One day, I rather timidly suggested to Rachel that maybe we could play with the other kids. I don’t remember how I brought it up, and I may well have worded it poorly, but Rachel FREAKED OUT. She acted like I was dumping her. She acted like I was saying I didn’t want to be her friend anymore. She would not listen to what I was ACTUALLY saying.

We came in from recess, and a pissed-off Rachel got out her pad of post-its. She wrote out a bunch of notes that said “Holly is mean,” and “Holly is the worst friend,” etc, and then used them to decorate the entire perimeter of her desk. Every kid sitting nearby could see them. (How did my third-grade teacher allow this?) I was pretty confused and distressed that my friend was mad at me, and frustrated that I hadn’t MEANT to upset her at all. I wasn’t being “mean.” She just wouldn’t listen to me. And of course I couldn’t try to explain myself right then because I’d get in trouble for talking in class! (The rules I adhered to as a kid were ridiculous. Did you know one time in kindergarten I got spanked because I had to go to the bathroom?)

The last note Rachel hung up said, “I will give Holly one more chance.”

That one made me reconsider our third-grade relationship. I asked myself, do you really want to be friends with this girl who makes you sit in a corner of the playground every day, won’t listen to you, calls you mean in front of everyone, and expects you to grovel for one more chance? Then I answered myself, “EFF THIS.”

(No, I did not literally say “eff this,” but if I could go back and relive that moment with my current wisdom and vocabulary, I would have. I would also like to grab that “last chance” post-it and rip it up, just to make my feelings on the matter clear.)

So basically, I started doing my own thing on the playground, and the rest of third grade was pretty fun. I actually made some friends, despite my freakish height, my weird, floaty hair, and the dorkiest clothes ever.

The first day of fourth grade was totally awesome. My teacher had us push our desks together into little groups of four, which was the COOLEST thing ever. I was in a group with the only boy that remotely approached my height, whom I was naturally in love with. We were also the closest group to the door. And who should appear in that door but my old ex-friend, passive-aggressive post-it Rachel?

I remember being genuinely bummed to see her, but I don’t remember if I actually said anything. Here is the story as it was told to me later: Sweet innocent Rachel, who JUST wanted to say hi to all her friends from last year (the ones she never played with and hardly talked to), stuck her head in the door. I saw her, rolled my eyes, and said, “Don’t tell me SHE’S going to be in our class, UG!” And the entire class burst out laughing. (This is total bullshit. I was never cool enough to say anything that made the entire class even collectively smile.)

That is the story as told to me by my mother, who heard it from Rachel’s mother, who heard it from Rachel. I found out about all this when I walked in and found my mom giving the sink and counter the most aggressive scrubbing I’d ever seen, tears streaming down her red, puffy, booger-y face. When she saw me, all she could do was keep repeating, “I am sooo ashaaaaaaaaaaamed of YOU!”

That’s a pretty intense way to figure out that you messed up somehow. I tried to tell her my side of the story, but she’d already decided to be ashamed of me, and she wouldn’t even consider that RACHEL was the meanie who’d embarrassed me in front of the whole class, or even that the whole thing could have been a misunderstanding. No, my mom forced me to write Rachel an apology letter. Then, when it wasn’t apologetic enough (I think I included something like, “I’m sorry we can’t be friends,” at the very end) she made me re-write it. She was also extremely ashamed of me for like a week.

I don’t know why I was thinking about all this last night– maybe because there are so many unanswered questions. Did I actually hurt Rachel’s feelings, or did she exaggerate to get me in trouble? I wonder if she ever got my note. My mother is sort of the queen of not finishing things, so she may have never delivered it, or maybe Rachel’s mom didn’t pass it on because she’d decided delicate Rachel had been through enough. If she did get it, how did it make her feel? And how did she end up? I was a dweeb in high school that nobody could stand. Was she?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how people interpret events from their pasts. It’s been almost ten years since I graduated from high school, and during that time I’ve developed a lot of strong feelings about my classmates, and then slowly gotten past them. A few of my classmates I loved for being popular kids that showed me the tiniest kindness (like passing me the ball in PE, seriously, I’m easy). A few were genuinely wonderful friends. Most I was angry at for a long time. Lately I’ve been wondering about the other side of the story. Maybe some of those kids thought that I was a snotty jerk, and that’s why they were mean to me. Maybe they had no idea I was upset at all.

I’m still not a perfect communicator, but I’m glad I live in a grown-up world where it’s easier to talk to people. I’m also a bit stressed out for little kids… There are a lot of misunderstandings and feelings running around out there.

I’m fairly sure that I don’t have any readers who don’t know me personally. I feel like a lot of people I know are aware that I don’t want to have anything to do with my mom, but maybe it’s not as obvious as I think it is. So here it is, in case anyone wondered: I told my mom several years ago that she’s hurt me and the people that I love so badly and so often, and she’s so far from showing any true remorse or signs of getting better that I’m not going to do it anymore. I hardly ever say it out loud, because I think it confuses and unsettles people, but I don’t consider her a mother anymore. I don’t have a mom.

When I was a kid, my mom would do something awful, and it would just break my heart. Eventually I would get over it, and things would be normal for a while, and then she’d do something else, and I would be so hurt, and I’d remember all the other times I was hurt, and I’d be mad at myself for letting it happen again. But I’d always eventually let it go, until I was eighteen.

That’s when my mom decided she wanted to adopt twenty-one-year-old girl, and she deliberately lied and manipulated my whole family to do it. My sister and I didn’t compare stories until the night before the adoption, and we ended up in the living room, in the dark, crying. Dad came in, and we all found out together that she’d lied to him too. Mom came in and we confronted her. She lied that she was sorry. She lied that God wanted her to do it. She acted like it was our fault that she’d lied, and that we were being cruel for confronting her. She tried to make us feel guilty for making her upset.

That’s the last time she surprised me. While one part of me was thinking, “How could she hurt us like this?” another part of me was answering, “She’s done it before. Remember this time? And this time? This is what she does. You should have seen this coming.” So I kept my distance. It took me a couple years to figure it out, and I finally explained to her three or four years later that I wasn’t going to let her in anymore.

The problem is that I can’t avoid her. She still lives in the same house as my dad and brother, so I still see her when I’m there. For a while afterward she stayed in character, pretending to be sorry she’d hurt me and devestated that I wouldn’t let her in, but I knew she was lying. She’s amazingly selfish, to the point that I’m not sure she could really be sorry about anything, and she’s also a pretty bad actress. She kept looking after me longingly, and sulking around, and telling me that she was sorry and loved me, but I’d finally learned my lesson and I knew better. She’d ask me questions about my life, to which I’d reply, “That’s none of your business. You don’t get to know those things about me anymore.”

One Easter Sunday, and she was attacking my dad about something ridiculous, and I stood up for him. I called her a liar, because she was lying. She always lies. She snapped out of her act and went after me and started hitting me in the chest. My brother had to grab her and pull her away from me so hard that both her feet left the floor, and it’s not like she’s tiny. She screamed, “I’ve been wanting to beat on you for weeks!” She left a hand print on my chest. I told her that I KNEW she’d been lying. All those time she’d been looking at me like a sad little puppy, she’d actually been wanting to “beat on me.”

Then she made a deal with me. She said that if I really wanted to not have a relationship with her, I had to stop interrupting her for like, the rest of the day or something. I said, are you serious? So let me get this straight, if I don’t say anything else, you’ll stop asking me about things, you’ll stop standing around, waiting for a hug when I come home, you’ll stop looking at me all forlornly? And all I have to do is stop talking for a while? No talking for today, and then you give up? We’re through? “Yes.” My dad, brother, and sister were all there. I spelled out the conditions of her deal several times, and asked all of them if they understood it, and if she understood it. Then we shook on it, and I went outside. I think she realized that she shouldn’t have done it part of the way through, but she didn’t stop. Just kept saying “yes.” She never meant to keep that deal. Lying. Again.

It didn’t really hurt my feelings that time, because it didn’t surprise me. The fact that your mom would rather argue without you interfering than have a relationship with you might hurt YOUR feelings, but for her, it’s pretty typical. And it’s not like she’d  never hit me before. That happened all the time when I was a kid. Pretty much every day during the summer. She just tricked me into thinking she was allowed to do that.

My mom never held up her end of the deal, but it didn’t matter. I still shut her out. At church or school, when people asked about me, she’d just make things up. She said that I hated Seattle and couldn’t wait to move home. She told people I was buying a Mustang. She didn’t really have a clue what I was doing for a living, so she just fabricated things. Whenever I’d talk, she’d listen in for something that she could repeat to someone else, to pretend like I’d said it to her.

That’s one reason I’m hesitant to write. I don’t want her to know anything about me.

The other reason is that she’s so manipulative. She uses information and lies to her own purposes. I know this sounds paranoid, but I’m afraid it’s true. She records her phone conversations without people’s knowledge, in case she can use them. Sometimes she plays them back to other people. My dad and brother have seen her do it. She saves the texts that my sister sends her and shows them to her friends out of context, trying to hurt my sister’s reputation. She tells lies about my family, especially my dad, and tries to make her friends think he’s a bad person. When we were kids she would give us things, and then hold them over our heads, and threaten to take them away if we didn’t do what she wanted. I feel like she bribed us all the time. If I hadn’t stopped accepting presents from her, I think she’d still be doing this.

I don’t know what she would specifically do with information about my life, but I wouldn’t put anything past her.

I really want to tell all of my mom’s friends that they’re being lied to, that she’s manipulating them, that she’s using them to hurt my family, that she’s not the person they think she is, that she has no problem betraying and hurting the people she’s closest to, etc, etc… That’s why I don’t feel bad about publishing this. If everyone I know reads this, I’d still feel okay about it.

And I also wanted to explain why I haven’t been updating. I hope nobody felt neglected. I do have funny or exciting or frustrating things happening in my life, and I love keeping in touch with people. I just seems like I’ll have to figure out a different way to do it.

Our logs are supposed to be super-professional and formal, and are read by all the important people associated with our project, and are actually kept for like three years after our project is done, just in case they need to look something up. I would never just decide to do my logs in bubble letters. But Nick told me not to. On April Fool’s Day. What was he thinking?

Luckily he wasn’t looking at me, or he would have seen my silent communication with Dave. I could not have totally hidden the excitement if I’d tried, and it clearly said, GREATEST IDEA EVER.

I’m not bad at bubble letters, but turns out writing tiny, legible bubble letters in full sentences and numbers for chemistry results takes a while. But I persevered, and my logs look awesome. I am especially proud of my bubble signature… it actually looks like a cartoony outline of the real thing. I hope Nick takes a minute to appreciate that, before he makes me re-write my logs. I also wish I was coming in for day shift tomorrow, so I could watch the reaction. Dave promised to fill me in.

I was so excited while I was writing them. I kept showing everyone at work my bubble signature, with a real signature for comparison, including this cranky Chief who doesn’t really like me that much. “Pretty, good, huh?” I asked him.

He stared at me for a while (nice brake from the usual glare), then said, “Are you for real?”

“I think sooooo!”

Then he told me to cut back on my medication. I’ll win him over!

After I stopped brushing my teeth I thought, MAN, these walls have no sound insulation at all! It’s not even that muffled! What’s the deal? And it sounds like Heart; is it Heart? And I got close to the wall to see if I could make it out. Here’s the weird part… the music FADED as I got closer to the wall.

That’s when I realized that it wasn’t my neighbor’s music at all. While I was brushing my teeth, I stepped on my raincoat, which was on the floor in front of my bathroom sink, where I dropped it when I got home from work, because you know what? I’m the only one who uses my bathroom. Yeah. And my ipod was in my raincoat pocket, so I inadvertently turned on the tunes and turned up the volume, and it was, indeed, Heart.

My place is a MESS. Apparently I need a coat hook. I need to go to the store and buy some real food, for real meals. I need to pick up the sheet music that is all over the living room floor. I so need to water my tomato plant, and do laundry, and make a trip to goodwill, and mail the packages that have been sitting in my hallway FOREVER. My little living room table hasn’t been clear since… probably since I moved here. And I need a haircut. Bad.

Thank goodness I have proper motivation to shape up… my dad and brother are coming to visit! YAY YAY YAY YAY YAY YAY YAY YAY YAY YAY YAY! They will be here in a week. I hope I can pull it together by then. Maybe even a haircut.

It’s been blustery here. Pretty-colored leaves are blowing around, and they even make it as high up as my sixth-floor windows (awesome), and the outsides have that nice soggy-leaves smell, and Seattle has such beautiful fall colors, and they last for SO LONG, and thanks to my wonderful Grandmomma, I have gingerbread cookies that turn my mouth Halloween colors. Yay.

Last night I caught the ferry to go visit my (poor, overworked) boyfriend to order pizza and carve pumpkins. It was just getting dark on the ferry ride, and by the time I was getting close to Bremerton the sky was only a little lighter than the shadowy trees on the islands, and you could just see them going by. In anticipation of going home next week, I’ve been listening to my sun-shiney, happy “New Mexico” playlist, which is a little ELO-heavy, and while I was pondering the creepy skyline outside the ferry, “Strange Magic” very appropriately started playing. The (few) lights on the shore were reflected on the glass, and the ones from the other side of the boat doubled themselves and started bobbing around as the ferry rocked, opposite to the motion of my side of the boat. It was cool.

Then there was this black flying thing… most likely a seagull, but it was dark and silhouetted, so who’s to say it wasn’t a giant vampire bat? Not me. It was flying right near the skyline, so at first you think the creepy trees are flapping, and then you realize that it’s an animal, but you can only see it a little bit, and then not at all–but you know that whether you can see it or not, the vampire seagull is still out there. Then the ferry turns you toward the moon, and it’s all hazy and silvery and slivery and shivery and halloween-y.

Pumpkin-carving was so much fun! I took pictures of course, but I can’t find my camera cord. It’s not in my “computer stuff” drawer, but I DO have like six hundred water balloons in there… weird. We named our pumpkin Fred, and we tried to make him mean-looking, but he still came out a little jolly. His teeth say “BOO.” Oh yeah.

At one point Kevin decided that Fred’s smile wasn’t big enough on the right side (Fred’s right), so he started sawing away, and I BARELY saved the day and talked him out of it. Fred’s teeth almost said “8OO,” which doesn’t make sense.

This morning my (poor, overworked) boyfriend dropped me off at the ferry on his way to work. Almost to Seattle, I was still walking around looking for a warm spot (by the way, what’s up with that, Washington State Ferries? Why do people in the Northwest hate being warm?), and that’s when I saw that Seattle and the bay all the way up to Alki point was covered in really thick gray fog… Seattle only has like twelve buildings tall enough to stick out over the fog, but all the other buildings were completely invisible. The fog, the city, and the light grayish-purple sky overhead looked really cool and creepy, and we were headed straight for the mysterious cloud.

That’s also when “Strange Magic” started playing on my ipod again. I love when that happens.

I will be home in FOUR DAYS!

I work for the shipyard. The shipyard works for the Navy. If I want to be part of the shipyard that works for the Navy, I have to impress the Navy. Before the shipyard will let me try to impress the Navy, I have to REALLY impress the shipyard.

I took the Navy’s test (the NAVSEA test) on Friday. Before the shipyard will let me take the NAVSEA, I have to pass the shipyard final, which is way harder and takes about seven months of studying all day. I only got paid for forty hours a week, but that’s over now. I took that one last Thursday.

The shipyard final was a nightmare. Worst test I’ve ever taken, and I’ve taken some really bad ones. I’ve discussed this with several people now, and we agree that the shipyard final is like the Fundamentals of Engineering Exam, only all the material you learned to prepare for the test (from four years of college) is crammed into seven months, and they don’t give you that appendix with the formulas and tables… you have to memorize it.

After eight straight hours of writing, I finally finished(ish) my test, handed it in, and called my dad and cried. I was so sure I failed. Honestly, I WOULD have failed if they’d graded it as harshly as they usually do. I was really borderline in three (out of five) sections.

The NAVSEA is a little easier, but it’s still a 7.5 hour test, so it wasn’t a piece of cake or anything. The muscles in my arm still feel awful. People keep saying, “It’s all downhill from here,” but downhill from, like, Mt. Fuji still takes a lot of work, and it’s still a big difference from some Pacific beach somewhere…

Here’s the point: I’ve been getting through the past several weeks by thinking, “Only a few more weeks to go, then things will be easy,” but instead, I not only have ANOTHER test on Friday (it should only take like an hour and a half, but still! This is a great example of how “downhill” is still a lot more test taking than the break I was hoping for), but I’m also having trouble getting my leave approved for Halloween next week. Big shocker, because I really thought that all my days of “If you miss a day you’re in big trouble and will fall behind and will have to work super-hard for the same amount of money even though we DID charge you for the days you weren’t here” were behind me.

I haven’t been home since March. That was seven months and two weeks ago. I haven’t seen my dad or my grandparents or my aunt and uncle or my two baby cousins (seven months is a big deal for a baby!) for ages, not to mention my dog or decent food or just the fact that it’s MY HOME. The last time I was away for this long was when I moved here, and that was only four months. When I turned in my leave chit they asked me, “Wait now… WHAT is this for?”

Are you serious? I need a break. I need to see my family. I’ve been working tons of unpaid overtime and I’m exhausted.

NOT TO MENTION that I told them about this in January. It’s Halloween. It’s like Christmas. I go home and paint gravestones and castles for a couple days to make up for the fact that I live on the other side of the country from my family and couldn’t be helping the entire time. It’s so much fun and I feel awful when I miss it. They ask, “So this is important?”

I really feel weird about explaining how important something may or may not be, because bottom line: I haven’t seen my dad in seven and a half months. Because they’ve been making me work too hard.

I just get the feeling that this is a precursor for how the job is going to be the rest of the time I’m there: more important than me or my family. I don’t like this.

On the other hand, there is no way I’ll ever, ever, ever know everything I need for this test. When I say “big,” I mean I’ve been learning a ton of new material every week for the last 6.5 months, and this test covers everything. I’d settle for just studying everything on the little schedule I wrote out, but I’m slowly realizing that’s not going to happen either, so now I’ve got to guess the least-important thing and cross it off.

I shouldn’t complain. This morning I wasn’t even sure I was going to take a test this week, and putting it off ANY longer (okay, well, maybe any longer than one day, which I could really use to go over all my fluid system drawings) would just destroy me. The thought of prolonging this horrible process actually motivates me to work harder. For free. Ug.

However, I had a toothache all weekend, which is not normal.

I figured it was from eating popcorn for lunch, so I flossed extra-well Friday night. Saturday it was worse, so I tried again. Sunday someone asked me, “Where does it hurt? Up where your wisdom teeth used to be?”

Oh. Wisdom teeth.

My sister had a bad toothache around Easter. She went to the dentist and they told her, “You’re having surgery on your wisdom teeth, TODAY.” It seems like most wisdom-teeth adventures put people down for three days, and she was definitely dysfunctional (and swollen, and probably heavily medicated) for a while.

Well, I definitely can’t afford to be down for three days. I can’t afford for anyone to tell me, “you’re having surgery today,” for at least two more weeks. So I went to the dentist this morning (and lost five hours of study time that I really could have used to review my electrical diagrams), and the whole way there, I was thinking about what to say if this was actually a surgery-emergency, what the doctor would say if I asked him how long I could wait before my mouth is seriously damaged, and whether it would be worse to take my test in pain and  on soft foods and heavy drugs, or in pain and having my mouth torn apart by my own teeth.

I also wondered at what point my health and comfort slipped under this stupid test on my priority list. I think that was sometime last week. Curses curses curses. I hate my life.

Here is the deal: apparently my lower-left wisdom tooth wisely decided to get its roots into a nerve running down my jaw. Like a jellyfish! Okay, not really, but that’s what the x-ray looks like. Also, when did dentist x-rays get so PAINFUL? I seem to remember that they used to be a snap—what’s up with that? Anyway, I irritated the tooth somehow, THROUGH the gums (maybe by eating popcorn?), and in turn, my tooth irritated my nerve. Brushing and flossing it actually made it a lot worse. Go figure.

The good news is that I don’t need surgery this week (or next week!). The bad news is that my wisdom tooth has a death-grip on a nerve, and I can tell you it’s a painful one. Other bad news: apparently I can’t eat popcorn. Also, the dentist said, “the tooth has not erupted yet, but it will soon erupt.” I wonder if “erupt” is common dentist wisdom-tooth lingo. It’s a very descriptive word.

My directions were to STOP brushing and flossing that area (how often does your dentist tell you that? Ew…) and to find a good oral surgeon.  :(

So I guess me and my test are safe for now.

Almost every time I’ve typed “wisdom” tonight, it comes out “widsom” instead. What is wrong with me?!?

It’s work. It’s work, halfway because I’ve been so busy and exhausted that I never get around to typing things, and halfway because all I have to talk about is work, and that makes a stressful post for me to write and a boring post for you to read. However, something happened at work this week that made today’s post possible.

I had a big test on Friday (I think I passed). On Wednesday, I was sitting up in my room studying, stressing out, and thinking, “Only two and a half more weeks of tests. Just be hardcore for two and a half more weeks, and then this can all be over.” Then my course manager came in, followed by my two other classmates, and he said, “The final exams are getting pushed back a week, because we have more material for you to learn!” My classmates thought this was great news.

But my countdown went from two and a half weeks to three and a half weeks. That’s like a forty percent increase. (I think it’s EXACTLY a forty percent increase, but who works these things out? Not me. I cherish my time that I don’t have to do math in my head.) And I had been pretty stoked last week when I thought I was FINALLY at the end of the new material… and the lectures… I do hate the lectures.

This new schedule also ruins the celebratory nature of my planned trip to the premier of Zombieland next Friday. Now it won’t be an “I’m done with the shipyard final!” party, and I’ll probably have to go to work the next day. Why does work have to mess with my zombie movies? That’s low.

On the other hand, it means I don’t have a test next week (first time in six months!), which means I’m SURE not going in to study this weekend. So here I am, second day off in a row, and I almost don’t know what to do with myself. Hel-lo, blag!

Last week I bought two ornamental pepper plants at the store! One is red and purple, the other is orange and yellow, and both are beautiful. I think maybe they will inspire the tiny tomatoes on my cherry tomato plant to turn red. All my plants are doing really well, especially my enormous basil plant, and my big leafy red-and-green plant, and I have this other shrub-type that’s getting white flowers! And the ivy is going crazy. I think even my poor lavender plant is going to be okay!

I’ve been going fishing with my boyfriend. We haven’t caught anything, which is ridiculous, because there are tons of huge salmon in this steam that are just SO BORED with fishing lures and totally not hungry, but it’s nice being by the river, especially since the weather gods have seemed to favor the weekends lately, which is fine with me. Am I getting used to Seattle weather? No, no, no, that can’t be it.

I’m reading Salem’s Lot. It’s so creepy! I love it. I’m sorry, but Steven King is way awesomer than H.P. Lovecraft.

I’M GOING HOME FOR HALLOWEEN! I could just cry about this. My dear little brother Andy came to visit me this summer, and since he’s such a lovely lad, he brought me a lot of frozen chile rellenos, and well… things that have been fried in fat should just not be frozen. But he’s such a sweetheart to try.

Maybe, in three weeks, when I don’t have any more written exams to take, I’ll be able to write more. But this doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about you! I took pictures of my apartment and my view (and my plants!) to post, so you guys can see what I see, and it’ll happen. It will happen! And I’ll be October soon, so I want a trip to the pumpkin patch! And I’m starting a belly dancing class soon, too!

I’ll be better about this.

So my last post was kind of negative, and I’m trying to put a positive spin on this one. So, positives (until I run out of time again):

1. I’m in Maui.

2. The airport security officers are very nice and even chatty, especially considering they are only still here at one in the morning because my flight got delayed seven hours.

3. I’ve been reminded once again why, even if you have a pressing reason to stay outside, you should keep re-applying sunscreen every two hours. (Trust me, I SO know this one. The reason was just quite pressing.)

4. I’ve got a great excuse to go shopping for another pair of glasses.

5. I had foresight enough to pack two pairs of glasses, just in case I lost one in the waves just like I did LAST YEAR in O’ahu.

6. Oh neat! It’s raining. Seriously, that’s kinda cool.

I have 49 seconds left. We’ll talk more later.