For years, probably about 11 (when I first heard it) to 16, if I had to pick one song I identified with most, it would have been Simple Plan’s “I’m Just A Kid.” Saying that now, I have the urge to throw a defensive “DON’T JUDGE ME!” in here with that admission, because I am so. over. that song.

“What the hell is wrong with me?
Don’t fit in with anybody
How did this happen to me?
Wide awake I’m bored and I can’t fall asleep
And every night is the worst night ever

I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare
I’m just a kid, I know that it’s not fair
Nobody cares, cause I’m alone and the world is (having more fun than me)
Nobody wants to be alone in the world.”

I don’t really identify with any particular song anymore, but I do know that my ipod is full of songs from the same phase as listening to Simple Plan, bands like Sugarcult and Panic at the Disco, Fall Out Boy and Linkin Park and Good Charlotte, and I find myself increasingly unable to listen to them. I would never delete them from my ipod, but I don’t listen to them and relate like I did. (I have a problem ’shutting doors’, and what if I wanted to listen to them again?)

While in the past the songs I chose to listen to have been ALL about the lyrics, without caring about melody or beat, I find I am actively searching out songs with beautiful melodies, songs I enjoy singing along to. I don’t know what that says about me. A lot of the songs with beautiful melodies are also slower and sadder, but often with an optimistic tinge — at any rate, far more optimistic and less angry with the whole world’s unfairness than those I used to listen to. They often, in a very general sense, take the view that life moves on. Lots of songs are about breakups, for example, but the songs I used to listen to would fixate on it, seeing whatever breakup it was as some kind of earth-shattering event. The songs I listen to now broadly take a view along the lines of “It was pleasant while it lasted, and I am going to be genuinely sad and upset for a while, but life will move on, and so will I.” So maybe that’s what I’ve come to realize — life will move on; it’s constantly changing; nothing is insurmountable, no matter how it seems at the time.

The only song I have loved from the first moment I heard it — during the same phase as Simple Plan — and probably always will, despite forgetting it for stretches of time and not playing it often, is “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” by Green Day — which has the same general message. It’s odd that I loved it so much back then, and even more that it has endured. I used to identify with being constantly tested and never knowing why; now I identify with the chorus, that it was worth all the while, that “why” is a lesson learned in time.

“Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road
Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go
So make the best of this test, and don’t ask why
It’s not a question, but a lesson learned in time

It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right.
I hope you had the time of your life.

So take the photographs and still frames in your mind
Hang it on a shelf in good health and good time
Tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial
For what it’s worth, it was worth all the while

It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right.
I hope you had the time of your life.”

Maybe I should just be honest with myself for a change.

I don’t even know what to call this anymore.

It isn’t writer’s block, it isn’t even really anything. I just have no idea what to write.

When I looked at a blank page … or a road sign … or a single sentence, a single line of a single poem … it used to be an endless realm of possibility. I’d just look a certain way, sideways on to the world, and it was like flowers expanding in my head, files upon files opening and connecting with very little effort on my part. It was like Roddy’s flower files or Lyra’s alethiometer: something that was so natural it was like breathing, something so easy I wouldn’t have to think.

Of course getting it all written down took work, and for years I couldn’t write anything longer than a few pages. But that didn’t matter so much, because there was nothing I couldn’t spin into a story, take and shape with words. It was so easy.

It was one of the reasons I got so angry in English class. I was a writer, it was how I thought of myself, and nobody wrote things down thinking of how they’d sound later. And if they did there was a certain tone: confusing, self-satisfied smugness. Sometimes authors pick based on what flows better, what communicates the details of the story better, what sounds better to the ear.

Then came the epic bout of writer’s block.

I’d heard of it happening before. Writers suddenly being unable to write for months on end, even though they desperately wanted to. And then when they could write again … nothing. Emptiness. I’d had writer’s block before, but never like that.

It hurt. It hurt me more than I knew it could. I had to face the possibility of a life without writing, and I knew I couldn’t do it. Whatever I’d been telling myself about giving up my dreams of being an author and going to law school was total lies. I could not physically do that.

The world got dark. Whenever I thought about the future, it hurt me. It just looked bleak and dark and lonely. Without the comfort of my imagination, without those thousands of possibilities spinning forth, unfolding from even the most ordinary of objects, what was there to life that was worth living for?

I made an effort for my friends. They didn’t understand, but how could they? They’d never defined themselves so deeply by one thing, without even realizing they were doing it, and then been unable to do it. And they tried, but it wasn’t enough. I needed to be able to write again.

Today the sky looks lighter. I think that everything will be okay. But I still don’t know what to write. All I get when I look at the world sideways-on in that way I used to are brief flashes, and then they are gone. The rest is white and empty.

But I will find them again. Like Lyra, even if it takes a lifetime, the magic that was mine in those unreeling possibilities will be mine again. Even if it takes a whole long life. Because without it, my life would not be worth living.

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.

I’ve read 27, which I guess isn’t shabby, but for someone who reads as much as I do it’s fairly sad. I want to read 17 more, and the others I either have no interest in reading or haven’t heard of/don’t know much about. Some on this list surprised me — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Really? And The Da Vinci Code? But whatever. It is what it is.

Edited to add: I went through a phase in 7th and 8th grade where I read classic after classic, because I’m apparently a literary snob. But most of them didn’t make it on the list. I wonder why?

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee : LOVE
6 The Bible – yeah, right.
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (I love the story, and I’ve even written essays on it, but I’ve never actually read it. Methinks I should, if only to make it up to the poor teacher I deceived.)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman : LOVE (This is probably my favorite series of all time. I luffs it.)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (Again, a book I’ve never read but whose story I love and about which I’ve written essays — although that teacher knew I hadn’t read it and gave me an A anyway.)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (I HATED this book with a BURNING passion. My mother and most of the females I’ve met who’ve read it love it. Go figure.)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare — No, but I have read Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, and probably more, so a significant number.
5 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (Don’t even get me started on this book. I hate it. With a passionate, fiery hate that is so strong all of Salinger’s work has been contaminated and as soon as I see “JD Salinger” I start to breathe fire a little bit. I hate it. So much.)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams : LOVE (As everyone who knows me knows.)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (I’ve read part of it and I like it in the same way I love Kafka’s The Trial, so methinks I should finish it one day.)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis : LOVE
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis : LOVE
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell : LOVE
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Oh, god, I hated this book too. Our lit circle recommended it to people who had insomnia because it would surely put them to sleep. We got in trouble for saying that, but it was how all 10 of us honestly felt.)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery : LOVE (Weirdly enough. This book is something I would usually hate, but I love Anne’s character.)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon (We have to read this for English this year. So, soon.)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley : LOVE (Another one of my ABSOLUTE FAVORITEST BOOKS EVAR.)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon : LOVE
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I don’t ever plan to read this, considering my two previous experiences with his work. I hate it. A lot.)
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (This one’s sitting in my drawer, waiting for me to read it …)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (This book creeped me out as a child. And I mean CREEPED ME OUT. But, even though it did, and even though it has all the hallmarks of a book I would hate, I actually don’t hate it. That said, I have no intention of ever rereading it. I have bad, bad memories of reading this book.)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson : LOVE (He’s hilarious.)
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White : LOVE (I think it’s surprising how few people have read this; it’s beautiful and so, so sad. And SO much better than the movie.)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (At first I loved these, but I read all of them and they start to get really, really formulaic after a while.)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (In the original French, no less. Yes, I win. And no, the book does not deserve to be considered a work of philosophical greatness, it deserves to be considered a really FREAKING WEIRD book written while probably under the influence of certain … organic compounds, shall we say?)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams (Too preachy for me, and really, who the hell cares about the rabbits?)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (Surprisingly, I’ve only had to read excerpts.)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl : LOVE, but, that said, I don’t think this is his best work. It’s just his best-known one.
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (I’m holding out until I can read it in French. Snobbery? Probably.)

So far? 42 full, 43 and 1/2 counting the halves. Not bad for a 17-year-old, eh?

Do we remember August 6? August 9? Days when we caused so much pain and woe for another country? Days when millions died, because of our technology?

No? I’ll tell you. Those were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I’ll admit, I had to look them up too.

Some of you won’t like what I have to say about September 11, but it’s how I feel.

Of course I remember it, I remember exactly where I was the day I found out. I think I always will. I was standing in line, waiting to enter my fourth-grade classroom. I will always remember what it was like to live through one of the greatest tragedies of the modern world. I will always remember the horrific images on the news. I will always remember the distraught look on my mother’s face when she watched. It was tragic, horrifying; it stopped us feeling safe in our own country anymore. And all those innocent people who lost their lives because they helped out, they deserve to be remembered. Everyone who lost their lives on that day deserves to be remembered. But then, so does everyone who dies. And how can we tell those who gave their lives to help out and who was but an unwilling, unsuspecting victim? Some of these people are heroes, maybe. Heroism is earned, and some earned it that day. But not all of them, not just because they died in a massive tragedy.

And I will also always remember where I was on July 7, a day most Americans don’t remember. A day whose date is seared into my brain, a day that is not acknowledged here in America but a date I didn’t have to look up. I will remember that day with much greater fear, because we were less than an hour away from those bombings instead of a whole country away.

July 7, 2005. The terrorist bombings of London’s public transport system. I remember feeling distanced from the events of September 11, but these bombings were frighteningly close. I was in Britain for the summer, staying about 20 minutes away from Heathrow, London’s busiest airport. The horror and panic, the fear, just doesn’t compare.

I will never forget September 11, even if, eight years later, the whole country doesn’t make a big production about it. Just as I will always remember July 7. I have been in or around the outskirts of London on July 7 in the years after the bombings. And even that close, it’s not something that you would see, if you were to walk down a busy London street. But people remember. Quietly, calmly, they remember. And there are people the world over who won’t forget even the older tragedies, the ones they lived through: August 6 and 9, 1945. December 7, 1941.

Countless tragedies.

Always remembered.

Today I was at Safeway and the lady asked if we had a Safeway card (there were three of us) and I said that my parents might and she offered to use it on all three separate orders. I volunteered my old home phone number, pulling numbers from the back of my mind, reeling off numbers I hadn’t given to anyone in months.

Because as much as I hate it, our whole lives are defined by numbers. Social security. University ID. Telephone. Cell phone.

Our lives should be defined by words, by deeds and actions and descriptions and names and just something a little more personal than a string of numbers. Numbers that can be rearranged again and again and yet still never hold any significance, any hint of personality or separateness. Numbers that blend in, that forge us into one herd, one mass of humanity rather than individuals.

The Nazis tattooed numbers on the Jews during the Holocaust. Nobody seems to question that this was a terrible thing to do, to mark them like that so they could never escape the memory of the horror, never get away. To mark them so that others would always know what had happened to them. A mark of pity, maybe, an inhuman mark; a forced mark, that its victims had no choice in.

Maybe our own numbers aren’t so horrible. They aren’t a visible mark, they don’t remind anyone of a massive genocide. But. The implications are there: we get no say in the fact that we are controlled by numbers; we can never get away.

Numbers have no feeling, no humanity, nothing that can be shaped and molded to mean something special, the way a name can.

I leave you with this quote:

“Oh you’ve given me a number and you’ve taken off my name;
To get around this campus, why, you almost need a plane.

I wish that you’d make up your mind; I wish that you’d decide
That I should live as freely as those who live outside
Cause we also are entitled to the rights to be endowed
So when I’ve got somethin’ to say, sir, I’m gonna say it now.”

Yes, that would be why nearly all of the blogs on my blogroll are infertility or parenting-children-with-special-needs blogs. Even though I’m 17.

Because I can.

But anyway, because of all this reading (and even though I might not do NaNo because I’ve promised myself I won’t try to write another major work until the one I’m in the middle of is done, and I really don’t want to cheat at NaNo) I’ve started to wonder about what this parenting children with special medical needs really means.

I’ve never thought of myself as different, not in that way. Never thought of myself as a sickly child, never thought that I, too, might belong in the, for lack of a better word, “medical baby” category — for those babies with medical needs beyond the norm, be it surgery, therapy, or whatever. Or that my sister might.

But do I? What says I do and I don’t?

When I was small, I had a nearly continuous stream of ear infections (my ears are really kind of too small for their own good). I had three sets of ear tubes placed. In fourth grade, I had a cholesteatoma removed from my ear, and I now have a synthetic bone in that ear. I had bad hearing, waxy ears, and (I think) poor fluid drainage. I saw an ophthalmologist for my cafe au lait spots (spots which look like someone spilled tea or milky coffee on me, sometimes more visible than other times), which could be linked to an optic nerve disorder. (I was borderline and luckily I’ve never shown symptoms, but I have to go every year, just in case.) I saw my regular pediatrician, the aforementioned ophthalmologist, and an ear, nose, and throat specialist. I had HUGE allergies and I eventually had to have a full allergy test, where they prick you with different allergens to see how you respond and to try to identify the source of the allergies. True to form, I reacted HUGELY to the general allergen, and then proceeded to not react to ANY of the specific allergens. Not dust, not pollen, not fur. Nothing. Pricked in the back over twenty times for nothing. Thankfully I seem to have outgrown the allergies, like so many of my medical “issues”, but to this day we have no idea what I was so allergic to and what kept me sick for literally years on and off. Does that make me a sickly child, the sickly child I never thought of myself as? To some, I guess it would. But I hardly ever got genuinely sick — it was always just allergies.

Children who have medical issues which necessitate going to see many doctors often begin to associate doctors (and doctors’ offices, hospitals, etc) with unpleasantness, and begin to hate going there. This is certainly true in me. Ever since I can remember, I have hated doctors fiercely, often with no justification (except that they were doctors). And since I was smart, apparently I was often the Goddess of Obnoxious herself to doctors and nurses, and really, anyone who happened to be working in the hospital and made the mistake of trying to be civil to me. (I don’t really remember this; I only remember HATING them.) Does this kind of “phobia” (I think it’s called that, but I never remember feeling afraid, only angry) mark me as one of those children?

(Parentheses are my friends. Btw.)

My sister had hernias when she was tiny, two of them, so long ago that even the thin white lines of the scars have faded completely. She had to be flown to Honolulu for surgery. We do have a family history of them and she was only diagnosed with one, so luckily the surgeon thought to check for another, and lo an behold!

Does that make her a “medical baby”? Do my repeated surgeries and chronic ear problems make me one?

What truly counts? Is there really a family out there who hasn’t had *some* kind of medical issues beyond the normal colds and flus and fevers that children get?

Obviously there are babies born with more serious issues than mine. Babies born with congenital heart defects, for example, or those born with kidney failure or liver failure, who need transplants almost as soon as they are born. Mine were never life-threatening. My procedures weren’t very risky; the riskiest one was the cholesteatoma, especially because, since it was a growth, there was a chance it could grow back. It was certainly the most serious of the surgeries I remember, with at least a month-long recovery (during which they told a kid with chronic allergies she mustn’t sneeze. For at least a month. Needless to say THAT one went out the window pretty fast).

When I had my wisdom teeth out this past summer, I was slightly worried about the anesthesia. That was a strange feeling to me, one I’d never expected when I learned of the surgery. I’d expected to be worried about the pain, of course. I expected to be worried about how I would cope, and how the surgery would go. The usual things. But I’ve had to deal with anesthesia all my life, it feels like. It’s strange to think that my last surgery was in fourth grade. Strange to think that my last surgery was almost a decade ago now, eight or nine years, when I was eight or nine years old. Because inside, I never felt like I was the girl who would be a little bit scared of being put to sleep by something outside my control. Inside, anesthesia felt like old hat, just another routine bit of life. I guess four surgeries before you’re ten will do that to you.

Do other people feel like that? Do people with heart defects — especially ones that were cured — forget about it all sometimes? I don’t think about it very often. I’ve outgrown most of my medical issues. I haven’t had ear tubes in over a decade. I haven’t had ear surgery since fourth grade.

Was I a medical baby, someone with medical issues most babies don’t have? Or are most babies “medical babies”, and I was just one baby among countless others, none of whose problems were exactly the same as mine, but still perfectly normal, my medical needs fairly common?

Maybe I’ll never know.

Do I believe that we have souls? Yes, I do. And I believe that most things have souls, or a “spark of life” or something, because in most cases things which die peacefully don’t have anything which outwardly changes when we die. In many cases, the bodies of these people are still fully functional — they just aren’t in them anymore.

But I don’t believe our souls go floating up to Heaven when we die. I don’t believe there’s anything after this world.

And it frightens me that so many people seem to set their sights on this Heaven.

I read a well-known Christian blog, My Charming Kids, and she recently posted this snippet:

“But the facts are the facts: this world is not our home. Our forever home is in Heaven and my sights are set there. While we tread this temporary earth, I will do my darndest to focus on eternity. For that, my friends, is what truly matters.”

Can I just explain quickly how much this frightens me?

“For that, my friends, is what truly matters.” This statement makes me want to cry inside. This world matters. It matters more than a lot of people obviously think, and I honestly don’t understand this position. It’s like racism, or homophobia. Some things I will never understand.

How can people do their best for this world if their sights are set on the next? How can people achieve their full potential if this world doesn’t truly matter? What kind of person would be willing to give everything they have in them to make this world a better place if all they are doing is marking time until they can get to the next world, the next stop, the next station?

Yes, I am aware that people of all religious creeds can be selfish, amoral bastards. And atheists and theists alike are equally likely not to give their all.

But I think a comedy show I watch put it best. It was about prison, and class distinction, delivered by a lower-class man to an educated, high-class man: “We don’t make no alibis. We deserve to be in here. But compared with you lot, there is a sort of honesty about our dishonesty, know what I mean? Because some of us couldn’t get anything unless we took it. But you — you had it all and you still want more, don’tcha?”

I may not achieve my full potential. In fact, it’s likely that I won’t. But I’m not waiting on anything. I believe there isn’t anything after this life. So I have to make it count. And if I don’t, that will be my fault. And if I do, it’ll be my fault too, and there won’t be any rewards and no justification for trying to make the world a slightly better place except its own merit. No Heaven, and no Hell. Just free choice and my own beliefs.

This is what it’s about. Here. Now. Living for today.

And that frightens me less than the idea that the next life is the only one that matters.

… The job situation is looking better. I have an interview on Friday and a bookstore, and then on the 13th I’m going to apply for another job, which if I get it should be rather cushty.

Fingers crossed on the scholarship front!

BUT mostly I have orientation in August. And it’s like, that should be easy? Yes? But now I’m all … freaked. My mom’s telling me I have to figure out what classes I want to take and what my APs get me out of BEFORE I get there and my dad’s like “there’s people to help with that” but I don’t know who that is and really? The websites are SOOO not helpful.

I don’t even know anymore. I don’t want a job until I can start one I’m reasonably qualified for, but most of all, one I can be off my feet for. Because seriously? I stood in line for an hour and a half waiting for security at Gatwick to hurry the fuck up and my back was killing me. Honestly? I don’t know if I can work those 8-hours standing shifts I used to. Lovely issues courtesy of my mommy.

I’ve been having:

Back pain, when I have my back bent in one way or the other for a bit, and then I go to the other way or straight. Like if I was sitting at a computer typing, and then lay down? Shooting pains. These were the first things I noticed, years ago now; the memory foam topper on my bed mostly makes this a non-issue.

Intermittent, mild tendonitis in both wrists (probably unrelated to anything)

Hip pain, in my right hip only, not shooting pains this time but a dull ache. Happens when it’s overused; in Prague, on the last day, I took ibuprofen for it as soon as I took a few steps, something that I *hate* doing until I really need to. And it hurt anyway.

More back pain, this one recent. Lower back pain, not shooting pains but not the dull, insistent ache of period pain either. Happens most when I have to stand for periods of time, until I can stretch it out again by sitting down.

A random twangy thing in my lower back, left side. (I don’t know how to describe this. If I stretch a certain way when it’s happening, I can feel something’s not right, and if I twist it more there’s this stretchy kind of pain and then it snaps and it’s gone.)

So seriously? Physically I think it would suck. I want a job where I can sit. Not likely … until I’m 18 and can work at, oooh, the public library like I wanted.

And I’m not going to know for sure, though, unless I do it, because the earliest doctor’s appointment I have is August 18.

Damn.