The Town That Let Mediocrity Win

   The white picket fence, the two children, the perfect little suburban life is....the biggest bullshit we have all been fed from childhood. From the second we are born, our cookie cutter parents try to force us into the same cookie cutter mold they were forced into, and that their parents were forced into. They make you think that you have to go school and get into college, you have to get married and settle into a boring suburb and pop at least 2 kids to be considered successful.
   I quickly sensed this epic lie when I was quite young. I woke up and opened my eyes to the zombies I was sharing that dying, trap of a town with. It was a joke. So I went to Kansas for college. Sure, it wasn't the most glamorous place to be, but I could breath away from the choking mediocrity of my home town and all of the fools I grew up with. I was able to see what I wanted my life to be, and what I sure as hell DIDN'T want my life to be.
   Luckily, I found my other half who felt the same stifling, soul-sucking atmosphere I had always felt in the town. We left. We moved to Seattle, a place filled with choices and creativity, and just things to do! They say you can always go home. Well I say, who the hell wants to!
   I just feel bad for all of those cookie cutter zombies I left behind. The ones who let themselves get stuck there. The ones who got married and bought the house. The ones who had kids too young. The trapped ones. The ones whose lives are as predictable and un-glamorous as that shithole little town. I sort of look forward to going to my ten year reunion. Oh you still live here and have 3 kids and are so bored with your life you are about to have a psychotic break? Awwww,,,good for you!

How To Fail At Life

   Failing at life is actually very difficult to do. It takes a perfect storm of things not working out and doing exactly what you are told all of the time. I let none of this stop me in achieving my epic life of failure. You too can fail at life in just a few easy steps!

Step 1: Buckle Down In High school

   

Don't actually have fun and experiment in high school. Buckle down, get good grades. Like your parents say: If you don't get good grades then you don't go to college. Heaven forbid you just get to be young and have fun! You have to keep the weight of the whole rest of your life on your shoulders!

Step 2: Go to College

Now that you wasted your high school years making sure you get into college, continue buckling down and get good grades. In fact, graduate with honors...you might as well since you aren't out there partying and being crazy like the other college kids. And you know what they say: if you don't do well in college, you won't get a good job after you graduate. So make sure you pick the most expensive school out there, because it is only worth it if you spend tens of thousands of dollars on something that becomes completely irrelevant when you try to find a job.

Step 3: Move Back to Po Dunk Town

After all of the hard work you put into graduating magna cum laude in college, make sure to completely waste your time and degree by moving back home to the boon-iest little town ever. These type of towns are great since they don't afford you any opportunities to move ahead in life, let alone in your career.

Step 4: Get a Job In Retail

Eventually, you will realize you are stuck in a place with nowhere to go in your career and you will become desperate enough to get a job in retail. At first, it doesn't seem so bad. You are tricked into thinking you make decent money because you are so young and naive. You will work your butt off for big corporate douche bag company and attempt to get promoted. Silly, naive child! It it not about the work you do, it is about who is the manager's favorite and evil politics! After wasting 3 years of your young life working hard in a job you hate and continuously coming up empty handed, you will walk away before you break down.

Step 5: Move Halfway Across the Country

After being denied and denied, and feeling like a down-trodden fool, you will decide to move 1,200 miles away to a real city. You think that all you need is a place of opportunities and everything will fall into place. Leaving behind middle-of-nowhere town for big, shiny city will be as easy as pie. You get a taste of the good life and are ready to join the ranks. 

Step 6: Wrack Up Credit Debt With A Wedding

Of course, the best thing to do right after moving to a new city and attempting to find a job is to plan a wedding. Make sure it is a really nice wedding that costs lots of money! If you don't get close to maxing out your credit cards you aren't a real bride. Now, on top of the stress of getting married, trying to change your name on everything, and finding a real job, you get to worry about your ruined credit and how you are going to pay everything off!

Step 7: Work In Retail

Driven by financial desperation, you will apply for another retail job because that is all the experience you actually do have. You will get hired by another corporate douche company that will pay you minimum wage and take the worst kind of advantage of you. They will cut your hours, and make you work ridiculously late, and you will hate yourself for being stuck there. So you will re-double your efforts to find a real job.

Step 8: Attempt to Get a Job You Actually Love

Too bad that really expensive piece of paper that you spent 4 hard years acquiring means nothing to employers. So you have a college degree, so does everyone else! You will spend many months being rejected or not hearing from job after job because you do not have any actual experience in your field. They will tell you to get an internship. That would be awesome...if you weren't an adult with bills to pay. Most internships are only open to students anyway. So you will get the joy of being caught in a delightful Catch-22, where you need experience, but no one will hire you to get experience, all while you curse college for doing absolutely squat for all the money you paid them. College is really just a big sham. As many universities see it, there is a sucker born every day, and they are going to cash in.

Step 9: Get Rejected From Graduate School

The only way you are going to be able to take internships and pay your bills is to go back to school and take out loans to cover your expenses. That's okay. You planned on going back all along, and it will get you the experience you need and a higher degree. So you will spend months writing poetry that you put your heart and soul into. You will track down your professors and beg for great letters of recommendation, and you will even write an epic essay over the stupidest topic ever. You will pay $65 you do not have in order to apply, and then you will hold your breath....and hold you breath...yup still holding your breath. In fact, the school will make you hold your breath for over 2 months before they give you an answer, even though they knew a little over a month into it what their decision would be. You will turn into a crazy person lingering at the mail box. Checking and double checking for the piece of mail that will decide your whole future. Then, with one small piece of paper, your future will be left in tatters. You won't get into graduate school. You will read that letter and feel disgusted with yourself, with the school. They tell you to re-apply in a year and to keep on writing. Yeah.....I will get right on that after I pick out a good cardboard box to live in since I have no idea how I am going to get a good job so I don't get evicted. 

   If you follow all of these steps, you too can be lost in an endless limbo of regret! People will tell you it will be okay and just to work through it and get over it. But, they will fail to tell you how to get over it. I grew up believing I was meant to do one thing in my life: write. Now, life is telling me I might have been wrong about that, that everything I thought I knew about myself is a lie. How do you just get over something like that? How do you accept that you may be ordinary? You don't. You break apart inside. You wonder how so many years of your life seem to have drifted away while you dreamed. Everything seems spoiled, rotted out. It is an infection that slowly eats you away. But if you cut the infection out, will there be anything left of the person you know. I hope to discover some kind of answer. For now, I choose to rust and decay.

   

The Victorian Bride

   On September 15th, I was married. It was the beautiful day every wedding should be. There were flowers, and candles and even string quartet. But even with the jitters and stress of a wedding, I couldn't help but feel like I was actually saying goodbye to a part of myself. The part of me that swore I would not be ordinary, the part that screamed I was meant for more. Here I was promising myself and my life to another person. Now, I love my husband more than anything, but it is hard to stamp out 25 years of romantic notions. I felt a little like a Victorian bride who has just realized that she has given up her little amount of freedom for baby-making and housekeeping. 

  It is not like I mind the housekeeping and baby-making, I knew that would happen eventually. However, I never thought I would feel so defeated and so utterly ordinary so young. I never thought about how I was throwing away some chances at greatness when I threw the bouquet. What would have happened in history if Joan of Arc or Queen Elizabeth I married? Joan would have been too busy running after the children to help the French achieve so many victories in the Hundred Years' War, and Elizabeth would be speaking Spanish while she cooked the evening meal.

   Maybe some people just are not destined for greatness. If every person lead a great and exotic life, the world would surely be a chaotic, unstable place. I long for greatness, but also long for a normal life with my husband. Is it enough to WANT to be great, or am I slowly tearing off little pieces of me?

   The answers to these questions do not exist for me right now. What I do know is that I love my husband, I love my friends and family, and I love my city. 

The World Will End When My World Ends

  I have built my life on the belief that I was destined to be a writer. Shakespeare was more a friend to me growing up than any of the people I went to school with. I loved to read , therefore I learned a love of writing. So I studied myself raw and numb in high school in order to get into a good college so I could continue the pursuit of my difficult dream. I was accepted into my good university where I learned to consider myself at the top of the writing food chain. I was an English major. I was on my surely destined path to writing greatness! I graduated with honor after academic honor. Surely my destiny would be guaranteed?
  Yet, after 3 agonizing years of retail and an atrophying spirit, I do not have the experience to land any real writing jobs. Caught in an horrible Catch-22 existence, I consulted a very nice man who ran a small publishing company. He confirmed what I had been thinking for months. In order to get a leg up on my competition, I needed to go back to school and get my graduate degree. So, I researched all the universities in my area that offered the MFA I seek. What do I find out? That my program only accepts about 30 people during each enrollment period. Not only that, but that resumes and transcripts mean very little in their consideration of who they let in.
  So the degree that put my parents in the poorhouse, the degree that I worked hard for, means very little in the bigger picture of my life. I have to rely solely on my talent as a writer. What I am worried about the most is that what if I am not good enough? What if I am not meant to be a writer? Do I lay down my pen and my happiness? Do I have to waste my whole life at a job that makes me bitter and numb? The graduate program I desperately need to be accepted into only accepts about 18% of applicants. That one little number stands as a monumental obstacle between my dream and myself. What an unfair world! The application deadline is the beginning of October, and then I am sure they make their decisions within a month or two. So I can only pray that come the winter, when my destiny is decided and sent to me in a harmless-looking envelope, that the world will really end if the news is bad. I would rather be dead than spend even one more year dead inside.

Things That Grind My Gears...

   You know what really grinds my gears? Emergency vehicles. With their noisy sirens, and their seizure-inducing lights. They think they are so important! Making cars stop to let them through and acting all hurried and smug about it.  Go ahead, blare your sirens at 3 AM! It's not like anyone is trying to sleep! I know how congested the traffic is that early in the morning. Those one or two cars and the hobos scattered around really are quite the daunting obstacles! Oh my gosh! Beware the parked cars and the stray cat! Better put on the sirens just in case they miss the gigantic, noisy, red monstrosity coming towards them! How about you shut the eff up and get on your merry way saving the undeserving drunks who don't deserve your help!
   Maybe you annoying firetrucks and ambulances can do me a favor and plow down the annoying drunk people loitering on the corner underneath my apartment. I know drunk people are incapable of speaking at normal volumes, but do you really have to enlighten the sleeping masses to your epic flirting failures and your mostly retarded intelligence? Maybe instead of getting drunk you should read some books, because if I have to listen to you yell one more drunken pick-up line, I will seriously consider leaning off my balcony in order to pee on your annoying head! Get a life! Those "damn fine ladies" do not want a piece of you no matter how hard you try.Believe it or not, drunken, gussied up high school drop-outs hold little appeal for most women.
   The only thing that is more annoying than sirens and drunks, are runners. With their tight clothing, and their perky ponytails. Whoever thought running would be a fun way to get in shape needs to be partially drawn and quartered and then thrown into a vat of mutated acid piranhas! You don't look cool, you look sweaty and miserable! Plus, the ragged, heaving breathing is disgusting! Like, you are a morbidly obese person who just walked a whole 20 feet to the refrigerator. Stop heaving your sweaty breath in my space bubble! Go learn a fun sport like tennis or swimming! The only people who should be running are people who are trying to catch a bus or actual professional runners. At least the professional runners do it on private tracks where us normal people are not subjected to the sight of their sweaty, wilted forms. Run past me with your fancy mp3 holders and your designer water one more time and I swear I will trip you on purpose! Or maybe I can wait until you have a heart attack, then we could both be put out of our shared misery! You aren't a freaking antelope being chased by a hungry cheetah! That is what really grinds my gears.....Road House.

If Only We All Learned How to Pay It Forward

   To survive in this world, many people embrace a survival of the fittest attitude. People become greedy, vicious and uncaring in order to remain intact. While I understand this, and sometimes embrace this same thought process, it never ceases to sadden me. We learn to walk alone. We learn to close ourselves off from all others in order to protect ourselves. But sometimes we are allowed to make a connection with other people. I was lucky enough to have an experience that proved there is still goodness left in this world.

   Even though I have lived in Seattle for months now, I have yet to buy myself an umbrella. I put it off thinking that the nice weather would continue if I was unprepared for bad weather. Apparently Mother Nature doesn't give a crap about my delusions.As I left work and began my 12 block trek home, the light drizzle became a violent downpour. Within five minutes I looked more like a beached mermaid than a frustrated human. I was so wet that my hair kept dripping into my eyes blurring my sight. I was wet and angry, but still I trudged on! My mantra became "just a few more blocks".

   I was so wet and cold that I couldn't feel my fingers, and more than once I thought about throwing myself into the mammoth puddles to end my misery, not that drowning in a one inch puddle would have been an easy feat. I jealously gazed at passers-by who had the sense to carry umbrellas with them. Unfortunately, I am not prone to stealing what isn't mine. But as I considered a life of thievery, a woman approached me walking the opposite direction. She looked me up and down taking in my sea-nymph state and asked me how far I was going. I automatically replied my new mantra "just a few more blocks." She handed her umbrella to me saying I could have it. Being raised a proper lady, I kindly refused stating I couldn't take her umbrella. She said it was fine because she had another one in her purse which she pulled out so I could see. She handed over her first umbrella with its case exclaiming, " Now you actually might make it home without drowning!" I thanked her for the gift and she kept on walking.

   This amazing woman never even asked me for a dime. She just gifted me her umbrella and continued on. Her kindness hit me hard. By the time I arrived home I was almost tearing up. A complete stranger had turned my whole day around. There was still good in the world. There were still people who cared about others. I swore from that moment on that I would carry an extra umbrella with me in order to pay forward her kindness. Maybe I can also save a fellow human from a terrible day. 

   So to my kind rescuer: Thank you for being the kind person you are. Thank you for saving me from a frustrating day. Thank you for boosting my spirits and making this world a better place. I hope the best for you and I promise I will strive to do the same for others!

I Pray For a Zombie Apocalypse

   Sadly, I can no longer watch the History Channel. It seems like an Apocalypse frenzy every time I turn it on. There is always one documentary after another about the end of the world. Some of them say it will be a natural disaster, some swear it will be a plague, while others seem to think the end of the world will be brought on by a massive climate shift. While the scientists cramp their hands and brains with calculations and the scientific validity of apocalyptic scenarios, I pray that humanity is taken out by zombies. That's right, zombies, because zombies give me a higher chance of survival. Without immense financial or military backing, surviving world-ending natural disasters or climate changes would be extremely difficult. However, any idiot who can aim and shoot a gun can battle zombies and survive for at least a little while. With the proper preparation, every person has a fighting chance at surviving a zombie-type Apocalypse. I pray for a zombie Apocalypse, because I have the perfect plan to survive it.

Step 1: Preparation

Your plan is only as strong as your preparation for it. I plan on surviving the zombies unscathed and relatively comfortably considering the world is over. I plan to start taking various classes to build my fighting capabilities and to get my body in peak condition such as archery, shooting classes, fencing, and some sort of martial art such as Karate or Tae Kwon Do. That way I can properly and effectively defend myself against zombies in any situation, or with almost any weapon including my own hands. Another necessary preparation is having all of the necessary supplies. I will make sure I have a varied supply of guns and ammo, knives, and a well-stocked survival pack. I will make sure my zombie kit is always readily available at every moment of every day, because zombies do not have manners and will not think twice about disrupting dinner or your favorite show.

Step 2: Gather a Crew and Learn Some Skills

A group is only as strong as its weakest link, so make sure your group doesn't have one! I plan on utilizing  thorough investigative interview processes to attain members of my zombie-killing crew. I will make sure my crew has a vast array of skill sets including a doctor, scientist, technology professional, soldier, musician, engineer, professor, and even an inventor. Every person in my crew must take part in all of the above preparations so they are capable of defending themselves and killing scores of zombies. Average people are also able to join my crew if they have or learn a valuable skill such as desalinating ocean water, building shelters, or even advanced sewing. If you can kill zombies and you have skills, you are in!

Step 3: Have a Viable Plan 

Come up with a plan and stick to it. The more you deviate from your plan, the more likely it is to fail. After much thought I came up with an ideal plan for my location. I believe the best chance of survival is on the water. Ships have the benefits of an island with the ability to move. In most zombie movies, the zombies can not swim, thus a ship would be the easiest to protect and defend. This plan will not be difficult, as I live in Seattle, and there are many different types of ships to choose from close at hand. A military ship will be the best vessel to ensure survival for the beginning part of the Apocalypse and, luckily, there is a navy base right across the Sound. A military ship is large, stealthy, and already designed to defend against attacks. It has a basic and bare set-up which will more easily allow my crew to clear it of any zombies that have wandered onto it. We will take the vessel into the ocean while we zombie-proof it and are able to defend it without any problems. 

After the Apocalypse is well under way,and after things have settled a bit, we will return to the city and sweep it for capable survivors and more supplies. All new crew members will undergo rigorous training to ensure that the crew has no weak links. We will make city sweeps up and down the coast once a month until we stop finding survivors and zombie attacks become less frequent, or sparse, as we kill the zombies or they die off. Once the crew becomes large enough, we will begin to consider comfort and re-establishing a proper and functioning society. We will begin this endeavor by taking over a cruise ship since they are designed for comfort and basically off-land living. 

After the Apocalypse seems to be winding down, we will begin to replenish and build a proper society on our ships. Anyone with skills in trade will begin to teach others their skills. Everyone must choose a set of skills to learn in order to keep a functioning society. Any children that are born will begin defensive training at the age of five. It is pertinent that there are no weak links. We do not want another outbreak of zombies just because our children are helpless and totally dependent on the adults. After many years of sea living, we will consider moving back to land. 

People are either survivors or they aren't. So the question is, are you going to be a survivor, or are you going  to be a zombie?