A Fair and Balanced Account of Valentine’s Day as a Holiday.

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Yesterday my Facebook feed was abuzz with adorableness on Valentine’s–people publicly declaring their love and celebrating their flowers. As a manifestation of how old and mature I’m becoming, many of my friends posted pictures of their new Valentine’s–little babies covered with smooches, or pregnancy announcements clad in pink and red.

And honestly, it truly was adorable. I enjoyed it. I clicked the like button many times! I was happy it was Valentine’s Day!

But I was also a little bit cognizant of how much I would have hated my Newsfeed on Valentine’s Day five years ago–in the most cliche way of course. And though it was cliche and perhaps unnecessarily bitter, I don’t want to delegitimize the loneliness one single girl can internalize while scrolling through a Facebook Feed Full of Love.

So, remembering my former self, I decided to chronicle my 2015 Valentine’s Day here, where people actually need to CLICK to see, to choose to imbibe this particular love potion.

Your Whining Makes Me Whiney

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A couple of years ago, my New Years resolution was to quit whining altogether. I knew my mom was proud of me because she told all her co-workers about it, which is what she always does when she is proud.

Unfortunately, I made the resolution in January and January is cold, so my resolve not to whine lasted as long as it took me to defrost my first frosty windshield.

The Curse of My Life.

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I don’t have vision problems. I have 20/20. Currently, this is the curse of my life.

I want glasses. I want hipster glasses. I’ve even found a few in stores, but the makers are always presumptuous enough to put some sort of magnification in the little lenses to ensure that glasses can only go to elitists with real vision problems.

And the Claustrophobia Sets In

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…We all knew this would happen.

Last night, and for the past several nights, I’ve felt a particular sense of ennui that’s common at the tail-end of summer. I’ve done all the fun things for three months, and because I’ve done so much of them, they don’t seem like fun anymore. I’m itching to be in charge of something again. I’m dying for some responsibility.

“Like, 10 Chickens had to die just so she could look that bad.”

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It’s turquoise, and you know what? Off the rack it’s actually cute. Not flashy cute, definitely not compliment worthy but it’s a passably cute t-shirt that I bought for three dollars from Forever 21.
But when I put the shirt on, the shirt’s secret powers of ugliness release. I’m not sure why the shirt is so ugly, but I am certain that it is. Still, I wear it, maybe because I only have few t-shirts for hot days, or maybe because turquoise is so “in” right now, maybe because I deep down believe that it will look better today than it has the past fifteen times I’ve worn it. In theory the shirt should work. It doesn’t hug the curves I try to hide, it doesn’t come up too short or plunge too low. In all fashion theory, the shirt should work.
Since it doesn’t, I am led to conclude: the shirt is cursed. The shirt is not one that I would wear to an occasion that would require me to do my hair, so you can bet that I will leave my hair wavy on days like this. I call wavy hair my “50-50 Hair” because you have a 50% chance that it looks good (even with the exact same amount of mousse and the exact same towel drying), and there’s nothing you can do to control the outcome. It’s chancy, but on occasionless days, turquoise shirt days, I wear it wavy, and 99% of the time with the turquoise shirt, my wavy hair looks terrible.
And because I promised myself that I would never go out in public with wavy hair AND no makeup at the same time because the world can’t handle the ugly, I do my make-up on days like today. And when I wear the turquoise shirt, my eyeliner inevitably goes on too thick and one eye looks bigger than the other. At the end of it all, I look worse than when I started.
I’m sad that I tried marginally hard just to look this ugly. 
Do ugly days also happen to you?
Ten bonus points if you can guess which movie my title came from. 
Keeping this image small on purpose….But I thought you all needed proof. 

Maybe I Should Just Go Barefoot.

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It wasn’t the overly-telling suction to my chicken legs. It wasn’t the apparent contour of my booty that I was worried about. You wanna know the real reason I was stressed out about embracing skinny jeans?

The Shoes. 

Skinny Jeans come with the commitment that you must also buy a specific sort of shoe. This just felt like a large fashion commitment. So I was, admittedly, a late adopter. 
I find these shoes REPUGNANT and blister-inducing.
No offense. Image Source
And while I think I have somewhat navigated the world of skinny jeans, I think I am still working out the shoe part (and the sock part for that matter). 
I have come to realize that I am not the best accessorizer of feet. 
I don’t consider myself a “fashionista” but I’ve always considered my style “comfortably cute,” to say the least. I mean, I get compliments on what I wear, so I can’t be a horrible dresser. But recently I’ve had an epiphany. I don’t get compliments on my shoes. I get… comments
It all started in ninth grade. We did this thing called “The Issuing of the Faults,” where everyone went around in a circle and told one another their faults. It was a bonding experience. I don’t remember what anyone else said really (well, Elaine told me I had ugly hands, but whatever), but something that Ruth said stung me to the core. 
Before I tell you, I should probably paint a character sketch of Ruth…. and Ruth, you must understand, I mean this very lovingly and with extreme affection. Ruth wore the Muppets on her clothes. Usually she wore a long-sleeved striped shirt underneath a short shirt and sometimes overalls. All her clothes were purchased at Savers. Truth be told, it was one of my favorite things about her. She was a hipster long before it was cool to dress… like that.
My point is, it blistered when Ruth announced  that she didn’t like my shoes. It was the first time I gave into peer pressure; I bought new shoes that weekend. 
But I still remember these very shoes with nostalgic fondness! 
Here’s the best image I could rustle up.
If you can’t tell, these shoes had a one-inch foam platform, and were cobbled with brown striped suede. They gave me the needed height to navigate the high school halls with dignity. Apparently my dignity was misplaced. 
Years later, my feet are still getting comments, though I am realizing that the bulk of my trouble comes from my sock issues. Jeremy has REAL issues with my socks. 
Most Recently, the comments have been:
  • “Sierra, your socks.. don’t even come close to matching.”–Jared
  • “Jared, haven’t you noticed? Sierra’s socks never match.”–Kristy
  • “Sierra, those are boy socks”–Chloe  (To which, I scathingly reply, “No they are not! I stole them from my mom’s sock drawer.”)
  • “Sierra, you’ve got to stop wearing my socks.”–Jeremy (yesterday)
  • “Are those really the shoes you want to wear today?”–Jeremy (he says this every time I want to wear my beloved moccasins). 

I thought all was fair in socks and war, as long as Burkenstocks or Jelly Sandals weren’t involved. 
But you know what, I have cold feet, so I need warm (boy) socks! And I get ready in the dark, and so I can’t be asked to locate socks that match in the dark in the immediacy of the cold feet issue!
Jeremy told me I needed to purchase these special (flimsy, piece of crap) socks to accompany my skinny jeans shoes. But honestly, I don’t see the major difference between 
This:

and This:
Honestly, you can still see my socks no matter what, but in one pair my feet are cold and the other are not. 

And you know what?! If Moccasins had platforms, I would certainly be buying those too. 

SOL: And No One Knows, Tiddly Pom, How Cold My Toes, Tiddly Pom, Are Growing

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I am typing (my 100th post!) in gloves. I am letting my hands recover from the cold. They feel like they’ve been holding dry ice for a couple of seconds—literally burned by the cold.
When I was a kid, I was the kind that would hang out in the door wells during recess in the winter. The recess aids, Mrs. Pemperton (whom the students spitefully called Mrs. “Temperton”) specifically, would come and pull me from my safe haven of extra warm, and scoot me back into the cold. I’m still not sure why they made the rule about not hanging out in the door wells. I wasn’t doing any harm… besides maybe a pagan indoor dance or something (not really. I was probably reading a book). 
Anyways. Whenever Mrs. Pemperton escorted me back to the playground, she always added advice to her rebuke. 

“Go run around like a normal kid. It will warm you up!”

15 years later, I am here to debunk this childhood myth, like the ones parents tell you about your bread crust being good for you, etc etc. I can now attest that there are some colds that body heat just cannot compete with. That was the cold of this morning. I know this because I was walking very briskly today and that still didn’t stop my boogers from turning into icicles and my ears becoming hard enough that you could chisel them from the side of my head like a sculpture. That didn’t stop the furious pinking of my cheeks—in fact, it probably only augmented it.(I’ve taken my gloves off now, in case you were wondering) Walking briskly did little, in fact, it was so cold this morning that my joints started to freeze up as I was ascending the RB stairs, and my brisk walk turned more to the pace of a dying praying mantis.
Image Credit 
I’m the kind of person who hates waking up in the morning, not because of the early hour, but because I hate getting out of my igloo of blankets, my carefully constructed heat dome of happiness. But I’d gladly wake up early to beat the dancer kids to the parking spaces outside the RB, if only to stay a little bit warmer-longer on my morning walk to campus.
*Ten Blogger Points if you catch the literary reference in my title. 

Slice of Life: Turbulence

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*For my usual readers, you may notice “SOL” placed in some of my blog titles over the semester. This means that they are a “slice of life,” an assignment given my writing class to, make the seemingly mundane moments of life take on a life of their own. It shouldn’t be terribly different from my regular blog posts, so I invite all to read. However, I must warn you about the contents of this specific entry.
Are you ready for this particular slice of life, dear readers?
Here are the quick stats of the last 24 hours:
Hours Slept: Total? You mean, combining all of those little mini-sleeps caught here and there on the way to the bathroom? About 3 composite hours of sleep.
Times I (attempt to quaintly say) Rid My Stomach’s Contents: We lost count after 10.
Hours Spent in the Hospital: 3 1/2
Needles That Went Into My Body: 3, and several to look forward to tomorrow
Times I Cried Like a Little Wussy Girl: Like, 7.
In short, I’ve been throwing myself a right pity party for the last 24 hours because I have had the stomach bug that Lucifer, himself, concocted in his special misery pot, and sent up straight from Hades, just for me.
            And yet, while I have made plenty of time to feel miserable, this nasty experience has also produced one of the most tender moments of my life. It was around 4:00 AM. My stomach was finally starting to settle down, and after hours of escorting me back and forth to my couch (I got too weak to walk around 1:00), after hours of back rubs, and holding my hair back, and grabbing things at my every need, after hours, sleepless hours, I asked Jeremy to go to bed—he had 9:00 AM class. And as I finally felt myself drifting off to sleep, a thankful pull into oblivion from Heaven above, I expected Jeremy to go and do the same. I wantedhim to do the same. But as I opened my eyes in my final moments of consciousness, Jeremy was there. And when I woke up a half an hour later, Jeremy was still there, my ever-vigilant watch dog. He sat in a stiff chair while I took over the couch. I could only make out the dark outline of his body, his exhausted, sleep-deprived body, but I could tell he wasn’t asleep. He was checking on me. Above everything else, he gave me his worry, and honestly, sometimes that’s a nice present. He couldn’t have served me any more, and yet somehow he found a way. He was my knight in shining armor all night, and then some more all day.
Marriage is good like that. Even when you feel like you are in the depths of hell, you can fall in love all over again. I hope everyone marries a husband like mine.