zombeavers: zombie beavers.

it's that last day of my june go! challenge and there are a lot of things that i could blog about.

serious things. like mental health and feminism and raising the minimum wage.

instead i'm going to blog about the worst movie that i've ever seen in my life.

ZOMBEAVERS.

yes, this is a real movie. and yes, you can watch it on netflix.

adam has had bad netflix movie marathons. i have not. we were talking about it with hannah and her boyfriend brandon, and brandon told us about the masterpiece that is zombeavers.

and it's exactly what it sounds like. zombie beavers.

so without further ado: ZOMBEAVERS, A SYNOPSIS AND MOVIE CRITIQUE

so we start off with a comedian i've never seen and john mayer.

john. fuggin'. mayer.

and they're in this truck with some chemicals and making bad dick jokes and john mayer is like, "hey man you see that deer in the road?" and random comedian is like, "i sure do" and then they hit the deer and the chemicals go spilling into a lake.

cut to three girls and a dog in a prius. they go to college in INDIANA so they have SOUTHERN ACCENTS. (that's just southern indiana, and this was certainly not southern indiana.) they are on a trip to escape their frat boy boyfriends because one of them was being a cheating asshole. they aren't allowed to have their phones once they reach the secluded cabin on the lake. but until then, they can look at dick pics. which they do.

they reach the cabin and go swimming in the tiny disgusting lake. zoe, my favourite, is completely and utterly topless and they find a beaver dam covered in violently green gunk. and they're like, "omg, do beavers pee on shit to mark their territory?!"

then some redeneck guy with a gun comes up and is like, "you should cover up your boobs there girlies and by the way, i'm a creepy misogynistic middle aged man and you're bringing about the death of america and also, beavers are mean."

now they're wearing cute pyjamas and playing would you rather, and i won't even get into that. when suddenly, the three boyfriends show up! frat boy, cheating asshole, and fatter frat boy!

and then the loud sex begins.

the girl that got cheated on is sitting there with her cheating ex-boyfriend like, "wow this is awkward listening to my friends screaming in ecstasy" and he's like, "babe" and she's like, "don't fucking touch me bro" and she goes to the bathroom and there is a ZOMBIE BEAVER IN THE SHOWER WITH INTENSE GREEN EYES AND YOU CAN TOTALLY TELL IT'S A PUPPET!

the badass frat boys stab it with a kitchen knife, put it in the trashbag, leave it on the cabin stoop, and they all go back to having wild sex.

the next day the zombie beaver is gone! a dog must've eaten it, but not zoe's annoying little dog that's been on the trip the whole time. they go swimming in the lake and wow, swimming in a small, gross lake has never been more fun. we learn that cheating asshole has been cheating on blond haired girl with her FRIEND, sorority girl, who owns the cabin. talk about a plot twist!

then the zombie beavers come and literally bite off fatter frat boy's foot. like, he's swimming and holding his foot.

in order to reach shore without being eaten, they sacrifice zoe's dog to the zombie beavers and there's a lot of screaming and crying. against better judgment, they leave fatter frat boy laying on the couch and put his foot in a plastic bag. suddenly it's dark and they think, "wow, maybe we should take fatter frat boy to the hospital."

so regular frat boy and zoe take fatter frat boy in the prius away from the cabin to try to find a hospital, leaving blond girl, cheating asshole, and sorority girl alone at the cabin to face the zombie beavers, which are slowly crawling toward the house with their creepy green eyes that you can definitely tell are just flashlights. there's a good scene with blond girl on the counter in her swim suit and a zombie beaver is going straight for her vagina until she stabs it in the head.

the road is blocked and zoe, frat boy, and dying fatter frat boy can't get to a hospital. frat boy goes for help, but two zombie beavers chew through a a tree and it falls on him and kills him instantly. suddenly redneck guy shows up in his truck, shoots some beavers, and take zoe and fatter frat boy to the cabin next door, where an old couple lives. they are no where to be found bu that's fine, they'll just stay in their creepy farmhouse cabin with the lights off while zoe tries to put fatter frat boy's foot on ice. while she's literally holding his foot, redneck guy is offering her fried chicken.

after blocking the cabin from the encroaching beavers, blond haired girl decides to talk to her sorority sister, the one she doesn't know has been cheating with her boyfriend. sorority girl is laying in bed all sensually and blond haired girl climbs on top of her and and sorority girl is like, "i've told you i don't love you that way" and suddenly it's like, IMPENDING LESBIAN SEX SCENE?

i wanted it. i really did.

but before they could start having lesbian sex...

BLOND HAIRED GIRL TURNS INTO A ZOMBIE BEAVER HYBRID AND TRIES TO EAT SORORITY GIRL'S FACE.

i can't even deal with this.

sorority girl runs and holes herself up in the bathroom with cheating asshole. they have to make sure that they haven't been scratched or bitten, so they get naked and start hitting each other. then they start having sex on the counter.

in the other cabin, zoe has discovered the dead old couple and their dead dog (the saddest part of the movie) and fatter frat boy has turned into a zombie beaver hybrid too! he attacks old redneck guy! now the old couple are zombie beaver hybrids! zoe is trapped on the second floor so she literally dives out of the window and you think she's dead!

while sorority girl and cheating asshole are having sex, blond haired zombie beaver hybrid breaks into the bathroom, bites his dick off and kills him, and sorority girl escapes out the window after the cabin is lit on fire. she and zoe get into the prius and drive like there is no tomorrow! while they are driving, they are running down all the inhabitants of the lake, who are now zombie beaver hybrids and are trying to gnaw on trees to block their path!

it's now almost dawn and they've gotten to where frat boy was killed by the tree. he is now a zombie beaver hybrid (but how?) and they shoot him with redneck dude's shotgun. they resign to walking the rest of the way, bloodied and valiant. zoe finds an ax and is using it to help her walk. once they climb over the tree, sorority girl pulls a gun on zoe and says, "ARE YOU GONNA TURN INTO A BEAVER, BITCH?" and zoe is like, "c'mon man we've been through too much this weekend for this bullshit" but then SORORITY GIRL TURNS INTO A BEAVER HYBRID SO ZOE CHOPS HER UP WITH THE AX.

now zoe is the only one left standing. she valiantly walks down the lonely road, using the ax as a crutch.

cut to john mayer and his comedian friend. they are driving down the road. john mayer says, "hey you see that girl in the middle of the road?" of course, says the comedian, i see her.

zoe turns into a pancake and we're at the credits!

the credits are the best part. it's literally a frank sinatra impresonator crooning a song called "zombeavers."

now for the critique part.

the acting was okay. zoe was by far the best actor, but sometimes her southern accent went away and it was like, where did it go? there was a lot of useless dialogue with old redneck guy, the scene where the loyal golden retriever that's being petted is suddenly replaced with a zombie beaver is a tired old trick, and the impending lesbian sex scene that didn't actually LEAD to a lesbian sex scene was just disappointing for everyone.

they could've used their budget better. the deer killed at the beginning of the movie was some really great graphics. so they decided to have a really good dead deer and a few beaver puppets with what limited resources they had. they could've used that money more wisely, like to make the beavers actually not look like puppets.

the frank sinatra in the credits was a nice touch and made up for the fact that they portrayed college students as being stupid enough to let fatter frat boy sleep on the couch while holding his own foot when they could've just taken the prius to the hospital right then and there.

but A++ for the line, "don't young people just lay around and scissor to lady gaga?"

movie rating: one and a half out of five. if you like bad movies and want a bad movie night, instant five stars.

and if you didn't think there wasn't a scene where a zombie beaver is going straight for blond girl's vagaina, here ya go.

stuff. so much stuff.

last night i had a nightmare.

people classify nightmares differently. my boyfriend, for example, has really intense nightmares about dark forests and demons and beasts with fangs and dead girls standing at the end of his bed.

i would call those night terrors because there's no way in hell i'd be able to deal with that.

my nightmares are pretty much all anxiety related. i'm at school and my locker won't open and i don't have any of my homework done. i'm at a swim meet and i don't have my swim suit and i have to swim the race naked.

those kind of nightmares.

i had one of those last night. i don't remember that much of it, but the basic premise of it was this: it was time for me to move and i hadn't packed a single thing yet.

when i got up this morning and looked at my perfectly stuffed bedroom, i realised that i move in two weeks.

two weeks.

TWO WEEKS.

TWO WEEKS.

i don't know, man, but that's like, REALLY HELLA SOON.

i'm really nervous about this because my parents aren't going to be here to help me move. they're going to be in florida celebrating jesus with a lot of other older people. i'm even more nervous because i don't actually know what day i'm moving in, i just know that it's sometime during that week that's two weeks from now.

i have a pretty happy image in my mind. like, hannah, her boyfriend, and adam and i are slowly, methodically, and happily moving stuff up the staircase and into our brand new shiny white apartment. once everything gets brought inside, we assemble the furniture and the TV, which we sync to our netflix accounts. once the kitchen stuff is unpacked, we'll pour ourselves some wine, order a pizza, and celebrate in our victory with a bad netflix movie like zombeavers.

REALLY THO, THAT WAS THE BEST WORST MOVIE I'VE EVER SEEN AND I SHOULD BLOG ABOUT IT TOMORROW. SOMEONE REMIND ME.

in reality, this is how moving is probably going to go.

1. i will run out of gas from making van trips even though i only live a mile and a half away.
2. the couch will not come on time.
3. hamlet will shit on the carpet from moving anxiety. (that's my lizard, by the way.)
4. someone will break a bone moving stuff. probably me.
5. my boyfriend will be crushed by my desk.
6. many of our things will break.
7. i will revert to using language that would make my mother keel over.
8. we'll be too tired to go grocery shopping. or get toilet paper.
9. it'll take ten whole days and a swarm of locusts will appear.
10. did i say swarm of locusts? yeah, that'll probably happen.

all of this has been swirling around in my brain. on top of moving, i'm still working two jobs that week, hannah is working, adam will be sleeping on my floor, and it's just going to be a train wreck.

so i got up early this morning after my nightmare and decided to start parking.

where to begin? where to even start?

clothes. winter clothes.

i learned a good tip from moving my shit to and from michigan for college: put your clothes in trashbags. that way you can just stuff them into hard to fill areas between boxes.

i also read a moving tip in a very valuable article called "how to grow the fuck up" that you should leave your clothes on the hangers so that way, you just can hang them up right away and you're not moving a gigantic box of hangers around.

i discovered, after going through my winter clothes, that i have three trashbags full of sweaters. THREE. ENTIRE KITCHEN GARBAGE BAGS. OF JUST SWEATERS.

and i want more. i always want more.

i haven't packed my dresses yet. i know i have at least twenty dresses. and i almost bought an eighty dollar one today.

then i set to work on my dresser once my closet was mostly done, not counting all the weird shit that i have on the high shelf, like my clown costume and a box of letters that i wrote to dead people in high school.

in my bottom dresser drawer, i found about two thousand dollars' worth of swim suits.

most of them were from high school and they were super old and thin and i was like, why the hell do i even have these? so i threw them away. then i found a bunch of weirder stuff, like three pairs of bike shorts and a bike jersey (i am not a cyclist), a pair of wrap parachute pants from the dominican republic, a canvas bag from amsterdam, and four two hundred dollar competition swim suits.

competition suits get weird. like, the one that i wore in 2008 when i was seventeen went down to my ankles. then they banned those. so then i got a few that went down to my knees. the one that i used in college in 2011 is illegal now too because i guess it has some weird flotation thing in it that's supposed to make you drop time?

well, i wore it at the MIAA conference meet, and let me tell you, i didn't drop any time.

i was planning on doing more packing besides my closet full of sweaters and my dresser drawers, but then i went dress shopping and fell in love with an expensive dress, decided i was too poor to buy it, and pined over it for three hours. i was going to tackle my desk, which is HUGE, by the way. it's big enough for hamlet's 75 gallon tank and my TV and my laptop. it also has a lot of drawers and is generally thick and heavy and large.

i don't even think i want to know what's in those drawers. that'll be a blog post for another time: the official packing with emily post.

you know how in my moving tips blog (read that here) i said that i'll just have adam carry my entire desk up three flights of stairs for me and how i hope he doesn't die and become an adam pancake?

... it turns out that my desk doesn't actually come apart.

GUESS WHO'S CARRYING IT UPSTAIRS!

we'll say a collective prayer that he doesn't turn into an adam pancake. i like him to be 3D. it's better for cuddling.

even just going through my closet and my dresser, i realised exactly how much stuff i have. most of the adult stuff that i've been getting, like my bar stools and my table and my bathroom stuff, is in the basement. then i have my entire bedroom, which is a big bedroom, full of stuff. and then i have everything that i moved back from college in my attic that i need to go through.

i have so. much. junk.

do you ever get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things you own? like, i have three shelves on my wall full of knickknacks that i've acquired over the years. i have my shot glass collection, a bunch of cool stuff that my grandparents have gotten me from various countries, and a few trophies. most of the stuff is really cool because it's come from around the world, like my russian dolls and my wooden clogs from the netherlands.

but like, do i actually want to move these things? do i want to pack them up?

not really. i kind of just want to leave them in my room at home for a while. i'm not moving out of fort wayne for another year and a half to two years, so do i really need to take them with me? my mom is converting my bedroom into a guest room, so whatever guests we have can look vaguely at my shelves and say, "ah. things."

my two bookshelves are coming with me. one is small and holds my DVD and VHS tape collection. it also has my awesome owl lamp, my alarm clock, and my earring holder. it's effectively a bedside table. my BIG bookshelf, that's gonna be fun to move, and it probably won't fit in my new bedroom because i'm downsizing, so that might just go in the living room. we'll see how that works out.

i just have so much shit that i don't know what to do with it. so i need to buck up and throw things away that i'm pretty sure i don't need even if i think i want them.

i get attached to things. it's a problem. i gotta let go.

it'll be a process.

a process that'll probably come fruition come july, so if you're lucky, you'll get a july post about it. hooray!

i'm moving. it's real. it's happening. i can do it.

here's a picture of of a cute dog running to calm us both down.

the big announcement.

we were eating dinner the other night and my mom says, "well, it looks like you've entered that stage of your life. the wedding stage."

ain't that the truth.

my facebook is nothing but wedding pictures. three of my friends just got married on the same DAY.

just about every single weekend so far this summer there have been pictures of weddings that my friends are either attending or are actually participating in.

wedding season is always exciting. i get worked up over what dress i want to wear to a wedding. my cousin is getting married in august and i've been obsessing about what dress i want to wear for like, the past few months.

i still haven't decided, by the way.

you get to dress up and celebrate the next big step with your friends! it's so amazing! it's so happy!

and then, if you're like me, you go home, wipe the makeup off your face, put your feet up, and binge watch grey's anatomy.

i love weddings and i love my friends and i am SO HAPPY that they are taking the next step but i'm also like, HELLA BITTER.

i've posted about this before. the bitter part about watching all of your friends get married. because you get really super bitter.

so then you sit around and you start thinking about the idea of marriage. and you get all excited and happy because MARRIAGE.

and then you think about being forty-five and having a bad sex life and four kids and you're like, ABORT ABORT ABORT.

my biggest question is this: how the HELL do you know when you've found the right person?

i asked my brother this the other day and he says, "you just know." and he winks at me.

and i'm like, "all right, fine, whatever, blah blah blah pretentious douche."

but apparently my brother knew because that MOTHERFUGGER JUST GOT ENGAGED!

when your friends get engaged and most of them live in michigan, you can look at cute pictures and go "omg i'm so happy for you!" and squeal a little bit inside and smile like a big idiot.

when your brother that you LIVE with proposes to his girlfriend and she says yes, it's a bit bigger than that.

i knew that he had been planning on it for a while. he went to detroit to get the ring and he showed me a picture of it. then, when it came in, he showed it to me.

me: ring?
me: ????
me: !!!!!!!!

then i was like, "there is an engagement ring in my house. in my house! across the hall! IN MY BROTHER'S ROOM! AN ENGAGEMENT RING !!!"

this isn't the ring, by the way.

up to this point, i always thought that i would be getting engaged/married first. i was in a two and a half year relationship (my brother was not in any relationship) and i thought it was going to end in marriage. i realise now that i was very naive about this and i'm very happy that that relationship ended, even though i wasn't at the time. i've been with adam for a year and a half and i felt more with him in four months than i felt with my ex in that entire two and a half years.

on friday, i heard aaron and gracie (his now fiancee!) leaving to the house and i came downstairs for dinner with my parents like, "where are the lovebirds going" and my mom was like "tonight is the night!"

and i was like, "what do you mean tonight is the night? is this some lady and the tramp shit?"

and she was like, "AARON IS PROPOSING TONIGHT!"

and i was like "HOLY HELL IT'S TONIGHT? HOW DID AARON NOT TELL ME IT WAS GONNA BE TONIGHT? WHY DID NOT CONFIDE IN ME? HOLY SHIT IT'S HAPPENING TONIGHT?!"

my brother and i are practically twins. we've lied and said that we were twins and have gotten discounts this way. we look alike, we're about the same height, we did the same sport, we were both in band, and we both had the same summer job at the same place doing the same thing.

look how cute we are circa 2012. twinning it up. this picture lies, though, BECAUSE I AM TALLER THAN HIM.

my brother and i are pretty close. so i was a little bummed that he hadn't told me that tonight was the night.

i ate pizza with my parents and tried not to think about it. then i realised that i really needed to write so i poured myself a gigantic glass of blackberry merlot and attempted to get tipsy enough to write uninhibited.

then he and gracie came back from their dinner. gracie ran up to my room, stuck out her hand to show me the ring that aaron had shown me a few weeks earlier, and i burst into tears.

then she asked me to be a bridesmaid and i was like, CRY CRY CRY SOB SNIFFLE OH MY GOD I'M SO HAPPY.

my mom has gone into planning mode. now that she's planned next year's vacation, she's in her wedding planning prime. my brother has been engaged for less than 48 hours and she's already found about ten venues and has managed to coax gracie into telling her exactly what shade of purple the dresses are going to be.

next up in MY exciting life: i bought a vacuum like an adult. not quite as exciting as getting engaged.

i've said it before, but i love the idea of weddings. the dress, the flowers, the bridesmaids, the music, the dancing, everything. i'm a horrible planner, so hannah is going to plan my wedding for me. i know i want it to be honeybee themed and that's about it.

(NO, DAD, I AM NOT RELEASING HORNETS DURING THE RECEPTION, SO DON'T ASK AGAIN.)

i approached this topic with adam and he says, "well if we get married and you want a honeybee themed wedding, there's really nothing that i can do about it."

i found a pretty wedding dress online and i sent it to him and he says, "eh it's okay."

OKAY? IF I WALK DOWN THE AISLE IN AN EXPENSIVE WHITE DRESS TO MARRY YOU, YOU BETTER CRY.

adam is not a crier. i am. i'll probably cry the whole way up the aisle. hell, i'll cry enough for the both of us.

wedding season gets me incredibly excited about weddings. i keep talking to adam about it and he said two very important things.

1. "you are so excited because it's wedding season."
2. "marriage is the next big milestone for you, so why wouldn't you be excited? but it's not my next big milestone."

things i must remember.

until i get my own engagement and wedding, whether with adam or otherwise, i have another wedding to plan for and to be in.

MY BROTHER'S.

a train wreck.

so i've come to notice that 538 of you have read my post about sandra hill's rough and ready.

don't remember that?

read that here.

make my post about a really terrible adult novel my most read blog post, I DARE YOU.

to be honest, i don't know where this post is going to go.

there's always a day where i just have absolutely no idea what to write about. like, absolutely no idea.

i've been sitting around most of the day trying to figure out what to post about. like, i already did the SCOTUS ruling, i've already been bitter, i've talked about charlie cox's sculpted british ass, and i haven't done anything TOO exciting today and except see jurassic world.

which was awesome, by the way. i almost shit myself about three times and on the way home i thought a dinosaur was gonna swoop down, tear open the roof of my van, and eat me.

i don't want to write about it, though, because it's only been out for two weeks and i don't want to spoil anything for you. but i did raise my hands and shout "YAAAAS BITCH YAAAAAS!" at bryce dallas howard so that happened.

also this like, pretty much sums up jurassic world:

so what else has been going on in my life?

i've been writing about bad moving tips and currently i'm following all of them.

have i started to pack? nahhhhh.

have i alerted my bank that i'm moving? or contacted the DMV? nahhhhhh.

have i lazed around and watched netflix and worked on my novel?

absolutely.

i'm a champ when it comes to procrastinating. if anything, the day that i get the keys to my apartment i'll look around my room and say, "oh, did i not pack? WHOOPS."

today i was planning on celebrating some awesome pride SCOTUS stuff, but fort wayne was interrupted by this HELLA BIG STORM.

i'm fine, by the way. and my basement didn't flood, so yay sump pumps!

i woke up at eight o'clock this morning to rain rattling against my roof like i was in some victorian era novel. i went downstairs for breakfast and i asked my parents, "hey, why aren't you bike riding?!"

remember, my parents are the crazy lance armstrong cyclists but without the dope. at least, i think without the dope.

my dad was like "hahaha 50 MILE AN HOUR WINDS."

and i was like, ahhh shit man, i was gonna go to the library to reread this book! but i can't leave the house in this wind!

my van and the wind are not friends. like, i've almost gotten in a car accident because of wind.

also, why did i want to reread this book?

1. i hadn't read it since i was in high school.
2. there was an entire subplot with a ghost that i had forgotten about?
3. i was just sitting in my room and like a bolt of lightning i was like, "I MUST REREAD THIS BOOK FROM MY PAST THAT I FORGOT ABOUT" because that was totally normal.

does that ever happen to you?

in other news, when i got home from jurassic world i took hamlet, my bearded dragon, out of his tank and pretended that he was a dinosaur.

like, i set him on my knee, grabbed his little hands, and went RAWR RAWR RAWR and he looked at me like "are you shitting me right now".

until i'm done freaking out about jurassic world, he will be my wee dinosaur.

now i'm sitting in my basement with my brother and his girlfriend and we're watching jurassic park because we needed more t-rexes in our lives.

IT'S SO NINETIES. hold onto your butts.

this post has been a train wreck, like that time i tried to live tweet game of thrones sesason four episode seven on a friday night and i yelled "IT'S TIME FOR GAME OF THRONES SEASON FOUR EPISODE EIGHT ON THIS BORING SATURDAY NIGHT" and i was like "oh shit wrong episode wrong day of the week."

meh, i don't care. stream of consciousness is kind of fun, i've gotten to post some cool pictures, and there's always a june challenge post that doesn't really have a point and nobody really reads it.

but go make my post about rough and ready my most viewed blog. that would make my day.

we can marry! now what?

this morning while i was at work, i checked twitter to see that SCOTUS (surpreme court of the united states) had made marriage legal for everyone in all 50 states.

me: ???
me: ...
me: !!!

since then, i have been all over social media, reading dissents, watching buzzfeed articles pop up like this one and numerous onion articles that are letting us know that we a long ways to go, and just generally being excited.

i've also been making fun of scalia, but i've been doing that for years now, so what's new?

but what does the SCOTUS ruling mean for YOU, an average american?

first off, it means that you get to spend today partying in all of your rainbow coloured clothing.

scream! run around! wave flags! kiss your loved ones! weep with happiness!

(these are all things i wanted to do at work but that's frowned upon.)

here are some other things that legalising marriage means to the people of the united states.

FOR GAY PEOPLE

it means that they can get married!

and they certainly have been! twitter just alerted me that a couple in texas that's been together for almost sixty years just got married. hooray!

besides being able to marry, gay people are now awarded the full benefits of marriage that aren't necessarily granted in a civil union or just by being in a monogamous relationship.

some of these things include:

1. financial stability
2. hospital visitation rights
3. joint health care
4. estate planning and access

the last one is huge. it was brought to light when the famous astronaut sally ride died a year or so ago and her partner was not able to have access to her estate even though it was laid down in her will.

so when we talk about wanting to marry, it's not just standing at an altar and saying "i do" to the person that you love and want to spend the rest of your life with. it's being afforded everything that comes with marriage financially, and this is crucial.

FOR STRAIGHT PEOPLE

it means that gay people can get married. it can impact your life in one way.

1. you'll have a lot more wedding invitations from your gay friends.

other than that, it's not going to affect your life, and if you think it will in some negative way, boy do i have news for you.

couples get married every single damn day and you have no idea and you don't care. now more couples are going to get married every single damn day and you still have no idea.

it does not affect your life negatively. 

your religious freedom is not impinged because believe it or not, even if gay people can now get married, you can still practice your religion! you can be free to do that still! you can still be free to change religions! you can be free to do all kinds of religious things! you're just not free to shove your religious beliefs down people's throats and make them adhere to it, which isn't called freedom of religion, it's called bigotry.

if you look at what religious freedom constitutes under the law, marriage equality does not affect it. at all.

so what's the takeaway from all of this?

obviously, this is amazing. this is monumental. i can't even describe how absolutely incredible this is. everything is in a happy uproar. i'm so happy, and for once, i'm proud to be an american. i am proud of my country and the decision that we've made toward equality.

the key word is toward. we are not an equal country, and we will not be a for long time.

in terms of LGBTQIA rights, this is just the first step. now that we've taken that step, we cannot stop running. we cannot stop fighting. we cannot simply sit back and believe that everything is over.

now we have other issues to focus on. LGBTQIA homelessness. LGBTQIA people are three times more likely to commit suicide than straight people and this is for a number of reasons, the most common being bullying and unacceptance.

in 30 states, it is legal to kill a trans person. think about that. it is legal to murder someone for being tans.

in my home state, although marriage has been legal for over a year, you can be fired for getting married.

indiana is the not the only state without sexual orientation job protection. 28 other states can fire you for being gay.

i spend a lot of time on tumblr and even when marriage equality was only in about five states, there was large sentiment that marriage is not the be-all-end-all, and it's certainly not the most prevalent issue.

women fought for decades for the right to vote, and we finally got it. it was monumental. are the struggles of american women over? absolutely not. we are still fighting huge battles to be treated equally.

black people fought for centuries for equality in this country. they are still fighting for equality. it is far from over.

the LGBTQIA community is no exception. we have made a monumental achievement, but we are not done.

there is so much to do.

so saddle up, grab your equality flag, and ride that gay-ass unicorn into the sunset and help make america even more equal than it just became today.

(in looking for this next picture, i googled gay unicorn. DO NOT DO THAT. DO NOT.)

(bad) moving tips with emily!

as the date of my departure from my parents' house looms ever closer like a gigantic fly blotting out the sun, it's time for some moving tips.

(BAD) MOVING TIPS WITH EMILY.

1. definitely don't bother to pack.

i have mastered this tip quite well and i learned it in college, where you learn all of your important life skills, like how to write a twenty page paper instead of how to balance a checkbook, how to memorise useless pieces of information instead of how to apply for a loan, and how to not let other people know when you're hungover.

not packing well in advance before you move will ensure that you have HIGH LEVELS OF STRESS. i learned this helpful tip during all four years at school where i decided to pack up my entire room literally the day before i moved out.

this became even more clear when i was still packing up my shit after i graduated.

i was still in my cap and gown and dress. i had a diploma. and i was still packing crap up into my van. this was very life affirming and i enjoyed every minute of it!

2. when you do decide to pack, why bother labelling anything?

i've found that labels just get in your way and make things too organised.

isn't it more fun to open up a box and have no idea what's inside? forrest gump has an entire life philosophy about this! i mean, there's nothing better than unpacking a bunch of shit in your new room, opening up a bunch of boxes, and finding out that it's full of kitchen stuff.

even better, it's more fun when you open up a box and it's got a complete mix of things that can go anywhere! so you just lay it all on your bed and figure out what to do with it later. your bed is big. you'll have plenty of room.

3. you definitely don't need to know what you already have.

have a bunch of stuff left over from college that you don't know about? it's fine, let it stay in the attic, it's already boxed up anyway. (see number two for fun with opening boxes!) it's so much better to go to target, look at stuff you don't think you have, spend lots of money on it, and then find out you already had it.

then you have two! it's a party!

4. no time to go through all your clothes? that's fine.

there's something totally cathartic about going through all your clothes that you don't wear AFTER you've hauled them across the city, state, or country. it's not like they took up bunches of room in your moving vehicle and you spent hours hanging them back up in your new closet.

5. completely forget about buying essentials.

there's nothing quite as exhilarating as pooping in your new bathroom for the first time and realising that you didn't buy toilet paper and have you have none in your entire new place.

6. there's really no point in taking pictures of how your furniture goes together.

everybody can read an ikea manual, it's easy! and that furniture that's hella old, like my bed that's older than my mom? i'm sure that comes apart and goes back together in a completely normal and easy way for me to figure out.

or better yet, you can just haul it into your new place without taking it apart. i'll just ask my boyfriend to carry my gigantic desk up the three flights of steps to my third floor apartment by himself. i'm sure he won't mind at all.

7. the friends who help you move definitely don't want pizza.

nah, they're totally fine with helping you move all freakin' day or all freakin' week and hauling all your shit everywhere and dealing with your unorganised ass and they don't want anything in return.

8. buy a lot of expensive decorations so that you have the coolest apartment in town.

nothing says chic like going into massive debt by buying a TV that you probably won't even use all that often and obscure wall art. only peasants eat off TV trays and don't get couches until they've saved up enough money. while they're busy saving money, you'll be living in style in debt.

so who's the real winner?

9. definitely don't use all of the amenities that the apartment complex provides.

it's not like you're paying for that in your rent or anything. your apartment has a pool? cool, i'm sure it's full of sharks. what about the gym? only weird people exercise. you're not one of those weird people.

10. don't tell anybody where you've moved to.

this is your chance to change your life and completely disappear. your parents, your coworkers, and your friends won't know where you've gone and you can finally have some freedom. your bank and the post office people will LOVE not being able to get a hold of you.

now, get out there, find an apartment that's too expensive for you, don't bother to pack up your shit until the day before, and start your new life under the crushing weight of capitalism and your grandparents wanting you to succeed!

this article was written by emily hollenberg, author of runwhenyourun.blogspot.com. she occasionally writes buzzfeed-like lists in hopes that buzzfeed will see her potential humour and hire her and pay her lots of money. she will not accept lawsuits or damages that result from adhering to this post.

wizarding politics.

all right, it's about time that i blogged about harry potter.

i have read each harry potter book 50 times. yes, you read that correctly. 50 times. each.

i don't want to get too into my extensive harry potter knowledge, but i know enough about harry potter to have an entire june go! challenge where each and every post is devoted to an aspect of harry potter.

today's aspect: politics.

when i was looking at grad school programmes where i live instead of abroad or across the country, i was also reading the prisoner of azkaban for the 51st time. and i began to form a super intense political theory about the ministry of magic based on that book and how it sets up the political structure for the rest of the books.

and then i was like, WHY CAN'T I GET A PHD IN HARRY POTTER?

like, all i wanna do is write academic papers about the wizarding world. that's pretty much it.

we are going to assume that the rest of the blog post deals with the BOOKS and not the MOVIES.

the third book is where we really get into the politics of the wizarding world and a deep glimpse into the ministry of magic. it's in the second book that we learn about azkaban when hagrid is sent there for being a suspect in opening the chamber of secrets again.

once we learn what azkaban is and that it's gaurded by dementors, this brings up a lot of questions, the first being...

you're going to send a dude there simply for being a suspect? without proof? because you think he did it once before fifty years ago? 

that doesn't seem quite right, does it?

let's just talk about azkaban for a hot second.

azkaban is a gigantic cement block in the middle of the north sea. you can only get to it by flying (that's only been mentioned ONCE in the sixth book) or swimming, and you'll probably die attempting that. it is guarded by dementors, who are like, the worst creatures to ever inhabit the earth. they suck the life and happiness out of you. some people are more greatly affected than others, but by the end of your stay in azkaban, you will have gone insane.

hagrid was there for maybe... a month. and he lost his will to live. that quickly.

as far as we know, this is the only prison.

THE ONLY PRISON.

so what that means is that anybody that commits a crime that's worthy of prison goes to this hell hole in the middle of the north sea that's almost entirely inescapable (until the dementors join voldemort).

pirated some music and got busted by the FBI?

AZKABAN FOR YOU, SUCKA.

got caught peddling stolen cauldrons?

AZKABAN FOR FOUR YEARS, HOPE YOU DON'T DIE.

harry doesn't know too much about the wizarding world, but he knows that when you break wizarding law, you go to azkaban. in the third book, when he accidentally blows up aunt marge, his first thought is that he's going to go to azkaban.

he's thirteen and this is his first thought. when he's fifteen and he uses a patronus charm, it's another thought that crosses his mind.

i've broken a few laws and going to prison is certainly not MY first thought.

any offence can get you into azkaban, no matter how small, if the ministry sees it as prison worthy, and they seem to find a lot of things to be prison worthy. stan shunpike gets thrown in there for merely talking about being a voldemort supporter. (he's not.)

now let's talk about the judicial system as a whole. here are some pretty weird things that they've done in the books.

1. threw hagrid in azkaban on a hunch.
2. completely stopped a murder investigation after finding a finger. that's it, close up shop, we're done here, life in azkaban for sirius.
3. not giving sirius a trial with hardly ANY investigation.
4. denied harry a witness in a full jury trial for underage magic. do you even need a full jury for that? 50 members of the wizengamot for underage magic?
5. threw a lot of innocent people into azkaban to make the government look like it had things under control.
6. USED DEMENTORS IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?!@$!!!
7. seemed complacent in weeding out voldemort's followers without proper trials, investigations, or meaningful testimony or witnesses.
8. became complacent in getting rid of muggle borns in the new voldemort regime.

8 is a bit of a fluke because we don't accurately know if the people working for the wizengamot were all voldemort supporters or not. but we do know clearly that umbridge is not a death eater, she is just a terrible, bigoted human being that believes in blood purity and is completely and utterly happy stripping the rights of people that she believes to be lesser than she is.

but 7 still stands. barty crouch senior did same major damage and stuck a lot of people in azkaban without a trial, including sirius black.

don't even get me started about sirius. that's an entirely different harry potter post.

wizards, especially the ones in the ministry, tend to think that they're much better off than muggles. (arthur weasley is one of the exceptions.) some of the more bigoted ones believe that they are superior to muggles. they have magic. they have flying cars. their memos can fly through the office. their ministry is large and reaching and encompasses all kinds of magic and magical beasts.

basically, the wizarding world prides itself on being forward thinking because what up, we have magic!

i've found that this is exactly the opposite of true. i think that the wizarding world is stuck in the past and refuses to move forward because they believe that they are innovative when they aren't.

one of the major themes in harry potter is the inability to change and to let history repeat itself. the entire premise is that a really evil man is coming back and wreaking destruction again. he's done it before, there were signs that it was happening, and the all-knowing government ignored it and it let it happen again. not because they didn't see it, but because they refused to change what they were doing.

muggles are FAR more advanced than wizards. muggles have found innovative ways to solve problems that wizards cannot solve. british muggles perform police investigations that wizards don't believe they need to perform because they have magic. muggles, for the most part, don't lock up the wrong people in prison. muggles have a superior government and judicial system, they don't kill each other nearly as often, they're happier, and they're always creating new ways to advance their society.

the wizarding world doesn't come out with new technology very often. their society is not advancing at all. there are lots of times where ron is like, "we can't do that" and harry is like "lol i can do that in the muggle world."

sure, in the muggle world he can't fly his broom, but he can operate a telephone. ron can't, he can only send letters or a talking patronus. ron doesn't even know what a dentist is.

like, who cleans ron's teeth? i'd really like to know.

the cool thing about harry potter is that it doesn't have to take place in a magical world. hogwarts could very easily be a british boarding school and the plot would still be revelant. a bunch of teenagers at their boarding school are witnessing the rise of a dictator and the collapse of their government and they work together to help set things right. there just happens to be magic involved.

even after everything gets cleaned up and we get to the epilogue, how much in the wizarding world has changed? are people still in azkaban? are dementors still around? is the government still useless at running investigations? are they still throwing everyone with minor to serious offences into the equivalent of guantanamo bay? does society actually evolve and move forward? do they get dentists?

these are the real questions that i want answers to.

along with: are there humans that work in azkaban? because i'm just like, picturing dementors cooking all the meals and cleaning the cells and stuff. and somehow i just can't imagine a dementor cooking.

forreal tho. dementors cooking.

l8r g8r lol!

maybe you've been reading my blog since it was first born in january of 2011 (i hope not because those posts are like, kind of scary) or maybe this is your first time reading my blog, but you've probably noticed one thing.

i don't capitalise anything.

i also spell things the british way and i'm not british in the slightest, but that's beside the point.

i don't like to capitalise things.

if i am on the internet, and i am on the internet quite frequently, i do not use capitalisation.

i've gotten a lot of flack for this from my uncle specifically, who's a principal. sometimes my dad will mention it. so the question is, why don't i capitalise anything on the internet, especially my blog posts?

two reasons.

1. it's an ode to e. e. cummings, one of my favourite poets. i haven't read him in a long time but he really shaped my formative years as an english major.
2. i like to write on the internet, specifically my blogs, like i speak.

my mom finds one major problem with this, and that's the language that i use my blog. two days ago she was like, "really emily, you don't use language like that at home." (language here means bad words. like shit.)

well, no. i don't.

but i try to write the way that i talk.

like, this is hella informal. i would never write like this in an academic paper. if you wanna know how eloquently i can write, here's an excerpt from an english paper that i wrote in college:

"Strictly from a narrative perspective, the monster Humber is characterized by a lowered writing style, strayed thoughts, and obsessions. The narrative style shies away from the usual long, winding, adjective-ridden sentences that the artist often employs, and settles for shorter, more succinct diction and syntax."

that's very different from me being like, "charlie cox makes me so thirsty like HOT DAMN, YA FEEL ME?" 

i have a laid back blog, which is surprising, because i am not a laid back person. i am a very uptight and anxious person. 

i'm pretty laid back on all forms on social media (and i'm on a lot of them), except when somebody posts some shit on facebook and i decide to get involved. then i turn into "emily with a bachelor's degree in english and rhetoric" and i will dismantle your entire argument succinctly and with as much flair as i can muster without using too many big words because i am condescending.

i don't do that that often. most of the time my facebook comments are like, GURRRRL YOU LOOKIN' GOOD.

the reason i'm blogging about how i blog and talk on the internet is because i had to read this hella boring chapter about netspeak, or speaking on the internet, for my linguistics class today. i did actually read the whole thing, i even printed it off and highlighted it, but i forgot that we had questions to answer, so guess who got a zero on that assignment?

MEEEEE.

oh well, i'm still getting an A in the class, so like, whatever.

this article was written in 2001 so it was hilarious. like, emojis weren't a thing. facebook wasn't a thing. so really it was just talking about emailing and how people use smiley faces like :) and :( and even *8-B, which was my favourite when i was in eighth grade, because buck-toothed nerd with an idea, right?!

in class today we talked about the differences between written speech and spoken speech. i thought about my blog and how i tried to write the way that i talk. but as you can tell from this very paragraph, i probably don't talk exactly like this. 

this is because written language and spoken language are fundamentally different and english is primarily a written language. we value written language more than spoken language, which is why i'm able to write a twenty page paper on a single topic and sound like i actually know what i'm talking about.

most of the time i do. but sometimes i write papers drunk. and so it goes.

netspeak is a combination of written and spoken language. it's informal to a degree. i think it's safe to say that i'm hella informal. it meets the needs of whoever you're talking to online.

i'm talking to you. i don't know who you are, but i have a target audience, and that audience is primarily my facebook friends. most of them are my age. so basically, if you're in your early twenties, congrats, you're my target audience. i also know that my parents and sometimes my grandpa reads this, and who knows who else finds it? i have ways to check, and i have a small following in england, russia, and india.

if you're from there, hey. welcome to the midwest of america. it's warm and sunny currently and gay people can get fired for getting married. also, how did you find my blog?

i talk to people online in different ways, and i text people in different ways. when i text adam, i don't have to use as much context because he knows me so well. when i text my mother, i use lots of emojis because she likes them and they make her smile. when i text my dad, i text him full sentences with emojis. when i text hannah, it's most just like GURRRRL YOU SO SMOKIN' I LOVE YOU LET'S GET MARGARITAS and she's like, YAAAS GURRRL YAAAAAS and that's about how that goes.

that's very different than how i would email a professor.

i'm sure that you don't talk to your parents the way that you talk to your friends.

i get home from work and say, "hey mom!"

i see hannah's boyfriend and i yell "WHAT UP BRO HOW YA DOIN' KID" and i probably wouldn't yell that at my professor. or either of my bosses.

when i'm with adam, my swearing goes up about ninety percent. i say things that would make my mother cry. do i speak like that around her? of course not.

and does ANYBODY speak like they write college papers? hell no. super important literary critics and writers of all those boring science papers that you read? do they actually speak like that?

no. academic writing in the spoken world is worthless. i wrote a twenty page academic paper and i can sum it for you just like this: paula can't go through a door. osman can. 

that was literally my twenty page paper and i can say it in eight words and you understand exactly what i mean, that paula cannot go through doors and that osman can.

when we speak, we take social cues. we hear each word individually as it's being spoken, and since our brains are like, super intense and amazing, they process each word individually so quickly that you don't even think about it until you've understood an entire sentence. we look at facial expressions and body posture and tone and all kinds of shit.

because of that, we don't need a lot of context.

in writing, there's a disconnect with your audience. like i said, you're reading this, and i don't know who you are. i don't know what you're thinking while you're reading this because i cannot see you, and you cannot see me. (i'm lounging in an armchair in my pajamas, by the way.) i have to write this in a way that you'll understand without you being able to see me or ask me questions or ask me to repeat myself. 

and i still try to do it as informally and as naturally as possible.

blogging like this is difficult, kids, but i love it. and i do it for you as much as i do it for me.

we've been told a myth by old people. we've been told that being on our phones and texting and blogging is making us stupid. we've been told that kids today have melting brains and that they bring text speak into their homework and academic work.

THIS IS A LIE.

kids are smart enough to understand when and when not to employ texting lingo and informal speech. i blogged all through college, tweeted all through college, tumbled all through college, facebooked all through college, and did i ever say something like "lol" in a paper? nah.

people have done research on this. kids don't do it. it doesn't happen. it's a lie. maybe one kid will do it accidentally, but it's certainly not a trend.

also people that text and are on social media are more literate and score better on literacy exams. why? because texting is writing and reading. also kids that text more than their peers are better spellers.

we may not be reading novels like les miserables, but we're reading and it's helping us out.

so don't listen to those old people that complain about you being on your phone all the time. i'm on my phone all the time because i'm addicted to twitter (that's an entirely different post) and i'm talking to my boyfriend who lives 200 miles away and who i only get to see once every two months.

old people also think that we're like, totally tearing down the english language brick by brick by using text speech. researchers have concluded, over ten years of texting data, that only 10% of words in texts are actually abbreviated. like, lol and wtf and omg. 10%.

i dunno, man. that's not much, lol!

i only use phrases like lol to make a point when i'm writing. when i say lol it's not because i'm laughing out loud, it's my way of saying "AND THAT WAS REALLY NOT FUNNY BUT I'M SMILING REALLY PAINFULLY LOL!" 

"LOL YOU KIDS TODAY ARE RUINING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE GET OFF YOUR PHONES!"

yeah, i'm calling you out on your bullshit.

i write how i want to write on the internet. i am smart enough to understand not to put text abbreviations in my research papers, and so are you.

so write you how wanna write and speak how you wanna speak, unless you're writing an academic paper, then you should probably write academically.

i'll leave you with moby dick in emojis.

this book exists, by the way. the entire thing. in emojis. 

your back is an investment.

for the past eight or nine years, i've felt like i've been trapped in a 60 year old woman's body.

not that that has really stopped me from doing stupid stuff like breaking bones, hoisting kids up rock walls with broken hands, or thinking that i can do things that i can't.

to be honest, i don't know which pain started first, the lower back pain or the upper back pain. i used to characterise it like this:

my upper back hurt more often, hurt more, but didn't hurt as long.

my lower back hurt not as often, didn't hurt as much, but hurt for ages when it did.

since i was an athlete, i got some tests done. x-rays, bone scans, all the jazz.

bone scan was clean. so was the x-ray. so we moved on.

my back pain got worse. and like a smart person, i ignored it. i knew my limits when it came to stuff outside of swimming. i stopped mowing the lawn, i stopped lifting heavy stuff that i should be able to lift, and i didn't participate in human pyramids.

it wasn't until that i was a freshman in college and swimming at the collegiate level that the pain got unbearably bad.

like, keep me up at night crying having problems walking and breathing bad.

back to x-rays i went. nothing. back to bone scans i went. nothing.

my swim coach told me to get it fixed over the summer, so i went to an orthopaedist like "FIX THIS PLEASE IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME?"

i got an MRI and they didn't tell me anything about it, just that i had a bulging disc in my upper back.

a disc is like a cushion between your vertebrae. a bulge meant that my vertebrae were squeezing it and squishing it and that some of it was sticking out where it wasn't supposed to. like if you squeeze an oreo and some of the frosting comes out of the sides.

that didn't explain my lower back pain, so they gave me a back brace, sent me to physical therapy, gave me six spinal injections that hurt like a bitch, and told me to have a nice life.

the brace made my lower back worse, the spinal injections didn't work and they made me cry, and i still had back pain.

i went to my chiropractor for a while. she attempted to adjust my upper back and loosen it up. her diagnosis was that i had no lower back stability so that my upper back was carrying all the weight.

after eleven weeks of physical therapy and going to my chiropractor, i still failed every lower back stability test that they gave me.

so i went back to school, avoided moving heavy objects and being a part of human pyramids.

that's me avoiding being in human pyramids.

then, this past winter, i started having lower back pain that shot straight down into my leg, down into my foot, and made my leg go numb sometimes.

this was new and alarming.

i just sang NEWWWW AND A BIT ALARMINGGGG in my head from beauty and the beast, by the way.

i went to webmd and quickly learned that i had spinal cancer.

... i do not actually have spinal cancer.

so i looked up some chiropractors that i could help me out. i hadn't had too much success with my old one and her kids had left my swim team for our enemy swim team, so i was bitter.

i ended up calling dr. busch and scheduling an appointment.

at the time, i didn't know that dr. busch was all over the radio and all over TV with his AMAZING AND LIFE CHANGING DRS PROTOCOL TRADE MARK.

so i went in for an appointment and they were like, "did you hear about us through a radio advertisement?" and i was like "lol no you were the first link i found and old people seemed to like it here, so i'll fit right in."

boy, do old people like it there. i am the only person there under the age of seventy-five.

dr. busch is like gilderoy lockhart but smart. he came in, shook my hand, took a bunch of x-rays, told me that i had degenerative disc disease in my lower back and that i had a horrible horrible disc bulge down there that was causing me problems, and he'd go over my VERY OWN SUPER SPECIAL TREATMENT PLAN TRADE MARK. NEVER FEAR, DR. BUSCH TRADEMARK IS HERE.

then he gave me a signed copy of his book and i just about threw up in my mouth.

(i also got a complementary t-shirt. it's actually pretty comfy.)

and then the bill came and it was four thousand dollars.

did i want to spend that much money for an asshole to fix my back pain?

my parents and i decided to go for it, with me paying a thousand of it in installments every month. because i'd had eight years of failed attempts and this was probably actually going to work.

at least that's what it said on TV! and the TV can never lie, right?!

so we paid for it.

it was around this time that dr. busch started grabbing my shoulder affectionately and calling me kiddo.

uh, no. don't do that, bro. you have kids older than me.

according to him, i was the PERFECT candidate for his DRS protocol, the only thing like it in the country, and that i would be a huge success because i was young and vital and all that crap. at this point, now that i'm done with the treatment, i don't even know what the DRS thing stands for.

when i went in for treatment, after they gave me a bunch of hippie pills to take, they had me lay down on a table with a pillow under my upper back because at that point, i couldn't lie down flat. they put me in a harness around my hips which connected to an angsty machine in front of me.

then they put ANOTHER harness over my shoulders and tightened it so much that it was hard to breathe.

the harness around my hips was attached to the angsty machine. they set the angle of my harness running to the machine, and then they pressed a bunch of buttons, stuck a cannula in my nose, shut off the lights, and let me play on my phone for twenty-five minutes while the machine groaned and made angry noises at me.

the DRS machine basically does this: while i'm strapped to the table and pretty much unable to move, it physically hones in on my two problem vertebrae and moves them to where they're supposed to go, making my disc get all big and happy and squishy again and letting it breathe and go back to its original position before my vertebrae got angry and smooshed it.

cool, right?

i did it four days a week for like, four weeks. then three days a week, then two, then once a week, then once every two weeks, and now i'm done.

i'd either nap while i was hooked up, read through @mugglehustle on twitter, or text the man friend. then when i was done i got some electrical stimulation on my back and sat around with a bunch of old ladies who told me that i was too young for this kind of thing.

when i say old, i mean old. miss dorothy and miss grace are both 93. they shuffle in every day, talk about their dead husbands, and how one of them still goes out to karaoke every tuesday with her son.

when i'm 93 i hope that i'm staying out til midnight at karaoke bar. i mean, HOT DAMN.

the treatment wasn't that bad. i eventually started getting adjustments from dr. busch personally and not just getting the DRS treatments with his entirely female staff. so he'd come in and say, "good morning, kiddo!" and grab my shoulder and i spent like, a month trying to find a way to tell him that like, i was twenty-three (at the time) and working two jobs to support myself.

so finally with about a month left of treatment he asked me how i was and i said very pointedly, "well i'm very busy working two jobs to support myself as a young woman with a liberal arts degree" and that seemed to alert him that i wasn't like, twelve.

he still kept calling me kiddo, though.

EUW.

now that i'm all done with the treatment, i have exciting news, and that is that...

MY BACK DOESN'T HURT!

i mean, it does sometimes. it did when i vacuumed today.

BUT MOST OF THE TIME IT DOESN'T HURT!

so... four thousand dollars well spent?

now my dad is treating my back like this insane investment. when i told him about the insane inflatable 5K he was like, "your back is worth $4,000! do not ruin it! do not total it!"

i mean, i have a pretty good idea of what i can and can't do with my body.

and since i did this weird treatment with a creepy dude that gave me a free book that i'm never going to read, i can do a lot more than i used to.

now, if i can stop breaking bones and spraining things and tearing ligaments, maybe i'll be in the body of a twenty-four year old and not a forty year old.

that's the dream.

"do you dream of freedom from your back pain? look no further than the DRS treatment, which is very costly, doesn't accept insurance, and is run by a creepy middle-aged man that dyes his hair and will probably call you kiddo!"

the charlie cox post.

it's always hard to blog on sundays.

sundays are lazy, time gets away from me, nothing exciting happens, i never have any strokes of inspiration, and nobody ever reads my posts on sundays.

i mean, you're reading this. thanks, i really appreciate it.

i went to my grandparents' house today and i asked my dad, as he is my most faithful reader, what i should blog about. he shrugged and it was then i decided it was time for the charlie cox post.

like, i don't even know where to begin with this. "the charlie cox post" has been this vague idea just floating around in my brain. i didn't have any true format of what i wanted for when i blogged about him and his glorious ass. like, was it going to be a buzzfeed thing where i listed stuff about him that was amazing followed by a picture and an inappropriate quote?

that sounded great until i found a buzzfeed post along the lines of 16 times that your thirst for matt murdock was too real.

which i read at work and let me tell you i had to duck underneath my desk because i was so overcome.

IF YOU'RE INTERESTED, HERE IT IS. 

i'm making this post up as i go. here's a picture of charlie cox so that you get a sense of where this is coming from.

i swear to god that smile could cure most illnesses.

so i was first introduced to charlie cox in the movie stardust, WHICH EVERYONE SHOULD SEE BY THE WAY, on an airplane in like, 2008. it didn't have any sound because i was watching it on someone else's screen and i was like, "this looks like a really rad movie" so we rented it.

netflix's synopsis of it is perfect.

"a love-struck lad goes to another realm to capture a fallen star. he can handle a witch, but can he handle a cross dressing pirate?"

the cross dressing pirate is robert deniro, by the way.

it's got witches and kings and queens and really great humour including the best dick joke of all time besides the one in titanic, a freakin' unicorn, and robert deniro as a cross dressing pirate.

like, what more could you want?

seriously, it's in my top five favourite movies, it's on netflix, GET GOING.

FORREAL THO.

(i watch it about once a week, honestly. i watched it this morning.)

when i started watching daredevil, i kind of recognised the main character, but it was difficult for a number of reasons.

1. when he's daredevil, he's wearing a mask over his face and all you can see are his lips. his, sweet, sultry lips.

those lips tho

2. when he's a lawyer, he's wearing sunglasses.
3. in stardust he was 24 during filming and now he's 32 and all grown and super fit and buff and has some real nice beard scruffle.

so he's beating some dudes up from the russian mob and takin' names and then it cuts to the theme and it says STARRING CHARLIE COX and i was like, THAT'S THAT BRITISH GUY FROM STARDUST

and sure enough, there he was in all his british glory.

he's just really hot.

he's also like, adorable?

how does he do both? i am confused?

i've had similar fads with other british actors. my most outstanding was andrew garfield, which spanned like, three years. if i hadn't rediscovered charlie cox, we'd still be going strong.

i watched andrew garfield's ENTIRE filmography. on my whiteboard in my dorm room, i put him as number one on my to-do list. (eheheh.)

i've seen charlie cox in three things. stardust, daredevil, and the first episode of downton abbey.

i do not recall much of that episode, nor him being in it. i know that he kisses a man. i feel like i would remember that and be like, YAAAAS GAAAAY because much of my life is like, YAAAAS GAAAAAY.

he's in two seasons of boardwalk empire. i've seen a few clips, particularly the one where he violently murders this dude in a bathroom, spits on his body and says, "fuckin' piece of shite" in an irish accent and i was like, fanning myself.

now i'm on a quest to watch boardwalk empire.

"really, emily? just because charlie cox is in it?"

hell yeah. i suffered through THREE terrible andrew garfield movies for him, i can watch two seasons of a critically acclaimed HBO show for my new british fav.

i share my love of charlie cox with my friend laura. when we get sad, we send each other pictures of charlie cox. when she had a rough night, i sent her a picture of him looking up into a beautiful godly light holding a latte and i said "charlie cox is thinkin' bout u".

when i found the incredible buzzfeed article, she said "HOLY MOTHER OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN" and we thirsted for a good hour.

there are many things to like about charlie cox.

1. he's hot as shit.
2. he's also adorable as shit.
3. he's a really nice down to earth person in real life? and he like dogs?
4. he takes his acting very seriously. like, he's been acknowledged by the american foundation for the blind and visually impaired on how seriously he took his role as a blind person on daredevil and how well he did it.
5. his smile could probably cure cancer.
6. he laughs like a nerd.
7. HIS ASS IS MAGNIFICENT.

number seven is a proven fact. his co-star, elden henson, who plays his best friend foggy on daredevil, has been quoted in multiple interviews as saying that dat ass does not quit.

he also brought ice cream for the cast and crew on set because he's nice.

like, WHAT A PERFECT HUMAN.

me: oh my god
adam: are you thirsting after charlie cox again
me: yeahhhh
adam: should i leave you alone
me: probably
adam: are you gonna leave me for charlie cox
me: i mean, if he showed up at my house and asked me to marry him that would definitely be a thing.

adam and i talk about having celebrity outs. you know, if ever a famous person came to you like, "i love you let's have sex".

i was like, "i get two, a man and a woman because i'm bisexual" and he was like, "well then i get two" and i was like, "you're straight?" and he was like, "i would do major things to hugh jackman" and i was like, "okey dokey then".

so charlie cox is my current male celebrity out.

laura and i talk a lot about things that we would do to charlie cox if given the opportunity. i'll let you contemplate that.

like, honestly, i just kind of want him to give me cuddles, play with my hair, talk to me in his british accent, read to me in his husky american accent, and then give me kisses on the forehead.

yeah, that sounds about right to me.

i don't know, man. i'm just real thirsty for charlie cox. and i think we'll leave it at that.

and some pictures.

CONGRATULATIONS ON BEING A PERFECT HUMAN SPECIMEN.

sing! sing! sing!

i have enjoyed singing pretty much my whole life.

nobody ever told me that i was good at it. i did band in middle school and high school. i started playing the piano when i was five and i moved on to trumpet and cello. but i still enjoyed singing.

it wasn't until i was in college that i decided that i could be a choir kid. so i joined chorale, the medium kid choir, halfway through my junior year and i enjoyed it immensely.

i auditioned for the alma choir, the big kid choir, and didn't make it in.

even though this was over two years ago, i'm still bitter about it because that group travels around the country and around the world and gets to wear cool tartan vests.

did i mention they travel around the world?

it's evident that i'm still bitter because i STILL have dreams where i've made it into that choir and i wake up upset and full of longing. like the dream i had last night.

like, honestly, i need to get over myself.

when i auditioned for chorale, doc, our choir director, made me sing a scale until my voice cracked. then he sighed and said, "well, you're an alto."

that was something that i was already painfully aware of.

in chorale my senior year, i stood next to my apartment-mate lindsey. we were both first altos, which means that we were the higher of the two alto groups. this suited us just fine but sometimes, sometimes, we had to sing up to a D, and that was difficult, man!

we sang a song called "ride on king jesus" and let me tell you, it got lowwww. like, drop it to the floor low.

it became an inside joke. we'd be sitting in our living room doing homework with emily, our first soprano apartment-mate that was in the big kid choir, and sing, "NO MANNNN CAN A-HIN-DUH MEEEE" as low as we possibly could.

then we'd bitch about not being able to sing disney songs.

frozen came out my senior year and we were consequently obsessed with it, as was usual. (frozen is actually really problematic in a lot of ways but that's a different post.)

me: i just want to sing a disney song? and not like, go into a terrible head voice?
lindsey: I KNOW, LET IT GO IS THE WORST I CAN'T REACH ANYTHING
emily: what are you talking about?
me: says the operatic first soprano with classical voice training.
emily: wanna take a buzzfeed quiz to see what type of food you are?

i was a burrito, by the way. i'm proud of that.

constantly singing in an alto range means that your voice will stay down there. while singing in chorale, i hardly ever had to go higher than a D. it also meant that i got to actually read music, which was fun, because that was something i'd been doing since i was four and i didn't like having to rely on the melody. i loved almost everything we sang, from the circle of life at homecoming to mozart's requiem mass for masterworks.

that's us singing the circle of life. i'm in the front row, can you find me?

choir was also how i met adam, so that's cool.

doc is always talking about choir couples. when we have the alumni concert at homecoming, which i unfortunately did not get to sing in this year, he always asks, "who fell in love on choir tour?!" and there's always a couple that's been married for ten years like, "we fell in love on choir tour!"

adam was standing behind me and he yelled, "what if you fell in love at festival of carols?!"

bless my man friend. bless him.

when adam was in scotland, he and doc were drinking at a pub and adam had to remind him that he was a in choir relationship. but doc forgot because i wasn't in the big kid choir, i was in the medium kid choir.

and such is life.

after i graduated and i sang loch lomond in my cap and gown and cried a little bit, i knew that i wanted to keep singing.

my dad is a singer. he has been singing his whole life. he did choir and show choir. he sang in college. he has a beautiful tenor voice that is slowly working its way down to baritone as he ages. (sorry about the aging thing, dad. but you're like... kind of old now.) he has sung in the church choir since before i was born.

and i thought, well why couldn't i be in church choir?

so i showed up at church and went to our choir director, melody (ISN'T THAT AMAZING?!) and said, "hey, i'm here to sing! i'm an alto."

and she looks at me and she goes, "oh my god NO we have too many altos. you're a soprano."

... okay.

choir practice for my church is on wednesdays at seven. unless i'm coming from work, my dad and i carpool. sometimes my mom accompanies the choir and the three of us all go together. we don't stand, we sit. there are like... twelve of us. total.

and i'm the only one under the age of thirty-five.

like, forreal. my dad is almost 55 and he's one of the younger ones.

there are three sopranos: me, leslie, and karla. we sit in the first pew. of the three of us, karla is the only real soprano. leslie used to be an alto like me, but we needed her to be a soprano so that's what happened.

most of the time we laugh and screech and let karla do most of the work when it gets really high.

have a descant? give it to karla. anything above an F? leslie will drop out and i'll just pray that i don't strain a vocal cord.

we sang a beautiful version of "here i am, lord" and it was hella high. i was practicing at home with my mom and my brother was like, "OH MY GOD CAN YOU STOP SCREECHING" and i was like, "I WILL HAVE YOU KNOW THAT THIS IS LIKE, FIVE NOTES OUT OF MY NORMAL RANGE".

i had to sing it the day after i coached a seven hour swim meet. i drank about eight cups of lemon tea with honey before that song and it was still terrible.

but after singing soprano for nine months, i've felt my range shift. which has been pretty cool.

the problem is, it's not expanding. it's just shifting.

i can't sing low anymore.

if lindsey and i were to get together and sing ride on king jesus, i wouldn't be able to hit the low notes below the staff.

i'm very happy that i can now sing a high F almost comfortably. but i miss my super low G's and my manly alto range.

since switching from alto to soprano and classifying myself as a mezzo soprano with my new range, i've come to know something that i didn't know existed: choir humour. 

it shows up on my tumblr dash occasionally and this is how i know i'm following quality blogs.

how many altos does it take to change a lightbulb?

none, none of them can get that high.

AHAHAHAHA.

how do you know when a soprano is at your door?

she can't find the key and doesn't know where to come in.

AYYOOOOOO

i've also come to notice part erasure, which adam finds to be a rather sensitive subject. when i met him he was a tenor, but since then, he has become a baritone and sometimes a bass. honestly, he just kind of moves wherever doc wants him.

when he was a tenor, i used to tell people that he spoke like morgan freeman but sang like mariah carey. adam has a very deep speaking voice.

most of the time adam's a baritone. most of the time i'm a soprano but i'm really a mezzo soprano.

according to tumblr logic, there are four genders: soprano, alto, tenor and bass.

someone commented: BARITONE ERASURE IS A VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM AND NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

there's a whole thing about which choir parts go best with each other, like altos dating basses and basses staring at altos asses.

this is true. you can feel the basses standing behind you staring at your ass. you can feel it. and they talk about it. like, i know which asses were subject to the most scrutiny during four hour festival of carols rehearsals. because they would talk about it.

"ayyyy did you see the way that so-and-so's ass was moving when they did their step and clap during the virgin mary had a baby boy? DAMN GIRL."

i got my pay back when the men had a song and they stood in front of us. i took a picture of a bunch of the basses butts and put it on instagram and labelled it "CHOIR BOY BUTTS HEART HEART HEART".

i brought up this pairing with adam and i said, "what does that make us? the baritone and the mezzo?"

"invisible," he said sadly. "it makes us invisible."

my cousin matt, a true choir nerd and band geek, told me that it made us "UNSTOPPABLE AND AWESOME."

so here we are. the invisible unstoppable choir couple.

it was definitely a transition going from a fifty person semi-professional choir to a twelve person volunteer church choir. when we sang an easter song in latin, i got really excited and yelled "THIS IS JUST LIKE COLLEGE!" and then i consequently had to help everyone pronounce the latin.

choir members: how do you know this?
me: when you practice mozart's requiem for four months you kinda learn it.

i'm so glad i'm in church choir.

i wish that i had joined choir my freshman year and started in glee club. then i would've gone to chorale, and then by my junior year i would've been in alma choir. i could've spent two years doing that. (and i would've gotten my complementary alma choir fleece, along with the chance to travel around the country and around the world.)

but alas, i didn't get that chance.

but i did get a chance to sing. to work on my vocal technique. to expand my range.

i got a chance to sing and it was awesome, and i'm still getting that chance and i'm blessed. i love singing and whether or not i'm good at it isn't the point.

the point is that it's fun.

SING, YOU GLORIOUS CREATURE. SING.