Step 49: Become A Big Shot Movie Producer

...who produces Haiku movies.

I'm back in school and learning all kinds of meaningless things. In my electronic writing class, we are learning how to use final cut pro. I made my first movie in just a shade under an hour. We had to write Haikus and then find images on Google to accompany the poems. Then I photoshopped my pictures a bit (aka I clicked random things in Photoshop-- because I don't know what any of it means-- until something I liked happened). It's all very high tech. Only master's of English like me can do this sort of thing.

So Hollywood, can you please give me my mil now so I can quit school and start watching Netflix full time?

Here's the masterpiece:

Step 48: Get Religion

I found God today between the layers of veggies and folds of cheese on a Jimmy John's sandwich. Each bite tasted like a spiritual awakening.

Step 47: The Art of Boredom

Summer vacation is a great thing in a teacher's life, but also a very complicated thing. I went from working anywhere from 60-80 hours a week (I had two jobs, P.F. Chang's and teaching) to working 20-30 hours a week. This week, I have Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday off from work! That's a lot of time on a girl's hands whose life has solely consisted of work for the past year. But, with a little planning, those days fly by. In order to fill worthless days of nothing, follow these easy steps:

1. Sleep late. Even though your body wants to get up at 7:30 or 8 am, don't let it. The longer you can force your body to linger in bed, the less hours you have to find things to do during the day.

2. Take your time getting ready. There's no rush when time doesn't exist for you. Try everything in your closet on until you look perfect. Listen to music while getting ready. Put on a full face of make-up. Kill as much time as possible in this stage.

3. Think of all of the potential things you could do during the day. And then make sure you space them out. You don't want to do it all at once in the morning. No, no, no. Get your eyebrows waxed in the morning. Take a break. Go to the book store. Take a break. Eat lunch. Take a break. Space out your errands to maximize time wasting.

4. Only drive scenic routes. Drive the back roads that take an extra few minutes to get wherever you are going. You may even see something new. You can learn and waste time!

5. Call everyone you know. Talking on the phone is a great waste of time. And if you call everyone you know, someone is bound to answer.

6. Watch all the movies that your boyfriends never wanted to watch with you. You know, all the Jane Austen's and episodes of Glee that you can never con anyone into seeing with you.

7. Read. Reading should be thrown in throughout the day. In step three's "breaks," reading is an excellent option. It fills time and makes you smart.

8. Wander the mall. Who knows, maybe you need something.

9. Eat your favorites. Drive to the next town over to get your favorite take-out or make a special trip to the grocery store to cook something delicious. Dinner can take six hours if you want. The longer the better.

10. Clean your house. This is the hardest part in the art of being bored. But if your house is messy like mine, and you are bored everyday like me, and never clean your house even though you are bored like me, then you will just feel bad about yourself. You have to turn off Netflix, and do the laundry and dishes. It will feel better in the long run.

Step 46: You Can't Have It All

Even though we always want it, we can't have it all; it's just not possible. And as soon as you think you're close, you'll end up with nothing. However, in these situations, nothing can be the best thing for you. Sometimes you need the universe to spit in your face, tell you that you cannot have your cake and eat it too, and then wipe your slate clean in order to really see how unfair it was to try to have more than your share of anything. But good things do still happen and will happen again to you, but maybe slowly at first. And the best part of the whole process is that we get know ourselves more completely.

Hello, New Day.

Step 45: Give to the Earth and the Earth Will Give Back

I hostessed at P.F. Chang's today. My shift started at 4:30. Not a lot of people get dinner around then, so naturally, it was slow. To keep busy, I snacked on food, wiped things down that were already clean, folded napkins, and performed other mindless tasks- basically anything to keep myself from falling asleep.

While looking for pointless chores, I noticed a small trash tornado was cycloning about on the patio. Large pieces of styrofoam had been caught in our gates along with receipts, newspapers, packing peanuts, and candy wrappers, and it was all blowing about with a bunch of dead leaves. I was mesmerized by the spinning garbage.

I decided to sweep it up. I marched outside with my broom and dustpan and began to sweep. Because the wind was blowing so fiercely, I struggled to sweep the garbage into the dust pan. I would think I finally had a trash particle in my grasp only to see it swept into the air and out of my reach. My coworkers had gathered at the door to laugh at me.

I brought in heap after heap of trash, and my fellow workers continued to taunt me. As I went back out to the patio for a final sweep, I felt pretty sheepish. I did sort of look like a trash-loving fool out here chasing this garbage around. Why was I doing this? And then, the heavens opened up and the earth paid me for services rendered. That's right, I'm talking money. I found a 10 dollar bill blowing about in the leaves. A small fortune.

Give to the earth and she will give back. And all of you butt holes at work can suck it.

Step 44: My Life, The Ben Folds Musical

It's no secret that I am a huge Ben Folds/Ben Folds Five fan, have been since I was a kid. My sisters are pretty big fans as well, and we always marvel at his vast array of discography. A while back, it was mentioned amongst us that a musical of anyone's life could be made with only Ben Folds or Ben Folds Five music. On my flight from Salt Lake to Pittsburgh this Christmas, I decided to use my spare time to write my very own Ben Folds musical of my life. I decided which songs would go for which year of my life. Here it is:

1 -5 years old: Gracie and Philosophy and For All the Pretty People
6 - 10 years old: Kate and She Don't Use Jelly and Bastard
11 years old: Jane
12 years old: Alice Childress
13 years old: Air
14 years old: Underground
15 years old: Best Imitation of Myself and Rockin' the Suburbs
16 years old: Not the Same
17 years old: Julianne and Song for the Dumped

Intermission: Mitchell Lane and Steven's Last Night in Town and Fred Jones Pt 2 and Magic

18 years old: Your Redneck Past and Army
19 years old: Wandering and Jackson Cannery
20 years old: Zak and Sara and Still Fighting It
21 years old: Landed and Regrets
22 years old: Annie Waits and Don't Change Your Plans and Evaporated
23 years old: Late and Video

....choreography to follow.

Step 43: Accomplish Great Things

I have been trying to apply to graduate school over the past few weeks. It has been a totally irritating process, and I really have got nothing done so far which is so typical of me. While filling out applications, I keep running across the same question: What is one of your greatest accomplishments (or something to that tune). It's pretty standard, I know, but always a difficult question for me. You see, I am excellent at being a face in the crowd and making snide comments under my breath, not for being captain of the whatever or leader of the X. And besides, shouldn't it be obvious what my greatest accomplishment is? I'm applying for graduate school which means I GRADUATED...but I feel like I can't write that. Every time I read this question, I start to zone out because it makes me feel like nothing is enough for these people.

While quietly zoning out the other day, one of my favorite childhood accomplishments came flooding back to me...

I was at my neighbor's house, Stephanie. She had this fancy basement with a laser-disk player that we would watch Tom and Jerry on all the time (and later in life we would switch out Tom and Jerry for Spice World...but that's another story). Her basement also had an awesome sound system hooked up with the laser-disk. I guess this was sort of lost on us since we only used it to watch cartoons, but her brother was very aware of the basement's capabilities.

Some how, a game got started with Steph and I and her brother who was five or six years older than us. The game was that we would each pick a song from his CD collection and make a dance routine to it. Her brother would then watch the dances and judge them.

Naturally, we would mostly pick No Doubt and Ace of Base songs, but there was one song we always wanted to pick but were too afraid: Janet Jackson - If. We had both tried dancing to the song before. For whatever reason, the beats of Janet Jackson proved to be far too superior for our elementary dance moves. Dancing to that song always meant a losing score. It was dance competition death to choose that song.

Well, after drinking a lot of Juicy-Juice and eating a bowl of Spaghettios, I felt like I was on-top of the world, and then we decided to play dance competition. I chose "If." Her brother kept warning me, begging me not to throw away the competition, not to seal my own fate. Stephanie hungrily licked her lips at what was turning out to be an easy win. "No," I told them both, "I want to do it."

I stuck to my instincts and danced to "If." When it was my turn to dance, I moved like I was on fire. Flailing about and doing cartwheel after cartwheel. I was going to win this dance to "If" no matter what. I wanted it so bad. All I really remember is thinking that I had to go faster.

My speed and effort paid off. When Steph and I both stood before our judge, I received a 9.5 (or something like that...I don't remember exactly). He said it was the highest score ever awarded for an "If" routine. I swelled with pride. I had decided what I wanted, went after it, and got it. A true Neeley- hard worker by day, dancer by night.

I know that most of you will read this and chuckle or, even better, roll your eyes, but I think it was my first sign of greatness. And I just can't stop thinking about a graduate board reading this story and thinking that I am insane which for some reason gives me a little bit of a smile. Plus, they already know my most recent greatest accomplishment- graduating - so why not give them my first as well?