Weirdness meets relaxation

OK, it's time to let the cat out of the bag.

I'm weird.

Oh wait, you already knew that? Silly me, thinking this was some big revelation!

Well, in short, it's always been kind of obvious that I'm a little different. Recently, however, I've been spending some time thinking about how exactly I am a little different. I believe that it may boil down down to just one major point - I'm a die-hard intellectual.

Basically, I am book smart. I am very intelligent in a research paper kind of way. I learn new things quickly and can extend my knowledge easily. I tend to leap to an abstract level of thinking. Like that time I went for extra help in Calculus 1 in college.

Professor: And then the limit approaches infinity.
Me: I have a question.
Professor: Yes?
Me: Since a limit can approach positive or negative infinity, can there be different sizes of infinity?
Professor: Um... this is freshman Calc. Are you sure you're in the right section?

Of course, my booksmarts really do zilch for me in real life. What's the good of developing new theories of urbanization if you're too socially awkward to really express those theories? And reading about extrusion technologies in the production of snack foods unfortunately does not actually make dinner and put it on the table. In fact, having a bookish bent is usually much more of a pain than it should be. It makes it almost impossibly to experience anything for the experience itself without jumping immediately to thinking about the experience.

Everybody else: I just bought the newest Chobani - it's apricot and so good!!!
Me: Even with the new plant expansion into Idaho, I wonder if Chobani can really keep its market share in the next few years. When Pepsi branches out in dairy offerings, your brand might really be in trouble. Maybe they should sell out now?

Yep, this is Pepsi's collaborative yogurt brand. Trust me on this one.

Needless to say, it's very hard for me to stop and smell the roses because I'm too busy measuring the rose stems For Science.

At any rate, I've been trying to do more Normal People Things as of late. Things like going to the pool and not analyzing the demographics of the pool's attendees. Things like watching a movie and ignoring historical anachronisms. You know, Normal People Things.

So last weekend, we decided to do a Normal People Thing. We decided to go to the beach - and enjoy it. We decided to go to Point Pleasant for the day.

The morning started out rocky enough. If I'm stressed about something, I tend to get upset easily, and I was stressed over going to the beach and forcing myself to do nothing all day. So I gave Dan an earful about sleeping in until 730 AM instead of 7 AM. What was he, the king or something? We had to beat crowds, seriously!

Then we realized we didn't have things like beach towels. So after we ate breakfast, we had to go on over to Target and get beach towels. By the time we left Bethlehem, it was already around 10 AM.

Traffic happened.

When all was said and done and the car was parked half a mile away from the actual boardwalk and I had finished changing into my swimsuit in the free public bathrooms (never again, if I can help it; I've learned my lesson well), we finally walked onto the beach about 2 PM. Yeah. So much for spending the day.

But once I actually got on the beach and down to the water, I actually forgot everything and... relaxed.

I spent the next two hours on the beach in utter bliss, collecting stones and shells, burying my legs in the sand, eating incredibly overpriced fish and chips, drinking incredibly overpriced lemonade, and watching this absolutely adorable Hispanic family with five kids who were hanging out to our right. It was beautiful, and nary a thought of the development of leisure culture in America passed through my mind for the entire afternoon.

I am rarely able to relax like that. My brain never stops moving from morning until night. I'm always thinking or figuring out something. Even when I "relax" at home, I'm usually playing Civilization... because it's a game that's fun but I still need to be thinking. (Watching TV, by comparison, can actually be very stressful for me because it's a much more passive way to relax.) Part of the reason for my hyperactive brain is the ADHD, I'm sure. The other part of the reason for my major brain waves is my difficulty not overanalyzing everything I see or experience. But relaxing... it was wonderful. Maybe all the normal people lying on their beach chairs listening to music and getting sunburned a few feet away from me had a point about the beach, after all.

Unfortunately for my relaxing revelation, however, Dan was not huge on the beach,  because:

1. If you went with your high school band to Hawaii for a week when you were sixteen, all beaches kind of pale in comparison.
2. There might be trash on the beach.
3. There might be trash in the water.
4. Sand irritates eczema.
5. Point Pleasant seems to attract mostly families, not hot babes in bikinis.

So he mostly stayed on the blanket and read historical novels on the Nook.

But I had fun, at least. Dan says he'll be glad to take me back... when he works up the stamina. In his defense, he did drive both ways.

I took all the stones that I collected at the beach and put them into a cute little candle holder I had lying around. It's sitting on my desk right next to our wedding picture. A reminder of relaxation... right next to a reminder of stress! I kid, I kid.

It smells a little funny, too. Just like the guy in the wedding picture.

A little bit of history

I have a dirty little secret.

When the day is done and I've finished reading about Honduran banana plantations and I've finished analyzing the marketing of the latest Greek yogurt offerings, I sit down at my dining room table and...

...I read the latest Elle magazine.

Yeah, I know, it is so not me.

But I love my fashion mags! My favorite is Elle because the writing is actually excellent and the material goes beyond the normal affordable-versions-of-insanely-not-affordable-clothing articles. It makes me wish that I could be hot and willowy and have more people skills so I can hop over to India and write a wistful review of the peaceful architecture of the exotic former colony. And yes, they actually write like kinda like that, just better.

At any rate, I love reading Elle, but I don't necessarily give a hoot about fashion that isn't written up beautifully in some glossy that's lying next to my dinner. I don't do things like fashion shows, because I'd just laugh at the ridiculousness, and I don't do things like fashion, because good luck getting me into something that's made for humans of average-or-above vertical height (and good luck getting me into something made for those of us with below-average horizontal width). But last night I was reading the newest Elle and a dress caught my eye. And by caught my eye, I mean that I choked on my chili and coughed some black beans onto the page.

The dress was from the Dolce and Gabanna Fall 2013 runway show. For some reason, the powers that be decided that it would be a great idea to slap some Byzantine art on a couture frock and call it a day. I think I saw my favorite-to-hate Civilization 4 AI, Justinian, walk down the runway a couple of times during the show. The dresses are actually quite beautiful, but the historical motifs are just enough for me to go all fashion nerd for D&G.

Even the crown is so Justinian. It breathes evil.

I actually watched this thing twice, so enthralled was I that somebody else in the world gave a hoot about the pre-1000 AD Dark Ages. It made me slightly uncomfortable, though. I felt like I was a willing participant in the popular demolition of an individual culture. Kind of like how all fashion inspired by African clothing is "tribal couture". I voiced my concerns to Dan.

"Dear," I said, twirling my hair around my index finger, deep in thought. "I can't help but feel like I'm desecrating Byzantine culture by watching this show. What do you think?"

Dan sighed.

"Dear," he soothed, "It's OK. They're all dead."

"Oh."

So please watch and enjoy the show. And just in case anyone gets any funny ideas, I had to check the D&G website several times to make sure that it was Gabanna, not Gabbana.

Birthday spoils

In honor of my birthday, I tried my very best to go throw caution to the wind this morning and waste some money on stuff I didn't actually need immediately. I really did try, but it was tricky.

First I went to Old Navy to look at shirts and quickly decided that the material of the chosen shirt was too flimsy for $16.94.

Then I went to Ross and almost bought my first pair of maternity pants. Not because I'm actually pregnant, but because they were sweatpants for $6.99. I decided that I had more dignity than that and did not purchase the pants.

Then I went to the Christmas Tree Shoppes and almost bought the makings of a cute summery centerpiece for our (bare) dining room table. But then I realized that I don't actually like nautical stuff, so I left empty-handed.

Then I went to Target. And found the back-to-school section.

Now if there's one thing Grace loves, it's office products. I love sticky notes, I love pens, I love rulers and protractors, and I love arranging it all so it looks pretty. Most of all, however, I love composition notebooks. I tend to jot down my thoughts either on a computer or in a notebook almost every day. When I'm feeling especially anal, I'll include an index in my notebook. It's actually quite useful. If I ever wanted to recall what my New Year's Resolutions 2012 were or what the heck I was thinking when I developed my own Suburban Growth Flowchart I can turn to page 13 or whatever and go to town. Anyway, I'm rambling. I just love composition notebooks.

I walked out of Target with eight cheap-o composition notebooks, one dry-erase board for my side of the office, new dry-erase markers to replace the ones ruined when my kid who eats everything ate my old dry-erase markers, and some chalk for the kids to use next week. My duty is done. Now I'll regress back into Scrooge until next year.

Treating myself right....

Tomorrow I turn 28! A momentous occasion!

Ever since I was little, people would ask me what I wanted for my birthday, and I honestly never knew what to say. Not only do I have some, ahem, esoteric interests, but I always have trouble putting what I want into words. Of course, that means that people will go with the safe, boring birthday present, which is the reason I got three separate candle sets for my fifteenth birthday.

I think I have trouble figuring out what kinds of birthday gifts I'd like to have because most of the things I really want, money can't buy. I want a teaching job, which money can't buy. I want to have more confidence, which money can't buy. I want to be able to do my own point-of-sale trade analyses at area supermarkets, which money definitely can't buy. OK, if you have enough money you could simply farm out the trade analysis from some marketing research corporation, but that would take a boatload of cash to actually pull off.

So I have decided that this year, for my birthday, I will treat myself to....

....get ready....

....drumbeats....

.....more drumbeats.....

......maybe even a gong.....

...a Starbucks iced coffee drink, laced with sugar, chocolate sauce, and whipped cream! It will be as overpriced as all get out and will make me feel twice as hot just to hold the disposable cup!

Then I'll go home and avoid washing the dishes, just for good measure.

How do you live a life, anyway?

I've always had this problem. Some of it probably has to do with my raging ADHD, some of it probably has to do with as-of-yet-undiagnosed brain chemicals swirling around in my head, and some of it probably has to do with my extreme shyness and general lack of a social network. But it's a real head-scratcher for me when it comes down to it.

So I'm Grace, I have a husband, I'm almost twenty-eight, I work a low-skill job that I find strangely fulfilling, I like to eat, and I like to learn. So now what?

Is this what life's all about?

I don't really know how to live my life to the fullest. Actually, I don't really know how to live my life, period. For most of my life, I've swung between two extremes - either I'm involved with something and checkin' off my to-do list like crazy, or I'm sitting on the couch, staring at my computer and thinking so what should I do with my free afternoon?

How should I live my life?

For the past few years, I've treated life like one of my favorite things in the world - a to-do list. I love to plan and think and organize and get things done (certain kinds of things, at least). I'll plan and organize my life down to the millisecond, if you let me. Sometimes I'll even do a task for the express purpose of checking it off my list, I'm that bad.

But this is my problem: Once my list is done, the kitchen is organized, I've put out my clothes for the next day, and I've eaten the correct number of calories, I'm kind of lost. After everything that needs to be done is done, what do I do then? My jerk reaction is to sit on the couch and play computer games or watch TV. Sometimes, if I'm feeling adventurous, I'll browse articles from the Journal of Sociology. Unfortunately, that only fills some of the time. What do I do with the rest of my time? What do I do with the rest of my life?

I've come to the conclusion that living my life like it's a to-do list doesn't really work for me. Once the stuff is all done, I feel like my life is all done. And that's just depressing, to say the least.

I guess I could live my life just because it's, well, life. But how do I do that? Isn't living life a lot of doing stuff? How do I separate the to-dos from the done? How do you do things like "have fun" if such things don't have a set purpose or a set beginning or a set end? Heck, what are the rules of life?

I have no clue.

Tackling the clothing monster

Disorganization and inefficiency kill me (I know, I know). Of course, I'm also a lazy bum, so we're kind of disorganized and inefficient anyway. Thankfully, Dan is completely disorganized and inefficient and makes me look like a total neat freak (he is very proud of that fact, too). We actually don't have too much stuff. In fact, we don't even know what to do with most of the rooms in our house. But when we moved, most of our stuff just got shoved into random spaces and wasn't really organized. It's not the biggest job ever to organize, but it's really been weighing on me lately.

Today I tackled our clothing situation. Thanks to my uncle's generous donation of a new bedroom set and our purchase of a Lehigh dorm dresser, we have a lot of clothing space. For two people, we have the following.

1. A double vanity with six huge drawers
2. A wardrobe with three huge drawers and a larger space up top for clothes that need to be hung up
3. Two medium-sized closets
4. A chest with five medium-sized drawers

As of this afternoon, this is how we had divided the space up.

1. Grace has the entire vanity
2. Dan has the entire wardrobe
3. Grace has one closet
4. Dan absolutely refuses to use the other closet, and it was pretty much empty
5. Dan has the entire chest of drawers

This situation drove me bonkers. I have a lot of clothes, but I'm not exactly the snappiest dresser. I feel I have a lot of weird, old, tight, loose, or faded clothing that I don't really want to own. But in all honesty, it was Dan's clothes that were pushing me over the edge. First of all, how could one guy have that many T-shirts? He had six drawers just full of T-shirts, I'm not kidding! Secondly, why did he feel the need to infect not only our bedroom with his old XXXXXXXXL T-shirts (that one I am kidding about.... his old shirts are mostly XL) but also the chest of drawers in the guest bedroom? Finally, what was wrong with the second bedroom closet? Why was it somehow unusable?

And so it was that Pinterest saved our marriage.

 The pink capris also helped to save our marriage

Unfortunately, I did not design this particular war of placing folded clothes into a drawer. That secret will remain deep within the bowels of the internet. But today, on a whim, I decided that I would try to implement what Pinterest had so kindly suggested. What you're looking at above are all my shirts, all my shorts, all my capris, and all my summer-weight jeans. In one drawer. Oh yeah!

Flush with victory, I tackled all of the clothes we own in a desperate attempt to regain organizational control. When the lint settled, I was victorious. This is how our space is currently divided.

1. Grace has four drawers in the double vanity. One of those drawers is devoted solely to dressy scarves, so I can go down to three. The T-shirts Dan wears most often are in one drawer. One drawer is empty.
2. Dan still has the entire wardrobe.
3. Grace has one closet.
4. Dan still refuses to use the other closet.
5. The chest of drawers is empty.

I'm happy. We are using space more efficiently, there's room for expansion, and Dan doesn't have to use the guest room for clothing storage at all (he explained to me that it was easier to walk across the hall than to use the closet... somehow). Ah, organization.

Making my space

I've been trying to pretty up my space a bit lately. We finally have a home, now I just need to find the motivation to spend some money to decorate and organize. Trust me, I love the organizing part, but it's tough for non-creative me to decorate well, and it's even harder for me to spend money on something that isn't absolutely necessary.

Today I breathed new life into my desk area. This is how it looked... before.

Sadly, this picture was badly photobombed by Dan

Both being kids who love our reading and writing, it was decided when we moved that both Dan and I would have a desk of our own. He has a traditional desk that you might be able to see at the far end of this photo. My "desk," in the foreground, was actually our old kitchen table (and it was Dan's parents' kitchen table before that!). My big thing about desks is that I like to go back and forth between my computer screen and whatever else I have on the side. The empty space underneath allows me to swivel back and forth with full freedom, so I love it.

So that's my desk up there... before. Before there was light. Before the moon and the stars shone down from the heavens. As you can see, it's kind of messy. I did have organizers but it still looks... messy.

But now it looks better, like this!

Dang it, he's in the picture again!

I went on over to TJMaxx today and bought the cute gray organizer thing you can see in the middle of my desk. It was thirteen bucks, but I gritted my teeth and did the deed. I moved most of my pens and scissors and stuff over to the organizer and left the sub-par pens in the wire organizer (I'm very particular about the quality of my pens). I have a place for my envelopes, stationary, and stamps. I used some plain bookends to take my many notebooks out of the wire organizer and stand them up on the desk - I think it looks much more neat this way. You'll notice the blue, pink, and yellow sticky notes on the front of the organizer. I attached those the good old-fashioned way, with tape!

Finally, you'll see a framed photo of a couple on their wedding day on the right side of the desk. The frame was actually given to us for our wedding, but up until a few hours ago it still held a very nice photo of Generic White Guy And Generic White Girl Smiling At Each Other. We displayed the photo for a while, just for laughs. However, it's now time to decorate the desk with a nice portrait of painful realism, so there ya go.

Offal and more

Somebody made a hilarious music video about the weird things Asians eat.

As an honorary Asian, I'm proud to admit that I've eaten about 50% of the foods featured in the video, including the intestines and blood sausages.

No words, no problem

Sometimes, autism can really make your life suck hard. Not all the time, and not for all kids, but sometimes autism is a real obstacle.

Take, for example, one of my students this summer. He has a bad case of the cute and an even worse case of the parts of autism nobody's fond of. This guy has no way of communicating his wants and needs. OK, I lied. He does have three ways that work for him on occasion. Here's how he can currently communicate, and my best guess at a translation.

1. Annoying, exaggerating crying. Translation: "I want something you're not giving me! My stomach hurts! I don't want to play with this toy! I'm bored, come play with me!"
2. Shoving, hitting, or kicking. Translation: "I don't want to do that job. I don't want to play with that toy! I'm in a bad mood! I'm bored, come play with me."
3. Grabbing. Translation: "I want that cookie and I want it now. I don't want to do this job so I'm going to do this instead. I want a high five!"

I can't see this working in the real world.

This little guy doesn't seem to point at what he wants. He doesn't know any sign language. He certainly doesn't talk. So what then?

Well, if you have about $400 lying around, you could try Boardmaker. Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of cold hard cash lying around, so I came up with a different option.

First, I Googled and downloaded the best picture I could find of something my student seems to really like... Goldfish crackers.

Goldfish unfortunately not to scale

I printed out this picture and mounted it on the back of piece of an old manila folder. I got me some real Goldfish crackers and I got myself my student, already doing his annoying crying thing in anticipation of the slave labor that he would shortly be required to do. Then I performed the following ritual with my student, which is totally not by the book and dead speech therapists across the world are probably still rolling over in their graves.

1. I showed my student the picture, touched it, and said "Goldfish" when I touched the picture. He's autistic. He looked for three seconds and then continued  with the annoying crying.

2. I showed my student an actual Goldfish cracker, touched it, and said "Goldfish" when I touched the cracker. Ah, food. Maybe slave labor wasn't all that bad. My student stopped crying and looked at the cracker.

3. I put the Goldfish picture on the table in front of the student. Thankfully, he didn't seem too put out that the actual cracker was no longer in sight. He looked at the picture.

4. I took my student's hand and physically helped him to pick up the Goldfish picture and put it in my other hand. When the picture touched my hand, I said "Goldfish" and immediately gave him an actual cracker. At this point, my student looked like he was positively enjoying the slave labor.

5. I repeated the process a few times. He enjoyed the crackers, immensely. 

6. I put the Goldfish picture on the table and waited for my student to give me the picture. He did it independently! He got a bright new cracker every time he gave me the picture for his trouble.

No problem if you can't talk, dude, we've got you covered.

Of course, soon after I had finished ooh-ing and ah-ing over my student's first words, he started the annoying crying again, and I had no idea what he was trying to tell me. You can't win them all, I guess.

Today, he communicates that he wants a Goldfish cracker! Tomorrow, he'll communicate that I'm singing the wrong version of the Days of the Week song! The sky's the limit from here on out!

Maybe we can even get him to spell, too...

Welcome to my brain

It was hot outside, boiling inside, and the history books were calling my name. I definitely did not want to write my book report. Fourth grade was too short as it was. But it wasn't just that, I almost felt like I couldn't write that book report. Almost.

"Mom?" I asked, curiosity getting the better of me.
"Yes?"
"Do you think I have ADHD?"
"No," said my mom, annoyingly matter-of-factly. "I think you just don't want to write your report."

Burn.

In a way, she was sorta-kinda right. I didn't want to write that report. It was boring. And because it was boring, I couldn't focus and thought it was more boring. The cycle continued until it was late and I got a B for procrastination.

In grad school, I worked full time and went to school full time. My papers were always on time and done perfectly. This, however, was normal goody-two-shoes behavior. What made it a little on the excessive side was that my papers were usually done about three weeks before they were due, sometimes before the semester started, if I could get my hands on the syllabus early enough. I had laser focus, and I used it. After I was done at work and school for the day, I'd come home in the evening, throw my books on my three-foot-tall pile o' stuff on my bedroom floor or my five-foot-tall pile o' stuff on my bedroom couch and zone out on the CIA World Factbook or something equally nerdy.

Being the observant person that I am, I eventually asked myself the question that was so glaringly obvious it might as well have been spelled out in gigantic, flashing, Times Square neon letters.

What gives?

How come I could write a ten-page paper in two hours but couldn't bring myself to throw out that pile of Wal-Mart receipts on the floor next to the trashcan? Why did I feel sorry for myself if I had an A- average and then forget to wash my clothes for a week? Heck, why did I do so well in school in college when I totally forgot every deadline for every assignment in high school?

After performing some detective work, I self-diagnosed with raging ADHD, got myself on some meds, and chilled out a bit. Well, I tried to chill out a bit, but it was hard. Like, really, really hard. But I finally figured it out.

ADHD stands for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or eight-year-old male child, take your pick. And it's a total misnomer, in my opinion. Hey, look at me. Would you call my pathological overachieving an attention deficit? Not unless you wanted to get a major earful from yours truly. Or would you describe me as hyperactive? Pshh, no. Once again, here's Mom to illustrate.

"If I were an animal, vegetable, or mineral, but not me, what would I be, Mom?" said my sister, giggling.
"I think you'd be a watermelon!" Mom responded. "Very summery, sweet, and of course, very pink!"
"Pink!" squealed my sister.
"Well," I said, poking my nose out of Little Women. "What would I be, do you think?"
Mom thought for a second.
"I think," she said, with all seriousness. "I think that you'd be a log in the forest."
"A log?" I was a little bit sad. I didn't like pink, but logs were kinda... boring.
"Yeah," Mom went on. "You'd be a log. I mean, you don't really move around too much. You really love to read your books and that's what I always see you doing. So that's why I think you'd be a log."

Yeah, I'm totally not hyperactive.

So let's fix the ADHD misnomer as it occurs in Grace's brain, shall we?

Let's change attention deficit to stimulation sensitive. My brain needs to have the appropriate amount of stimulation at all times, or it will make its own. I can have too little stimulation, too much stimulation, or just the right amount!

When my brain is not stimulated enough (I'm looking at you, stupid book report), two things can happen. Either I'll wander off and look for something more interesting, or my thoughts will drift off to something that I find more interesting. This is where I tend to get told I'm just a lazy bum. Basically, if something doesn't catch my eye, I'm just not stimulated enough by it because I find it boring. And if it's not stimulating enough, it's very hard for me to focus. Thus, faced with a book report, I was not stimulated enough. I compensated for the lack of stimulation by doing things I found more stimulating, like reading more Little Women or thinking about reading more Little Women. In college, cleaning my room was not stimulating. I compensated by focusing on the more stimulating parts of my college experience, like writing papers and writing more papers (shut up, I hear you over there).

My brain can also have too much stimulation. Take shopping for clothes, for example. I learned long ago that after about an hour of clothes shopping I started snapping at everyone, getting anxious, walking around in circles (literally), and feeling like I wanted to just lie down and sleep then and there under the socks display. All the colors would seem to bright, the lights would be too bright or not bright enough, and the music would always be way too loud. There was so much going on my brain just couldn't filter it all at one time. A good dose of focusing on just one stimulating thing helped to cool me off - like playing with my phone or listening to music on headphones.

When I have just the right amount of stimulation, I'm engaged, can focus on things that I find understimulating for limited amounts of time, and am generally on the ball. Unfortunately, this state mainly occurs about thirty minutes after I take my meds. It's rare that this state can be found in the wild, but I'll take what I can get.

And finally, let's change hyperactivity to hyperfocus. If I find something that stimulates my brain, I tend to stay with it. Whatever it is, I get really, really into it. In college, I hyperfocused on my grades. When I was younger, I hyperfocused on reading. Now that I've embraced the nerd that I am, I hyperfocus on geography statistics. I can get really into interactive maps and I can spend hours doing it. So many hours, in fact, that I forget to go to the gym. Such is life.

Thus, our acronym becomes SSHD. Catchy.

Aging

Recently, I've discovered that I'm getting old.

This shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone, especially me. Unlike everybody else, I never wanted to grow up and kind of dreaded my birthday every year. By the time I was in college, I would occasionally calculate how many more years I had left to act like a kid and not be totally creepy about it. I finally gave up trick-or-treating at 25, when I started to look like I was older than 15. Although I never wanted to get older, I always looked much younger than I actually was, so it was simple to trick myself into believing I was still at an age where I could get completely giddy over going through the drive-thru and get away with it.

It wasn't until I was 26 that I finally accepted that I was... 26. At that point, I had to. If you're looking for a quick way to kill any stray idealizations about the happy lives of people under the age of 18, go spend a few months with juvenile delinquents on suicide watch and report back. I guarantee that you won't be the same person you were before you went to jail. After three months inside locked doors, not only did I rapidly age into my twenties, but I also started finding these annoying grey things hidden away in my hairline. Drat.

So I'll be 28 in a little over a week.

I am starting to majorly gray at my roots. My grandma was totally gray by 30, so I'm told, so I guess I have hundreds of thousands of small reasons to feel blessed that I am aging gracefully. It didn't help matters that I only started worrying about things like how my hair looked and how short I looked in that length of jeans until just about a year ago, so every new part I try out makes me look grayer than I actually am. My hair is also thinning near the top of my scalp, which might be even worse than the grays, since it makes me look like George Washington (seriously - we both have triangle head, him because it was stylish, me because I can't get my thin flyaways to do what I want).

My joints are getting stiffer by the day. It feels like they get locked into place if I sit or lie in one position for longer than five minutes at a time. I'll come down the stairs in the morning limping like I've pulled a muscle - not too likely, given that I snooze like the dead. Sometimes I'll be walking along and all of a sudden my knee will just give out and I'll stumble and be awkward like that. When I was younger, I used to joke that all my aches and pains were just my arthritis flaring up - but then I was told it really was arthritis, Lyme disease arthritis-like symptoms. Ten years later, I'm wondering if my stiffness is the real thing or just a sign of getting older and melding more freely with the couch. Who knows.

And of course, the irony inherent in all my aches and pains of growing older is achingly obvious - I'm not actually old. I'm a youngin', in fact! If the stats play out right, I have a good fifty years of getting older left to live. But right now, I'm at the oldest that I've ever been in my life, and my future is measured not in years, but in boxes of hair color and bottles of anti-inflammatory meds. Seriously, just bury me already.

The serial blogger strikes again

Please bear with me as I attempt to follow through with yet another blog. I enjoy writing, I have at least some spare time, and I could always go for playing around with HTML for blog templates. Blogs I've attempted over the past few years have an annoying tendency to go kaput within about a month, and honestly, it shouldn't really happen that way. I'm going with the (probably dead-on) assumption that my blogs that I began because I wanted to write about a particular subject just couldn't go head-to-head with my raging ADHD, and maybe just a little because of post perfectionism. Just a little.

Thus, I've decided to start a blog in which I will be writing about whatever the heck I want to write about. Mundane daily diaries! Funny kid stories! Google searching for dummies! The history of the banana! Book reviews! Lifting stats! And everything and anything else that won't get me fired or locked in jail!

I'd love it if you could read some of my stuff on occasion. Not only will it provide me with the egotistical fodder I will probably need to keep on typing, but you may indeed learn a lot about the fascinating banana. It really is a very interesting fruit, no lie.