I spent the majority of my day yesterday bumming around my house, going back and forth between listening to Jim Harold’s various podcasts and reading my most recent Half Priced Books find, Memoirs of a Monster Hunter by Nick Redfern. My big house was unusually empty, and I happily took advantage of this to  roam free on the main floor with my Bluetooth speakers keeping me company. It was an uneventful, introverted day, and it wasn’t until my sister dropped by to borrow our moms big old truck that another person came to the house. She quickly left, and having run out of things to do, I decided to take a bath. I sent her a text telling her the house would be locked while I was soaking away, so if she brought back the truck to be sure to bring a house key. I got no reply, but sunk into the warm waters anyway with nothing but silence in my ears and a book in my hand. About fifteen minutes later, I heard the front door open and my dogs go ballistic. They quieted down almost immediately after being soothed by a voice I assumed belonged to my sister. Assuming she would need help unloading things from the truck (hence the reason she borrowed it), I pulled the stopper from the drain and watched the water get sucked away with all my dirt from the day. Having heard her go upstairs, when I climbed out of the tub and into a towel, I called up the stairs outside the bathroom to let her know I would soon be able to help her, but I was answered with simply more silence. Confused, I ascended the stairs, peering into every room at the top to find them empty. Going back to the main floor, I checked all the doors to ensure they remained bolted shut then peaked through the window shades to see if my sisters small Toyota (which she left when she took the truck) was still outside, and sure enough, it was. The truck, as I suspected, was nowhere to be found. Realizing now that whoever must have come over was not my sister, I called and texted every other possible source of the noises, including my mother who happens to be in Florida, with no avail. Having at this point realized it would be wise to throw on some clothes instead of skulking around in a wet towel, I went down to my basement to change. Coming back upstairs about five minutes later, I met my sister just as she and her boyfriend were walking in the door.  They, too, had no idea who had been at my house. This gave me permission to play a game that has become a favorite of mine over the past few years, and realizing this made me pretty excited. My house has security cameras in the front and back, a feature which has afforded us to catch some pretty hilarious attempts at graffiti in the past. Now realizing I can just check the cameras to figure out my mysterious visitor, I hopped onto a chair to reach the in-house recording device that’s hooked up to the TV and began to poor through an unnecessary amount of 15 seconds clips filled with insects and passing cars. I found clips of my sister coming and going, but nobody else. This leaves me with no other option but to consider that either A) due to being constantly surrounded by other people, being alone in my house for longer than a few hours at a time makes me hallucinate another person’s presence, or B) whatever strange things used to happen in this house when I was a few years younger than I am now are slowly creeping back up on me. What I find interesting about this is that while I was hearing these things, my mind didn’t go to the paranormal, to a ghost, or to something strange, it went to a completely logical explanation. I feel like that’s the part that gets me, that these experiences can be so real that it isn’t until after you’ve evaluated them that you realize they had to be something other than what you initially thought. It’s the quiet, insidious way they sneak up on you, a slow revelation. I suppose I’ll never know what really happened, and honestly I’m not really all that worried about whether or not I ever will, but I can say for certain that realizing you’re never really alone in this house is a realization I have made many times, and yet it never fails to make me feel a little more uneasy each and every time.

I’ve been away from this blog far to long, because I’ve been awful busy trying to figure out my life. Again. Surprise! I’ve always had this horrible sense of ‘not good enough’, a sense of complete dissatisfaction with every major I declare in school. Yes, even going to school to have a job playing with serial killers wasn’t enough for me. I’ve struggled greatly over the past few years trying to figure out what in the actual hell I am going to do with myself, and have realized recently that maybe I can quiet down all that inner yelling if I just, very eloquently, say “fuck it” and do what I want. So, alas, I have just returned from a meeting with an advisor at the university I’m transferring to next fall. I made this appointment with a woman who specializes in helping students create their own degree programs, as there is no doubt I won’t be able to settle for something everyone else already has (coughcoughbrat). Anyway, I had to come up with an idea to pitch that wasn’t along the lines of “I want to be able to go hunt for cryptozoological creatures in every known country on earth, then probably settle down somewhere in California where I can study UFO’s and Bigfoot from my own backyard.” So, using my creative little noggin, I sugar-coated this, just a bit. “I would like a degree that blends media and television production, cultural and anthropology studies, and history”. That seems normal, right? “I want to produce documentary-style television shows that focus on traveling around the world to explore different elements of different cultures.” I just sort of left out the part that should have included “mostly their beliefs about different things that lurk in the shadows”. This pitch was not entirely bullshit, I have always had a very strong interest in other, mostly non-Americanized cultures, and would genuinely enjoy a job where I could just run around the globe sharing different cultures with people who never get the chance to leave the US themselves. Ironically, the advisor perked right up and said “Oh! You know my husband and I just started watching this show called Expedition Unknown!” to which I immediately replied “Yeah, that host is named Josh Gates, and I very literally want his life. So help me design a degree that will get me that sort of job.” So, in the end, I walked back out onto the lawns of the ridiculously large, intimidating campus (that I had never even seen until today. Oops.) with new hope that I could probably maybe do something with this little life of mine. All that inner screaming that I need to get a MOVE ON with my life has quieted down, at least for the moment, and for the first time, I’ve officially decided to just go ahead and plunge head-on into the mysterious world of attempting to, as cheesy as it is, ‘follow my dreams’. Student loans, be damned, I say. For the most part, I’m just hoping this all goes according to plan. But if I’m wrong, and I end up going to graduate school for something completely unrelated, at least I can one day say “one time in college I graduated with a major I designed specifically to make shows about monster hunting”, and I will forever be the coolest aunt of all my siblings little monsters. And frankly, that’s worth it.