I Am Sadface

It's kinda funny to be posting here after my month or so long hiatus... I guess it's because I never knew what to say? It's not really that there was nothing to say, because I had tons of opportunities... Every time me and the Hedgehog went to Wal-Mart and we saw a new Kit something, something I'd been planning on doing weekly... My overly ambitious 25 Awesome Legend of Zelda things post, even editing Cathrin's stupid story... I could've talked about how weird it was having the Terror finally treat me normally at Christmas, or how I finally got the courage to talk to the Hedgehog's family...

I could've talked about Ichibancon and how much fun I had, or about how Hunny's been acting selfishly and seems to not take as much interest in her friends anymore and how that's been bothering me. I could've talked about how I first met the Hedgehog, or said something on his birthday. I could've let him know how much I love him on Valentine's Day; I could've let him know I cared for him, and was thinking about him, and how much I hoped his grandfather would get better when he was in the hospital. I could've said something when his grandfather died, about how my heart went out to him, how I've been there, I know how it feels...

I could've mentioned the toxic shock syndrome scare, and how stupid hospitals are, or when my dad went missing and I was scared...

When I started learning to join the Kemetic Orthodoxy I could've posted. I could've joined the Wiccan blog project. I could've talked about how I got interested in Homestuck...

The truth is, the longer I went without posting, the worse I felt about doing it, and about myself. I'm not confident, though I try to be, and I'm not very brave, I guess... Looking at life around me, I put things off for as long as I can, and then I give it up, because I know I won't do it. It's how I've lived here this long and still not gotten a job, I do everything I can to not do what I have to do.

You have to admit, you didn't give me a reason to keep this blog up. No one cared what I wrote about, no one left comments, no one showed interest. I wanted a place to vent my spleen, sure, and this was fine for that, but... only my friends were reading it, and since they appeared in all of my posts basically... I started to get afraid, chicken out. I wanted to say something, and thought of them reading it...

I guess I'm posting this now because I know it'll get read, that the Hedgehog will read it... It's the only way I could ever say this to him. I'm sorry I'm so pathetic and weak, that I can't stand up for myself, and I'm too afraid to go outside; I'm sorry I'm broken and useless... But it hurts so much more because I keep thinking you're ashamed of me. It doesn't help that you don't let me be there for you, that you exclude me from things... Maybe it wouldn't bother me so much if I were stronger, but when you disappear to go spend time with family, I can't help but feel I'm being left  behind because you're ashamed of me. I'm weird and cagey, and I barely speak, and when I do I talk too loud and say things I shouldn't...

But I love you, and I left the house despite trying to talk myself out of it, and I'm saying things I'm saying things I'd never say, even if they are kinda not to your face... The point is, I'm trying, but I need your help; I'm broken, and I won't get fixed on my own. Treating me this way isn't helping. That's... all I have to say...

The Girl-Fiend

So I called my dad to talk to him and instead got the Girl-Fiend… She was nice, polite, sweet… That’s when I remembered that she’s not all bad all the time, she’s only unbearable half the time. You know, when she’s not purposely trying to get under your skin by doing things like… making two boxes of pizza rolls and forcing them on you and your friends, and then later claiming that you ate both of them without her permission and refused to share…

Check Out This Cake!

So I've been hard at work on the Oh Bento! comic this weekend and all of today... Some funny stuff has happened, but honestly? The Hedgehog is funny so often that it's hard to pick something that he does and do a post about it... not to mention a lot of it is weird humor you just have to be there for it. Some of it is even hard to remember afterwards, no matter how hard I laughed at the time... So, instead... Here's something I worked hard on for the webcomic for you guys to enjoy.

Dynamite In A Biscuit

"French food: it's dynamite in a biscuit." -  The Blonde One

Butt Gremlins

 So the other day, the Hedgehog is just laying on the bed when he suddenly announced in a cheerful voice, “I have butt gremlins!”

“They go: ppppbbrrrrruuuupbt! That’s how they growl.”

Then he got  up, and as he walked away, he farted. “Oh, that’s Ted. He says hi.”

If You Read This, The CIA Knows...

What doesn't help my case:  this freaks me out somehow...

 Okay, by this point in time I doubt there is anything I could do to make you guys think I don’t freak the fub out every time something slightly weird happens,  especially not with the following story supporting evidence against me… I mean, telling you all I love horror movies and creepy pasta would probably do nothing to sway you…

Anyway, when I went to the Renaissance Faire with my friends, the night before we went, me, Lulu, and Tiffy shared a bedroom. Tiffy and Lulu had the bed, while I laid on the couch at the end of the bed, and after the lights went out we laid for a while and started talking; and after a while Tiffy started to fall asleep.

At first we talked about the NaNoWriMo contest and how I was competing with an old friend of ours who thought she was an amazing writer but who made Stephanie Meyer look like Shakespeare. From Stephanie Meyer we fell into how libraries are destroying books and we all want to move to Canada. From that we fell into how the US government could  pretty much care squat about the average person, and the fact that most of them are just in it for money and power. Ultimate power ultimately corrupts, after all.

While I’m not exactly an insane conspiracy theorist, I pay attention to evidence, and when talking about the government, I can’t help but to bring a specific something up: “I still don’t think we went to the moon. I saw something on television once, about how in this one picture you can see the crosshairs behind the lunar lander. I saw that picture in my science book that year. It’s true.”

Somehow other things we doubted about the government kept coming up, and the more we talked… the more the room started to feel creepy  and defiled. Shadows looked like they were jumping in the corner’s of our vision. It felt like being little again and afraid of the dark and monsters under the bed.





What if there were members of the CIA laying underneath the bed listening to us talk, ready to pounce at any moment?!

It got worse when I brought up something that had never made sense to me: “And with black boxes being virtually indestructible, able to be found even in ocean crashes, how is it we never found a single one of the 9/11 ones…?”

That was it, we couldn’t take it anymore. Getting up both at once, Lulu and I rushed for the bedroom door and opened it a crack, letting light from the bathroom fill the room. Instantly we were relieved, and I let out a sigh.

Feeling safe again, Lulu and I went back to bed.

Worst 50th Post Ever

... You know how I'm an easily terrified person? My mind sits and thinks about how things can go wrong so I'm always prepared, but sometimes something happens that even I haven't thought of; maybe it's something so good my brain thinks it's a trick, or maybe it's something so bad that all of my instincts scream at me to run before something worse happens.

This has happened to me a lot in the past, but only in the years after I lost my mom. After I lost her, I changed. I couldn't take confrontation, couldn't handle change... Believe it or not, I didn't get terrified at every little thing that might go wrong. I've run a lot. Get in a fight with my dad? Run. Get in a fight with a friend? Run, then make excuses not to talk to them. Get in a fight with my dad's Girl-Fiend? Get forced into a fight with her, then run.

Tonight's no different, either.

See, apparently the Terror (oh gods, should I be calling her that...?) had a bruise. I saw it today, she showed it to me. I figured it came from either when she made me pick her up and carry her away from the door while she was kicking and screaming, or from when her dad had to haul her up last night. Either way, it was getting blamed on me... Remember my fear of the Hedgehog's family hating me? Thinking me a horrible person? Yeah, well it happened, apparently... They are mad at me...

And every single fiber of my being is screaming at me to run, trying to come up with plans so I can avoid confrontation all together. Even horrible stuff I would never do my brain is thinking of. Everything from "fake sick so you have to stay home on Thanksgiving and not talk to them" to "get up after the Hedgehog goes to sleep and walk away, we'll figure it out from there."

... What kind of horrible person am I if I'm thinking of running off in the middle of the night without saying goodbye to my Hedgehog? Or even that I love him? What kind of twisted, selfish, cruel-hearted person would do that?

I'm terrified the answer is me...

Don't You Make Me Come Get You!

How could you be so stupid, me?

... I can't believe this child made me chase her down... again. I can't believe I made the mistake of letting her play outside again... again. Honestly, when am I ever gonna learn? Do I have some kind of chronic brain problem that makes learning from past mistakes impossible?

 It's just the Terror's been so... terrible today. All day long she's stared at me in that strangely blank but vaguely sad and confused way she has, making me repeat everything innumerable times.

"Stop. Stop it. I said stop. Stop right now!"

 "Let the dog go. Let Noodles go. Stop it, let him go, he wants down."

 "Close the fridge, you just ate and you didn't even finish your food. Close it. No, you just ate."

 "Pick that up. Pick it up. Pick it up. Pick up your mess."

"Let him go. Leave him alone."

"Get up. Get up and let Noodles out. Get up. Up. Up. Up!"

That last one was followed by, "Don't make me come get you..." She stood up and started inching away, and when I stood, she bolted. I chased her down the stairs and around the back of the house before I could snatch her up without hurting her...

Update: Ugh, she just made me have to get up and turn her back around in the timeout chair after she tried to play with Noodles and watch cartoons... Which is impossible because the kitchen is blocked off from the television...

Update: ... And after explaining again how timeout starts when she's quiet, she tried to get Noodles to come over to her... again...

Edit: This is my 45th post...

How I Got Curly Hair (a hint, I wasn't born that way)

In case no one has seen the awesomeness that is my adorable little self with my cute blonde hair in paint form, here it is.

I put the bow on so you know I'm a girl!

In case no has seen my normal paint self, which causes me to wonder who you thought that was all this time, here it is, too.

Clearly the most epic person on the internet...

 Now, unless you're the kind of person who knows a lot about hair and how it can change, you might be a little  suspicious about why I was so cute and blonde when I was little, and why I happen to have dark curly hair now, you might also be wondering about the glasses, but that's explained way more easily: I was near sighted my whole life and no one noticed me squinting really hard to see until I was in middle school.

I have two things to say about this picture... Yes, my hair looked like that, and looking at it, I have to wonder why I wondered why people always thought I was mistakenly mad at them...

 Of course, that creates interesting pictures and makes you wonder why no one ever noticed me making that face, and I really wish it could help explain why exactly I was so bad with faces, but it doesn't... I'm just bad with faces, and names. I once became friends with a girl because in gym class I became friends with this girl who was tall, thin, had straight blonde hair, and glasses. The next day in gym class I saw a girl who looked vaguely familiar and started talking to her... She was short, had a huge butt, and had short, curly, red hair... the only thing they had in common was glasses...

 I thought they were the same girl...

Clearly something is wrong with me, but you already knew that.

Clearly there was also something wrong with them if they became friends with this face...

But this isn't the story about how I'm so awkward with remembering people that complete strangers sometimes come up to me and start conversations during which I sit there the whole time trying desperately to remember where I know them from, or how I managed for years to pass eye exams while making a face that some people only make on the brightest day of the year when they're at the beach and the sun is glaring directly into their eyes... This is the story of how I went from thick, straight, super long blonde hair to having short, still thick, dark curly hair...

 My head was shaved.

When I was six years old I was living with two of my aunts, both of their husbands, two of my cousins, and my older brother. This was a household that was... how shall I say this simply...? They were pretty open to my tomboyish ways.

This did happen... And that kid didn't go to school the next day.

And I was quite the tomboy. I played in traffic, thought I could walk everywhere, got into fights, ignored other little girls because playing with dolls was dumb, and really only played with boys because they were all I had to play with and I wanted to live up to the expectations of my older brother... I was a lot like the Terror in this.

Brrrooooooothhheeeeeerrrrr...

 Still, I was a pretty open and friendly little kid, super outgoing, really mischievous, and I let everyone play with my hair. Who wouldn't want to? It was thick and long enough it reached past my butt and strawberry blonde. I loved my hair. I washed it all by myself every morning and kept it clean and brushed.

 My head was the perfect storm for lice.

I spent most of the 1st grade out of school because I kept lice. They never left. Every time I went back to school they had returned, magically, overnight. I practically bathed in lice shampoo. My clothes were kept in black bags. I wasn't allowed to sleep on a bed... of course, that might be because my aunts were the embodiment of pure evil, but I digress...

Eventually the effort to win the war against my lice became so bad that my aunt decided to cut my hair.

First to my shoulders...

Then to my ears when she realized she couldn't cut hair to save her life.

And it was still crooked...

We thought that was the end of that and I went back to school, feeling cold and lightheaded, by when I passed the school nurse's lice check, I was happy. Looking more like a boy that before, my behavior wasn't considered all that weird anymore, but I still looked slightly like a girl.

Then they did another lice check and my lice had come back... bigger, stronger, and looking like super lice. I can still remember the school nurse standing over my head saying, "Why are they invisible? Should they be transparent? This isn't normal..." to herself.

With no other options remaining, my aunt shaved all of my hair off, and we won the war against lice...

 Only now I didn't look like a little girl at all, I looked like a little boy, and I got treated like one. No one told me I was "so cute" or "so pretty" anymore, or asked to play with my hair, or if they could brush it or braid it... I didn't realize how much I'd liked the attention until it was gone.

That year I went back to live with my mom and she was devastated. I was practically bald and didn't look a thing like a little girl, and my momma was a very girly woman. She dressed me up like a girl in all pink so people would know I was a girl, kept me from playing in the road, and stopped me from playing with the boys... not that I had much choice, that was the stage where girls were icky to them and they refused to play with me... and the girls refused to play with me because I was too rough.

I only had one friend, the boy who lived across the street... and that was because he liked me. He kissed me on the cheek.

 It was a few more years before my hair got to my shoulder blades again, only now it was more of a dark dirty blonde and it was sort of wavy... Mom loved it. She highlighted it champagne blonde and curled it up like hers, and I managed to become a little more girly for all her efforts...

"Are we really twins, mommy?!"

 And then one day when I was twelve she looked at my had and told me, "I bet if we cut if off it'll be curly... Look at that wave, I bet you that the weight of your hair is the only thing stopping it." With an inability to predict the future, I let her. She was right, my hair curled right up, and for all of a day I was super cute...

The only problem was, I didn't know how to take care of curly hair. I brushed it when it was dry, had no idea about conditioners, didn't know what to do with it when it was frizzy... before long it looked like I was making a half-assed attempt at an afro. It kind of wilted in the middle too much to be a real afro, and it hung down too low in the back...

Also,  I made this face...

 The first day of middle school, four boys licked Skittles and threw them at the back of my head to see if they would stick... I was teased relentlessly, every day, about it... When I graduated from high school, I was still dealing with people yelling, "Skittles, taste the rainbow!" at me in the hallway... then again, the accident with the hair-dye in 7th grade probably didn't help refute that...

... It actually looked worse than this...

There are reasons why I'm an awkward not-quite-member of society.

Creepy Conversation of the Day

(The color changes in the next pic... tried to find a more tile-y color...)

So yesterday wasn’t too bad of a day with the Terror… I mean, she was a real, horrible, Terror yesterday, but the Hedgehog had the day off of work so he was there, and his little sister came over for a while, so the Terror wasn’t focused terribly on me… Still, she pitched an ever loving screaming fit because the Spawn and the Hedgehog’s little sis wouldn’t play with her? Or something like that… So to punish her for being bad I put her in timeout like I always do.

Timeout is a chair in the corner of the kitchen. Sometimes she sits and whimpers quietly for five minutes, sometimes she sits and screams and tries to move and I have to bump it up to ten minutes… Guess which one she did this time?

Not pictured here: a weeks worth of dirty dishes, and sanity.

 Oh, and when she sits and screams, she does it purposely, meaningfully, emphasizing each individual scream. And if I make the mistake of looking back at her she stares forcefully into my eyes, screaming short little blasts of “ah”!

"Ah! Ah! Aahh! Ah! Aaaah! Ah!"

"AH! AAAAHHHH! CAN'T YOU SEE I'M SUFFERING?!"

Well, while ignoring her so that she understands this won’t get her her way, Hedgehog’s sister came out, saw her in the kitchen, and told her, “If you want out of the chair, just get out of it.” and so the Terror did so… I may have lied when telling this to the Hedgehog by telling him that his sister picked the Terror up and moved her, because honestly… his little sister is scary and intimidating to my “shy-just-getting-to-know-you-and-therefore-not-comfortable-speaking” stage I go through. Normal me would like her, but for now she’s loud and aggressive and yells a lot at everything.

… All I could think was that my authority had been undermined… Whether purposeful or not (and I doubt it was, though she had to know that the chair in the corner was timeout) it put a thought in the Terror’s head: she could get away with anything, timeout was no longer a punishment…

I know this because a few hours later she got into raw cookie dough and huddled in a corner trying to eat it quickly before anyone noticed… right behind me… while my back was turned… I who thought she was just being a weird kid staring over my shoulder making slurping noises.

And I could’ve prevented it, too, if I’d spoken up earlier in the day when the Hedgehog’s sister had given her a chunk of the cookie dough. I could’ve said, “No, that’s your older sister’s, I don’t think she should have that”, but instead I clamed up and worried about how if I spoke up she’d hate me… But the Terror suddenly saw that the cookie dough was something she could have, and she did so…

When she got yelled at for doing it, she crawled under the table and proceeded to drag herself across the floor, looking pathetic and shoving at anything within arm’s length…

In fact, the only not bad thing that really happened with her today was a creepy conversation we had. See, after the Terror woke up I asked what she wanted for breakfast. Normally she wants pbj, because she freaking loves the stuff, but for the past couple of days she’s wanted toast instead. So I toasted her some bread and was looking for a butter knife, but all the forks and butter knives were dirty. Well, thinking she could help, the Terror grabbed the only knife left and thrust it at me, so I had to talk to her about how certain things are only for adults… (Apparently telling her how cars are only for adults doesn’t work, because the Hedgehog’s little sister lets her drive sometimes… Seeing a trend here...)

While telling her about this, we had this conversation:

Me: Knives are only for adults.
Terror: But mommy uses them.
Me: Well, mommy’s an adult.
Terror: She uses this one on her toe!

I was caught so off guard, I lapsed straight into, “Ugh, ew! That’s so disgusting!”

I then, because you should never tell a small child their mother is disgusting, had to cover it up quickly by saying that the Terror should never do such a thing… but I couldn’t help but ask why her mom used it that way.

Terror: Because her toe hurts.

… And the knife solves this problem?!