Neuroticism and other new traits

So I am erupted back from the dead by a lovely head cold that has snapped me back into one of the few remaining artifacts of my former life: my blog. Since my last post, I have been accepted to graduate school, met a long -lost sister, planned a wedding, got married, quit my job, moved, and became a full time student. Life is so different from what is was just four months ago, I fear the fall out or absolute meltdown that may lie ahead. No one switches up this much crap and gets off scott free.

I have embarked on becoming a physician assistant because apparently I think I am smart. I really just think I'm a damn good actress that fooled a lot of people. I sit in my class everyday soaking up thousands of little bits of information concerning the human body in hopes that one day I might even be able to pronounce it, let a lone recognize it and actually help someone. There is so much data cramming into my neurons, the little person in my head that sits back off to the side and is amazed at it all. Now this side person, I'm convinced, is a product of my sheer loneliness. She needs a name, for she's somewhat stylish and pretty funny. Come to think of it, she reminds me of my former self. But I digress. Many of my fellow students have felt the same sentiment. One girl wanted a cat so she'd have someone around. Another one admitted to talking to pictures of her friends. So really, having this imaginary person to talk to in my head doesn't seem so crazy.

I think she's stylish because she wears cute outfits, much unlike myself these days. I was so used to buying fun, professional attire. Now that I am just wear jeans and tee shirts, I feel like everyday is the first day of my period. Or that maybe I was kidnapped as a child and raised by bums. Either way, I feel pretty not pretty. This person in my mind is also pretty amusing. She tells good jokes. Everything in class is so serious, so detrimental, so pertinent. It was beyond old after the first week. I'm tired of everything being a flipping emergency, like the western hemisphere is going to burn down if someone gets a B because they didn't know that diarrhea was a side effect of some obscure tropical disease.

At home, I am a wife. I think. This new abode I live in was his prior to the wedding and some days I feel as if I live at a hotel only without the maid service. I'm not very good at cooking or cleaning, but I try in between paragraphs of human behavior and power naps on the kitchen table. The laundry room looks like downtown Beirut. I have so many clothes missing, I swear the lawn guy comes in the house and shops in my closet for his wife. Its the only explanation I can come up with for the missing athletic shorts, white dress trousers and black flats. Whoever has them looks really good from the waist down. I'm also in charge of grocery shopping. Currently we have chocolate soy milk, an over-ripe avocado, some spaghetti sauce and pretzel sticks. Apparently grocery shopping requires an unoccupied brain. We eat out a lot.

So needless to say, life has gone from one kind of crazy to another. Instead of a year planning for massive change, its a new year of coping with its aftermath. It's trying to keep up while finding moments to relax/silence my brain. Sleep is a hot commodity. Its figuring out my new role as a wife, sister, in-law, and roommate while creating another as a student and medical practitioner. It's exercising all morning just to eat it all back on trying to stay awake while reading physiology. So really, there's no figment, there's just the apparition of my former life I'm clinging to for some means of stability. And I feel its only fair I get to post up a little bit of neuroticism every now and again.

Magic Words

Or not so magical. There are words that just drive me crazy, gross me out or just plain don't make sense. Here are a few of the toppers.



1. Moist

This is just a gross word. It's an oddly formed word coming out of your mouth to begin with. But at the end of the day, it conjures up some crass-nasty mental pictures. Moist cupcakes. Moist towels. Moist underwear. Let's just be honest. Moist underwear? It's wet. Whether you peed your pants, are unusually sweaty or just glimpsed George Clooney in the flesh, it's not moist. You're just trying to be delicate. Moist cupcakes and moist towels are wrong for the same reasons. We all know that anything "moist" eventually generates nothing but fungus regardless of how good it tastes and how much icing you put on it. Give me a damp cupcake any day.



2. Tender

This goes right along with moist. "Oh she has such a tender heart" or "Oh this steak is so tender!" If you're labeled as "tender hearted," you could be foreseen as a sensitive person, maybe overly emotional- borderline a wuss. Compassionate- now that's a word that shows your humanity while retaining your dignity very much unlike "tender" that will lead people to think you pull over and cry for dead squirrels or secretly re-enact reruns of "Touched By an Angel" in your bathroom. Tender steak? Bull crap. Anyone who uses that word to describe meat is just trying to soothe their nagging conscience for satisfactorily devouring the a tiny Japanese calf that was fed nothing but beer and never allowed to stand. Definition of moist, tender steak: you're a fungusy prick.



3. Hubby

Oh Lord how I hate this word and any conjugate of it. "The hubs and I are going to dinner to night." "My hubby won't ever fix the door knob." Of course he won't! In one word, you've just verbally castrated him and tuned him into a complete pussy. Just like I would be aggravated by being referred to as "The Wif," I'm sure there is not a man in this world who wouldn't be grateful for this term to be lost to the English language. Number one, its just disrespectful. But secondly, he sounds like possession that has replaced your slobber-covered, threadbare, "Woobie" insecurity blanket you clung to when you were a child as life support from the real world. Again, not great. The occasional usage of it could be overlooked but one girl referred to her fiance as "The future hubby" so often on Facebook, I actually asked her if she knew the name of the man she was marrying and promptly deleted her from my friends. It just seems weird to me that after dating hundreds of douche bags, that one would completely disrespect and emasculate the one person they're supposed to revere above all others by consistently calling them "My Hubby."



4. Baby Bump
I don't hate this word, it just doesn't make any sense to me. After gaining minimal weight, my friends and I will spare no mercy and cut ourselves down- "My gut is getting huge," "Well that bike tire inflated over night,"or "It looks like my belly is housing a banana factory." But once someone is pregnant, it becomes a "bump." Realistically speaking, there is no bump in this situation. Being that I have never been pregnant and have no prior experience, I may not have any room to talk. But I have been led to believe that being pregnant causes your stomach to be larger than it has ever been. So why is it called a "bump" when three months ago, you derogitorily referred to your own belly button as a bomb crater? This especially goes for celebrities. Kourtney Kardashian gains a few pounds and she's slathered on the tabloids as a morbidly obese "Jabba-the-Hut," eating everything within a five foot radius of her mouth. But pregnant and 26 pounds later- baby bump photo shoot on page five. I know its called a "bump" because there is a tiny little cute baby inside instead of just a large fat mass of cheese and girl scout cookies. But the liberal frickin media, the people who firmly state that babies are nothing more than a ball of flubber until they're born, coined this oxymoronic term. As previously stated, I don't hate the word In fact, it gives me hope that after a night of heavy Mexican food binging I can begin referring to my need to crap as my "bam-beano bump." It just seems very double standard-ish for ourselves.

* Addendum
After posting this, I realized how this explanation could come off as horrible and hurtful to those I love around me. The more I thought about it, the more I felt a deeper explanation was needed. This term really bothers me because it is such a huge indicator of our vanity as a society and how we let the media, yet again, influence our self awareness. We're already told that if you eat carbs and weigh anything more than a typical fifteen year old, that you are ugly, lazy and fat. Any sign of getting larger is a mortal sin. It doesn't matter if it's self or age induced, or part of your genetic make-up, there is just simply no excuse to carry excess weight. And while it seems that pregnancy should be an exception, it too, is not exempt from this rule. It's like we just HAD to come up with a term to make absolutely sure that no one thinks we're fat and that we'd be a size two, 36 C running down the beach in a yellow two piece if it weren't for this "bump." We simply just HAD to downplay any sort of size increase. Entertainment Tonight says,"While Natalie Portman's baby bump is getting bigger, she's still working hard to make sure her body is red carpet ready." Really? Is that what's most important? The bump isn't getting bigger, the baby is getting bigger. Why? It's healthy and normal and a baby. It's not an inanimate object, some pillow stuffed under a shirt. It's a human being that is depending on its mother to get bigger to properly sustain it, protect it and enable it to flourish. We should be encouraging this through healthy eating, appropriate exercise and education of healthy weight gain. Not this sick mentality of exercise binging, dieting and body image obsessiveness just to avoid possibly being labeled overweight. It's not a bump. It's not a body image. It's a belly, and a large, beautiful one at that, containing a son, daughter, nephew, God child, or sibling, and most importantly, a promising future.

5. Rockabilly

Absolutely the most God-forsaken word in this world. Oh how I hate it. The whole world and lifestyle around it is just atrocious. Its utterly mind boggling that this is a style people actually choose to sport. It's defined as: a vigorous form of country or hillbilly music (referred to as hillbilly boogie) fused with rock or electric blues. The fact that the term "hillbilly" is even in the definition is enough for me. I don't care if Elvis is involved or not. The style gets to me too. Fifties fashion barfed up with a side of Bumpit mullets and toothless smiles of red lipstick. Heinous. But at the end of the day, it's the word that just gets me. Its awful. Its just plain awful.

I Love....

Since the world needs a little more positivity (in my opinion) and I'm on this Sesame Street-ish alphabet kick, I figured for "L" I'd list something oddball that I love for every letter of the alphabet. But the deal-e-o is, I want to hear yours. :)

Asiago cheese bagels with reduced fat cream cheese. The "reduced fat" part does some reverse psychology helping me forget I'm eating close to half a day's calories in one bagel.

Babies. I love to hand them back at the end of the day.

Chapstick. I'm just glad I don't have to use it intravenously or I'd have track marks like a Central Park crack whore.

Donkeys. And small horses. Donkey's are just so sweet and obviously make the best animal noise possible (hyenas are a close second). My great uncle had one named Chico that stood in the same spot by the fence, all day every day. There is a mini horse farm near my house. I cannot lie. I have pulled over to pet the mini horses.

Erasers. They just feel cool because of the volcanic rock in them. Or was that just an urban legend?

Fogies. I love old people. I love their stories. I'm envious that they got to live in times where personal propriety existed. I love the fact that I can look at them as they type on their 22" laptop fully aware that they've seen the invention of toilet paper.

Goonies. I finally bought the DVD of it this year and regardless of how many times I watch it, I still want to ride down those tunnel water slides and I would have totally stuck some jewels in my underwear. The Fratelli's wouldn't have checked there.

H&M- Apparently Oklahoma isn't one of the "cool" states so the nearest one is roughly a continent away. But I can't get enough of being able to buy trendy clothes at a reasonable price. It's like Forever 21 minus the need for Ritalin to shop there.

In The Raw. It's a local sushi joint in Tulsa. I hate sushi. But they have an expensive steak there that I'd give my right ovary for and since I don't like anything else on the menu, it seems perfectly reasonable to get the steak.

Jack Sparrow, Captain that is. First off, anyone denying that while stranded on a tropical beach is straight loony. Secondly, burning off all the rum while stranded on a remote tropical island with Jack Sparrow (ok. Really just Johnny Depp) is just a tragedy. And thirdly, I would have given my next year's salary for him to pose just one time like Captain Morgan right in the middle of that Disney flick.

K9's- Doggies that is. Doggies Doggies and more Doggies. My finance once asked me what the chances were that one day I'd come home with 48 dogs. I shrugged, "Pretty good."

Lingerie. It's always a good laugh picturing myself in it.

May. Ah the month the children go home. The month I get married. The month I can celebrate an entirely different country's Independence day with salsa and beer.

Nougat. I have no idea what nougat is made of or what it's technical state of matter is. All I know if that it tastes good and my thighs love it.

Opening Mail. It's like Christmas! (so long as it isn't a cut-off notice)

Potatoes. Au Gratin. Baked, Caked, Diced, Evaporated, Frenched, Garnished, Homemade, Irish, Julienned, Kosher, Loaded, Mashed, Natural, O'Briened, Peeled, Curly Q'ed, Roasted, Sweet, Toasted, Uncooked, Vegan, Wild, X Crossed, Yellow or Zapped. I will eat a potato for breakfast. Love 'em.

Quart sized baggies. These are the perfect size. The sandwich size only fits sandwiches whereas the quart can hold leftovers, become an icepack, or store an extra pair of panties in your car, just in case. The gallon size is too big. Much too big.

Red lipstick. I always feel like a cheap hooker right when I put it on. But combined with the correct attitude, you can feel like a siren.

Sonic ice. Those of you reading this may not have a Sonic Drive-In in your sad little place of residence so in case you don't. here's a quick synopsis: Sonic is heaven and can kill you in five minutes. You can get burgers, coney's, fries, tots, fried cheese, milk shakes, ice cream and slushies. You can also get fountain drinks in something that resembles a small barrel. And it comes with this crushed ice that is so great for chewing. People actually just drive up and just buy the ice.

Tumbling. At this age, it looks and feels more like I'm being thrown around by F5 tornado winds, but there's no feeling to match yourself flipping end over end on purpose.

Underpants. Panties, whatever. I have about five thousand pairs. There are particular pairs for underneath dress pants and yoga pants. Certain ones for sleeping. Some are for summer only and others are considered "curse panties" for when mother nature tries to destroy Victoria's Secret. Most of them are nude string bikinis but a few are crazy colors. I have one boy cut pair with a picture of my dog on it.

Vasectomy reversal billboards. Really?? They make me laugh much like the Cialis and Viagra commercials. Call me immature for laughing but really???? I understands a men's health magazine or pamphlets in locker rooms, but billboards? Public television?? Cut to story time-

Once, on Thanksgiving day, I was sitting in the living room with my 90 year old grandfather and my dad. (That is correct, I was not helping my mother cook. Yes I know. I am going to hell. Just hold tight- I get my just dues....) A Viagra commercial comes on and they're at the part where they list all the side effects, one being, "If you have an erection lasting more than four hours, seek medical attention." As if being in the room with two men while a wiener plumper commercial is on isn't awkward enough, my ornery father looks at my grandpa and laughs, "Can you imagine a hard-on for four hours?" My mother shouts from the kitchen "That is NOT an appropriate conversation," while my grandfather just laughs. I promptly exit the room and take my rightful place in the kitchen. Cut back to prior paragraph.....

I totally get how a man would want something like that fixed (and his wife, partner, whatever) but I wonder how many men have looked at that billboard and actually said, "You know what, honey? I think I'd like to get a vasectomy reversal."

Wienermobile. Speaking of wieners. I always pictured myself getting married in Vegas and riding off down the strip in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. I may not have Vegas but I wonder about the latter......

X Chromosome. I love being a girl. I get to look beautiful even if no one else thinks so, I get the right to be crabby once a month even if I don't have a period and I won't ever be bald or colorblind, and will always be able to clot my blood. To all you Y affiliated people out there- Sorry suckas!

Yahoo Babelfish. I have the ability to write home to your momma, you Urdu speaking punk!

Zygotes- we were all one once. All the same color, androgynous and silently floating through our mom's fallopian tube. Ahhh..... I remember those minutes. The last real time I felt rested. But zygote- such a great word.