I'm trying to redesign pedx, and it's a lot like the feeling I get when my body deep in sleep has to pee like a motherfucker, and communicates that need to my sleeping mind, which then changes the plot of any dream I'm having at the time to focus on me hovering over a toilet, having to desperately urinate but finding I can't or shouldn't. The internal battle that on most night lets me awake without pissing the bed is what redesigning feels like. I need to really badly, but it won't fucking come.

Which is also an accurate statement of my masturbatory career at this point.

I had a Jack and Pepsi One on Monday night. I fixed myself a big beaker and then watched The Exorcist. I thought a Jack and Coke was nice, but this was goddamned fantastic! Like one of the best-tasting drinks I've ever had! Feel free to ostracize me now!

I've had dreams about The Wood and 50 Cent lately; surprisingly, in the first he was trying to kill me, and in the second, he was my boyfriend but completely useless when men tried to maim me with blowtorches. Naturally in both dreams I had to do all the killing myself. Last night I think I drowned in a metal box with Dakota Fanning and some boxcar children, or maybe the Brady Bunch.

My mother's screaming, "Go McLeod! Kick his ass! TAKE HIS HEAD!"

Highlander fans make great parents. Tonight she thinks we should get drunk to deal with our stress.

I think I suffer from hyperactive Scenario Syndrome, which is not the same as the randomly-named Blue Whore Syndrome, in which I cannot properly conduct telephone conversations. Scenario Syndrome is the press of my inner Boy Scout need for ultimate prepared-ness on every moment of my waking life.

Every time I move through the house in the dark, I think, "What would I do if someone were around this corner? What weapon can I immediately grab? What about that window? Should I lock myself in the bathroom? What if I were locked in the bathroom? Where could I hide the kids? How could I wake them up the quickest and explain what I need them to do? Which set of knives should I grab in the kitchen? Do we still have that poker? If I got out of the house should I try across the street or down?"

I mentally map out plans of action for every possible disaster or attacker, for the chance I'll find a dead body on the side of the road, or what to do if someone comes screaming and knocking on my door--how do I effectively determine that it's not a ruse? Because people could totally do that. If I thought a woman was in trouble, I'd allow her access to my home. But maybe I shouldn't! But how do I tell?

When I'm driving, I'm constantly scanning for a least damaging escape route should someone drift into my lane. I don't own my own car, but for the past few years I've been compiling a mental checklist of things I want to keep in the trunk -- a gallon of water, spare tire, matches, first aid kit, blanket, tool kit, flares, jumper cables, crowbar, jack, set of clothing, rations, hunting knife, atlas, instructions on how to perform a tracheotomy and hair bands, so far. Plus, like, maybe a really great mixed tape.

I sort of wish I could keep a weapon in the shower.

It's not just threat of violence, but those are the ones that I think about most often.

I have read my Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook cover to cover. Now I just need to be medicated into a defenseless stupor, so that at least I'll stop pop-quizzing myself to death.

I had a great idea for a Halloween costume for a two-year-old boy of my own someday: a plain t-shirt upon which I have written in black Sharpie, "FEMINIST."

I ate kettle corn for the first time on Saturday! We went to an 1800s festival at the crack of dawn, and I bought a Norwegian bowl and ate popcorn and stumbled a lot. There were an awful lot of dogs and quite a few hideous looking infants.

There are two Unbelievable Truth albums I need, the latest Weakerthans, and some British Sea Power. I'm putting myself on a five-year plan. I also need a button maker, jewel cases, and for Wainwright to love women.

I think some of my grief at having to be alive and live life and all is lifting. A little. Keeping busy leaves me little time for my black moods. Most of my problem is that I feel helpless and unable to make choices. I miss being able to control the structure of my days. I feel panicked at how quickly time is passing.

("Time is a face on the water.")

Naturally, because I was asked to go to Wal-Mart this morning before any type of hygiene activities could take place, and I consented, because who the fuck is going to judge or see me at Wal-Mart?, and I was shopping while also bearing a disturbing resemblance to an out-of-work crackho -- naturally it's the one time in my life I am photographed by the local newspaper.

Ah man. Erestor the Fish suicided this morning. Jumped out of his bowl and died on the floor while the household was asleep. Erestor! Why did you kill yourself right after I finally named you?

My mom said she'd buy me 50 Cent next week! I want to use way more exclamation points, like this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My head feels the way your head usually feels after you've been crying, but I have it on good authority (me) that I haven't been. Maybe tap dancing is the physical equivalent of a long crying jag?

Kids still bother me in there. With their sweaty arms. Ariel, you'd puke for sure.

I got a betta fish today. I named him Glorfindel. In a hopeful Glorfindel No. 1, the Balrog-slayer kind of way. Not so much Glorfindel No. 2, the Bruinen model, although I love him too.

My other fish is Erestor.

In my dream the other night I was carrying the twin sons of Elrond, Elladan and Elrohir, but I stopped on my way to give birth to help a friend color in a sign for a carwash. She really needed help with some black magic marker clouds. Then Elrond called to see how I was faring, and he was all, "I love you!" and I was all, "I'm bearing your elven twins, you had better love me!"

The importance of this dream is that baby dreams involving human infants wreck havoc on my baby-making, baby-needing desires, but elf fetus dreams are apparently 18309x more potent when driving my ovaries CRAZY. I woke up hardly able to deal with my regular life and its lack of domestic harmony.

Dreams are generally only interesting to hear about when a) you're in them, and you've acted like a dickhead, b) it involves gay wonder sex, c) LOTR anything. Then it magically becomes ... magic!

I think I'm on smack today. Never mind me.

O how your fingers drowse me,
Your breath falls around me like dew, your pulse lulls the tympans of my ears,
I feel immerged from head to foot,
Delicious, enough.

I think Walt Whitman wrote the most beautiful thing I have ever read when he wrote that verse in So Long!
It's something I would whisper to a lover someday, if it were true.

My father likes to make sexist remarks about household chores for the sole purpose of irritating me, because I usually go off like a rocket when I hear him say that laundry is a woman's job -- which he really believes is true. Today he made comments about a tv commercial that led to us shouting back and forth at each other and concluded with me chastising him for making these kind of remarks in front of my little sister, because, as I screamed, "Erica doesn't need to hear that sexist bullshit!"

Then I defeated myself by storming into the kitchen to wash dishes.

There's a big fuss about a woman down here who's been brain-dead for the past thirteen years. She's kept alive through tube feedings, which her husband wants her off of so she can die, as he claims she would have wanted it, but her parents want to maintain her in the vegetative state. The judge ruled to let her starve to death, and her parents are scrambling for an appeal, and I'm just glad I don't live in Pinellas Park, because there are the usual Dickheads With Signs. I cannot abide Dickheads With Signs, especially ones that read "Is This Hospice or Auschwitz," the owner of which should be beaten to death by offended Holocaust survivors.

I don't personally want to kept alive in such a condition as this woman is in. I want someone to find one person who, when hale, would agree that being kept artificially alive in this manner for over a decade sounds appealing and appetizing. This is not a coma -- she's not going to wake up and look around and ask what she's missed. She's not going to be rehabilitated, like her unhealthy and denial-ridden family thinks. So if someday it's you and me and I'm lacking brain activity, let me assure you it's okay to smother me with a pillow or bludgeon me or stop feeding me. I give you permission. Unless I have an unborn baby in my womb, in which I give you permission to keep me alive for the sole purpose of incubating my offspring, and then you can harvest it and give the baby to my husband, if he's not an asshole, or my family, who definitely aren't assholes. Otherwise, I want to be dead. DEAD. Is there a contract I can sign to this effect? "In case of vegetative state, smash me with big fucking rocks if nothing else is handy, just END IT" ?

I went to a toddler's birthday party today. And didn't eat cake. And then some woman gave the kid the same gift everyone knew we were bringing, and naturally hers got opened first. I sat on the floor and bled from my womb, literally and figuratively.

I'm gnashing my teeth. GNASHING MY TEETH.

I watched the same Andre the Giant biography twice today. Which I'd see before. Then most of From Hell. So my television viewing was also filled with a lot of hookers. Distracts me from wanting to scream and cry and throw things and cry and scream some more in complete frustration. Maybe that was Jack the Ripper's motivation.

ALKJSLKDJFNNNNNLSDKJFLKSJFLJDFLKJFLJFJ. !)(#$)#(U$)

If I had a piano, this would be the time I banged angrily on it. If we had doors that swung freely, I would slam one. If I had an elf, I would fuck it.

LSKRJLSKDJF)(@#)(#)(#)()(

Goddamn.

I really love trouser socks! Trouser snakes, not so much.

I think I live my life, or at least desire to live it, like someone's RPG. I think about Skill Acquisitions, things like knowing how to hunt my own food or hotwire a car or navigate by stars, and my Level. How much Damage I can take, how much Healing I can do per round. A really shitty RPG at present, mind you, but still.

Exhausted. The baby I watch wore me out today, people being dumb bitches wore me out today. Then we spent two and a half hours in Wal-Mart, my mother and I, where we freaked out about autumn food and bought apple cider, caramel apples and pecan tarts, when usually we treat sugar like the plague. We ate and ate and watched an autopsy show. Nothing goes with your dessert like a scalp being peeled back or stomach contents ladled out.

It was gross, I guess, and pathology is not exactly what I want to do -- I don't want to weigh the organs, I want to boil the bones clean -- but it was still watchable, and the sudden influx of sugar in my diet made me feel more queasy than the brain slicing.

When they removed the sternum/manubrium, with the ribs cracked open to access the heart, the cropped shot looked like a slab of any other carcass -- like cow. I think folks who consider people as "special" animals above others have the hardest time with this kind of thing. There's a distance required, I think, and an ability to not think about the fact that you're busting apart the head of a now-dead but once-live human being, but doing a job. That hopes to serve them justice.

We get upset when we see people being treated like animals, but at the same time I place us in no higher category.

I was just trying to think of how doing the job I hope to do, which means sifting amongst body parts, wet or dry, is going to require being both removed and moved.

I was pushing on the eye of a needle hard today, trying to jam it through about thirty-four layers of paper, and then realized the burning pain in my finger was from the needle's blunt head entering my flesh from the pressure and shearing its own tunnel under my skin.

Just now I choked on my own saliva and coughed until I peed myself. Adventure Living.

Here are my feelings regarding John Travolta.

I have feelings regarding John Travolta because everyone in this town, and the newspaper in this town, and the town next door, have feelings about John Travolta. Because he lives in the town next door, where he lives with his gigantic Boeing jet planes in a special rich-folks-who-fly-their-own-airplanes community, and frequents our restaurants. So basically John Travolta wanders our streets, eating at our crappy middle-class restaurants, and then our crappy middle-class citizens freak the fuck out and mob him and the police apparently have to show up to escort him to safety. So the reason I have feelings is because John Travolta living here has forced me to have feelings, and the stupid people who lived here before him have forced me to have even more feelings, and in general I've had way too many feelings on this topic. I am exorcising the demon on this here Website of Mine.

Feelings: A) John Travolta! Okay, the enthusiasm lasted all of four seconds. B) It's totally embarrassing to think of people mobbing him outside of the local Ale House. Like, you fuckers. He's just a man who makes movies, trying to eat a (probably terrible) meal amongst you. C) He's bought sushi from Publix, and eaten at Hops (even I don't go there, John. Oh John!) and Red Lobster among other places. We have one nice restaurant, I think, and it's Carrabba's, and I only think that because I'm way impressed by linen napkins and all the meals cost at least fourteen dollars. But no, John Travolta eats at the restaurants the rest of us poor bastards eat at, and it makes me feel sort of embarrassed and ashamed. Because I know he's eaten meals worth more than a semester of my former tuition, and I wouldn't wish Hops upon a starving hobo. I don't really care what John Travolta thinks of this shitty town, as I hate it myself, but I guess I'm bothered by the idea that he might eat someplace and then think it indicative of My Kind. I want to pat him sympathetically on the back and find him a nice Mom & Pop diner. He's made it! He's fondled Olivia Newton-John! He shouldn't have to buy his sushi from a grocery store! I shouldn't have to buy my sushi from a grocery store. D) If I catch him in Wal-Mart buying batteries, I'm going to weep.

I'm going to apply to graduate schools in Florida, California and Pennsylvania. God willing, you'll see me in one of these states next fall. Unless it's Florida, in which I will move back to the same miserable city I just spent three years in, and you'll see me nowhere new at all.

Don't forget that part where the will of a supreme being plays the biggest role in acceptance.

Nothing scares me more than the thought of being rejected by every forensic anthropology certificate or master's program in the country. Because I think that's a very real possibility, and then I'm screwed, and I swear to God I will give up on life and go find a hillbilly to marry and start spawning like wildfire, determined to leave my genetic mark on the world if nothing else.

Those insane, irrational urges, you know, the ones you're not really in danger of acting upon, but the mere chance of you ever doing so sort of fills you with horror, like, what if? What if I followed through and went ahead on my sudden urge to pour bleach all over our chicken and cook it like that? What if I really did stick my hand down my pants in English class?

Or, right now, what if I do as I desire and pour Dr. Pepper all over my crotch? I want to do it so bad, probably because it's the only cold beverage I have and my vagina/related machinery is really hot.

Jesus, my face never feels clean enough! This is why people get desperate and resort to peach scrub, which I learned from one gay man or another that you should never use on your face because it TEARS IT UP. I'd be willing to rip off all my skin and regrow it, Fifth Element style, by bombarding it with greasy ions.

What's that new Mya song that's all "something something something ... right now" ? Because all I know is that we tap to it every week, and when it comes on in the grocery store or on the television, I go off like one of Pavlov's dogs.

The air conditioning's broken, and I'm having dorm flashbacks. But unlike the dorm, we can't open the windows in the house because most of the screens house venomous, life-stealing and limb-eating spiders, while in the dorm I kept the windows open for two years solid except for when mandated by university to close them and suffocated in the space while a man pressure-washed the grime off the building for the new incoming freshman they wanted to coddle while kicking out the upperclassmen who'd been sticking it out happily enough in shitty ghetto conditions and taking it in the ass from the administration in all things related to parking, quality of life and game-day assholes.

Not that I'm bitter or long-winded or anything. Just hot.

Concerning the News

Siegfried & Roy -- At first when I found out about the attack I laughed, because that's what you get for playing with wild animals. Then I found out Roy was all "Don't hurt the tiger!" and Siegfried was all, "The tiger was trying to help Roy, he just helped too hard," and I almost got teary. Bless that gay duo!

Escaped Serial Killer from Pennsylvania -- Don't worry. We all know where he's headed, and it's FLORIDA, like every other goddamned serial killer! The manhunt can be immediately limited.

More People Who Let Their Babies Drown in Pools or Die in Cars or Perish Unattended in House Fires -- When I can muster up the sympathy for you stupid motherfuckers, I'll let you know. I might be out of the loop concerning parenting, but the last I heard, you had to watch the kid or something.

The cats are loud in the morning, like the screams of dying women.

My fingers are still stained blue from my sister's CareBears birthday cake, much like the wall in our apartment that forever remained blue because of someone's Clifford birthday cake. Frosting dye is apparently more than a little volatile. I'm sure someone has capitalized on this and made some art out of it. Someone has capitalized on everything. And then made art out of it.

I come across yellow things lately and want to buy and save them for my living quarters when I leave the state. I want a red and yellow bedroom, or else a pink bedroom and a fantastic red and yellow other-room. It occured to me that when I go back to the snowy seasons of my youth, I might also have to return to the practice of sleeping in the bed and under the covers for reasons of temperature. Right now it's perfectly acceptable to be flung backwards on top of my bedspread. Right now it's survival instinct when no one wants to put the air conditioning below 80.

We saw School of Rock on Friday, and it was adorable and funny and perfect already, but then it went into a whole new level when Jack Black started quoting "Greatest Love of All" as regular conversation. I was thrilled but also a little jealous, as we decided during dinner at Chopstix several months back to use that song during job interviews, and now our dreams were being realized on the big screen. I'm wiping away tears.

I went to bed at like 10:30 last night. What new devilry is this?

Out of desperation and frustration I let my mother cut my hair. The resulting product can be categorized as new devilry.

My brother, eight years old, has decided to write his own fanfiction after browsing fanfiction.net and leaving unsatisfied. DEVILRY, DEVILRY.

My sister told me the other night that the only people she will be sad to see die are her family, friends, and Bill Cosby.

Here are some pictures.

Like, if I were trapped in our bathroom during a nuclear war and chose to commit suicide instead of starving to death, could a combination of Suave mousse, Clean 'n' Clear Mattefier and Calgon Hawaiian Ginger body spray do the trick? What about eating three tubes of toothpaste, or ingesting the entire bottle of generic listerine?

I'm in my dark place, as Nicole's mother says. I thought my hot shower would be the best part of my day, but I spent the majority of it fighting back tears and thinking about killing myself with household items.

What's a website for if you're not going to be honest about both your love of porn and your depressive nature?

It just hasn't been a good day. Sean Astin has only made it worse. So has PMS. Not to mention that any morning when you're awoken by your father reading aloud a newspaper story about abortion which makes you want to rip your ears off is probably not going to come to any positive fruition.

Why did I never know there was a terrible He-Man movie starring D. Lundgren?

I went to a basket party tonight, and lusted. But I can't become that person, I just can't. Person With Twenty Longaberger Baskets Before Age 26 is just one kind of person on the Huge List of People I Don't Ever Want To Be. Unfortunately as I stumble through living I add about five new lifestyle scenarios to this list per week. I'm left with being a hermit or florist.

Most of the time I try specifically to not be an asshole, but it usually doesn't work.

My diploma came in the mail today, my B.A. in Anthropology. It took me three solid minutes to pull it out of the tube without crinkling it more than it already was. Then I looked at it and put it back in. It was the most anti-climatic end to three years of my life I could ever imagine. Mostly I felt like crying. That's sort of been today's theme so far.

I suggested to my parents that we set it on fire and then dance around it. "Not with all the money I put into that," my father declared.

Jack Sawyer, Scout Anne, Jason Michael, Frances Nicole.

It is October! Worthy of a post on its own! Halloween! Halloween! My favorite holiday! Fuck Christmas!