My Life's To Do List:

1. Update this blog more.
2. Write a book for me, not other people.
3. Take bartending classes and bartend.
4. Teach English in Korea.
5. Join the Peace Corps. (Start applying.)
6. Skydive.
7. Get my tattoo.
8. Spend less money on petty things and more on earrings.
9. Pay off student loans quickly.
10. Find my way back to England.
11. Figure out a nicer way to tell people I don't like them.
12. Solidify my beliefs.
13. Make turning 21 worth it.
14. Empathize with people better.
15. Complain less unless it's about getting a raise.
16. Work on making a portfolio.
17. Make someone's day at least once a day.
18. Master the art of grammar.
19. Never say the words, "I'm bored," ever again.
20. Get motivated in classes at school.
21. Eat less bread and drink less pop.
22. Eat more cookies and cream ice cream.
23. Live in a cheap house with nice things.
24. Marry for friendship and love not obligation.
25. Have children at age 30 with or without a man.
26. Get a filing cabinet.
27. Do my laundry.
28. Clean my room then trash it again.
29. Never wear Alfred Dunner clothes when I'm old. (Google image it if you don't know.)
30. Always wear mismatching flower patterns when I'm old.
31. Imitate a child's innocence as much as I can.
32. Stay young by always adding to my bucket list. (That way I never kick the bucket.)
33. Stop biting my nails.
34. Tone down my competitiveness.
35. Teach the next generation to find their own voices in writing.
36. Build my music library.
37. Dedicate a room of my future house to bookshelves and quietness.
38. Reach my goal weight with minimal effort. haha.
39. Show my children the magic in the world.
40. Cater my teaching lessons to every student in my classroom.
41. Make the word "humongous" look right in my head or stop using it.
42. Give loans to family members when I'm rich and famous with low expectations.
43. Give more presents to people.
44. Go dancing in a club.
45. Watch "Fight Club" finally.
46. Give better advice.
47. Take more risks.
48. Learn a larger vocabulary.
49. Don't take so many days of my life for granted. I'm alive, damn it!
50. Be more creative with my blog posts.

Pizza, Honking, and Giggles

So I have this amazing friend. At first sight, she comes off as abrasive and sometimes defensive. However, that's just her crusty outside (she's my cute little oreo). Inside, she's this wonderfully delicious cream-filling. She's a dessert that has sweetened my life and the way I look at things. Acting all tough, she'll mock me and joke around with me, but I know that underneath that, she sincerely cares about me. I'm flying to Los Angeles on Wednesday. Instead of saying, "Have a nice flight," she warns me that I had better text her when I get on the plane, when it takes off, and especially when I land. Same thing goes for the trip home as well.

This girl has taught me many a thing in my life in the short 6 months or so we've been friends, and I can genuinely say best of friends. I'm jealous of her passion. There's a drive in her I have never seen in a person before. A drive to overcome. Overcome hardships, laziness, over-spending, and countless other things she hates about herself (if I'm being honest, she is the strongest, hardworking woman I have ever met and she deserves to treat herself, bee tee dubs). She would jump in front of a car for her best friends. Not because that's what friends do. She would do it because she would be broken if she saw any of her friends get hurt if she didn't at least attempt to save them. It's simply astonishing how one person can put another person first in their priorities like she does with no selfishness or personal gain in her mind.

That's my introduction to her. I'm sharing all of this because today was the best holiday I ever had because of her.

My friend picked me up from work today after an especially hard day. It's 4th of July and there was a big coupon going on at my retail store. We've cut down on giving out coupons to everyone, so everyone and their sister was yelling at me for coupons. Ugh. So when she picked me up from work, I was in a huffy-puffy kind of mood. We picked up a Little Caesar's Hot-N-Ready pizza. We hadn't thought through where to eat it. She says to me, "Have I ever shown you my favorite place?"

She takes me to the pedestrian walkway over highway 94. As we started walking across, I said, "Man, this always really scares me." She looked so disappointed as she said, "But this is my favorite place...we can go if you want." (Always putting me first, God bless her.) I told her no way, I wanted to share this with her. She sat down facing the traffic coming toward us. As we open the pizza box she says, "I love waving at the traffic." At first I thought, That's really distracting to cars...what if she started an accident? She waves to the first car and they wave back, a huge smile on their face as they disappear under the bridge below us.

I look at her and she's beaming. I'm smiling, too. We start waving to every car that passes under us. Semi-trucks honk at us; they sounded like the distant horn of a train, something I didn't expect. Passengers waved at us with both hands. Truck drivers blew kisses at us. Peace signs and rock on hand gestures were thrown in sometimes as well. A lot of honking and laughing and connections from many feet away.

I looked at my friend sitting next to me on the concrete. I know why that is her favorite place. It's a place where you can make people smile and laugh. She told me that she loves to think that she just made someone's day just by waving at them and showing she cared, even if just for a few short seconds. She told me she hopes they reach their destination and say, "So, on my way here, I saw two girls waving at me over the highway. They were crazy-cool!" haha. It's a way she can finally reach hundreds of people just in an hour and a half.

This is my friend and this is why she's the most self-less person I know. I love you, Chels. :)

Damn Kids and Their PDA

So I was walking down the escalator at work (because that's what you do, you walk. Refer to my "Fatties and Escalators" post for details) when I heard this unusual smacking. Not like someone taking their hand and smacking them across the face, but just a sweet kissing noise in rhythm. I looked up and down my escalator, but no one was there. In our store, the escalators are built next to each other so you can see the people going up as you descend downwards. Hmm, that seems redundant. Descending downwards. Oh, well, I'm leaving it because just stopping at "descend" sounds really awkward. Anyway. I looked over to my left to find an older gentleman (probably 55 judging by his greying hair and start at wrinkles) kissing his younger girlfriend/wife/hopefully-not-his-daughter. She had to be about 30 judging by her haircut and sleek body.

The two of them kissed their whole flight upstairs. The really sweet thing is that they were standing with her on the step above him, making them an equal height. Instead of just being on the same step and just turning to kiss, she was turned completely backwards smooching him. For some reason, that makes it even more sweet. They were so invested in their pecks on the lips. They never once looked down at the old woman scoffing at them or looked over to their left to see me oogling at them and smiling. It made me feel like it was true affection. It wasn't for show, fo' sho', but it was for spontaneity and love.

The old lady scoffing at the couple made me angry. What's wrong with kissing another person with your arms held around them in public? Since when is showing another human being affection wrong? I can understand PDA and how it can get really R-rated, but this was simple and sweet. It was fresh and genuine. It's most definitely wasn't disturbing anyone. I mean, it was only me and the old lady to gaze upon them. I'm trying to come up with other reasons the woman may have been perturbed but I can think of none. Jealousy? Lust for that kind of affection? Annoyance? I'm not sure.

The experience made me think of my own relationship. I'm not one for PDA. I hate kissing in public unless it's in a moment of privacy. I'll kiss his cheek when he says something cute or does something nice. We hold hands constantly. He puts his arm around me when we walk together. But never do we just kiss in public. Right on the ol' smacker. Maybe that should change. Not that I'm going to just make out with him any chance I get in front of a bunch of strangers, but maybe I should be a little more lenient with smooches and hugs. Why not? It's a way of showing emotions. It's intimate on an escalator with people on it. It's simple and old-fashioned, and I love it.

I Wish I Could Be Hal Jordan

Spiders, snakes, the dark, the unknown, heights, large bodies of water, airplanes, public speaking, failure, death, dentists, clowns, change, open spaces, small spaces, and needles. All common things people fear in life. Some are justified, some emerge from past experiences, some are just unexplained. I was recently asked what my biggest fear was. I smash spiders; I've cut off the heads of snakes with my grandparents; I enjoy darkness; the unknown intrigues me; I love heights and can't wait to skydive this summer; I love swimming; airplane rides are really fun and get me to my destination with minimum risk; I'm great at public speaking; failure makes me stronger; I think death is horrible for the people left behind, but death itself doesn't scare me; dentists are nice and make my teeth feel slimy and amazing; clowns are funny; change is good, without it I'd go nuts; open spaces are fun for running; small spaces suck, but I'm not afraid of them; and needles aren't fun, but I've gotten used to getting stuck by them because my veins are tiny.

So what is it that scares me? It's that someone will know everything about me--from my outside appearance, to my thoughts, to my opinions, to my judgements, to my preferences, to my personality--and they won't like me for who I am. That scares me. Each person in my life only knows a little about me because I'm always afraid if they knew everything, they'd reject me or become uninterested. Kyle is probably the exception to this fear because he knows everything about me and that's what makes him love me. My flaws and imperfections are perfect to him.

But he's the minority. The one person. I'm a different person to everyone else. My family knows different things about me than my friends, my friends know different things about me than my coworkers, my coworkers know different things about me than my church friends, etc. I don't know why I have to be so many people. It's almost as if I wear all these masks. I'm afraid that one day I'm going to put on the wrong mask when I come into work, or go to a party, or when I'm at home. I ask myself why it would be so horrible for people to know the things they don't, and the answer is that I don't know. My fear may be irrational, but maybe underneath everything I have a fear of rejection. I've had friends in the past where I let them in and all of them left me out of the blue one day. Either by leaving me for other people or just by not talking to me anymore.

I'm a very confident person and I feel like I have a strong self-esteem, but perhaps I don't. If I was truly confident with myself, then I would be able to tell everyone everything about me, right? That scares me, too. Maybe I'm not as self-confident as I thought. I'm afraid of rejection, of not fitting in, of not being the strong woman I think I am.

Family on Father's Day

So, it's Father's Day. It makes me think of everything that I've been given in my life by my parents. Here are just three of the ones I'm most thankful for.

1. A pleasant living environment.

Okay, that sounds really weird, but honestly, I think that's a very important thing when raising a family. Our house is a small house in a clean, friendly neighborhood. All of our neighbors are all old or are young families with small tots and beh-bies. Again, it's small, but that's what makes our family so close...not just physically. We had to learn how to get along because if we went to our rooms and slammed the door, we could hear the conversations on the other side and they could hear us cry. We sit on the couches as a family when we watch our shows and sometimes it felt like we were sitting on each other's laps, but it made us comfortable with each other.

2. A living example of a working, loving relationship.

My parents got married really young, but they have never lost their love for each other. For some, cheating is a question of when it will happen and why. However, for my parents, it has never been a question. They still get each other gifts for birthdays and anniversaries even if it crunches the budget a little bit. I love how they support each other's hobbies. My mom loves to crochet and my dad loves comics books. They do those things without causing distance to grow like rust between them, munching away at their bond. Instead, they have a stronghold. Both of my parents came from houses with failed marriages. Instead of making that their greatest weakness, they twisted it into an act of healthy rebellion. The tides changed and they became the strongest couple I know. If my sister and I ever question our relationships, without a doubt we can just hold them up to our parents like tracing paper to draw straighter and sharper lines.

3. A support mechanism.

The best thing about my family is our support system. I can talk about really deep things with my mom. Whenever we ride in the car together, go shopping together, or work together, I can tell her anything about my life without worrying about feeling judged. She gives the best advice and more often than not, I take it. She's very smart about knowing how other people feel in a situation just from listening to my side of the story. In that way, I gain a stronger knowledge of other people while resolving my issues. My dad is the opposite. Instead of delving into an issue to solve it from its core, he provides a distraction from when the drama and work and future all get too hard to take. We'll talk about video games, movies, television shows, comics, electronics, and music. Anything to make the hurt disappear and I always appreciate it.

Both my parents are very different in both parenting styles and personalities. Somehow, they've found a way to make it work and I couldn't be more thrilled to be in the family I'm in. We laugh together, cry together, take walks in the rain together, take silly pictures together, watch So You Think You Can Dance together (8 seasons and counting, but don't even get us started on Survivior), and wear Green Lantern shirts together. It's not like we're perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but much like Tim Gunn would have us do, we "make it work."

Darkly Dreaming Dexter

I don't know if any of you have every watched "Dexter" but you really should. Get it on Netflix, go rent it at Blockbuster, borrow it, buy it, bootleg it, I don't care. Get ahold of it, take it out of the case, put it in your DVD player and watch it. I caught the last three seasons and I fell in love. Kyle and I are going back and watching them all from the beginning. 

I'm a TV buff. When I'm not working or going to school, doing chores, reading, or surfing the interblags, I'm watching a show. Sitcoms like "The Big Bang Theory" and "Modern Family" are my favorite for a quick bad-mood suppressant. Dramas such as "Parenthood" are good when I want to feel good about my life. Detective shows like "The Mentalist" are good for when you want to think. "American Gothic" is perfect for when you want to have a hard time sleeping at night for fear of blood on the walls and the Devil tricking you into selling your soul. 

"Dexter" is different. It's better than a novel. Nothing makes an audience feel more dirty than rooting for a heartless serial killer. Dexter is a man who blurs the black and white line of morality. I love the idea of anti-heroes. Have you ever seen "Boondock Saints?"Men out to rid Boston of corrupt and evil men. By killing them. You root for them to kill each evil man. Pretty messed up. Anti-heroes can be as simple as Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. He is the definition of rebellion and teenager angst. In real life, everyone would hate a kid like that, running around drinking and swearing. It's unheard of, but glorified in Salinger's book. Yossarian from Catch-22 could be considered an anti-hero going out of his way to avoid going to war. He pretends to get sick, gets drunk, has sex, anything he can do to get out of fighting. People want heroes to go to war, not a man who just wants to go home. They want to feel safe; yet the whole book the audience is rooting for Yossarian and his fretful attempts to leave the army. Something that would be considered weak in our society. 

Perhaps the best parallel to Dexter would be Hannibal Lecter. A serial killer who eats his victims. His saucy tongue and tender appetite charmed audiences all over the United States. Hannibal blends into society just like Dexter. When he walks the streets, he walks with confidence and poise. Dexter is charming too. A friendly neighbor, a loving boyfriend, a shy brother, and so on. He pretends. Hannibal was caught in "Silence of the Lambs," but he never lost his charms. The whole time, the audience is so excited to see him escape. That's just good writing. 

If you want a show to get your heart pumping and have your morals questioned, watch "Dexter." You'll never be so supportive of a cold-blooded murderer. I should hope. 

How Can We Keep from Singing?

I found another thing to put on my to-do list. Tonight was my sister's last choir concert at her high school because she's graduating in a couple weeks. The theme was centered around one of their songs titled, "How Can We Keep from Singing?" Essays were read from the seniors in choir that emphasized why they chose to sing even when trampled by finals and after-school groups and sports. Each essay brought a new insight on why singing is so important to them. For example: Singing is the only pure thing in an evil world, singing is a way to leave your troubles at the door, it's an escape, it's a drug, it's harmony with your friends, it's fun, it's a message even when the music is in another language...and even when there are no words at all!

Lately, I've been content with just singing in my car, belting out ballads like "Eclipse of the Heart" sung by Bonnie Tyler. My favorite is sining "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" by Frankie Valli with the windows rolled down and watching the old people start singing when I pull up next to them. Because singing is ageless. It's in the soul. Which is why I thought I would bring it up in my Spiritual Strudel. It's nom nom. Even the most awfulest of singers can't help but belt out their favorite songs when they're alone. It's an urge. An impulse. It's also a cure. Singing karaoke in a bar, singing while fist pumping with your girls at the club, singing in the shower, singing along at concerts, singing the national anthem at a baseball game, singing your audition for American Idol, singing in the opera, in a musical, in the streets...it's all the same.

Singing is global. It breaks open the language barrier. Everyone can understand the emotions of a song even if they can't understand the words. In high school choir, Mrs. Freeman would play us a new song in Latin or Italian or French and have us make skits about it while she played it in the room. She never told us what it was about. Somehow, even when the situations were wrong (mostly because they became outlandish), we always understood the emotion and were always right.

People scoff at singers and judge them worse than Simon Cowell. Good! Criticize! How else will pieces of art be made or new genres created? It takes criticism to grow stronger. However, how could anyone truly hate anything that comes from the heart? I love singing to elderly men and women at the nursing home before Christmas. We gather all around them and sing to them their beloved carols and they offer suggestions. Hunched over wrinkle pots come shuffling from the very darkest corners, smelling of stale urine, to hear the music. Their smiles are what keep us singing and not want to leave. My favorite part is their voices. It's not like old people have smooth, toned voices or anything. They suck, to be quite frank. But I'll tell you, I've never heard a more beautiful sound because every word means something to them. Memories of Christmas pour out of them at the sound and you can see them as young children, glitter and shit coming out of their eyes just as if they've just sat on Santa's lap.

It looks like I'll have to get back into choir. It'll take a while to find one that I'm comfortable with and that I think does a decent job. Freeman has made me a choir snob. Sometimes I can't handle choir members and divas so maybe something like an a capella group would be best for me. Something where we're all on equal ground because my voice is a blender anyway. We'll see where this goes, but one thing's for sure: I cannot keep from singing.