This is how I feel upon completing a paper.

Weeeeeooooeeeeooooeeeooo from blurb on Vimeo.

Blocked

I should be doing the happy dance because it's quittin' time on Friday afternoon. Instead, I am completely dreading going home because I know I have to finish my final paper of the quarter. It was actually due on Wednesday, but my professor offered us all extensions if we wanted one. I took her up on it, and now my paper is due at high noon tomorrow.

I feel completely unmotivated to finish it. So far I have about 4 pages, and it really needs to be about 10 pages. 10 pages is not a lot, especially as far as grad school papers go, but yet I feel completely blocked. I've had 1 surge of inspiration this afternoon, and now I'm back to feeling blah.

I am so incredibly burned out at this point that I have begun to wonder if I will be able to hold it together long enough to actually finish my coursework and thesis. I am feeling very discouraged right now, because I know that I can write a kick ass paper. I've done it before - why isn't it happening for me now?

Hopefully my next post will be much less whiny and much more interesting.

Memory Month: My First Car Accident

Roy's recent car accident has led me down memory lane a bit - specifically to my first car accident, which was full of drama and intrigue. (Really, what else can you expect from the teenage me?)

It was March 1996, and I was 16 years old. I felt quite pathetic because I didn't have my driver's license yet (although I did have my learner's permit). My mom would sometimes let me take her car (a 1993 red Honda Civic - similar to the one pictured) on short drives to the store down the road, etc. One afternoon during Spring Break, I asked her if I could take her car to Country Express to get my new work schedule for the week. She said yes, and off I went. (Country Express was about 5 miles away from my house.)

After I'd gotten my schedule, I stopped at the store next door to Country Express and ran into Roger, a guy who lived in the area and was my on again-off again crush. We had never really dated before, but when he saw me at the store, he asked me if I wanted to go to the street dance downtown later that night. Of course, I said yes, and he said he would come by and pick me up. (A street dance is just what it sounds like, by the way, only the streets are actually closed off.)

And so I drove home. But I didn't take the direct route, which was the highway. Instead, I took back roads. I can't remember why I decided to take this route instead of the highway, but it was probably because I wanted to smoke a cigarette while driving so I could feel really cool. At any rate, at one point in the drive I took my eyes off the road for just a second, and all of a sudden, I was driving into the ditch on the left side of the road. I came really close to hitting a reflector, panicked, and overcorrected myself. I turned the wheel so hard that I ended up in the ditch on the right side of the road, and this time there was no saving me or the car.

I distinctly remember running into several fence posts, and then all of a sudden, the car was laying on its side (the driver's side, to be exact). To my credit, I didn't panic. It felt extremely odd to be sitting sideways instead of upright. I remember the radio was still playing, and the car was still running. There was some hissing noise going on, which of course made me think the car was going to explode any minute. Oddly enough, the thing I was most worried about was the fact that I had brought cigarettes into the car with me and couldn't find them. (I really didn't want to get busted.)

I probably sat there for about 30 seconds taking it all in. Then I just crawled out of the driver's side window, which was against the ground. A truck stopped to help me. The people in it had seen the accident happen, and they took me to the closest house so we could call 911. (This was before the age of cell phones taking over the world.) We drove back to the scene, and an ambulance showed up. I was mostly fine, except the airbag had hit me in the face. But I was taken to the emergency room. I can't remember if my mom rode with me or if she showed up later.

While I was laying there, waiting to be checked out, a cop showed up and wrote me out a ticket for "failure to control speed." I got a warning for driving without a license. My mom got a ticket for letting me drive without a license (which she later challenged, I think). When I was released, who else was waiting for me but Roger. Apparently, when I wasn't home when he showed to pick me up, he and my mom went looking for me and found the scene of the accident. He ended up giving us a ride home that night. He and I finally went out on our date, and we ended up dating until my first semester of college.

The car, of course, was totalled. Apparently I ran down 12(!) fenceposts. And my mom did find my cigarettes in the car. Doh!

Looking back on this experience, I have a few comments:

1) What kind of punk kid was I to think that I should smoke in my mom's smoke-free car?

2) I am really lucky that the couple who gave me a ride to the nearest house after the accident weren't serial killers.

3) Only a really skinny person could've gotten out of the car the way I did.

4) Speeding didn't cause my accident, so I don't know why I got a "failure to control speed" ticket. I should've gotten a "failure to keep eyes on road" ticket.

5) I now understand why my mom told me that I was harder to raise than my brother. I totalled her awesome car and probably made her insurance costs go through the roof. Not to mention the fact that I was smoking cigarettes at 16!

All I can say is I'm glad I've grown up.

1 Month Update: 101 in 1001

A month ago, I posted my list of 101 things I want to accomplish in 1001 days. During this past month, I accomplished 6 of them:

48) Finish thank you notes for wedding presents. These were finished and mailed out on November 14. A huge relief!

52) Report our videographer to the BBB. I did this on November 13 and have yet to hear anything back. I basically did this so our videographer will have a bad rating on his record. The back story to that whole issue can be found here.

74) Break my Us Weekly addiction. I threw out my renewal notice for Us Weekly on November 4. As entertaining as this magazine is, deep down I feel like it's a waste of money. Besides, I have plenty more reading material that I need to work through.

76) Shut down my Vonage account. I took care of this on November 5.
Vonage is a pretty awesome company, and I had my account with them starting in 2005. However, we always use our cell phones, so it didn't make much sense for us to continue paying for a phone line we don't use.

97) Make wedding albums as gifts for family members. These were done through My Publisher. I completed them on November 23 and received them in the mail on November 30. They look really good, but My Publisher makes my computer operate very slowly.

98) Close credit card accounts once paid off. I think I originally planned to close each credit card account as I paid it off. Instead, I decided to close down 2 accounts that had small credit lines and that we hadn't used in quite some time. I'll leave the other ones open so it won't look bad on our credit reports.

I also had a failed attempt to do one of the things on my list:

81) Give food (not money) to a homeless person. Last week I was getting off the freeway to go to work, and I saw an elderly man with a sign asking for help just off the freeway. So I went to the nearest fast food place, which was Carl's Jr, and ordered a breakfast burger combo. When I went back to the place I saw him, he wasn't there anymore. I was already late for work, so I just kept the hashbrowns for myself and gave the OJ to Myra and the breakfast burger to Beans. I'll try this again sometime soon.

As long as I keep accomplishing things on my list, I'll do a monthly update. Only 95 things to go!

A Sense of Balance

As soon as class ended tonight, my phone rang. It was Roy, and he proceeded to tell me that he got into a car accident earlier in the evening on his way to school. He didn't call me before my class because he knew I was giving my presentation tonight and didn't want to worry me. Anyway, he's fine, but his car isn't. He's still able to drive it, but the front of it is pretty smashed. The other guy's truck has minimal damage. Unfortunately, the accident was Roy's fault, so we're looking at an increase in our insurance premium - and we're thinking Roy's car will probably end up being totalled (it's older and not worth much anymore). And just last week we paid $600 toward repairs and new tires for Roy's car.

What also gets me is that we just paid $3000 to a credit card, paying most of it off. We had just begun to make progress on our debt, and now we're going to have to probably add yet another car payment to the load. The last time this happened was when my car was stolen. We didn't know how we were going to be able to afford a car payment, but I got a job offer (for the job I currently have) the day after I bought my new car. So I'm thinking that there has to be some balance due here and that maybe I will get the job I interviewed for 3 weeks ago. Otherwise, I just don't know how we will be able to afford the extra car payment every month.

It's always something, isn't it? For every step forward we take, we take a step backward. However, I have not forgotten for a single moment that the most important thing about all this is that Roy is okay and that the accident wasn't extremely serious. I can handle an insurance increase and a car payment, but I don't ever want to lose Roy.

A Dream of Three Kitties

Last night I dreamt that Roy and I had Kerwin and Woogas with us in some building that was filled with junk. Much to our alarm, we found out that a huge python had taken up residence there, and so most of the dream was spent trying to save our cats from a terrible death. We would put them in a cage, and they would escape. We would get them in the car, and then we would notice that the car had no floor - so again, they would escape. In the end, we were able to save them and get out of there. Towards the end of the dream, Scampers, one of my old family cats who lived with my mom and died just a little over a year ago, appeared, but we were unable to save him. I have no idea why Scampers showed up in this dream, but it was so sad losing him again. I miss my buddy, although Kerwin's disposition reminds me a lot of him.

Memory Month: Christmas 2004

I was talking to my mom on the phone earlier, and I found out that she's planning on flying up to Minnesota to stay with my brother for Christmas. My brother is a PhD student and has taken on a part-time job which has him working almost every day during December. There was no way he could've flown down to Texas to stay with my mom this year. And since Roy and I already knew we weren't going to be able to travel for Christmas this year, we all might have ended up having separate Christmases (which, so far, has been unheard of for our family). So I am beyond thrilled that my mom is flying to see him.

As I wrote before, this will be the first Christmas I won't be seeing my family. It has been the 3 of us for so many years. Even when my brother was married, he would spend Christmas Eve at home with us, and his (now) ex-wife would spend Christmas Eve at her parents' house. (They lived in the same town, so it wasn't a huge deal.) The 3 of us would open our presents, eat a ton of food, and just talk. Sometimes it'd been a whole year since we'd seen each other, so it was awesome to reconnect.

One of our best Christmases was in 2004. That was the year it snowed like crazy - in south Texas, of all places! (The last time it really snowed in south Texas was 20 years before, when I was 5.) The snow began late Christmas Eve afternoon. We were at my brother's ex-in-law's house hanging out, and we decided to leave because the roads were getting really icy. So we drove back to my mom's house, and later it started snowing! We got all bundled up and went outside to play in the snow. It was so much fun. No one was able to come over the next day because all the roads were closed, which was also different. (Normally, my dad and uncle come over on Christmas Day for lunch and presents.) We sat around all day and were just lazy. We really enjoyed the foot of snow that fell the night before. It was our first and only white Christmas.

Here are some pics from that year. It was truly a great Christmas. I am going to miss seeing my mom, brother, dad, and uncle very much this year, but I am also happy to have my first ever California Christmas.

My mom and I having a blast in the snow (with a bottle of MGD, because that's how we Texans roll!):

My brother, covered in snow:

Me, also covered in snow (and with much shorter hair, different glasses, and a really red nose):

My mom's house on Christmas Day:

One thing Texas has is really cool trees:

Here's to fond Christmas memories and to memories in general!