i don't think that question was rhetorical.

okay, so picture this.

i'm sitting in my bedroom with a gigantic bow in my hair that i got in kindergarten. my room is dark because i think that lights waste energy half the time. i'm sitting in my circle pod chair that's covered in pillows and blankets. my feet are crossed, and my god, i'm still listening to kanye west rapping power out of my ihome.

hi, you're looking at me right now.

tomorrow my parents are leaving me to go on vacation (i'm sure there will be a blog about this later this week) and i was hanging out with them when i got back from one of the greatest grad parties ever, minus those terrible little bloodsuckers that really like my perfume. (mosquitoes, not boys, what kind of girl do you think i am?!)

i like to hang out with my parents. i love them. they're cool. they're extremely intelligent. my dad is hilarious. my mom is short. (i'm obviously not.) they're fantastic people.

so we're hanging out in the kitchen and my mom yawns and says something along the lines of, "oh dear, it's getting late, we have a flight to catch in the morning, it's bed time."

my mind says, "oh fuck i haven't blogged yet today. fuck fuck fuck." but i'm nice and keep my swear words in my head like a good little girl. i try not to have a foul mouth. a foul mind is bad enough.

so i say, "oh shoot, i have to blog today! what should i blog about?"

i'm greeted by complete silence. i've expected this. it's pretty much a rhetorical question. my parents, even though they're cool enough to have facebooks, don't truly understand blogging, but heck, i don't either, do i?

so then i tell them that i had a dream earlier in the week that involved a few kids that i coach telling me what i should blog about. my roommate, honest to god, interprets dreams, and i'm pretty sure that she would interpret my dream the way that i did this one: i'm stressed about my job and about this whole blog every day in june go! challenge. my mother then asks me why on earth i'd be stressed about blogging.

and then i said, well, i have READERS!

that's YOU!

even though i don't particularly care, i check my stats. it's nice to know that someone out there is reading whatever you feel like posting on the internet, not just the eighteen people who are crazy enough to follow me on twitter. (shameless ploy, @emilyyxh, check it.) so anyway, i check my stats. and then i realized something.

there are a decent amount of you. yes, you. readers. and you're not all from the united states like me.

no, you're from cool places like denmark. and australia. and canada. i've even had someone read my blog who's from russia.

at this point, i'm really hoping you all can read english, because otherwise viewing my blog is pointless. sure, i've said a few phrases in spanish and had that cool zulu thing going on in my lion king blog, but other than that, i do that english thang.

speaking of english and other languages, i got really excited when i realized that when i become fluent, i can speak spanish at home to my children. as my father says, children adapt, and even if my husband doesn't speak spanish, they'll pick up on it. they can speak spanish with mommy and english with daddy. and when they're old enough, they'll realize which langauge i use when i'm really pissed. it will probably be spanish.

but i digress. i have way more viewers than i thought was possible. and then my father asked me why someone would actually want to read my blog.

that sounds like a mean thing to ask, but it's a curious, harmless question. i don't think my parents have the ability to be mean, so i know that it was a curious question. and then i realized i have no answer.

why do you, reader, read my blogs?

i'm not good at blogging. i'm a twenty year old girl who lives in the midwest who blogs about crazy things like the lion king, serial killers, learning to drive a stick shift, maybe one day hoping to be a spanish teacher, and about the craziness of my life. i'll repeat the first part of this paragraph (can you call it a paragraph if it's not five sentences like they taught you in middle school?) and say, i'm not good at blogging.

maybe i am and i'm not giving myself credit. i tend to do that. i really believe i suck at everything until enough people tell me i'm good at it. and then i only half believe them. this doesn't mean i'm not a confident person, because i am very confident in myself and my abilities. but i honestly believe i'm not just good at blogging.

so thanks for reading, whatever country you're from. the more you read, the more stressed i become about writing something that i feel is decent, and the more likely it is to pop into my dreams. which is fine. because i'm still having those back pain drug induced psychdelic ones and i'm losing my precious z's to them.

to answer the question that i asked my parents earlier, that question my parents thought was perhaps rhetorical, my mother said, "you could blog about how you cooked a lasagna today and it was the first time you've ever really cooked in your life."

keep your eyes out for that blog. i'm sure it'll come before this challenge is over.

i am taller than kanye west.

i have this annoying habit of listening to a song over and over again.

see, i know what you're thinking. you're thinking that it's not really that bad of a problem, listening to a song a few times in a row. but then you look at my top 25 played on itunes and you say, oh.

my most played song, for which my entire blog is named, has over 750 plays. this is just on my ipod. never mind the hours and hours i've had it on repeat in my car.

currently, i am listening to "power" by kanye west. that has been going nonstop in my room since tuesday.

see, this is not even that terrible. my record for longest time listening to a song goes to "such great heights" by the postal service with a ground shattering three weeks of constant listening. that's three weeks. that's five hundred and four hours, which equates to thirty thousand two hundred and forty minutes. this equates to over seven thousand and thirty-two listens to this song. that's not even the times i've listened to it after my three week "such great heights" kick. or all the times randomly in my car.

yes, it's a problem.

while "power" is rolling through my ipod over and over, i haven't had a chance to plug my ipod into itunes to see if it has wormed its way into the allstar top twenty-five most played. i'm pretty darn sure it has by now. number twenty five (miss friday by nico stai) is holding on with a puny one hundred and thirty-five plays. i think kanye west has a nice shot of squeezing his way into listening glory.

i've been trying to figure out exactly why i end up listening to songs over and over for such ridiculous amounts of time. part of it is that delicious OCD cereal i ate that one morning in middle school. about halfway through my intense listening, i simply cannot listen to another song. i have an intense fear that something absolutely terrible will happen if i listen to another song, and i cannot bring myself to listen to anything else. it's an almost paralyzing fear, and the more i tell myself that it is an absolutely pointless fear, the more overwhelming it becomes.

this fear never lasts very long. a day at most. i enjoy ignoring it. we all enjoy ignoring things like that.

i need a song to fill me up completely. i don't think this will ever truly happen with a song, but i will listen to it until i feel like it's filled me up enough. i'm still figuring out exactly what this means, what it constitutes. it's a feeling. a beautiful, glorious feeling.

i don't know how to achieve this feeling. before i can fully get to this point in my musical experience, sheer song exhaustion takes over. my favorite song, "swim until you can't see land" by frightened rabbit, hasn't gotten to that point yet, even after thousands of listens. i can listen to it without hearing it.

but every once in a while, when that song plays, i get chills down my spine just like i did the very first time that i heard it.

"such great heights" has been worn out. it's been exhausted. i honestly don't think i can stand to listen to it anymore. maybe someday i'll able to go back to it.

i worry that this will happen with "swim until you can't see land." i don't want this to happen to it. i'm terrified that this will happen to it. i will find myself worn out, run down, and when that comes pops up when my ipod is on shuffle during a dorm cleaning frenzy, i'll sigh, roll my eyes, and skip it.

i want to feel that shiver of excitement every time it comes on like i do now. like i have for the past seven months. that shiver that makes me stop my cleaning frenzy, drop my duster, close my eyes, and breathe.

i think that feeling is me being full to the brim with music.

i doubt i'll get this with "power." i work out to "power." and sure as hell can clean my room to "power." my room has never been this clean in my life. thank you, kanye. he didn't interrupt my life like he interrupted taylor swift. i really thought she was going to cry.

i think if he interrupted me, i'd hit him. hard. i'm taller than he is.

i'm really hoping i'll get this filled to the brim feeling more often.

but as kanye west says in power, "until then, fuck that, the world's ours."

for those of you who are interested, this is "swim until you can't see land." enjoy my favorite song. :)

well there went my childhood.

warning: this will ruin fairy tales for you. you can turn back now. i wouldn't blame you in the slightest.

as an education major with my main focus being literature, i'm required to take introduction to literary analysis. this class changes every year. it keeps the same course number, but every year, it's a different type of literature.

the one that i landed myself into was "revising fairy tales."

i had this super happy idea that we'd be writing fairy tales and reading them. that sounded absolutely exciting to me. but you know enough about my life by now that when i get a super terrific happy thought in my brain, what actually happens is never super terrific and happy.

my professor, dr. v (von wallmenich, say that five times fast) was just about the coolest professor i'd ever encountered. the first day, she said, "if you ever get lost while we're reading, you just raise your hand and shout "DR. V, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN THIS TEXT?"" i thought i wouldn't do that.

oh, but i did. it felt pretty damn awesome, too.

she also said that to get through english, you need to be able to bullshit. "pull wisdom out of your ass and you will be golden. it's an art that you're going to college to perfect."

the first book we plowed through was transformations by anne sexton. it was her take on grimm's traditional fairy tales in poem form. now, if you don't know anything about anne sexton, you should know this: she's more perverted than that fifteen year old who never leaves you alone. she was sexually abused by her father. she was bipolar and writing poetry kept her stable. when poetry stopped being stabilizing, she took her own life.

grimm's fairy tales just got grimmer.

i absolutely loved her poetry and her style. but in anne sexton's world, sleeping beauty was sexually assaulted by her father while she was asleep. and rapunzel... well, mother gothel sexually abused her too. cinderella's happy ending was too much of a happy ending and she was forever trapped by it, collecting dust like a figurine.

her poems were graphic through her fantastic use of metaphor. i appreciate her poetry for everything that it is; raw metaphor. i enjoyed reading her take on the grimm fairy tales. i loved how each fairy tale had a subtle message of her childhood. each poem opened with a narration in first person in which she described herself as a witch. she was not the princess. and she didn't need to be. she just needed to write.

from there we moved to the wolf trilogy by angela carter. these were creepy. they were very dark. the symbolism was driven by metaphoric rape and menstration. that's all red riding hood is. she's an innocent menstrating girl who gets devoured by male desire. we read at least five different versions of little red riding hood, and in every single one, she was an innocent but independent woman (angela carter's wise child concept) who was eventually consumed and raped by a male's desire. no happy endings for her. i won't even get into wolf alice. you can read that yourself and make of it what you want.

then we got into lolita.

you can judge me all you want, but i love lolita. i am in love with a story about a man in love with his stepdaughter. lolita is one of the most intriguing and most eloquent pieces of literature ever written. i could spend my life being happy as a lolita scholar and study nothing but lolita the rest of my life. but as we got into it, i kept thinking: how the hell is this a fairy tale?

dr. v kept calling lolita "humbert's wayward fairy tale" and it took me a while to understand exactly what she meant. humbert's account of of his life lusting after his stepdaughter is exactly what dr. v said it was; a fairy tale. humbert is in his own little world of insane infatuation and he will do whatever it takes to be with lolita. his entire life has become nothing but a pedophilic fantasy that he puts onto paper. there are also hundreds of allusions to fairy tales throughout the novel. as humbert plunges through his fairy tale of a life, he references them so often you can't keep count of them. humbert's fairy tale does not have a good ending either, but you learn that in the beginning of the book. you work your way to how he got to where he got to through his lust for a little girl named dolores haze.

as if i wasn't terrified enough with werewolves and sexually assaulted disney princesses, we watched pan's labyrinth. it won a fair number of academy awards if i remember this correctly, and the movie is an absolute masterpiece. it's a foreign film, so we watched it in its original language (spanish) with english subtitles. we looked for the contrast between the real world of the film and the fairy tale world of the film. and then we came across the child eater.

the child eater is arguably the scariest movie monster ever created.

i will not post a picture of it on here. after i saw that movie, i could not sleep for five hours. i had to sleep with the light on. i would not sleep without my roommate in my room. i cried myself to sleep i was so afraid. there was a little voice in my head that said, "you are a grown ass man" (woman?) but that didn't help whatsoever. the child eater scared the living daylights out of me.

pan's labyrinth does not have a happy ending.

not a single fairy tale we went through had a happy ending. even the things that we read that didn't seem to be fairy tales didn't have happy endings.

growing up in the disney renaissance, i believed that things turned out okay. but disney spent a lot of time changing plots and creating happy endings. they pulled a lot of strings.

after taking this class, i feel like a lot of my childhood was ruined. i'm really hoping i didn't ruin yours by writing this.

if you can take away anything from this blog, let it be this:

1. read lolita. it's one of the greatest books ever written.
2. fairy tales suck. but they all have intense moral lessons.
3. watch pan's labyrinth with a buddy. (for more than just the reason of the child eater.)
4. take a class on fairy tales and expand your world.

have a happy ending. :)

blogging for killers.. again. kind of.

i've blogged about serial killers before.

if i'm correct, that's my second blog. i'm really too lazy to check. this is my twenty-second blog this month, so that's a lot of clicking on that giant orange button that says "older posts."

serial killers are decently taboo.

a lot of things are taboo. they vary from culture to culture. a lot of things that we do here in the united states would be absolutely scandalous in say... zimbabwe.

there are (generally) two taboos that are universal. drum roll please:

1. incest.
2. cannibalism.

a lot of cultures have different definitions of incest. generally, brothers and sisters are out in terms of marriage, but not necessarily cousins. i learned in my anthropology class that it's usually socially acceptable to marry your cross cousin.

i don't have a cross cousin. on either side of my family.

but this blog is kind of sort of maybe not really about serial killers, so the main taboo that's on my brain right now is cannibalism. yes, it's nine fifteen at night, i just got off work, and i'm thinking about cannibalism. i've been thinking about it all afternoon. my mind is a circus with too many trapeze artists and a lion that's not trained well enough.

if you know me well (or you've read my blog about serial killers) you know that they're a hobby of mine. i wrote that awesome sixteen page paper on them equipped with a presentation that involved me carrying around a human skull (relax, it was plastic.). it really freaked out my orchestra teacher, and it came in handy later when i had to act out a part of hamlet (alas, poor yorick, i knew him!). but i digress. fact of life: i like serial killers.

another fact of life: i watch criminal minds like there's no tomorrow. i watch it more for the killers and what they do and how they behave more than for the action and the character interaction (all of which is fantastic, by the way). today, after physical therapy, i decided that i wanted to watch criminal minds, but i didn't really feel like frequenting the two seasons that i own; i wanted to watch season three.

like a good college girl, i opened my google chrome and proceeded to my favorite website that lets me watch criminal minds episodes for free, no doubt illegally. i clicked on an episode in season three i'd only seen bits and pieces of on television while studying for an organic chemistry exam. the part that i saw looked decently intriguing. and the killer looked like jeffrey dahmer, which gave him extra terrific points from me, the avid viewer and killer enthusiast.

halfway through the episode, the reliable BAU team had decided that their killer was a cannibal. the conversation between the team went something like this:

"how did we get to cannibalism?"
"well, they'd all been frozen and he wasn't abusing them sexually. and he took their legs."
"cannibalism. the greatest taboo. don't we have a lovely job?"
"it's like a sexual urge. a crosswiring of the most basic human drives. sustinence and sex."

so, they got to cannibalism.

i had this on my brain the entire episode, even after they caught the cannibal, flew back to virginia, and i moved on with my life. i moved my life onto dinner.

i'm a vegetarian. so i didn't have any terrifying images of my hamburger suddenly becoming human flesh because, well, my veggie burger looks like... a veggie burger. i got through dinner just fine without feeling disgustingly sick to my stomach. until dessert.

my mother baked short bread and put strawberries on top with whipped cream. strawberries are my favorite food, so i was super stoked. while we were eating, the conversation turned to old reality shows, and we reminisced about fear factor. i loved that show except when they had to lie in tanks of tarantulas. this lead to how the second challenge usually led to something disgusting, like fishing through sewage or drinking something terrible. this then led to talking about how survivor challenges used to have a "here drink this nasty stuff for immunity" challenge while fear factor was still on air. and then my mother said, "hey, wasn't there a year where they had to drink a milkshake made out of cow's blood and milk?"

suddenly my strawberry juice looked a hell of a lot like blood.

no, i did not finish my shortcake. and no, i did not vomit.

cannibalism and incest. the two universal taboos.

because my mother is a biology teacher, i have enough genetic knowledge to actually write a fairly detailed blog about the dangers of incest. what i have on cannibalism is this: in the movie the book of eli, eating people makes you shake. if you run into a shaky person, you run the hell away. i don't think this is factual. i just know that denzel washington makes a really badass blind guy trekking across a nuked america with a braille bible.

go, denzel, go.


(i don't know how to end this blog. it's awkward and taboo and not the best. so i'll just end it by cheering on denzel washington as he kicks butt on his way to alcatraz where that guy from heroes has a library.)

i conjugate, you conjugate, we conjugate.

i'm going to college to become a teacher.

this is very natural to me. my mother is a teacher. so is my father. so are my aunt, uncle, grandma, other aunt, and about... fifteen of my grandmother's eight million cousins. and a few of my great aunts. i have a lot of those running around ohio.

my number one goal is to be an english teacher. that's high school english, not seventh grade english where all you do is write out spelling words and do grammar worksheets. i want to be that awesome teacher who makes hamlet fun and can actually manage to get you to read charles dickens without committing suicide. i believe we call this class literature, not english. that is my ultimate goal.

my second goal (penultimate, perhaps?) is to teach spanish. by the time i graduate, i hope to be fluent (and hopefully have studied abroad in argentina) and be that nice spanish teacher who lets you pick a spanish name and brings chips and salsa to class every friday. i will help you say "me llamo bob, como estas?" i want to do that. i really do.

while i was sitting in my first college spanish class the other day, i realized that there's a distinct possibility that i will teach english.

in spanish.

i thought about this long and hard instead of writing down all the conjugations for irregular spanish verbs in the preterite. (i am seriously regretting this, my final is tomorrow.) the kids i would be teaching would be fluent in spanish and i would be teaching them how to say, "hello, my name is bob, how are you?" instead of "me llama bob, como estas?" i'd have to think in spanish. speak in spanish. and try to teach my native language. and when i speak in english, i'd get all those looks that we give my current spanish teacher when she rambles in spanish. those looks of, "what the hell, slow down, the only word i got out of that was 'libro'. which i forgot under my bed."

for about a day, i thought that this would be absolutely terrific.

then i realized that english is the hardest language to learn, besides russian and arabic. i don't think english has a single regular verb. and remember that blog where i wrote about the word terrific? yeah, we have probably five times as many verbs as every other language.

in spanish, we conjugate all the time. yo hablo, tu hablas, el/ella/usted habla, nosotros hablamos, ellos/ellas/ustedes hablan.

i talk, you talk, he/she talks, we talk, they talk.

english conjugates in the weirdest ways.

we don't have set endings like spanish does. sure, we add an s in the third person singular for the present, and in the past we drop the e and add ed. remember that craziness from third grade and you kept asking, why do we drop the e when we just add it again with the d? i sure remember asking that. and then there's the whole mess of not having an e at the end, then it's just add ed, right? sure, until you get to stupid verbs like can. and will. but that gets into future tense. we won't go there.

in english, just about every single one of our verbs is irregular. can you imagine trying to memorize that? and CONTRACTIONS. oh lord, contractions. i spent an entire day trying to speak without using a single contraction, and it was ridiculously hard. i also felt terrifically snobby.

english is hard. and stupid.

we don't think about it, but we conjugate all the time. all those irregular verbs, we conjugate them all the time without evening thinking about it.

i conjugate. you conjugate. he conjugates. she conjugates. we conjugate. they conjugate. the WORLD conjugates.

so much conjugation, so little time.

there's also the problem of infinitives (los infinitivos!). in spanish, they're all one word and super nice. conjugate it, and you've got a verb in whatever tense you conjugated it in! yippee! we can make verbs!

in english, we can turn anything, including nouns, into infinitives.

all ya gotta do is stuck 'to' in front of it and BAM, infinitive time.

to swim. to run. to blog. to grammar. to college.

in college (at least at mine), if you don't know your greek letters for your frats and sororities, you are told this: "learn to college." and if you suck at grammar, well, you better "learn to grammar." i'm okay with the greek stuff. i can sing you the greek alphabet. and i actually know the difference between your and you're, unlike all of my facebook friends.

look at us cool college kids, inventing infinitives and not knowing how to use contractions and possessives.

english is verbose and strange enough that we can invent just about whatever we want. like that time back in 1888 where we suddenly decided to make terrific mean fantabulous and not frightening.

i'm waiting for the day when i get to say, "caída de la e y añadir ed" to my new students who want to learn english.

drop the e and add ed.


(forgive my lack of spanish accents, i'm terrible with alt keys. another personality flaw.)

just push that button right there.

i am proud to say that i, emily hollenberg, have entered the world of modern technology.

you already know that i've never had cable except in my dorm room, and even then i don't watch anything but network TV.

the teeny TV in my bedroom here at my house has a VCR. i've got the lion king looped. for my birthday i actually got a DVD player, so i've had the luxury of watching DVDs on my little television. i was so excited i almost had an asthma attack. i could watch criminal minds and chuck on my TV. it was so incredibly legit.

i get unnecessarily excited. it's a personality flaw. and it's highly annoying. i apologize to any of my readers who have to deal with it.

but my DVD player wasn't my move into the world of modern technology. i thought that my laptop that i got for graduation was because it had windows seven and we actually have wireless in my house.

no, today, i got a touchscreen cell phone.

yes. i told you that i'd blog about this in my last blog. go ahead and judge. i'm just true to my word.

i'm going to start off blogging about cell phones like this.

i absolutely HATE kids who have cells phones. you do not need a cell phone until you can drive. you have no reason to have a cell phone. i think once you hit age fifteen, then it's fine. but if you're twelve, there's no need for you to be buying apps at the app store. play outside like i did when i was a kid. get in touch with nature. and especially if you're under the age of fifteen, you sure as hell do not need an iphone or an adroid. what on EARTH could you possibly do with a phone that nice and expensive if you're just finishing up elementary school?

i'm touchy about this. this is because i didn't get a cell phone until i was seventeen.

yeah that's right. seventeen.

and i didn't get a nice slide phone with a keyboard like my friends got. no, i got a teeny little flip phone from walmart. honest to god, my dad bought it at walmart for twenty dollars. the payment plan on it is beautiful, however. it's a prepaid tracfone, and my dad bought me a set number of minutes i can use. calling is one minute, receiving a call is one minute, and then the number of minutes the call actually is. sending a text is a third of a minute, receiving is a third. i thought maybe, now that i had a cell phone, i could text and be like all the cool kids who had cool phones. i could make my lame phone cool.

no, that wasn't the plan. my cell phone was for emergencies. i got 300 minutes. for an entire year.

if you had my phone, you'd spend that in about... a week. just texting.

i didn't upgrade every year. as soon as a new phone comes out, i know people who go get them. i got to stuck with my little walmart phone (i named him simon, obviously after simon from lord of the flies) for three entire years. so when people complained about having an old phone and how they needed a new one, i felt no sympathy. when people whined about how they didn't have a touchscreen and their keyboard was so ungodly lame, i felt no sympathy. maybe i'm mean. but i just didn't care.

i liked simon. i really did. he was extremely resilient. if you want a phone for LIFE, get a tracfone, because they will not break. honestly. i threw simon out of a two story window and he doesn't have a scratch, bump, bruise, or dent. he is still one hundred percent functional.

functionally, i had no need to upgrade my phone. now that i have two jobs, my dad buys me more minutes because i expect phone calls that aren't just emergencies, and as i said, simon was fully functional. but i was really feeling the pain when suddenly all of my friends had iphones and adroids. or at least touchscreen phones that had internet connections.

when tracfone came out with a touchscreen phone that could connect to the internet for fifty bucks, i pounced on that like a lion takes down a wounded gazelle. so in other words... terrifically.

i bought the phone with my own money. i spent an entire week awaiting it. when it came, it was very anticlimactic. in my head, i had this terrific vision of the doorbell ringing, me screaming OMG MY PHONE IS HEREEE and epically leaping down the stairs and throwing up the front door to sign the package over from the nice fedex man. and then i would run upstairs, rip open the box, and activate my new touchscreen phone and send my very first mobile tweet.

what actually happened was this: i was taking a well deserved nap and didn't hear the doorbell ring. my mother signed over the package, took it upstairs, and dropped it on my head.

i woke up enough to say, is that my phone? then shoved the package off of my bed and slept for another hour and a half.

after dinner i activated it, transferred my old number, all my contacts, figured out which little apps i wanted to have displayed on my screen, and took a few pictures for my wallpaper. then i sent my first tweet, was rather alarmed and how many airtime minutes it cost me just to connect to the internet, and then i went to work like a good working college girl.

i have joined the world of technology. i have tweeted from a mobile device. i have mastered the art of touchscreen scrolling. i can pull out my phone and be proud of it.

but does this mean that i'm going to use my phone for every little thing and constantly be bending over it like everybody else on the planet? absolutely not.

i am very proud about the fact that i am extremely cell phone independent.

I AM AN INDEPENDENT WOMAN. and i love my new phone.

rest in peace, simon. you were a good phone. but all good things come to an end.

post script: i will probably alert you when i have named my new phone. naming things is another personality flaw. i have a lot of those.

down to zero, here we come!

for a long time, i've liked the idea of countdowns. counting down to something exciting, counting down to something that you're absolutely dreading, counting down to something.

i like the idea.

i've never really had countdowns, however. it's kind of like the thing where i have a need to be organized? i just never actually get around to having countdowns. sure, i SAY that i'm counting down to something, but if you actually ask me how many days, hours, minutes, what have you, i have no idea.

this summer, the busiest and most terrific summer of my life, i actually have countdowns, and i'm rather proud of myself for having them. i'm also a little bit ashamed because sometimes i feel that having a countdown is for lesser people who waste away their lives.

honest to god, during my last month of high school, i did not keep a day countdown. my teachers did, sure, and marked how many days until they could get out of school, just like us. i really only knew how many days of high school i had left until the very last week of school. i was more excited about my birthday. i believe that one of my largest personality flaws is my overexcitement for my birthday. it's obnoxious and i really really try to keep it under control.

the countdowns of emily hollenberg are as follows. brace yourself.

THE STATS.

six days until leigh-ann palmer.
one day until i get my new and first touchscreen phone.
a week and half until my brother comes home to visit.
three days until spanish finals.
one week until my new spanish class (go second semester!).
exactly two months until i move back to alma.
two months and two weeks until i start alma classes.
twenty-six days until harry potter comes out. i will cry. and cry. and cry. and cry.
twenty-six days until city swim.
twenty-nine days until my job ends.
forty-seven days until summer classes end.
fifty-two days until CEDAR POINT!
one week until my parents abandon me for a week. i hope i don't starve because i do NOT know how to cook.
approximately three years until i graduate from college, move out, and officially begin my life.

i'm really trying not to focus on the last thing on this list. if i focus too much about things like... where am i going to live? where can i apply for jobs? how can i pay off my student loans? what kind of car can i afford? what size apartment can i afford? will i actually be able to move out?

if i focus on things like that, then i'm going to completely waste my last three years of college. college is about having fun, finding yourself, and becoming independent. the whole "having fun part" kind of gets lost to the winds if i spend too much time worrying about how i'm going to financially support myself.

but nonetheless, three years until the future.

the most pertinent (now that's a nice word) countdowns are really just about this month and this summer. tomorrow i get my new phone. it's about time, because i've only had one phone my whole life. i didn't even get it until i was seventeen, and it's a silly little walmart flip phone that i had for three years. i will probably have a nice blog about this later this week when i actually have my hands on my new little joy. that's been a countdown since last week when i ordered it online.

if it's not all it's advertised to be, like most of life, i'm going to cry. because i don't get a refund.

i feel like countdowns give you focus. you have a deadline. you know what you have to get done by this time, and you can plan accordingly, including intense procastination. i enjoy intense procrastination until the moment comes where i actually have to get my act together and do something. then i'm a classic procrastinator and grump about it. deadlines are nice to have. they let you know where you stand.

i also feel like countdowns can distract you. if you focus too much on how much time needs to elapse before a big event, you lose the process of getting to the event. life is about the journey, not about the destination. everybody dies, and nobody really knows where we go, so enjoy the journey of getting there.

the entire time i've been writing this, i've had the song "graceland" in my head by the new pornographers.

the first line of the song: count down to zero, to zero, are you listening?