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.