Tiffany Rambles

I'm an ultimate wallflower. I somehow went from being a semisocialite to someone who shudders at the thought of calling friends and gets emotionally drained after hanging out, which later leads to abrupt sadness. I'm pretty sure that's also why I've been hesitant to use Twitter for so long. There's so much chatter. It makes me feel like I'm at a large party, expected to talk to all of these people, and then I just shut down.

A couple of days ago, I decided, "To hell with that. I'm gonna do things. There's no reason for me to feel lonely, like Matthew is the only one who wants to hang out with me."

So I did things. I went to the zoo with Matthew's sister and her boyfriend. A seagull creepily approached and stared at us the entire time we ate. When all the kids ran him off, he would come back and just stare.

I loved the meercats. They were so chill. When they're sitting there, looking up at the humans, it's like we're actually the zoo animals and they're watching us.

For 4th of July, I hung out with my cousin and her friends. We all shot firecrackers at this park. Someone let kids with no concept of death shoot the crazy firecrackers, and it was terrifying. Then, after that, I stayed in Chicago with my sister, mom, and niece for almost five days. 

This thing was made be trolls. The moment we lit it, it turned around and started shooting at me, my cousin, and her friends.

Mike, Matthew's best friend, recorded my Indiegogo video. I'm a little nervous that I look really awkward, but what the hell. It'll be fine. Now I'm just waiting to get the edited video back; then I can officially start the Indiegogo campaign and get back to work on the novel.

EDIT: He gave me the edited video right when I was in the middle of adding pictures to this post. It's mostly okay! I wanna edit a couple of things, but I like it. ^_^ 

I hung out with Matthew and a couple of other people at Mike's house. It was initially supposed to be a movie day, but it instead turned into a Minecraft day where I tried (and failed) to write a scholarship essay. I'm perfectly cool with that. I like Minecraft. Whenever I have the time, which I hope will be soon, I'd like to play. It's basically an advanced version of Legos, and it's great for building 3D maps.

Me, Angie, and a couple of other friends went to China Town for a parade. It was my first time at China Town. I wasted money on a lunch box and a fan, but it was money I was proud to waste. Wish I could've wasted more.

I don't know why I left the lunch box out of the group picture.

Found the petting zoo, and that was really fun. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the parade when we first got there, so we all spent most of our money in the normal stores. By the time we got to the parade, we were broke and kinda tired. The petting zoo made finding the parade so late completely worth it.

He has the Fro Factor.

Then we raced against time to get to the bus, but GPS on phones failed us and we missed it. Good times, good times. Still, I had a lot of fun, and I mostly feel sorry for Angie for having to spend so much money on the CTA passes.

I planned a beach trip. It was a small trip. Me and four others went. Though walking on the sand was like walking on hot charcoals and the flies persistently tried to rape us, I had a lot of fun at the beach. I discovered that my swimming phobia is much more fatal than I thought. When Jojo dumped me in the water, I seriously almost drowned. I'm the type of idiot that goes under and automatically screams. Whenever we went in to the deeper portions, it felt like the ground would just disappear and I'd drown. Just typing that now is making my heart go crazy. I think it's a control thing.

Anyway, these kids stole the big bouncy ball I brought. We had to go and get it back, but the ball kept flying back to them every time, so we punished the ball by forcing it to stay in a chair.

Ultimate punishment for a backstabbing ball. Somehow, though, the ball looks really godly.

Then a group of guys came and started playing football in the water. I didn't have my glasses on, so they all looked like running flabs of meat blob. Just when I thought THAT was odd, someone brought out an alligator. I'm really sad that I couldn't get a picture of that. First everyone thought it was fake, but then we saw stuff like his tail move. He had a duct tape around his mouth and a leash. The guy let us pet it. So I did, like three times.

The day before the beach trip (I think?), I got hired. I now have a part-time day job! All in all, this has been a great week, but I know that, soon enough, I'll have to return to my busy schedules. I don't want work to fall too far behind. Still, this vacation was much needed. Now that wallflower syndrome is going away. I like hanging out and talking to people. I like planning events, and I feel much better about myself.

Today I finished putting all of my office stuff in my bedroom, since my stepbrother is moving back in and needs that room. I love waking up to the medals, office materials, and that picture of me and Matthew at prom. It always reminds me that I have accomplished a lot, and I have a lot more to accomplish.

I had a ridiculous nightmare last night. This isn't the first time I've had a wild dream. In fact, I have wild dreams almost every day. Some are so realistic that it often feels like I'm losing my grip on reality. I'll get a crazy sense of deja vu only to realize that a certain moment or memory isn't real. It just happened in a dream. Other dreams teach me stuff or work out story elements I couldn't figure out while awake. For instance, I learned about a minor character's entire back story through a dream. I also learned about soul splicing and ragnarok, two terms I had no idea existed until I woke up and Google'd them.

So, I bet you're wondering how a nightmare can possibly combine all of those shows? Even if you aren't wondering, here's a retelling of the nightmare with pictures. Pictures make everything better, after all.

So, the guy was basically Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.

Except he was strong enough to easily murder Sam and Dean Winchester from Supernatural. I don't know why he wanted to murder them so badly, but he REALLY wanted to. Than again, the Winchesters don't understand that death means forever, so they'll be back.

He can also shape shift (his true form is...hard to describe. Also, I don't remember) into a guy that looks just like the dude from Ghost Ship...

...And whenever he shape shifts into Ghost Ship dude, he cuddles with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who is apparently his girlfriend. She knows that he is a shape shifter with the same interests as Buffalo Bill, but she somehow doesn't find this creepy and refuses to murder him. They are madly in love, and their relationship is very angst heavy.

This is where the mind screw comes in! It turns out that I'M Buffy.

I don't understand why my mind created this nightmare. D:

Seriously, I've typed five different explanations for why I had this nightmare, and none of them make sense. If you've ever wondered what it's like to be inside my mind, there's your answer.

I'm the type of person that finds a reason to go outside every day. I blame it on those seven or so months I spent at Indiana University Bloomington. There really wasn't any way for me to stay inside. If I didn't have to head out for classes, I had to head out for a meeting. If it was the weekend and I had no classes or meetings, I had to head out for food. I tried to hoard food that would be great for weekends where I didn't want to leave the dorm, but that always failed. It's amazing how quickly the food I saved became unappealing.

Meh, been there done that.

There's nothing wrong with loving to walk around...at least when it's not damn near 100 degrees every day. And it has been damn near 100 degrees every day, so there is clearly something wrong with me. Still, the heat didn't matter as much to me when I walked around near my house. My house has air conditioning, my dad's car has air conditioning, my boyfriend's house has air conditioning. As long as I know I'll  be returning to an area with A/C, braving the heat isn't a big deal.

Braving the heat is a big deal now. It has been a big deal ever since I left Hammond for 4th of July to do stuff with my family, since no one seems to have A/C. But I'm a trooper. I can't stop working just because I'm hot and a bit crampy. I have books to read and review and coaching sessions to renew. Initially, I thought about asking the authors whose books I'm reviewing if I could write the review next week, but then I'd end up having to read and review three books in one week as well as work on my new author website, author photos, and the Indiegogo campaign. Plus, I really want to go to the beach. I don't want to overwhelm myself.

These are the methods of survival I came up with for my current predicament - staying in an apartment with no A/C and limited fans. For me, it really is survival. I have a frail body. Frail bodies are susceptible to fainting and death, yknow. D:

Buy an Extra Fan

By Buy an Extra Fan, I mean buy a fan for yourself. That was the first thing I thought to do when I entered the apartment and noticed that there was five of us and only three fans, two of which are broken. This may be a tricky one if you don't exactly have money, but getting money in any way you can is vital for this option. At the Family Dollar near the apartment I'm staying in, a box fan is $18.00. You should probably stay away from illegal things like drugs and prostitution. You see, Independence Day just happened, and police are always more on edge a couple of days before and after Independence Day. Chances are you'll get busted pretty fast.

You can always start a hobo style Indiegogo/Kickstarter Campaign. You can go about this in a couple of ways. You can set up a lemonade stand and sell lemonade, but this may be ineffective if you're an adult and need a license to sell objects. I've never seen anyone do a lemonade stand in reality, so I don't really know how it works. Maybe you can find a cute kid to do it for you or enlist your own kid?

I expect 50% of the profit.

Or you can get the whole hobo experience and label a can "Help Me Buy a Fan." Then stand out outside, dressed in rags, and wave the can around. Or you can pretend to be a statue that only moves when you put a quarter in the can. Amanda Palmer did it for years.

Pros: Your own fan; constant air.
Cons: Depending on what you buy, noisy; constant air, but it's constant hot air. That's arguably better than no air.

Cover Yourself in Wet Hand Towels

You know what's really hard? Trying to sleep on a small couch when you're really hot. When you're really hot, you don't want any parts of your body to touch each other. That's as disastrous as the *mashed potatoes touching the spaghetti on the your dinner plate.

*EDIT: So, it's been brought to my attention that mashed potatoes and spaghetti is an odd combination. So feel free to replace mashed potatoes with apple sauce or something. I have a bad understanding of what foods go together. 

Don't judge me and my belief in food segregation!

My mom, who sweats a lot more than I do and wears a wet towel around her neck, suggested I wear a wet towel as well. That's when I decided to get two wet towels and put one on my belly and the other on my legs. The hot air coming from the fan wasn't as hot with the cold, wet towels on me and I was finally able to sleep.

Pros: You can wipe the sweat off; the hot air coming from the fan isn't as hot; it feels good.
Cons: Sleeping with wet towels on you all night could make you ill, but if you're in a house that really is 100 degrees, the towels will dry pretty damn fast anyway.

Put Your Head in the Freezer

One fan is so broken that the air coming through it is either nonexistent or hot. Still, my mom used that one. The other fan works as long as its put in a box so that it can stand up some way, but that wasn't discovered until this morning. My niece and I have our own fans.

My younger sister doesn't have a fan, and I couldn't afford to buy her one, so she stayed up all night, really hot. Sure, she would've stayed up all night anyway (that's how she is with her laptop), but I felt bad because of how hot she was. At 8 am, she came and sat next to me to get some of the air from the fan. After complaining about how her body heat was clashing with my body heat, I finally just got up and let her sleep under the fan. Unfortunately, that left me without a fan for a couple of hours, so I walked around the house like a zombie until I decided to put my head in the freezer.

That was such a wonderful experience. I kept my head in there for about 3-5 minutes. The longer I kept my head in there, the more I felt like I was exaggerating about the heat. I thought, "You know, its not THAT bad. As soon as I get my head out of this freezer, I'll get right to work."

The instant I took my head out of the freezer, the heat instantly bombarded me. It was like that moment when you're taking antidepressants and you stop taking them because you think you're not depressed anymore but the depression crashes down so hard that you feel like the pills betrayed you (that's why I hate pills and hate that psychologists are always so quick to give them to you. They don't cure anything). I continued my zombie tactics until my niece gave my sister her fan and I took my fan back.

Pros: It feels good.
Cons: It only feels good when you're head is in there. The freezer effect is not long-lasting. Also, if you do it too often, you'll run the risk of irritating people or somehow breaking the freezer. And trust me, you don't want to break the freezer or the fridge on a 100 degree day. 

Lay Down in a Depressed Stupor

At some point during those hours where my sister had my fan and my head wasn't in the freezer, I laid on the coach, arms and legs spread completely a part in a fashion that I'm sure looked ridiculous, and gave myself a self pity party. I thought back to the time I almost fainted in Six Flags Great America and had to spend the rest of the day in my friend's car while he and my other friend lived it up in Six Flags (I'll write a blog post about this later). I thought about how I could very easily faint now and how much easier that would be than trying to survive the heat. That gave me some type of vengeful satisfaction, though I can't for the life of me understand why. Who was my vengeance aimed at? The sun itself?

Your vengeance feeds my happiness, silly frail human.

I kinda wanted to cry, but then I also wanted to save my tears. I mean, I already wasted enough water sweating. I didn't want to waste any more on tears.

That lasted for all of two minutes before I put my head back in the freezer again and decided to check Facebook.

Pros: Vengeful satisfaction against the sun?
Cons: It's the sun, you goober.

You should also drink lots of water and try to wear as little clothes as possible without being completely naked (unless you're not in a house with four other people and being completely naked is fine).

How are you getting by?