Travelin'.

John and I are in the Midwest visiting family and friends. It's been pretty good. I totally surprised my parents when we showed up at the airport. I had told them it was just gonna be John, but then I came along too! It was great.

Rochester was a lotta fun. We mostly hung out with Tim, but John also got to meet the rest of my family. We celebrated Christmas, kinda, so he met all my nieces, too. They LOVED him! It was crazy, especially since he "hates" kids. I think he's full of shit, because he is awesome with them. He even bonded with Tim's ex-girlfriend's kid Brennan. He's amazing. :)

We just got to Moorhead, and it was a trip. The muffler on our car, like, fell off just outside Minneapolis, so we had to find a Walmart and do a quick fix. It sucked. So we got to Moorhead about an hour or so later than planned. So we just hung out with his brothers and friends. Not too exciting for me, since I always feel awkward around John's brothers/friends, but it's cool. I'm waking up early in the morning to have coffee with my ex-adviser, and the day is filled with friends. I'm pretty excited.

We're going to Bottineau on Friday to visit John's parents. I'm super excited about that. I love love love his parents. He doesn't appreciate them so he doesn't like them much, but he's just dumb. They're so great. Apparently they got me a gift card to Pangea for Christmas. John and I got his mom these cool elephant statues and I'm getting his dad some cool glasses and possibly an awkward shirt [if I can find it]. I'm srsly looking forward to seeing them. You have no idea.

After that, we're driving back to Federal Way. It's gonna be a long long drive. BUT! I get to see the one and only Sara Boom. So excited for that.

Random tangent. This girl I've had a crush on for forever started texting me the other day. Even though we're both in situations that would prevent anything from happening, I'm still really happy she started texting me. I get to see her while I'm visiting, and it's gonna be epic.

Anyway, that's all. I'm glad I'm visiting Moorhead because, as much as I hate Minnesota, I love the people in it.

-Laura

Lord, I was born a ramblin' [wo]man.

I'm at school right now. I always get here, like, 45 minutes before I need to be since Taylor is so kind as to drop me off on her way to school. It's kinda boring. I should've planned more to get things done in the morning. Oh well. Tomorrow is the last day I'll be here this early. I hope.

Anyway. Only today and tomorrow left for school. I told my Homework Club [after school program] kiddos that tomorrow might be filled with fun activities and candy if they're good. Yesterday was terrible, so it might just be a day with a special treat at the end. Some of these kids come in here with no homework and just wanna hang out. So frustrating. Maybe if they did so quietly, but they don't. And I don't get paid to babysit, so no thanks.

John and I went out to dinner last night. I was frustrated when I first saw him, because he told me about his day and he got nothing done, really. I had asked him to do a few things, and he completely forgot. It's not that big a deal, but it frustrates me since I'm at work all day and he's just chilling at home. Like, srsly. And it ended with me being frustrated, too. He brought up Tony, which wasn't the problem, but it just steamrolled into other trivial shit that we started bickering about. So instead of having some wine and whatnot when we got home, we pretty much just went to bed. Hopefully today will go better.

I'm planning on writing thank you notes to all the teachers I work with here and including candy canes. John and I went a little candy cane happy last night at Target. So we have boxes for ourselves, plus boxes for school, but there will most definitely be leftovers. So. Many. Candy. Canes.

I was excited to hang out with my friend Jonathan on Wednesday, but he has to work or something now. Things have been really awkward between us. Probably because of John but I think something else must be bothering him. I can only guess as to what that is. But I do have a pretty good guess.

I had a strange dream last night that I was at home, trying to bike to someone's house. I can't remember whose. It might've been Sophal. It was odd, and filled with people from middle school [like Sophal] and high school [like Jordan] and AmeriCorps [like Jade and Molina]. I'm not even sure what the purpose of the dream was, but I do remember there being butter pecan soy dream involved somehow.

I'm going to bake cookies today. Baking cookies, writing thank you notes and probably drinking wine. I feel like I should be an old lady with lots of cats, not a 23-year-old living with her boyfriend. Oh well. Life is relatively good. So I'll take it.

-Laura

Hooked into a machine.

So I already failed at blogging for five minutes each day. To be fair, I feel awkward blogging with John laying right next to me, since inevitably, most of what I write about is gonna be about him. Whatever.

Apparently posting the last post wasn't such a good idea. Or perhaps putting it on FB wasn't. Even my mama read it. Oops. Oh well. Honesty is the best policy [in most cases] so I make no apologies.

Last night, my bff was texting me about how great being single is. As much as I love John and love being with him, sometimes I srsly miss being single and having no one to answer to. Especially lately, since John and I can't seem to see eye-to-eye on anything. Mostly the whole Skye issue. I don't even know what to do about it anymore, so I think I'm just admitting defeat. I can't tell him what to do and I don't want to. So if he wants to keep talking to her, even if it is about strictly platonic things, I just need to get over it. I mean, it's irrational for me to be upset anyway. But I can't help but be irrational about it. It sucks.

What else. There are top secret plans in the works! I'm excited for them to unfold. But I'm also really stressed out about them. The next three weeks are gonna be intense. I've been suffering from, like, anxiety attacks lately. My chest just gets this super sharp pain in it. I'm hoping it'll go away soon. We'll see, I guess.

Tonight is another adventure in vegan Sunday night dinners. For those of you not in the know, a few of my AmeriCorps friends [Sky and Molly] and I began to have vegan dinners once a week. Since I'm vegan, the dinners are always vegan, and they've started to include more people. Obviously John, since he's living here, and on occasion, Tory, Freddy or Leeann. Tonight, Taylor is joining, and we'll see who else shows up. It's a Hanukkah-themed meal, since Sky is Jewish, and I'm really excited for it. John and I will hopefully be baking dreidl cookies, but if not, there will at least be cookies around.

I'll try to be less John-centric in future posts. But I make no promises.

-Laura

Liiiiiiiife.

Alright. So if I had written this earlier today, it would be a completely different update. However, I didn't. So this is what you get.

I haven't updated since I started at my site [if my memory is right]. A lot has happened, but at the same time, not much has changed. I still love my job. Working with kiddos is amazing. I really enjoy going to work each day. And I changed my schedule, so I'm working with even more kids [something like 80 now]. I get to interact with many more than that, but I'm documenting 80. And I'm working with three kindergarten classes now. I love love love kindergarteners. So cute.

As for my personal life, shit's crazy. John moved here on Nov. 6. I should give you the entire low down about us as of late. In order to do that, we gotta travel back in time. So while John was in Australia, after I came back from visiting, we decided to have an open relationship. Srsly bad idea. [In hindsight, I'd say we basically broke up. At least, that's how I feel about it. Clearly, neither one of us gave a shit about the other's feelings, so that's pretty much being broken up, right?] Anyway, this decision was made and it was shit from the start. I started playing around with the idea of hooking up with other people pretty much right when I got to Washington. I'll admit, I was being really selfish. So some stuff happened.

Jump to my birthday, and John gave me permission to hook up with this couple. So I did, but I broke some ground rules John had set. As a result, John wanted to end our open relationship, be exclusive, but still have the chance to fuck other women to punish me and feel like it was fair [or some bullshit. I don't even know.]. Oh, also, before the couple thing happened, John had made out with this woman Carolina. And I wasn't comfortable with their friendship because it was clear that she liked him, but he kept seeing her anyways, although he kept telling me nothing was going on besides that they had made out a few more times, once after the couple incident [and he said he felt guilty].

Fast forward to shortly before he is to move here. He hid from me that he was still talking to women online. One of these women is Skye. He became FB friends with her, so I just asked who she was, and it came out that he had been talking to her. That's it.

However, that wasn't it. Because he told me later that they had hung out and whatever. He told me this while still in Australia, and since John had never lied to me before, I assumed he was being honest.

Big mistake. So he moves here, and despite what he told me, I still wasn't feeling that he was being totally honest. I don't know. He lied to me once about Skye, why wouldn't he lie to me again? So one morning, I had this terrible idea to creep on his iPod, since I knew he was logged onto FB. And that's when I found out that Skye had given him head. I confronted him about it, and he told me that that was all it was. And even though I still was skeptical, I believed him. Because why would he continue to lie when he was so clearly caught?

Well, apparently, that seemed like a good idea, because he did lie to me. Turns out, he fucked Skye and Carolina, and he wouldn't have told me if I hadn't been a psycho and creeped on his email and FB. To be honest, I didn't really care that he did that. I mean, whatever. But I was upset because he kept talking to Skye once he got here. Like, telling her how hot she was and that he'd date her and accepting pictures from her. All sorts of bullshit. That hurt a lot. I mean, like. Why does he need to be talking to another girl when he is living with me? Am I not enough? I was srsly hurt.

To be fair, I wasn't completely honest with him either. The dude from that couple, Tony, and I hooked up once and I didn't tell John. I told him everything that happened with Tony, and I thought that that was that, and we were gonna start being completely honest with one another. But then today, I asked him if he had been talking to Skye [which I wouldn't like, but I wouldn't keep him from doing]. He told me no and got all defensive. So being the crazy person that I am, I snooped again on his FB. And he had been talking to her. Or has been. Whatever. And instead of just being honest when I asked him about it again, he acted all stupid. Bah.

So now he's sleeping on the couch. This trivial shit is trivial. I wanna punch him. And it sucks because I don't trust him, but we're supposed to be moving in to Jade's place soon. Fuck.

Anyway. That's that. I'm done for now. I don't wanna talk to him or deal with him. It all just makes me nauseous.

And I wouldn't have typed all this, but today's training was about emotional intelligence, and Miss Debbie McGee said journaling for five minutes would be good. So blogging is my form of that, and this is a no-holds-barred forum. So if you want sugarcoating, go somewhere else.

-Laura