But a half-life?

I have several things on my mind today. Where to begin?
Well, the obvious place to start would be to say that today is my last day here at the conglomeration of half-companies I've been working for. Phew. I can stop looking over my shoulder at the men in trench coats who've been constantly underfoot....looking at my mail...wondering why I drive such a nice, shiny car.

Which brings me to my next topic: Dance. I love to dance (name that flick). Last night marked the end of So You Think You Can Dance and thus, the end of my life in The Know. You see, this is the only TV show I watch and it makes me feel slightly part of something. I have no desire to watch anything else (that episode of King of Queens Laura and I caught the other night was, um, dirty) and as a result of my zealous following of it this season, I have no desire to do anything except dance anymore.

What I don't understand is why I never feel free to go live some crazy dream. I mean, my friend Rachel moved to Seattle to make it as a dancer, and rather than the cliched scene playing out—you know, the one where she gets taken advantage of by some pimp-like manager and becomes heavily involved in drugs, sex, booze, and the deceiving lure of fame and has to reach rock bottom before she realizes who she is and starts to rebuild her life and climb to the top the right way ( I said I don't watch TV...That says nothing about abstaining from movies)—In her case, it's actually working. She dances, waits tables, and yeah. That's it. Awesome.

If anyone can tell me why I don't do the same things, please enlighten me. I don't even have a 401K. Or kids. I should be free. And if somebody comments that you need talent to do those things, I'll punch you in the face. What I lack in talent I make up for in style, and you know it. (Again, name that flick. HINT: It's the same flick! YES!). Besides, dancing is merely one of my million fits of passion.

Okay, I digress. Actually, this whole thing is one big digress. Maybe that's how I feel about these dreams I have—Pursuing them seems like digressing from life, not real life itself. Maybe to really achieve something you fantasize about you have to stop fantasizing about it and actually commit to it indefinitely. So what is real life then, if not what you dream about? Is it 40 hours a week in an office? Is it long periods of drought interspersed with quick, intense relationships? Is it singles wards? Is it balancing budgets, cleaning houses and daydreaming about singing in a band? I'm not so sure it is. Maybe once I figure that out I can finally be content with what I've chosen. In The Truman Show they call it the Superman complex—Thinking you're somehow special and made for something bigger than the mundane, higher than the dregs of life. I wonder if I'll ever stop feeling that way.

If I were to write a book, would you buy it? Maybe if I got enough people to promise me they'd buy it before I even write it I'd have the motivation I need. I could write enough blogs, emails, poems, and journal entries to fill a novel but once it has to have a beginning and an end and a meaning and it has to move people, I chicken out. Moving me doesn't count...at least not to publishers. I think there are probably 5 of you reading this at some point. Illustrating perfectly my point—I write for me mostly but others secretly more. But to actually print something with the intent that others read it—And pay to read it!—is like coming right out and declaring "I have something important to say and I want you to know and I want you to like it and you'll break my heart if you don't." Imagine giving birth to something you love—something you don't have to explain yourself to, something that represents everything you go through, everything you feel and want and fear, and you hand it over to somebody or millions of somebodies and you ask them to love it too. I can't stand the thought that they won't. The first critic who slams it would be the first to silence my voice and stop me from producing anything else for people to kill.

And there it is. The reason I don't do the things I love.

I kind of apologize if you've read this far and are now depressed. I'm also pretty curious if anybody feels this way sometimes.

Extreme Life Makeover...Me edition

Ah, the winds of change...
As many have heard, I've been making some decisions lately—The biggest one being a change of employ. I have accepted a position at Thomas Arts, an advertising company owned by a good family friend in Farmington.
Yes, I'm from Farmington.
No, I will not be moving to Farmington.
Sorry to all my Davis County fans. For now I'm staying in Salt Lake because, well, perhaps I'm hoping that out here I can at least pretend that I'm not a slave to the 9-5 by hanging out with all my hip friends at hip urban places. Or something. And I actually really love paying rent for a basement room full of Hobo spiders, equipped with what I recently learned is a window so small you can't legally call it a bedroom. I-15 Northbound, here I come.
I am actually really excited. And scared. Fake it til you make it, right?
I am actually really sad too. I won't be going to school this fall, which is seriously going to put a damper on the Art Night tradition we were just starting. School is another way in which I pretend I'm not a slave to the 9-5. Maybe I'll start again some other time; Maybe not. Maybe one degree is enough...We'll see.
So here's to me trying to grow up!
For an example of the mature woman I hope I'm becoming, I always look to my mother.

Correction

That post with my design examples? Freaky colors!
For a few days I had to work on a different monitor that inverted all my colors. I thought it only affected the way I viewed things but apparantly it sticks sometimes. So for the record, the dog ad is not supposed to be all freaky blue. Nor are the graphics on the t-shirt. Those are actually all different shades of green. Maybe someday I'll post the real things. Then again, maybe it's not that important.

The Tale of the Basement Beast

Once upon a time it was late at night and I was tired. I rose wearily to close my door before going to bed and caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. Prone to hallucination, I knew it was probably nothing, but I ventured a half-glance in that general direction and saw...nothing. I would have just gone to bed but suddenly my skin was crawling and an unmistakable crittery feeling came over me, so I investigated further. I pulled a box away from the wall and there she was: A very large spider. I shall call her Big Bertha. BB froze. I froze. A tumbleweed rolled lazily by. It was a standoff—Both parties contemplating the next move. I had an important decision to make and I had to make it fast, because as every spider hater knows, the only thing worse than the thing actually crawling on you is for it to disappear....for what we can't see is what we fear most, no? And as previously mentioned, the movement I saw was a 'flash' so I knew how fast the sucker could move. The situation obviously called for a certain, swift death. At this point, please allow a flashback (I want you to grasp the full scope of my imagination and the gravity it lends to the battle at hand.)
In junior high, my friend Candice and her sister Jessica underwent a similar battle with a beast in their basement. Jessica mustered up the courage to smash it with a shoe but left the shoe there and ran away. But when they went back and lifted up the shoe...BABIES went running out everywhere! Babies spilling out everywhere...I still have nightmares, and I wasn't even there.

So you can understand my hesitation at just going all warrior-crazy with a big boot or something. Thankfully, at the moment when I needed it most, I remembered a time-honored method first taught to me by another fem fatale friend, Val: Hairspray. Immobilizing my enemy seemed the only solution.

I raced upstairs to my hairstylist-friend's room (man, I have a lot of helpful friends!) to seize the aerosol hairspray and raced back downstairs, thankful that BB hadn't budged. Armed with a shoe in one hand and the deadly toxin in the other, I attacked. BB panicked and started running toward me, quick as lightning...But slowly she, well, slowed down until she was stuck, mid-scamper. Whereupon I bopped her with my shoe--not even hard enough to dislodge the babies she allegedly carried on her back. A perfect, Bertha-shaped splat remained on the sole of my shoe, with the length of her leg span as my only proof of her full size. The end.

Or so I thought. Battle with a new Bertha commenced last night. This one was not so quick to slow down (maybe I was cocky about my hairspray skills) and she ran under my bed, so I had to sleep on the couch upstairs. I smell a phone call to the exterminator. Sometimes you have to call in the general when the mere foot soldier exhausts her strength.