturday!

What 26 Looks Like...

i have the best coworkers ever :)

Home Alone

Just 3 short (sarcasm) weeks after my life suddenly turned on its head, things seem to be straightening out- slowly...
I finally turned in our old apartment keys on Wednesday before work (which made exactly 8 days straight spent packing or moving-ugh) and closed that chapter of life, so that was helpful. Oh ya- kudos to my AMAZING moving crew who set a new world record in moving speed! Huge thanks to Tyson, Keith, Jessica, Amy, Khou, Gretchen, and Rebecca. And thanks to Emily, Caraina, and Jen who helped me get boxes and to Heather P who hemmed my professional pants at the last minute so I didn't look like a bum going to my grad school interview- I got in and, if nothing goes horribly wrong, will start taking classes in the MAT in Special Ed program at NCCU this fall- woohoo!
Now you're caught up to this weekend. Thinking back to how stressed out and tired I was at the end of this week, I suppose the fact that all my people are out of town for the weekend is a good thing, but when I first realized that Brandie and Lauren would be gone for the weekend I was pretty upset. Brandie and I have our birthdays two days apart and have celebrated together for the past 5 years, but our birthdays are this week and I will be outta town for Mother's Day next weekend, so I'm kinda bummed...
Nevertheless, the show must go on!
So I did all my necessary shopping when I got off work yesterday (buying pizza and chips to entertain me on my lonely weekend) and came home determined to lay around and watch tv until I passed out (I have big goals).
Here is my dilemma. My typical tv shows of choice are reality tv and weekends are especially full of crime tv shows- my secret love. I try to be careful about when and how many of these shows I watch because I have a RIDICULOUS imagination and often let inappropriate things (murder scenes mostly) slip into my dreams- this is an even bigger consideration for me since I'm staying alone in my new townhouse and the dogs are I are still quite unfamiliar with all the sounds of the place- they bark psychotically every 5 minutes or so. So I tell myself no crime tv tonight and go downstairs to prepare my pizza. When I came back upstairs, my tv was on one of the crime stations (because they are set as my favorites) and they were profiling the case of this blonde chic and seemed to be setting it up as if her boyfriend murdered her, so I figured it was safe to watch. After all, it was still light outside and domestic violence shows tend to upset me less because I have no "domestic" to be violent :)
So I'm watching the show and I'm slowly realizing that her boyfriend didn't do it (now fully aware that I should change the channel, but determined to find out whodunnit) and he is reliving the night he realize something was wrong. He called her cell phone and left messages all day and she never called back, so he went to her apartment and her car was there but she didn't answer his knocks. Panicking, he remembered there was a sliding glass door in the back, but knew he wouldn't be able to get in because she kept a stick in it as a lock. You know where this is going, but what you might not know is that in my scary new townhouse there is a sliding glass door in the back (facing the woods) and I have been unable to locate one of those lock sticks and that is a main source of stress in my life these days. As soon as the creepy announcer voice said "Jeremy approached the sliding glass door to find the stick was gone and the body was..."- I was out!
I decided it would be safer to watch a movie, so I popped in "Evening". I just purchased this movie a few weeks ago because I saw it in the theater and there was a quote in the movie that I have desperately tried to remember since I first saw it, so I decided to distract myself by finding the quote.
[Big sidenote: The movie is about a woman who is old and dying (yup, this is what I watch to cheer myself up) and her old best friend comes to visit after many years of not speaking and as they are lying in bed together reminiscing, the old lady says,
"Have you been happy?"
Her friend answers, "At times. And at times I have been very unhappy. But I never expected as much as you did."
The old lady replied, "I expected so much..."
And then her friend said, "Oh yes you did! And you got so much..."
I love that quote (my blogger name is "expecteverything" after this movie) because I have always expected so much- from myself and other people- and, for the most part, I feel like I get more because of those expectations. Oh well, that is for another blog :) ]
So I'm watching the movie and crying my eyes out (because that is what I do when I watch movies alone- tear duct therapy) and I sit up in bed to check my email or something and I almost wet the bed (which I haven't done in at least 6 months) when I see this white glowing face in the tree outside! But before I had time to think that my plastic sheet isn't on the bed yet, I realized that the glowing image was my pasty white face illuminated by the computer screen reflecting in the window. Though it was only a 5 second scare, I can not stress enough how incredibly scary it was!
That's when I knew it was bedtime...
Today has consisted of hanging out with all the most amazing kids in the world- I took Eric to softball practice (and I'm proud to announce that I did NOT lock him in the car), bought a dryer (which has nothing to do with kids, but I'm quite proud of it), did flips and hung out at the park with Jennifer and her kids (gotta say- they are AWESOME kids! I wish we lived closer so I could have more precious kiddie time), and took a walk with Heather, Hudson (my favorite baby ever), and the pups. I came home hoping to veg out in front of the tv again (perhaps with less drama) and found myself engrossed in a show about gangs (confession- the gang members were showing their signs and before I could stop myself I was practicing throwing up gang signs- in front of my open window- in Durham- did I mention I don't have a sliding door stick???) and then I took a nap.
I think it's just about bedtime for me. But I don't need to watch crime tv to give myself nightmares because I was just informed that I'm taking Billy SWIMMING tomorrow! I won't get into all the reasons why this is a VERY BAD idea, but I have a feeling that my next blog will be entitled, "When white fat met the sun".
I hope you are all having an amazing weekend and thanks to everyone who stuck with me during the three weeks when my only forms of communication were bitching and whining- I wouldn't do it for you, but I'm glad you did it for me! ;-)

So it is 7:30pm on a random Monday evening and I am driving my two dogs (one is on so many drugs he is barely able to stand and the other is wearing a plastic shield to keep her from chewing on her bloody stump of a tail) down I-40. It is pouring rain and I am driving to North Raleigh to hand deliver some paperwork that I forgot to mail in (again). My gas light comes on (again) and I notice that there are two brand new wrecks on the other side of the road and I grumble to the dogs about sitting in traffic and the damn rain (keeping in mind that we are still in a severe drought) and how I am an idiot for not mailing this stuff in last week. In my head I am planning my next blog- a rant about my hellish week (I locked my autistic boy in a hot car and AAA had to come break him out- and that was one of the BETTER parts of my week!) and wondering if the bad news will ever stop coming...

Literally it came out of NOWHERE- one of the biggest and brightest rainbows I have seen in a long time just popped up in front of my car- almost as if it wanted me to follow it. I took the time to enjoy it for just a second before grabbing my cell phone to snap a pic- my mom will love it! So I took a few pics (before realizing that a state trooper was cruising in front of me- this is NOT the week to push my luck with the law) and veered off on an exit to buy some golden gas. I was disappointed that the gas station was on the wrong side of the road (how DARE they build a gas station on the non-rainbow side of the road!), but as I pumped the two gallons of gas I could afford, I noticed that the people around me were all looking to the sky. Then I noticed what I had been missing all along- the rain had stopped and I was parked directly in front of the OTHER side of the rainbow! It almost seemed that it was springing up from the gas station! Just as I grabbed my phone, an old biker dude kinda guy walked up beside me with his camera phone. "I'm bout to do the same thing." he said with a smile.

And I couldn't help it- I was smiling. I am angry and frustrated and really ticked off about pretty much everybody and everything right now, but I just stood in a gas station parking lot staring at the sky with a bunch of strangers and I smiled.

Rainbows mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people and I know that it's nothing more than science to some (reflection and light and stuff), but to me it is one of the most beautiful natural occurrences imaginable. Even more than that, it's a promise. Believe what you want, but the rainbow reminds me that there's only one promise that won't be broken. And today that was the best reason I could think of to smile.