Category Archives: about me

pretty sure I just secured my spot on the Guaranteed To Be Abducted list

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Prompt for Nov 6th: What was your biggest fear as a child? Do you still have it today? If it went away, when did your feelings changes?

We had this set of Time-Life books called “Mysteries of the Unknown” when I was a kid.

I think they were actually something that I ordered off an infomercial at one point and then my parents were stuck paying for it.  I did that…uhh…more than once when I was a kid.  *shifty look*
mysteries

Anyway.  These books were actually really interesting, at least to seven or eight year old me.  There was one about Mystic Places, like the Bermuda Triangle and Stongehenge.  There was one about psychic powers, ESP, astral projection and the like – that one was my favorite.  There was one about mythological monsters, one about mind over matter, etc.  There were a whole bunch of them (although I just looked the set up and there were 33 total but we definitely only had like six or eight so apparently my parents wised up and got the subscription cancelled sooner rather than later.  Bummer.  I had no idea I was missing out so much!), including one about aliens and UFOs, which fucking PETRIFIED me…

…but of course I read it…

…and was promptly reduced to a total mess who couldn’t sleep without the light on for months (because aliens can only get you when it’s dark, duh…).  It got to the point where I actually had to hide that book on myself because even seeing it on the bookshelf when I was going for one of the other ones would freak me out.  If the book was out of sight, I could stop thinking aliens were coming to get me and maaaaaybe sleep at night.

At least, until the afternoon my parents put Close Encounters of the Third Kind on the T.V. and then both fell asleep.  I was probably 9 or 10 at the time.  I was so engrossed in the story (because really, it IS a good movie) that I couldn’t really make myself turn it off once I realized they were asleep even though it was scaring me.  That was good for another few months of needing to sleep with a light on right there.

So, as you can see, I already had an excellent base of alien phobia built up over the course of several years by the time the movie Fire In The Sky came out and my mom talked me into watching it with her.  And then…you guessed it…fell asleep.

If you’ve seen Fire In The Sky, you have a pretty good idea of why this was An Issue for me.  If you haven’t, well, take my word for it, it’s FUCKING DISTURBING.  To make matters worse, they made a huge deal about it being based on a true story.  I was probably 14 when I watched it and I was pretty into horror movies at the time – stuff like Poltergeist, The Omen, Friday the 13th – if it was creepy and bloody, my friend Christina and I were ALL ABOUT it.  So it’s not like I was just an all-around wimp about creepy stuff – it really was just alien stuff that truly bothered me.  Fire In The Sky, in particular, is a movie that I still can’t even think about without getting the willies even 20+ years later.  Even looking it up on Wikipedia so I could link you to it just made my brain weasels go into overdrive for a few minutes.  Ugh!

I’m not really sure quite when I started getting over the alien phobia.  It was still pretty strong circa 2002 when Signs came out because I flat-out refused to go see it with a couple different groups of friends even though they said it was really good and assured me that there was very little actual alien content.  Some time after that it started to slowly ease up, though.  I still get kind of creeped out at the idea of human-like aliens, particularly the ones with the big heads and almond-shaped black eyes, but I don’t have a panic attack every time I see a weird light in the sky like I used to and I don’t (generally) have to sleep with the light on anymore.

The thing is, I believe.  I believe even more today than I did as a kid that there has to be SOME kind of other intelligent life zooming around the Universe.  It feels incredibly arrogant to think otherwise.  And not only to I believe, but I find the idea truly fascinating.

So long as no one tries to beam me up.
You hear that, aliens?  I AM NOT VOLUNTEERING!

an important lesson

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Prompt for Thursday Nov 5th: What is the most important lesson you learned as a child, and who taught it to you?

The most important lesson I learned as a child was to be independent.  I had no siblings growing up and my parents worked a LOT, so independence was something I had to learn pretty early on.  I don’t want to make it sound like I was abandoned or anything because that wasn’t the case, but I was pretty mature as a child, (which came to a screeching halt at about age 15, as you have probably noticed), so my parents trusted me to stay out of trouble when I was alone or when my mom was asleep.  Mom worked nights so she was usually just getting home and going to bed when I was leaving to catch the bus in the morning and would still be asleep for an hour or so after I got home in the afternoon, and my dad was often gone at work from 6 or 7am until 5 or after in the evening.

Independence wasn’t just about being able to feed myself and not burn the house down, though.  My mom indirectly taught me about financial independence by balancing her checkbook at the kitchen table every week.  I understand now that she was probably doing it because money was really tight and she was trying to find a few extra bucks here or there for things we needed, but as a child what I saw was mom sitting there managing HER money, paying HER bills, taking care of HER business.  That had a pretty profound effect on me.  I learned to balance a checkbook when I was 16 and it’s still a habit that, 20 years later, I don’t feel right if I’m not doing at least every other week.

Technically, I got my first job at 13 years old, but I worked for my dad on weekends and time off school from about the time I could push a broom and pick up sheetrock scraps.  My dad taught me to be independent by showing me how to do something and then leaving me alone to do it…and giving me hell if I did it half-assed.  He wasn’t afraid to let me fail and learn from the failure.  I was never Daddy’s Little Princess.  I was Daddy’s Helper.  I was the holder of wrenches, the finder of sockets, the cleaner of paint brushes, the mixer of joint compound, the stacker of wood.  It taught me that there’s no such thing as “men’s work” and “women’s work” – there is only work that needs to be done and if your hands are the closest, they’ll do just fine no matter your gender.

When I got older, my parents taught me independence by not giving me money or things that I wanted and instead making me get (and keep!) jobs.  Some of my friends had parents who paid them an allowance for doing chores around the house, or just bought them things that they wanted when they asked.  I had chores I was expected to do because it was helping out, and if I wanted money I had to get a job.  This taught me not to look to rely on other people for things I wanted but rather to go out and earn them myself.

Now that I’m in my mid 30’s (I’m holding onto the “mid” until I’m 38 and a half and you can’t make me do otherwise!), the independence that my parents instilled in me helps me not be afraid to think for myself and do my own thing.  I have some pretty eclectic beliefs and interests and the older I get, the less I care what anybody thinks about them.  I don’t necessarily PREFER to be alone, but I’m not AFRAID to be alone, so I’m not obligated to try and please others just for the sake of keeping them around.  The older I get, the more I realize just how valuable that trait really is, at the very least in terms of self-preservation.

autonomy

late as usual

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A bunch of people I know are doing NaNoWriMo this month, and someone just asked me if I was going to participate as well.

The answer to that question is “HAHAHA, NO”.

I heartily salute all the people trying to write novels this month (or any month!), but I’m pretty sure I couldn’t organize enough words to write a novel if my life depended on it.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  I like being alive, so if it was to come down to WRITE OR DIE, I’m sure I could come up with…something.  It would probably involve wiener dogs and unicorns and a lot of swear words and terrible grammar, though.  If it was a matter of having to write a GOOD novel or die, I’d definitely be toast.

There is, however, this thing called NaBloPoMo, which involves posting on your blog every day for a month.  I think I could probably handle that.  By rights, I should have started November 1st, but I’m basically never on time for anything so it seems fairly appropriate to start the challenge five days late.  The website says their cut-off date for being included on the November blogroll is the 5th, so maybe I’m not that tardy after all.

I think I’ll try using the provided weekday writing prompts, unless I run into one I don’t like, at which point I’ll be like:

do-what-i-want

So, with that in mind, I’m going to do the first few prompts all in one go as penance for being a late-coming slacker.  Here goes!

Monday 11/2: What was the one toy that a friend had that you wished you had when you were little?

When I was a kid, Koosh Balls were a huge deal.  I remember having a couple of normal-sized ones, but one of my friends had a really BIG one that was rainbow-colored and I was just…obsessed.  I wanted one SO badly.  Every time we went to the local shopping center I would trawl KB Toys, (which dates the fuck out of me right there, because didn’t KB Toys go out of business in like 2000 or 2001?), searching high and low for the giant rainbow Koosh of my dreams.  Sadly, I never found it.

Tuesday 11/3: What did you think was the coolest job in the world when you were younger? Do you still feel that way now?

I was SUPER into animals as a kid, (some things never change), and I thought being a zoologist was pretty much the most amazing job in the universe.  Who WOULDN’T want to hang out with critters all day every day AND get paid for it, you know?  I harbored the desire to become a zoologist right up until 9th grade when we started having to talk with the guidance counselor about what we thought we might want to do after high school.

As an aside, my high school had one of the LEAST helpful guidance counselors EVER.  He would basically look at your test scores and decide whether or not you were “too smart” to go into the vo-tech program.  In 10th grade I walked into his office and said, “I’d really like to be a cook. I’d like to go to the vo-tech program and then culinary arts school”.  His reply was that I was “too smart” for vo-tech and that someone like me really should go to a “REAL” college, not culinary school.  So that paints a little picture for you of the ass-hattery we dealt with.

Anyway, so in 9th grade the shitty guidance counselor did this thing where he’d ask you the top three jobs you thought you might be interested in, then he’d look them up in this gigantic book that would tell what kind of degree you needed for X, Y or Z job, average salaries for those jobs, growth expectancy for the next 10 years, etc.  I had him look up zoologist right off the bat and he said basically I’d either have to become a zoo-keeper (which is NOT up my alley – zoos make me sad), or go into academia (in other words, a million years of school and become a professor), and that neither job made any money so I probably shouldn’t pursue them.  Again – total ass-hat who had no idea what he was talking about.  But, at 14 years old in Bumfuck, New Hampshire, I didn’t know any better so I bought his line of bullshit and gave up on the zoology thing.

I still think zoologists have really cool jobs.  I don’t know that I’m cut out to like, hike through the jungles of Borneo trying to study orangutans, but there are plenty of animals that don’t live in jungles that I think it would be amazing to observe in the wild and learn about.  “Why don’t you quit your accounting gig and go to school to be a zoologist”, I hear you asking.  I appreciate your boundless optimism, but there are these things called paychecks, and I can’t really get by without mine unfortunately.  You can scoff that it’s a lame excuse all you want, but I’m nothing if not a realist.

Wednesday 11/4: When you were a kid, did you want to have the same job or a different job than your parents when you grew up?

My dad was a sheetrocker, carpenter and painter, and my mom was a telephone operator – first at AT&T for many years, then at a gigantic medical center a couple towns down from where we live.

I never really had much interest in my mom’s job except for the times when she’d say she got to talk to someone from another country – that always fascinated me.  Other than that though, her job (as I understood it, anyway) consisted mostly of sitting in a chair and being hooked up to a switchboard all day, punching buttons and answering questions.  It sounded pretty boring.  The irony of the fact that I now do a super boring job that mostly involves punching buttons and answering questions all day is not lost on me, of course.

My dad’s job was something that I actually got plenty of experience in as a kid because I’d often go to work with him on weekends or during time off from school.  He usually had me filling screw holes with compound and a trowel, or painting trim if he was at a painting job.  Neither of these were things I particularly enjoyed because they both take practice and I’ve always hated having to practice things to get better at them.

As an adult who has been chained to a desk pushing other peoples’ papers for the better part of 20 years now, I appreciate my dad’s job a lot more.  He basically gets to create all day, every day.  I mean, it’s not like he’s painting murals on peoples’ walls or anything, but he’s physically MAKING – building walls, entire rooms, entire HOUSES.  He can turn around at the end of his day and see that he’s further along than he was yesterday.  In my line of work, there’s very little of that.  The most tangible result I get from my job is shifting a pile of paper from one side of my desk to the other.  I didn’t want to do a job like my dad’s when I was a kid, but I envy a lot about his job now.

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That’s all the time I have for right now. I’ll do today’s actual prompt a little later on.

There is no “sam” in Samhain.

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Halloween is my favorite.  I know, it’s basically everyone’s favorite, but still.  I love seeing the clever, creative and often ridiculously artistic things that people come up with for costumes.  Also, I think it’s nice that there’s at least one guaranteed day a year where everyone can let their freak flag fly if they want to without being judged.  Want to roll up to work made up like a mermaid with a shark eating your head and not have anyone even raise an eyebrow?  Halloween’s your day!

 

Halloween also marks something more important in my personal calendar, which is the festival of Samhain.  I won’t bore you with a history lesson on how most Christian holidays and a great many of their most sacred rituals were copied directly from or closely based on those of the pagan peoples that they then went on to subjugate, but there’s plenty of information available if it’s something you’re interested in reading up on.

Anyway.

Samhain was thought to be, at its earliest root, a festival to mark the bringing in of the cattle for the winter by the herdsmen of ancient Celtic tribes.  During this time of year the herdsmen slaughtered animals to feed their tribes through the winter. They were getting the last of the plant-based food gathered as well, and getting ready for the long, cold season ahead. It was considered the beginning of winter, of the dark and unproductive (crop-wise) time of the year.

The transition period between summer and winter, the light season and the dark season, was also thought to be a time when the world of the living and the world of the dead drew near to each other.  This is, of course, the origin of the “spooky” themes of our modern Halloween, but in ancient times this drawing closer of the two worlds was far more serious business. There were spirits that needed to be appeased in order for herds, food stores and families to make it through the winter, and dead kin who were thought to come back to re-visit their families for honoring and celebrating.

I am drawn to Celtic and Germanic pagan traditions in general, partially because that’s where my ancestry lies.  My family came to what was then still “the colonies” from the British Isles, Germany and France, and were subsistence farmers for many, many generations on both sides of the Atlantic.  I’m not a farmer myself and probably never will be, but that generations-deep synchronization with the seasons is something I still strongly feel and relate to.  It probably also helps that I live in a very rural area where these seasonal cycles are to a certain degree inescapable whether one bases their livelihood on them or not. It’s a lot harder to lose touch with the change in seasons and what those changes mean for both man and beast when one lives in farm country.

Samhain, in particular, is also important to me spiritually because it affords me an opportunity to feel closer to lost loved ones.  I’m not generally big into the “woo”.  I don’t believe that I can light a candle and ask my dead grandfather to step through the veil for a nice chat, for example (although if you think YOU can do it, I’m willing to invite you over to try because I think that would be AWESOME).  But, I do believe that this time of year, the spirits of the dead are closer to our own world and may have a better chance of hearing us if we speak to them.  And really, who doesn’t speak to a dead loved one now and then anyway?  It’s not actually that weird, if you think about it.

Whether you spend it getting your goats in from the summer pasture, passing out candy to trick-or-treaters, keeping an ear open for the voice of a loved one long passed, carving jack-o-lanterns, or even sitting inside with all the lights out pretending you’re not home, I hope your Samhain is happy and safe!

And for fuck’s sake, stop pronouncing it “sam-hane”, “sam-in” or SAM-anything. It’s saw-win. Or sow-in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

if the world is going to end, I need to tell you some things

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Crazy people think the world is ending tomorrow.  They’ve never been right before, but I figure, why waste a perfectly good opportunity to tell secrets and air grievances, right?  RIGHT. So pour yourself an adult beverage and let’s begin. Try not to judge me too harshly, ok?

Let’s start out with some easy ones:

  • I love canned whipped cream.  The actual whipped cream part, not the nitrous oxide, I swear. A can of whipped cream lasts maaaaaybe 36 hours in my house. MAYBE. I will continually wander over to the fridge, up-end the can and spray sugary processed white joy into my mouth with utter abandon. There is no bad time for canned whipped cream. Which is exactly why I don’t buy it except on rare occasions.
  • I would eat pizza once a day, every day, and twice a day on weekends, if I could. Standards apply, of course. I’m not talking like $3.99 frozen pizzas. But decent gas-station pizza? Oh, it’s ON.
  • I talk to my dog constantly. That in and of itself isn’t so bad, but I also do the dog’s part of the conversation back to me in dog-voice. If my husband and I are both home, we take turns doing dog-voice. If the dog ever grows thumbs, we’re totally done for.

Now, some less easy ones:

  • I’m pretty sure most people that say they like me really just feel sorry for me. I don’t feel like I’m a particularly pitiable case or anything, but for some reason I just can’t ever quite believe that most of my friends would actually want to talk to me or hang out with me if given another alternative.
  • I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I’m almost 36, so this one is starting to become kind of a problem.
  • I am super duper afraid that I’m wasting my life.  I struggle with feeling like nothing I do is ever enough to live up to the fact that this is IT, you know? This is the only time I’m going to get. Am I using it well enough? It’s a scary question, at least for me.

And finally, here’s a video of my dog licking almond butter off a spoon as a bit of a palate cleanser for anyone who made it this far:

how bad CAN it go?

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I just did a Google image search for “how bad can it go” and among a whole bunch of pseudo-inspirational bullshit memes about adjusting a bad attitude, there was this completely random picture of butter. I really like butter and I really like completely random things, so I am linking to this picture with much delight.

When I finally decided to bite the bullet and start a new blog, I had a lot of trouble coming up with a name.  I wanted something clever and snazzy, something that was memorable and rolled off the tongue.  I’m generally neither clever nor snazzy, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t pretend to be on the Internet, right?!  The names I came up with were weak at best, though.  Finally, I put the question to a group of my favorite knitter friends on Ravelry (shout out to my LSG ALA hoars), and the suggestion of “Eat Your Words” came up.  Since eating my words in the figurative sense is something I’m all too familiar with, and since I was coming off a long (if sporadic) stint as a self-styled food blogger, it felt like a perfect name.

The Internet, however, is full of thieving rat bastards who come up with good ideas WAY faster than I do, so “Eat Your Words” was already long gone on every blogging site I searched for it. Incidentally, so were “Eat My Words”, “Eat These Words” and “Eat Some Words”.

‘Ok, Internet, I FUCKING GET IT’, I thought to myself. I started to question whether or not I should even bother with the blog at all, and had a good 45 minute grump session where-in I detailed all my life failings to myself (the list is vast but I’m so well practiced that it tends to go very quickly once I start), before finally saying, ‘Fuck it. I’m doing this. How bad can it go?’

And then it dawned on me. If I was going to write about my mental struggles, my whacked-out sense of humor…if I was going to write about ME…then “How Bad Can It Go” was actually a far better name than the ones I had originally been looking for. It fits so well because not only is it something that I actually say ridiculously frequently (usually in a sarcastic manner), but it’s also a play on how my brain works.

When you’re an analytical person, you tend to be the type that thinks through many possible outcomes of every action. When you’re analytical by nature and also have an anxiety disorder, your ability to think through multiple outcomes and weigh various options can swiftly turn from a useful asset to a crippling liability. I am a person who often quite literally cannot stop thinking of all the ways anything and everything can go badly. You could point me to a scene of utter tranquility, ask “how bad can it go?”, and I’d be able to come up with at least three nightmare scenarios right off the top of my head. Granted, they would likely be far-fetched at best, but that’s one of the supreme ass-aches of an anxiety disorder – even when you know damn well that what you’re thinking is completely fucking ridiculous and far-fetched, you can’t not think it. You can’t shut off the part of your brain that is continually saying, “what if, what if, what if, whaaaaatttt iiiiiifffff”.

One of the ways I’ve learned to deal with my anxiety and depression is to try and find the funny in it. Even if it’s the type of terrible gallows humor that I can’t explain to anyone without making them grimace and back away slowly, it still helps. It’s a little bit harder to get stuck in a “what if” feedback loop when I’m coming up with the most ludicrous and unfeasible scenarios possible on purpose in the interest of making myself or other people laugh.

Like I’ve said before, I’m really good at starting things but pretty crap at finishing them, so this is the point in my little shit-show of an essay where I’m struggling to come up with something eloquent to sum everything up. So instead, I’ll just stop writing for now and wonder how bad it can go…