I tend to always watch out for the small, creepy things and never hesitate to let them freak me the hell out. Therefore, they follow me. If you would like to know what it’s like for an electrical surge to cause your hallway light to spontaneously flash once or twice at 2AM, invite me to your slumber party. We could bake cupcakes and see Paranormal Activity.

I’ve been renting the same house for almost a year now, so I’ve worked out most of the little oddities, like how the panels in the ceiling shake when they get hit with a good gust of wind. Or how the back door likes to creep open once in a while, usually at night, so I can come downstairs in the morning all, great, the poltergeists are in cahoots with the serial killers again, and HOLY CRAP WHY ISN’T THAT A MOVIE YET? Ghosts and psychos working together? A spirit unlocking all the doors in the house so a lunatic doesn’t have to worry about keys? Perhaps stacking furniture so as to block the exits? It could be called…Terror…Team.

Terror Team ©

For the past couple years, since wrapping up college at my third and final university, I’ve lived in a little neighborhood called Squirrel Hill. It quickly became one of my favorite places in Pittsburgh. It doesn’t hold quite the same feelings of gritty nostalgia as the more southern points — Carrick and Brookline and the South Side — but, as a whole, it’s really a good representation of the city.

Sorry to the non-Pittsburghers who have no idea what I’m talking about, but among the things I love about this place are the distinctive layouts of the different communities, and how when you’re walking in one little neighborhood and step over to the next, you are well aware.

When I was little and living off of Carson with my mom and she would do something to agitate me, like making me dance to Bruce Springsteen or mispronouncing Snuffleupagus or one of the millions of other things that will piss off a 2-year-old, I would roll out of the apartment wearing nothing but a diaper and a bright red wig from The Little Mermaid and scream for my grandfather, who lived over the hill in Mt. Oliver. And by hill I mean Pittsburgh hill, and by Pittsburgh hill I mean take your entire town, stick a pole under it, and push upwards. Your houses will probably lean to compensate and your mile-long main road will become five miles because you have to wrap it around itself a few times. This is expected. Leave it be.

Of course he couldn’t hear me because there was a mountain in the way, but all those times he hiked down the crumbling cement stairs with the light blue railings that jutted from the hillside, it really was like he was making his way from another country.

I decided to redesign this website again. It’s funny — I’ve spent the last several years trying to overload this place with widgets and junk, and the only way I was able to bring myself to update was to start tearing crap down. I started using Tumblr again, and liked the simplicity of the design so much that I decided to change this layout and the photography section to match (both of which are still on Wordpress).

The old lifecast section is now powered by Tumblr, which is much easier to update while away from my computer, which is more often than not anymore. The header font is Monbijoux, the chair is for resting, and my dog is a goddamn Yorkshire Terrier.

This website turned five last month, and has spanned three colleges, a dozen jobs, breakups and neuroses and OH THE ANGST. And I’m guessing it will continue to. Hopefully with less colleges. God, I hated college.

Thank you for checking back here, for not yet (YET!) deleting this place from your Readers, and for wearing that thing that you wear, because you look delightful.

Listen, I had no desire to try to make myself any thinner. It was around that time that I began falling headfirst into my obsession with certain time periods, and although I could probably stand around on the set of The Tudors and bark about historical details with the costume designer, I could not, for the life of me, tell you whether or not leggings are still in style. Are they? Do these muddy Nikes go with these lace tights? Because that’s what I wore on my date last night.

That was also the year that The Phantom of the Opera was in theaters, and Emmy Rossum’s waistline sashayed in and scared me half to death. You think Texas Chainsaw Massacre was frightening?

Even so, I was fascinated by them, and began writing a research paper for one of my classes about their history. And with all of that studying and searching, I convinced myself that I couldn’t get away with finishing the project unless I tried wearing one myself.

However, the thing about corsets is, if you want to wear one correctly, you need a professional corset-putter-onner. And so I beckoned for my lady-in-waiting to fetch my Mistress of the Robes so that I may be dressed, and my roommate gave me a dirty look and told me to effing quit it, psycho, it’s 2:00 in the morning, why are you topless, get the hell away from my bed.

But the next day, as I stood gripping the top of my dresser, and she ran the laces through the metal eyelets in the back, I braced myself for the suffocating. Which didn’t happen. Because every time she yanked backwards, she pulled me with her, so that she had to keep letting go of the strings to stop my half-naked self from thrusting into her, pausing each time to consider how, exactly, she ended up living with a prude masochist.

I didn’t give up, and when I went home for Christmas break, I brought the thing with me and asked my mom to try helping me into it. Because who better to inflict the optimal amount of pain on a girl than her mother? And so I stood against a door frame, having the wind pulled out of my insides, suddenly understanding the hidden metaphors of that scene in Titanic when Rose’s mother is forcing her daughter to submit via lingerie.

I lasted about fifteen minutes. I even thought it would be a good idea to attempt driving, except, do you know what those things do to your spine? I was so upright that my neck was convinced it couldn’t move independently from the rest of my body. I was like one of those little tools you use to draw perfect circles. My arms were really the only things that would work freely, and they did, as I flailed for someone to help me out of the car, I can’t move! AND IF I FALL ASLEEP YOU’LL JUST THINK IT’S A MANNEQUIN HELP!

And so, here is where I say, wow, ladies of the past. You and Keira Knightley have some balls.

My grandfather drank it black, and nearly every Sunday, as I walked across the church basement with the little styrofoam cup, I would try a sip and regret it immediately. The other 12-year-olds were throwing it back like chocolate milk, like they did with the concoction of grape juice and Christ’s blood we were given an hour before, and I never understood how they could stomach either.

The reason I’m talking about coffee is because the day I had my first real cup of it was the morning after I had stayed at a birthday party until 3AM and needed to drive to Maryland an hour later. I had told a friend that if I ever needed a caffeine kick, I would chug Mountain Dew, as coffee had never really “worked for me.” That was my excuse. And he said, in some words, “Look idiot, the crap in the Mountain Dew that’s keeping you awake is the same crap in coffee,” and suddenly, it was like an abundance of knowledge was raining down on the world!

And that is my roundabout way of saying that I’m now more motivated to write than I’ve ever been, since I’m not anticipating having to pause between sentences to take a nap. I just need to become accustomed to washing away morning breath with a bottle of scotch and I’ll really be able to call myself a writer.

The subject of this post is one I’m breaking up into two or three parts, and the one thing I’ve always had to tread lightly with despite its huge impact on my life. I’ve vaguely referred to the situation before, glossing over my more gloomy posts and attributing them to “the ex-boyfriend who took his own life,” and then leaving it at that.

It’s a tricky thing to talk about. On one hand, I can attempt to be tongue-in-cheek about the situation (”the situation” being a more cautious way of saying, “my life”), but I’m not sure I have that license. If the depression were something I was going through, and not watching from the outside, I could see how it would be acceptable for me to harness those emotions and express them in any way I felt appropriate. However, there are aspects and perceptions that I had no part in, and therefore, it’s important that I keep the story limited to how I was affected, no matter how deeply, and not my speculations.

And there I go being vague again. Suffice it to say that this isn’t something I’ve brought up before with many friends, and the ones I have entrusted with it have reacted in such a way that was so insensitive I was driven to further hide any scraps of grief or helplessness that were constantly eating away at me.

So even though I’ve occasionally posted small pieces of this story, I’m finding that it’s necessary to start from the beginning. Because there is a story to be told.

I’ve had an issue with nightmares for as long as I can remember, and distinctly recall my mother mentioning it to my pediatrician when I was little after I’d been having trouble sleeping because I couldn’t stop hearing marching. And when the doctor asked me about it, I was about as descriptive as a no-more-than-6-year-old could be. I hear marching. It sounds like marching, and people marching. Like how people sound when they march.

I’ve mentioned before how I have trouble sleeping without the TV on, but really, any change in the atmosphere of my bedroom can trigger it. There have been nights when I’ve slept in the same room as other people, and for whatever reason, one of them has gotten up to move in the middle of the night, and no matter how deeply I’m sleeping — HEIGH-HO HORROR! This particular situation causes the most disturbing episodes, as I’m convinced that my eyes are fully open, that I can clearly see and comprehend the room around me, but I’m not awake and cannot make myself become awake and am completely trapped in that state for a good amount of time until, after several tries, I can pull my mind into consciousness.

…and I just killed my chances of anyone inviting me to a slumber party ever. Yeah, so, if you need to pee in the middle of the night, and you come back and I’m not moving but my eyes are wide-open and I look as if I’m pleading to be released from the terror that is my own subconscious, feel free to sleep with your back towards me. Or just hold it. Either one.

It did come in handy when I worked as a camp counselor one summer and had to stay in a cabin with ten 16-year-old girls. I could wake up in the morning and be all, listen ladies, I dreamt that a clown was hovering above my bunk last night and I almost vomited I was so disturbed and as soon as I find out which one of you left at 2AM to make out with one of the boys in Cabin 14 you’re bringing me breakfast for the next three weeks. And they’d be all, HOW DOES SHE DO IT?

I’m at the point now where I can wake up and say, “Well crap, the goes another one of those gruesome dreams,” rather than, “THERE ARE MIND-DEMONS MARRING MY WORLD HELP,” but I think it’s safe to assume that my future husband will eventually want his own bed.

Scott Blasey of The Clarks

The dog had his surgery today. He’s doing fine, although, from the looks he’s been giving me, I may wake up tomorrow morning with a clear plastic cone shoved down my throat.

The year of my 21st birthday, my days started moving a lot faster. Rather than each day having the potential to be something wonderful within itself, they all started clumping together as a means to achieve something in the future.

Until my 21st birthday, I could go through a hundred emotions in one week. I could wake up feeling enthusiastic, progress to annoyed, and go through depressed, stupid, and jubilant in one afternoon. Then, suddenly, I had weeks of “good” and “fine” and “normal.”

Was that adolescence ending?

It’s like life is becoming all of the things English teachers say to avoid when trying to become an interesting and descriptive writer.

And the fact that I marked that occasion as a significant occurrence without giving much thought to the actuality of Saturday being my last ever day of college shows how meaningful a role higher education has played in my life.

I’ve been saying for a year now that I wish I would’ve studied computer science or web design. While I don’t regret my major, which ended up being English lit (though I was only a handful of credits away from creative writing), it may have been a good idea to study something more career-oriented, as I’ve been hired to code three websites in the last two months, and not one person has offered to pay me for a pretty poem.

I do have a pretty good outlook on things, though. Twitter has my back, y’all.

(Thanks to everyone, even the jerks who landed their major-related dream jobs, for your responses, and Burgh Baby for the original tweet.)

Molly is unlike my fifteen-year-old self in several ways, most outwardly in her distaste for makeup and boys. Also, she’s on her way to eventually growing to be at least a foot taller than I am.

For years after that dance, and even after I started this website, she pretty much constantly looked a lot like this.

Every weekday, I pick her up for lacrosse practice, and her t-shirts are two sizes too big, her sweatpants are falling halfway down her hips, and her curly hair is wrapped in a frizzy ponytail on top of her head.

This past Friday was her ninth grade semi and I helped her get ready, thinking to myself the entire time, can someone get this girl a modeling contract?