A Plague O' Both Your Houses!

I've been hit with an exhausting bout of ennui dear friends. I have neither the will to live or die and nothing seems particularly enjoyable. Not even food, my old standby, seems appealing. I don't even have it in my to be appalled by it all.

I'm 23. I've been out of high school for 6 years and what do I have to show for it other than some crazy stories about nothing of consequence? They'd probably be good fodder for a book, but a writer I am not. Since I obviously suck at blogging, I'm going to try writing short anecdotes from my life to help my friends better understand why I turned out the way I did. My own take on NaNoWriMo.

Will anyone care? Probably not, but I desperately need to feel like my life isn't completely pointless.

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Speonk, more specifically my parents' backyard, was hit by a veritable plague of tiny frogs the summer of my 6th year. I'm not certain if these were young frogs or simply some strange quarter sized species that descended upon the Schmidt homestead, but they came in droves.

I spent most of July and August creating habitats for the frogs in glass jam jars. After an hour or two of squeezing them to watch their eyes bulge and hind legs kick out, I would seal them into the jars. No one told me however, that you needed to poke air holes into the lid and 50+ frogs were not only tortured, but suffocated that summer. No frog has wandered into our yard since.

The next spring my grandmother died, setting off a string of terminal disease and death in my life that has yet to end. Three years later my cousin, while saving me from a school bully, told me not to worry because "what comes around, goes around." I'd never heard someone say that before and as I lie in bed that night I thought about the frog graveyard under the porch stairs in the backyard and cried myself to sleep.

At 10 years old, I was convinced that all the death and sadness in my life was essentially self inflicted due to my ill-treatment and penchant for manslaughter that one summer a few years prior. I suppose it's a bit remiss to call it manslaughter seeing as no men were slaughtered, just frogs. I am also, by no means trying to make their lives sound diminutive by saying "just frogs." A life is a life, species for naught and what occurred still weighs heavy on my conscience.

I will never know what possessed me to enslave those poor frogs or why no one stopped me, but I do often wonder if I'd still have any grandparents if I had not had a summer of psychopathic behaviour.

Man, karma's a bitch.