At the start of my Abnormal Psychology class, we were warned about the “medical student syndrome” - where students studying this stuff tend to start analyzing themselves and thinking they have all of the problems they’re thinking about.

I don’t know if I actually have this syndrome. It is difficult to be objective when diagnosing yourself, I guess. I’m not even a Psych major, I’m just a minor. But I am really terrified that I am falling into depression.

The whole thing with the movie organization yesterday was just a small cherry on top of a sundae full of shit. All of this work is stressing me out; even when I get all of my work done for the day, I have this very strong need to keep moving moving moving, find more work, get more done, be more productive. I haven’t actually sat down to watch one episode of one TV show the entire semester so far. As an American, I feel like there’s something wrong with that. (Sad, but it probably is indicative of something wrong with my brain. I just can’t stop DOING THINGS.)

I also miss my family terribly. No semester before have I been so acutely aware of how alone I am up here in the city. And it’s not because I don’t have a lot of friends. But for some reason, I don’t enjoy going out with them. It feels too forced and I don’t feel like going out and spending precious money just to put myself in awkward situations. I prefer to be alone, if not with my family.

I’m especially missing Josh something awful. I thought I was doing pretty good after he left; I cried a lot before they left to go back to Kentucky, but then I was okay. But I think I’m kind of repressing a lot of my anxiety, and just how much I miss him and need him around me. Lately, every time I get extra stressed or worried about something, I instinctively think about Josh and wish I could go home and just have him hold me. I miss him so much.

And of course, none of this would be contributing to a diagnosis of happy and joyful.

Depression runs in my family. My mom was depressed for a long time, my sister was, and I was depressed for the first time in middle school. I’ve been fine since, and I thought that since I had been able to change my mental state and my entire way of thinking that I would be impervious to this disorder ever after. Well, I guess genetics don’t give up that easily.

I am sad. I want to go home.

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Today is my lovely future husband’s 23rd birthday! Happy birthday baby… if I haven’t already said it a million times. I hope you’re coping well in your old age without me there to support you right now.

My my, you’ve come a long way from your 21st birthday (or rather, a few weeks afterward) when you got passed-out drunk at some club in Florida. Fortunately, this was before I knew you.

I also wanted to share this video I watched earlier today that really, really made me think. I have a horrid confession to make: I am not registered to vote. I KNOW, I KNOW! I’m 21 years old, I should’ve been registered YEARS ago! See, I always had this feeling that people shouldn’t vote unless they know the candidates’ platforms and actually know what they’re voting for. For most of my life, I have never paid any attention to debates or politics, so I never thought it would be right to “use” my right to vote.

Well, this year, I don’t think anybody can help but know how Obama and McCain stand on every issue known to man. I even read about them in an issue of Glamour (or some other trashy woman magazine). And after watching this video, I realized that I DID know what I wanted done with this country, and I knew WHO I could choose to do it.

So I am printing out my voter registration and mailing it tomorrow afternoon, just in time for the Kentucky October 6th deadline.

REGISTER! And PAY ATTENTION! This is a big election, people! Even someone as politically retarded as me can feel it. Can’t you?

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First of all, just wanted to say I had to switch back to the old theme. Something about the Harry one was not satisfying me. I will be working on either making another one or finding a premade before long.

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I have been super worried about money lately. My savings seems to be rapidly dwindling, and I still haven’t started my tutoring job because the stupid school won’t ever call me back. I have to start by Wednesday or I lose my opportunity completely, which means I have to go looking for another job in the middle of the semester. There was one shining light yesterday, though! I’ve been accepted into BlogHer, and am putting their ads where the Google ones were. I know using your blog for money may be reprehensible for some people, but I’ve already made more from BlogHer in 16 hours than I usually do from Google in two weeks. As far as I’m concerned, you all are just helping me pay for my honeymoon and my house. And you don’t even have to do anything. But I’m still thanking you for it.

Speaking of honeymoon, this is something else Josh and I have already talked about, and even thoroughly planned. (Okay, well, I did the planning, but he nodded and said “Sounds good.”) Thing is, it’s going to cost almost as much as the wedding. Which I guess doesn’t really matter, since we’re paying for the honeymoon and my mom is paying for most of the wedding (and his parents will most likely help a bit). And before you think that’s still outrageous - we have a very low wedding budget. I honestly can’t fathom how people spend tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding. I would feel bad even ASKING my mom to dole out that much dough, you know? I felt bad when I said the budget was going over $3000!

So, at first, I thought that we should go out of the country for our honeymoon since we both have our passports now. I looked up a private oceanfront villa at a Hilton on a beach in Cancun. With our budget we could spend something like six nights and seven days in that villa - but we basically wouldn’t have money for any big activities. Just the occasional bar or lunch out. It still sounded lovely, though, and the pictures of the villas were gorgeous.

We had actually already agreed on this, when I had a random burst of inspiration. What if we went to California? True, it’s not out of the country, but it’s across the country, and certainly somewhere neither of us has ever been near. Then I started thinking about what we would do in California. I thought of Disneyland right away. Then I realized… California has TONS of theme parks. I started doing research. I talked to Josh about it. For the same price of the villa in Cancun, we could stay at a cheap-ass Days Inn for seven nights, rent a car for the week, go to FIVE different theme parks, have a few nice dinners out, and still have spending money for souvenirs and stuff.

I asked Josh which idea he preferred. First, he gave me the runaround, wanting to know what I THOUGHT first, as usual. It didn’t take much to pull his opinion out of his butt though - he was excited about the theme park hopping.

So that’s what we’re doing. A theme park honeymoon. Yeah, we’ll probably be staying in a shit-ass hotel with no mini-bar, but it’ll have a king-size bed… and that’s all we really need on our honeymoon, right? And during that week, we’ll go to Universal Hollywood, Disneyland, California Adventure, Magic Mountain, and Knott’s Berry Farm, AND maybe go to the insanely expensive Pirate Show dinner, eat at Hard Rock Hollywood, and still have around $300 for spending.

Now THAT sounds like a memorable honeymoon. We’ll save Cancun for our 10th anniversary.

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Okay. Josh and I are so close to buying this one house we can taste it. It’s right next to my mom, sure, but that just means free dinners all the time.

We almost bought it earlier this summer, but decided that since I still had a year of college and no steady job yet, that we should wait. Well, the price dropped $15,000. It’s been for sale for over a year. It’s a bank foreclosure, three acres of land, over 2000 square feet with attic space and a full unfinished basement. It is GORGEOUS. It does need work, including having windows replaced and putting a sink in the main bathroom. But we both kind of fell in love with it from the first day we broke into toured it.

Since they’ve already dropped the price so much, and it’s been for sale for so long, I have this weird feeling that the bank would accept a really low-ball offer. But I want to wait and see if they lower it themselves again first. If a lot of people start touring the house and we think we might lose it, we’ll probably go ahead and make an offer. But we’re crossing our fingers it’s still for sale when I graduate, and in that case, we will definitely be making an offer.

I think the reason it hasn’t sold is because we’re out in the middle of nowhere. No one wants to spend the gas to drive all the way out to where we live just to LOOK at a house nowadays. There aren’t any pictures on the online listing except the exterior, which is probably working in our favor. Yes, this house is a fixer-upper, but superficially we can see absolutely nothing majorly wrong with it. And there was a family living in it right up until it was foreclosed on, so the electric and plumbing can’t be total shit. More importantly - if they accepted what we’re prepared to offer - the monthly payments would be way less than what we’d have to spend on rent anywhere around here. Double win.

I am really excited about Josh and me having our own place. There are just a few habits I hope he hasn’t been hiding from me, or else I may have to give him the boot:

• Leaving cabinet doors and drawers OPEN. Why it is so difficult for some people to close these things when they’re done with them, I will never know.
• Cleaning up spills in the bathroom by moving the bath rug over it with his feet.
• Leaving HUGE. CHUNKS. OF FOOD. in the kitchen sink after rinsing out dishes.
• Pretending those giant dust bunnies next to the refrigerator aren’t really there. Or following you as you walk by.
• Cluttering up the end table within MINUTES of me cleaning it off.
• Peeing in the kitchen sink. Even if he removes the dishes. Bathroom sink I can deal with, because hey, our eating utensils don’t go in there. I just wouldn’t want to drop my contact or anything.

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Last night on Josh’s lunch hour, we were having one of our conversations about children again. Sometimes we discuss how many we’re going to have; sometimes we discuss names, for whether we have boys or girls or both; and sometimes, it gets a little more serious.

Like last night, I asked him how he felt about termination in those situations where doctors are able to detect certain mental or physical deficits within the first trimester. Usually, he would ask me for my opinion on questions I ask before he answers. I suppose he then decides how he’s going to answer based on whether or not he thinks he’ll piss me off. But on this particular subject, he didn’t hesitate to answer, and was very clear.

“No. No matter what would be wrong with it, it’s my kid and I’m going to love it just the same.”

But then I asked him about those situations where it’s a disease or deficit that would be 99% likely to kill the child within a certain amount of time of being born - say one year or less. See, I’m still on the fence about this. First of all, in general, I don’t think it would be fair to the baby or us to see it to full term in this situation. We’d just be putting ourselves through a lot of pain, and a waiting game, to see when we’re going to lose our baby. And most likely, the baby would suffer, and wouldn’t even get to live long enough to appreciate its life. But at the same time, there’s always that 1% chance the baby COULD live to be much, much older. And, people die. It just happens. So if I had a baby with a deficit that caused it to die after one year, how would that be much different than if it (Bob forbid) got hit by a car or something? The difference is knowing… but again, everybody dies. So should we deny that baby the right to live for at least a short time, regardless of the psychological impact it would undoubtedly have on us?

Josh, again, didn’t hesitate.

“I’d still want to have it. Unless it was putting you at risk.”

I absolutely love how excited he is about having kids. And he keeps saying things like, “I can’t believe I found a woman that wants to have my babies.” Seriously. Who WOULDN’T want to have babies for someone that adorable?

We have not yet decided how many we want to have. We’ve already picked out two girls’ and two boys’ names, though. (Yeah, we’re that crazy.) (In case you were wondering: Joshua Andrew for first boy, Benjamin Ace for second; Layla Marie for first girl, Samara Michelle for second.) But supposedly, having twins runs on my mom’s side of the family, and that she had twin sisters. However, she was separated from them when she was really young, so she doesn’t remember if they were identical or fraternal. Only fraternal twins are hereditary; identical are purely accident. So if they were identical, then that has no bearing on whether or not I’m likely to have twins. But if they were fraternal, not only does that factor in, but it is my generation’s turn (as it also supposedly skips generations in her family). (Can you tell I don’t always trust my mother’s anecdotes? *cough*)

My sister had two pregnancies, neither were twins. Of course, she did have them very young. The older you are, the more likely you are to have fraternal twins. I want to wait until we’re closer to our 30s, so that Josh and I have a few years to ourselves to enjoy. This means I’ll be more likely to have twins, regardless of genetics.

Josh and I both think it would be cool to have twins. And we both agree that two kids is the max we’d want, so he’d get snipped up after that. The problem is, what if we have one the first time? Do we stop there? Because what if I ended up with twins in the second pregnancy? Then we’d have three. And while we would OF COURSE love them all, that’s just not what we want.

We might end up with just one in that situation. Then we can spoil it and I can spend all my time reading my Abnormal Child Psychology book trying to figure out how not to screw it up.

And if I do screw it up, then hey, maybe we’ll try for another one ten years later. I can start all over!

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