One Of Those Days...

(This will be my last post on this blog. From now on all blogs will be posted to http://juliasherred.com/blog/ and remember there is the main site as well that is updated many times throughout the day http://juliasherred.com. Please remember to add them to your rss feeds if you are a regular reader of this blog)

You know the days that I am talking about. Where you wake up and you just know its going to be one of those. Where you wake up and you feel as if someone once again stole your body while you were sleeping, ran an octoathalon and then returned it without your knowledge. Where you see the signs of daylight peaking through your blinds, taunting you and you just want to throw your pillow over your head and tell the sun to go back to bed, only to remember you have a lot to do.

Then you walk down the hall in zombie mode. You go through the automated motions of making coffee, saying good morning to the kids and head to your office waiting for the coffee to finish. There are many things out of the norm that part of you brain picks up on but you and Self are not fully communicating with each other just yet. Self is yelling at you in the back of your mind but you tell it to shut up because you haven't had the blessed coffee yet.

Mechanically you check your e-mails, overnight tweets, Facebook and surf other sites that are part of your waking up routine. But Self won't stop nagging at you. You wave your hand at Self to shoo it away as if it were some annoying fly buzzing around your head.

Ah, you hear the coffee is done. So back down the hall you head, robotically. You grab your mug, fill it with coffee and add your cream and sugar. You look over into the living room and say, "Self something doesn't seem right." Self replies, "I have been trying to tell you..." "Shhhhhhhhh, I haven't had my coffee yet", you respond before Self has time to finish its sentence.

Back to the office you head, coffee in hand. You sit and stare in a complete daze at your computer screen, unblinking. Moments pass, maybe even minutes before you realize you are staring and were about to do something, only you do not remember what. You sip your coffee as if it were nectar from the gods. "Something doesn't feel right" you say to Self. Self tries to speak up again but you shut it down quickly.

15 minutes later, you realize your coffee is done and it is time to go get your second cup. Now you are a little more open to communication. As you are pouring your second cup you notice that your feet and the bottom of your sweat pants are wet. Why would they be wet? Self, not feeling brave enough to speak up, "I have been trying to tell you!" You look over at the fish tank and notice that there is 3 inches of water missing from it. What the hell? Self is now annoyed, "I have been trying to tell you!!! But no, you won't listen to me yet again!" FUCK!

You put down your cup of coffee and walk over the fish tank to see water all over the floor. You pull it away from the wall to find the water pump has sprung a leak. You grab towels to clean up the mess and that is when you definitely know its going to be one of those days. Once you have cleaned up the water and refilled the tank, you grab your coffee and head back to your office wishing you had nothing to do.

But you have a lot to do. All day long your find yourself completely spacing out and having to snap yourself back to reality. It one of those days where things normally guaranteed to perk you up and bring you to reality, fail miserably. And you cannot afford this. Especially when you are going away in a few days and have a list 9.4605284 × 1015 meters long needing to get done and there doesn't seem to be enough hours in the upcoming week to get it all done.

Your day is full of just going through the motions. Nothing seems real. Everything is in a thick, heavy fog. You go back into the living room every few moments to make sure it is not yet again flooded. The minutes of the day swing from dragging on to all of a sudden realizing 30 minutes or more have passed with you doing nothing but staring off into other worlds. These other worlds you don't even know what they were. It would be okay if the other worlds were inspiring productive ideas but they are just black holes. You just come to realization that you were lost somewhere unknown. The day is many variations of the above.

You start to hear things. Strange noises, such as the sound of dripping water coming from your ceiling. You look up and down and all around trying to find the source of this noise. Seeing nothing, you realize you are just paranoid because of the mess you found earlier when you finally became somewhat aware of your surroundings. These noises won't stop. You keep swinging back and forth between getting sucked into the void to becoming aware of things around you. You hear the noises many many times and everytime you look, nothing is there to make them. The noises are taunting you.

Then you look over a final time because you are yet again hearing these strange noises (and even so you look over, you expect not to see anything) only to find something standing there. It is a figure of some sort. It takes a moment for you to comprehend all that is going on in your environment. You were not expecting to see anything and something is there and making noise none the less. Your heart leaps into your throat (especially since not to long ago your house was broken into in the middle of the night while everyone was in it) and you scream WHAT THE FUCK. Then you come to the realization that it is your child making Darth Vadar noises. You break down into tears and start to shake uncontrollably. Your normally sweet child has just transformed into some type of demon monster and starts to laugh uncontrollably because he just scared the living shit right out of you.

Tears start to stream down you face. The demon spawn is very proud of himself. One of the reasons why he is so proud is because you have a habit of scaring him yourself. You do not mean to though. It is never purposeful. You are just a quiet person and the child gets lost in his own little worlds while he is playing video games. You go into the kitchen to do something and he jumps after you have been there for a while asking, "When and how did you get there?" Your child thinks you have the ability to apparate. You remind him if you could apparate there would be a definite cracking noise everytime you did so.

Regardless of the above, the demon spawn has made it his life's mission to try and scare you. He tries to sneak up on you at every opportunity and startle you. But it does not work as the demon spawn is never quiet enough. Finally he has victory! And he wasn't even trying. However, due to your lack of awareness throughout the day and you finally sticking a gag in Self's mouth, you have no warning that the demon spawn is approaching your office. He won't stop laughing and you can't stop crying and shaking.

Poor demon spawn starts to think you are angry. So you have to give him a hug and kiss and reassure him, no my love I am not angry. Today is just one of those days... Happy in the knowledge you are not in fact angry or upset with him, away he goes. Every now and then you hear him laugh and snicker and yell down the hall, "I still can't believe I finally got you!"

Yes today has been one of those days for me.
julia sherred

Name Game

Every once in awhile I run across a Facebook note where I think, "HA! That would be funny to do." Here is one such note:

1. YOUR REAL NAME: Julia Christine Sherred

2. YOUR GANGSTA NAME: (first 3 letters of real name plus -izzle.): Julizzle

3. YOUR SPY NAME: (favorite color and favorite animal): Blue Tiger

4. YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME: (your middle name and street you live on): Christine Hawke

5. YOUR STAR WARS NAME: (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name): Sheju

6. YOUR SUPERHERO/CRIMINAL NAME: (Your 2nd favorite color, and favorite drink): Purple Coffee

7. YOUR IRAQI NAME: (2nd letter of your first name, 3rd letter of your last name, 1st letter of your last name, 2nd letter of your moms maiden name, 3rd letter of your dads name, 1st letter of a siblings first name, and last letter of your moms first name): UESACCS

8. YOUR WITNESS PROTECTION NAME: (parents' middle names): Mary Ernest

9. YOUR GOTH NAME: (black, and the name of one of your pets): Black Fish

10. Your ghetto girl name (first 3 letters of your first name and add -iqua): Juliqua

11. Porn Star name: (Name of your first pet and the first street you lived on): Skipper Beaver (Beaver isn't the first street but its the first street I remember living on)

Are you brave enough to share your names with me?
julia sherred

And The Countdown Begins

Today is the 1st of August. Do you know what that means? That means it is one more month until I leave for Seattle for PAX09!

I am so excited! On Thursday, I bought the supplies to make my costume for the Pre-PAX TriWizard Drinking Tournament and the dance off dual between myself and the Slytherin Muggle. SQUEE! My costume is going to rock! I have decided to go as a younger, sexy version of Professor McGonagall. I cannot wait to unveil my costume when the time comes.

Now not only am I counting down to PAX, but I am also counting down to another vacation. In 13 more days, I will be going on a short vacation. It has been almost 2 years since I have gone anywhere. It is long overdue. So of course I am beyond excited that I will be going on 2 vacations in as many weeks. The anticipation is started to really eat at me. Hopefully I remain sane waiting.

Can I has vacations yet? KTHXBAI

julia sherred

Well Its Somewhat Finally Done

After being two months being behind schedule, my website is done. Well at least for the time being. My blog will also be moving as well. So if you subscribe to my blog, there are two new sites to add to your reader/feeds: juliasherred.com and juliasherred.com/blog.

I am not happy with the format of the blog how it is now so that will be changing shortly. But after working on my site for the last 24 hours straight, I think its time for a break. And I still haven't gotten all my programs back for my computer after the dreaded reformat.

There is another site that will be coming shortly as well that solely focuses on the independent artists that I play on Party 934. You will have to watch the other sites for more information on that.

For the next little while, I will post both to here and my new blog until everyone has a chance to move over. I will post a farewell when this blog finally goes to bed. It has outlived its usefulness.

julia sherred

I Win 12 Internets!

So my friend @cwknight asked for people to send him dirty text messages today. At the end of the day, he would pick a winner for best message.

He received some interesting messages, some of which you can read here. They involve donkey shows and peanut butter, chili dogs, dishwashers and a bunch of other things that are confusing. I decided text messages were amateur and decided to leave him a voicemail because A: I do not have a cell phone (*gasp*) and B: voice mail is so much better. AND I WON! I WON 12 INTERNETS!

Now really you should go read his blog cause there is some funny shit on it, but if you are too lazy, you can listen to my winning submission here. According to @cwknight this is why I won: "Audio, Web 2.0 company mentions, AND a sexy sign-off? How could she lose?!"

On another note, it was interesting after I left that messages how many other requests I had for messages on their voice mails. A couple people told me I should start a business of phoning people and leaving them weird messages. Maybe on day HA!

julia sherred

Dear Technology,

It is with a heavy heart that I write you this letter. I am really sorry to say this, but our love affair must come to an end. If we do not take a break now I am afraid that it will only end up in divorce. I wrote you a warning once before, however it looks like you did not take me seriously. Truly, I am sorry.

I RAM your motherboard, I unzip your files, I fill your empty slots and you turn on me. When you asked me if it was okay to stick a Trojan on my hard drive, I thought it was foreplay. I did not realize you were serious. When you asked if you could dangle your worm in my..., well you get the idea. The days of me FlickR'ing your YouTube in return for you Twittering my Yahoo are at an end. It is time for me to reformat our relationship. Maybe once that is done we can re-examine our relationship.

Believe me when I tell you, I plan on sleeping around while on this break. When I have calmed down and had a chance to decide if our relationship is what I want, we can talk. If we decide we can continue this love affair that has lasted a lifetime, you better not pull a Rachel or this will be your future:

Yours truly,

Jules

julia sherred

Heffalumps and Woozles

When I was a child I spent a lot of time in imaginary worlds. It was necessary for my survival to escape. Luckily I had a great imagination to escape into. I use to do a lot of role playing. Not the sit around the table, roll dice type of role playing (but that is so cool too) but I would step into these characters, run around and be them for hours at a time whenever I had time to escape life. When I played Transformers with my friends, we WERE Transformers. We didn't play with toys. The same goes for G.I. Joe, He-Man and She-Ra, Justice League and a myriad of other characters. In those games I was anyone else but me. I needed to be anyone else but me. These escapes into other worlds is probably one of the reasons why I love acting to this day, why acting is still a vital part of my personal mental health program. My childhood was not a happy one. My mother is an alcoholic and she is bipolar. Not a great combination. For as long as I can remember, I was the mom of the family. It was my job to take care of my mother and my little sister. Most of my time was spent being an adult and not a child.

Despite the troubled childhood, I do have wonderful memories about those years and a few good memories of my mother. I wrote before I owe my love of gaming and games to her. My love for books and reading is also due to her. There was nothing I looked forward to more as a child than the moments where my mom would take time out of her life for my sister and I. Times where my sister and I were not a distant afterthought. Those moments normally involved being read to.

The book she would read to us most often was Winnie The Pooh. She would read to us out of this ancient copy (in our pre-6 year old minds it was ancient) which belonged to her brother when he was our age. It had a brown hardcover with a red inlayed outline of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet. The pages were yellowed with age. When you opened up the pages, a wonderfully comforting musty smell would waft out. On the inside cover, which was wallpapered with a repeating image of the single cover image, was an inscription stating whom the book belonged to and whom it was from. It was perfect. My sister and I knew magic was about to happen when our mom would pull out the book and tell us she was about to read.

When she read, she was full of life. She would make voices for all of the characters and read to us with great enthusiasm. It was like listening to a full orchestra. There was a richness and fullness to her voice. Her voice would rise and fall, slow down and speed up, ebb and flow. She was animated and happy. We were happy. My sister and I would listen intently as she very carefully unravelled the story for us, vividly painting pictures in our heads of the adventures of Christopher Robin and his toys. Winnie the Pooh made us a family. So it is of no surprise that my sister and I would take these stories and make them our own reality.

When my sister and I were younger, we lived on two properties that had a ton of acreage. The first of these properties had a little bridge over a little creek. The property was so vast, we would have to drive golf carts to get from one area to the next if we wanted to get anywhere in good time. But on days when we were in no hurry, on days where we had moments to escape, my sister and I would walk down the road and visit the creek. This creek was the source of much amusement. On the banks, grew watercrest. Sometimes we would pick the watercrest and pretend we were proper ladies eating watercrest sandwiches. But most of the time, we would play Pooh Sticks.

My sister and I would take our times finding just the right sticks or pine cones for this game. After all, a lot is at stake during such a game as Pooh Sticks. This is not a decision you make lightly as any old stick will not do. After we had found our lucky sticks, we would very ceremoniously walk to the dropping point. I am sure that we had rehearsed dialogue that would take place as all of this happened, but to this day I cannot remember it. All I remember was the anticipation that we felt finding the stick. My sister and I ensuring we did not rush the decision that will either cause us win or lose. Making sure that every moment of the escape was exact and picture perfect. We would drop our sticks very solemnly and then quickly run to the other side of the bridge to see who's stick appeared first thus declairing the victor. Once in awhile we would imagine Eyeore floating under the bridge with out sticks. From time to time, we would include extra sticks and pretend all of the animals from the 100 Acre Wood were there playing with us. And if it was I who lost or my sister, we would start up some conversation directly out of Winnie the Pooh about how the stick needs to be dropped in a twitchy sort of way or other such methods for effective stick dropping that would enable victory.

Our own Adventures of Winnie the Pooh did not end there. We moved to another place that had acreage. The property was not as vast but there was more usable forest, allowing us to take our role playing to a whole new level. Heffalump hunting! We would spend hours upon hours digging Heffalump traps, covering them with pine branches and pine needles, and making sure our tracks were covered while we found a place to hide and wait. Wait for those sneaky Heffalumps to show their faces. Wait for the perfect moment for us to jump out from our hiding place and surprise them while springing the trap. Because if you are not smart and if you are not careful those tricky Heffalumps will sneak up behind you and steal all your honey! We would also spend many hours with our noses to the ground following Heffalump tracks. This is very tricky business. You have to tiptoe ever so quietly because if you make a noise you are bound to be Heffalump food. If by chance we broke a twig, heard a snap or a rustle in the woods, or even the noise of any bug or animal, we would yell and jump for the nearest cover. We would shoosh each other and try our best to breathe ever so quietly and pray the approaching Heffalump would not find us. This is very serious business. If you ever had the unfortunate circumstance to run into a Heffalump (such as my sister and I did on many an occasion) you would understand why. They are not exactly the friendliest of creatures.

There were other Winnie the Pooh adventures we would reinact from time to time, but none gave us more pleasure than playing Pooh Sticks and going Heffalump Hunting. Those memories stand out the most. Those two games were the beginning of many years stepping out of reality and stepping into fantasy. Those two games allowed me to be free. Those two games allowed me to be a child.

Winnie the Pooh will probably be my favourite book for the rest of my life. When I was growing up, I could not wait for the day that I could impart on my own children the joy and wonder that is Winnie the Pooh, for the days when we would have our own Adventures in the 100 Acre Wood.

Winnie the Pooh may be a silly old bear but he is my silly old bear.

julia sherred