Catch Colds, Not Feels

(Or be like me and catch both. Your call really.)

I’ve been sick for a little over 2 weeks and it doesn’t seem to be going away. Speaking of things that aren’t going away, I’ve run into a slight predicament in the realm of romance. (And not VD you pervs… geez.) Rather that something that was never supposed to be anything other than friends hanging out has recently become slightly more than that, at least on my end.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If the person I’m talking about (and you know who you are) is currently reading this right now (although that’s doubtful, and I’m not sure if you do actually read this), please click away. I promise I won’t say anything bad or personal but I also don’t want you to be aware of the aforementioned feels I currently possess. Also, you don’t need to know the extent of my crazy (even though you probably already think you do) and I don’t want any of my nonsense and most-likely-fleeting feelings to affect our friendship. Thank you for respecting my privacy, now please go away. :)

Alright, now that we’re alone I can get back to the business of explaining my current problem. I truly believe that old age is turning me soft because I rarely get sick and I rarely have genuine human feelings of this nature.

So basically I have a friend who I’ve known for almost a decade and now that I’m back home we’ve been hanging out. It’s been really chill and fun (as hanging with your friends often is), and up until recently it’s been totally casual. (Side Note: I never know how to spell the truncated version of “casual”. Is it “cash” or “caszhe” or “caz”?? Someone please let me know in the comments.) Then a couple weeks ago, we were sitting at the bar completely “caszche” and I suddenly got an overwhelming urge to kiss him.

…Uhhh, what now?

First of all, WHAT THE HELL, ALANNA?!?! Second of all, Like come on girl, it’s HIM. Your FRIEND. The guy you once saw get so angry about losing in Pokemon Brawl that he got up and left your other friend’s house. Plus, I’m not looking for a boyfriend or anything even resembling a serious relationship. I just broke up with my boyfriend of four years and not only would that be disrespectful to him but also to the new guy. Not to mention it would be irresponsible for my own sanity and general well-being.

But the thing about feels is that they don’t care about logic or rationality. Your amygdala is just like, “Soo… I’m gonna take a nap. Sorry about your lack of good judgement, peace out fam.” Then your hypothalamus, along with its little buddy the nucleus accumbens, is all like, “Alright alright alright,” (a la Matthew McConaughey) and before you know it you’re attached to your phone in case he texts you and wondering what he looks like naked.

(Also, please don’t bust my balls if that’s not entirely correct. I’m not a neurologist and it’s been a while since I took that class.)

So all of this basically is fine, just me freaking out about having feels to begin with. Especially for someone I’ve been friends with for so long and want to remain friends if things go back to normal. The weird thing is that even though we’ve been friends for a billion years, I realized that I actually know very little about him. I mean, I know things like what sports teams he’s into and his opinions on the election and why his brand of beer is superior to mine. I know that he constantly travels on the basketball court like we don’t live in a society with rules and I know what memes will make him laugh.

But the other day, we were just talking (like humans do, ya know?) and he starts talking about his family and their quirks and stories about his parents and nephews and all that. Suddenly, I notice that I know NOTHING about his family or even his life outside of the superficiality of drunken conversations and trash-talk while playing video games. I thought back for a second and realized in the almost ten years of knowing him, he’s never once mentioned anything about his family and now he’s sitting here talking about growing up with his siblings and how their relationship has changed over the years.

“Hey, nice to finally meet you, my name’s Alanna. What’s yours again? Oh, that’s right, your name isn’t even your real name, it’s your middle name but I didn’t even know that until like 7 years down the line. Nbd, fam.”

I feel like I’m in one of those movies where after years and years the people find out their friend/spouse/family member is actually a spy or a member of the royal family (except on a waayy less significant level). Normally, I’d question my own listening skills and scold myself for being too self-involved, but this time I wasn’t just being a self-centered bitch. I talked to my one friend the other night about this whole thing and she was basically like, “Wait.. he has a family?” and I was like, “I KNOW RIGHT?!” so there ya go.

She also joked about how her and some of the guys were assessing this situation and how the guys were like, “Yeah they’re ‘chilling’ but they’re not ‘chilling’. I give it like 2 weeks at the most,” and my friend was all, “Yeah, yeah, whatever… I think this is actually happening.” (I’m directly involved and I still question whether or not I’m in a coma or perhaps have slipped into another dimension where nothing makes any sense.) My friend made a very legit observation that none of us have ever seen the guy bring any girls around.

Literally. None.

That tripped me out pretty heavily because he obviously dated and did other human things but none of us actually witnessed it. And we’ve all brought around our various dudes and hos, even if it was just some bullshit thing. Not him though. I remember seeing one girl drive up while we were playing football like 6 years ago but she didn’t even get onto the front yard. He just walked all the way over to the road and talked to her while she stood next to her car, and from 100 feet away we were all creeping like, “Ooohh shiittt, waddupp,” (and damn, even from that distance it was obvious she was hot af) but when he came back up to the field he didn’t say a single word about her, the conversation, or the situation at all. He just left us in the lurch leaving us to make up our own conclusions as well as some pretty funny jokes.

The moral of this story is that I like a guy who may or may not be the Batman.

I’m not even worried about analysis or labels or anything, it’s all in good fun and my life is going pretty great in general at the moment so in a totally uncharacteristically-“me”-type-way, I’m just enjoying having fun and chilling with a friend. (But not “chilling”, of course.)

If you read through this entire post, congratulations. You get a prize. (The satisfaction of reading 1200 words of nonsense.) I hope you’re all having a wonderful December. Merry Fuckery and Happy Lols to you all. <3 <3 <3 <3

R. I. P. Diane Kitten

(Well, not really.  I mean, kind of.  Like you think you know someone for a whole year and then they turn out to be a completely different person so you sorta feel like the person you knew is dead.  That’s where I’m at right now.)

Alessandro and I finally took Diane Kitten to the vet after almost a year of having her (not out of neglect, we’re poor) but because she randomly started coughing and it was clear she was having trouble breathing.  We rushed her to the kitty Emergency Room and found out she has asthma so it’s all good and she has medicine and feels much better now.

We found out some things like she’s about 2 years old and has a little tracker in the back of her neck (which I totally wanna remove, especially considering we looked for her owners for a longggg time and nobody claimed her so they’re clearly just bad people).  We also found out she is not a she.

Diane Kitten is a boy.

Then again, how am I supposed to know how he/she identifies?  It’s my fault for assuming he was a girl, but apparently he’s neutered so it makes sense why I was confused.  Also I hoped he was a girl for solidarity purposes, imposing my own desires concerning his gender upon him which is totally philistine and not at all forward-thinking.  I never thought I’d be this type of mother (cat-owner) and my surprise as well as my feelings of loss at the news were quite disconcerting.

I looked it up though, and there exists a phenomenon within the transgender community that people don’t really talk about.  There is often a need to mourn the person you (or your friend/family member/etc.) used to be so that the true person can live and flourish in their real identity.  It’s actually good to grieve the loss of the prior identity and gives the transgender person a feeling of closure without any guilt in moving on.

I’m likening my feelings to this phenomenon because even though it’s just a cat, I feel like I got to know him as “Diane Kitten” and in my childish brain, I built up this whole personality surrounding that female identity.  Now I feel like I have to get to know him as a boy and mold an idea of who he is around this knowledge.

The worst part is changing the name. I was proud of that name.  (She even has a twitter account.)  The deal was that if we found out Diane was a boy, Alessandro would get to pick the name, so he picked “Mr. Tibbs”, Sidney Poitier’s character from the movie “In the Heat of the Night”, which is a badass role and Sir Sidney Poitier is probably the coolest person you could name someone after, but he already has lots of social media accounts and Virgil Tibbs had to deal with so much racism and bullshit which I would like to shield Diane/Mr. Tibbs from.  “They chew you up and spit you out.”

“THEY CALL ME MISTER TIBBS!!!”

So here we are, going through the gender identity process together.  Tibbs has certainly taken to his new name like a justice-minded detective to the mean streets of Sparta, Mississippi.  I’ll miss Diane, but I can’t wait to spend the next couple decades growing and learning with my perfect little boy.  :)

I Like Pina Coladas And Pretending To Be Sane

(Jimmy Buffett & Rupert Holmes knew what they were talking about.  I just figured out how to make mixed drinks with my NutriBullet so I think it’s safe to say I’m getting my life together.)

Hello, my darlings.  It’s been a long time.  I’ve longed to feel your sweet caress against my parietal lobe.  Or whatever part of your brain can see blog notifications.  Once again, the world has taken me hostage with homework (avoiding it), bleakness on the news, and the fact that I JUST discovered “vlogging”.

It’s blogging, but with videos.  (Otherwise known as crack.)

Shane Dawson is currently my favorite, as well as anything with ghosts.

Supposedly, vlogging has been around for over a decade but as far as I’m concerned, it’s the new hip thang yo.  Sure, I used Youtube for listening to music, but I had absolutely no idea there was so much awesome stuff out there.

Ghost hunters, conspiracy theory videos (my long lost love), and people reacting to things… it’s like I was in an internet-coma and finally woke up.  It’s actually making me consider making my own “vlog” but I’m not totally sure how to do that and I don’t know if anybody would bother watching because my life is terribly boring.

I could vlog about the ghosts in my attic?  Although they’re not too talkative these days.  My hope is that they’ve moved on to heaven or whatever but it’s more likely they’ve decided to haunt more interesting/less-talkative type people.

(Perhaps my Burmese nextdoor neighbors?  A nice spooking with the added benefit of being introduced to a different and fascinating culture.  Good for you, ghosts.  Eat, Pray, Love and all that.)

The other reason I’ve been absent is because school.  It’s trying to kill me but I remain strong.  Plus I’ve been getting involved with people and things which is completely out of character for me.

For example, one night I had rum and pina colada mix and my Nutribullet was like, “Hey there pretty lady, ya know you can add those ingredients to me with ice and have a party,” and I was like, “OMG WHY HAVEN’T I THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE?!?!?!”  And my Nutribullet said, “Because you’re not the sharpest blade in the blender,” and I was like, “Good one, Nutribullet.”  So I took the advice of a household appliance and got pretty tipsy on some delicious iced cocktails.

Then I was all pissed cause Alessandro was watching Fox News and the world is getting on my nerves with political nonsense so I thought to myself (out loud), “Why don’t I write a letter to people and tell them to shut up because they’re being annoying?” and Alessandro was like, “You should do that,” but I wasn’t talking to him so I said, “I wasn’t talking to you,” and set to work on writing a rum-and-stupidity-fueled piece to Thought Catalog (which I had no idea that they’d publish because I mean come on, but they did).

Anyways, I made the mistake of assuming nobody in my real life pays attention to me or what I do on social media so I posted the link on my actual Facebook page.  Somehow, people saw it and then started seeing links to my blog and my instagram and twitter for my blog, and now everyone(ish) I’ve ever known since high school found me and is following my stuff.

“Why is that bad?” you might ask.  Well, if you’ve been following me or know my writing even a little bit, you know my candor vis-a-vis the people I know in real life and how I say terrible things about them as well as revealing many secrets about myself.  So whether it’s libel or slander or just being a dick (because what I say is true so technically it’s not libellous), I’m gonna piss a lot of people off.

Have you guys ever posted something you’ve later come to regret?  Or have stories of family and friends kill you for what you write?

Tell me about it in the comments.  Or come to my house and chat because that’s how easy it is to find me now.