Pills, Work, Words, Iceman

Every morning I go through the arduous task of trying to swallow my birth control pill. From the time I put it in my mouth, to the time I actually manage to swallow it, always differs. This morning it was only like, fifteen seconds. Yesterday morning it took me almost a full minute. I don't have the easiest time taking pills but I really didn't think a pill this tiny would be so difficult.

I have to have liquid in my mouth before I can put any kind of pill in it, cause I'm insane and I imagine that if I put the pill in first it'll just sit on my tongue like so much dead weight and no matter how much I drink it'll never move until it dissolves and then I'll be stuck with that awful taste. So I take a drink first and then imagine the pill is just floating around in the there trying to find the back of my throat cause it wants to go home. (In this analogy, home is heaven and the back of my throat is the guiding light. It's fucked up, I know.)

Sometimes I have to take a second drink cause I've managed to swallow all of the first sip without taking the pill so it's just sitting there drying out and making me feel sick. Sometimes I use a really cold beverage and by the time I manage to get the stupid pill down that sip can be best described as lukewarm. (Occasionally, hot. Gross.) Sometimes it gets stuck between my back molars and the inside of my cheek, that happened three consecutive mornings last week. I was angry. Once I thought I had taken it, but it turns out it started to dissolve and had reached the point where when it was trapped between my molar and mouth, it was so tiny that I didn't even notice I hadn't actually swallowed it.

Sometimes I can take the pill with just a handful of water from the bathroom sink. If you've never taken a handful of water from a faucet before, what have you been doing with your entire life? I bet you also use an actual cup to rinse your mouth after brushing your teeth. You pretentious ponce. It's not a whole bunch of water, in that handful, is the point I was trying to get at. I used to take a super tiny pill with basically the equivalent amount of water, and it was no trouble. I did it just last Sunday. Why is my mouth-throat-water-pill-situation never the same?

Those are just the issues with the birth control. I take vitamins too. Half of them I chew. They're not chewables. I have some issues with swallowing small objects. Which... I guess is... good? At least I know I'll never be inclined to eat like, Legos, (Lego's?) or something. (At 25. When the pallet finds Legos most delectable.)


A couple days ago at work some broad asked me to help her retrieve a password that had been sent to her email. I saw it was a yahoo address, I directed her to the yahoo website. She said, do I type it in here? and gestured to some random point on screen. I corrected her and prepared myself for the absurdity that I knew was forthcoming. We go through her logging in process and it says the username and password is incorrect. I asked her to try typing in the password again and she says, I don't remember it. I ask if she was trying to tell me that the password she was trying to get was for her email. She says no and gestures wildly to some lottery scratch-off cards she has in front of her, eventually explaining (I made a lot of helpful guesses in this game of 'guess what this string of mumbles and murmurs means'.) that she had entered an email address on this website and that they had sent a password to this email for her to use on the same website. Or some such nonsense.

Long story short (too late): she didn't even have an email address. She had made one up for the purpose of that website, and if that email already existed then she's out of luck because somebody else has the password she was looking for.


The other day, while killing time at the slowest branch at work, I found one of the loveliest definitions to an already lovely word.

    suspire:

1. to breathe
2. to sigh

"And from that one intake of fire/ All creatures still warmly suspire" - Robert Frost
(Thank you Free Dictionary.)

I love the word 'wherein.' I think it's so magical. It sounds like an adventure awaits, and not just any adventure. This particular adventure has sword fights, and eye patches, and a rambling old fool who turns out to be the rightful lord of the land, and a damsel who for once isn't in any distress. Speaking of which, one of my favorite things ever in film is the scene in Enchanted when Giselle slays the dragon, because I'm bored of women always finding themselves in trouble and then having to wait for a white knight to save them. Save yourself, for god sake. You're better than that. 

This brings me to another point, RE The Following. Can anyone tell me why every female character, even the FBI agent whose name I don't remember because that's how much of an impression her character has made on me, is either a victim or a psycho? Also, I don't honestly care about Joe Carroll. I want to know what's up with Harper, and I want to know what's up with Bobby Drake. I want detailed back stories and I want them now. Bobby Drake is having some issues right now, everyone knows that. Why is it that when he lashes out in an unconventional interrogation Harper's all, what's up with you man? Are you kidding me, Harper? That dude was forced into a Fight Club because he knew where your lady love was and they practically killed him when he wouldn't say. He is going through some shit right now, Harper. He needs time to process and talk to a therapist.

To be fair, I honestly have no idea how much time has passed on this show so maybe he did have sufficient time off to deal with his problems and he just didn't? I don't know. What I do know is that the writers are making me angry and I'm only continuing to watch cause of that reveal at the end of the last episode that made me go, oh-HO SNAP RYAN HARPER you're hardcore! Also, I would have sex with Bobby Drake.

Alright that's it.

Wherein I Talk About Words As If They're People

I've been encouraging people to read my blog lately. This is absolutely frightening behavior for me. As a general rule, I don't even tell people about anything I write, or if I do it's in passing and if they ask about it I sort of gloss over it. "Oh you write a blog?" "Yeah. So I was doing the laundry yesterday and I found a receipt for Sheetz, which I haven't been to in like, a month. How the hell long has it been since I washed those jeans?" "You mentioned short stories?" "I basically just write anything, to clear some space in my head so I have more room to analyze how Sherlock survived that fall last season."

Things like that.

But I keep reconnecting with people who seem to think there's something interesting about me, and it's making me think there might actually be something interesting about me. So I'm all, yes read my work and help validate my existence. Except that isn't how I feel anymore. I used to think that in order for me to feel confident in my work and about my work that people had to like it. In a way, a very small way, I do still think that, but I've found myself at a point in life recently where I can feel confident regardless of whether people will like it. This world is nowhere near as small as people keep saying it is. It is incredibly vast, and there are so many people on it, and they all have different tastes. So if I'm going to be a successful author, I can't keep writing in the hopes of making everyone love me. I have to write so that I love me, and keep believing that the audience I'm trying to reach is also trying to find me.

The other day I woke up with residual writer's block from the previous evening when I had apparently exhausted all of my mental faculties, which culminated in my writing the same sentence almost word for word three different times with the exception of the last effort, where I actually wrote "insert character name here" instead of the characters name. Which I knew. So I decided it was time for bed. Woke up the next morning feeling the same exhaustion but instead of taking a break from writing and waiting for it to come to me, as is my usual approach, I made myself a cup of coffee (cream, no sugar), opened up the document, and forced myself to write. Forty-five minutes later I had written just over one thousand words. And not only did I not absolutely despise them, they were actually kind of okay. Maybe I'm growing.

I forgot to mention this, or maybe I didn't, but I surpassed my goal for November of 50,000 words by 7. I set the whole thing aside and didn't come back to it until a few days before Christmas. When I deleted more than half of them. That's right. I went through each story, found the really awful parts, found the not-so-good parts, found the parts that were kind of good but felt forced, I even found some really good parts that in a different context would've worked really well. And I deleted the fuck out of them.

When I told a friend about this, it was like I had slapped her in the face, In all honesty, this reaction never occurred to me. At some point very recently, I decided that if I keep holding on to things in the hopes of them getting better I'll never be able to get to the things that are already better, the things that don't need so much work and hand-holding, the things that take so much more time than they should. Writing should be like being in love. Sometimes it's really easy and it just makes sense and it doesn't take any effort whatsoever, it just happens. Sometimes it does take effort, and it is work, but both parties are working, both parties want the best for each other. The things I had to let go of, they weren't working with me. They didn't want to help. They didn't have my best interests in mind. I had theirs in mind, and I knew they would be better off without me. The thing that felt most natural to me, was deleting them. So I set them free.

Maybe they'll come back. But if they don't, it's not the end of the world. If they don't, we'll both still manage.