Nicole’s Got a Gun

I recently brought home a Remington Pump Action Model 870 shotgun. Twelve gauge.

My first reaction to this is amusement. My second reaction to this is trepidation. My third reaction to this is the first thing this gun has triggered for me, which is memory*.

Growing up, my sister and I were latchkey kids, and we’d spent most afternoons since grade school alone, at home, doing the things that kids do when you give them a little bit of empowerment and a lot of responsibility.

We’d grown up around my dad’s constantly rotating collection of guns, and we were well-imprinted on the no-touch factor by that point. But this day was a bit different. My dad walked us over to the closet where he kept his guns, and he pulled a gun out of the case.

“This is a shotgun,” he said, “and it’s always loaded.”

From there, we followed him to the second-floor landing of our house. It overlooked the front door and our living room.

“If anyone ever breaks into the house, you come up here, you get this gun, you point it at them, you pump this part. You tell them that it’s filled with buckshot and you’re going to pull the trigger. Got it?”

The sound of that pump action shotgun echoed against the high ceilings of our little house. There’s no way not to get it when you hear that sound. I remember being wide-eyed and imagining the scenario over and over again for weeks. Me. A gun. A stranger in the house. And the movie-like scene my father described.

It was a powerful moment, a strange one. And to this day one of the memories with my dad that remains crystal clear.

It’s also the basic extent of my gun education. My dad had wanted to teach me and my sister how to shoot, but you know, things happened. It never came to pass.

So now here I am. Thirty years old. And in possession of that same Remington Pump Action Model 870 shotgun that my dad showed to me and sister, somewhere south of twenty years ago.

Life is strange.

What the shit are you doing with a shotgun?

Good question, reader.

I’ve still to this day never shot anything more potent than a water gun. I mean–it was a bazooka BACKPACK water gun so, you know, pretty durn potent. In a water-fight.

I did hold this once, I think it’s a Colt 45? No zig zags tho.

Seriously, what the SHIT are you doing with a shotgun?

Okay, okay.

The bigger story behind all of this is that within the past few years I’ve thought long and hard about learning how to hunt. And–at the very least–learning how to shoot**.

There are a ton of layers within the buildup to this decision: my Midwestern youth, my mom marrying into a hunting family, reading an essay by Tom McGuane, hitting deer with cars, moving to Montana, considering my own personal ethics around animal husbandry and what and how I’d like to eat if I could.

And then there’s the crazy twist of falling into a job where I’m inundated with hunting and the conversations that surround it nearly 24/7. And not only am I inundated with the conversation, I’m moderating it. From ethics, to conservation, to politics, to harvesting and processing and training.

For someone who likes getting an education, I’ve landed in my own personal intensive academy of The Sporting Life.

It’s a mad world out there, you guys. Even when I’m not looking for the boundaries of my comfort zones, I find them in the same way you find mountain ridges at a distance. Those ridges beckon. I go to them.

The Gun. Remember?

Oh. Right. Digression. And that sort of thing.

Last week I called my mom and for some reason I thought of Dad’s guns. And I asked if we had any of them.

Within a few days, I’m in possession of a beautiful gun. A gun that has history and meaning. A gun that belonged to someone who would have taught me to shoot it if he could.

Like anything in my life, I refuse to approach this without thought, consideration, empathy, and all the things that follow.

Adventures await. Tough decisions await. I’m curious. And I’m the best version of myself in that state.

Here goes.

*I make zero sense sometimes, as the third thing is actually the first thing. Just roll with it, homies. 

**File that under “Things that would make my dad proud”. Also, my younger, princessier, fashion-designing #cityslicker of a sister already knows how to shoot a gun. 

Springing Forward, Looking Back

Today, the earth began to tilt.

Sometimes, I’m sure I can feel the movements of the planet. It’s the same whirling and leaning feeling that I got the first time that I drank hard liquor. In that moment I was seventeen and in a bed that still had posters of galloping horses taped over it, still had sweaty shin-guards and mud-caked cleats underneath it, still had journals that told the private secrets of a young heart with trees and flowers sketched into the margins, the notebooks hidden under pillows and mattresses.

That place between childhood and adulthood is a line I still walk. I felt the earth tilt while I was lying on a giant trampoline, phone in hand, laughing so hard while talking to my best friend that we couldn’t understand each other’s words, with a golden retriever named Pearl bouncing around below, begging me to jump.

When I find myself in those moments, it’s hard to keep small shadows of nostalgia from slipping in, from shrouding the joy that was once so effortless and child-like. My connection to my youth exists only in memory as I live in a gypsy family of nomads, creatives, wild-cards and on-the-goers. My home lies in people that are often far from me, the people who know the intricacies of my humor and my sensitivities and the quirks that are often just living right under my sleeve, where my heart sits without acknowledging whether I would like it there or not.

I often find myself aching for the places of my childhood, with no place that exists but in people. And sometimes I stumble upon that place while on that giant trampoline with Pearl bouncing around me, laughing tears down my face over the ridiculousness of friendship and life, with a person who can help me celebrate my imperfections by laughing with me over them.

And today, in that same moment, Spring blows her first breeze over me–a breeze of new growth and renewal and all of the colors of the living–and I feel it so powerfully that I am stopped in my tracks. I am hypnotized by the fact that I am very much so on a living, breathing, spinning, heart-beating planet. That I am moving very quickly through space. 66,000 miles per hour towards all that lies ahead.

Why do I think about these things? How does the first breeze of spring transform me into a reverential being? How does it bring me back to the places where my innocence was momentarily eclipsed, where I began my transition into an adulthood in which my childhood constantly taps at my shoulders, begging me to come play?

I only know that somehow it’s instinctive. That something within me came from something before it, and something before that, and so on–to the point that I have to give words to the feeling. I have to somehow give these small spaces of my discoveries credence, no matter how trite or strange it may seem.

I’m a better version of myself in the spring and in the summer. Bring on the playtime. Bring on the sunshine.

Tarantulas, Maslow, and Living with Intention

I’ve been going through a strange state of self-growth as of late. One that feels different, more challenging, and…I can’t really explain it. It feels entirely new. Like I’m balancing on an axis of some kind. Tip-toed. Arms swaying for balance.

Tarantulas are incredible animals. The females can live to be 30 years old. They’re the only spider that continuously molts throughout its lifetime. When they molt, they’re incredibly vulnerable. So vulnerable–in fact–that they can be killed by crickets, an insect that is typically their prey. (If a tarantula is kept as a pet, all live insects have to be removed from their cage to protect them.) It takes a week for their exoskeleton to normalize enough to be handled. Throughout the molting process, they can regenerate their own organs and even legs & other appendages that had been lost or damaged prior to the molt.

Three days before the molt, they begin a fast, and they continue to fast for three to four days following the molt. They can grow up to 1.6 times their previous size with each molt. They’ve somehow skirted a lot of the cast array of arachnid evolution and remained incredibly similar over the course of 16 million years. They’ve kept this process of continual molting and the ability to outlive all other arachnids, although scorpions have been known to live to 25 years.

Shedding skin. In less of an “I really need lotion because it’s winter and everything about me is dry and scaly”  way and more of an “I am really going head first into this whole ‘WTF is even happening thing’ right now” way. I know. It makes just about as much sense to me as it does to you.

I’ve been writing a lot, but it’s been the kind of writing that doesn’t circle back to a conclusion. When I get to the end of one of those pieces, I typically purse my lips, shut the screen, look wistfully toward my ceiling, and feel slightly majorly unfulfilled.

I like conclusions. I like solidity of motive. I like plans. I like a lot of things that I don’t have right now.

To be honest, my right now consists of picking up a hell of a lot of the pieces from 2014. It’s the kind of thing that happens when you get a big idea, go balls to the wall trying to make the reality of that idea match the reality of your vision*, then spend more time functioning at the very bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs way longer than you could have ever imagined.

I like that graphic because it’s a little overdramatic and….well….graphic**…

Fast forward to having the baseline of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs met, and all of the sudden you’re cleaning up the levels of the hierarchy that used to be the very normal, very comfortable, very safe places.

It’s a major reorganization for me. One that will take some getting used to. One that includes evaluating my own personal norms and the mores of the communities I choose to be a part of.

The adjustments aren’t easy ones. They come with price tags of all sorts and although money does weigh into it, it’s very little of what this has been about.

Living with intention is not a smooth or simple path, and it’s one that looks different for all of us. I’m starting to develop a careful familiarity with my own rhythms of growth. Perhaps if I can learn to see it as a molting process–as a regenerative, restorative period of vulnerability–then I can attach more peace to what sometimes feels like inner uproar.

And honestly, if you take just one thing away from this post, listen to The Amazing World of Spiders via my favorite Boston radio show On Point. It’s one of the best pieces of radio/podcast material I have ever, ever listened to. And I’ve listened to way more than any of us should ever account for.

*Big, big mistake on the “but this didn’t match my vision” thing. It’s kind of like having high expectations for New Years Eve. That scenario rarely, rarely works out. More to come on that soon.

**PUN AWARD OF THE DAY GOES TO THE “GRAPHIC GRAPHIC”***

***Yes, I just awarded myself my own award. You can do that finger-gun shooty thing at me right now. 

Also, brief thanks to blogosphere champions and real-life friends Lydia, Jesse, and Joe for inspiring me with their words over the past few weeks. Some of the coolest, most creative, kick-ass people in the Boze right thurr.

The Process of Winter Solstice

From here on out, the days get longer.

I like turning points. The place where the line curves or the roads intersect or the moment arrives. Winter Solstice in itself is a turning point that is life-giving in this simple, small, incremental way. One minute, then two, then three, and suddenly the Montana horizon is glowing at 10:30pm, birds are still singing themselves to sleep, people are finally baring their skin to the steady warmth of summer nights.

I’m not sure i could live somewhere that doesn’t have definitive, recognizable seasons. I learn so much from them every time I observe the turn-over. It’s an actual part of my inner process, the recognition of these gains and losses, the joy of winter’s first big snow, or spotting spring’s first mountain bluebird or finding golden tips on aspens as they prepare themselves for The Big Sleep. I like Montana’s rhythm. It feels ancient and dependable and mystical. I trust it. All of these things register as part of an observational calendar, things to anticipate, things to look forward to.

In one of my favorite books, Thich Nhat Hanh writes “I am not the same, and I am not different.” For me, this has registered as an honoring of the progression of life. I love that. So much.

I think about this as we head into 2015: what’s happened this year, who I was and who I wasn’t, the things I did well, and the things I destroyed–for better or worse. How did I grow as a person? How might I have regressed? What needs to change and what needs to continue to evolve?

It’s a good time of year to live in the questions and work out your answers. It’s a good time to be both reflective and proactive. It’s a good time to reconnect with the possibilities.

And this is the day that for me the process of growth re-establishes itself. The cycle is now giving us more than it is taking away. Renewal begins, and then a New Year, and then all of the pieces of the natural puzzle reliably begin to fall into place.

I’m always a little bit melancholic when Summer Solstice rolls around, but then six months later, a familiar hope sets in.

From here on out, the days get longer. I could say this to myself a thousand times today and it wouldn’t be enough. I love today.

Happy Winter Solstice, friends. And here’s to the future late-night mountain sunsets of 2015.

NOTE: Alternate title to this post: DayMan > NightMan

The Things that Do and Don’t Add Up

Thirty divided by two equals fifteen. Fifteen plus fifteen equals thirty. Fifteen subtracted from thirty is fifteen.

This is simple math. The kind that you don’t have to think about.

Thirty plus fifteen is forty-five. This is how old my father was when he died on this day fifteen years ago, when I was fifteen years old.

______________________________________________________________________________

Loss isn’t the thing that we talk about. We talk about the people, or the pets, or the places we’ve lost. We talk about day-to-day things in the same way. “I lost my keys” does not equal “I lost my dad” and so on and so forth.

The places where language itself doesn’t add up are often the most striking to me.

 

______________________________________________________________________________

How can we learn to be honest with ourselves?

This has to be a crucial part of our process. It’s looking at our emotions and finding honest ways to define them.

This is fear. This is hurt. This is sadness. This is grief. This is anxiety.

I think about a lot of the men that I know in my life and how this disproportionately makes things harder on them. Not many guys I know will take the time to sort out these feelings. They will shape them into something different. They’ll self-medicate with drugs or booze when they feel those gnarly energies rising. They’ll mask these things with anger or rage, which I once read is the most extreme form of disappointment. It made so much sense to me that now I can’t think of anger in any other context.

One of the hard parts about my dad was that he had some issues with anger and he was very much so prone to disappointment. I remember hiding under the dining room table from him at one point and pulling in the chairs around me. These are the things we’re not supposed to talk about. These are the things that are hard.

Disappointment. The feeling of sadness or displeasure caused by the non-fulfillment of one’s hopes or expectations.

The thing that I see underlying in disappointment is our own humanity. The ability to be sensitive. The ability to hope.

______________________________________________________________________________

Today, I find myself wrapped in this kind of processing: I approach each emotion and label it and try my best to give it its due. I experience all of the different “what-ifs” and set them aside out of self-preservation. That’s the hardest part for me, really. For every place I’ve made a decision, for every experience I’ve ever had, there are a million what-ifs and I subconsciously love to torture myself with them.

We all do it, right? Our imaginations are the internal wilderness. I spend a lot of time there. Too much, actually.

______________________________________________________________________________

All of this somehow comes back to love.

I don’t want to mess this part up. As soon as I wrote that, I realized how messy it could get. How maybe we’re all just as uncomfortable about love as we are with loss. How discussing this might even be the harder thing for me and the place where a lot of people might stop reading.

Without even realizing, I just stopped typing, began staring at the screen and immediately crossed my arms over my chest. The protective stance of the vulnerable. The emotional warrior pose.

Shit. Shit shit shit.

Separating love for me is what separating emotion is for others. So this is familial love, and this is a general love, this is passion, that is lust not love, the way that I feel for this person may or may not be love, this love is protective and that love is precarious and this love feels more maternal and the other one, well, I’m not even sure what that looks like yet.

I say that I love so many things, like horses, and pizza, and the mountains, but the love that I have for my people? It’s the same word. How is that possible?

Recall: The places where language itself doesn’t add up are often the most striking to me.

The love that I have for my father is unrequited not in space but in time. That is the hardest part of loss for me. That at the end of the question, there is no answer. That in the space that I will always need this person, the time has run out.

That time has now been half of my life.

In another fifteen years, I’ll be the same age that my dad was when he died. He would have been sixty years old this year. And I am thirty years old, the same age that my dad was when he first became a dad to me.

Simple arithmetic. Complicated outcomes.

How I’d Like to Answer the Top Ten Interview Questions…

…after ten weeks spent applying for a gajliion jobs. In other news, let’s all come up with some questions that don’t make the interviewee feel borderline suicidal. We’re all in this one together, team.

Tell us a little about yourself.

I have no metal within my body and an aversion to wearing lots of jewelry which makes airport travel really simple. I have two cats who do well when I am traveling as long as I leave adequate food and water. I prefer a mattress on the firmer side. I dislike red onions.

I do enjoy extemporaneous speaking, which I’m hoping falls within the duties of this entry-level position for which I’m obscenely over-qualified.

What are your strengths?

Well, my strengths are thus: I am very good at catching a horse in a big field that would prefer to run away from me. This is due to a studied and experiential knowledge of the body language of ungulates. For example: Did you know that if you aim your chest towards a horse’s shoulder he will slow his motion but if you accidentally point it towards his rump you will increase it? An example of one of my many strengths.

I also have an uncanny ability to remember rap lyrics, such as those in most Coolio songs and that one nineties song where they’re like “A hip hop, a hip to the hoppity to the hip hip hop and you don’t stop the bang bang the boogity beat”.

My final strength is creating an excellent cream-to-coffee ratio while tactfully and politely declining a server’s request to refill until I’ve finished the cup-at-hand. From there, I am able to summon said server graciously then reconstruct the original and perfect ratio once more.

What are your weaknesses?

Well, if you put Brad Pitt in front of me and he was lying nude on a bed in a way that made me feel both welcome and safe, I wouldn’t say no if that’s what you’re asking…

You’re not asking that are you.

Then I guess my weakness would be that subtlety is not a strong suit.

Tell us about a time when you worked as part of a team to accomplish something.

At one point in college, my best friend’s beloved VHS of “Spaceballs” became jammed inside of an ancient VCR. Together, we were able to take apart the VCR, save the VHS, and put the VCR back together again successfully without googling anything. It was a real victory of mechanical ingenuity for two liberal arts majors studying (tenuously) at a state school.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

Having a baby, if we’re being honest. I want to really leave my mark on this world, but in a genetic way.

How do you handle stress and pressure?

*Very loud high-pitched uncomfortable laughter followed by immediate and intense weeping followed by a silent, stoic stare into the distance*

Also, Zoloft. Next question.

How do you evaluate success?

Typically I tweet about an accomplishment followed by the hashtag “winning” in a non-ironic and legitimate manner. In order to truly gauge the success of the positive situation described to my fan base, this particular tweet would need at least a 5-7% engagement rate and perhaps might grow my follower demographic in a manner that I find pleasing.

Why are you leaving or have left your job?

This question simply sounds grammatically incorrect. I am not avoiding the question as so much as I do not understand it so I am unable to give you an answer. I’d be happy to take the next question.

Why do you want this job?

Frankly I’m not interested in the actual position. But I enjoy my apartment, eating food, and attending social gatherings so I’ll abide by the conceptual actualization of a diminishing work environment in exchange for monetary reward.

Additionally, this job pays so little that I will be able to defer on my student loans for an indefinite period of time. I’ve also learned that if we can make this low-pay arrangement work for twenty-five years they will be entirely forgiven. Fingers crossed.

Why should we hire you?

I’d hire me because I’ve done a great job masking the general despair, dramatic sense of ennui, and creative roadblock that I’ve acquired since entering the professional workforce in 2008. But you should hire me because I never take the last cup of coffee without refilling the pot, which is how I best demonstrate adding value in the workplace.

Do you have any questions for us?

Filling in the Pieces: Where have I been since June?

Dear readers/friends/people who are confused and here accidentally,

Well, the reality is that I had started a different site and this one lapsed in the process.

I’m back, for a long while at the very least. Tons to write about, tons to explore, tons of things awaiting my long-winded and often presumptuous opinions.

I did do a lot of writing in the course of the past few months, some of it has been sent out to lit mags so it shall not be posted. The rest of it I posted here on a site I built with a thing called Wix. That I ended up hating due to crappiness that is that platform. But the site still stands and it looks okay and the writing is all intact.

So if you’re interested in what happened during my time on my Kickstarter-funded long walk through the mountains, or in seeing some of my photography, that’s the place to find it while I’m in the course of revamping this site.

And it shall be revamped. And all will be well. And we shall come together in sun-drenched…

What am I even talking about. It’s in the works, people. And in the meantime you have TWO sites to play on!

It’s all of the funs.

xo–

Nicole

The Language of Loss

I found out last night that a college friend & former co-worker passed away unexpectedly, and I was thrown back into all the questions that we face in the moments that loss looks us in the face.

I think a lot about loss, I write about it a lot, I’ve gone through therapy for anxiety around it, and it’s a presence that I haven’t been able to shake since I lost my dad to renal cell cancer at fifteen years old. Unfortunately, our culture’s loss language is–to say the least—sorely lacking in helpful, comforting ways to talk to each other about one of the most basic facts of life, and the Judeo-Christian outlook on death creates the most bizarre waiting game of all time. I suppose it’s comforting for awhile to believe that we will be reunited with our loved ones in what lies beyond, but for me this idea was a glaring uncertainty. I needed something else.

In my own grieving process, I found myself searching for language. I wrote and wrote trying to find it. I went through incredible experiences of knowing the presence of my father post his death, in warm winds, in songs, in animals, in dreams, in children, in friends, and in my own family. I could feel the language, I knew it had to exist somewhere.

Where I didn’t think I would find it would be in a quiet moment sitting cross-legged on the floor of a bookstore.

Depression often hits people like a brick wall in their late teens and early twenties, and I was no exception to this rule. After a pretty intense bout, I was desperate and seeking for anything that could give me some level of comfort. I found myself in the grief and loss section, and I saw a book called “No Death, No Fear” by Thich Nhat Hanh. Against every instinct of self-respect*, I pulled it out and at some point I read the following words:

The day my mother died, I wrote in my journal “A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.” I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut of my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk with her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in the moment that my mother is always alive in me. 

I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the table halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often…Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine alone but the continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. These feet that I saw as “my” feet were actually “our” feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.

Lightning struck the entirety of my body in that moment. These things that I had been understanding as a continuation of my father were not alienating or a singular experience. No, they were the effects of interconnectedness, they were knowing that those that we’ve lost are still here and with us, if only we keep our eyes open.

When I moved to Montana, I began hiking and I got back into photography. It hit me today as I woke up that being outside is my form of walking meditation. And in those places I’m able to see those which I’ve lost in the most clarity, and that my camera is an incredible tool to capture those moments.

For me it’s in the wilderness that I see my father laughing, a herd of horses galloping and playing, a white and black spotted dog prancing, a huge fluffy tabby cat soaking in the sun. I see a friend climbing trees, another friend riding a bike, another friend dancing. I see my friend Charlie celebrating life, as was his character.

I hope we can all find those places where the ones we have lost live on in new and beautiful forms. I hope we can all find peace in the fact that it’s okay to live in these questions and I hope we never stop learning more about the malleability of the answers.

If you’re looking for language like I was looking for language, I linked the book title to the Amazon page. There are used copies for less than four bucks. The entire book is filled with an insanely simple and beautiful wisdom, my copy is dog-eared, waterlogged, and well-loved. I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

*We all know self-help books are for weirdos. Fortunately, I’m a weirdo.

A Witch’s Brew for The Black Death

I’ve spent the past three days being sick with what I will call “The Black Death”. It’s basically an illness where the ghost of William Howard Taft lives inside all of your sinuses, tries to explode your head, and desperately tries to get out via quarts and quarts of sinus drainage or what I’ve deemed it more politely “The Presidential Drip”. Thanks, Big Bill.

 

He wears the pants for the whole family.

Anyway.

I haven’t been able to work. I’m on a billion meds. My cats are staring at me like they’re waiting for me to become their next dinner, and I’ve essentially lost all contact with the outside world due to codeine hallucinations and benadryl comas. I’m in severe human withdrawal, and I’m actually starting to feel better.

What I’ve learned about myself in the past few days is this:

1. I am really stubborn. There is a huge possibility that I am one of those people that would put off going to the hospital forever until they’re dead. Like blood could be coming out of my eyeballs and I’d be like “Let’s just wait it out, I feel like this isn’t that big of a deal.”

2. I will try every home remedy on the planet. No matter how weird. Homemade herbal brews? Check. Eating raw jalapenos? Check. Tea tree oil in everything? Check. Turmeric tea with raw ginger? You got it. I will also supplement these with prescribed antibiotics and then claim my homemade remedies are actually the winning element, because I am not a total hippie weirdo.

3. I can sleep forever when I’m sick. Yesterday, I slept a total of twenty hours. TWENTY. That is half of a work week. HOW DO I NOT FEEL PERFECT RIGHT NOW. F you, universe. F. you.

4. I will constantly berate myself for being sick. What did I touch? Who did I talk to? When did I not wash my hands? This is probably just mental. Dude, you are fine. Stop being such a p*&*y. Have less friends that can harbor germs. Maybe just stay in your apartment all the time. And never, ever leave.

5. I get really, really bored when I can’t work. Like REALLY bored. I hate not working. I hate not being able to accomplish things. I hate not having energy. I hate being sick. I hate William Howard Taft. And I hate mayonnaise*.

So those are the five things. BUT. I did come up with a pretty kickass tea that has helped me feel better than total shit so I thought, hey self–why not sharesies this recipe?

My Witch’s Brew for The Black Death

A couple ounces of fresh ginger, thickly sliced

2 cinnamon sticks (or a tsp of ground cinnamon)

A splash of ground cloves

1 tbsp fresh-squeezed lemon juice

1/2 tsp turmeric (or fresh slices if you can find it)

Optional for badasses: 1 tsp cayenne pepper

Honey to taste

Bring all ingredients to boil, then simmer for about fifteen minutes. Added bonus: you can totes breathe in the steam to help with the breaking up of things. Add honey after pouring into mug.

Have Kleenex on hand, then feel better.

All in all, I hate being sick. Thanks for allowing this vent session. Please return soon for another.

*Unrelated.

Some Statistics I Just Made Up

I’ve been reading a lot of statistics lately. Like probably 87% of the current ones out there, and it seems like a lot of these stats may or may not actually be true. So I figure, if everyone is having at least 73% of a good time reading about these statistics, then I should write some of my own.

I’m really giving 100% here you guys:

1. 23% of women contain more cat DNA than human DNA. 

That is practically ONE in FIVE. Seriously, if you’ve had five girlfriends, you’ve also dated a cat.

2. 67% of people prefer dark meat over light meat. 

This statistic is true whether you’re talking about poultry or some sort of sexual innuendo. Both percentages are remarkably the same. if you are typically on the side of white meat, amp up your next chicken dinner with thigh meat and maybe invite Beyonce over for dinner because THIS:

Seriously girl, we are also 99% positive your thighs touch. Don’t even play me like that, Bey + Photoshop.

3. There is a 37% chance that the Apocalypse will happen right after you close out of this blog post. And there is an 100% chance that there will be no post-apocalyptic humans, because we will all be dead. Basically, if you even bring up the word post-apocalypse like you’re going to survive when the SHTF*, then all humans reserve the right to punch you one time.

4. There is a 13% chance you are wearing flannel right now. 

Look at yourself. Look at your closet. What have you become.**

5. 97% of morning people are serial killers. 

Of fun. Of happiness. Of joy. Of siestas. Of constitutional rights. And of people. Morning people kill people.

This isn’t from the movie Monster, it’s simply what happens when Charlize is up before 8am.

6. 78% of Facebook statuses are actually from shitty sources*** that serve your own self-interests so you post them on Facebook and it makes me sad & I cringe & then it’s the theme that I use to cry myself to sleep on Thursday nights only.

Okay I guess that was the point of all of this.

BYE.

*If you know what this acronym means because you think doomsday is coming, there is a 99% chance that I hate you.

**You’ve become sexy. Duh.

***Like me writing this blog. I am in fact a shitty source.