5. List your bad habits and/or addictions and what you have tried to rid yourself of them.

You'd think this would be a difficult topic for a lot of people to brooch, but the fact is, I sort of hate myself all the time, so I don't really have trouble coming up with things that need to be changed about me.

Which leads us to point one. I have low self esteem. Like, really low. But it's weird, because objectively I don't really think I'm that terrible. Granted, appearance-wise, I'm like a four on a good day, and I am not particularly nice, but I'm at least loyal to my friends, and somewhat helpful (to my friends again- fuck volunteering and shit) and fairly entertaining and decently smart for a girl. But everything I do doesn't feel good enough. I have pretty much no self-worth and my general outlook is that I am completely replaceable in every regard, to all people. So that leads me to feel like nothing I do matters and everything is sort of this downhill spiral of self-loathing after that. The one bright spot of this is that I've felt this way pretty much my whole life, so at this point I'm inured to the feeling of worthlessness. Okay, well, maybe that's not really considered a "good" thing, but it maintains the status quo and I'm fine with that.

My one "habit" that I need to stop is biting my cuticles. Actually, before I was about 16 I just straight up bit my nails. But for Junior dance I got acrylics (the one and only time) and with those on I couldn't bite my nails any more and so somehow I just stopped. However, the habit was quickly replaced with biting my cuticles. This is both better, because now I have long nails to paint, which slightly detracts from my oddly large hands (I swear to god I'm not a man), and worse, because sometimes I bite them so badly they bleed. I would pretty much have to wear gloves to stop this, or just never be bored again, because it's definitely a bored habit. However, I don't see either of those happening. We all have vices I suppose.

I guess the other habit that's really terrible is the procrastination, which ties in partly with the permanent apathy mentioned above. The procrastination keeps it from devolving into a total sense of ennui (I can't even pronounce that word correctly as I took Spanish, not French, so it wouldn't serve me well to be consumed by it as such) because I constantly have to distract myself to procrastinate- usually with movies/television shows or books. But we're talking like... reading an ENTIRE book or watching a whole series run on Netflix here. While it's interesting and I suppose increases my cultural IQ, it's not particularly great for, say, my school IQ. To improve this, I would have to not be able to successfully do stuff at the last minute and still make decent marks. (Un)fortuantely for the case of the procrastination, I can pull that sort of thing off, so... not gonna happen.

I think Elaine would like me to stop nagging her about working on her med school application, but that isn't going to happen, either.

As far as addictions go, I suppose there's Nutella. Or food in general. I eat too much. It's why I'm fat. Thankfully I have no issues making myself work out, so it keeps me from becoming morbidly obese rather than just overweight. To break this habit, 1) food would have to stop being delicious and 2) I would have to get some goddamn will power. But that goes back to the procrastination/effort thing, which goes back to the apathy, which is really the source of all my issues apparently.

Finally, I suppose we need to look at the source of my apathy. I don't like failing. I don't like letting myself or others down, and I don't like being vulnerable. So I try not to extend effort to things that I might possibly fail at. I don't like being shut down- it's why I never flirt with guys, I just assume I'll be rejected so why bother. So the apathy is a defence mechanism because it keeps me from caring about things that might end up breaking my heart or whatever. The problem is, it all probably started as a defence mechanism where deep down I really did care about stuff, but sometimes I'm starting to think that it is really true a lot of the time now. I mean, I'm fairly easy-going to begin with and don't tend to have strong opinions on stuff, but I think I genuinely don't care about myself and thus my life at all. Not in an emo way, just in a "meh, whatever" way.

This post ended up being more depressing than I intended. Here are some pancakes.

4. What music album would be used for a movie about your life?

I know I haven’t updated with these prompts recently, and that’s been for several reasons. One, because I had people here this weekend and was terribly busy preparing for them and getting as much work done as possible before they came- which translates to watching all my shows’ finales and going to yoga. Also I’ve been putting off this next prompt because it required much thought and I knew I’d ramble about it. “What music album would be used for a movie about your life?” Don’t ask me questions about music. There’s just too much.

First of all, if I just had to choose one album that already exists to define my life, I can’t even begin to guess what to use. I feel like no one band has a single album that captures the complete essence of my life. Or anyone’s really- life is a weird, jumbled thing, and if a band is any good, their albums should be holistic enough that they can’t really express that hodgepodge of human experience that we call life.

So instead I suppose I’d have to create an album with a collection of songs that sort of represents each chunk of my life. I haven’t lived that long (even though I feel really old sometimes) and obviously I have more musical attachments to more recent parts of my life, and also of course there are certain songs that represent one very specific thing. Now, keep in mind, my life never has been and probably never will be terribly exciting- no whirlwind romances, jet-setting action/adventure, or heart-rending drama. It’s like the lives of the other 99.9% of the human race- pretty average, good enough for me but not that fascinating to other people. I don’t have very good stories or mini-plots within my life, but fortunately I am a good enough storyteller that I’ve fooled people into thinking I’m interesting. But what I’m getting at here is that no one would bother making a movie about my life, so this soundtrack is moot, but I’ll do my best to come up with some stuff.

Birth/infancy: I really can’t come up with anything good for this. Obviously I don’t have memories from back then, and I don’t like corny pop/country songs that might potentially be about children. (Is that what pop music is about?) I guess just to be really visceral about it I’ll go with “Wet From Birth” by The Faint. It’s the only song about birth I can come up with.

Childhood through pre-puberty: again, didn’t listen to a lot of music at this stage in my life. I suppose just insert some generic Gloria Estefan song in here because that’s what I listened to as a child- because my parents have awful taste in music. I’m sorry. Also maybe a Spice Girls song from when I was about 9 or 10.

Prepuberty: “It’s All Been Done” by Barenaked Ladies. To this day I have distinct memories of this song and being in 6^th grade, which was awful for me because I had no friends. The one girl in my class who was nice to me (because she was awesome and didn’t judge people for being uncool) introduced me to BNL and I think it was the first band that wasn’t distinctly pop (although it was pop, but alternative pop at least) and which I formed visual memories along with the music.

Puberty/ early teenagerhood: This is actually sort of tough. I can’t think of anything to definitive for this period. I listened to all that poser punk crap that was so popular at the time, Avril Lavein (or however it’s spelled) and Good Charlotte, but also stuff from the radio like *Nsync and Linkin Park and such. I guess just something generic that represents the early 2000s.

Age 16: Now we’re getting to the point where I gave up on the radio and MTV and started listening to music for myself. I won’t pretend any of it was good necessarily, but at least I was in control of it. So there’s two songs for this. 1) Swing, Swing by All American Rejects because I remember singing it at Safety Town to each other and that was the first CD I ever spent my time in my car driving around listening to and 2) Story of the Year Anthem of Our Dying Day. YES I KNOW THEY’RE TERRIBLE. But I just remember singing out of my car in the pouring summer rain and thunder, belting at the top of my lungs. That’s a pleasant memory.

Age 17: Photobooth- Death Cab. This song reminds me of me in a way I can’t explain. There is more than one blog post about this, so I won’t go on.

Age 18: Swing Life Away- Rise Against. A perfect graduation song and I feel like it really captured that summer before my college career started.

Age 19: Something by the Shins. I don’t care what, I guess Red Rabbits maybe, or Phantom Limb. Those are the two that make me think of that year the most.

Age 20: Holland, 1945 by Neutral Milk Hotel. I had had this CD for a long time and never really listened to it until then and that song was just like… BAM. Not that the words or anything have anything to do with my life (I’ve never even read the diary of Anne Frank) but just… the song works for me I guess.

Age 21: Probably two things. Hot N’ Cold by Katy Perry, which I am completely aware is awful, but it reminds me so fondly of being 21 finally and going to the bars, and of course on the night of my birthday they played it twice in a row and it was perfect. And on a less stupid note, possibly Family Tree. For various reasons that song works very well for that year.

Age 22: To think that was just last year. There’s a lot of stuff that could work, but I have to go with The Suburbs (the song specifically) by Arcade Fire. With all the travelling I did and the major change of moving to the big city, I feel like it’s a perfect song to express how I felt about what I left behind.

Age 23: okay well I’m not even halfway through this, and since it’s so recent and there are so many things in my mind, there are a lot of options. I have a lot of different songs that make me think of a lot of different things very specific to the present moment in my life. But I’m going to go with Mondegreen by Yeasayer because right now, at this moment 1) it’s stuck in my head 2) the weather is gorgeous so I’m in a bright mood, and this is a bright song and 3) Yeasayer is on Conan tonight!

Okay that’s what I got. If I actually wrote a movie where I attempted to be interesting, I’m sure this list would change. It’s just a general vibe from what I’m coming up with right now.