Lots of spontaneous moments turn out fantastic… More often than not in my personal experiences.

Traveling far from home for ice cream. Playing on the playground in the middle of the night.

I have two tattoos and a piercing that were spontaneous. They are some of my favorite body adornments. I went in to buy jewelry or was just driving by in a mood.. and WHAM… new holes. This certainly did not please the people I was dating at the time, but it is possible that this was part of the point and the excitement.

Driving to Kroger at 6 am for donuts in a geometro hatchback, three deep in the front seat.

Surprise visits to family when we realized we had a little extra vacation time.

I’m probably forgetting more recent spontaneous adventures.

I’m a bit of a control freak over important aspects of my life, some things are planned out even if only enough to make sure we don’t die. I don’t drink out in random places with people I don’t know. I did that once and it never happened again.  I plan my hiking experiences so that I will not be stranded out in the middle of nowhere and get eaten by a bear or fall of a cliff in the middle of the night. And because of work and now school I take my time seriously. I am also really boring now. Yes that makes me sound a bit old, but I love to be lazy and do nothing. Most of the time I would rather spend the day watching movies or star trek.

I’m starting to think I picked a list off a religious website or something. I’m not liking some of these questions and their implications.

spir·it·u·al

adjective
1. of, pertaining to, or consisting of spirit; incorporeal.
2. of or pertaining to the spirit or soul, as distinguished from the physical nature: a spiritual approach to life.
3. closely akin in interests, attitude, outlook, etc.: the professor’s spiritual heir in linguistics.
4. of or pertaining to spirits or to spiritualists; supernatural or spiritualistic.
5. characterized by or suggesting predominance of the spirit; ethereal or delicately refined: She is more of a spiritual type than her rowdy brother.

I cannot say that I have experienced any one of these definitions. I do not really believe in the majority of these definitions. The 3rd one would have to be the one that I can most identify. I would have to say that my husband and I are nearly the same person and we certainly seem to share a brain most of the time. Some people might find this sad or lacking in some vital aspect of humanity. I do not feel lacking or damaged. I feel like this is just not an experience that I will have. That is ok.

My first couple years of college was probably a really shitty time in my life. K and I became really good friends and that was certainly the best thing to come out of that time, but my interactions with other people and my feeling about myself were pretty horrible. I want to blame it on having left over teenage hormones and being out on my own for the first time. I was self destructive and manipulative. Life was full of insane unnecessary drama. I really hate to go back and look at my old live journal posts, some of them are bat-shit crazy.

I surrounded myself with drama filled people and instigated anything I could get my hands on. Everything was OMG SO EMOTIONAL. I guess this may have started my senior year of highschool. Once I was done with highschool and on my way to college the crazy just broke loose.

I never did anything to physically hurt anyone and I never got caught for the illegal things I did do. I spent too much time agonizing over boys and their equally crazy bullshit  and I did not take enough time to be with the people who were good for me and loved me. I’m really amazed that J & K stuck through that… though we are around the same ages so they may have also been in their own mini dramas.

18-22 year old girls are NUTS people should stay away from them, or at least not let them drag you into their drama. Turbulent, hell yes. Probably dark at times. And really a ton of learning a very small period of time. Just enough learning to make me realize that I would be learning things for the rest of my life.. and that it will need to be drama sparse because that shit is exhausting.

At this stage in my life this person is hard to define, I do not have anyone really close to me. Not highschool/college girlfriend close. Not ring you up on the way to the store and see if you just want to hang out while I go shopping. Not having a glass of wine or coffee and just hanging out. Not anymore these people are too far away or the people I am close to here, it just doesn’t feel like that kind of relationship. That feeling may just be me not being able to get over the loss of how making friends used to be so easy. I have tried calling and setting up dates to talk and have a phone beer, but they never seem to last more than a couple dates.

I realize that I would stop referring to friends as “home” friends and “here” friends. I will work on that.

E – She was the first person I really met when I moved to this area. We were in a training class together for a job. We were both snarky and really didn’t like other people, but we stuck together. She ended up becoming my supervisor a couple months later and when she left that job we stayed mostly connected. We are work buddies and she came to the courthouse with me to get married. We think alot alike, but can also let the other one know when they are being crazy.

K – We have known each other since 8th grade journalism class. We have seen and experienced each other’s craziest moments.  We have also been there for some of the best moments. Living so far a way is hard on me. If we lived closer I’d be able to help more, and I’m sure we could have had a fun time grading together when I was teaching. Our students were probably at the same level. Hopefully there would have been no beer stains. She is special because she is so smart and thinks on another level most of the time. It challenges me not to just be complacent and blend in with the idiots on my day to day encounters.

J – My family has adopted her. She could show up at any time for dinner and no one would notice that I was not there. I believe this has actually happed before. Though we had probably been introduced before, we sat together and became good friends over my sophomore year lunch period in high school. She was my date to prom and my room mate sophomore year of college. We would eat breakfast and watch blues clues my freshman year. She is the most outgoing and generous person I know. She collects friends and experiences like trading cards. I’m sure she has been unofficially adopted by at least 10 families, a couple in every city she’s lived in.

The Princess Bride

I remember walking through the video rental store with my dad in 5th grade. He picked the movie this time, when we walked into the Drama section, he looked at me  and said “It isn’t really a drama, don’t worry.” I was still skeptical. The name also didn’t help Princesses and Brides were against everything my 10 year old self wanted to believe in, neither really interested me.

And then I watched it… probably 3 times before we returned it. I really hate watching movies back to back, but this one I don’t care. You could probably leave this one looping and I’d be happy.  I’m not sure why I love this movie so much. Could be because my dad introduced it to me. I could be because it is not the normal Princess story. It could be Cary Ewes coming back from the dead? Well mostly dead.

I went to a comicbook convention with my dad when I was 14 or 15 I think. I bought a bumper sticker for my future car.  I have a tshirt that says “Hello my name is Inigo Montoya.” ( Which you should not wear out in public where people may be legitimately wearing stickers like that. It confuses people.)

I’m not at my limit for words. This may just require me to watch it again and finish this later.

The way this question was written gives me a religious connotation. I do not think I have such an experience. Religion was never forced or really a big deal in my family growing up. I went to church with my grandmother off and on until  I was 11 or 12. I went to church on special occasions & vacation bible school with my cousins. I studied with my Jehovahs Witness friend when I was 9 or so for a couple weeks. It was an interesting experience and she was wiling to talk to me about things I didn’t understand. Growing up my mom had books about health crystals and herbs around the house. I don’t ever remember being forced to think anything. I liked going to church to play and sing with my friends (all of these girls turned out to be mostly crazy when we got into highschool together.)

I have never had a deep seated belief in religion. I never got caught up on the spirit. I’ve tried pagan religions, and as with christian ones I never felt any real connection. Everyone seems to feel a spirit or a sense of warm fuzzies… I have never felt any of that, no matter how much I tried because it was a community I liked.  So what fills me with awe and excitement… just the world around us… I don’t need a greater being behind it or more of a meaning. Life and the world are brilliant all on their own.

Something that shakes my beliefs to their core? Alternate realities… or the fact we may not exist.. Imagine hearing this as a 10 year old…

On a time line there is the past the present and the future. The past doesn’t physically exist anymore because it has already happened, and the future doesn’t really exist because it hasn’t happened yet. So that leaves the present… but but the time the images and sounds reach your brain from your eyes and ears and other senses, they are the past…. so does the present exist.

Seriously Dad, WTF?

I do not think I have a tenancy to meat people randomly. I am not social, I don’t make small talk, I find it more of an effort to speak with people who do not have the potential to be in my life more than momentarily. (Strangers that I won’t see for more than a day.) I’m trying to think of a time where someone random has done anything that might have made an impact, either seeing it or hearing it or something just passing by even if I have not met them personally.

Last year at PAXEast, we went to a pannel of speakers (we actually went to bunch of them but this one sticks out) where Jeff Greene or Ken Levine said something that still sticks out to me.

… I should give  some context. I have grown up playing video games. I had an NES when I was young. I had computer games after that. Though they have not always been a huge part of my life, they were always around. In college I would watch my roomate, her boyfriend and the neighbors play a all the time. I would watch exes play. My husband plays. I am comfortable in the culture even though I do not play often myself. I am not very good, controlling the camera while walking confuses me. We listen to podcasts about video games and other nerdy things.  The gaming industry is my celebrity, but they tend to be smarter.

People do not understand games, but at one point they didn’t understand movies or tv or cars or whatever… No everyone understands art or literature. That is ok… games are not childish… but I understand if you were introduced to them when only children were playing them. Just look at how they have evolved… really…Its another medium of story telling.

AND NOW I can’t remember the exact quote but it was something along the lines of ‘there will always be someone old who does not get video games. someone who didn’t grow up with them as part of the culture. and someday they will all be dead.’

Being an adult sucks. Being an adult who has moved away from 90% of their friends and family sucks even more. Most of my friends have drifted away to some point or another. I can’t just show up, or call them on my way to the store for company. Now as they begin to have babies or continue to be less and less available due to work and being on the other side of the country that gap in commonality is getting bigger and bigger. It sucks.

I can think of two people  who I miss the most. One intends on having kids and I fear that will be the end. We do talk on a regular basis and are on top of the important things in each other’s lives, but when she does have kids… mommy time is much more important. One has moved so far away, we often are in different time zones with schedules that don’t match and play phone tag. And then one of us forgets to call or gets caught up in something and puts it off… and then… We haven’t spoken in 6 months…This really breaks my heart and I try not to feel less important but some people seem to be more worth the effort. In reality thats probably not very true.

Making friends as an adult, I have not gotten the hang of this. I have two close friends where I live now. Which is probably comparable to the percentage of friends I had in my home town. I nabbed them and held on from my first job here and even now I feel a little adrift.

Flipping through the channels one day a few years ago I landed on c-span of all places. Maybe it was because that was one of the few channels I had at the time. It is entirely possible that this was a re run… a quick search on google shows that she regularly reads portions of her books in C-Span. This just happens to be the book I caught. Sarah Vowell “Partly Cloudy Patriots”

This may be when I started to pay a little more attention to the world around me and the politics that are involved with being an adult. Her combination of historical facts and observations connecting to current day feed both the history teacher in me and the lazy young adult who gets most of her news from the Daily Show. I have read more of her books and will try and read any she writes, if only to feed my history needs.

But now I pay more attention to the repetition of history and how it has influenced the modern day. I voted a couple years after this was recorded. It was my first year voting. I had taken my AP US history class, I had taught younger students about random presidential facts and I paid attention in my 8th grad civics class. But I had not idea what I was doing voting. Just the same I made an educated guess and my family was proud that I had fulfilled my civic duty.

I dated someone once that did not see the point in voting and actively refused to be registered to vote. I was always appalled at this. I know some people don’t want to register to vote because they somehow think that it will register them for jury duty. In the state I grew up in, if you were over 18 it didn’t matter, you were in the jury pool.  I am still appalled that someone would not want to believe in at least participating in the process and attempting to make the world a better place no matter how futile it seems.

As always I can’t follow the letter of the law, I will need to expand on more than just one. In no particular order

• Stroke 9 – I first heard this band while I was in high school and their most popular song at the time was “Little Black Backpack.” I (and my friend V)know every word to every song on this album. My favorite was Make it Last. Their music has stuck with me for the rest of my life, being appropriate for many stages. Including bad breakups and young adult hijinks.
• LFO – YES the horrible boy band that brought you such songs as Summer Girls. The songs are dumb, but they are so dumb I can’t help but smile when I hear them. They make me think of girly young adult hiinks with Sexy.
• My wedding had two important songs – Radiohead “Everything in its Right Place” and Peter, Bjorn and John “Young Folks“
• I used to fall to sleep to an old tape of Metalica when I was in elementary or middle school – and stay up late to the country station when that didn’t work. They would play “when you say nothing at all” by Allison Kraus before anyone else had heard it. I swear I only heard it late at night.
• I would fall asleep to Norah Jones when she was first published and feel safe and sleepy.
• Baby its cold out side and Daisy

Some bands have changed significance over the years. During a less than healthy time in my life I was really into Incubus, but I did not like anything that I heard from their earlier recording. Now – I would much rather hear those than anything.

The song Float On by Modest Mouse, I ‘d only heard the radio version when it got really big one summer. Now? I’ve heard real versions and prefer those. I did not like the radio version… perhaps it was overplayed.