Let's Play Favorites

A favorite hip shaking song

I remember taking all those MySpace surveys with immeasurable fondness, so I thought I’d sort of make my own list of favorites and some other stuff I’ve found in old copy/paste surveys in remembrance of one of my favorite wastes of time for Sunday Confessions. Hope you'll read through and maybe copy/paste your own answers onto your blog or in the comments! Have fun with it :)

Basics

Name:  jenniy

Age: 33

Hometown: Eldorendo

Hair color: Naturally, medium brown. Now, brown with green streaks

Eye color: Green

Favorites

Top 5 Music: stoner rock, sludge metal, 90s grunge, indie garage rock, blues

Top 5 Bands: Graveyard, Allman Bros Band, The Sword, Red Fang, The Black Keys

Top 5 Albums: Allman Bros Band-Live at Filmore East, Graveyard-Lights Out, The Black Keys-Magic Potion, Baroness-First and Second EPrepressing (both eps on one album), Jimi Hendrix—Are You Experienced?

Cover band: Me First & the Gimme Gimmes

Cover song: Beastie Boys and Biz Markie doing Elton John’s Bennieand the Jets

Author: Stephen King

Book: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Top 5 Movies: The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, Dazed and Confused, The Breakfast Club, Pulp Fiction

Top 5 Directors: The Coens, Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, David Fincher, Kubrick

Smell: Jasmine

Perfume: Poe’s Tobacco by Tokyo Milk

Food: Sushi

Fruit: Cherries!!!

T.V. Show: Freaks and Geeks

Childhood Cartoon: Ducktales

Video Game: Parasite Eve

Color: Teal

Drink: Whiskey and ginger ale                       

Holiday:  Halloween

Either, or

cream soda or root beer: cream soda all the way, baby

tater tots, curly fries, or French fries: tater tots

comedy or drama: comedy

Dill Pickles or Sweet: Dill. If you don’t like dill pickles, we can’t be friends.

Beer, Wine, or Liquor: Whiskey

Pizza or Tacos: TACOS

Cat or Dog: Ducks. ha. I have some of everything

Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, or Toad: Princess Peach all the way.

Tattoos or piercings: Tattoos.

Singles or Full Albums: Full Albums

Republican or Democrat: Neither

Morning or Night: Nighttime is the right time.

Right or left handed: a little of both, but mostly right

call or text: text. If it can’t be texted, it’s not worth knowing.

HAVE YOU EVER

Gotten a ticket?: yes     

Been out of the USA?:   no

Triggered a fire alarm?: on purpose, no. But cooking accidents do happen

Been toilet papering?:   no

Done something illegal?: um, yes. plenty of times.

Been caught by the cops?: no

Wanted to move out from where your currently living?: I think everyone does at some point or another, but these days, I love where I am for the most part. I don’t get people who blame all their problems on their location.

Been ashamed of your family?: One side of it, yes.

Been go cart racing?: no

Broken a window?: yes, throwing my purse at my ex. I can’t even remember why now.

Been attracted to an animated character?: Mayyyybe. Ok, I guess I had a little thing for Shaggy from Scooby Doo. That probably says more about me than the rest of these questions.

Been in a car accident?: yes, but not driving

Caught your hair on fire?: no, thankfully

Done karaoke?: no, I have awful stage fright.

Tripped in front of an entire audience?: I’m a klutz, so more than likely, yes. Earlier today I stepped in the cat’s water bowl. That should tell you something about how well my feet function. My heels are all like kitten-size or thicker, retro-style because I do not trust myself to walk on a stem not much bigger than a toothpick and not kill myself.

Cut your own hair?: all the time. No one else has cut my hair in years. I cut my bff’s hair too.

Had surgery?:    yes, I’ve had my gall bladder out and had an emergency c-section

Broken/fractured a bone?: my nose

IN A GUY/GIRL

Funny/serious: funny

Competitive/laid back:  laid back

Good dancer/singer: dancer. duh. The sex is likely better that way ;)

Tall/short: either

Long/short hair: No preference. I’ve dated people with both.

Sweet/Attitude: A little sass goes a long way.

Outgoing/shy:   I’m not shy, but I am most definitely introverted, and it’s easier to be around other people who are than a person who is extremely extroverted. But, I do prefer outgoing introverts that keep me at least somewhat social.

Bearded/Clean-shaven: No beard, no service. Period.

Dependent/Independent: I’m far too independent, so I think this question is a bit tricky. One person shouldn’t be an extreme of either, so I’d have to say a little of both. You can’t be afraid to ask for help the way that I often am. A little dependence is a good thing. Clinginess is not. It’s about balance.

YOUR BEDROOM

Clothes on the floor?:    No, never! But, I do have some folded up on top of the antique stereo in my room. I put those away regularly, so it never gets out of hand, but I do throw things there for convenience during the week.

What color are your walls?: teal accent wall. The other walls are gray. And the moldings are black. Not that you can really tell with all the things I have hanging on said walls.

What is your bedspread and curtains?:  My bedspread is a floral sugar skull design and my curtains are black.

TV/game system:  In my room, just a TV and record player, but we do have a ps3, a ps4, wiiU, an old modded xbox, and some handheld game systems.

Do you need a drink by your bed when you sleep?: YES. Double Yes.

How many windows do you have?: 2 in my bedroom.

Light/Deep sleeper?:     Light. Any little thing can wake me up especially creepy kid stares.

How many pillows do you sleep with?:   2—one firm gel pillow and a softer one under that

Do you sleepwalk/snore/talk in your sleep?:       Snore, definitely.

RANDOM QUESTIONS

Are you more like your mom or dad?:    An equal mix of both, probably. Some ways I’m like my mom, and in a lot of ways, I’m like my dad. I’ve taken the qualities I’ve gotten from them and twisted them into my own in a pretty balanced way.

Do you mind getting up and speaking in front of a large audience?: Can’t do it without having a panic attack.

have you ever made out with 2 different people in one night?:  um, yes. I don’t want to say more than that, though. ha.

What color underwear are you wearing right now?:  gray with teal and pink polka dots

What 3 things can always be found in your refrigerator?:  coffee creamer, dill pickles, and spicy mustard

Ever worn your pajamas to places other than your house?:  I wont even wear pajamas in my own yard, so that’s a resounding no. No, no, no. I get dressed up to run errands and do other things despite how busy I am throughout the day. It’s a mode of self expression that I truly enjoy. I wouldn’t be caught dead in my pajamas outside my house.

Name 5 of the most important things in your life:  My son, writing, music, family and friends, my pen pals

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Be sure to check out the other confessions this Sunday over at the More Than Cheese and Beer page!! And as always thanks for reading :)

#Gamergirl

Lissa is sprawled out and halfway under the cream colored comforter on her bed when she hears her phone vibrate. It snaps her back from near-sleep with a jolt, but she just as quickly dismisses the idea of checking it. It’s too late as it is, and she figures whatever it is can wait. If it is an emergency, the person will call, right? Right. That internal semi-debate is over almost as soon as it begins then she settles herself back into the pillows pulling the comforter up higher over her shoulders.

It’s not long before the phone vibrates again. And again. And again. It doesn’t finish that signature buzzbuzz buzzzzz before it starts again. She’s mega-annoyed when she finally sits up in bed and snatches the phone off the nightstand. If it’s Amy, she thinks, pining over some guy she saw at the bar, I swear I will kill her. She swipes the lock screen on her phone and enters in her security code. In her frustration and sleep-state, it takes a couple tries before she enters it correctly while the phone continues its neverending cycle of vibrations. What the fuck is going on? Finally she gets it unlocked and slides the notification menu down. Twitter. Twitter. Over and over and over. She can’t delete one notification before another one pops up. She swipes the notification menu back up to open the Twitter app itself. She doesn’t even have 100 followers on Twitter, so she has no idea what's happening.

Her heart is beating harder with her frustration and a slight sense of panic. Nothing good could come from a blow up like this on her Twitter. She’s read the stories. She knows what women on the Internet have to go through or really anyone on the Internet.

When her feed loads, she touches the icon for her notifications. By now there are dozens of them, but she doesn’t stop to read them yet. She wants to see what started it all.

Oh shiiiiiit, she thinks. She sees it and knows immediately how fucked she is. She tweeted a photo of her GTAOnline character, a woman dressed in a corset and made a snarky comment about how ridiculous it is to think a woman would boost cars in that thing without her tits falling out. She meant it to be funny. I mean, she’s the one that put the corset on her when there were other options. And she tagged it… Of course she did. How stupid could she be.

#gtaonline

#allaboutthecleavage

#sensibleoptionsforcartheft

#gamergirl

#toosexyforyourcar

And that’s all it took. The tweets are still pouring in calling her an idiot, telling her she gave gamers a bad name, demanding she shove her feminism up her twat. The insults come hurtling toward her at light speed.

Cunt.

Bitch.

Psycho.

Fat.

Ugly.

Stupid.
Everything that people will call a woman when they don’t like what that woman says…

She has a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach as she reads through more. There are people threatening to shove her game controller up her various orifices, to rape her with it, and even to kill her. There are more telling her she should kill herself. Fuck. Her address! Her whole entire fucking address is posted. Photos from her personal Facebook page have been uploaded with comments about her appearance. Photos from Instagram! Even that risqué one she took in the bathtub with the hashtag gamerslut.

And then she sees it… some guy retweeted her address and says he’s exactly 57.4 miles from her house and will be there to burn it to the ground in just over an hour.

Her heart thunders in her chest. Her ears are ringing. In the glow of the phone, the room looks like it’s spinning. She has to make a run for the bathroom barely making it to the toilet before what’s left of her midnight snack is reversing its trajectory.

What do I do now? Do I call the cops? Would they take it seriously? Is it serious?

Am I safe?

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It’s quite possible that in this scenario, the main character IS fairly safe. She *might* not actually get her house burned down as the threats against people online often end up being empty ones meant to scare a person into silence, but that’s not always the case either. We live in a world where women have been targeted and murdered simply for not wanting to sleep with a man or for being a female in a male dominated industry because, as a lot of men will tell you, no woman could ever be successful in

a field that men love without fucking men to get to the top and those “females” deserve their unethical actions to be exposed, right? Amirite?? We seriously live in a world where a woman who states publicly that she believes in the gender wage gap and wants equal pay will be threatened with rape, where a woman can tweet a smartass comment about a sports game and be threatened with rape. And, unfortunately, this world is one where 98% of rapists never spend time in prison.

How can we guarantee safety for women in that kind of world?

Our society has evolved to a more technologically based one. We live and thrive on social media. We stay buried in our phones. We summarize our lives in 140 neat little characters. We exist in snapshots and tidbits. There’s no denying this change. Yet, there are no ways to protect yourself as an adult when online threats and cyberstalking happen. Most state laws that actually have cyberbullying laws use those laws to instruct public schools to have policies to punish these occurrences for students. Adults have nothing. Elliot Rodgers uploaded his entire manifesto online, but no one would do anything. Rape threats are made every second, but no one has a way to take legal recourse for those threats. Regardless of many people feeling like the government has enough power, that we have enough laws as is, the safety of women, of men, of children is truly at risk when there is no legal statute nor court precedent to protect them allowing assholes to make threats, publish addresses and terrorize others freely without consequence. That freedom only bolsters these bullies increasing the intensity and frequency of their attacks.

Even if you can argue the absence of any real threat, the potential for crippling mental health issues stemming from the kind of situation the character in the story faced is very much present, accounted for, and real. Stress, anxiety, depression… even post-traumatic stress disorder has been claimed following an attack. Clinical psychologists have agreed that this is a very real possibility. Given my education in counseling/psychology, I agree. The constant barrage of threats and bullying could most definitely lead to the development of PTSD which involves anxiety, emotional deregulation, emotional intensity, avoidance of triggers, nightmares, insomnia, inability to focus, reckless behavior, hopelessness, intense shame or guilt, and interpersonal problems.

There’s no magic fix that will eliminate this sort of behavior, but if these sorts of things happened face to face, the offending person would be charged with harassment, stalking, or possible even terroristic threats. An evolving, technologically dependent society needs laws that reflect the times. We should already be at this point instead of leaving people with no actual way to legally protect themselves. Many end up fleeing their own homes and hiding out until the blowback dies down.

As a society, we need to demand more be done and stop dismissing these behaviors as empty threats from neckbeards still living with their moms. That may actually be the case, but why are we so willing to risk people’s safety to protect assholes who hide behind a computer screen?

Fuck that. People’s wellbeing should always come before the unhindered freedom to be a dickhead. Period the end.

So, share the stories, demand people listen, and push for more to be done. That push is the only way to get anything done.

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This has been another installment of Sunday Confessions! Be sure to check out the More than Cheese and Beer page for other linkups and the Facebook page for anonymous confessions

Days Like This

The water trickles slowly into the bright green, Mario-inspired mug bringing with it a waft of steam and a sweetly bitter smell that makes her mouth water at the thought of the creamy warmth that will soon blanket her taste buds. She’s too eager to take the first sip to let every single drop find its home before she takes the almost-too-hot-to-touch mug from its place. It slips into her hand like a familiar lover’s. She lets the heat get so, so close to unbearable before she sets it down again. She adds a couple spoonfuls of Splenda from the vintage yellow canister on the counter and stirs in the extra extra creamy creamer changing the dark brown to a smooth caramely color.

Perfection.

She travels with the mug, then, back to the couch setting it carefully on the table before she takes her

his hair is actually much longer now

place tucked safely into the corner on the left side. The boy giggles from the red chair on the far side of the room, the chair he always sits in when he’s playing his games and living the carefree life that children should. She watches him for a moment and smiles that smile that mothers have when the love feels like it might burst from every pore, surely it must radiate from her like a disco ball shining in his presence. He looks up at her then, his laughter still fresh on his lips, and asks, “what?”

“Nothing,” she says.

He shrugs his shoulders and goes back to his game while she reaches forward for the coffee that will now be just right or so she hopes. The first sip is like sunbeams on her tongue, warm and full of life. She sits back then, mug in hand, and blows a little on the still warm liquid before inhaling the aroma of the banana and caramel undertones in the coffee. The second sip hits her taste buds and is even better than the first.

She flips the television on looking for something to fill the silence but not in the mood for a record that would only distract her like music tends to do. Her favorite tunes would consume her instead of provide background noise which is not what she needs at the moment unfortunately. Looney Tunes will work, she decides. The boy sends her a thumbs up of approval. It’s the new show not the old classics. Fun, humorous, but also easy to ignore. It’s still somehow familiar though and just adds to the ease of the day.

With the remote settled back into its place on the coffee table, she grabs her fuzzy throw—the gray one covered in black bats—to cover her legs. The cats know that blanket all too well and are snuggling together on it in groups of 3 as soon as she gets it in place. The added warmth and the vibrations from their purring is more than welcome as she takes another sip of her coffee and watches them for a moment lovingly bathing one another like furry best friends do.

She stays like that lingering in the semi-quiet moments. There is so much left to do this day. The house is clean, the animals are full and sleepy, the laundry is in the wash, the boy is done with schoolwork, but her day is far from over as the mug of coffee may suggest. It’s time to get to work on her own schoolwork, her blogs, her letters. It’s somewhat of a never-ending cycle, but she takes joy in being busy, in the words that flow from her fingertips to the white screen filling it up one after the other in academic pursuits, deep conversations, stories that beg to be told, and reflective essays.

As much as she sarcastically jokes about domesticated bliss, there’s comfort in these routines and the way she can sink into life like it’s a big comfy, purring, fuzzy couch and enjoy the little moments that make the day something unique.

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I'm not sure why I decided to write about myself in 3rd person, but it felt right. I actually started this as a first person narrative, but it felt off. So, here we are. This was another installment of Sunday Confessions with More Than Cheese and Beer. The prompt this week was comfort. Thanks for joining me in my comforting routines every Sunday. Be sure to check out the MTCAB blog for the other linkups!!

Indigo Blues

This is my very first time ever participating in the Use Your Words challenge. I think I'm going to have to keep this up. Despite what you're about to read, I had a lot of fun with this piece and with making the words fit together like a puzzle. So, this is how it works: participating bloggers picked 4 – 6 words or short phrases for someone else to craft into a post. All words must be used at least once and all the posts will be unique as each writer has received their own set of words. That’s the challenge, here’s a fun twist; no one who’s participating knows who got their words and in what direction the writer will take them. Until now.

My words were submitted by  http://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com and are: 

Indigo ~ graphic ~ hindsight ~ fountain ~ thirst ~ under the bridge

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Sometimes I feel

Like I don't have a partner

Sometimes I feel

Like my only friend

Is the city I live in

The city of angels

Lonely as I am

Together we cry…

She hears the song playing on a nearby radio and is immediately thrown back to the past in graphic, vivid detail. Her former husband loved this song, Under the Bridge. Every time it came on, he’d blare the radio until the speakers would nearly blow and (often drunkenly) belt the lyrics at the top of his lungs out of sync and off key. As annoying as it was especially when she was trapped in the car with him and thought surely he was going to rupture her ear drums with the higher pitched parts, this is one of her better memories of the man. Hearing this song makes her nostalgic for the good times, for the man she knew before the booze took over, before the pain, before she ended up here. When she remembered him singing along at impossible volumes to his favorite tunes, she was remembering what it was like to be loved and to love someone more than she ever thought possible.

In hindsight, she should have known that things weren’t good when he stopped turning the radio annoyingly loud and singing along, when he stopped telling her to listen to this motherfucker play during his favorite parts. When the music stopped giving him chill bumps, he stopped being himself. No one who loves music that much could ever turn it off like a light switch; no one could go from full on to nothing at all without it indicating a deeper problem. Somewhere along the way, though, that’s exactly what seemed to happen.

Surely, it must have been a slow progression, but it seemed to her to have happened all at once. One day he was the same old man she had loved since high school. One day he was a completely unrecognizable monster. It was impossible for her to pinpoint the exact moment the beast erupted from her husband’s skin in a Kafkaesque metamorphosis. But, that monster was all she had left one day--a human-like creature with a short temper, a penchant for violence, and an unquenchable thirst for alcohol. Music didn’t resonate with him anymore, and she became more or less a metaphorical and literal punching bag. Her own metamorphosis left her a shell of her former self covered in blacks and blues, scars both mental and physical, and an overall deflated quality that spoke volumes about her state of mind.

She looks down at the faded indigo jumpsuit she’s wearing with a frown on her face. The song she heard that took her back down the road to the past has long since faded, but her travels have yet to be over. Remembering the good times conjures memories of the bad as well which always leads her to think about why she’s here locked in this prison every day hustling to get a few stamps to write home and maybe for an occasional piece of candy. Being in prison blues didn’t do a thing to curb her sweet tooth.

Her mind is flooded with fuzzy Technicolor images of fights that ended with broken bones and shattered teeth, nights of name-calling and fear. No matter how hard she tried to forget the thrown ashtrays, the cigarettes stubbed out on her skin, the names hurled like daggers in her direction, those memories wouldn’t leave her. There was no point even attempting to forget the night that led her to where she’s standing right now, where she had been for years now, where she would spend the rest of her life. There was a big part of her that hoped she’d be able to erase it forever, but there was an even bigger part of her that felt the torture of these memories was the universe punishing her for what she did. Maybe her whole existence was meant as a punishment for transgressions in a past life. It sure fucking seemed that way.

She doesn’t even realize that she’s weeping openly, a no-no in this place, when she thinks back on that night. She had spent a couple hours in the kitchen putting together her recipe for shepherd’s pie, his favorite meal. It was his 43rd birthday. She wasn’t working and couldn’t afford a gift (not that she could have gone out to get him one without consequences) so she decided to make him his favorite for him to make up for what she couldn't buy. He was supposed to be at work that day. He was at work that day until he was canned for coming in hungover again. After that, who knows…but obviously he had been drinking. He came in stumbling and slurring hours after he should have been home with a huge fountain drink in one hand and a burger in the other. He seemed so jovial for once, laughing and joking around with her. And, after a few shared laughs, she let her guard down. Mistake.

“I don’t know why I bothered making this huge shepherd’s pie if you were just going to go get fast food, Tommy.”

That’s all it took. Just that one little sentence to set him off. He whirled around on her then and before she knew what happened, he had thrown the entire drink in her face before pelting her with the remainder of his burger. From the smell, he had definitely poured out the soda in favor of far more booze than mixer.

She has replayed this moment in her mind over and over and over again. He had done so many things to her over the years that she had never quite been able to figure out what made her snap that night, what finally pushed her over the edge, but there’s no reasoning that makes total sense. She guesses now that in part it’s because she wasn’t much of a drinker at all. The reek of cheap bourbon in her face mixed with the ketchup sliding down her faded black tshirt after she’d worked so hard in the kitchen that afternoon followed by the sound of his booming laughter sent her into a rage she’d never felt before. He tottered off into the living room to pass out in his chair like he always did, but instead of getting cleaned up and letting it go like she’d done time and time before, she sat there stinking of booze and grease, seething.

This is where her memory gets tricky. She remembers standing in the kitchen and feeling that rage take over her whole body. She remembers gritting her teeth and finally wiping her face dry, but after that everything is a blank until she was standing over him covered in blood with the largest knife from her kitchen in hand.

She shudders there in her cell thinking back to him laying there lifeless. Her Tommy.

Her attorney tried to fight for her saying it was self-defense. She had been in the emergency room for falls and for “walking into doors” more times than she could count. The neighbors had called the police so many times when things had gotten really bad, on nights when she couldn’t stop screaming from the pain. She never filed charges though. She never admitted to the cops what Tommy was doing. Hell, she couldn’t even fully admit it to herself. This was the man she loved,after all, for her whole life. They’d been together since she was only 16.

But, the prosecutors contested self-defense. If she was really in danger, they said, she would have gotten out. If she was really being abused, she would have had the man thrown in jail. Why would anyone stay, they asked, if it was really as bad as her attorney made it sound. They painted her as a mooching nag that finally had enough when her husband was fired from yet another job and let him have it. The jury bought that version of things. Obviously, given her prison blues.

She stands there a moment longer, remembering. For a long time she was bitter about things, but that wasn’t going to change anything, so she learned to let it go like she used to let things slide with Tommy.

She loved that man—despite what she did. That’s what made her stay, part of the reason anyway. There was always a piece of her that could hear a song and remember the good times or look at him across the table and get a glimmer of the man he was before things changed.

That night, though… that night was the end of her hope. And, she guesses that spending the rest of her life in prison is better than the prison she was in.

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Hope you enjoyed it. I've really been focusing more and more on my fiction lately. Be sure, too, to check out all the other bloggers who linked up today to see how everyone has interpreted their words. Thanks for reading!!

http://www.BakingInATornado.com                                 Baking In A Tornado

http://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com/                          Spatulas on Parade

http://stacysewsandschools.blogspot.com/                        Stacy Sews and Schools

http://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com                      The Bergham’s Life Chronicles

http://batteredhope.blogspot.com                                   Battered Hope

http://eileensperpetuallybusy.blogspot.com/                    Eileen’s Perpetually Busy

http://www.someoneelsesgenius.com                             Someone Else’s Genius

http://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch                    Confessions of a part-time working mom

http://www.southernbellecharm.com                            Southern Belle Charm

http://singlemumplusone.blogspot.com                        Searching for Sanity

http://sparklyjenn.blogspot.com                                  Sparkly Poetic Weirdo

http://climaxedtheblog.blogspot.com                             Climaxed

 http://www.eviljoyspeaks.wordpress.com                       Evil Joy Speaks

Dream a Little Dream

There is blood everywhere. So. Much. Blood.

Just a few minutes before, I had been relaxing on smallish black inner tube floating down this massive, muddy river. I didn’t remember how I got here exactly, but the rush of the tepid river water on my bottom made the heat of this scorching day a little less oppressive. I had trailed my hands in the water in some sort of daze wondering if any fish would mistake my fingers for wrinkled worms and lazily pulled them out every now and then to watch the water droplets bead on the top of the tube before quickly fizzing out of existence in the harsh sunlight. Maybe this was a metaphor for life, I thought…this inner tube drifting towards an unknown destination with my dreams fizzling out one by one just as quickly as those tiny worlds of water on the top of this expansive blackness.

All around me there were other people dressed in solid-colored swimsuits just like mine. Black ones, orange ones, a royal shade of blue. Each of us on a plan black inner tube. It felt like some sort of Great Migration, all of us here in our similar garb traveling downriver, but I wasn’t sure. I had been trying to push past the haze to figure it all out when I heard the screaming. I tried to sit up in my panic, but my head was too fuzzy, and I was way to off balance on that fucking tube.

First one person then another and another until there were a chorus of screams ahead of me.

That’s when my tube floats through the blood--a vast crimson that tinted the murkiness seemingly without end.

There is blood everywhere. So. Much. Blood.

I try to get a look ahead of me peeking my head up as high as my dizziness will allow like a drunken tortoise attempting to peek out to see where he ended up the night before and if, perhaps, there’s something waiting there to eat him. Something brushes against my ass—the ass still floating along in blood and I give a little screech. I have no idea what that might have been feeling my panic increase to astronomical amounts. I’m absolutely terrified to be in water where things with teeth dwell—a fear I’ve seemed to forget about until just now when clarity finally pushes through the fog that has blanketed my brain and kept me docile in my travels.

There is a fucking head. A head! Floating by on my left.

I don’t really have time to process what could have happened to that person before I’m being lifted out of the water, fast and hard, from underneath the tube. Now, it’s me who is screaming.

I can’t readily identify what it is that I’m basically sitting on, but it looks like an alligator. Size-wise,

though, it makes the monster from Lake Placid look like a baby. He’s powerful and tosses me like a ragdoll over to the bank of the river. I hit hard and get the breath knocked out of me but don’t lose consciousness. In a second, I push myself up and run faster than I’ve ever run in my life.

There is absolutely no where to run.

Then, like some kind of miracle, I see my own home, the house I grew up in, beyond the mist in the distance. I can hear the beast behind me crashing onto the back, growling, and it fuels me even harder. I’m running and running, but it doesn’t feel like I’m making any progress. No matter how hard I push myself, I’m not getting any closer. I can almost feel the damned thing’s breath on my back before I finally make it to the front of the house. I push through the front door sure that the monster is on my heels. I haul ass through the living room and make a sharp right turn down the hallway and an immediate left into the bathroom. I’m barely inside the door when I hear the crash coming from the living room.

There’s no way I’m going to live through this. Absolutely no way.

I close the bathroom, lock the door and look anywhere for a weapon. There’s nothing but a plunger. A fucking plunger of all things. I grab it anyway because something is better than nothing and get ready to barricade the door. It’s there, on the other side, I can hear it breathing. So, I grab the plunger harder, ready before it begins nosing at the door. It’s almost unreal like it’s fucking teasing me slowing splintering the door jamb so it can ease its way inside. The door is threatening to swing open so I sit on the ground and push back against it with my feet, but it’s a futile effort. I’m already getting weak and the door is falling apart. I catch glimpses of the blood-stained, yellowed teeth that are bigger than my legs, the cold, dark eyes…I’m as good as dead, but I can’t give up. There’s a cabinet to my right. I swing it open searching frantically with my right hand while wielding the plunger in the left and keeping my legs on the door, but all I find is some Scrub N’ Bubbles spray. Fuck it, I think, and start spraying it into the beast’s eyes.

He disappears.

I feel a great sense of relief and a strong urge to pee.

I roll over then in the pregnant light of morning, still dazed with my heart racing, and look at the clock. 6:12 a.m. I momentarily groan that it's so close to time for me to get up for the day and trudge begrudgingly towards the bathroom replaying the nightmare and wondering just what the fuck is wrong with me. 

Today is another Sunday Confession with More Than Cheese and Beer. The topic this week was "dream" so I thought I'd write about one of my strangest ones. I suppose the river really was a metaphor for life and the the beast was a symbol of some stress I was under the time especially since I had to battle him in my old childhood home which is a common theme in my nightmares as it was a source of great stress when I was younger. Thanks for reading and be sure to check out the rest of the link ups over on the MTCAB page!

Ask Me About My Crafts

Today is Secret Subject Swap day! This month 14 bloggers have signed up for the Swap challenge. We each submit prompts ahead of time which are distributed and handed out about 2 weeks before the post date. None of us know who got which prompt until today when we all sit down to read and comment and discover it all at the same time. So, sit back and enjoy a cuppa whatever you love and enjoy the adventure. There will be links to all the other blogs who participated at the end. 

My “Secret Subject” is:

March is National Craft month. Are you a crafty person? What have you created in the past, or what would you like to create?

It was submitted by: http://thelieberfamily.com

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Crafty.

Without trying to sound completely full of myself, I am one crafty bitch--in every sense of the word.

Craftiness, of course, has several meanings. Clever, accomplishing goals by sly methods, creating objects, decorative or otherwise, by hand. Yes, yes, and yes. I am, indeed, pretty crafty.

Craftiness of every sort is probably one of the main things I picked up from my mom growing up. If something was broken, she would take it apart to figure out what was wrong and try her damnedest to get it back together and working. If she wanted something, more often than not, she would make it herself—like the doghouse she built for our Australian Shepherd Katie and the picnic table that lived under the pecan trees in the front yard. She was also pretty fucking handy with a hot glue gun and some fake rosettes. She still has a hat she decorated years ago with said rosettes and some lace ribbon hanging on a wall in her living room.

I’ve been known to invoke the power of craftiness a time or two in my day much like my mom before me. I’m responsible for the décor in my house from the paint on the walls to the colors of the frames that hold my records, band flyers, and pop culture themed prints. I have a Cyndi Lauper album in a frame I sprayed with black glittered paints as well as a wisteria purple color because doesn’t that seem fitting for the girl who just wants to have fun? I also have a knack for lamp creating. In my living room, I have a lamp I created out of a bowling pin (The Big Lewbowski) and an antique I bought in a thrift store that I rewired and turned into a High Fidelity themed piece. For my room, I took a lamp I found at Goodwill and used old record inserts to decorate the lamp shade. I plan on using a small cable roll to make a Johnny Cash themed lamp for the other bedside table next. It’s going to be quite an involved project, but I have faith I’ll get it done. I’ve also turned my tv stand doors and my all my living room tables into collages of movie images and covers. In my kitchen, I’ve really gone for a mid-century décor and have been able to replace my light fixtures with vintage pieces as well as doing some small touches like covering my light switch plates with vintage mushroom style shelf liner (my kitchen has tons of vintage mushroom décor as is). I've been known to make a pretty tasty cupcake and definitely some delicious cheesecakes of all types. My favorite so far was a pumpkin cheesecake covered in homemade salted caramel dip. And to top it all off, I make my kid's and my own Halloween costumes every year either using already made pieces as a base or starting from scratch.

I’m not quite as crafty as others. I’m certainly no Pinterest mom. I don’t make yogurt from my own vaginal secretions like that one woman or scrapbook every memory (though I’m often envious of people who have the time and energy to do so). I’m not so clever that I could fashion a life saving, bomb shelter from a few toilet paper rolls and my own bras like an alternative culture, huge boob having, non-mulleted MacGyver. But let’s face it, that’s alright because my bras are their own bomb shelters anyway. I’ll save you all.

And, of course, if you're one of those people who thinks it counts, I craft with words. Some of the things I've posted on this blog in the last year are some of my most prized examples of crafting, in fact. I'd like to think the places and feelings I create with with words would rival even Pinterest projects. 

 

White Russian cupcakes

Zombie Angus Young

Red Riding Hood took down the Wolf

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That's my Swap. Hope you enjoyed it! As promised, here are the links to the rest of the participants: 

http://www.BakingInATornado.com                          Baking In A Tornado

http://stacysewsandschools.blogspot.com/                        Stacy Sews and Schools

http://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com                      The Bergham’s Life Chronicles

http://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com                          Spatulas on Parade

http://dinoheromommy.com/                            Dinosaur Superhero Mommy

http://themomisodes.com                                          The Momisodes

http://climaxedtheblog.blogspot.com                      Climaxed

http://www.someoneelsesgenius.com                       Someone Else’s Genius

http://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch               Confessions of a part-time working mom

http://thelieberfamily.com                                            The Lieber Family

http://www.southernbellecharm.com                            Southern Belle Charm

http://singlemumplusone.blogspot.com                           Searching for Sanity

http://sparklyjenn.blogspot.com                                  Sparkly Poetic Weirdo

http://www.smalltalkmama.com                                Small Talk Mama

So, Maybe I Do Care 'Bout My Bad Reputation

I’ve seen the phrase “what other people think of you is none of your business” quite often.

As an upwardly mobile woman with a unique sense of style and a long-standing rebellious streak, I wholeheartedly agreed with it for a good long while. In essence, it was a variation of my rebellious tendency to shout that I didn’t give a fuck about what anyone thinks of me. A classier version, albeit, but something pretty similar all the same. Who would really argue with that? That part of it, the face value aspect, still rings fairly true, doesn’t it? A person should unapologetically be who they are without asking for others’ approval to be, to own their space in the world, to live without guilt.

But with self-awareness comes a need to look at that statement on a deeper level, to turn it over and examine all the cracks and crevices in the full light of day to see it for what it really is and not just the pretty package you get when it’s sitting in the shadowed corners of dusk. A lot of things sound good, look good, and get quoted when they’re left in the dark. For instance, I look pretty decent without makeup in the middle of the night, but put some fluorescents on me and whoa… run for cover, man, and wait until I put on my face. Words are like that. Words are like that more than we fully realize with so many of us sharing silly inspirational memes after a second’s thought that aren’t so applicable to anything remotely rational or inspirational or good once examined a little harder. There’s this one Marilyn Monroe quote that comes to mind that I’ve seen more than a time or two. It says, “A wise girl kisses but doesn’t love, listens but doesn’t believe, and leaves before she is left.” If you don’t think about it much, surely that seems like badassery. But on further inspection, all it says to me is that she probably had borderline personality disorder because for fuck’s sake that’s exactly what people with said disorder do and say. Is that really meme-worthy? Hardly.

When you dig a little deeper concerning that sentiment that another person’s opinion of you isn’t your business, it doesn’t have as much value. At least, it doesn’t to me. It doesn’t have to be about you not being allowed to be your true self. But, when you’re on that path to self-awareness, a difficult and time-consumingly emotional process, isn’t it important that the person you are inside match what people perceive you to be? Isn’t it worth understanding whether the image, the you that you project to the world—to your contacts, your associates, acquaintances, friends, loved ones—is the same as the you that you are striving to be, the you that you want to be?

I watched SLC Punk as a teen. It was one of those films that left its mark on me. I wasn’t in the punk scene in the 80s by far, but I related to those characters being a rebellious teen in a conservative area

that was unaccepting of anything perceived as even remotely different and like Stevo and Bob, it made me rebel even harder. Stevo said some things in that film that I couldn’t relate to at the time being so entrenched in my own acts of defiance, but the more I’ve grown as a person, the more self-awareness I’ve gained, the more they’ve come back to me almost like the sucker punch Stevo got with Bob that changed everything for him. He said, “And so there I was. I was gonna go to Harvard. It was obvious. I was gonna be a lawyer and play in the God-damned system, and that was that. I was my old man. He knew, so what else could I do? I mean, there's no future in anarchy; I mean let's face it. But when I was into it, there was never a thought of the future. I mean we were certain the world was gonna end, but when it didn't, I had to do something, so fuck it. I could always be a litigator in New York and piss the shit out of the judges. I mean that was me: a trouble maker of the future. The guy that was one of those guys that my parents so arrogantly saved the world for, so we could fuck it up. We can do a hell of a lot more damage in the system than outside of it. That was the final irony, I think. That, and well, this. And "fuck you" for all of you who were thinking it: I guess when all was said and done, I was nothing more than a God-damned, trendy-ass poser.”

He grew to that point that he understood change isn’t made on the fringes. I’ve seen that myself for a long time now. He also saw the changes he made wouldn’t exactly be approved of by his younger self or by young punks and old ones alike, but he was okay with that. The fact that someone else didn’t approve of his choices wouldn’t change those choices In the process of self-awareness, though, that look into another person’s perceptions is needed to grow, to really become okay with what you’ve made of yourself or to realize what else needs to change.

It doesn’t really matter one way or another if a person likes the way I wear my hair or thinks I have too many tattoos unless that person is hiring me for a job, but it does matter the overall image I project. That is my business. The person I feel like on the inside should match the person I show the world otherwise I have a whole lot of work left to do. To assume that the outward projection isn’t my business is to fail at awareness altogether in favor of something easier and lazier. It lets me escape half the journey, and what’s the fun in that?

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Skipping the fiction this week for Sunday Confessions in favor of something that's been more or less on my mind for awhile now. Thanks for reading and be sure to check out the other posts today on More Than Cheese and Beer!