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.