It’s not you, it’s me.

I’m doing a lot of things I didn’t think I’d do. That first line, for instance. Why do people say that? But I’m not breaking up with you, blog, though I don’t know if an explanation for my neglect is what you’re looking for. It’s been an interesting semester, and I wonder if I had the same discipline in years past maintaining this blog during this semester, . . .  I don’t know. Something had to give. A lot of things did.

Other people have come into my life, blog. When I make friends, that doesn’t seem to distract me from blogging, but this instance — this individual –  seems to be an exception. And that’s because I spend a lot of time with this person, time I could have been spending on blogging.

Don’t get me wrong: I still love to blog, blog. But there’s more out in the world to love. But you probably mean that I can always blog about the things I love, and I can understand your point.

Consider what I’ve blogged about: Everyday, mundane, natural. My complaints, depression; idiot boys, crazy and wonderful friends and school things.

I’m beginning to understand, blog.

I should be keeping better track of this time of my life.

One semester left, and it’s going to be crazy.

I took the GRE on November 22, and my math and verbal raw scores were very close. Either I’m equally deficient or equally genius in those categories.

About 20 pages of stuff are due this week. I don’t really feel like writing for any of my classes.  It is the last week of class, and as I type this, I’m finally feeling some anxiety about finishing the semester well. Strongly. Without failing.

Classes this semester were terrific and fun. I learned so much, and I wish I cared enough about grades to let the work reflect just how much I enjoyed classes. When I went. Which was most of the time. I’d rather just sit and absorb, but for some reason someone decided that writing papers as an English major would be a good evaluation of academic progress. Which: fine.

I could continue writing about my classes and friends, or I could try being one of those annoying blogs that goes on and on about a boyfriend. What a great guy he is. I could document about all the PDA we avoid, except when he walks me to my door at night, and then it’s really short, accompanied by a whispered but confident expression of deep and mutual emotion.

If I kept it up the whole semester, it would have started out as a weekly report of weekly incidents, but then it would have progressed to a weekly or daily recounting of daily events. Hours spent together, every. Single. Day. Conversation about family and books and movies and music. And life. Initial nervousness turning into pure comfortability leading to talks about a future together and togethering together.

It’s really none of the world’s business, this guy. All the world needs to know is that he’s incredible and caring and thoughtful, and he lets me be goofy, and I let him make me happy. But that’s obvious even outside of the context of our dating. It’s not like I need a rooftop tour to shout about it or announce that he’s coming to Florida to meet my family at Christmastime.

It’s serious, blog. You deserved to know.

And I am trying to tell you.

I am also about to watch another episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Sometimes I’m weird.

On Wednesday, I had a work bowling party. Nine of us came to the BYU Games Center, and I only knew one other person. We divided ourselves into two lanes, and I ended up going third out of the five people on the right lane.

So, at first, whenever it wasn’t my turn, I talked to the one person I knew, but as the game progressed, I loosened up a little and started at least commenting on other people’s games.

Also, I’m really good at being excited for people. I will cheer for you and cheer for you, and I will feel bad for you if I know that you really wanted that strike, or if the gutter was particularly merciless.

Anyway, all that outwardness didn’t stop me from winning. By 50 points over the 2nd-place person. Of course I wasn’t boasty (of course?), and I especially don’t like attention from people I don’t know, so I made sure to deflect attention and accept compliments and the quickly shoot compliments back. The outwardness didn’t help the awkwardness.

It’s sometimes really hard for me to accept compliments, but I do practice at saying “thank you” and actually feeling grateful.

Then later on in the week I admitted to someone that I can be anal retentive.

I spent most of this morning packing up my room before going on a bike ride with some friends. When we got back, I popped some popcorn and we relaxed a bit before moving my stuff to my new place. We laughed a lot about some things, and I laughed until I cried about a thing that I can’t talk about here just in case somebody’s somebody happens to come upon this blog. It’s just hilarious to me.

So, we packed up my friends’ van and moved a lot of things over to the new place.

Then we returned to the old place and saw that I left my NYC subway map on the wall. I removed the pushpins and took down the map and began folding it while my friends were telling a story or texting their family or something. When they finished, I asked them, “Do you know what makes me so happy?” And, they let me answer: “When I can fold a map, and it isn’t wonky and it can lie perfectly smooth when it’s nicely folded.” And they were like, “Uh, sure.”

Then we went out for sushi, because my friends are the best for helping me move, plus one of my friends received a text coupon for a buy-one-roll-get-one-free deal, so we had to take advantage of it. The food was great, and I might have eaten too much, because the rice in my stomach is staging a coup. Too crowded. Overpopulated. Not equal benefits for everyone.

After dinner, we stopped by the new place again to drop off a few other things. We looked at my bed, which was on cinder blocks so that I could store things beneath it. The bed isn’t pushed up against the wall, but a few inches from it, and I expressed a small fear that the bed might not be stable enough. I shook the bed, and the cinder blocks rocked a little. A friend asked if I was going to rock the bed like that, and I said that I wasn’t going to tell her. Personal stuff, you know?

Anyway, I ended up saying that I didn’t want to push the bed against the wall yet because I needed to make the bed, that I really like making beds, that once I make the bed and get all the hospital corners right then I’ll push the bed against the wall and it will be safer. I said that I make my bed every day, that sometimes I’ll completely strip my bed just so that I can make the whole thing over. I said that it is soothing and that it helps me clear my mind.

The same thing goes for most housework.

I can’t believe I’ve dedicated 700 words to how weird I am. Maybe I should scratch that and include the last eight years of blogging. Which is even harder to believe. Maybe not as hard if you’re not me, but maybe you should be grateful that isn’t the case.

Whatever. It’s time for Buffy.

Not really. But I feel so remiss when I don’t update as much as I used to. Blame darn school.

I’m just going to paste a few excerpts from responses to prompts from one of my classes. I like the class a lot.

This is part of a response to a prompt about literacy, but shucks, it’s truer than true with my writing.

I suppose that whatever I try to write makes them vacillate between realities, either jarringly or gently, opening their eyes to more possibilities, or at least reminding them that once they internalize the ideas these words represent, they’ll always have access to them.

After reading this fairy tale, I wrote:

If I were a nonconformist fairy tale author in the nineteenth century, I would enjoy poking fun at the social expectations of the day. I’d create a king who demands a daughter from his wife-queen, with an open disclaimer and subtext about actually wanting a son, so as not to put undue pressure on his wife-queen, which essentially effects said pressure. And just to spite and/or please her husband-king, I’d make the queen bear a lovely and beautiful daughter.

Oh, the dear infant’s christening! How much more can a sister-witch feel jilted than by her brother not inviting her to the grand christening? First of all, she’s a witch, which immediately casts her in her brother-king’s shadow, and second of all, she’s a witch, and everybody knows not to slight his own sister, especially if she’s a witch. It might be within the Divine Right of Kings to make mistakes without the same kind of accountability as punishable society, but being a sister-witch to the king also makes her a sister-witch-princess – Princess Makemnoit, to be exact – and somehow she turns the christening into a cursing! Interesting caveat.

So, the heir to the throne is not only a daughter, but also weighs nothing. And, she laughs too much. Not suitable at all for anyone who will need to find a husband-king and to rule with gravity (horrible pun intended).

And, she finds no satisfaction on dry land, but she discovers that she can think more deeply in the water. She realizes she has substance when she swims. The light-princess meets a prince who helps her with these self-realizations, and the possibility of marrying and becoming a happy merman-mermaid couple is not so far-fetched. After all, what were his chances of meeting a weightless light-princess with a chronic laugh?

Love is the cure for such an ailment (of course it is), and when the prince offers his life to save the light-princess, she struggles to return the favor. She does save him, and she is glad to have him and finally cries, at least a lake’s worth of tears, the materialization of all her emotions culminating to a proper sobbing, causing it to rain, relieving the drought, ensuring that the lake never recedes to a dangerous level again.

Happily ever after, of course. I would be trying too hard as a nonconformist author of fairy tales in the nineteenth century if it were a different ending. But the happiness here is relative to gravity, and the prince and princess live without fear of curses upon their children that render them as electrons, without matter. In the end, everyone matters.

So, I know about who’s in Australia, some people in Utah, and a lot of people along the East Coast. I don’t know about anybody anywhere else. Western Europe, Russia, East and Central Asia; the one blip in South America; and who’s the little guy swimming in the middle of the South Pacific? He’s probably browsing the internet while holding an umbrella-adorned beverage and wearing board shorts (and nothing else) and sitting under a palm tree as the waves crash upon the shore. Lucky. According to the information, he’s from Wallis and Futuna.

I imagine whoever’s in Russia is doing the exact opposite. Is that even still Russia? Yep, I checked. Parka, boots, slow internet; tundra, timberline; vodka.

This weekend is going to be busy with school stuff. The university should just make this whole next week part of Thanksgiving break. I’ve overheard a lot of conversations about people leaving tonight to fly/drive home to spend time with their families. I vote throwaway days, since there’s no class on Wednesday anyway.

Sometimes it’s this:

I write like
Margaret Atwood

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

Other times it’s this:

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

Also:

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

And also:

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

And, after one last sample, this:

I write like
Vladimir Nabokov

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

So, what a fun little algorithm thingy. I write like Margaret Atwood and a bunch of men. There’s my halloween costume!

Atwood: Canadian, novelist, short storyist, other stuffist. (Very incisive style.)
Doctorow: Canadian, novelist, blogger.
King: American, novelist, other stuffist. (I like his tips on writing. His horror is compelling, and maybe I agree with his comments on Stephenie Meyer. Maybe.)
Wallace: American, novelist, essayist. (“Consider the Lobster” is pretty dang awesome. His commentary on Kafka is great, too.)
Nabokov: Russian, novelist, short storyist. (I’m not very familiar with Nabokov, but I do appreciate Russian literature quite a bit.)

These authors are all rather dark, but I trust the algorithm thingy uses keys words and syntax to determine common styles. This doesn’t mean that I’m trying to deny the melancholy or macabre in my stuff, I just find it all very interesting.

I received an email from a lawyer today. It kindly requested I correct some information about the person the attorney represents. After I made the necessary edits, I replied:

Per your request, I did correct the reference to [the person] in my blog, mayiwrite.com. The edit was according to the designation you provided, [the designation]. Please confirm this correction or advise to omit the name altogether. I’d be more than happy to do that.

There is another mention of [the person] on my blog, besides the post where you commented. It happens to be in an anecdote from one of my readers. If you scroll down to the comment of [this post], you’ll see [the person's name]. If I should do anything with this particular comment, please let me know.

It was never my intention to offend or misinform. I apologize for any oversight.

Thank you.

May Anderton

The esquire promptly replied, thanking me for making the change. He also said he read through some of my other entries. He said they were interesting and that I am an excellent writer. Keep up the good work, he said.

This whole situation is a pretty big deal, because our favorite search engine listed my blog as third from the top when I typed the person’s name in the window that dares me to find anything I absolutely want in the whole universe. How does that even happen?

My bad information could have turned into bad blood.

Very interesting experience. Always learning.

Yesterday was a bit of a heavy-traffic day here at mayiwrite.com. I looked at my stats and tried to figure out where all the viewing came from. I can’t nail it down to any single source.

For all you new folks, I hope you found a little something of what you’ve been looking for. I hope you come back.

For all you lurkers, I appreciate you. I may or may not know who you are, but hopefully you find something here useful or entertaining. Hopefully not blackmaily or otherwise extortiony.

For all you whose feeds spit out my posts on a seemingly obnoxious basis, thanks for not unsubscribing.

Thanks for reading. Seriously. You have no idea how much it means.

***

In other news, last night I went to a cabaret. Afterwards, some of us went to a restaurant to celebrate and we ended up sitting close to Geoffrey Rush. He did not look like a troubled piano prodigy or a pirate. So much fun.

The cabaret was excellent. Remind me to showcase Matt on the next Friend Feature. He’s really a stellar guy.

I promise not to go crazy with the pages. But if you would look at the top of masthead you’ll notice a link for fiction. I’m going to try to keep my stories in one place, so it’s easier for everyone to access, especially me. I’m taking a creative writing course right now, and it would be nice if I could pull the stories up easily.

It’s not like I’m prolific, or even any good yet, but I like being able to know what I have written and what I need to work on. I foresee some incomplete and abandoned stories. I like that; it kind of means I’m listening to my muses properly. Plus, I have to keep practicing. That’s the only way, people.

Also, the stories I had to split into two entries in LiveJournal I combined into one post here at WordPress. I think WordPress and I are at the holding hands stage now.

I’ll keep digging through the archives and posting as I come across any stories. I’ll try to keep them in chronological order.

If you have feedback to give, I’d greatly appreciate it.

I’m getting close, people. An idea flashed in my brain about how I want to relate the oath ceremony. I can’t do it tonight, though. It’s going to take some time to organize it. It’s going to be relatively long, probably the longest I’ve written in a few months. And I have to find the right words; there’s always the right word for every situation. My mouth is watering and my brain is about to bubble over. I hope it turns out as good as I envision it.

It’s late. I spent a couple hours with some great friends, and I can never turn down an offer to play Guitar Hero. I also need to polish my seminary lesson for tomorrow.

I want to blog SO BAD, I have two, maybe three hefty posts swirling around in my head right now. If my brain weren’t contained, those thoughts would shoot out. Intact skulls are a blessing, people. So are brain casings.

I’ll post a quick photo. I’m not sure whether to call it “High Fives” or “Virginia Reel.”

img_6203

It got over 60 degrees today. You can call that whatever you want.

Today is February 12. That means 8 days until I swear in. And, yeah. Patty Griffin, too.

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