I have a foot fetish.

It isn't a secret. I've gotten better about it over the years. I used to freak out (as in shove you onto the floor almost breaking your nose as I tackle you) when people put their feet near/on me/my stuff. When I was younger I would force all of my friends to wear socks in the house. (I told them it was for their safety). And even though I'm not as OCD about feet now, they still freak me out.

Like now. My foot hurts.

You can ask anyone. I have a lot of phobias. Blood is one of them. When we have Health at the end of the year I have to put my head in between my knees at times to keep from fainting/becoming hysterical.

So right now I am clutching my leg to my chest because my foot is asleep.

When I was nine my ex-grandmother bought be a book of "Who, What, When, Where, and How's". One of the "What's" was What happens when your foot "falls asleep"? The answer was that when your foot doesn't get enough blood you experience a brief tingling sensation as the blood forces it's way through a compacted space. Of course this is the one fact that has stuck with me over the years.

So there you go. Blood and feet. My worst nightmare.

Moving on (while I continue to hyperventilate).

Today has not been a good day. I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom during third period because I was starting to cry. My math teacher seemed concerned. I'm going to have to thank him somehow for not getting upset when I spent fifteen minutes in the bathroom trying to gain control and missed half his lecture. And because he kindly ignored the fact that I was distracted and obviously texting throughout the rest of the period. I honestly considered asking him if I could visit the councilor, but I'm pretty sure she would call my parents if I told her everything.

Everything.

I'm the type of person who isn't going to lie to you if you ask them how they are.

I'm also the kind of person who isn't going to be blunt and just sit you down and tell you everything.

But I can tell you somethings.

My dad put an offer on another house this week. I love the house. It feels right. I'd have my own bathroom, something I've always wanted. And the finished basement would be all mine. But the whole reason I really want it is the stairwell.

In my room (maybe) there is door. It doesn't have a doorknob. It doesn't have a hole. You just have to squeeze your fingers in this little crack and remove the board. On the other side is a room. More like a tunnel really. The ceiling is about 3 1/2 feet tall, about 5 feet wide, and aprox. 10 feet long. This room is the stairwell.

I don't know why I love this so much. But it's almost like having a secret hideaway. there are stickers on the cement walls. I'm guessing that some kid about 7 or 8 once played under there.

I love the idea of passing things on. When I die I am going to will everything to a different person. It's like a part of you is moving on. Giving someone the same feeling you once had. Just like some 8 year old is giving me a room that may have once been used as a sekrit spy facility or a school for her stuffed animals. (The stickers are Barbie. Therefore I assume it was a girls room).

Moving on...

I want to talk to someone. She knows who she is. What happened in second left me shaking so hard I had to sit on my hands. I understand that maybe you don't want to talk about it. But that doesn't mean we can't talk. I have questions. You don't have to answer them. All I want is to make sure that this isn't some practice round. That you aren't working up to the big game. You know what I'm talking about. Suicide.

We all dabble in depression. When I experimented with cutting. Do you know what stopped me? I thought, "What if 20 years from now I found out that my daughter was a cutter? What would I do? What if my sister contemplated suicide? What happens then?"

People love you. Your mother, your father, your sister, your friends, heck even your teachers! And your right. Maybe we don't fully understand. Maybe we never will. But we aren't going to just leave you alone and act like nothing is wrong.

Life is full of cliché's. One of them is that when you fall people will always be there to catch you.

We can't catch you if you won't let us.

In conclusion...

I am thirsty. Nighty Night

~Emma

This might make sense, and it might not. But whatever.

My parents fight constantly. They expect so much of me, but I can't do everything. I'm not superwoman.

My grandma is dying. We all know it. I think that even she does. Yet she does nothing to help herself. She smokes, eats like a pig, and sleeps all day.

My aunt recently moved to California. My uncle is making the trip to meet with her today. I'm barely going to be able to see them.

I was sexually harrased. Of course I haven't thought of it that way until recently, but it's true. I was.

I hate school. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I want to start over new in the other school. But it's too late. Sure, my friends are in my classes, but I still hate it.

I'm no longer friends with her. I grew tired of her over dramaticness, and how mean she was to me. So I ended our friendship. It still hurts though.

There's more, but my parents are harrasing me again. And I'm not in a blog mood. *Shrugs*

-Jamie

I miss my friends.

Somehow I have managed to make the past three days fly by.

This week was my first week of school. I hate school. Sure all of my friends are on my team, but I guess that doesn't mean we'll have classes together.

My voice cracks every time a teacher asks me a question. Not because I'm scared or nervous. But because I no longer use my voice. I eat lunch alone. Well, not alone. With the boy who sexually harassed my best friend.

Fantastic.

Maybe it will just take some getting used to. Maybe I rely too heavily on my small circle of friends to get me through the day.

Or maybe I'm just super emotional lately.

I almost cried in English class on Friday. Why? Because we were learning about respect and my teacher said that she "Respects every child that walks through her door, because she knows that they are somebodies baby. Somebodies little boy or girl."

It occurred to me that I am no longer -- that I never was Carrie's little girl. That every kiss on the cheek. Every hug. Every mothers day card. Was a waste of my life.

I wasted my life on a woman who didn't even respect me. On a woman who did nothing but put me down day after day. And it makes me sick to think that I'm never going to get that time back. That every meaningful conversation that I have ever had with her. With anyone in her family was just a show.

And the worst part is that no one gets it. Yes. I hate her. Yes. I have been praying for the day that she would leave. For the day that my dad would finally catch on to the fact that she was having an affair. But that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt me. That it doesn't bother me that I'm only going to see my sister 5 hours a week. I've been practically raising her since birth for Christs sake!

I was supposed to be the one who teaches her how to shave her legs. I was going to be the one to talk to her about boys. I was going to take her shopping for her prom dress and I was going to eat Ben & Jerry's and watch chick flicks with her when she has her first bad break up.

After all I'm the one who stripped the sheets of her bed and make her a pallet on the floor when she wet the bed. I'm the one who gave her band-aids for all her invisible boo-boos. I'm the one who taught her how to do a somersault and the one who taught her how to play all the good games.

And it's so frustrating to go from being the sister she called mom to the sister she sees once a week if she's lucky.

And then there are these questions that keep me up at night.

How did it happen? It seems like just yesterday we were vacationing in New York and everything seemed perfect. How can it be that after getting so close with my grandmother, she could just drop me like Carrie did? No call on my birthday. Christmas. You'd think that after spending 12 years together she'd care about me enough to at least call to say that she can't call me anymore.

Will my dad get remarried? What if she has kids? Where will they stay? Will we have to move again? Will I have to change schools? Will her kids be older then me? Will she accept me into her family? Will he finally get it right?

And worst of all...

What if he gets divorced again?

I know it's selfish, but I'm not ready for yet another mother figure. Two divorces is enough for me thank you very much.

I stayed the night over at Lauren's house on Friday and we started talking about religion. I'm not sure how we really got on the subject. I remember mentioning missionaries, but I'm not sure how we even got on that topic. I admit it. Sometimes I think about joining the peace corps. I would love to be able to help people like that. The idea of saving someones life or helping out a starving man fascinates me. But am I really that selfless? No. Of course not. I can't see myself putting my life on hold for others. I'd love too, but I'm far too selfish.

But anyway, we started talking about how the bible says to love your enemy. I, honestly, could never grasp the concept. If someone were to shoot a person close to me and I saw them on the street 20 years later, I wouldn't -- I couldn't go up to them and tell them that I forgive them and accept them for who they are.

It's possible that I'm just over thinking it though.

I realize now that maybe I've been suppressing some things. I think spending the night with Kailey helped some seeing as she is in a similar situation and she can empathize without sounding like she is clueless.

Anyway I suppose I should start on my book for my project. I went to the library today and they didn't have the book I wanted, so I just picked up a random book by Jodi Picoult without reading the cover. It turned out to be about a girl getting raped.

A real light read...not.

So needless to say I'm not doing my report on that. I probably won't even finish the book just because it's so depressing. Back to the drawing board. =/

And even though I have spent all weekend with friends I managed to avoid the one thing that I really need to talk to someone about.

Actually there is only one person who I think would truly understand. Of course she isn't online and I probably won't have the guts to bring it up anyway.

What was my point?

Blah.

_______

In response to Jamie:

I think we should just make a vow to post once a week. I really don't want to have a certain day.

-Emma

Okay, well, I felt like writing something, probably since I was on TweeterDeck and Hayley G was all like, "I'ma gonna write in that there blog soon", which is totally what Hayley says because she's from Jersey or something and that down South you know they're total hicks. You know what else is down South? Yeah. Take that.

So I'm a little nerved 'cause my book from Amazin' is going to be here either tomorrow or Tuesday most to the likely. It's called Jeff Herman's Guide to Coal and Gold Mining: How Getting Your Hand's Dirty Can Result in Good Clean Fun.

No it isn't.

It's called...err...long title let me go look it up for the exact one...Jeff Herman's Guide to Book Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents. The 2009 edition. Which was published in late 2008. But no matter!

It was recommended to me by none other than Meg Cabot herself on her official website, so of course I, like Michael Buckley, had to have it. So it was ordered by my mother on Monday (my birthday) and should arrive, according to Amazon, in 7-10 days, though my mother says it usually takes less time than that.

I was thinking about, earlier, what I would do if it did get published and it made it somewhere. Whether it was the New York Times Bestseller List, Oprah's Fun-loving Bookity Book Club, or even just a shelve in my local Borders, like a senior that I knew who graduated this year and went off to a local, but private, college. I don't know if I want to spend my whole life being an author. Part of me wants to be something else. I want to major in liberal arts, not English, because English is so limited and with a liberal arts degree you can do pretty much anything. According to the Wikipedia...

The term liberal arts denotes a curriculum that imparts general knowledge and develops the student’s rational thought and intellectual capabilities[vague], unlike the professional, vocational, technical curricula emphasizing specialization. The contemporary liberal arts comprise studying art, literature, languages, philosophy, politics, history, mathematics, and science.

Doesn't that sound just plain interesting to you? I discovered it the other day and it sounds exactly like what I want to do. I like a variety of subjects in school, and I've wanted to be a million different things growing up. In second grade I read every book in my school's library about planets. The ones with the breathtakingly vivid pictures anyway. I wanted to be an astronomer. In third grade I loved Math and wanted a Math-type career, and I think it was a similar interest in fourth grade as well. In fifth grade, I don't know, I think I just wanted to be older, or be a famous pop celebrity. In sixth grade I'm pretty sure I wanted to be a movie critic. In seventh grade I was fascinated with politics and government,and after visiting Washington D.C. I was convinced I was going to work as an environmental lawyer and study environmental law.

But all through elementary and middle school, people used to tell me, and I'm not bragging here, that I was a great writer. In first grade my writing piece about hiking through the woods was broadcasted in the cafeteria in the television for all to see, and my story about not being able to fall asleep one night and seeing things scared quite a few of my classmates. It was written on report cards. It was praised openly by teachers. I read obsessively, drinking in words, though throughout third and fourth grade it was mostly "The Babysitter's Club" series, to such a point that my mother made me take out different books and instructed the librarians to not let me check out any more of them. I wrote my own script for when I hosted our school's academic showcase, twice, and was told that I had a natural stage presence.

And I tried being a writer. My first real attempt at a full length story was, and I regret not keeping it, a story about a girl named Katie, who upon entering middle school, lost her best friend Natalie to the popular crowd. It wasn't the best written story, nor the most original plotline ever invented, but I poured my heart into it for a few weeks before getting frustrated with the lack of flowing direction and deleted it from the email form that I was writing it in. Once I got my own computer I wrote on Wordpad or Open Office, similar stories about girls with simple, everyday problems. I even had a "blog" that was actually a girl keeping an actual, real written diary, similar to Amber's, except much less witty and way more about a girl she knew with anorexia. I deleted that blog. That was me. I deleted everything that I hated, every time a storyline went sour, every time a character fell flat. I never got far in these stories, with lack of word count I estimate that the lucky ones got to maybe 8,000 words before I lost the point of the novel.

To this day I scoff at girls on television or in movies who proclaim, "I want to become a writer!" I think, "Yeah, good luck with that career." Even people around me, this girl in my grade who wanted to be the next Sarah Dessen. The thing about the writing career is, to make it, you can't be the next Anyone. You have to make it on originality, concept, the words. I didn't want to be someone as lost in a sea of others as a writer, constantly having to prove myself again and again, never stable, never comfortable. I wanted a career that I would immediately be accepted in, a career that I could be good at and nothing else.

But I loved almost every subject in school, except maybe P.E. and Math sometimes, when I didn't like the teacher or the work was too this or too that. I loved learning a new language, I loved the planets and our solar system, I'm still fascinated with early history, the dark times, anywhere from anytime B.C. to like, 1600 A.D. I adore. I loved baking things in FCS and feeling like a housewife. I loved drawing, even though I stunk at it royally, in art. I hated Tech Ed, which was basically Wood Shop, because I don't think wood from our precious trees should be wasted in my incapable hands. I liked working on the computers. I loved culture, things, observing (not stalking) people and their activities, guessing who they were. When my parents occasionally took us places like Boston or when we drove to DC or NYC on the highway, I liked looking at people in their cars and wondering why they were driving, who they were driving for, what they did for work. They didn't notice, they were driving.

That's part of the reason why I loved New York City, it was this big, organized blob of people, places, food, stores and shops. Somehow the people generally harmonized, usually by ignoring each other almost completely, focused completely on themselves. Here in New Hampshire, people try to spark conversation with you when you clearly didn't want to. I liked New York because I wasn't expected to socialize while walking on the street or buying something. I was expected to do what needed to be done and carry on my way.

But I've gotten a little off topic.

Anyway, I've been praised, yes, for my academics. For Science, for Math, for Latin and French, for Social Studies, even for Art and FCS, and especially for my English. I don't know, maybe this blog was for my own benefit, because that Book is coming and maybe I'll become an author and share Amber with the world. Maybe I'll go to the New School in Greenwich or Barnard or Columbia or NYU (one of the surefire ways to make it in Manhattan is to go to school there). Maybe I'll stay in New Hampshire all my life and be a stay at home mom and go to UNH, most likely with my current classmates and major in something stupid and dead ended like Comparative Literature (oh God I hope not). Or maybe my life will take me somewhere else entirely. I just want to be somewhere, you know? Have a niche in society where I can say honestly that I belong, whether it's the Writer's Guild or the Environmental Protection Agency or somewhere in Something City. And these days I can't say that I'm too young to think about these things. I'm entering high school next week.

This blog was probably for my own benefit, but I liked writing it. Finally plotting down all these swirling thoughts in my head. And actually, my headache's gone away and I need to go to the bathroom, so I'm just going to post this.

- Jerrica
Future Something or Other

I don't exactly know how we've planned on doing this. Do we have assigned days? Cause that would be cool. We could be like the 5AG and not have to post for a month or something. Ideas? Even though it seems like Emma is the only one posting. But I haven't talked to the other girls, and they might just be busy. Have I mentioned that I'm out of the loop? It's sad, isn't it?

I am now officially an eighth grader. It's not really that big of a deal, and I don't feel very different. I'm sure that towards January when we begin to start High School papers and such I'll feel different.

School's pretty good. Most of my teachers are good. Except for my language arts teacher. She talks slow, takes too many pauses, and enunciates every word. She's also way to laid back for my taste. I miss Mrs. Pate. :( (Yes I just said my 7th grade teacher's name. Come and stalk me.)

I had this whole big plan about what I was going to write in my blog, but I've forgotten it. Damnit.

Boys. I admit it. I'm obsessed with them. Why? I'm not sure. They only cause shit that I don't need, but I can't stay away.

So, as you can tell my next topic is going to be about a boy.Shall we call him Smith? I think we shall.

Smith is a total nerd, but hates to admit it. He's in Venture, so Emma might be able to guess who it is, and she'll probably hate me for liking him. And I even hate myself for liking him. I mean, he's been a jerk multiple times. But sometimes there's those rare moments where he's really sweet, and those moments are just so amazing. <3. Two (Maybe three) of my other best friends like him though. Which causes some problems. So yeah. It sucks. Kind of, I guess. I mean, I'm not like in deep like with him or anything.

That's like really all. I might go to Jessi's (Friend) house tomorrow and spend the night. That would be cool. I guess.

-Jamie

P.S- Seventh graders are mean. And sixth graders are LITTLE!