i know. i'm blushing.

Mmm, cereal. My go-to breakfast or mid-day snack (or dinner, I won’t lie). Earlier this week, I got home from school, poured myself a giant bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and sat down in front of the TV to relax for a few. As I polished off the last sugar-coated square, I noticed something kind of weird. A tiny dark clump floating in the now sugar-saturated milk. I thought, “It’s probably just a clump of cinnamon or maybe a little broken off chunk of cereal.” But it looked odd enough that I scooped it up into my spoon and went to examine it under better light.

I don’t know if I’m glad or regretful that I did that.

Dead bug. Chilling on my spoon. In a little puddle of milk. It was a creepy, brown, segmented bug with about a million legs packed on to it’s tiny body. Who cares if it was probably only about 1/16 of an inch and you needed a magnifying glass to really see it, it still completely grossed me out. I sat there looking at my bowl of sugary milk, freshly eaten, and I wondered how many of those critters made it down the hatch into my stomach.

Gross. After inspecting the bag and finding a tiny hole in the bottom, I threw it out, sprayed down the shelves in the cupboard, and kind of swore off cereal for a while.

And now I sit here, days later, stomach rumbling, so hungry for breakfast, craving some cereal, but too afraid to try. I wish I could think of it as camping, where you don’t really care if a bug or two joins you for your meal. But that mental game isn’t helping. I just really prefer it if there aren’t any bugs in my cereal. Or at least that I’m unaware of their presence.

PS. Don’t google “bug in cereal” unless you want an adventure. Apparently, my 1/16″ bug is nothing.

Everyone who told me that I wouldn’t need air conditioning in Washington, except for maybe three days a year, was flat out lying.

Just putting that out there.

Also, even if I did only need it for three days a year, those would be the three happiest days of my life, sitting in the comfort of my cold, air-conditioned home while the rest of the world boiled away outside.

It’s 5 o’clock at night, 93 degrees outside, and probably 193 degrees here in my top-floor apartment.

.. .. ..

Alright. I’m done whining. For now. Thanks for listening. Back to FNL.

We had some house guests a couple weeks ago who introduced us to Friday Night Lights, and now we can’t stop watching. We burned through the first two seasons in two weeks and started on season three tonight. (So far, season one wins.) My point in telling you all that is this: These past two weeks of total Texas immersion has begun messing with our brains. I swear we’ve both started talking with a Southern drawl. It may be slight, but it’s there, and it’s kinda freaking me out. Guess I’m doing my mama proud.

I just found this:

I happened upon some of my old journal entries from many years back, during some of my darker days when just being alive was hard work, and this was one of the things I found.

It’s so strange and funny, and sometimes shocking, to read things written in the past. Because I don’t think I always realized what I was saying… how true and real the things I hoped for could be. How now, years later, I’d still be me, but be so different. That I’d have such a new view. That Me Now would be reading these words from a place that Me Then would have wanted to be. That it’s possible to grow. That those growing pains back then were just a part of the whole, long, messy process. They were a part of my “failing and continuing on anyway.” They were—in some terribly inconvenient and uncomfortable way—a part of my dream.