Chapter 1

Hello everyone,

Let's jump right into the first chapter of my adult life.

It's 4:30 a.m. and I decided to create a blog. It was not an impulsive decision - impulsive decisions are not me at all. Instead, I prefer to mull over things until they sound better in my head than they would in practice. This was the case with this blog. If you are reading this, you are probably more bored than I am right now and could probably use a little humor in your life. And I shall step up to challenge. I find most things that happen to me pretty funny. I mean, I spent the first 20 years of my life thinking that my life was pathetic and depressing. But then I started to look at my life as though it were a stranger's life on a TV sitcom or something. And you really start to see the humor in things.

I'm in my senior year of college. You could probably sum up my entire college life in a blog post. A boring one at that. But I shall spare you. I won't be modest here - I'm a smart kid. I've had a 4.0 GPA since I was a freshman and I study at an Ivy League school. That pretty much leaves time for zilch in my life. But I kind of did well - had a steady boyfriend for 3 years, a great group of cute friends whose virtuousness put Barney to shame. Not bad to look at either.

Everything sort of fell apart about 6 months ago. My boyfriend dumped me, my parents got divorced. My adorable sausage dog passed away (Polo literally was the only member of my family who I could stand for extended periods of time). My GPA sort of went downhill. I spent the last semester literally eating cookie dough in my room, watching Katherine Heigl movies to drown out the pain. And some strange antidepressants, too. I was just coasting. "Coasting" is a term that I have sort of adopted as my own and defined to be what I consider myself to have been doing for the past 6 months. Doing whatever it is that will keep me afloat. Not really caring about anything or having any sort of drive. Just going with the flow and surviving.

So what brought on this blog? Well, 2011 begins in 2 days. I am stuck in a gigantic house with my dad after what could possibly be the worst vacation EVER. I had planned out this amazing trip to Florida with my high school BFFs. But the blizzard in NYC sort of killed those plans. What's more, I ended up stuck somewhere in rural Brooklyn outside a broken down cab, knees deep in snow. Wearing Florida clothes. Nothing but 50 bucks and a dying cell phone in my pocket. It was pretty awful. When I finally got back to my sister's apartment in New York, (after dragging an 80 pound suitcase through a blizzard for 30 blocks in Brooklyn from one closed down subway station to the next), I realize that I have to spend the next 72 hours in close quarters with my family. What a perfect way to end an already miserable vacation.

A couple of things you should know about my family:

1- if we are all in the same room for more than 4 hours, the universe WILL implode.

2- my sister has extreme rage issues. She swings from extremes of emotion and is generally an extremely volatile person. She hates my parents and generally resents them for everything.

3- my dad is a variant of my sister. He's much more sensitive about everything. He loves us, I know, but he spends every day thinking of ways to make us better. At everything. He is the king of micro management and he will drive you crazy if he takes a liking to you. If he doesn't, you're probably screwed too.

4- my mom loved Polo, our dog, much more than she ever loved us. That's possibly the only thing I am certain of about her. She's depressed after thirty years of a failed marriage to my dad. She's the sweetest person deep down, but she has trouble expressing any sort of emotion at all. She will consciously choose to like anything my dad dislikes and hate anything that he doesn't. Which makes her relationship with us extremely complicated and in flux.

5- Me, I'm what people call the "normal one". But that's only because I have definitely perfected the art of repression. I hate confrontation and when my family gets at it, I generally zone things out. But I have 21 years of bad memories locked up somewhere and my biggest fear is when that Pandora's box is going to spring open and bite me in the ass.

So this blog is my way of giving myself a breather from the whirlwind that is my life. A way to sort of sit back and write about my days as though they aren't actually happening to me. So that I can sit back and say "haha, that girl is so fucked."