We are changing. No sleep, no gas, no excuses…

So evidently I’m titling my posts by semi-appropariate songs that come to mind. All righty then.

Sorry I haven’t posted, even though a lot has happened. Well, it’s particularly due to the fact that so much has been going on so I could hardly get a breath, let alone computer time.

They day after Christmas, my best mate (yes, I use the word mate) got sick with some gross dizzy/weak/nauseous thing. Of course, this was incredibly stupid of me, since I have no immune system what-so-ever, but I seemed to be fine for a good long while after, and thus didn’t think much of it. We just lazed around and watched Stardust (better as a book, but not an awful movie), I really wasn’t helpful in the nursing department at all. I don’t know where to find anything in her house, least of all medicine.

At 3am that morning, my sister’s fiance calls in a squeaky panic. She’s in labor, of course. However, my mother (having blissfully already been through this twice) declares that it will be a while, and that we will head up in the morning, hangs up the phone, and rolls right back over. Finally, a score against sleep deprivation! Except that I’m still reading Twilight, and it’s so incredibly good I can’t put it down until I’ve read the very last page at 4:45. I was tossed from bed at about 7:30, making for just short of three hours of sleep. And then we drove the two hours to K-ville, in which I managed to crash for about half an hour in the backseat. So we arrive at K-ville’s women’s hospital (lemme tell you, this place is snazzy, the hospital rooms are bigger than our kitchen/dining room combined) and we sit. And wait. And listen to my sister groan. And wait. I got a smidge of writing done on Blood and Feathers (extremely tentative title, I just can’t think of anything else to call it, yet) and listened to some Apocalyptica (my favorite music for writing, I highly reccomend it.) Eventually, after a couple hours of thrashing boredom, my step-dad offers to take me over to the nearest Borders. Containing squeals of absolute glee and clutching the $140-something in Christmas cash from various relations, I sprinted down to the van and bounced through traffic until we finally arrived. Containing myself as best I could, I blew $70 righta way. Picked up New Moon and Eclipse (sequels to Twilight) to keep myself busy, an edition of xxxHolic (yes, Xae’s a manga nerd, too), an album by The Hush Sound and re-bought a Linkin Park CD that mysteriously vanished after a visit from my sister two years ago. Returning to the hospital, I listened to my new CDs and chatted with my biological-dad who had just arrived, looking much like a cornered gazelle. Bio-dad relaxed after I was there and we talked a bit about the same things we always do, conversation can be sparse between us, until 5:00ish, when at last, Evelyn Faye made her appearance. 7lb., 6oz., and with a headful of auburn hair. I’ll admit, she cute, and was quiet the first two days of her existence. Mom stayed over, Dad and I went home and back the next morning. I curled up with my Hush Sound CD, headphones, and New Moon to pass the time. So much of the day passed in oblivion to me minus a few short conversations and minimal baby-contact. We went home again I applied for a job I don’t want, kept my nose into the book. I was done with the 550+ pages of it at 3:45 and went to sleep.

Waking up, my anti-immune system caught up with me. I was dizzy, my stomach rebelled into my throat with every movement, it truly felt like someone was crushing in my eyes, but the absolute worst of all was the sensation of falling apart. Now, when I say that I feel “like I’m falling apart” everyone assumes I mean emotionally. No. This was like someone had ripped the seams out of my body and that my skin was unravelling and tearing all the muscles with it. Nasty imagery, but it was an awful feeling. So I stayed in bed all day, no reading, minimal anything. Then Evie and Sis came home and things just got insane. Every member of our family had to come in, with me dizzy and stranded on the couch in my pajamas, looking like hell. After the parade ended, I fled back to my room and hid, writing some more.

Of course, sometime in the night, Sarah has to stick her head in my room and ask me to watch Evie for a minute while she goes to the bathroom. Post-pregnancy-pee’ing evidently takes 10 minutes. Evie started wailing and I had to pick her up and try to dance her back to silence. Being. Sick. How does no one get this? I’m dizzy, I might throw up, I’m weak as a kitten and you’re having me hold your newborn baby? Come on, people! Anyway, it didn’t work. She was hungry and I couldn’t find the pacifier to appease her. Mom woke up and came to the rescue thankfully, though Sarah kind of sighed when she saw me like I was an absolute disaster. Uh, I am. I don’t do child/baby things. I’ve been pretty clear about this since the first new baby in the family. Ah, well.

Which brings us to today, where I’m doing almost nothing at all. Woke up, wrote this. Sorry for the delay, and the ranting.

…I just noticed how incredibly long-winded I am. Sorry about that!!

Merry, Merry Christmas, Baby

The title’s only really for this song. It’s been running through my head for a couple days with no particular reason.

As expected, Christmas was kind of strange and unfullfilling. The morning agenda included spending three hours walking my sister through updating her messenger so that she could webcam and watch us open presents, thus making her less lonely. It seemed a little ridiculous to me, honestly, since as soon as we opened some there, we took the rest up to her apartment two hours away to spend the day there. She was very round, bubbly, anxious, and (as per normal) whiney. I never thought people could be bubbly and whiney at the same time. I have been corrected. It goes a little something like this… “ahaha! Everything’s so sparkly and pretty! But I can’t move, none of my clothes fit, and it’s in no way my fault! ahaha!” Yeees, of course the baby just burrowed its way into her body through her navel while she slept. She was in no way responsible.

Sorry, that was kind of petty of me, but my temper tends to get the better of me when I talk about her. I suppose the habit of hers that infuriates me the most is how she flaunts her good-for-naught fiance in front of me, as if I should care. Back when she was in high school with me, she would simply flirt with and hang all over any boy she heard I might be attracted to. I never really understood why, and perhaps that’s for the best. Now she has to get her digs in by rubbing it in that she has someone, precisely when I discover that I love neither the Fox nor my boyfriend. I’m not even sure I like them, let alone “like” them, anymore. Ah well. Back to the Christmas bit.

Anyway, we went out to the only place open - Calhoun’s - and ate lunch/dinner. It made me ill, so I crashed in the backseat the whole way home to ignore my nausea and woke up out at my grandparents’ house. Aaah, now this is Christmas, I thought to myself. Every year I’ve been alive, Christmas dinner is out at the farm with as many members of the family packed in as would fit, dressed in madrigal costumes, handing out mountains of presents and singing. Yes, normally we wear big dresses and tunics and such to our family Christmas. My family’s just a little odd, but I adore it. It’s an outlet to get by with about any kind of quirk. Well, there weren’t costumes this year, but I finally got to meet my cousin’s baby, Samuel. He’s remarkably tiny for a nine pounder, but blessedly quiet and thus, infinitely more adorable. A lot of the family wasn’t there, and my parents didn’t want to stay as long as I did for once, but I got to see some of my family who lives a little farther away and walked away with $125 to show for it, since my extended relations can’t be sure of what I’m into lately. In other words, it’s Book-and-CD-spree time. They’re inducing labor with my sister tomorrow, so I’ll be up in K-ville (easily the biggest town within 2 hours) and right next to a big ole shopping center with all manner of places to lose myself. Yay-rah-potato for not being stuck outside the delivery room with fussy relatives. My cousin, whom we shall simply call “E” and her baby Sam might even come. I used to clash with her like nothing else, but it seems we’ve both done a lot of growing up and she has come to accept that I am only girly as an afterthought and thus can rarely appreciate talk of shoes and hair. Instead, we find common ground in books and suddenly I adore her company. Family’s funny like that, sometimes.

Speaking of books, I have been horribly and delightfully proven wrong. Stephenie Meyer’s vampire book “Twilight” is absolutely worth the read. Granted the types of people I’d heard praise it, I was expecting it to be an atrocious transgression combining shallow teen romance and vampires and thus cheapening and lacing up the latter. I was gloriously wrong, and I can hardly take my head out of the book long enough to write this. I’m about halfway through and buying the other two of the series tomorrow. Aaah, to be a bookworm again. I only get this way over three (now four) authors. Neil Gaiman, Tamora Pierce, Garth Nix, and now Ms. Meyer. I would reccomend anything you can find by these people. They are my inspiration.

Not a whole lot else to say - I have to run and take care of my ailing best friend. I just wanted to jot down a little note about my holidays and say that I hope everyone else’s were wonderful! God bless.

On the Subject of Christmas, Babies, and Boyfriends

I am, at present, in an immensely deplorable situation. This situation cannot be summarized into a sentence, a phrase, or even a single paragraph without excluding tremendous amounts of very relevant information. Right now I am curled on my bed, all the bedclothes are strewn on the floor along with half of my other possessions (much to my mother’s display) and I am shivering. Why? Because it’s December, and whether or not it is “abnormally warm” I am still losing the feeling in my fingertips. I hate being cold. I always have. Long live the equator. However, the external cold is hardly the source of my despair.

My dearest sister, whose name, like many others, I hesitate to hand out and will thus replace, is an absolute idiot. She is due any day, very likely tonight in fact, and yet she plans to drive two hours to visit with family, and then drive back. Yes, drive, because her idiotic, pathetic, low-life boyfriend will not do it himself. I could slap her. Were she in arm’s reach, I likely would. While she was on the phone, telling me her latest idiocy, she gasps that she thinks her water broke and hangs up. Oh. Joy. Not that I’m not tired of hearing her gripe about being pregnant all day, every day, but I pity the daughter she’s soon to have. My sister is not a capable girl. She dates schmuks, degrades herself, smokes excessively, fills her apartment with similar low-lifes, druggies, and stray cats. Hell must smell like my sister’s apartment. As it turns out, she is not in labor (yet) and had, in fact, peed on herself. This is only a small delay on the inevitable approach of social workers who will remove my niece from her care and dump little Evelyn on my parents. This will certainly strengthen our already blossoming family relationship. But she won’t listen to me. She never does. If she did, she’d never have experienced the pains of abuse, rape, masochism, attempted suicide, abortions, or maybe pregnancy without a dependable father at all. My dear reader, I only wish I was exaggerating. Believe me, the melodrama of my life thoroughly exhausts me. Her condition causes my mother great pain. She starts crying sometimes, swears she’s fine and refuses to be helped. Her depression only strains her relationship with my step-father, who is not really very fond of my sister and has not been for a very long time. Their tension, since they do not wish to fight with one another, is redirected to the younger daughter, me. My step-father criticizes me, shouts, and swears for the most miniscule and ridiculous things. (At present he is put out with me for losing my grip on a stray wolf-hybrid we’ve managed to pick up while we were trying to administer eardrops for a nasty infection.) My mother, on the other hand, is attempting to spread her neurotic tendency toward stress-cleaning to my room with a “chipper” heart. She intrudes at least once an hour to announce some thing or another and then tag on that I should be cleaning, then becomes upset when I don’t leap up and sing for the little birdies to help me like Snow White. Overly-mature and verbose or not, I am a teenager. I like my mess. This way, I know where everything is, and if it is clean, my room will feel empty, unorganized, and as if I have no place in it. This is beyond her comprehension.

Outside family, another stresser is my boyfriend. Yeah, yeah “ooooh! Xae’s got a boooyfriend!” Yes, she does, but she shouldn’t. Her parents don’t want her to and it seems increasingly like a dumb move. Why? He’s twenty-one and from Indiana. I have never actually met him, only spoken over the internet or the phone and made so many plans to see him only to have them fall short because he is tight on money. Because he won’t or can’t get a job. Believe me, the idiocy of this is beginning to bleed through. While he has made (or claimed to have made) the move of ending his affair with cigarettes for me (I’m allergic to them), I cannot seem to feel very much for him anymore. He seems, of late, shallow and hypocritical. I can hardly talk to him. If we are not arguing or discussing some horribly serious and depressing matter, he has to speak of things so air-headed and flat that I get bored nearly to tears in ten minutes or less. It didn’t used to be this way. Though perhaps the thing that bothers me the most, and maybe this is selfish, is that he does not like my writing. It isn’t that he doesn’t like the story or the characters, that I could cope with because inevitably, there will be people who won’t, but he does not even seem to like that I write. He is upset by the idea that it takes precedence over him. Writing is who I am. My identity should be a step above paying every second of my attention to him. Increasingly, I feel nothing for him.

On the other hand, there is a boy with whom I have been entirely obsessed since middle school. I told him once. He told me I was “brave” for having had the nerve, and that he treasured me as a close friend. Such is life. At any rate, he is possibly one of the best friends I have ever had. He is selfless, and kind, concerned, and always willing to drop everything he was holding to fix even the slightest of his friends’ problems. He is an artist, a musician, even a bit of a writer at times, and a fellow collector of weaponry. We are kindred spirits of a sort in many ways. We are often compared, told that we would be a perfect couple, that he and I are the same person except that I take myself too seriously and he is more open about being nice. Since for now we are avoiding names, I shall call him my Fox. The reason being that he is a mischeivious, clever, and elusive red-head. Fox is practical, short, and thus easy to remember. Today, I went to the movies with the Fox and his sister. Until a couple weeks ago, she was dating one of my close cousins, and I absolutely adore her. She is my sister’s age and possibly one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met. We went to see “The Golden Compass,” which I haven’t read, so I rather enjoyed it on the basis of it being very pretty. Unfortunately, even the Fox seemed to fall short of expectations. Over our senior year, he seems to have grown shallower and simpler and all the things I used to adore about him… His art, his passion, his honesty, his lofty standards, and the way in which he looked at me that made me feel as if there were no other place he would rather be, and no person he’d rather be with… all of that has faded as if instead of growing up, he has shrunk into the fickle and simplistic nature of so very many of my fellows. I feel like the part of him I loved died and that now I am only feeling for a memory and measuring every person to its standards. A memory does not love back.

All this contributes so intensely to my dismal feeling, intensified by the quickly-dark and cold nature of the winter, has left me decidedly “Grinchy.” It doesn’t feel like Christmas Eve. I miss the old feelings of Christmas. The delight when the tree first lights up, the anticipation as presents build up under it, the joy of driving around with family to see the Christmas lights and the contentment of a big family dinner with a fire and music. But none of that is here. This year, I was too busy writing a term paper to decorate our tree. Instead of waiting until I could, they did it without me. Decorating my grandparents’ tree (which has long been a tradition of even our most extended family) was small, quiet, and sad. The only person there I felt truly related to was my cousin. I have never really been all that close to him until lately. He had only just broken up with Fox’s sister (or rather she with him) and was trying to pretend as if it hardly affected him, but he seemed to reach out for me, as if he desperately wanted me to know and wanted me to fix it. I know he is hurting, I know he is depressed, and the rest of the family either doesn’t notice or pretends not to because they are unsure of how to cope with it. They have done the same to any family member who has felt this way, and now similarly they avoid me. I want to help my cousin, but I am unsure of the way, and he is prone to changing his mind about whether or not he wants me to. Christmas in the immediate family is not much better. We aren’t sure of where we’ll be having it (what with the sister waddling about like Mary fresh off the donkey) or when and so everything is almost on hold so that my sister can be apeased. She is, after all, pregnant, helpless, and volatile, and thus has commanded nearly all their attention most of her life. Not that I want to be fussed over, but it is tiresome to be an afterthought. All in all, it doesn’t feel like Christmas, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t feel like this is my family or even my world. No one is acting right for it to be where I should be.

Have you ever experienced the feeling in a particularly boring dream, where you know that you are dreaming and are only waiting to wake up so that you can do something worthwhile? That is how I feel, but I know it’s not a dream, and I can’t seem to wake up and find the things that feel real. Critics are likely thinking “why doesn’t she talk to her friends” or “this girl is clearly over dramatizing and pitying herself by blowing things way out of proportion.” Maybe I am, but in response to the first, none of them feel like my friends anymore. The ones who might understand feel as if they have moved on too far, the ones still here feel too shallow, and my closest and dearest friend without whom I am not sure how I could live is simply not right for the job. She hates people who are depressed without ample cause, and does not believe that they should be even then because they should simply be able to ignore the bad things. Also, she has a tendency to take my boyfriend’s side, so she is little help there either. It just seems as if the problems which I am currently facing are ones I don’t know how to deal with, and that no one is readily available to help me through.

Writing this down does have a slightly cleansing effect though. Part of me doesn’t feel so sick. Well, any little thing to get you by, I suppose.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Introductions, What a Bother…

The purpose of this blog is not for my friends or family to read. It isn’t for my classmates, my fellow workers, my lover, or anyone else deeply acquainted with me. For now, this is a blog for strangers. Maybe someday that will change. That isn’t to say I don’t want anyone to read it, moreso that I want no one to come up to confront me elsewhere about something I have said regarding them. I would adore comments, advice, or even just sympathy or the knowledge that you laughed or enjoyed something. Please, do not make the mistake of thinking I do not appreciate you.

On the matter of introductions, since I intend to give out information on myself sparingly, there is only so much I may say. My name is of very little concern, though I’ll tell you now it’s a pathetically common one. I live in the South-East of America at present. I am female. I am seventeen. I don’t tell you that to not be taken seriously, but rather to make better sense of some of the things I will undoubtedly post. I’ve always been told I’m older than my age, or something like that. Other important things to note are that I am a senior at my high school, I will graduate in May, I will be eighteen in June. My family is extensive, but quite close. Immediately I have my mother, whom while I love, has an absolute lack of understanding and precious little in common with me. She and my father split when I was about three. He lives two hours away, speaks to me at his convinience, is utterly clueless about my life, and is prone to doing things for the sake of being “the cool parent.” My step-father raised me more than he ever did. My step-father is a good man, he looks after us well, but again, his is an entirely different sort of existance and he is not frequently known for “getting” me. I will likely say very many unflattering things about him. I have only one sibling, a sister three years my senior, who at this very moment is nine months pregnant and may go into labor even as I am typing this sentence. She is unmarried. Her boyfriend is a dick. I will say very few flattering things about him at all. Or her, for that matter. In the case of the yet unborn Evelyn Faye, I cannot yet say. We shall see what she amounts to be, other than smelly and loud.

Above all, though, you must understand that I am a writer. Nonfiction is not generally my specialty, so expect inconsistancies and embelishments. My forte is truly fiction and in the strictest sense fantasy. I dabble in sci-fi, horror, and even romance at times, but fantasy is my art and my passion. I have more books started than I can remember, more half-formed ideas than I realise, and only one completed work which I loathe so entirely that I can’t even stand to edit it. (I wrote it as a part of National Novel Writing Month, in which one spouts quantity to achieve 50,000 words in 30 days. www.nanowrimo.org if you’re interested. It’s certainly an experience.) Anyway, much of what you will find in this blog will be similarly written as my works, and now and again I will reference them or post an exerpt as I am confident. For now, that seems enough for you to know.

I suppose the issue that spurred me to begin this blog is best saved for a seperate post.

P.S. I am entirely aware that my spelling is something unspeakable. Please don’t remind me, I do what I can.