I'm a hypochondriac. Really. I am. This isn't something that I am exaggerating. I have hypochondria and it is what it is. I started becoming a freak in the beginning of fourth grade, right after I was in the hospital for two months and almost died of various childhood diseases that attacked me all at once. I was crazy. I was at the doctor's office every other week for around two years (thankfully my mother worked for a doctor so we had amazing medical benefits and my disorder didn't cost us a fortune). I've had so many xrays that it is quite possible I will have complications in the future. Imagine, a nine year old girl waking up in the morning... picking up a timer and taking her own pulse before she got out of bed and then walking to the bathroom, opening up 4 or 5 different pill bottles and taking her doses out for the day and then checking the size of her pupils and nodes. Not a good life to live.

If I had a stiff neck, then I had meningitis. If I had a headache, it was from a brain tumor. If I had a stomach ache, my intestines were tangled. I really hated my life. The mind is a powerful thing, it is possible to think yourself to sick. Believe me... It kind of works the same way placebos work... Anyways, since the fourth grade, I've realized that I shouldn't worry about every little thing...

I haven't really had a problem with hypochondria lately... but sometimes I really hate the internet, it can only make hypochondria worse because we look up our simple symptoms (for example, I have a low grade fever at the moment), and then we come up with some crazy self-diagnosis (eg. "OH GOD I HAVE A LOWGRADE FEVER ... A SYMPTOM OF CANCER!"). Of course, this is completely ridiculous. My boyfriend keeps saying "You crazy!" in a high pitched voice and telling me that I'm thinking too much into things. He's probably right. I should just go to a doctor... but my appointment isn't until Monday morning... that's... too... long... to wait.

  So for my 18th birthday party a few years ago I received a few different scrapbooks. When I was younger, my mother and I had tried our hand at assembling one... It didn't work out so well. Scrapbooking is more expensive and a bit more complicated than you would think! Or is it?

This year I went to New York City to visit my boyfriend and I wanted something more special than a simple photo album to remember by. During that trip, I had saved my plane tickets, my week-long subway pass, our tickets to a comedy club and to the Top of the Rock Observation Deck at the Rockefeller Center, along with a few menus of places that we had eaten at that week.

For a young person like me (who is paying for college when money is tight), these items turned out to be the perfect scrapbook material. I decided to make my scrapbook a book of travels. On the inside of the front cover, written in script, is the quote "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step". I thought it was fitting. For the page facing it, I cut out a page from an old atlas. On the second page, I paste all of my plane tickets. For the actual pages with photos on them, even four photos on one page can leave a lot of blank space. I used generic phrase stickers I found on clearance at a local craft shop along with my makeshift souvenirs. I also used some menus as backgrounds. On top of that, I also wrote little notes and captions around a few pictures.

My scrapbook turned out lovely and I feel it really portrays everything that we did and everything that I want to remember.

I've included two horrible resolution pictures of a section in my scrapbook hopefully it helps a bit.. Sorry, I don't have anything better than a webcam right now.

I just took the longest nap of my life.. and I had some pretty weird dreams.

Dream #1: I lived in Michigan with my mom, dad, and brother. My mother hired a butler who happened to be an African Voo-doo witch doctor. I guess I offended him in some way, because he cursed me. For the next week, I was stalked by a highly-intelligent, full-grown lion. I was in shape from running all the time, but I was scared for my life every second of the day. Luckily, I had come across a transporter card from a Chuck E. Cheese in California. I came home from wherever I was that day, went into my room, and plopped down on the bottom bunk of the bunk bed. I heard my mother scream that he was coming (he was only supposed to kill me without hurting anyone else) and I slammed the door shut and used the card. WABAM. I appeard in Chuck E. Cheese with a bunch of kids in shorts playing Wheel of Fortune. I immediately found a job as a waitress and moved into an apartment with a roommate. For two years, I was at peace. I almost, ALMOST forgot about the lion. However, with my paranoia over the years, I had collected 100 transporter cards to different places. One day, after work, I walked home to see the lion sitting in my bedroom window and waiting for me to come home. I turned around and ran for my life. The lion saw me escape and I could hear his roars all the way down the block. Also, from my paranoia, I had a gun. Gun? Transporter Card? As much as I wanted to run away, I felt like living in fear was worse than anything. So I let the lion catch up and I shot him dead. With his last heart beat, everything rewound to the day that my mother hired the butler. He was about to curse me but I apologized, this time.

Dream #2:  I was in some underground club with some modern mobsters. Apparently, I had heard something I wasn't supposed to. They were about to use a powerdrill to attatch my wrists to the wall when some dude ran in like a crazy person and distracted them as I jumped out of the window. I ran and ended up at a small jail in New Mexico where I met Johnny Knoxville, unfortunately, he was insane and tried to kill me so I ran some more. I somehow got home and told my family to run upstairs to my parents' room. For some reason, my mother was running on a treadmill while wearing a long, red gown, but I didn't question it.. Anyways, they ran upstairs while I watched the window and explained that gangsters were after me. I then saw two dudes pull up in a fugly car and watch the house. They watched for hours and on my duty to watch the window, I fell asleep. When I woke up, one of the men had climbed onto the roof and came into the window. He had two guns. The first one, he shot everybody with. They shot out these weird squares that stuck to skin. After he shot all of us, he pulled out the real gun. He tried to shoot my father, but I jumped infront of him (I somehow was suddenly wearing a bullet-proof jacket..). It was a weird gun, and after two minutes of the guy trying to shoot everybody, the gun exploded and the guy exploded all over the room with it. I examined his remains and found out he was a robot. We burned his body just incase he could reassemble himself (you never know, with robots these days..). My dad thought it was time to get the guns out, they were in the garage and shed, which means we had to go outside. We hadn't taken ten steps when some tall, muscle-y man who looked like he should be the strong-man in the circus pointed an insanely long rifle at my dad. My dad then proceeded to bend the gun while I hit the man in the head with a big rock. He passed out and my dad bent the rifle straight again and then shot him. We got all the guns and brought them back up to the room. We had two guns for every person, including my grandma and little brother. I called a friend who came over and put a movable, giant, bullet-proof glass wall between the window and the rest of the room and another one over the door leading to the room. We waited and soon enough, more men showed up and tried to jump into the window. They hardly scratched the glass with their bullets when we all pushed the glass until it was up against the wall with the window and smushed those little buggers' brains out. When the wall was being put up, we didn't think about how we would be able to clean up the dead bodies and now we would have to move because there were bloodstains on the carpet. Someone then, had the great idea to call the cops and we were put in the witness protection program and moved to Russia.