My Mother Worries Too Much

Here I am, back in school.  Summer is behind me, and the chilly days of fall are settling in.  As my parents are helping me carry my things to my dorm room, I realize I’ve forgotten my water bottle.  I follow them back out to the car to retrieve it, but it’s not there!  I must have left it at home by mistake!  Ah, well.  Not to worry; I’ll survive without it.  I say my goodbyes to my loving family, and am about to go back into the building, when this exchange takes place:

MOM (to DAD): You’re going to walk her back in, aren’t you?

ME:  No, that’s fine.  You don’t have to take me all the way back to my room.  Bye.

DAD: Bye

MOM: But what if something happens to you on the way?

ME: … I… I live right there.

MOM: But what if someone hurts you?

DAD:  She can walk back on her own, she’s fine.

MOM: HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF WE JUST LEFT AND SOMETHING HAPPENED TO HER??!

DAD: …

ME: He’d feel bad, but the chances of that happening… Mom, it’s broad daylight!

MOM: So? 

ME: NOTHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ME I LIVE RIGHT THERE!!!

MOM: SOMEONE COULD ATTACK YOU ON THE WAY!!!

DAD:  Your mother could be right…

MOM: THANK YOU!

DAD:  Those kids heading into the dining hall could be planning to kidnap you right now.

MOM: THEY COULD BE!

ME: NO, they’re NOT!

MOM:  Fine, fine.  Do what you want.  I just don’t want my daughter murdered, sorry I care…

I'm about to head back when my dad and I start talking about comics and other things that we tend to get carried away with, when-

MOM:  STOP TALKING!!!  LET HER GO IN BEFORE IT’S DARK!!!

It’s about 4:30, by the way.

ME:  Mom, I walk around here after dark all the time.

MOM: WHAT??!  WHY!!?

ME:  I HAVE NIGHT CLASSES!

 MOM: WELL, THAT’S STUPID!  DON’T THEY KNOW HOW DANGEROUS THAT IS?!  I DON”T WANT YOU WALKING AROUND AT NIGHT ANY…

 

Finally, I’m able to say my goodbyes and leave my family in the parking lot.  As I walk to the dorm, however…

ME:  HE WORKS HERE!  STOP FOLLOWING ME!  GO HOME!

DAD:  I’m sorry.  She made me follow you.

MOM: TEXT ME WHEN YOU GET THERE SO I KNOW YOU’RE OK!

And, like a good daughter, I do.  But I still don’t understand my mother’s worries.  I’ve been going to this school for three years, now.  I’ve been walking this campus all that time.  Why the worry now?

Anyway, I finally am able to return to my room and relax.

Mom is silly... I'm perfectly safe here!

...everyone wants me dead.

QUICK CHANGE!

I've been away for a while, but I hope you are all ready for a new round of completely fun, completely crazy, Completely Inaccurate stories following my senior year in college.  I'm not hanging up the bustier and star-spangled shorts just yet!

When The Zombies Come, Will You Be Ready?

Question: If the zombie apocalypse happened tonight, would you be prepared?

Answer: No, of course not.  No one ever is.  So, sit back and pay attention, because I am going to share with you the story of what could happen in the event of a zombie apocalypse, and what I tell you may save your life someday, when the zombies come.

And they will come.

*                                                                      *                                                                      *

My sister, Emily, doesn’t worry too much about werewolves or vampires or other supernatural flim-flam, but when there’s a ghost in her daughter’s closet or a chupacabra in the woods behind her house, she takes that business extremely seriously.  So, you can imagine how seriously Emily took the zombie threat.

Months before the zombie’s came, Emily was making plans.  She took shooting lessons, trained her children in various martial arts and cheerleading forms, and meticulously inspected the local Wal-Mart for its suitability as either a temporary or long-term base from which our modest resistance would operate.  She stockpiled food and toilet paper like it was Y2K, or maybe 2012, and chose members of her group based on the skills they would provide.

When the zombies came, she was well-prepared, and all went well.

At first.

*                                                                      *                                                                      *

Unlike Emily, Sarah did not thoroughly prepare.  Before the zombies came, she wasted her time getting a degree in English and planning for a non-zombie future.  Despite several warnings from friends (mostly me), Sarah refused to take the zombie threat seriously.  When the zombies came, she really had only one option.

When the threat has passed, she will emerge from her cryogenic slumber.

*                                                                      *                                                                      *

Bernacki didn’t plan, she didn’t prepare; but then, she never does.  When the zombies came, Bernacki was in the Science Center on campus, developing a serum that may or may not have actually started the whole fiasco.  Whether or not Bernacki intentionally provoked the zombie apocalypse as a way to relieve the boredom of an otherwise normal afternoon remains to be seen.  What is known is that that day, in her laboratory, the most devastating wave of zombism in human history was unleashed.

And Bernacki owned it.

*                                                                      *                                                                      *

I have devoted a fair portion of my life preparing for an eventual zombie apocalypse.  I have developed both escape and battle plans for all conceivable forms of zombie menace.  When the inevitable first-wave came, I was completely and utterly prepared to deal with the threat.

Totes got this.  Totes.

Or so I thought.

Are you loving it?  Are you learning, yet?  At the very least, have you not yet given up on life?  Then check back next week for the next installment of my current series “Zombie Apocalypse”.  When the zombies come, you’ll be glad you did!

Also…

Bu-bu-bu-Bonus!

Thanks for bearing with me last week.  I was lost amidst a sea of exams, essays, and extracurriculars!  As a show of gratitude, and a desire to add extra pictures to this week’s post, I’ve decided to tack on this little bonus piece, detailing the trials and tribulations of the past couple weeks, so you’ll know that I wasn’t just screwing around and not bothering to update.

Bernacki graduated!

I caught my one true love, Sandwich Boy, with some other girl.

I got a tattoo!
OK, so it's a spray-on tattoo, whatever.

And, I ate pizza like a BEAST!  Like a GIANT, PIZZA-EATING BEAST!!!
This is practically all I ate during finals week.

Ok, so I kinda was totally just screwing around, mostly.  Don’t judge.

Portland

I have a little dream.  It involves living on the coast in Maine, in a nice little house where I can look out at the ocean while I write.  I imagine running a little bakery/gift shop in one of the touristy areas, and spending my life living simply and happily.  I don’t know if my dream will ever come true, but it’s nice to have one, to have something to work towards and look forward to.

Bernacki has a dream, too.  She wants to move out west and be a hippie for a few years.  Unfortunately, Bernacki’s dreams don’t exactly match up to what her family wants from her, and it leads to some tension.  They want her to get married and have kids, and just stay near home forever.

Well, I know what it’s like to have a dream, and I want to see Bernacki’s dreams fulfilled.  That’s why I’ve charted out the path of her future, and am posting it here, so that she can check back and make sure that she’s on the right path.

THE MOVE

After graduation, Bernacki moves out west and lives like a hippie for a little while, eventually settling in Portland, Oregon, where I imagine she’ll live doing vaguely science-y things.  She’ll save a couple forests and probably find the cure to insomnia in some random plant that she saves from extinction, which she will never need to use because Bernacki never sleeps.

also, she looks like this.

One day, she will find herself taking soil samples on the beach, when she will look up and see the perfect man as he emerges from the surf, like a hairy Aphrodite.

She will promptly take the specimen to her lab for analysis.

FAMILY LIFE

At some point, Bernacki will get tired of saving the environment and building time-traveling jet packs 24/7, and will scale back on those activities just enough to make time to have a couple of kids.  She will, I have no doubt, expertly balance the responsibilities of her work and home life, so that her children will never feel neglected, and neither will her hybrid monkey-lilies.

They look weird, but they smell a lot better than the average monkey.

She and her biologist trophy husband will be completely happy with their life together, and their children will be the happiest, healthiest kids on the West Coast.

But, inevitably, the time will come that discontent will fill Bernacki’s heart.  She will be in a bookstore, browsing lady-scientist fiction, and she will see the author’s name…

…and she will long to see old friends again.

REUNION

So, Bernacki will reach out to the friends she once knew.  She will become reacquainted with their boring, unscientific lives.  She will remember the good “thymes” we once shared and she will, at some point, decide to fly back east to visit.

And, boy, are her arms tired!
...sorry.

After catching up with family and friends in New York, she will come up to Maine to see me, who just so happens to also live in Portland, because that was who she really came back east to see in the first place; let’s not lie to ourselves.

After we have been properly introduced to each other’s families, we will all go out for a nice dinner and catch up.

We will be incredibly impressed with each other’s children.

mah bebehs.

By the end of the evening, an amazing discovery will be made…

…and we will part again, happy to have seen each other.  Bernacki will spend the rest of her life content, remembering why she moved away in the first place, and will never question her life decisions again.  Everyone will live happily ever after.

Except for Sarah, who grew a beard.

How My Father Ruined My Social Skills

So, something that I may not have made clear to everyone yet is that I love comic books.  From the day of my birth, it was pretty much foretold by the gods that I would one day be a rabid comic book fan.

This is the Comic God.

My dad has been reading comics for a really long time, so I feel pretty comfortable crediting him with my own love of comic books, and I must note straightaway that reading them has brought me untold amounts of happiness in my life, and I truly love them for that.  On the other hand, though, they also prevent me from connecting in any way with another human being who isn’t interested in them.  So, you know, there’re some pros and cons.

It began pretty much as soon as I could hold a comic without ripping it in half, and possibly before that, actually.  My dad started me off with Archie comics, which were filled with innocent and light-hearted tales involving the wacky misadventures of a freckle-faced teenager, his friends, and the identical women who could be told apart only by their hair color and who, for some reason never fully explored, lusted after the titular klutzy ginger.



This would never happen in real life.



I started to become disenchanted with Archie comics once I was reprimanded in school for drawing pictures of the characters (apparently, the fashion choices of Betty and Veronica are considered ‘lewd’ in the real world), and when I finally realized that “Sugar, Sugar” is just awful.

I quickly moved on to Marvel, particularly the X-Men.  I spent most of my literate life greedily consuming any and all superhero stories Stan Lee could throw my way.  Most of my collection came from my Dad’s doubles, but I ended up with reprints of most of the original runs of X-Men and Spider-Man.  I also, of course, was following all of the current storylines, and reading all of the god-awful fan fiction online.  That was my deep and wonderful love of Marvel.

And the comic book movies!  I was so excited when I first realized that that was a thing.  My sister and her then-boyfriend took me to see the first Spider-Man movie when it came out, and I brought my friend Cassandra with us.  This was apparently a terrible idea, since I seemingly didn’t realize until we were already in the theater that Oh, Jesus, this is a movie about Spider-Man!  I must have been in some kind of zombie-trance up until that point, but as I sat there, realizing that I was really about to see Spider-Man up on that screen, I became very excited.  So excited, in fact, that I turned to Cassandra and, within the first five minutes of the film, told her everything I knew about the origins of the character.  Most notably, for example, about the death of Uncle Ben, and the lesson that “with great power comes great responsibility”. 

"Did you, or did you not, come here to learn about Spider-Man?"

I still don’t understand what she was so upset about.  I mean, it’s not like I spoiled the entire movie for- oh, crap.

So anyway, I’ve been riding the Marvel train for a while, now.  I’ve suffered through some truly horrendous stories, artists, and movies, but I’ve stuck it out.  Up until recently, when Marvel did the unthinkable.  My favorite X-Man, Nightcrawler, was killed off.  It devastated me.  Ok, ok, fine; I’ll admit it.  He’s a comic book character; it’s only a matter of time before he’s brought back to life, but still.  I was super-bummed out.  And, to be totally honest, I had been unhappy for some time by then about a lot of the stuff I was seeing in Marvel.  It just felt like another letdown by the comics I had loved.  It almost felt, at that point, as if I were reading them out of a sense of nostalgia for what they had once been.  And then, it happened.  One evening, while reading an issue of X-Men Forever, I witnessed something that changed everything.  While fighting alongside her fellow X-Men, Shadowcat phased into an opposing combatant (some type of Sentinel, I think; I actually don’t really remember what they were fighting, but Tony Stark was involved), and un-phased while inside, disrupting the machine.

Now, let me pause for a moment to say this: That doesn’t make any sense.  When Shadowcat phases, she doesn’t displace matter, she moves through it.  So, if she stops phasing while inside a solid object, her body should merge with that object, killing her in a worst-case scenario, completely destroying that part of her body for life in the best case.  I had seen her powers misused in this way before, but this time, it was just too much.  After all they’d done to me, it was enough.

No more... no more.

I stopped buying Marvel comics and, by God, it almost killed me.

My dad was not having any of that, however, and promptly caught me up on all I’d been missing in DC Comics.

Now, I was no novice to DC stories.  After all, my dad had been regaling me with stories about DC since I was little, and I had a modest collection of my own of DC comic books.  My first human love was Christopher Reeve in the first Superman movie (my first love in general was that dog from Muppet Babies. Don’t judge).  What I’m getting at here is that I was already well-acquainted with the DC Universe; I just hadn’t yet become a serious reader.  That was all about to change.

So, my allegiance has switched from one comic universe to another, but my problem is still exactly the same:  I am a comic book reader surrounded by non-comic book readers.  Now, this problem usually manifests itself in one of two ways:

First; the fake comic fan.

The second way this problem manifests is one I’ve described before: I go too long without discussing the stories I’m reading, and I simply explode with them, and whoever is unlucky enough to be near me when the dam bursts is forced to listen until they gouge their own eyes out with a plastic fork to distract themselves from my inane fangirl babbling.

The problem, I think, boils down to this: I don’t have anyone, outside of my father, to talk to about the comics I read.  I just kind of have this huge hobby that I’m forced to keep mostly to myself.  If I try to talk to someone else about comics, I either have to worry that I’m boring them (except for Sarah; I’ve stopped worrying about that.  She’s on her own when it comes to stopping me), or I end up talking to someone who only pretends to know anything about comics, and I end up boiling over with white-hot comic rage (which, incidentally, is just awful for my complexion).  I’ve always kind of wished for a friend who was as into comics as I am, and I always kind of assumed that being into comics would naturally draw other comic book fans into my life, but thus far, it’s not working all that well.  So, I think maybe it’s time to really put it out there, and make it clear who I am, and let other fanboys and girls come find me.

My name is Amanda, and I read comic books.  I have a poster of Hal Jordan over my bed, teach my four-year-old niece the names of the Green Lanterns on the weekend, and am half-convinced that I am Wonder Woman.  I am a Creative Writing major, and a Pisces.  Looking for like-minded people for innocent comic-related fun.  Occasional costume play.  No smokers please.

It’s time to just be honest with the world and say, “this is who I am”.