Shannanigan's Search for More...

I think that just about every young couple goes through a pregnancy scare at some point. It's so funny, because ever since 8th grade I've had friends periodically coming up to me, asking how much they can trust the at-home pregnancy tests, was I sure they couldn't have gotten pregnant through oral sex, or if I knew of an anonymous clinic they could go to. I'm the information girl of my groups of friends, what can I say? And usually, all these worries were total overreactions of girls who weren't ...

This morning I woke up and donned the ironed black shirt and pants and sqeezed my feet into the loathsome heels to carry out the formality of burying someone who no longer inhabits their body.

My boyfriend drove us to my mother's house where we rode with her, my stepfather, and my brother to the funeral home. What do you say to the guy who's mom died a week ago and is now driving to a viewing he doesn't want to be at? He had been avoiding having to see her lifeless body for so long, ...

Oh, how strange are the people we make our attachments with...

I've been asked not only to be the "back-up" reader of the eulogy at my step-grandmother's funeral, in case her daughter gets too emotional to finish, but also to read Psalm 23 as part of the service.

I'm absolutely honored that my stepfamily feels that I am so much a part of their family that they want me so included...but you have to look at this from my point of view. I mean, yes, yes I know ...

One day I laid in bed, thinking of what to do with my free time, and I though to myself "I should really take up writing again. That was good times...I felt so stimulated and intelligent...I felt like I could do anything, be anyone and anywhere. It would be cool to get back into that."

And yet, instead I picked up a book, to be somebody from somebody else's world. And it was still good, and still fun.

Years have passed since that night, and I have yet to "get ...

Well, I got the phone call this morning, and my stepfather's mother has "passed away," as my boyfriend so cautiously put it.

I find it strange that I seem to not be affected by death, but this might be because I have never had anyone extremely close to me die. I still have all four of my grandparents; and my stepfather's mother, well, I only met her about two years ago...and we didn't spend a whole lot of time together.

About two years ago a girl who went ...