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This f&*#ing question.

I've been dreading this one the most.

The last time I answered it, I just said that I would do what I did the last time it happened...talk my husband off the ledge and buy another car seat.

Yeah. About that...


Day 28 ~ What if you were pregnant or got someone pregnant? What would you do?

Truth, eh? Awesome.

I'd be ecstatic.

I'd be terrified.

I'd be blissful.

I'd be scared.

I'd be joyous.

I'd be frightened.

I'd be happy.

I'd be nervous.

I'd be elated.

I'd be fearful.

This is one of the prompts in this challenge that stings. A lot.

Three years ago, things were different. Everything was different. I thought I had a grasp on so much that I clearly did not. I still had my parents, both of them.

Back then, my family was the best thing I had going for me...or so I thought.


Day 27 ~ What is the best thing going for you right now?

Stares at blank screen.

Hears crickets.

Goddammit I hate this challenge.

Really, I do.

Anyhow, if I'm being completely honest about this one right at this exact moment in time, which is the point of this challenge, after all, I have to say that the best thing I have going for me right now is me.

I'm broken and flawed, I'm a complete disaster at times. I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm grounded, I'm deluded.

I'm trying to fix the things that I know are wrong with me. I'm learning to embrace the quirks and weirdness that oozes out of my pores. I'm a fighter and a lover. I won't be quieted or shushed or condescended to. I stand up for those who can't. I protect those I love. I uncover the ugliness of the world because I know that the only cure for what ails us is the blinding truth of the light.

I over analyze everything. I talk to myself all the time. I cry in the shower. I make lists just to cross things off of them. I smile when I want to cry.

I'm unflinching and stubborn. I wear my heart on my sleeve. I refuse to give up.

I'm a mess, but I know that. I own it.

It's gotten me this far. It's kept me here. It's made me whoever I am now.

Though there are times I would give anything to go back to that naive place I was in when I answered this the first time, I'd be doing myself a disservice if I did.

This version of me is pretty fantastic, even with the extra scars.

This question goes hand in hand with the one from yesterday about the reason that I am still alive. When I answered it the first time, I thought I had been through a lot. Oh, how naive I was.

The funny thing about being naive is that you never realize just how oblivious you are about it.

I wrote about how I had never thought about giving up and how I'd been tested and so on and so forth. It's almost comical to read it now.


Day 26 ~ Have you ever thought about giving up on life? If so, when and why?

I've been to hell and back since the first time I did this. A few times. There were certainly moments in that three years that I thought my life had gone to shit, that it was unrecoverable. Many, many times, I fantasized about leaving, running away from it all and never looking back.

I craved irresponsibility. I wanted to be selfish. I longed for just a moment of not having to worry about anyone else.

My fantasies always involved giving up on this particular life, not life in general. I wasn't ever suicidal, I just wanted to get away from the set of circumstances I was in. I am in.

I have never once thought about ending it all.

I haven't for four reasons.

My kids.

They need a responsible parent. They need me here. They need me stable and grounded and sane.

I would never do anything to jeopardize their lives, their happiness, their stability because of my own selfishness.

I know this now without a doubt.

I'll warn you guys. I'm in a mood today. I can't really pinpoint what is going on inside my head right now, but it's like a gigantic swirling storm of emotions and every once in a while, one of them gets launched out like a projectile. I'm trying to keep it all in, but goddamn.

The truth challenge is kicking my ass. I do it because I hate letting myself off the hook for things I have committed to, because it is a fabulous mental exercise to do a legitimate self inventory and because it's forcing me to confront a lot of stuff that I feel like I should be ready to confront.

Which sucks anyway...but then this morning, one of the people that I write about elusively pops back onto my Facebook feed courtesy of the wonder of a twenty year friendship that went to hell and the fact that when you know someone for that long, you have a lot of shared friends.

I want to scream from the rooftops what she did, I want to tell the people who I know care about me what happened, I want to warn them to keep an eye on this one. I want to, but I don't.

That whole not stooping thing. The fucking high road can kiss my ass.

Sorry, I'm swearing today.

If that offends you, my apologies.

Anyway, I am in a weird place. I still mostly despise Christmas music. I'll be fine one second, then catch the kids playing with one of the Nutcrackers my Mom bought the year she was here. Then two seconds later they will be making a huge mess with all the craft supplies she bought and left. If you've ever been completely heartbroken and angry at the same time, but after the person who makes you feel all those feelings was gone and there wasn't a damn place to put those emotions, you'll know what I mean.

It's not pretty.

Plus, I do this thing. This totally unfair thing where I get my hopes up for some grand gesture. Some magic moment. Something huge. The something I want more than anything in the world and that I know won't happen and I try to pretend like it doesn't bother me because it's getting really old. But it's there. It's always there no matter how much I try to ignore it.

AND THERE'S NO CRYING IN STARBUCKS, KELLY.

PULL IT TOGETHER WOMAN.

Kanye, DUDE....just stop
Yeah, so I've confessed before of my strange love for Kanye. He's an ass, we all know that, but he's a ridiculously talented one. (Although I'm not sure WTF is going on with his new album...seriously)

He's pissing me off. Which is kinda his thing, I suppose. He doesn't care about pissing me off, but he seems to get off on pissing off the world...and if there is one thing he's the freaking best in the world at, it might be this.

Just in the past few days, he has tried to draw parallels between Mandela and himself...then tried to say that being him is as dangerous as being a police officer or soldier at war. 

The guy who designs $100+ plain white t-shirts is saying this.

Kanye...do you even have a mirror?

Speaking of Mandela...
The world lost someone amazing when this man passed away. You may not agree everything he ever stood for, you may feel compelled to nitpick his past and his associations, but don't do it at the expense of his legacy.

In the wake of his death, there are the extreme right wingers like Dick Cheney grabbing soundbytes about how he would still vote to keep him imprisoned and Rick Santorum who tried to compare his fight against apartheid to the GOPs battle against Obamacare.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that, at least on my Facebook and Twitter feeds, this seemed to finally be the one thing that almost everyone could agree on - that his death was something worth pause, that his contributions not just to South Africa, but to the world, are to be celebrated.

I wanted very much to write about him, but I chose not to because I feel like I have nothing significant to add to any conversation about a man like him. I know many who have visited where he was imprisoned, and defer to the voices they lend to this dialogue. Was he perfect? Of course not, none of us are. What he was, though, was a voice for the voiceless. He was a hero.

Songs that stab you in the heart
When you're battling things in your head already,the wondering why they were the way they were, the wishing that they had been different, music can reach into the depths of your being and crush you.

Right now, this song is doing it.

I just can't.


Unless you've been in this place, unless you have been begging for someone to give you a reason to keep trying, unless you've been pushed to the point where you had no choice but to walk away...you won't understand. If you have been, let me just say this - I am sorry. I am sorry that you know. I am sorry that you were put there.

I am sorry.

Liars, Fakers and The Great Pretenders
The world seems to be full of artificiality anymore. I make a point of being as real as I can without it hurting anyone else in all my relationships with people, whether they are in person or online. Sometimes life is totally freaking mindblowingly amazing, and sometimes it's hell on earth. Talking about both of the ends of the spectrum is not widely encouraged or accepted. People want the shiny and happy. People only want to see the shiny and happy. People only want others to believe the shiny and happy about them.

There is actually a thing now, a real thing, called social media depression. Derived from the false notion that everyone else's lives are better than yours, that everyone else is happy, that everyone else has more money, more friends, more of it all.

It's almost entirely based on lies. On half truths. On the shiny happy versions that people want you to see.

I don't live that way. My life certainly isn't that way, and I'm not about to pretend that it is.

Talking about the negative things in life doesn't make us negative...it makes us real.

I've been accused of a lot in the last week. More than is fair. I've been called selfish and self-righteous and stupid and insignificant and ignorant. The one that hurt the most? When someone accused me of being fake.

I wear my heart on my sleeve. It gets me hurt a lot, but I won't change who I am.

Call it whatever you will, but this is me.

Frankly, I don't have the time or energy to fake anything. Do you?

This is one of those questions that still makes me shake my head a bit, because it pre-supposes that everyone has had a brush with death, been suicidal, given up on life at some point. I don't think that's always the case though.

The first time I wrote on this prompt, the timing worked out well. We had just been in a major car accident while driving cross country to get home for Christmas. I don't recommend that, by the way.

I'll try to dig a little more this time.


Day 25 ~ The reason you believe you are still alive

Now that the show is officially in it's mid-season hiatus and I am desperately holding out on catching up with the last two episodes from season 3 I haven't yet watched, I thought it was time to finally write about this show.

I am going to attempt to write this in such a manner that it won't spoil anything for people who haven't yet seen it and plan to. It really is one of the best shows on television right now, and you really should be watching it. I also don't want to go through just rehashing the obvious things that those who do watch it already know well.

A while back now, we decided to try and start watching it at the urging of a few people who seemed deeply enamored with it. I believe the show was running the second season at the time, and we caught just enough of it to make clear the facts that we had no idea what was going on with the plot and that zombies are nasty.

We turned it off, shaking our heads and wondering aloud what the big deal was.

Then something happened, and I'm not quite sure what, but we decided to start watching it from the beginning a few months ago.

By five seconds into the first episode, I was hooked.

In deep, I was quickly sucked into the vortex.

My husband decided he wanted to read the comics as well, though the story lines diverge fairly early on. I have read through enough of them now to see how different they are - one is not necessarily better than the other, they are different enough, but they still center on the same ethical struggles.

At it's core, this show isn't about zombies at all.

I'll let that digest for a moment.

It isn't.

Truly.

It's about the resilience of people, about the sacrifices we will make, about the eternal battle of good versus evil, about the ways that people will justify choices and so much more. The zombies are more a part of the setting, the background, than anything else. They are just a defining component of the place in which these stories unfold.


With my background in public health, I am fascinated by the disease component of the show. Whatever it is that causes those who die to turn, whether it is a virus or a bacteria or a parasite...it's fictional, but not outside the realm of possibility. Since watching the show, I have had a great number of conversations with my older kids (who also watch it) about pandemics. Though our planet hasn't been ravaged by anything that brings people back from the dead and turns them into hungry flesh eating predators, the population has been brought into decline rapidly by diseases in the past. I don't imagine that anything out there will ever end in the manifestation of zombies, but annihilation of the population? Not out of question. Not by a stretch.

Fairly quickly in the first season, it becomes obvious that the world we know now ceased to exist very quickly after the disease spread. All the modern conveniences we know and love, gone. Running water, electricity, television, internet, no more. Until and unless you've actually lived in that kind of scenario, you can't really understand how much it changes everything to be without the things we completely take for granted. It becomes painfully obvious in a hurry how much we depend on those things once they are gone.

The show, as my experiences in real life have also shown, details how quickly some people can adapt. Those who don't adapt don't survive. Those who don't adapt just don't endanger themselves, but everyone else. Natural born fighters are the ones you want on your side.


The show exposes the darker side of humanity from the first episode all the way through to the current season. The biases and stereotypes that alter how people treat one another, the lies that people will tell themselves just to make things feel better in the moment, the underhanded way that people deal with one another anytime someone has what someone else wants. Natural leaders emerge very quickly, and it becomes clear that not everyone who can lead has the moral integrity to do so. It becomes obvious how much people will lie to get their way.

The show strips away the stigmas that we bring as viewers and forces us to do better. It tells us that even the strongest people struggle once they are inside their own heads. It tells us that good people can come from bad upbringings. It tells us that trust is essential to survival. It tells us that sometimes you have to cut your losses and move on. It tells us that faith is important, but work is more important. It tells us that some people will go to the ends of the Earth to protect the ones they love and that others will worry only about themselves when held to the fire.


The show makes you care about these completely fictional characters in this insane world. When a deeply loved character is taken out, you feel like you lost a little piece of your heart too. The more well loved, the more spectacular their deaths seem to be. The more they meant, the more horrid the ending they must meet. I'm still upset about the last one. Still. As a fan of this show, you should know better than to get close to the characters. It's almost a certainty that they all will die eventually, and yet they are so real, so raw that you can't help it. As they bond to each other, we bond to them.

The core of the show is one man's struggle with who he is, with what has happened to him, with what has happened to the people he loves. His resolve has been tested, his faith in others questioned. He's struggled with his own sanity, he's fought for control and pushed it away. The last episode that aired, the mid-season finale, told you just about everything you ever needed to know about Rick. About who he was, who he is, what he is made of.


Sure, there are zombies, always, a constant nagging presence that must always be dealt with, but I can assure you that the show isn't about them at all.

Nope.

The humans are the real monsters.

The zombies are just the eye candy.


The Walking Dead returns to AMC in February, 2014.

The first time I did this all those years ago now, I wrote up a playlist for a dear friend that I have known for many years. 

I'd still so totally send her that playlist.


Day 24 ~ Make a playlist for someone and explain why you chose all the songs

I thought for a while that this was going to be one of the easier days in the challenge, and then no.

I've made playlists for this person before, but all that was before everything changed. He's different now, I am different. There's really no other way to describe it.

Stay married long enough, and the person you are married to now won't much resemble the one you married all those years back, no matter what happens in the meantime.

The playlist for my husband, from where I stand in 2013.

The song we danced to when we got married, still true now even if it stings a bit.


When I'm pissed.


When I want to throw stuff.


The one when I realized this wasn't on me anymore...and that it never was.


This damn song. You tore a hole in me. The one I can't repair. But I still love you, I don't really care.


The song from the album that made me love Katy Perry.


When the going got ugly....and did it ever.


And finally, the song that I'm convinced P!nk wrote for us. Real. Truth.


It's been hell, but we're still here. We've defied odds before, we're still doing it now. It's kind of our thing, I guess.

Love you.