So heeeeeey, guys. It’s been a while. What? I’m still here. Almost five months you say? Yep.

I think that must be some sort of record for me in not blogging. Although, I don’t know if “not blogging” describes what it is I’ve been doing. I still write regular reviews over on Goodreads, I’m still posting semi-regularly over at Big Damn Heroes, and I still talk to most of you more than I talk to my own mother. (I’m sorry, Mom, I love you, even though you are not reading this because you don’t understand about computers.) I guess what I meant to say is that I just haven’t been blogging HERE. Blogging HERE on this personal blog of mine just feels very PERSONAL.  And I guess writing about PERSONAL issues right now feels a little too much like actually dealing with my life, instead of NOT dealing with it, which is what I have preferred to do for the last couple of months. I don’t actually know why I am typing in all caps right now. Maybe because IT IS FUN.

You know what else is fun? Having a quarter-life crisis. I know this because I am in the middle of having one. For example, let me tell you a story.

Once upon a yesterday, which was actually Friday, I didn’t have work for the first time in a million years, so I had all these grand plans: to finally finish my Farscape post that I’ve been working on for four months (FOUR MONTHS), or failing that, write something else. To job hunt, maybe (don’t want to talk about it). To clean things, at least. TO READ A BOOK! But no. Instead, I turned on my television and watched three movies in a row (Overboard, About a Boy, and Back to the Future II, if you’re curious). And then, in the middle of the second movie, I happened to stick a finger into my belly button, because I guess that’s what assholes who sit on the couch all day do? Stick their fingers in weird places? I don’t know. My point is that THERE WAS SOMETHING IN THERE. I’m just telling you right now, you might not want to finish reading this post.

I paused the movie. This was important.

I don’t know if I’ve ever told any of you about my intense fear about belly buttons, but it’s a thing. The idea of anything being put inside of my belly button freaks me the hell out, and that includes fingers. Like, when my friend Ashley had her appendix removed, and I asked her if I could see the scar, she said, “There wasn’t one because they went in through my belly button.” And so what happened next is that my head exploded because THEY STUCK THINGS INSIDE OF HER THROUGH HER BELLY BUTTON. And then they pulled her appendix out of her body FROM INSIDE HER BELLY BUTTON. Excuse me, but no. If someone ever came at me with so much as the idea of sticking something in my belly button, I would just hit them so hard on whatever body parts were closest, and I would probably scream and scream until they went away. Maybe also I would keep screaming for a while. Perhaps I sounds like an insane person by admitting this, and perhaps most of you don’t understand this extreme reaction (to which I say congratulations on your sanity), but you’ve got to admit it helps to set the scene a little. Remember the scene? Where there was something INSIDE OF MY BELLY BUTTON?

Just checking in case you’d forgotten.

I got the tweezers, the hydrogen peroxide, the paper towel, and twenty minutes later, that little fucker was out of there. I then spent the next twenty minutes disinfecting my belly button. I don’t want to go into details because I might freak out again, so you’ll just have to use your imaginations. In fact, yes. Use those imaginations well, because this could happen to you. It could be happening to you RIGHT NOW. All those dead skin cells, all that time it’s just sitting there, and you’re so oblivious . . . I mean, is this a thing? Should I have regularly been cleaning out my belly button all of these years and I didn’t even know it? Is it like with ears? Because I clean those out regularly. But guess what? My ears have never smelled like a toe.

Something you probably have forgotten is that there was a point to this story, and that point is that I strongly feel that this whole experience is a metaphor for my life. I’m not exactly sure how all the pieces fit together yet, but I’m pretty sure part of it is about not paying attention to details, and part is about letting things fester, and part is about the darkness of the human soul and the rot that hides in the daylight while we go about our pointless lives, and part of it is about being a lazy asshole on a couch with nothing better to do than freak out about the contents of that thing that used to be attached to his or her mother, and then there’s also probably something in there about it being significant that the belly button is a dried up husk of what was once proof of a tangible human connection, but is now only a reminder that someday we’re all going to die, that we have, in fact, been dying since the moment we were ripped from our mother’s bodies, and there’s nothing we can ever do about it except to perpetuate the cycle over and over and over again. There’s probably also something in there about being completely full of shit, but I’m not sure yet. On the plus side, I think I’m really getting the hang of hyperbole.

Just in the spirit of full disclosure, I feel the need to confess that earlier today I cried while watching Sandra Bullock make out with Ryan Reynolds in The Proposal, and that it was the happiest I’d been all day.

Thinking about my belly button again. . . I still think there’s something in there.