random truths, second edition

Alrighty, second edition here we come!  A few more random things about me that some of you may or may not know (c:

1.) I'm so stressed out about writing books that it seems to be all I ever think about anymore.  The funny thing is that where I'm at right now is the longest I have ever spent writing continuously.  I started the final edit of Episode I back in early January, finished it in mid June, and started working on Episode II right away.

I should have expected this... I think at one point I knew when I put Episode I out into the world I would be so dead focused on finishing the rest that it would consume my life.  But now that it has, I'm still somehow surprised.  It isn't necessarily a bad thing, I'm very focused right now and that's great because the work I am churning out is pretty excellent when it comes to progressing the storyline and characters.

The trouble arrives when I start to only talk about the books, and then I get panicked.  I feel like very few people actually care, and there are even less people who have read the old material that would know what I was even talking about.  We all have our torches to carry ::dramatic sigh:: 

2.) Fall makes me sad.  I say that every year, I'm fully aware, but it does.  And it really has nothing to do with being in a relationship or not, because the season always does the same thing to me.  Maybe it's not about being "sad," but instead feeling melancholy.  It's a nostalgic season, an entertaining one as always (Halloween, hey-o!), but overall it's the "slow down" time of year and that's always an adjustment.

Everything is starting to die, from the flowers shriveling up to the leaves on the trees falling away.  It rains a lot more, coffee dates and cuddling up with loved ones or fuzzy pets seems much more alluring, and the general darkness of daylight begins to set in.  The warmth is starting to leave the air and there's a certain crispness that is at once ideal because it unlocks the better part of a wardrobe and at the same time is such a bummer because it means the cold snap of winter is not far away.  It's time to cozy up, stay indoors, and withdraw your grand plans of outdoor life that you somehow didn't live up to in the summer like you thought and will now have to shelve for the next 6 months.

Or 8 months if you live in Wisconsin like I do.

3.) I used to be so terrified to move away from here that the thought was almost crippling.  It is what stopped me from attending a college more than five minutes from home.  Over time the thought process has changed and more often than not I find myself now weighing the pro's and con's as you should with any major decision.  Like a Venn diagram, only it's in my head and not drawn in two huge circles like boobs in front of me.  

I should probably draw one anyway.

The pro's keep adding up though, and eventually they'll reach a fever pitch where I just say "fuck it" and throw caution to the wind, packing up my bags and getting the hell out of dodge with two cats in tow.  I said I'd like to be out of Appleton by the time I'm 30 and the awkward reality is that turning 30 is hardly more than a year away.  I won't feel like a failure if I don't get out of here by then, but I am good at setting goals for myself and striving to achieve them.  (As evidenced here, here, here, and here.)  Plain and simple it just feels good to set out to do something and have it so gloriously come to life before your eyes.  To be proud of yourself for something you did on your own is a terrific feeling.  I don't see why moving away should be so different.

4.) On Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, my awesome boss is going to be having her third baby (a girl, as yet unnamed).  It's very exciting, not just for the fact that she is having a baby but the fact that for the first time in 10 years of retail, I am going to be the acting General Manager of a store.  Two years ago I wouldn't have had any what the hell I was doing, but right now I am going into the holiday season with my head held high and a certain level of adrenaline and excitement raging inside of me.

It's a fantastic feeling and is compounded by the fact that AFTER the season is over and she is back to work, I will be signed off on as a General Manager.  Meaning I can go anywhere in the company... meaning that move away from Wisconsin is suddenly going to be much more real and a whooooole lot easier.

5.) It's been mentioned quite vaguely a couple times over the last three years that I've been writing blogs, and now it's time to share the story.  The poop in the fitting rooms story, that is.  Enjoy.

You said it, lady.

I was minding my own business, executing a floorset and smiling politely at customers I didn't really want to deal with.  Normal day at Express.  A girl asked if she could be let into the fitting rooms and I of course obliged, directing her to the side fits at Express in the Fox River Mall.  There were four rooms, three of them "normal" rooms and the last one being a handicap room.  The first three were occupied so I let her in the handicap room and said I'd be back in a bit to check on her.

No more than five minutes later, another girl wanted to try on clothes.  I took her to the fits, knocked on the first three doors (believing the handicap room was still occupied) and then said we were all full.  I didn't see a shadow moving in the fourth room, however, and decided to just knock and see if the girl had left or not.  

No answer.

So I open the door to let the customer in and see that there is coffee spilled all over the floor.  The third door opens on cue and a customer leaves.

"You can just take that one," I said, "I think someone spilled coffee in here."  So I let her into the room.  Meanwhile, there is a lady standing at the end of the fitting rooms by Go-Back racks while she waits for a friend.  I glance down at her and she chuckles.

"Someone spilled coffee?" She asked with that oh-I-feel-sorry-for-you tone.

"I think so," I said, opening the door again and looking in the room.  No clothes, no hangars, just the coffee.  So I leaned in a little bit and then the smell hit me.  I recoiled and looked down at the woman a dozen feet away.  "It's not coffee."

"What?" she said, looking up from her phone.  "What is it?"  I looked again.

"Oh my god it's poop."  She gets this horrified face (I probably shouldn't have said anything in hindsight) and then I called for the other managers.  "Trish, Mark, come to the side fits.  Someone shit all over the floor."

So of course they come running over and we are all giggling and making the appropriate gag sounds.  Around this point I'm wondering how the girl I had let in had accomplished this task and gotten away with it so effortlessly.  It quickly becomes apparent that my two comrades will NOT be cleaning this up, so instead of calling a hazmat team as we should have, I determinedly walked over the men's side of the store and grabbed a long-sleeved henley and then marched into the back room and grabbed cleaning supplies.

I'll just take care of it myself, damnit.

Tying the henley around my nose and mouth and then tucking it down into the collar of my shirt, I doubled up my gloves and started sopping the mess up.  It was about three feet off the ground where it had hit the mirror, streaked down, and detonated all over the tile floor.  As I'm wiping it up and putting it in a trash bag, I see a weird streak trailing away from the mirror and leading under the bench.  So I leaned forward to see what it was.

Well, it was about 6 inches long, rubber, clear, cone shaped, and with a white/black double helix running up the inside of it.  It was a butt-plug.

Of course I went straight to Facebook with it.

To this day, four years later, I don't know what could have possibly possessed a 21-ish year old girl, maybe 5'6", very polite and quite thin, to come shopping at the mall with a butt-plug firmly shoved up her tush.  Or not so firmly, as it were.  Whether it was due to a combination of Taco Bell or whatever sort of gut-rot hell she was in, either way you look at it, her ass exploded in the fitting rooms at Express with a velocity that probably sent her airborne across the cramped space.

I wonder if she has shared the story nearly as much as I have?  Surely not.  And for as foul and nasty as it was to have to clean that up, I'd still take it any day over cleaning up vomit.

A boy has to have his standards.

6.) When I sit down to write new material, I gauge what kind of mood the scene is going to be that I'm about to write.  Is it an action scene?  A fight scene?  Dialogue?  Is it sad?  Am I killing someone off (again)?  Whatever the mood, I pick music to suit it.

And I don't pick music with words... music you'd hear on the radio, per se.  I pick movie scores, of which I have 1,829 songs.

I find that writing to instrumental music puts me in a mindset so perfectly that it then directly influences the words coming out of my fingers.  Amazing, actually, because it just pulls emotions out of me.  I doubt I could write anything the way I do if I didn't have this system in place, but I'd certainly like to read what I would write if that were the case.  Some perennial favorites are the scores to Inception, Man of Steel, Tron: Legacy, Stardust, and Avatar.  

I suggest you try it sometime if you do anything that requires creative thought (painting, drawing, crafting, etc.)  Maybe it'll make a difference in your work too?

7.) In less than a month, my best friend of the last 16 years, @klreynol, will be moving very far away.  

It absolutely breaks my heart.  There's not much more to say about it.  

8.) I'm that annoying person who has to have everything in order all the time, especially when it comes to my music in iTunes.  Every song I obtain (I won't say how), I will find out what the name of the album is that it came from, what track number it was, and of course I'll get the album artwork that goes with it.

I trust you're beginning to understand I have small OCD tendencies, but before you say I'm a freak, I did just go a year a half without adding those said bits of information.  It was only two weeks ago when I accidentally deleted everything out of iTunes that I had to go back to the old habit.  Talk about a time-consuming whoopsie.

The Knightsbridge House

9.) When I was five years old we moved to a house on Knightsbridge Lane in Redlands, CA.  For some reason, one night when it was time for bed I decided to spout off something to my mother.  I said it to her every single night for the next seven years.  If I was spending the night somewhere, I'd either tell her before I left or call home to tell her.

"Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite.  You're beautiful, you're lovely, you're pretty, you dress nice, you have beautiful makeup.  See you later alligator."  And then she'd always say: "After a while crocodile."  

And then my life would feel complete.

10.) Adults with tiny baby teeth and enormous gums; I could stop right there and you'd know what I'm talking about.

We've all seen 'em, we all know how we feel.  I know not everyone in the world has perfect teeth and a perfect amount of gums, but it doesn't stop me from shuddering when I see it.  Am I alone here?  I don't feel bad sharing this.  After-all, the blog you currently find yourself in is "random truths," and it doesn't get any more fuckin' random than that.

Ciao!

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