Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Through the ragweed and barbedwire

It's cold here. Yesterday, feeling the effects of a week worth of Christmasy treats, I tied my running shoes, pumped up the jams (yeah, I just wrote that- deal with it), and stepped out the front door. Then stepped back inside. 12 degrees. Yeah right. So, much to sweet Mother's dismay, I decided to run up and down the stairs. Our dog Gidget, who is normally hunting down socks to destroy or a family member to terrorize, took interest in my cardiovascular endeavor. Apparently she decided it looked like a good time, and she started to follow. Up, down, up, down. Then she minimized her effort. She ran a few steps down, a few steps up, meeting me in the middle. And then she stopped trying altogether, but still watched. For thirty minutes. The dog who never sits still without a sedative, sat and spectated with a look of utter puzzlement, her head cocked to one side. Mom walked by and muttered, "Stupid Human."

Who decided raisins in any culinary creation was a good idea?

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Ima back

Mario. Nothing brings the family together like "Why did you go that way?" and "Shoot him with ice!" and "Stop bouncing on my head!".

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Merry

Love,
Meg

Thursday, December 17, 2009

These streets will inspire you

"Excuse me, are you the candy man?" he asked the adolescent in a red uniform standing next to me. A little creepy right? Wrong! He spoke in a Scottish accent. So he could have said "I want to pull out all your hair and feed you to my pet pterodactyl" and I would have nodded and smiled at this delightful elderly Scottish man. I contemplated following him around the rest of the store. Stealthily, mind you, lurking a few aisles behind, just close enough to hear "Lad" and "mutton" and you know....cute Scottishy phrases. And that's when I realized-- maybe it's time to move to a location where anyone who's even remotely different isn't such a rarity that I resort to grocery harrassment.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

I have no idea what you are talking about

Thank you, good people at Excedrin, for making the individual Excedrin packages impossible to open. Because every time I find my head splitting, my eyes watering, and my lunch ready to exit my body in a violent manner, there is nothing I want more than to focus really hard on a tiny piece of plastic, seemingly indestructible and therefore unopenable. Really. Such a delight.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

The Master and Margarita

There is a pile of my clean laundry sitting on top of the dryer. My clean whites, to be more specific. And everyday I take what I need from the pile, and will probably continue to do so until there is no more pile and it's time to wash another load of whites. Amen.

Monday, December 14, 2009

I found a fatal flaw.

I think it was about age 4 when I had imaginary friends. Sally and Baby.
Sally was brunette, wore a scarf, carried books, and talked about important things.
Baby had blond pigtails, wore a lot of pink, and giggled almost too often.
They seem like caricatures, hyperboles, an other words of elevated language that basically mean exaggerations. Exaggerations of what? If I had to venture a guess, and I think I probably do if I'm blogging about it, I would hesitantly say the two sides of my personality. Maybe as a 4-year-old I was trying to decide if I wanted to be Sally or Baby. The weirdest part (yeah, it gets weirder), is that Sally and Baby never got along, and both confided in me with their frustrations. So I'm self-conflicted.

Do you ever chew a piece of gum until it loses its flavor, and then have every intention of spitting it out, but get distracted and forget and hours later you're still chewing the flavorless blob and the back of your mind thinks "whatever is in my mouth is disguisting" but fails to transmit the message to the front of your mind until still hours later when you realize that you can in fact rid yourself of the agony that is chewing flavorless gum by merely spitting it out into the nearest rubbish bin? No? K nevermind.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

spin it. yeah.

"There's a time and a place to be a trophy wife" -English 291 Professor.

I guess that makes my most recent 291 test score ok, since really my only job is to ornament an arm. Which reminds me of this.



I've saved this picture on my computer twice. Once during the summer and once today (I had forgotten it was already saved). I named the file the exact same thing both times ("pretty cake", because I'm really funny). So there are two ways to look at this. 1. I'm consistent, which bodes well for the trophy wife life, or 2. my writing hasn't improved any over the last semester, the thought of which creates a big, dark, ugly pit in my stomach, compounded by my most recent English 291 test score, and now I'm feeling a bit short of breath and woozy, what with the dark abyss that is my future, wondering if anyone in a neighboring library cubby has a paper bag I might breathe into?

k I need you to stop bothering me know because I have a paper to write.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Maaaaaaaaaaaps

I'd rather see almost anything than see a used band-aid.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Macintoshes shall be carbonized.


16 years ago Mrs. Bastian asked our 2nd grade class if anyone had an important announcement to make. I saw a fleeting look of exasperation in her eyes as I raised my hand. (I raised my hand everyday, and my announcements were never important.) But today I had real news. Headline worthy.
My little sister Hannah was born.
And now she's driving and dating and other alliterations.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Stop. It's too late.

On snowy days I feel like people finally understand me. Well, people in cars. People driving cars. I drive like it's a snow storm all the time. Slow, overly cautious, lights on, wind-shield wipers wiping. So snowy days are the days I fit in.
Also, snowy days are the days when it's ok to do the things I want to do all the time. Take naps, watch movies, take more naps, imagine how great life would be with a snuggie, eat soup.
It's snowing so I think I'll take a nap.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Flume

I google myself. I do so under the pretense of maintaining a professional respectability so that employers will find only the most complimentary information when searching my name. This pretense is a lie. I google myself because I’m a narcissist. But for me narcissism isn’t so much a self-love as self-fascination.
This fascination with myself has led to a competition with other me’s. The rest of the Meg Morleys in the world, thought I don’t think they know that we’re competing.. Meg Morley the London-based belly dancer was hard to beat. But beat she was, and now “I Should Be Deserving To Be To Mars” is the first google search result for Meg Morley. I Should Be Deserving To Be To Mars is the name of my blog. It’s what I want people to know about me, my musing on webpages. Readers know Meg Morley saw this, or Meg Morley thought that. Meg Morley writes this way, therefore, this is Meg Morley.

There are those moments of distance, when I recognize my own existence. When I realize I’m not only my body in a time and place, but something abstract and large. I hate those moments. They feel nervous and strange, as though I’m lost somewhere in the universe. And in those moments my name is all I have to bring me back to earth. Because when floating through the stars, headed toward a black-hole of uncertainty, battered by the same question, “who am I?” I can answer, simply, I’m Meg. And again I’m back to Meg, in my time and place, doing what Meg’s doing, sleeping or laughing or writing an essay, unconcerned with the identity-swallowing void that lies beyond.
It’s a delusion of course. A delusion I buy into, because it’s safe. I believe that I’m Meg because it feels nice to believe. But in reality I know that Meg is merely the label for this marked time. My parents gave me Meg because they needed something to call me. Because they knew that others would need something to call me. Because I would grow up and do things, and those things need to belong to someone. But what I really believe is that my existence started before the nurses at Cottonwood Hospital wrote Megan Morley on the medical records 23 years ago, and that my existence will continue after Meg Morley is engraved on my tombstone. I believe that in that void beyond, as scary as it may be and as uncertain as I feel, I’m not Meg. I’m the before and after of Meg.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it? A name. That the name takes you and I places like the top of the google search list, or the class role, or a bank account. But in the end we’re not our name, we’re what we’ve done with our name, and we’re looking back on who we were with our name. Narcissistic? Ok.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Not like you do


Jacket= I'm cold
Jacket + elbow patches= I'm cold and scholarly.