The Big Three Oh

I’ll be doing a blog post all about the wedding (that happened) and the move (also happened) soon enough. 

I thought I’d start with this.

See, I turned thirty on November 17^th. 

My dad likes to say, “You can’t trust anyone over thirty, or people who work for the government.” 

I’m both.   

He’s kidding, but I started to think about how different thirty is now than it was in the 60s.  

Mostly, I just don’t feel like an adult yet.  I don’t think that has much to do with my age though.

I like that I can still enjoy what I’ve always enjoyed. 

Gaze upon my Bat-Belts!  This isn't even half of them.  

I wear these to work.  No one cares!  Or notices. 

I like that I can play.

I’m proud that I HAVE come as far as I have, regardless of trauma from all directions for so long.

That being said, I still have a long way to go.  I’m aware of that.  

I know there are things I still don’t like about myself, and those awful things are going to be the hardest to overcome. 

I’m happy with my body now, and my confidence is so much better than ever before.

I’ve learned to stand up for myself, though I still struggle with that from time to time…

I’m eating better and better every day, while still being careful about my allergies. 

I can BE careful without it ruling my life, even when I'm scared.  

…and that’s just really cool.

Still though, there are so many times where my imagination takes over and goes from “being creative” to a true sign of the mental illness I’ve faced for so many years.  

The dark, mirrors…  I’m actually terrified of a lot of things to an incredibly embarrassing degree.  

I’m thirty now, and I still take the whole Bloody Mary thing too seriously.  It’s another level of sad.

Now it’s a matter of not wanting to see the endless darkness that may or may not reflect something that I just can’t perceive when the lights are out…

I already told you about the time as a kid where I left a bathroom like the little chicken I am during the era of Spice Girls and pogs.  

(As a side note, we were doing a dance thing in a PE class once, and I was elected to be Scary Spice as I was the darkest one with curly hair.  That’s how bleached white our fucking middle school was.  Fuck.  Sure.  “Close enough.”  …  These days, I would take it all as a compliment, though I’m not sure how she would have felt being played by a Slavic Jew.  Really, I wanted to be Posh anyway.)

Seriously though.   

Under the bed was scary enough that I just put my bed straight onto the floor to avoid having an under-the-bed at all.   

The closet…  Ugh.  Especially when the door was just slightly open?  

All the way open or all the way closed.  That’s what it had to be.

My sister solved this problem for me by simply tearing the doors off of my closet in a fit of unbridled and seemingly entirely random rage.

Doors slightly open at all, ever…  For whatever reason, my brain immediately goes to, “Yeah, but what’s looking in?”  

Why is there ANYTHING looking in?  What??

Walking to the bathroom at night encompasses all of these things in some way or another, especially that first mirror-in-the-dark bit. 

This was all before the food thing became… a thing.

The worms and ants almost-phobia may have to do with the hidden nature of them, just as the dark poses for everything else.  

And yet again…

Ants though…  They’re like the Borg. 

And worms like maggots, eat the dead.

Realizing I’m very much alive, am I just afraid I’ll find out the hard way?  I’m more afraid of my own reflection in the dark than seeing someone other than myself…  Maybe it’s all existential.  

Fear and phobias are interesting things when they start to rule your life.

I was always super anxious about everything, but I very rarely expressed this openly.  I felt like a had to keep myself with a steely expression for my family, so that no one would know that I was scared or in any pain.  

That may have been a fear too.  I didn’t want to be a burden, and I didn’t want them to feel bad.  

So… I just pretended I was fine for as long as I could.

This led to weirdly humiliating moments, because it translated as being shy when I wouldn’t just speak up and say, “This is really shitty.”  

Good example? 

That time I had a mat in my hair. 

Why my parents didn’t just take a fucking scissors to my hair is beyond me.  It was in the back and under all my other hair.  No one would have noticed.

The whole thing was kind of my own fault anyway because I didn’t want anyone to touch my head.  

I was little then…  Elementary school I guess?   

And my head was an unruly mess of curls and tangles.   

Dad would (jokingly?) chant, “Rip tear!  Rip tear!” as he tried to brush my hair.   

I have since learned to either start from the bottom 

or just cut it all off.

So there we were at the hair stylist. 

The lady gathered everyone around to see. 

So, there I was, SURROUNDED by random people staring at my head.

“IT’S A PERFECT DRED!” she kept saying.  

I did not do this on purpose.  I mean, good to know, but having all those people stare and touch me, and have to sit there in silence pretending I wasn’t scared and embarrassed…  

Ugh. 

You know what?  I’m exhausted enough, let’s stick to the hair for a minute. 

Lemme tell you ‘bout my hair. 

I found my first single grey hair in middle school.   

Since this was the era of being called “Witch Girl” and being made fun of anyway, I decided to be how I wanted to be.  

Fuck ‘em.

I’d rather be poked at for things I choose than the things I have no control over.  

Cue my Rogue-style blonde chunk right in the front of my head.  

This was then blue for a while, various shades of “strawberry”, and green for a very short while.   

It’s hard to keep green without it becoming a variety of snots.

Eventually, I dyed the underside of my hair red, so when it was up in a half-ponytail you could see it… 

I very rarely did that though.

Finally, there was the black and red stripes. 

“Make it look like it’s bleeding.” 

When that proved too hard to maintain, straight red or maroon happened.

There were some mishaps, such as the orange frizz…  

  

And some disappointments.  

 “We have… semi demi purple?  It’ll wash out in a day or two.”  

I have since stopped dying my hair due to a combination of fear, lack of funds, lack of time, and straight up laziness. 

I have a few more grey hairs now though. 

You know.

Cause I’m thirty.

Strawberry (and Chocolate Milkshake) Fields Forever

I am by no means a "food blogger," nor do I intend to become one.  
However, I am thankful that Rob went from setting the stove (electric, no less) on fire while boiling water, to making delicious things mostly in the name of my recovery from the food phobia.  

I trust him, which means I eat the things he makes without serious panic about my allergies.  
It is pretty awesome.

So, while Rob DOES also make lovely actual food-food:

and this has probably saved my life...

 I'm also partial to his desserts.  

We'll start off with the Oreo milkshake.  It was in celebration of the Fourth of July, so we were picturing making it red and blue...  

We'll get to that later. 

 All you need for this is some vanilla ice cream, Oreos, and milk.  
Obviously, the cookies could be replaced just as easily as the other stuff can be replaced with lactose-free varieties.  

I can't even give you exact amounts to use of what, as we just kinda...  

"Whatever.  Blend it."  "More of this?"  "Yeah, sure." 

So much blending...

More blending...

Add more cookies...

AND BLEND.

Forever.

Eventually,  you will have a milkshake that may or may not bring all the boys to your yard.  

As stated before, we experimented in food dye...

It made it kind of pretty?

But didn't really work in the way we were hoping...

So fuck it.  Just stir that up.

Delicious.

              *****************************************

And now for my favorite thing he's made so far (and we have strawberries in the house...  Can this happen today?) 

THESE THINGS.

All these photos probably could have used some photoshop, but I'm an honest person, damn it.  This food ain't plastic.

*ahem*

The ingredients you'll need: 

 Cream cheese in either tub or stick form...

 Strawberries...

I prefer my strawberries GMO and bigger than my head.  Feel free to not.

 A metric ass-ton of sugar...

 SPOON

And a plate, if they make it that far.

Once everything but the strawberries are mixed together, you'll have something like this: 

Now for coring!  Just cut out those little strawberry innards. 

Then fill with the mixture...

And arrange. 
Here's what the steps themselves look like: 

 

...and devour.

YAY!

Bathroom Dark: A Special Kind of Dark

I'm going to start this off by stating that generally, even if something is wrong with the bathroom on the floor where I work, it's easy enough to go one floor up or down and find an open set of stalls.  

This one time, however...

Nope.

Break is not long enough for the adventure I went on for my quest to pee. 

It started innocently enough, looking with grim expression at the "Shit's Closed" sign on my floor, shrugging, and moving on. 

I tried the second floor.

Closed.

I tried the fifth floor.

Closed.

I just wanted to pee.

So bad.

My legs were getting tired from using the stairs, but work certainly has elevators.
No problem, right?


Well, I had STARTED by going from one sure-fire floor to another, which meant skipping a bunch. 
By that point, I'd narrowed it down to just having to move one floor up or down.

The thing about going down or up only one floor when there are other people in the elevator to notice is that I will ALWAYS assume I'm being judged as an asshole.

This is because I do this to other people, unless I can make up a good reason for them. 

Because I'm a bad person.

So, I felt pretty judged as I did this myself…

I swear to you, every bathroom on every floor was either being cleaned at that moment or just flat out broken somehow.

Every.

Single.

One.

BUT THEN I found one!

I tried at least three more floors until I came to one that wasn't closed, so I was super excited and relieved (in more ways than one).

Imagine my surprise then when I hear a man yelling outside.

…followed by the thundering herd of ladies rushing out of the bathroom…

And then darkness.


Guy didn't flick off and immediately turn the lights back on again to be like, "Hey, we gotta work on the bathroom…"  

He just shut them off until I got out of the stall. 

Then he turned them back on. 

You know what?  I'm going to take a moment to talk to you about my feelings when it comes to the dark and bathrooms. 
 
And mirrors in dark bathrooms. 








So, I don't know if you know this…

…but I'm a big chicken.

Bok bok bok.

A good show of this was back in the innocent days of Spice Girls and Pogs...

 
...my friends wanted to play the more traditional game of trying to summon a dead woman from a mirror. 

But, like, why?

I've never understood this.

If I could be summoned via mirror, I'd probably be pretty pissed (heh) to keep showing up in bathrooms due to little girls.

Just sayin'.

And when it all started going down, I opted out.

But I opted out in the most dramatic of ways.

Everyone else is giggling, and I'm running out of there like a lunatic going, "Just you wait.  Years in the future, she'll get you.  But me?  Naw, Man.  We have a respect." 

Part of this is that my stress level was pretty high (WAS?  Hahahahahaha My heart would probably just stop entirely if I chilled out for two fucking minutes at this point) and so I'd stress myself into seeing things.  

This included (and kind of still includes) seeing screwed up shit in reflections.

Especially in the dark.

I had gotten it into my head that all mirrors work like two-way mirrors, in that when the lights are out, you can see them back.

Otherwise, "they" are probably just seeing you.


 
That was my logic and-

UGH CRUD, you know, I'm trying to write this at night and I'm just creeping myself out I'M AN ADULT WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME

I used to run from the bathroom after flushing, because I knew when the sound of the flush was done, that was the DING of the timer and the mirror things would come out and eat my feet. 

So, I had to jump onto the bed to avoid them coming after me.

…and my feet.

They were somehow the same as the under-the-bed monsters.  

Closet monsters and I were cool though.

Look, I don't claim to understand the infrastructure of monsterdom, okay?

Actually, I should probably look into what the difference was.

I don't mean like, find an old tome to explain how monster society works, but sitting down and looking at my own logic.

For example, ants creep me the Hell out.

They're like the Borg and quietly invade personal space, so I hate them. 

And worms!  
I'm going to have to get over this one if I ever want to garden EVER.  
I think it's the fact that they're eyeless, limbless creatures that will eat my corpse if given the chance.

But then Silverfish are ACTUALLY creepy looking, right?  
But I looked them up and learned that they're the nerds of the bug world, kind of bullied by everybody else...

Which makes them okay in my book.





SO back to modern day work:
I get chased out of the stall pretty much mid-poop by this guy, and then he has the gall to just stand there in the small doorway.  

Like, Dude, if you want me to leave…

Fuckin' move.