They shot at my boots and told me to dance...

I have a 15 page paper due on Friday. Thanks to the wonderful website JSTOR, I should be able to find enough sources to write a paper on a topic that I know very little about. At the moment, I should be in the basement or on the 2M floor of Gorgas library finding the other sources for my book. Instead, I've been sitting here for the last four hours, wasting resources that other people could be using to do school work or research, to search Lawrence Arms videos and trying to not feel like a creep lurking on peoples' Facebook pages (which failed, by the way. I always feel like a creep for lurking).

So I was at my sister's house for Thanksgiving dinner with my family. It was me, my mom, dad, brother, sister, brother-in-law, and my dad's sisters and their spouses and offspring. Nothing too out of the ordinary. Up until a couple of years ago, we always did Thanksgiving with my mom's side of my family. As I was riding with my brother down to Caroline and Mark's house, we passed our grandmother's old house and I commented that it's still weird to me that we'll never have a family gathering there or set foot in that house ever again.

When I got to town Wednesday afternoon, I went straight to my sister's house. She and Momma were already cooking. If there is something that my family does well, it's cook. I'm for real. Paula Dean can kiss my ass. My mom and sister are the best cooks in the world. As Caroline was getting reading to make the dressing, I saw the note cards with the recipe on the counter. Step-by-step directions written in cursive and neat lines on the cards. It's handwriting that I will always recognize, handwriting that always makes me smile and always makes me a little sad. Before she started mixing the ingredients, my sister took a picture off of the coffee table to set on the kitchen counter. It was a picture of our grandmother. I never asked her why she put that picture in there, but I'm pretty sure I know why.

Back to Thursday. We had all finished eating and my aunt's husband was filling out a family tree, asking our names and birth dates and all of that shit. It bugs me a little bit that the dude that my aunt is married to knows more about my family than I do, but whatever. What really aggravated the hell out of me was when my aunt was telling me about a relative, I think great-great-great-great grandfather, and said that he was in the ledger at the courthouse listed as a slave trader. She then asked me if it feels good to be superior. I can't begin to describe how much this rubbed my ass the wrong way. Superior for what? Because someone four or five generations ago made a living selling people? No, that doesn't make me feel superior. I think it's disgusting and anyone that believes that it makes them superior makes me disgusted. Honestly, I'm ashamed to know that, even if she may be wrong. I hope like hell that she's wrong. I don't know much about my family history. Hell, I can't even tell you the names of my great-grandparents. All I know is that a bunch of them grew up dirt poor and worked for everything that they had. That's what makes me feel superior.

Whoa, damn. It gets really high up here on my moral soapbox. I should probably go find those books for my paper. Fifteen pages due by 11:30am Friday. I think I can do it. Then I've got a 10 page paper due next week for another class and I already have the sources for that one. Yeah, this paper is going to be my bitch. Both of them are.

I officially drank too much this past weekend. Last night was the culmination of beating the hell out of my insides when I passed out before 9pm. I woke up to a nice make-up job and a bunch of new pictures of me looking like a turd. It's a good thing that I'll be too busy to drink over the next couple of weeks.

The computer desks in Gorgas keep fucking up my left arm. Every time I sit at one of these for more than a few minutes, it aggravates a nerve in my left arms and the pinky and ring fingers on my left hand go numb. It's weird. It took me a couple of days to realize that I wasn't stroking out.

Yep, I'm outta here. Gotta get them books. I'm going to give you what is probably the most depressing song in the Off With Their Heads discography. That's really saying something, too. Read the lyrics to any of their songs. Regardless of how upbeat the songs sound, the subject matter is some heavy shit. Addiction, depression, suicide. Maybe that's why I like them so much. I love the hell out of some sad songs and these take the cake lyrically.