the Secret Life of the Bookworm

I love to read, i have ever since i was a little girl. My dad and i would cuddle and he would read to me until i was old enough to read to him. I still remember the first book we ever read together: BFG by Roald Dahl. I remember being impressed with myself every time i was able to read one of his crazy made up words, and the smile my dad would get on his face when i would read a difficult word without having to sound it out.

In Jr High and High School i would hide the fact that i would carry around books, and i didn't tell people, but i LOVED that my high school had a mandatory reading period. Other kids would groan every single day, and i would join in, but have my book in my hand ready to go before the bell rang. Sometimes when i didn't feel like going out with my friends, i would tell them i was too busy with homework, or that my parents were 'making' me stay in and i would hide out in my room with snacks and read for hours. I get frustrated on the stretches where i have to work back to back shifts because my only opportunity to read is during my never long enough lunch breaks, or leave my husband in the living room to snuggle with our animals and read a few hours before we have to go to bed.

Its a bittersweet thing that the books stores are closing all around us. I was very happy to still have a Borders close to where i work, and even though i have a kindle (and i love it probably more than i should) i would sometimes walk around on my lunch breaks and just be around the books. I know that probably sounds strange, but its something i must have gotten from my dad. There is a little thrill that comes from perusing the different sections and the treasure hunt of a new book. My favorite experiences doing this have always been when i was travelling and came across a little ma and pa shop, i think it has to due with the atmosphere. Does anyone understand what I'm describing or do i sound like a total loser?

Early on in our relationship (back when he did stuff because he was still trying ha ha) we would lie together and read aloud to one another. The funny part of this story was that it was the first Harry Potter (if that tells you how long ago this was) but he was never really into it, he just did it to make me happy. Now, i carry books (or my kindle) around with me everywhere i go because you never know when you are going to get a chance to read. I am still made fun of for our trip to Chicago when everyone was in awe of the buildings around us and the city... and this is what i was doing...

I am not embarrassed to say i was reading Twilight for the first time (all the books had already been published- i usually think I'm not going to like something if everyone is obsessed with it but my little sister Lili dared me to read the first book on the plane and i spent the rest of my trip tracking down the other 3 in various Walmarts haha)

I don't know why i am obsessed with reading books that are movies, but it is one of those things i almost cant stop myself from doing. As soon as i see a preview for a movie that was based on a book i am all consumed in finding that book and reading it before the movie comes out. Most of the time i think it makes watching the movie or tv show better, (like Twilight, Harry Potter, Pretty Little Liars, Dear John, Revolutionary Road, and I'm sure i will be adding the Help to that list once i see it). There have only been a few times where i have been disappointed, but i was also disappointed with the book so it was no surprise (i am referring to the Lovely Bones which got all this attention, and in my opinion sucked!)

I am also obsessed with books written by celebrities. Its a known quirk of mine that i love celebrities and am all knowing of their lives. They also tend to be really great writers. Some that surprised me and turned out to be some of my favorites are Chelsey Handler, Rob Lowe, Tina Fey, Lauren Conrad, and Lucielle Ball - just to name a few.

To conclude my all over the place taste in books (my iPod artists would reflect this as well) i also love the books that you wouldn't hear about on tv or in magazines, because you have to discover them yourself. The unknowns, as i like to refer to them. To list them would be pointless, since no one has heard of them lol but i have found some real gems by trusting the description on the back cover.

All this is a result of my latest visit to the going out of business Boarders near me. I picked up 6 books and paid less than $40 for them. I am happy my pocketbook is not empty, but i am sad that soon i wont have the option to explore the books, to feel them, smell them, and just get lost in the unknowns... What kind of books is everyone else into? What is it that you like to read?

Here is my 'que' of books if you will that i have scored from going to the closing sale every paycheck... its quite long and it doesn't include the multitude of books i have downloaded onto my kindle waiting to be read...

"The Wedding Girl" by Madeline Wickham (she is also known as Sophie Kinsella)
"Something Borrowed" and "Something Blue" by Emily Giffin
"My Booky Wook" by Russell Brand
"The Day I Shot Cupid" by Jennifer Love Hewitt
"The Suicide Index" by Joan Wickersham
"The No Asshole Rule" by Robert Sutton (to help me with my management skills)
"My Horizontal Life" by Chelsea Handler
"Mean Little Deaf Queer" by Terry Galloway
"The Private John Lennon" by Julia Baird (his sister)
"The Blind Side" by Michael Lewis (this is the only one i didn't wait until i saw the movie)
"One Day" by David Nicholls

I am also looking for the book that inspired 'i love you phillip morris' but i have been unsuccessful... At some point i need to finish the many books that i have started to write myself but get stuck and move on to the next. One day i suppose i will finish one and then maybe i will become an unknown ;)

Which one should i read first?

Two for the Money

Although i have no idea what that movie is about, i liked the title so i stole it for this post. I am hoping to gain some advice on what the best system is to manage our two lives (and dollars) coming into one.

Before we got married we had separate accounts and we were always pulling cash out to give to the other to balance our bills or outings. When we decided to move in together we started taking turns paying certain bills, and eventually fell into the regular routine of each of us taking care of the same bills and it all evened out perfectly.

When we got engaged we decided to open a joint savings account for the wedding, and we had automatic transfers from our separate account going into the savings account that we happily referred to as our fun money. Unfortunately, now that we live on our own we are transferring money in and out of that account almost daily, which apparently is a problem for our bank.

About a month ago, Kevin messed up big time with out of our bills, and it really screwed us over. I was absolutely and insanely mad about the whole situation, feeling like if i wanted it done right i should do it myself. However, i don't have the freaking time to do it myself, so i started to get upset that i couldn't count on my husband to take care of it when i already had so much on my plate. I spent about a week absolutely furious with him, and he spent that entire week trying to make it up to me. Of course he never meant to mess up, and these things happen, but at the time i just felt like i had had enough when it came to money and i was sick of talking about it.

Then i realized (after i was done being mad of course) that i don't want money to be a thing that i get upset about with my husband. I don't want it to be one of the things we fight about, and until that time, it had stayed out of the things we ever had to have conversations about. So, we are looking to change that. I want to get something straight, we are by no means 'rollin in dough' but we aren't scraping the bottom of the barrel (most of the time) we live somewhere in the middle, occasionally with a little extra and sometimes figuring out which bills will be paid late. So how do you manage it?

I have gotten the advice that we should just close our separate accounts and only have a joint- but we each spend a lot of time making sure our own accounts stay current that it kind of freaks me out to have 2 people spending from the same account at the same time. On the other hand, having to transfer back and forth is no way to manage successfully either...

So i put it out there to all of you, what is working for you and what isn't? Help a newlywed out ;)

To procreate or not to procreate...

If you have read the notes i sometimes post on my facebook, then you know that my opinion on expanding our family changes on a daily basis. Literally.

There are times when i watch my husband with the various children in our life, and i see the gentle and loving side of him come out, and it literally feels like my heart is melting in my chest. There is a different dynamic to my husband and i. If we were to have kids, we know that one of us would like to be able to stay home with them until they are ready for pre-school. That person would probably not be me.

I love kids, and i know that i would be over the moon for my own but i dont think i could survive every day at home. I am blown away by the many people who can, i admire them even. However, I need stimulation, i need to have adult conversations, i need to be on my own schedule. Kevin is the most patient one of us, and lets face it- he is more domestic than i am. We joke about him being a stay at home dad, but i think he secretly loves the idea. I'll admit now- i do too! I would love to be the one that goes out and makes the moolah and then comes home to enjoy my family while he takes some time to relax.

On the other hand, i was at Borders the other day reaping the benefits of their going out of business sale. I was perusing around and i went into one of my favorite sections (psychology) and there it was, a copy of the newest edition of What to Expect When You're Expecting and i started to have a mini panick attack. All these questions starting running though my head: What if i can never buy a hard copy book again? What if i can and its an arm and a leg to get? Isn't this the kind of book you need a physical copy of? How do you stick post-its with ideas and thoughts on a kindle? Wouldnt my color coding highlighting system be best for this book? And then i realized that i had started to sweat and i had to walk away from the book.

As soon as i was in the next isle i was able to calm down and start perusing again and before i knew it i had worked my way back over to that stupid book again. It felt like it was pulling me towards it, so me being the stubborn brat i can be just stood there staring at the book, trying to tell myself that i was being stupid. If i thought it was smart to buy this book (at 30% off mind you) then just buy it- why do i have to feel weird about it. I picked it up and instantly felt this calm settle over me. It was the strangest feeling, especially because i was in the middle of a busy going out of business sale and no one around me was any wiser to the mini drama i had just experienced.

When i got home and started showing Kevin all the books i got i immediatley felt like i had to justify it to him. My husband, he isnt so good at hiding his feelings so i was nervous to his reaction. To my relief, he thought it was cute and i only got an eye roll at my bit of crazy, instead of the lecture i thought i would get. It hit me then, that if this is something that we know we are going to eventually pursue, why do i have to feel strange about educating myself. Isnt that what your supposed to do if your going to take on a new challenge, or something you've never done before? Why do i feel the need to justify this to anyone- i can read about something that will one day be in our future, and its really no one else's business.

This is something i would like to work on, to let the pressures of being a newlywed melt away and just focus on how i actually feel instead of what im supposed to feel.

You Again

I recently watched this horribly written movie starring Kristen Bell. It could have been a hilarious movie, but instead it was one train wreck after the other. Its about a girl that was tormented by Odette Annable's character in high school and then this girl pops back up later in life and pretends not to know Kristen Bell. This movie sucked. The only thing it did for me was make me reflect back on how different i am now from the person i am in high school.

This is what i don't understand about people, everyone can reflect and recognize their own journey, but they have a hard time understanding someone Else's.
I feel like high school is just a game of survival. Everyone falls into a groove that helps them survive the day. My first 2 years of high school i was lucky enough to survive on my good qualities. I got to rely on the fact that i was ignorantly happy about what was going on in the world. I only knew my immediate surroundings and at the time that was good enough for me. I had incredible friends that made it easy to be my silly self. I always wanted to be in the middle of the fun and there was plenty to be in the middle of.

Unfortunately my junior year is when i had to change the way i acted just to survive. My great friends from the year before were gone, and the ones i had left- well that's a really long story that i don't actually know the reasons behind, but in the end all i knew was that i was alone and they made it their mission to make me feel as small as possible and even attempt to get me kicked out of the one place i felt at home: the theatre. That's when i realized that if had a sharp tongue before they did i had the upper hand. I didn't like it, in fact i even made a girl cry because of the things i said, and i ran into the bathroom and cried my eyes out.

I had to put up this front like i really didn't care what anyone said about me, but of course i did. I acted like the bitch they wanted me to be, and i still don't know why. If i had just stayed the self i was the year before i might have been able to keep someone on my side, but it was just me alone. I knew it was happening, and yet i didn't even try to do anything about it. I think i made a lot of mistakes when i was younger- who doesn't ya know- but i decided to beat myself up about it. I decided that i deserved what was being thrown at me, and let it keep happening and even adding to it with my own behavior.

Luckily, this circumstance is what brought me closer to the Choir community and if found some really great people that helped me feel like my old self again. Over the summer from junior to senior year i fell in love, met incredible people, and started to feel the anger and hurt melt away and self confidence start to creep back in. Then, senior year started out great. I was on top of the world, until a 'mean girl' if you will returned from my past.

She had moved away a few years ago but now she was back, and it wasn't long before she was starting trouble right there in my safe haven of choir. I was not completely innocent either, as soon as i started to feel like my perfect world was going to come crashing down i reverted back to my old ways of surviving. I foolishly thought i had to protect what was mine, and i did not act any better than she did. This is when i was at my skinniest- i lost so much sleep and every time i would try to eat my stomach would hurt so badly that all i could do was sit and cry. I hated the situation i was in, i hated even more that i helped myself get there when i thought i had made so much progress getting back to me.

It wasn't until the end of my senior year when i realized that everything i knew was going to be gone in a matter of weeks that something inside me clicked: Who fucking cares?! These girls that spent all their time attacking me online- that was all they had, and my reactions were only going to keep it going. I deleted my account and focused on soaking up every last minute i had in the things that were making me happy before they would be over.

I heard from everyone (because of course this was a public situation) that my deleting only made them try harder and i cant explain how hard it was not to go read it, and it was even harder because i could imagine what they were writing and i couldn't stop myself from thinking how i would get back at them, but i didn't.. for once i was able to keep myself from making a mistake that i was used to making over and over. It was even harder when the relationship i had had (and caused a lot of this drama) ended. It was easily one of the hardest things i had ever gone through in my life up to that point- and staying off the Internet talking about it was just as hard- i had all these feelings that i couldn't communicate and the shame that my 'mean girls' were right in the end- that we wouldn't last.

Then, a bright spot came into my life. A gift from God. I met my now husband, Kevin. He was there for me during one of the hardest times in my life, and he didn't judge me when i would get upset about my ex, he would stay and hold me while i cried. I should probably explain something- i am friends with every single ex I've ever had. So of course i still tried to hold a friendship with the most recent one, because we were so important to each other from ages 13 to 18... how can you just not care about someone? We tried to be friends but we are just so different, and there was so much hurt there, that a friendship didn't work out. We kept trying though, and every time it blew up in my face i would be heart broken all over again, and Kevin understood.

Over my 6 year relationship with my husband, he somehow showed me that it was ok to be myself again. I said in our vows, that from the minute i met him i started to become a better person. He says i was just able to be me, and i guess he is right. He is the only person on this earth that knows every single detail, every side, every emotion that I've ever had- and he has always stayed. I know that people say you need to love yourself before you can love someone else. I have to say that is probably true, but i like to do things my own way and this is no exception. I had to see that the real me is actually lovable before i was able to embrace it. I had to make sure that someone wouldn't run first, and Kevin is the only one who never made me feel bad for anything, he thinks all my quirks are cute even.

I can say that now, at 25 i am exactly the person i want to be. That is why its hard when i re-connect with someone from my past. I kind of cut myself off from everyone i knew back when i was trying to survive and failing at being the person i wanted to be. I worry that when someone sees me in my home town, they will stay away from me on purpose and not see me. I worry that people i had grudges or problems in the past wont believe me when i say I'm over it. (because lets face it- anyone who holds a grudge almost 10 years later has a freakin problem!) I'm sad that some people aren't able to move past the person i was before, and i suppose i deserve that.

If i could tell those people anything, it would be... I'm sorry. I'm sorry if i ever made you feel bad, or upset, because i do know what it feels like on the other end, and i did it anyway. I wish i could show people how different i am, how i can be, and everything i still want to be in the future. On the other had, i still wish i could get a few apologies from the people that really hurt me when i was young, but i do know that is never going to happen and i was able to move on. I am proud to say that I've never been happier in my entire life, that i am proud of who i have become, and a lot of that credit goes to finding my other half.

I think its ok to loose you self a little bit, you learn that way. Its the people who can't admit when they've done something wrong, or the people that don't see the problem that truly worry me in this world. A little self discovery goes a long way.

Happily Ever After... Oh, there isn't a script for this part of life? Shoot...

Something not a whole lot of people know about me is that i write- all the time. I am currently in the middle of writing two different books, and for some reason i can never finish one, i am constantly bouncing back between the two. I think the problem is that i need a place to get out all the other stuff swirling around in my head out so that i can focus on my other stories. My pen name is Cheyenne Kira, and i thought it was appropriate to carry that name over to my blog as well.

I decided to start this blog because i find myself wondering what other people in our situation are like. I know that we are not the only couple out there that choose to do things the "responsible" way. All i mean by that, is the way that everyone else wanted us to.

My husband, Kevin and i actually met way back in Kindergarten. We joke a lot that if we had known then that we were looking at the future love of our lives, we probably would have spent more time getting to know each other. Instead i went on to date many different guys, and he became a bit of a make out whore. After we graduated high school, we still hadn't figured it out. I was at the end of a tumultuous relationship, and he was basking in the glory of all the diff rent girls that visited the local Safeway just to get a peek of him and his surfer hair cut.

After i finally decided to end my relationship, i was in need of a cuddle buddy. I wasn't as in need as Mila or Justin, but i definitely wanted someone to look at me and make me feel cute. Kevin was willingly that guy, and loves to remind me how he was only supposed to be a rebound and somehow i got hooked. We then dated for over 4 years before he asked me to marry him. I was ready about 2 years in, but he wasn't quite there yet. He wanted to wait until we knew what we were doing in our lives, until we had a solid plan. Finally, we were drunk one night and i somehow convinced him that the perfect time to propose was never going to happen, we would always have something happening and none of it would perfectly fall into place.

We were only engaged for 11 months, i couldn't even wait an entire year to marry my prince charming. We had a wonderful wedding- well it would have been if it had gone according to plan. A sunset wedding on the sandy beach, but freakin mother nature had different plans and we were forced indoors. Although everything that could go wrong did, it was still one of the funnest nights of my life.

I thought we had finished our contribution to society, but it turns out the world had different plans. Now that we're married everyone wants to know whats happening next. The way thing are "supposed" to go, rarely happen that way. So far we have been on the track that everyone has wanted for us. We lived together for 2 years before we got engaged, we had the big wedding, and now everyone is waiting for us to complete the cycle: a house and a baby.

This is where Gulianna Ransic said it best "I Do, Now What?" See there are a few hitches to this happily ever after business. We live in California, and if you know absolutely nothing about real estate in CA, even then you know its almost impossible to buy a house in CA. Who has time to save up money for a down payment with rent, utilities, student loans, one of us still in college, 2 full time jobs, pets and oh yea- time for your husband and you to enjoy each other? Our plan now is to move home when my husband graduates next June. We are very lucky to have both sets of parents who would be happy to have us, but the open ended question of which place to go depends on the next part of happily ever after....

Babies... I'm sure i will have many things to write on this topic but for now i will just say that its complicated. When is the right time to start trying when we know that in less than a year we will be moving home, and what about work? I am on the fast track to success, so where the hell does a baby fit into that? Another hitch in our story is my PCOS. There are many things you can do for PCOS, but the honest truth is that it makes it harder for us to conceive. It will take us longer than most couples, but we are ok with that, because we are still trying to figure out when we are emotionally ready for this.

Even though i have many questions, concerns, and worries i hope to find other people who understand where we come from. There are far too many people out there claiming to know it all, pretending life is perfect when there are a lot of things yet to be discovered. I guess what I'm saying is, welcome to my discovery journey i hope its a nice ride we can take together.