Unintended Consequences of Accidentally Inhaling Hairspray

1.  Your lungs decide they want you to die.  Massive coughing will occur, for a prolonged period of time.
2. Your throat will burn for the rest of the day.  Like you started a bonfire back there.
3. You will freak out and believe you're going to get lung cancer or pulmonary fibrosis from a one-time inhalation.
4. You will not be hungry.  This will be a pleasant surprise if you're on a diet like me.
5. You will eventually go back to normal, and will be starving once you do.
6.  But you will still worry about the lung cancer thing, because honestly, hairspray can't be good for you.

Introspection, and an Announcement

At what point does your internet fame drown out your interaction with your readers and becomes more about your readers' interaction with each other?

I find that on popular posts, the interaction is no longer between writer and reader, but between the readers themselves...the writer no longer matters as an interacting being, but merely a producer of content to be debated among yourselves...

While fame seems like something desirable, I think I'd be happiest with a small following of regular commenters that I could interact with.

Also, I should probably let my Blogger pals know that I've started a new blog.  Hey, guys, I started a new blog! You can find me at limeokapi.wordpress.com! It's going to be more streamlined and stuff, and probably have more...organized posts.

Which means that this blog gets to be informal.  Yay!  Don't worry, though, my storytelling bit is still going to happen on a regular basis.

Romantic Tendencies

I've finally realized why I never have a boyfriend.

Point blank, plain and simple:  I'm not open for a relationship--not to most people.

I judge you the minute I see you, I figure out who you are based on your interactions, and then I deem you unworthy.

There have been people interested in me. But for whatever reason or another, I decided that a relationship with them wasn't worth pursuing, and I shunned them entirely.  Right now, there's a boy waiting for a text from me--and he will wait forever, or until he gives up.  Because his manner screams desperation, and his reputation isn't clean.  Because I am afraid of what a relationship with that kind of person might bring.

I have rejected people because they were creepy, because they were socially inept on a crippling scale, because they were poor communicators, etc etc.

So when I whine about being lonely, about wanting to find someone to "do life with,"  I have nobody but me to blame for my loneliness.

I haven't been giving people chances, because I'm overprotective of my heart. Which might be a good thing. I play the wary vixen, hiding everything about myself so that you won't be able to get near enough to touch my heart, my emotions, my mind.

On the flip side, if I am attracted to you, I immediately drop the coy act.  I instead want to share everything with you.  Everything I am, everything I want to be. This is true with friendships, too.  My best friends know nearly everything about me, and I know nearly everything about them.

I want deep relationships with people.  I don't do surface friendships, which is probably why I don't get invited to a lot of parties and social get-togethers.  I do have acquaintances, but we're not close.

Every now and again I meet someone that I could romantically connect with.  But usually that connection is one-sided, I wind up trying to share too much too soon, and then I wind up alone again--this time nursing a wounded spirit.

So a few years ago I gave up on love.  I decided I'd be the crazy dog lady (cats make me sneeze).  But I'm only deluding myself.  It's not what I really want.  And now, more than ever before, I want to find someone a little odd, like me, who I could partner up with for life.

I feel like this is all some cruel joke by the universe--here, Katie, see this dude?  He could be your soulmate!  But wait!  You can't have him because he's either 1) engaged/married, 2) not interested, or 3) unaware you exist.

And then I waste a year or so of my life pining over someone I can't have.

I Am A Sham, and I Know It

I have come to the realization that I did not need an English degree.  I could have majored in something else entirely and still be a competent writer and reader.  I could have furthered my knowledge of languages (I really have to finish learning Spanish or Sign Language), or learned how to do something important like math or science or something.  I could have majored in art and spent my days tossing paint on canvas and drawing pictures of flowers.  Majored in business and secured my future for the rest of my life.

But if I want to spend my days reading and writing, English was the way to go.

So I basically spent about $80,000 to become "qualified" to do something I already knew how to do.

Not only that, but it's something that a lot of people do, and some of them are better than me at it. I've read a lot of blogs lately, and there are people out there who do interesting things with their lives like science, or music composition, who write just as well as I do.

I feel like I should have a god-like knowledge of grammar for such a heinous price tag....but grammar still confuses and terrifies me on a regular basis.  Participles, what even is?   Or maybe I should have a wealth of knowledge about the literary greats?  All I can tell you is that Moby Dick is a terrible read, and Mark Twain is my literary hero. That literature has always been about expression, capturing emotions and feelings of the writers about some subject that was important to them.

But I'm no wealth of knowledge.  I'm no god of grammar.  I'm just the same reader/writer I've always been, but with more books under my belt.

I am such a sham, with my flashy degree.  I hope you love me anyway.

Of Travel, Life, and Home

I've never really been able to decide what I'm going to do with my life.

I know there are some things that I'm going to do.  I'm going to keep reading for the rest of my life. If I go blind, I'm going to learn braille just so I can keep reading.  If I lose my hands after I go blind, I'll learn to read with my feet.  Reading is a thing that I will always do.

I hope to travel for a good bit of the rest of my life.  I live for travel, for seeing new places and experiencing new things.  Every time I go someplace new, my spirit itself is renewed, and I feel like I've grown more as a person.  Travel changes me, defines me, makes me who I am and who I will be. I love living in new places and experiencing new cultures.  I lived out in New Mexico for two and a half months.  The desert was different than anything I had ever experienced.  That difference is why I value those two and a half months more than almost any other time in my life.

I can't imagine life without travel.

But I also have a loyalty to home, to my state, to my family.  So when I'm asked where I eventually want to live, I come to a stalemate between wanting to be a traveling vagrant and wanting to firmly plant my butt in the Southern soil it was raised in.

I thought that by now I'd have my life figured out.  I'll be 23 this August.  I decided my freshman year of college that I'd have everything figured out by now.

The one thing I have figured out is that you can't plan the future.  That I don't have my life planned out, and that I have to be okay with that.

Blogger, This is Why I Hate You

So you spend some time with your blog.  You want to make it nice-looking, streamlined, not eyerapingly atrocious, the usual.  You settle on nice, simple theme, with some pretty-looking fonts.  You're happy with it.  You fantasize about how your painstakingly chosen fonts will lure unsuspecting people to your blog, how your appropriate choices will entice them to read the words you have written.

You can't imagine how you won't get a wide readership in the matter of a few months time.  After all, you are amazing.  You picked a cool font.  That wasn't Papyrus, or Comic Sans, or any of the other god-awful font atrocities of the world.

But then...

You realize that for whatever reason, your font only works half the time.  You don't know why.  You can't fix it.  Your font defaults to some random stock font on half the pages.  You start to worry, but decide that if it's plain and boring--generally it sticks to Times New Roman, which is respectable if not a little old fashioned and stuff--then there's really nothing to worry about.  Your posts will just be a tad less snazzy than originally envisioned, no big deal.   The main page will still show your pretty font.  All is well with the world.

BUT THEN.

One day, after a long hiatus from your blog (while you were busy geeking out over video games and books) you return after being particularly inspired by a writer on Wordpress.   You are excited, because you now have loads of new and fun ideas and writing is suddenly the best thing ever.  So you pull up your blog page, and go to admire your chosen font that suits your personality so very well and WAIT JUST A DARNED MINUTE.

BLOGGER.  IS THAT.....NO...

But yes, yes it is COMIC SANS and it is decorating your page, every one of your posts, like something from the deepest circle of hell waiting to pull out your guts and feed you your own spleen.

You rapidly click again, and lo and behold it vanishes.  It changes back to your beautiful, beloved font, but the damage is done.  You now worry that your blog is displaying one of the most god-awful, overused fonts in the world to all of your visitors.  This must be why your blog has remained widely unread.  It can't be because you've only posted like four times.  Noooooo.

Unsure of what to do, your occasionally pessimistic brain immediately likens your work to this atrocity.

You quietly weep.

Why I Haven't Posted: A List

1) Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
2) New full-time job
3) Okamiden
4) Books
     a) Looking for Alaska
     b) Ready Player One
     c) Game of Thrones
     d) Dresden Files
     e) Love, Stargirl
     f) Fire World
     g) The Night Circus