shy girl

true to my word

2009-06-01T21:17:00.001-07:00

well i said it wouldnt be june until i wrote again and i was right. and really, i shouldnt even be writing...i have papers to grade that i promised would be graded tomorrow. i've learned not to promise things like that to students in the future.

but i have to write because i just finished the most incredible book. everyone should stop what they're doing right now and go buy the perks of being a wallflower by stephen chbosky. it's a teen novel published by MTV and i dont care if you hate to read or if you read tolstoy for fun, this book will change your life.

i just spent the past two days enraptured by charlie's first year of high school. go buy the book.

even you liz....i promise you will like it...

sleep deprived

2009-03-10T16:43:00.001-07:00

i'm writing to say that i can't write.

i haven't been able to write.

i will not be able to write.

and for this, i am sad.

maybe i'll get to write again in june...when i get my life back.

desk

2008-12-05T13:14:00.000-08:00

it only took a year but i finally have a desk.

i live at home like all bad-ass twenty-four year olds should and upstairs, mom has two desks in the room i have recently dubbed the "common area." One was actually a functional space; it was where she had her computer hooked up. but the other...well...if our common area were to be compared to the afterlife as the Catholics define it, the other desk would be that place between life and death. that desk would be limbo.

its where mom puts everything she doesn't use in her daily existence but cant bear to throw away. but maybe "puts" is too mild a verb. it doesnt give the right visual. shoves is preferable. or throws...

piles. casts aside. thrusts. pitches. chucks. heaps. stacks. drives. forces. mounds. rams. flings. stockpiles. discards...

basically, its a desk full of junk. junk that is not used but can't (for whatever reason) be abandoned. junk that has been accumulating for over 10 years. random pictures from every point of my life in no apparent order, empty printer cartridges, sharpie markers, unsent greeting cards, unlabled CDs, mechanical pencils, 3 pairs of scissors, a graphing calculator without batteries, return address labels for a house nobody lives in anymore, my mom's resume from 15 years past, 7 half empty boxes of staples, scotch tape refills, an 8x10 piece of autographed Chinese calligraphy, elementary school yearbooks, a tera cotta pot painted in valentine's day colors (probably a second grade art project made by my sister...she was the creative one back then), dried-up glue sticks, USB cords for God only knows what electronic devices, push-pins, and thirteen dollars and seventy-four cents in change.

it's a wooden vessel set aside and ordained for the most sacred purpose of housing mom's plethora of useless stuff. its almost like the ark of the covenant except mom's desk isnt made from gold plated shittim wood. it's oak.

i have a laptop. a beautiful, wonderful, fantastic macbook pro that i love with my whole life and spent all my savings to get. for the amount spent on it, i probably should have gotten a desktop but i'm still a relatively mobile human being and i like to look like the mysterious writer in the corner of local coffee shops. this is significant to my story because it is the reason i dont have a desk of my own. i was in college and after that i spent time alternately working dead-end jobs and traveling. a desk wasnt necessary...a laptop was. this begs the question then, if i had a laptop but no desk and my mom had two desks but was using them both, where did i work?

usually i chose the floor.

it was hard on the back, but it was really my only option. the people at It's A Grind begin to look at you funny when you transport your entire home office to their establishment in a messenger bag and set up shop attached to their free wi-fi for half the day in exchange for a three dollar and fifty cent latte. at some point you begin to feel like you're taking advantage.

last year, when i started doing more work from home, i begged mom to let me use one of the desks. It seemed fair enough to me. Really, she only needed the one...the second one was just an indoor suburban landfill. all she had to do was let me throw everything in the second desk away. i'd move her computer over there and hook it up (the dump desk was actually the better of the two) and i'd take the other one. it seemed like a great plan. she didnt have to do any work and id move from the floor to a chair. the potential upward mobility made me practically giddy.

one problem: my mother's nonsensical attachment to the crap in those drawers.

i have a personal policy. if i dont use something for two years, i get rid of it. i donate it, give it away, or trash it. thats just how it is. exceptions made for the limited sentimental nick-nacks scattered about my room, completed journals (you dont use them anymore but throwing them away defeats the purpose of writing one in the first place), and the books in my library. but everything else gets the ax. i always have a bag in my closet and every now and then i throw something in to be given to goodwill...as soon as its full i drop it off. its how i keep myself from being a clutter collector. my grandmother was a clutter collector and she passed this genetic trait onto both of her daughters. when my family had to move my grandma out of the house shed spent the last half of her life in and into the assisted living facility, we were left wading through a waist-high 40 year old collection of clutter. in the massive great big heap of junk that comprised my mother's childhood, i found a wig my mother wore in high school from the time when wig wearing was the style. it was still in the blue and white box labeled "dutch boy." i was so fascinated by this i took it home and hung the box on my wall with the wig still inside.

this is when i decided to never be like my grandmother and so the goodwill bag is always in my closet. but my mother is her mother's child and even though she hadn't seen the contents of those drawers for years and years, she insisted that i could not throw their contents away and that she needed to go through the drawers before i could move her computer and take over the lesser desk.

"how long will it be before you go through them?" i would ask

"soon" was always the reply

"how long is 'soon?'" i would counter

"soon sydney leigh. im busy and will get to it when i have time."

"soon" never actually means anytime in the near future in my family, so i wasnt surprised when a few weeks passed and i was still working on the floor. but when a year goes by, "soon" is no longer acting with elasticity...its not even being interpreted loosely..."soon" is being redefined altogether.

mom is a teacher with the school district. her school went year round this past year and she just went on track break. "soon" was going to mean soon once again. i bugged her about the desk again after a few months of reprieve telling her that my friend, hope, offered to fly down to vegas and set the desk all up for me as a christmas present. hope is a secretary and could have my home office scenario remedied in half a day if left to the task. i think my mom knew this and recognized the threat this posed to her promise. but my threat was only half true. hope actually said she would fly down if she had the money, but she didnt and she couldnt so my threat didnt really hold water.

but wouldnt ya know...it worked anyway.

cardiovascular songwriting

2008-11-29T15:15:00.000-08:00

it's been quite some time since i've posted. partially i was really busy...no lie...but if you ask coach kim, she'll say it's because i'm lazy.

see, kim is training for a marathon with her boyfriend and the piddly 4 or 5 miles i cant be bothered to run because im "lazy" have now become warm-up for her 22 mile training runs and she likes to bust me for it. but, let's be fair...kim and i were at the yardhouse the other night sampling the plethora of beers on tap and when she called me lazy for not going running everyday like i used to she immediately took it back when she realized that i would be grossly offended at the notion of sitting around my house all day doing nothing. this is a vicious lie. i hate doing nothing. actually, i think i have undiagnosed adult a.d.d. and i cant sit around for any extended period of time without doing something. if i am sitting, im usually reading...or muddling about with the mysteries of the universe in my head.

lately, im playing my guitar. it went long neglected last year when i had to take an hour out of my day everyday to run halfway across town and back. so im writing songs and kim runs.

if i called kim lazy for not writing songs im sure she'd look at me as if id just said she was lazy for not finding the cure for cancer. kim doesn't play an instrument...unless those electronic drums that come with the rockband game count. so of course i would be a fool if i gave her crap for not songwriting. she doesnt write songs. never has. i dont even think she has a desire to. her boyfriend has a guitar, but i dont think he wants to write a song either. so maybe it's not fair, but i just want to say, "hey, its not my fault you dont have as many hobbies as me! its easy to make time for running when its all you do! but i have many interests, high and lofty interests that extend beyond the physical realm and it is necessary that i spend time cultivating them." but i think that might be ever so slightly arrogant, and i like kim, so i don't say this even though i think it.

i like to think of myself as someone able to multitask. i can get a lot of stuff done in my 16-18 waking hours. i do two or three loads of laundry while doing paperwork. i carry on 5 conversations via text while teaching class. but i dont think i could manage cardiovascular songwriting. but it might be a good experiment for when the weather gets warmer. rockstars walk and jump and participate in all kinds of aerobic activities with their guitars on stage that get them all sweaty and out of breath, so im sure running in a straight line while playing wouldnt be very difficult. you wouldnt have to bother with a microphone because it could be a live acoustic set and i dont know how much of an audience a running performer would attract anyways. the idea of having to move down the street with the artist might discourage attendance.

now, that scenario is all well and good for playing songs i already know, but what about writing a new one? the pen and paper become a problem. the issue of a hard writing surface could be remedied easily with a clipboard, but writing and running and playing seem like too much. you dont have enough hands.

unless you employ a jogging scribe. someone to run with you and write as you dictate lyrics to them. it would be tricky, but it could work. the writer runs and plays while the scribe...well...scribes. kim will be in good shape by the spring with her marathon training and all so she'd make a good scribe except that her handwriting is pretty rough. so i suppose as long as she typed it out for me after the run, itd be all right.

and this way i could run and kim could write songs.

iwant itunes...

2008-10-19T16:27:00.000-07:00

this summer i went to europe with a couple friends of mine. i had a total blast, but (as happens when you go to a continent that essentially uses the US dollar as toilet paper) i came back broke. before going on this trip, i scrimped and saved for an entire year. i rode my bike and walked to work...i ate an ungodly amount of leftovers...i never set foot within 100 yards of a mall. but for all that hard work, i still came home in the hole. kim and i had big plans for the first paycheck i would receive upon my return to the glorious life that is substitute teaching: we were gonna go to huntington beach an blow every dime on clothes and alcohol. we might be drunk and broke again, but it would remind us of being in madrid together and at least we'd look hella good...

my other friend, sara, knew about my plan and a month ago asked if i ever went to california like i had planned...did i blow my first check like i had wanted to? i told her yeah, on my health insurance. the blue cross/blue shield got every last dime....them and the sprint company. blew the entire wad in one shot. it was almost as satisfying as taking a road trip...almost.

bright side: im finally operating in the black...a few hundred dollars in the black but hey....black is black and black is not red so i am no longer an incredibly stressed out individual. owing people money sends me into a panic. if i was buying a house, i'd rather sell my kidney on the black market than ask any bank for a loan to cover the down payment. needless to say i have the most amazing credit score you've ever seen.

so im in the black, but im living like im in the red....just for a few months until im not just a few hundred in the black, but a couple thousand. a few hundred in the black is like being two thousand in the red as far as im concerned. call me anal, but its how i roll.

needless to say, i dont buy anything i dont have to. i dont go out with friends, i dont go shopping, i live off whatever scraps my parents dont eat....even putting gas in my car (a necessary obligation that i should be ok with) hurts me inside. especially since i just found out that my bike tire is leaking air and i cant ride it until i patch the hole...a task i have no idea how to do and probably have to buy something overpriced to complete.

if money was an animated being with cognitive abilities and emotions, i would give it a big fat middle finger and tell it to go to hell...we dont need it...we could go back to the barter system and be just fine.

this is especially true today because i am sitting at a frigidly cold coffee shop, writing and listening to my itunes and was overwhelmed with a mood-altering realization: i am completely sick of my music (exceptions made, obviously, for the dave matthews band, iron and wine, and sara mclachlan). i want to buy the tegan and sara album ive put off buying for a year, everything ever produced by the frames, and the drastic fantastic album by kt tunstall. but nooooo....i only have $400 in the bank and the bills will show up in my mailbox by the end of the month. iwant itunes and i cant have them because the european economy's sole mission in life is to suck the joy out of america's youth by charging them 15 dollars for a crummy baguette and twice as much for a rubbish hostel room in the summer than in january.

it's unethical and i'm thinking of writing a very strongly worded letter to the leader of the european union.

hot sauce...

2008-10-04T13:30:00.000-07:00

i came home from volleyball practice today feeling like i hadn't eaten in a week. last season, because we had a low number on the team, i would have to step in at practice and play to run the 6 on 6 drills we need to imitate game-like circumstances. but this year, because we have 15 solid athletes, i have become the most amazing ball-tossing drill-facilitator you've ever seen. i do a lot of standing and watching...i toss a ball from time to time...it's pretty amazing. but today, my services were needed on the court and so i ran the set on my side of the net.

no problem...i'm in decent shape...not decent "volleyball shape" mind you (being in shape and being in "volleyball shape" are two very different things, but that's another story for another blog)...but i could run around without feeling like i was going to die and actually put the ball where it needed to be most of the time. but by the time practice was over i was soaked through....saturated in my own sweat. because of this year's budget cuts, the air in the gym is not turned on over the weekends. so that means on any given saturday, in one gym there are three teams running around playing volleyball. this roughly equates to 45 sweaty kids and one stand-in coach contributing their body heat to the already stifling conditions.

i was sweaty and gross and starving. i had eaten a bagel that morning, but had not anticipated playing volleyball for an hour and a half. if i do anything that requires more energy than sitting in front of my computer, i need protein....lots of protein. i burned through my bagel before the girls had even set up the net. i was running on fumes by the time i had finished practice and hurried home to cook myself lunch.

if i'd had a 9 oz filet in my fridge, i'd have eaten that raw, but im broke so i ate the poor man's protein...eggs. as i was finishing them up, i poured some hot sauce over top while they were still in the pan. the salsa had been in the fridge and was cold...nothing puts a damper on having breakfast for lunch like cold salsa making hot eggs lukewarm. so i thought i'd heat it up. but as i lifted the pan to slide my salsa laden eggs onto the plate some of the sauce dripped off the top of the egg, slid onto the frying pan surface, and immediately shot into my eye. i popped off some four letter words as the spicy projectile liquid singed my cornea and immediately rushed over to the sink to flush it out. it burned something fierce and i wondered if my vision would finally be impaired...by hot sauce of all things. if it was, would i get to wear an eye patch?

the best part of this entire scenario was that my mom was 15 feet away, so engrossed in whatever she was doing on the computer that she never noticed that pace picante had become airborne and was searing my retina. i could be blinded right now and she'd have been reading her emails.

brownies for brekkie...

2008-09-30T10:47:00.000-07:00

i had brownies for breakfast. brownies and coffee make for a fantastic morning meal...if you feel so inclined, i highly recommend it. the only anticlimax to this seemingly wonderful situation was that dad (yes dad, i live at home, bite me), when asked to bring home brownie mix for his period-ravished, chocolate-craving daughter, brought home the cheapest betty crocker shit-in-a-box excuse for brownie mix he could find. men pay no attention to detail. seriously. i urge you to visit the baking goods and cake mixes aisle of your local grocery store...there are like 13,000 different varieties of brownie mix. there's everything from the just-add-water-and-cook-in-the-microwave version to the ghiradelli triple chocolate brownie mix from heaven, and trust me, a woman on her period wants the latter of those two options.

i'm pretty sure dad went into that grocery store thinking chocolate is chocolate, saw a bright red box (the ghiradelli box is generally brown-gold in appearance and not as visually striking), and checked "brownie mix" of his grocery list for the week. there's nothing wrong with this line of thinking...if you're a guy. but if you're a girl, you are intimately acquainted with the different varieties of brownie mixes as necessitated by the monthly hormones that rage through our bodies making us erratic, emotionally-unstable, bloated, chocolate-jonesing animals once every 30 days. touch my pan of brownies during the last 3 days of my period and i might sacrifice your hand to Menstruses, the ovary goddess.

now, i'm not as elitist as i may seem. obviously i know what i want, ghiradelli is what i want, but surely i am a reasonable person and i would settle for something like the duncan hines chocolate fudge, or, if we're going with betty, her dark chocolate version provides the consumer a packet of hershey's chocolate to stir into the batter for a bit of additional-chocolatey-goodness. a little extra effort that i truly appreciate. but i do think that there is a problem when i go to pull out my first brownie and the bottom half of the pan is so oil heavy that the brownie leaves a residue on my fingers. isn't that supposed to be mixed in? i don't think its supposed to sink to the bottom in the 24-27 minutes i leave the pan in the oven unattended.

but this is exactly what happened to me two days ago when i went to eat my first brownie. i had to wash my hands immediately for fear i'd touch my face and initiate the next great blackhead invasion. i didn't say anything to dad because i didn't want to sound ungrateful, but i've decided that that man just can't be trusted when sent to the grocery store. unless you show him exactly what you want before he leaves the house, he has no clue what to buy. i will write "whole grain bread" on the list and he'll come home with brown wonder bread. tell him you want vanilla yogurt, he'll bring home just one cup because you didn't tell him exactly how many to buy. you tell him to bring home brownie mix and he brings you a box of vegetable oil-rejecting brown powder.

i love to do the grocery shopping. it's my favorite domestic activity. my laundry will remain on my floor for weeks at a time, i can't be bothered to put the dishes in the dishwasher, and i can't hem a pant leg worth a damn, but i can tear up a grocery store. i scan labels for trans fat and look for chips without hydrogenated oils. i find the granola with high fiber, the low-fat yogurt, and the OJ made with real fruit juices. my cart will be filled to overflowing with produce and cereal, chicken and mom's nasty sodium-laden lean cuisines and i know i could keep going if six people lived in my house instead of three. it's an addiction, the grocery shopping. but i'm pretty damn sure i'd bring home the right brownie mix...

ode to shauna...in b flat...

2008-09-17T07:38:00.000-07:00

today is shauna mccarthy's birthday...my friend...my ladybug...my roommate forever. i would like to pause for a moment and honor shauna with a few words detailing some of the many reasons i consider her to be the most amazing human to have ever walked the planet...

shauna wears pink goulashes in the winter time and pants throughout the summer...

there is a starbucks cup permanently attached to her hand...

you don't have to ask, she will do all of the grocery shopping and then refuse your money when you try to pay for your half...

she wears ladybug stickers in her cleavage...

when shauna is stressed, she bakes. and if it is fall, she bakes the greatest pumpkin chocolate chip cookies you've ever tasted. and if she lives with me, she always saves me a container of the uncooked dough so i can eat it while watching a movie...

when i lived with her, shauna always let me steal her clothes and they were c-u-t-e cute...

she can tell you where every single privately owned coffee shop in reno is located...even the ones tucked away behind trees and brick houses...

she must be the most patient person alive because she never killed rascal...even when he peed on her floor and chewed on her blankets...

only shauna knew what i meant when i said, "it's day three..."

she will make you feel like the resurrected Christ if you give her a thirty dollar gift card to trader joe's...

you'll never find a better person to share a glass of wine with...

her ass is AMAZING!!!

one of shauna's hugs is like getting a hug from everyone you know all at once...

contrary to popular belief, shauna will let you know that a denim jacket can go with everything...

one word...bangkok...

she may only have twenty bucks to her name, but she will buy you coffee and lunch before she'll put gas in her jeep (which is big pimpin' by the way)...

oprah is her hero...

when i create a non-profit in africa, she's going to do my PR pro-bono...

if you live with shauna, there will always be fresh flowers in your house and you will always want to come home...

i met shauna while pulling my first set of all-nighters in reno. she brought us energy drinks and candy bars. i thought she was an angel...

she will interview all of your potential boyfriends...

no one makes turquoise look so good...

she has this dance where she looks like she's in the marching band...

when shauna gets embarassed she turns beet red and it's the cutest thing you've ever seen...

she's not a cheerleader...she's a heckler...

she won't make you feel bad when you've had a little too much to drink and you stumble over your words even though she wants to laugh her guts out...

and the final reason i love shauna mccarthy and think that she's the greatest human to have ever walked the planet is this: she is the kindest and most servant-hearted person i have ever encountered in all of my life. her love is true and she forgives everything...literally EVERYTHING. she spends herself for everyone she meets and her own needs are an afterthought...something she'll get to if she ever has an extra minute. you look in her eyes and see how people are supposed to be...you share a home with her and you live in a place that radiates affection...you become her friend and you have found selflessness embodied.

happy birthday shauna...may you reap what you've sewn this year...

love, hugs, and ladybugs,

your roommate

guest teacher...

2008-09-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

i am a babysitter for the clark county school district.

a few years ago the school board decided to change the title of my position from "substitute" to "guest teacher." the motivating notion behind the switch was that the new designation would garner a greater amount of respect and compliance from high school students accustomed to treating the a fore mentioned with as much deference as you might provide an unwanted house guest. but for all their noble intention and in their infinite wisdom, the school board forgot one very important thing: to tell the kids about the change. so the uninformed students remain ignorant to the fact that i'm supposed to be treated as an honored visitor in their classroom, instead of playing the substitute's usual role: stand-in without a clue.

call me an optimist, but i'm sure that if someone told them i wasn't just a piñata for their verbal assaults and that instead i was to be offered a seat and cup of tea with biscuits upon my arrival, the students would be more than willing to indulge me. they would study dutifully and do their work diligently, grasping for my every word during lecture because my time with them would be brief and they knew they may never get another chance to taste of my brilliance.

of course i'd indulge the little underlings and regale them with tales of my travels and experiences since high school, all which seem insatiably desirable to fifteen and sixteen year olds held captive by nevada’s public school system. i'd teach them about the history of the world and the literary cannon in such a way that they would stay hours after school to listen to my musings. they’d ask me to teach supplemental classes at the neighborhood starbucks and give them an additional reading list filled with the literature i felt necessary for their most profound character development…books by david sedaris, vladamir nabokov, and hubert selby jr.

but i get no respect. i’m lucky if the kids remember my name, forget the literary cannon and the personal enrichment I might afford them, instead i get nothing but grief. all this because I’m the substitute…

on vanity...

2008-09-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

i woke up a few mornings ago with a mondo zit on my chin and another one on my left temple. i found this completely disconcerting as i am now a twenty-four year old semi-adult who took acne medication for years in her teens in order to prevent things like this from ever happening. the appearance of an unwanted blemish is to make a mockery of the years of saturday mornings i spent in blood pathology labs at the crack of dawn, waiting alongside henderson's most feeble senior citizens, in order to prove something i already knew: no i wasn't pregnant and yes i could have my next month's accutane prescription.

to add insult to injury, even after my diligent efforts with a too-expensive facial cleanser from origins and clean-and-clear's oil sucking persa-gel, i woke up today with three new white-headed-demons cursing my face. i didnt sleep much last night and already hated my life, so the presence of five not-so-subtle pimples scattered about my grill didn't really make the morning any better for me.

how is it that a zit...something smaller than a dime...can completely ruin a girl's day? i mean seriously? zits kill me...zits and bloating. when i am bloated i want to hide under my covers all day because the prospect of trying on everything i own in order to find something baggy enough to hide the upsetting roundness of my belly is too terrifying to consider. this is why i don't think i'll ever get pregnant. i wont be able to handle getting fat.

hope tells me all the time that she can't wait for me to be a mommy. she's been telling me this for something like six years now. she rambles on and on about how i will be so patient and good with the little buggers, i will spend my life in devotion to them, and i will love them with all of my heart...blah blah blah. she will continue to sing my everlasting praises until the intoxicating fumes rising off her never-ending supply of optimism so overwhelm her that her voice jumps an octave as a result of some kind of weird excitement-induced overload and her words become inaudible to anyone incapable of picking up frequencies likened to those produced by a dog-whistle.

i appreciate her faith in me, really i do, but what i think hope fails to realize is that i'm far too vain to carry a baby. the idea of my stomach sticking out so far that i can't see my flip-flops is insanely distressing. if i have to choose between being preggo and wearing a size 6...i pick the size 6. say what you will about the miracle of life and how none of the bad stuff like morning sickness and midnight pickle cravings matter when compared with the joy of raising a child... i'm not buying it. i went to europe this summer and gained five pounds. i feel the extra chub every time i move and i hate the way my clothes fit now and i cringe inside every time i sit down and realize my thighs are bigger than they were three months ago. i can feel the extra fat sit like sludge on the chair and it makes me flinch as i think about how much i can work out over the next week in an attempt to remedy the situation.

in college, i lived off cheese quesadillas and animal style fries. it was hard work losing the extra fifteen pounds i put on while i was in school and no one, not even my potential future child is gonna get in the way of me keeping it off. call me what you want, but i do not want to reproduce. i have no problem with kids...it's pregnancy i can't be bothered with.

blog without reason...

2008-09-12T09:52:00.000-07:00

so i always blog when i travel. i'd like to say that's because i love to update everyone on my happenings, but truth be told, my main motivation is my own lethargy. i simply cannot be bothered to email everyone. it takes too much time, costs too much money at cafes, and requires way too much effort on my part. blogging made sense...write one thing and put it in a place where everyone can see it. it seemed so generous and wholistic. really, i was doing everyone a service by posting my ramblings on the internet, wasn't i?

but really, the best part about blogging was this: if you didn't get updated, it was your fault...not mine. my job was to write, your job was to make sure you checked the blog every week. blogging put the responsibility on the reader, not the writer and in that subtle switch, i was absolved of any blame i might reap for not keeping someone in the loop (which is a persistent habit of mine). it seemed brilliant.

but as convenient as blogging was for me, i never continued after i came home. it seemed so narcissistic, in the way posting the details of your life on myspace or facebook is so tragically self indulgent. it's actually contrary to my ethics to participate in such activity because i feel like those things infuse our generation of significance-seeking worth mongers with a false sense of importance. i'm all about confidence...and i'm all about confidence as a LEARNED behavior...but i think the kind of life and opinion sharing made possible by the internet is only a hindrance to something that's actually worthwhile.

so if i believe all that, why am i blogging now? good question. i suppose i don't really have a good reason except that i need to be writing everyday. it's good for my sanity and an excellent deterrent to the implosion of my brain.

i have a friend who always bugged me to continue my blogs after i returned home, but i never did. i always wondered why? what was the point? i had a trusty old journal to write in...so why was it my responsibulity to entertain those in my social circle? where did i ever get the idea that my writing was mildly entertaining in the first place?

it's probably because i seek approval of my opinions just like the next girl. i'm a significance-seeking worth monger out to leave my signature on the world; my own proverbial "sydney was here" signmarker. so the truth is finally out there: i'm arrogant and vain and become insecure if what i think is challenged by one of the many people in my life that are smarter than i am...but so is everybody else...so i don't care. we can all be insecure together.

so i guess i'm going to blog now...i hardly ever work anyway so i might as well do something productive with my time.