I feel so alone.  I’m trapped between two conflicting and irresolvable viewpoints, and while I am aware of a possible solution that would leave both of the viewpoints relatively unscathed and keep them out of conflict…said solution leaves one viewpoint unanswered, my own viewpoint.

Viewpoint #1:  It is too dangerous to have sex with someone who is having sex with anyone else other than us, regardless of if she gets tested for STDs.  Contracting AIDS would ruin both our lives and destroy our ability to produce viable offspring.  Either that person must become single, or we must not have sex with that person.

Viewpoint #2:  The person I am with makes me happy when I am with him and focuses all his attention on me.  I feel like a better person around him, even if he isn’t interested in marriage or any kind of perceived commitment.  I have no intention of breaking up with him.  Also, he got tested a while back and was clean, and hasn’t had sex with anyone but me since then, nor have I had sex with anyone but him.

Possible Solution:  Give up on a sexual relationship and forcibly place ourselves in the “friend-zone”.

As one can see from reading the viewpoints, both are 100% valid and neither can be dismissed as less valuable in comparison to the other.  And as I said, there is no way to resolve them through discussion.  Instead, the viewpoints must simply be removed from a situation where they can conflict, i.e. removed from a sexual relationship with one another.

My Viewpoint:  I care deeply about the thoughts and feelings of both people involved.  Knowing the way I feel about my own partner, I could never ask anyone to break a real connection between themselves and another person for my own personal gain.  However, because I view the purpose of my life to be reproduction, I also can not allow myself to take unnecessary sexual risks.  I would accept a negative test as proof enough that sex would be safe, and the use of condoms would be extra reassurance.

I suppose I never should have become so attached after finding out about her boyfriend.  While I have no problem with a boyfriend, I should have used my husband’s thoughts on the matter instead of my own to make decisions because his desires are more stringent than mine.  Instead, I let myself ignore the problem I knew her boyfriend would eventually pose and walk around with my head in the clouds, imagining a life where my husband and I and our female life partner would be living together happily with our children (both her’s and mine) and a hypoallergenic cat in a big house somewhere on the west coast.  I’m a dreamer.  I’ve always been a dreamer, and now it’s ripping my heart apart.  The big house is burning down and I feel helpless to stop it. 

I don’t want to find someone else.  I want her.  I feel so alone.

There are a lot of things about me that are strange, it’s true.  I won’t deny it.  I often think of myself as too childish, too emotional, and sometimes too focused on sex and relationships.  I always thought I would end up wrecking my life somehow by this point, and yet, here I am.  But I look around me and there is carnage, there is ruination.  As my social life blossoms and my romantic entanglements become more and more stable with each passing day, my peers and wallowing in the beds they have made for themselves.  Some have already gotten divorced.  Some have jumped from partner to partner focused only on attraction and never on stability.  Some are just too selfish to ever be able to commit to a long term relationship.  And I think to myself, “If these people cannot do it, what makes my relationship stand the test of time?”  Not that any of my peers are especially outstanding people, nor are they particularly crappy, but I’m simply flabbergasted by the fact that only two of my close friends are happily married and many of them are still single in the mid-twenties to early thirties.

So what is it that makes me (or my husband for that matter) special?  I was thinking about it and I’ve come up with a few ideas that are better expressed as a list:

1.  We have compatible life goals, i.e. we both want children.  Because the end goal of both our lives is to reproduce and that is the most important thing to both of us, we don’t butt heads about the path we will walk and instead happily walk the same path together.

2.  We are rational people.  We can rationalize our own actions and the actions of others, and therefore avoid arguments based on a lack of understanding of motivation.  There are no silent treatments for days on end.  We tell each other why we became angry or sad, we discuss possible reasons and then we bypass our own emotional responses in favor of a mutual understanding of the situation.

3.  We aren’t afraid of “adulthood”.  When I say that I am overly childish, I mean it in the most shallow of ways.  I laugh at farts.  I make rude gestures in public.  However, when it comes to money matters or other important life choices, I have no trouble being an “adult” about them.  Neither does my husband.  We know what is important and what one needn’t be too serious about.  Consequently, we have fun when we should and get things done when we should.  I think that concept is lost on a lot of people.

4.  We don’t desire “freedom” in the sense that most people think of it.  We have no intentions of staying out until 6 AM getting drunk at random parties.  Neither of us likes the concept of “one night stands” nor do we have “friends with benefits” or any of that other frivolous stuff.  Having the “freedom” to addle one’s mind and then have lots of sex without any real meaning behind it doesn’t appeal to either of us, and I don’t understand why I would appeal to anyone.  And I don’t see marriage as some kind of prison that destroys all hope of happiness forever after.  In fact, I feel more free to be myself and tell people to fuck off now than I ever did when I was single.  I see marriage as a safety net, a big soft bed where one can curl up and be happy and be FREE.

5.  We actually care about one another.  I’m not talking about how you care about your friend or you care about your mom.  I’m talking about willingly giving one’s own life to save the person you care about.  If I was in a situation where my husband’s life was in danger, I would do anything to save him.  Ask yourself, “If [insert significant other here] was about to be murdered and the only way to stop it was to die myself, would I do it?”  For me, the answer is yes.  The answer always was yes from the first time I said, “I love you.”  That’s what those three words mean to me.  “I would give my life for yours gladly.”

And maybe we are strange, childish, overly emotional and too focused on one another, but let me tell you that when I see a stream of frustrated, lonely people on my facebook wall I thank the universe that my mind works the way it does and that I met someone else like me.  Perhaps we are just lucky, but I don’t think so.  I think those reasons I just listed sum it up.  A lot of the people I know are too fixated on being “free” and “young” to realize that their time is rapidly running out to find and subsequently make a connection with someone.  That connection has nothing to do with how much beer you can ingest or how late you stay out at night, nor can it be replaced by the company of dozens of strangers.  And it’s based on honesty and trust, two things that cannot be generated from being a child forever in the ways that matter.

Maybe I’m being too judgmental and chastising, but someone I know who is in his 30′s and was married has recently gotten a divorce…over something really stupid that if I discussed, it would sound like a high school kid’s problem in a two month long relationship.  I just…get so frustrated when I listen to people complain on and on about their supposed life partners’ insignificant flaws instead of focusing on the big picture, that picture being a life of love and support given up for a life of loneliness and depression masked by alcohol, all over something pointless.  Ugh…

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I had a panic attack in the car the other day.  My husband had just picked me up from the lab and I had failed again, even after modifying which of the three ligases I was using.  I sat down in the seat next to him and he touched my shoulder and I just started crying.  I was crying so hard that I couldn’t breath.  I coughed out for him to drive me home and I stood in the shower crying for another 30 minutes.  I couldn’t even think.  My mind went blank and all I could think of was my failure.  It swirled around in my mind and became a huge, hideous cloud of dark smoke, choking me from the inside.  It was the most frightening thing I’ve ever experienced.  I didn’t know it was a panic attack at the time, but when I explained it to my mother she immediately told me what had happened.  I never want to feel like that again.

I took the day off all Sunday.  I just sat around and EV trained Pokemon.  I needed to de-stress and reevaluate what I was doing in the lab and why it wasn’t working.  It helped a lot.  I’m back in lab today and feeling much better.  I’ve come up with several other solutions that I had previously missed because I was blindly following a protocol I had been handed instead of really thinking about what was happening in my experiments.  I think I can do this.  I know I can do this.  This is the life I’ve created for myself and I’m not about to fail at it.

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I have so much to say about my husband’s and my mutual girlfriend that I don’t know where to start, so I’ll tell it like a story and italicize it and then see where that takes me:

I’ve always felt as though I met the perfect male in college.  He is my husband.  But being bisexual caused me to long for a female as well.  I searched at college and turned up nothing.  Females are too different from me in most cases, and of course finding someone who is interested in mutually dating two people is extremely difficult. 

Near the end of my time as an undergraduate student, I met a girl who really struck a cord with me and we became fast friends.  Sadly, because it was so very near the end, we hardly spent any actual “face-to-face” time together, but I think we could both sense a kindred spirit in the other.  We kept in touch and one day she suggested that I try a site called OkCupid.com for my female search endeavors.  I was skeptical, but it was free and she made it sound pretty fun.  I made an account and started contacting people I thought sounded interesting.

One of the people I met was rather special in that she seemed like everything I was looking for.  I awkwardly messaged her, allowing a tiny hint of hope to creep into my mind, but keeping myself firmly rooted in the reality that she was likely not to even message me back as it is the way of the internet for these things not to work out.  But my hope was rewarded and we started chatting every few days, culminating in a meeting for ice cream and then a trip to her house for some general hanging out.  I had so much fun talking with her, probably too much fun since I can talk for hours, and I could barely bring myself to leave when the time came.

Weeks passed and we spent more time together.  I was working on a costume and she had a career in costume making in the past, so at first it was mostly for me to come over and use her knowledge and her sewing machine.  As time progressed, I knew she had to meet my husband and I brought him along with me.  We all chatted and laughed and smiled for hours together and it was like a dream.

But time constraints tore us apart.  My husband was winding down his last few days of employment and she was studying for her finals every night.  We traveled a couple weekends in a row, and consequently didn’t get to see her for a while.  But the night we returned from our exhaustive travels we invited her over on a whim and it just happened.  I suppose while I had thought about it many times, mulled it over, savored it and then dismissed it as an unobtainable goal, but finally kissing a girl was just as exciting as I suspected it would be.  And we certainly didn’t stop at kissing.  However, as a weary traveler, I didn’t have the stamina I should have had for such a momentous occasion and we had to stop short.

A few days later we had planned to have dinner together, but now it was something more.  I had stopped short the festivities of our first taste of intimacy with each other and everyone was anticipating continuing where we left off.  But I find, for myself, anticipation doesn’t get me going as much as surprise.  I was worried, nervous.  I hadn’t expected the first situation, thus I was left in a kind of limbo where I was excited that it had happened, but frightened that I wasn’t really ready.  My husband and I talked about a lot of things prior to the all important evening, how far we were willing to go, what precautions we should take, on and on.  I got to the point where I wasn’t particularly excited anymore, and instead just saturated with the idea that whether I was in the mood or not something was going to happen.  Like I hinted at, I’m not one who thinks you can plan good sex.  But I wanted to please her.  I wanted her to enjoy our company.  I didn’t want to seem boring and prudish.  My husband forbid me, however, from undressing her completely.  He was worried about safe sex and getting tested for STDs and a whole host of things that, while valid, certainly didn’t excite me for the evening.  I think we were all expecting something different and while it was alright, I think everyone ended up being disappointed.  Me because I didn’t see her naked.  Her because I didn’t see her naked.  Him because he was overwhelmed by the whole situation before it even began that night.  We had just made out for a second time in a threesome.  I should have been ecstatic.  Instead I just felt…kind of empty.

In the days that followed I had little contact with her.  I actually let tears well up in my eyes a few times thinking that perhaps we had ruined it over a stupid make out session.  My husband and I talked about the dark cloud that had been hanging over the situation, her having a boyfriend, and how he didn’t want to have sex until he was out of the picture.  I revolted and told him he was being unfair, but I still agreed that we should all get tested together if things went any further.  I felt it was a compromise between the two extremes that everyone (hopefully) could live with.  But that wasn’t at the forefront of my mind.  What worried me the most was her face as she walked away from us when we dropped her off that night.  She looked as though nothing could have made her any sadder that the evening already had…and it ripped my heart apart.

Finally I sent her an e-mail, voicing my concerns and telling her how I was feeling about everything.  She replied in kind and we talked everything over, what we should have done to begin with, even before the first kiss landed on my lips.  As I expected, we had all anticipated too much and spoken too little, especially about what we wanted out of the encounter.  I think it’s all on the table now, at least I hope it is.  I tried my best to say everything relevant, but these things are complex and I may have missed a few things.  I am only human.

And so is he, her boyfriend.  I’m tired of him being this weird grey area in the back of my mind.  I told her I want to meet him and I do.  I have no desire to become involved with him intimately, but I also have no desire to continue treating him like some kind of inanimate object in my thoughts.  And if he thinks she’s wonderful, well, we have at least one thing in common.  I think he deserves to meet the other people his girlfriend is involved with, and if he’s relaxed enough to do it willingly then there is no way I won’t get along with him at least averagely well.

In the end, things are going amazingly with limited hiccups along the way.  I never expected this.  I never thought that I would have a chance like this.  I never thought breasts would be so beautiful in person.  Most importantly, I never thought I would meet anyone else who could appreciate my strange personality.  I’m really happy.  I’ve lost my girl virginity and it feels nice.

I find myself thinking about Columbia a lot lately.  Even though our apartment here is much nicer (and contains no remnants of dead squirrels) and even though we have met some very amazing people here I really do miss Columbia so much more than I ever expected I would.  When I first got here, I thought it would be just like Columbia since it’s comparable in size and in the fact that it is a college town.  However, what I forgot to factor in is that I am no longer an undergraduate student.  I am no longer a free agent full of the wild eyed joy that is self discovery.  I am a graduate student.  I have work to do.  I don’t have time to gallivant around town playing DDR and otherwise nerding it up in a manner conducive to meeting like minded people.  I don’t have time to make hoards and scads of friends or even really make enemies.  It’s actually rather depressing.

And when I think on it my life isn’t going to get any less complicated.  Career, children, home ownership, true “adulthood”, they all get in the way of even our most intimate of social connections.  Families become islands.  I don’t like that concept.  Maybe it’s the tribal nature of my native ancestors that motivates me, but I don’t want to be an island.  I want to be someone on an island with lots of other people who I enjoy spending time with and even some I don’t.  Maybe we all have our own huts on the island, but that doesn’t mean we are completely isolated from one another by any means.  I think that tribal concept is predominantly lost in American society.  People have their house and their car and their dog and their stuff, even though all those things required countless other people to create and provide.  I want to feel like I’m part of a community without going to church.  I want to experience being handed something by someone that they made themselves and then handing them something back that I’ve made.  I think I hate money.  I want to trade things to people for other things.  I want to feel needed because I am providing a service or producing a product that others need and cannot make and getting the same in return for my efforts.  Maybe that sounds weird, but to me it sounds somewhat magical.  Maybe I like small towns more than I think.

Regardless, all that isn’t my point.  The point is that I don’t see ever making as good of friends as I did as an undergraduate.  Life was the least complicated then and I had the most time on my hands to simply meet people for the enjoyment of doing so.  Like I said above, it’s actually rather depressing.

I miss you guys, and I can see us spreading apart slowly, living our own lives, making our own islands.  Well, I say no!  I won’t stand for it!  I don’t want to live on an island if you aren’t going to be there with me!  Let’s make a big communal island together.  Let’s raise our families together and go to our jobs together and eat our meals together and laugh and smile and remember the good times together.  I don’t want to be an island.  I don’t want to secretly cry while I’m typing this.  I don’t want to only interact with you over the internet and pretend that’s good enough.  I want to see you!  I want to be close enough to reach out my hand for a high five!  I want to be there to hug you when you’re sad and smile with you when you are happy!!  Most of all, I want to know you in a way that can never be generated electronically.  Even if you read my blog you don’t truly know me.  I’m just a bunch of words spread out across a computer screen.  I want to know you in the way that your eyes give away that you want to go get ice cream or that your body language says you agree with me.  I want to know what you are thinking without you having to say it.  I don’t want to be an island.  Please don’t let society shape you into an island.  Please.  Togetherness is all we have left that hasn’t been tainted by capitalism or social networking websites and I don’t want it to slip away.  I don’t want to lose the only piece of humanity I have left.  Please don’t let it slip away.

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Anime Central, what can I say?  I had a lot of fun.  I think our costumes turned out great, we saw a lot of cool stuff and we got some soul searching out of the way for next year. 

Soul search fact #1:  We are probably too old for Anime Central to be a three day event. 
Soul search fact #2:  I can’t actually live on non-perishable foods only.
Soul search fact #3:  I can’t sleep when planes are taking off very near to me. 
Soul search fact #4:  No one is immune to furries given enough exposure.
Soul search fact #5:  I have no respect for fan girls.

#1 just means that we got bored before the end of the trip.  Without the draw of meeting and subsequently becoming intimate with other attendees, we found that the charm of walking amongst a large number of other costumed humans wore off quickly.  Additionally, we found that a once through of the exhibit area was enough and that we didn’t really need to go and look at all the stuff for sale again the next day.  We weren’t spending “Mommy and Daddy’s” money, so we didn’t feel the need to spend every last cent we brought before we left.

#2 is very important in that one cannot remain feeling healthy and spry when all one is consuming is junk food that doesn’t require refrigeration.  By the middle of the second day, the pop tarts, cereal, and granola bars were wearing on our stomachs and we had to cave in and buy some actual protein containing foods. This, too, I feel, is a function of our ages.  Trying to save money by bringing our own food was a good idea, but could have been executed better.  I think next time we will go as a day trip, so it shouldn’t be so much of a problem.  We’ll bring some kind of lunch and then get dinner at the event, resulting in only a limited amount of overpaying for food.

Keep #3 in mind when booking a hotel.  A day trip will remove this problem, but as it was all three of us got very poor sleep.  Via a combination of loud 16 through 21 year olds running through the halls and planes taking off every 30ish minutes, I probably got a total of 6 hours of sleep over the entirety of the trip.  The hotel was very close the the convention center, and therefore very convenient for all the events we wanted to attend, but it was also close to the airport and full of other attendees, so there really isn’t any way to reconcile the situation other than not to stay long enough to need a hotel.

While #4 may seem trivial to some, let me tell you that furries wear on your psyche.  The first few are just kind of awkward and funny…but as the hours passed and we saw more and more it became rather haunting.  So many furries, so many people being lead around on leashes, so many strange children holding signs that said they would come home with you for food.  It was pretty messed up.  One of our party members was actually propositioned by one of the sign holders, and by propositioned I mean the girl came up to her, held a sign up and made a kind of squeaking noise.  Creepy…

#5 comes from the horrendous Pokemon panel we attended.  Basically, instead of the panel being made up of people who helped design the games or write the anime, it was just four super fans there to answer questions.  Of the four, two of them took the panel over.  Both were very into the anime and the female of the pair talked about nothing but “shipping” and other equally trivial stuff.  Shipping is a term for choosing characters you want to become involved in relationships and then writing/reading stories about these relationships.  So, needless to say, I have no interest in such things.  I mean, most of the characters are children anyway!  Neither did some of the audience members, as they were asking questions about the games, which were to be directed to the other two quieter members of the panel.  However, every time a question like this was asked, one of the quiet panelists would answer followed by them being drowned out by the crazy girl and her shipping.  It was awful.  It was like a horrible fan girl from a forum ranting on and on about her fandom, only in person!  I couldn’t just navigate away!  Well, actually I could, and did, in that we got up and left before the fucking thing was over because it was so annoying to hear that girl ramble on and on about shipping.  Lesson?  Don’t go to panels made up of super fans.

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Since I got back from ACen I’ve been working with my new undergraduate student.  He seems like a really hard worker and I definitely appreciate that.  I can already tell that he will get ramped up quickly and become a valuable asset to my research.  I’m just worried that I’m not at a stage where I can provide him with enough background information for him to really understand the research, as I’m extremely new to it myself.  We’ll see how it goes in the next few days.  I’m hopeful that he can reproduce the experiments I’ve taught him successfully, and that will really be more of a test of my own skill than his.  Fingers crossed I suppose.

Also, while I was in the lab today I asked someone about ligases that we had on hand and discovered I’d been using the “wrong” one.  There were three containers of T4 DNA ligase from three different companies, and I was using the only one of the three that no one can get to work.  No wonder my experiments are repeatedly failing even though I follow the protocols to the letter!  It actually made me feel a lot better.  Now I’m rather excited about running the experiment instead of apprehensive because I’ll just be wasting reagents.

Classes are over and it’s time for me to focus on my research.  I feel like I should be more excited than I am.  Now I don’t have short segments of time blocked out during which I must be seated in a classroom, nor am I beholden to my husband’s work schedule since his last day was the 7th, but my life still feels really disjointed at this point.  Even though I’ve really been looking forward to ACen I think I will also be glad when it is over, not because I think it won’t be fun or anything like that but because I’ll finally be able to get settled in to a weekly schedule. 

I’m really tired of traveling and being away from home.  It basically sucks the life out of me because I have so much trouble sleeping in any bed but my own.  Traveling just isn’t restful or fun or exciting to me.  I would rather be at home 99 times out of 100.  I feel much more rested in my own space with my own things and not living out of a little bag for days at a time.  Another problem with it is that I have to take days off from work, and while that might be fine for most work places, my professor makes me feel like I’m a terrible graduate student whenever I broach the topic with him, especially this weekend because I just traveled for Mother’s Day and now I’ll be away at ACen the very next weekend.  Biological work doesn’t lend itself well to being put on hold and I know that’s what he’s thinking when I tell him I’ll be out of town for any amount of time.

Speaking of traveling for Mother’s Day, I really didn’t enjoy it.  When we arrived in St. Louis it was apparent that my husband’s parents were fighting between themselves about something.  They were moody and cold the whole time and that combined with the dogs and the super uncomfortable guest bed that we are forced to sleep on made me never want to visit them again.  They can come up here if they want to see us.  And my parents were fine, except that they brought up my husband’s job in every conversation and we kind of had to tell a bunch of half truths to keep everything smooth.  Even more, I bought my mom a board game she really loves while we were out on Mother’s Day even though I had already given her a gift and my husband got rather grumpy and angry about it because we don’t have a lot of money now and are trying to budget.  It really frustrated me because now all the money that we will be spending is coming solely from my income, so I think I have the right to buy a stupid board game for my own mother on Mother’s Day if I feel like it.  It’s not like I just threw the budget away when I bought the board game.  I was thinking about it and calculating to make sure we would be fine, so having someone rudely explain to me that doing extra things for my mom was unnecessary really hurt my feelings, especially considering who that someone was.  It was just a terrible trip in general.  I know it made both our families happy and I know everyone misses us, but I just hate trips like that so much.  The only redeeming factor was seeing our Columbia friends for a bit, but it was such a short bit that it just left me missing them that much more because I knew those few hours would be the most I would see of them, possibly for months. 

I’m sorry.  I’m so emo right now, but I can’t help it.  I’ll make a happier entry later.

Mother’s Day is this weekend and my husband and I are traveling home to visit our parents.  It’s funny that I just typed “home” instead of “to Missouri”, but honestly I still consider Missouri my home.  I’m both happy and apprehensive to see everyone, happy because I miss them and apprehensive because of all the recent changes in my life.

I don’t often think a lot about holidays or gifts for people on said holidays, but for whatever reason I’ve really been driven to purchase heartfelt gifts for Mother’s Day this year, heartfelt being the key word.  My initial response was to buy cards for both my grandmother and mother, and I started by looking for a grandmother card.  The first card I picked up was perfect, and I don’t mean perfect because I read it and thought it was okay and just went with it.  I mean perfect because it said everything I wanted to say in words that could have been from the very center of my own soul.  I wiped a tear from my cheek and placed the card and its envelope carefully in my cart as I moved on to the mother oriented cards.  I picked up on after another, each one stupider than the last!  Everything was about being shopping buddies or getting nails done or said really cheesy mindless things and I was just appalled.  Where was the thought and care and love that came through in the grandmother card I had already chosen?  I furrowed my brow and grabbed another grandmother oriented card from the shelf and read it.  While not as accurate as the one I had picked out in terms of my own feelings, I could see where someone else would have chosen the card.  And another, and another, all expressing deep feelings of love and appreciation for the existence of grandmothers.  I replaced all the cards I had in my hands and asked inside my head, “Why is it that we only deem grandmothers worthy of our most sacred thoughts and well wishings?  Are mothers somehow exempt from serious emotional responses in terms of greeting cards?”  I wasn’t only reading the “humorous” section of cards either.  It was just a general trend I observed.  There were no truly serious mother cards.  I had to choose between one that threw in a quip about shopping or wine or some other foolish materialistic concept that has nothing to do with the connection between a mother and her daughter.  I sighed and gave up.  My mother doesn’t particularly enjoy cards anyway, and I wasn’t about to hand her something that sounded absolutely terrible and shallow.  But I shouldn’t have had to make that choice to give up.  Is that all mothers are now, best friends forever for younger women to drag about from mall to mall while they pretend to be young again and while twenty somethings call them cougars?  If that’s the case, that’s fucking stupid.

The other part of my gift to my grandmother was to be brownies, so it was off to the grocery store this morning.  I can smell them now as they just came out of the oven a few minutes ago, and my grandmother has a great appreciation for things made with one’s own hands strictly for the purpose of making someone else happy so I think she will be quite pleased.  And my mother had asked for socks.  She’s a very practical person.  I didn’t expect to find socks at the grocery store, so I had planned to go somewhere else to find her some nice cozy socks.  However, as I stepped into the doors of the grocery store I was met with the floral department.  There were Mother’s Day floral arrangements everywhere.  I walked about, staring at the flowers, wondering if my mother would like any of them.  I thought of how they would wither and die quickly and how she would just end up throwing them out.  But my parents used to have a florist when I was a child and I can always remember how every Mother’s Day my mother would bring home two mum plants, one for her and one for her own mother.  I searched around for a mum plant and didn’t see any.  I shrugged and started walking away, but just as I was about to pass into the fresh produce section, I noticed a small stand with a few lonely little mum plants.  Two were lavender, one was maroon, and two were yellow.  I looked at the yellow one and suddenly remembered the year my grandfather died and my mother was hospitalized for months and near death.  While she was in the hospital my dad brought her a yellow mum plant to keep her company.  I tenderly raised one of the yellow mums to my face to hide the redness I could feel building in my eyes, and I quickly turned and walked away with it, onward to the cake mix isle.  I knew it would be much better than a few pairs of socks.

I know my gifts will be well received.  It’s the changes that I don’t want to talk about.  My husband will be unemployed in a couple of hours and I really don’t want to tell my parents.  I don’t know what the will say.  I don’t know how they will feel.  It’s the first thing I’ve ever allowed to happen without their approval, nay, against their will (as horrible as that sounds at 23) and I’m fucking scared.  I’ve always valued my parents’ opinions very highly and I feel like I’ve betrayed them by giving him the go ahead to give his two weeks notice.  Additionally, there’s the woman we are mutually dating, and while I don’t really care what other people think about our choices in terms of relationships and lovers and other related issues, I am slightly worried that I might let something slip about her and I’d have to be quite quick on my feet to patch it up before it sounded like something out of the ordinary.  For example, what if my husband’s crazy mother asks about how I sewed our costumes?  I’ll have to mention that I borrowed a sewing machine from someone and could easily pass that someone off as nothing more than a friend.  On the other hand, what if something sparks a memory of playing board games and I mention snuggling with her and my husband on our apartment floor playing Arkham Horror?  It would be a little more suspicious to say that I misspoke at that point I think.  It’s just…really stressful to hide things from parents, a stress that I’ve never really felt before.  I don’t lie.  I’m not a liar.  In fact, I’m an absolutely horrible liar.  I would make a lousy politician.  Consequently, to have to focus on not allowing sensitive information to slip from my lips, or even the mere fact that I have “sensitive” information to begin with, will be really taxing for me.  Ugh, sparing someone’s feelings with a lie is such a foolish thing to do, because when they find out you’ve lied it will hurt far more than the truth ever would have.  But, at the same time, telling my parents half truths to keep them from worrying about our financial situation is probably the best option.  I’d rather have them simply never find out.  We will finish our business here, move somewhere else, settle down there, and then my husband’s old job will be a long forgotten memory.  But years?  Years of deceit?  This will certainly be a new type of endeavor for me…

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I’ve been chaining Starlys in Pokemon Diamond for several days now.  I’ve caught two…but sadly one was modest and one was calm, both terrible natures for physical sweepers.  Additionally, I kind of feel as though chaining is a type of cheating, like Action Replay, so the actual catching of the shinies didn’t really excite me as much as I thought it would.  However, on one attempt, before I even started chaining I walked into the grass and entered a battle.  I sighed because I was going to use a repel once I got to the center of the grass, so I was prepared to just run away as the battle began.  I rolled my eyes and looked down at the screen.  A Shinx, whatever.  But then I did a double take.  A yellow Shinx!  A SHINY Shinx!!  My husband had been looking over my shoulder a few days ago commenting on how stupid all the shinies looked, until we got to the fourth gen Pokemon at which point he pointed out how Luxray looked better in yellow because he’s electric anyway.  I shouted and tossed a Quick Ball and caught him first try.  My first legitimate shiny.  I had only seen two previously, after all the games of Pokemon I’ve played.  One was a Quagsire in the Safari Zone (ugh…) and the other was Liza’s Lunatone during the gym battle in Emerald (double ugh…), so I’ve never had a real chance to catch one before.  But now I had one.  I personally like blue Shinxes better, though, so I traded the little guy to my excited husband when he got home from work.  It was a good day for Pokemon.

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My hair is very yellow right now.  It is the perfect color to mimic Zell’s hair on the 14th, but I personally don’t like the way I look.  I promise to post pictures eventually, but not right now because I’m super lazy.  And on that note, I’m really tired of people telling me it looks awful.  I know it doesn’t look that great.  It’s not supposed to!  It’s for a costume!  I don’t mind if someone tells me once.  That’s fine.  I like to know everyone’s opinion.  However, there is this one person in particular who tells me EVERY FUCKING TIME SHE SEES ME that she dislikes it and I really just want to punch her right in the face at this point because I’ve explained the situation and that I agree with her several times and she just keeps bringing it up!  She’s sooooo overbearing!  In fact, I wouldn’t mind not seeing her for at least a month because I’m getting really sick of her commenting on my looks in any fashion, be it insult or compliment.  I think she was (and still is) very attracted to me when my hair was its natural color and she seems to be obsessed with the fact that I have a nice body and it’s rather awkward considering I’m not attracted to her in the least.  Our personality types, much less my thoughts on physical appearance, are just not compatible.  Bleh…so awkward.

Anyway, because I don’t like it I’ve decided to use this bleached hair as an opportunity to do whatever I want with it.  I ran some ideas by my husband and we both decided that the coolest sounding option would be for me to do half my hair blue and half pink, blending it in the middle into a purple color at the back of my head.  I think it should look fantastic.  Again, I promise to post pictures eventually.

Three things:

1.  I love sex.
2.  I was courageous.
3.  Fuck chaining in Pokemon.  I don’t want a shiny Starly that bad.

I was going to make an entry yesterday but I thought better of it because I was in a terrible mood.  I feel marginally better today, so I guess I’ll go ahead.

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It looks as though I won’t be seeing her this weekend due to the necessity of studying, which I totally understand.  However, I’m really disappointed because it’s quite possible that I won’t see her again for several weeks.  Next week is the last week of classes for her so I assume she will be busy finishing up homework and exams and things, and we are traveling back to Missouri for Mother’s Day Saturday through Monday.  The following week is her finals week which will of course entail more studying, and that weekend we’ll be at Anime Central.  So basically, unless she happens to find some free time for us during the weeks…which seems unlikely based on the timing…we won’t see her until after the 16th of May…

However, considering my husband’s last day of work is May 7th, by May 16th we will have a lot more free time.  It should be easier to find time to spend with her.  My concern is that by the time we can all hang out again…the interest in one another will have faded slightly.  I had built myself up for this weekend.  This weekend I wanted to show her how attracted to her I am instead of just telling her or posting about it.  I wanted to kiss her, hold her, show her the new body I’ve sculpted over the last few weeks.  I wanted to give her something to remember before two weeks of little to no contact.  Maybe I should have told her that sooner so that I could have cemented plans instead of just hoping she would be available and asking the day before if she could hang out.  Honestly, I probably should have just kissed her the first time I was ever compelled to.  And now I feel like I’ve made a huge mistake by waiting for “the perfect time” for such things.

I’ve been hoping that she would appear online today, but she made it rather clear that she was going to hide and study all day…so I guess she’s just doing a really good job of it.  In the back of my mind I’m tossing around calling her to see what’s going on, but I don’t want it to come off as some kind of crazy obsession with her.  Ugh, I just don’t know.  I wouldn’t be so concerned except that I’m frightened about not seeing her for two weeks.  I’m so bad at this kind of thing for already having dated and married someone…

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This morning I totally beat the Elite Four in Pokemon Soul Silver with a pretty crappy team.  I had a 46 Wooper, a 46 Corsola, a 46 Ampharos, a 46 Persian, a 47 Ninetales and a 46 Meganium.  The only real problem was the champion and all his stupid Dragonites.  I had to use five max revives (which is something I kind of consider cheating) but I decided it was a trade off for not using any legendaries and also not using any other items during any of the other battles.

However, now I’m at an impasse.  I can’t decide whether I want to play Pokemon Platinum since I never beat it or if I want to go old school and play Pokemon LeafGreen again to get a Suicune, which I don’t have one of yet.  I’ll have to think about it.

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Speaking more of my husband and his jobless future, I’m so happy about it.  One would think that I would be stressed because of the sudden loss of income or the negative effects on his resume, etc.  However, I’m not particularly concerned about that.  We don’t really need the money and people with far worse resumes than his get jobs all the time.  What I’m concerned with is the changes I’ve already seen in him since he gave his two weeks notice.  His whole demeanor has changed.  He’s still frustrated by his job every day that he has to do it, but now there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  He complains, but with an aside to the fact that he’s almost out of the hell he’s been living in since we moved here.  A smile as wide as his face appears when I talk about how he will be able to do whatever he likes in less than a week.  I can’t wait.  I just want the person I married to reappear.  Meeting someone new has helped a lot as it gives him something else to focus on, but I’m sure as soon as he steps out the door on his last day of work he’ll be completely back to his normal, happy, silly self.  And I’ll be glad for her to see the person he really is, rather than the shadow of himself that he has become lately.  I can’t wait!