The holidays have come and gone, another semester has ended, a new year has begun... all without a web log from moi. How typical, non? What's with the French alluva sudden? Je ne sais pas. I've never studied French in my life. I'm going to blame it on the cold medicine... it must be from Canada. Donne-moi tout vous croissants.



Currently my cat is sitting between me and the laptop reading what I type. She's probably not actually reading this, but I'm not going to say anything negative about her just in case. Look, I'll even give her smootches. (webcams are so great) -->



A new semester starts on Friday and I'm feeling apprehensive. I'm not sure as to why. All of my classes are in English this term; what's to be anxious about? It's not like I haven't been doing this for... a long time. It's probably the fact that I'm very close to finishing my undergraduate degree that has got me uppity. Will write about my new classes once I've experienced them all next week.

I've been interning at an academic publishing company for the last two weeks. It's a bit stressful seeing as I'm not just interning in one department or even similar departments. I'm having a hard time balancing the editorial projects that are thrown at me with the marketing ones and lord knows I never know who I'm to answer to. C'est la vie. It's a great resume builder and networking tool.

I've also acquired a new guitar, ukulele and a stellar kazoo.

I'll check back in next week. In the meantime you should all go check out "This Is Ivy League." They are brilliant and that's coming from someone who hates most of the music that's being made these days.

You & Me Baby Ain't Nothin' But Mammals

I could write about my current state of being, but nothing of much consequence has happened lately. Instead I leave you with another strange childhood memory.

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My parents never taught me about “the birds and the bees.” To this very day, for all they know, I could be completely devoid of any knowledge of sex and the process of baby making in the human species.

We owned a fishing station and marina when I was growing up and we would go out and catch our own bait fish to sell. Now, for those of you not in the know, bait fish LOVE the unfertilized eggs of horseshoe crabs. I suppose it’s an example of god’s sense of humor; having fish enjoy the roe of another animal. Fair play? I don’t know really.

Anyway, in order to trap the bait fish we’d first have to catch fertile, egg filled female horseshoe crabs during the full moon. Why during the full moon? I’ll tell you dear friends, because horseshoe crabs move to shallow water and get frisky during the full moon. So as these poor creatures were enjoying a little slap and tickle we’d pry them apart, take the female and later CUT HER IN QUARTERS to steal her eggs. This is, remarkably, not the story I had planned on telling.

Is this why none of my relationships work? Am I secretly terrified someone or something is going to come along and rip me from my mate, just to cut me open and steal my unborn children? That's a bit dramatic. I'm grasping at straws and looking for a scapegoat on this one.

My story was supposed to be light hearted and a bit silly. It goes a little something like this:

One day, while at the marina, 2 randy horseshoe crabs were scuttling along the shore in front of us and my dad said something like, “Oh look, they’re having sex.” I, with the infinite wisdom of an 8 year old turned and said in my most petulant tone, “No, Dad! They’re MATING.” Dragging out the word “mating” as if I was trying to explain quantum physics to a 5 year old. It wasn’t until I was about 13 or 14 that the thought entered my mind that perhaps humans were subject to the same breeding procedures as animals. I then spent a good month or two being greatly disturbed before receiving a schoolyard education on sex and succumbing to hormones. Suddenly the idea didn’t seem so horrific.

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.

You're a Wizard, Harry!

This semester I am enrolled in "The Greek and Latin Roots of English." Each class is only 50 minutes long and my professor has taken to sending us emails to supplement the lack of class time. Below is an excerpt from the email he sent regarding Halloween:

"...In native English, "hallow" as noun (as in "All Hallows' Eve) is used as the direct translation of Latin "sanctus, sancti," which comes into French as "saint," whence English "saint." Also, "to hallow" is used as a verb, meaning "to make holy": The traditional translation in English of the so-called Lord's Prayer, or "Our Father," includes the words, "hallowed be Thy name," to translate the Latin "sanctificetur nomen tuum," which in more Latinate English might be, "may Thy name be sanctified."

God knows why J.K. Rowling called her last volume, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." If anybody knows the answer (along with God), and will tell me, you get fifty points for your house..."

Seeing as I apparently enjoy embarrassing myself, I responded to him as follows:

"...To try and squeeze out any logic to Ms. Rowling's "Deathly Hallows" would involve delving into this rather cockamamie world she's created. The legend of the deathly hallows comes from a fairy tale that wizarding parents tell their children and that she subsequently published in "The Tales of Beedle the Bard." As it would turn out, the Deathly Hallows were no mere fairy tale for young Harry Potter and his friends.

While I could shamefully wax poetic on the world of Harry Potter for hours, I'll spare you and make this brief. "The Tale of the Three Brothers" is a story about a run in with a personified Death, resulting in the creation of three of the most powerful magical objects (aka the Deathly Hallows). Whoever could unite the three Hallows is believed to be the Master of Death. Enter Voldemort.

Perhaps it was Ms. Rowling's intent to stress the reverence these items would hold to anyone yearning for invincibility. While anything surrounding death isn't immediately thought of as holy, Lucifer was once an angel and Hades a god, no?

You may reward any and all points to Slytherin house.

All things good,
Brittney"

I was instantly mortified upon sending this email, but there was nothing that I could do at that point. After 2 days and no reply I had thought he found me incredibly pathetic and had a good laugh at my expense; not thinking me worthy enough of a response. I was wrong. Oh, how I was wrong. I awoke today to this gem in my inbox:

"Good heavens, dear Brittney, YOU a SLYTHERIN?!!! If I were the Sorting Hat, I would have put you in Ravenclaw
.

But, well, OK, I guess Slytherin needs its good moral examples, and I can think of no one better than you to lead the way.

And then again, suppose the Sorting Hat had sent Harry Potter into Slytherin: What would have happened then? Would Draco Malfoy have become his ally early on, and Ron and Hermione his foes? Would Snape have made him his special pet? Would Snape have personally instructed him in the creation of all those special recipes in the chemistry book, including the Felix felicis potion? ("Happy of happy," by the way.)

But then, Harry would have had to fall out with Hagrid, I guess ...

I love the episode in Book 6, down at Hagrid's, when Harry has drunk the Felix felicis potion: terrific writing. But the movie version of 6 is the weakest of them all, thus far, IMHO.

Not that I am despairing about Book 7, movie-wise. Reading-wise, Book 7 is terrificly depressing: one horrible slog after another. And worst of all, the temporary alienation of Ron. It is an awfully complicated book, and it is wise of the Rowling movie industry to break it into two parts -- I guess the big challenge is to keep the principal actors still looking like vulnerable young teen-agers, when obviously the actors themselves are blossoming gloriously ...

FYI, entre nous, long ago the Sorting Hat told me that I would be a Hufflepuff.

And have you ever figured out what the etymology of "Horcrux" is? Of course you have: anyway, there are tons of Rowling-derived website out there, explaining every itsy bitsy detail. "Crux, crucis" is Latin, for "cross," as you know. And I am guessing that the "Hor" part comes from the name of the god in Egyptian mythology who is regularly depicted as a falcon. Which relates (in spite of the linguistic barbarism, about which in general I shall have more to say in class) to how, in some Egyptian pictures, the divine falcon brings the vaguely cross-shaped ankh to the worshipper, that being somehow a symbol of life.

Best regards,

Mark Caponigro"

When I was 5 or 6 years old (and completely toilet trained) my cousin Amanda made me and her sister Rachel put on Pull-Ups potty training diapers and locked us in Rachel's closet while we were playing "house." Rachel screamed bloody murder while I tried to get her to shut up. My heart was pounding; I was scared of the dark, but I knew that the closet was preferable to under the bed where I sure an alligator lived.

I wasn't a terribly vocal child. I lived in my head, played on my own and did everything and anything I could to avoid embarrassment. I'm pretty sure I would have stayed in that closet until I starved to death if it meant not having my Uncle Eddie see me in a pair of Pull-Ups like an incontinent toddler.

I continue to live my life in a very similar fashion; like at any moment someone might rip open the door and find me in a pair of Huggies. I keep my mouth shut and push people away for fear of something mortifying happening to me around them. I suppose I'm a bit of a control freak. Having control makes me feel safe, like I am curled up, all safe and sound in an anti-embarrassment cocoon.

I guess this is me saying that I've been having a rough time of it lately. The Grateful Dead's "Truckin'" has been playing non-stop on the ol' iPod. I suffer silently more oft than not. I don't exactly know how to lean on someone. My entire life I've struggeled silently, pulling myself up by my own bootstraps. Trust issues; an endless number of counselors have told me. It's easier this way, I say. They seem to disagree, things get awkward and I move on to the next. I'm apparently emotionally stunted and if I don't fix this I can kiss a relationship goodbye.

I used to think that avoiding heartbreak was the smartest thingn I could do, but I'm not so sure anymore. I'm lonely and I can't help but think that there's more to life than going at it alone. I want a Sharon and Ozzy kind of love. A love so strong you make a suicide pact just in case. A love so all encompassing that you physically cannot bear the thought of losing the other. If I'm going to do this, if I'm going to open myself up and allow myself to love and be loved, I am going to do it full stop.

I wonder if I'd have turned out like this if I had siblings.

Celebrity Collage by MyHeritage

On a regular day I look like Raven Simone...

MyHeritage: Family trees - Genealogy - Celebrities - Collage - Morph

...but when I gnaw on a dead crab I look like Harry Potter! WIN.

MyHeritage: Family trees - Genealogy - Celebrities - Collage - Morph

I love old New Yorkers. I'm not speaking of age, I'm speaking of people born of the Boroughs. Hardy folk that proudly count back the generations of their family that lived "in the neighborhood." Men who live for baseball season, women who live for the happiness of their families. The young couples that you know will still be together in 30 years, just fatter and a bit more leathery. Working class masses in family homes and rent stabilized walk-ups. People with names like Mikey, Jojo, Fran and Dot, who stuck it out and didn't move to Long Island or Westchester the first chance they got.

I suppose that's enough waxing poetic on people not normally seen as verbose, romantic or very beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder however.

I've been having terrible nightmares lately about tragic events that have happened in my lifetime and it's almost as if the floodgates are now just opening and I'm feeling the gravity of each situation for the first time. I think I completely distanced myself from reality in order to survive childhood sometimes. I hope I'm a strong enough adult to deal with all of these surfacing emotions.

I watched TWA Flight 800 explode over the ocean when I was 10 years old. I saw, first hand, 230 people go up in flames and plummet into the Atlantic. I sat by for days, as locals joined the search efforts, coming in and out of the marina with gruesome stories and no good news and just a few months later I enjoyed the beach where it happened without a second thought to the tragedy. I guess no 10 year old can fully wrap their head around something of that magnitude, but now, 13 years later I have a gigantic pit in my stomach over the entire ordeal. Why am I having nightmares about it now?