The Stairway Tree

 

When I started this blog, my intention was to read each chapter of my book, find some sort of quirk within that chapter, and write a personal anecdote corresponding to that quirk while showing off the chapter art; hence why every blog post is named after a chapter title. Of course I didn't want to write about the chapters themselves for spoiler purposes, but personal insights into my life are often amusing. 

The ultimate idea behind all of this being that, at the end of the blog chapter posts, I would be finished writing book two and be able to announce the upcoming title. That gave me a 20 week timeline to finish writing my second book. Instead, I have been busy with summer, work, summer, and more work. 

I wasn't going to announce this plan, you see. I was just going to do it and let the reader figure it out. But lo and behold, people are sending me comments about my previous blog that prove it was seriously misread, and now I feel the need to explain.

I have had comments such as, "I feel your pain;" "Why is it that we are both so bad at this?;" "This made me sad for you..." and so on. I was very confused because I thought the last post was hysterical. 

It was never meant to be a sad post, dear friends. It was strictly a satire; a pasquinade; a lampoon. It was written for comical purposes. I am very, very content with my life and have no regrets...(except that one time I kicked my dog). Every one of these ridiculous encounters offers me a hilarious story of my life that makes me smile, and sometimes snort laugh to myself in the midst of a crowded room while people stare at me and I can't explain why I am trying not to laugh out loud. I am glad I have made a bumbling idiot of myself on more than one occasion. It amuses me.

Sometimes entering the stories of my mind is like descending the stairway tree into a new realm. For some reason, those around me seem to have "normal" stories such as, "We went to the mall," or "I went to England and we had pastry;" or "We drove across country and nothing abnormal happened." This is not the way my journey takes. For me it's more like, "So this one time I was in the mall with my cousin and we were eating our food when a man with a mental disability walked up to me, hands outstretched, and reached pointedly for my boobs, never taking his eyes off of them. I grabbed his hand in mine and shook it and said, 'Hello!' really loudly and he suddenly looked up, saw my face, and immediately turned white and ran away. The Asian couple next to us literally had their chopsticks halfway to their mouths and were staring, mouths gaping, horrified, while my cousin and I laughed our heads off;" or "This one time a dear friend of mine and I were out for a drive, looking for our campsite, and it was late at night and we couldn't tell where we were going and the GPS seemed to be lost as well and we ended up down this random dark road at night where we saw a person with a reflective jacket walking in the ditch and a creature that looked vaguely like an alien as its eyes glowed in the dark somewhere above her head. We drove by slowly and realized the woman was out, late at night, taking her llama for a walk;" or "I was walking around a tiny island in the middle of a lake in the mountains and came across a foreign tourist who was telling his friend that he had eaten a sandwich the week before and in a thick, German-type accent said, 'the sandwich, it was corrupt.' In other words, he got food poisoning real bad." Those are basic examples. It gets much weirder from there.

But as you can see, I do not begrudge the stories of my past. I look on them with amusement, joy, and sometimes a little bitter-sweet sadness as I remember the people I have spent time with and no longer have the pleasure of being around. If you want to feel sorry for me, feel sorry that I don't own a Starbucks franchise, because I could use that.