I am like clay

I applied to Emerson College this year, and I was asked 'what would the title of your life be?'
And this was my take...
The title of my life story would be, The Clay Phase. No, I am not a renowned sculptor; my greatest achievement in clay is a thumb pot I mashed together when I was eight years old. “The clay phase” is a term coined by mother to describe my puberty. At age 11, I was an awkwardly shaped kid—overweight, boat anchor feet, and not even five feet tall. In middle school, no one wants to be a ‘unique’ shape, but the same shape as everyone else. My mother tried to explain that I was growing, morphing like clay, to become a tall, thin, and beautiful lady. At the time, the words “clay phase” made everything worse. Clay is shapeless, squishy, and an artistic word for mud. Eventually I did grow into the lady my mother described, and now I look onto the term, “the clay phase”, with new eyes. It wasn’t just my body that has been morphing over these past 18 years, but my morals, passions, dislikes, and decisions. I am still in my clay phase, and I always will be because, no matter how hard I have tried, I have always been a ‘unique’ shape amongst the ordinary.

Artistic portrayal of my puberty

The eggnog stain looks like...

My hiatus from the cyber world may be over. maybe.
That's because my mother got an iPad for Christmas.
Thank you Santa claus (or as you may call it: the combined efforts of husband, son, and daughter)
I would like to write a full-fledged post so I can call myself an actual blogger,but it's Christmas. My cell phone is dead, dad is napping, mom is chatting on the phone, and my new kindle needs to be played with.

So long freaks.

I got a secret

I, along with a friend, started our own post-secret phenomenon at our high school. Except we have complete creative control, and can edit at will. Just our little high schoolers submit their secrets.
Example uno

I didn't know you had to flip the page to read more.

My internet connection is either hibernating for the cold months, or it is on its feeble last breaths. Yesterday I waited thirty minutes for amazon to load. Read here for more babble on the computer I should give a toddler to play with.

In the absence of blogs, articles, and emails, I have returned to these funny things called books. I thought kindle was just another word for book. I then realized that reading a book meant holding a device that had enough flaps to fly away on its own. 

I've actually spent my entire childhood and adolescence with my nose buried in a book. I imagine that future generations, possibly offspring of my own, will regard books as flightless rectangular things. 

In kindergarten I struggled with reading as every child was, but by first grade I was reading chapter books. One time my first grade teacher asked me what I was reading. I promptly said, "The Junie B. Jone's series. I'm about half-way through."

The teacher said, "Oh dear, I'm sure your mother reads those to you."

I replied, "No. I read them myself."

The teacher firmly placed her hands on her hips, which were about at my eye level, and sternly said, "Carmella, it's wrong to lie. You're not good enough to read those." 

I sometimes have lofty imaginations that I am an undiscovered prodigy. Einstein's teacher thought he was mentally retarded. I had a speech impediment that rendered me almost unintelligible for most of my childhood.  I tell myself, there was a genius at work at even that young of age. 

Like every child of the past twenty years, I grew up on Harry Potter. I actually thought I was a witch, and I would perform spells that would infallibly prove I was. For instance, I would point at the cat with my index finger (this was my substitution for a wand) and would demand for the cat to walk in some form of complex gibberish like, "wakkmeharra". And guess what? The cat walked. Like magic, one would say. 

Yet I have advanced to a new addiction (an addiction for bookworms I mean),  Steig Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (first in the trilogy). Normally I'm not for the murder mystery because scooby-doo only keeps someone interested if they are under the age of eight, or incredibly stoned. Also, John Grisham sucks. I can't put his writing skills in fancier jargon. His book's just really suck. 

For one of the first times my feelings about a bestseller matches the shortened blurbs on the back cover. It is "engrossing"..."blazing"..."beautifully paced"..and so on. This book has taken my attention from calculus! Actually anything can distract me from calculus. For instance, a pretty cloud outside the window. So, as my teacher plotted away at some graph, I was in Sweden solving a murder. If my friend leaned over to ask for the time I resolutely lifted my hand and said, "Sorry, but I am investigating a murder right now."

A few times during the school day I slammed my hand down on the table and gasped in shock. The classroom paused and someone asked if I had finally killed the fucking fly that had been buzzing around for past hour. All I could sputter were things like, "He found the photographs!", "She's being shot at!", "I think I know!" 

Less than an hour ago I went to the bathroom, with my book in hand. I peed for probably twenty seconds, but sat on the toilet for fifteen more minutes, paralyzed with the need to finish the chapter. Later, I got up to have a snack. I sat motionless over the counter reading the book, until I abruptly realized I was in the kitchen to find food. 

This is the Harry Potter for adults. It's just as addictive, but includes all the sexual torture, murder, and danger every adult loves! 

I actually just got distracted by reading again. 

And now I'm only thinking about finishing the paragraph I was at.

Gotta go. 

(sorry for no pictures. I began searching for images, but, yet again, my internet is giving out on me.)

The Indian man thinks I'm rude

11:34 am
My brother tells me that he is banning me from his macbook because I downloaded shit onto his desktop. Yeah, its loads of creepy porn.
(Actually, I downloaded skype and enough phd theses to make my brains bleed)
11:37 am
I unhappily sit myself in front of the desktop computer. This computer is circa the turn of the century.
11:42 am
I am still waiting for the computer to open google.com, and then it informs me that the web address is unknown. It's fucking google.
11:43 am
I scream to my dad, "Fix the computer! It's taking forever to load!"
He replies, "You should wash some windows."
11:45 am
I scream to my brother, "Alex, can you make this run faster?"
He replies, "Not my fucking problem."
11:46 am
I call my mother at work (she didn't get an entire week off for Thanksgiving like the rest of us)
"Mom," I say, "the computer is running slow and no one will fix it."
She replies, "Why don't you wash some windows instead?"
"But mom, how am I going to work on college applications?" (actually I need to find a pirated version of this week's Dexter)
My mom's voice gets panicked. "You can't do you college applications? I'm on it honey. It'll be fixed."
11:47 am
The house phone rings. It's a man with an Indian accent. He tells me, "I received a call that you need assistance with your computer. I am here from Charter customer service to help you."
His voice is the gatekeeper of hell for many reasons.
I scream for my dad. "Charter is on the phone. It's for you."
He yells over his shoulder, "Uhhhh.. I'm going golfing." He is in his car and pulling out of the driveway in less than thirty seconds. Ass.
I scream for my brother. "Charter is on the phone. It's for you." No answer. I walk to the other end of the house.
He replies, "Not my fucking problem." He eats another chip. "Anyway the internet is not the problem. It's the computer. Just hang up."
I stutter, "But-but-mom-said---"
He grabs the phone and turns it off.
11:50 am
Phone call from mother: "Did you just fucking hang up on him! I'm only trying to help!"
The phone rings. It's Charter. I ignore it, frightfully.
Phone call from mother: "What the hell?! You hung up on him a second time?! He just called me again and told me I have rude children. How embarassing!"
I reply simply, "Alex did it. I did nothing."


I am seventeen and my brother is twenty, but I still turn toddler tricks when under the line of fire.

F-Flossing

I flossed my teeth for the first time today. The only other times my teeth have been flossed is at the dentist. Every year I recline back in the dentist chair saying, "No I haven't really been flossing that much." Which means I never ever, not once, even had the inclination to floss my semi-pearly whites. And every year I get up from the dentist chair saying, "Thanks for the floss. I'll definitely use it." That's a full-fledged lie. Sometimes the dentist goody-bag floats around in my car for the next few months, while other times I discard it under my sink. Either way the floss ends up in the trash when I am forced to clean.

Yesterday my dad said, "I never really flossed in my life, but one day I decided to. My god, there was so much shit in my teeth and I had just brushed! Stuff kept falling out of my teeth. I swear I filled my entire sink with gunk that I left after brushing. Now I just feel shit between my teeth."

That perked my interest. I am curious about all things nasty. For instance, popping zits and/or blackheads (this is vomit-worthy, enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf8G-c_eAhs). One friday night, as a lonely middle-schooler, I hoisted myself onto my bathroom counter top. This is the optimum position for extreme zit-popping because I can get so close to the mirror that I can feel the fog of my breath. So I did the standard pick, poke, and squeeze of my face. Then I got to glaring at this blackhead on my nose. It had been there for years...this stubborn, black dot. Let's just say I did not know that skin pores went down that deep. By the time I had squeezed the black spot out, it felt like I had tunneled down into the inner-organs of my body. I had actually gone through all seven-layers of my skin for half my nose. For the rest of the week I looked like a burn victim, but that blackhead never came back.

I am also curious about the roots of hairs. Did you know that your knees have the longest roots? Fascinating! Just like I am fascinated with rare diseases. I don't remember their names because I'm no doctor.

So this morning I flossed my teeth. Not exciting. I didn't take my dad's testimony of an "entire sink", but at least half a sink would have been disgusting and fascinating. I think I got one tiny piece of phglemy gunk in-between two black molars. So, next time I go to the dentist I'll say, "Fuck flossing."
Actually, no I won't say that. I'm not that confident.

Paris Hilton endorses "Fuck flossing"

Tis the season for a dangerous life affair

The first way to cultivate an online personality is to actually be online.
Sorry, but I've had too much real life. Actually I've been living two lives; it would've been three lives if I would have kept up with the blog. As a personal calculator, me leading two lives expires at two months--approximately.

Life number one:
A high school senior in the rural south. No, I don't spend my time huntin' before school, and, no, I haven't kissed any of my cousins. I haven't gotten a B since that dreadful geometry class freshman year, I've read almost all the classics, and my writing awards do not fit into my college applications. I'm a master at self-deprecation, and I hide my fear of failure. When I sit down in a back scratching train, I am skipped because my muscles are as stiff as a bookcase. I'm not muscle. I'm stress.

Life number two:
I have a foreign boyfriend. His name is Mustafa. He's an immigrant from Eastern Europe finishing his master's degree. He is handsome and romantic. Merging life #1 and life #2 was an interesting experiment. My friends reactions were, "hot damn, get it girl!" while my parents went something like, "Carmella, what would a man that age want with a girl in high school? We always knew you would date older, but this...this...is too much." (gotta love the wild card kid)
My parents thought it safest to enforce supervised dates. A movie date meant my older brother in a row behind. Going out to dinner meant being flanked with two parents that spoke to him like he only knew elementary-level English. Moments alone, like walking my dog, was something treasured.
Impatience is my deadly sin. Within a month I was secretly dating Mustafa. And by the next month I was caught. And by that time we were in love.

I have ignored this blog because my life had become a lie. I used to live by deadlines, test dates, and the promise of four hours of sleep. Now I am emotional and confused. Sometimes I annoy myself, and I know it's mutual when my best friend rolls her eyes.