Let's Do Some Chemistry: Or Each Other

Today was an unusually warm day here in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Finally! It's been super cold here forever, we were just waiting for it to warm up  and break out the flip flops. 

I've come to this conclusion: When the weather gets nice, the clothes come off, and the sexual chemistry and tension bubbles way over the beaker. 

The  broads show off their bust-lines, and the muscular men bear their biceps.

Now that my friends, is no accident. 

Even some of the best of friends mix dangerous chemical compounds with nice weather. 

Friendships and romantic relationships are questioned as others are just brought to the lab for more speculation. 

My sister kept her crush man in mind, when he was no different by showing off his fucking awesome forearms and she was showing off her sparkling shoulders. Think they got each other's attention? 

I noticed more co-ed interaction today than usual. Cute shoes, cute tops, cute imaginations. 

In the wintertime, no one can get away with flip flops or flirty tops, and showing leg or cleavage, it's just way too cold, who cares about leg when its 10 below zero?  

Even if there is no remote interest in one another, curiosity gets you into to trouble, just like your chemistry teacher telling you can't play with the cyanide. 

When it does get you into trouble like looking up and down one of your friends of the opposite sex, you just act like a real man(or woman) and just own up to it! 

We've all been caught doing it, there is no harm in checking out one of your friends, right? 

Who knew people in Northeastern PA had bodies? We wouldn't know most of time because it's been cold for more than half a year. 

As eyes wander, so do minds. The minds go to the gutter on every little word uttered out of one's mouth. And straight to the bedroom. 

The psychological  need for sex is fulfilled with enough skin exposed. 

Crazy things happen when it gets to be beautiful out in Mountainland. Smiles run rapid, and the end of the semester doesn't seem as bad. 

Smokers go out for more cigarettes than usual, and people hang out by the picnic tables to chat and do homework. 

The next time you want to sleep in? Sleep with someone else, do some chemistry. 

Queen Caffeine

I woke up this morning with only one thing on my mind. Caffeine.

There isn't any caffeine in my house, unless you count coffee.  I hate coffee. Hate is a strong word.  So I guess I really can't say i hate coffee. Let's just say I dislike coffee.  I really fucking dislike coffee.

My parents drink coffee. Who cares? But my boyfriend Andy drinks coffee and I hate kissing him after he's had some. I must really love him to keep wanting to kiss him with that atrocious coffee-breath.

Since I've started college, I've developed bad eating habits and a caffeine addiction. I think I'll save my bad eating habits for another blog, but here's a few of them. 

I don't often eat breakfast, and if I do, it's a granola bar and crackers. Or random food from fellow ATC-ers. Kayla bakes awesome muffins. Today's was banana nut, last week it was cookies. The other bad habit is eating Ramen noodles. Every single day. My diet is enriched with sodium and caffeine all day long. The sodium I could do without, the caffeine I can't.

I get headaches without it, and crave it in the middle of the day. Yesterday I left my journalism class to find caffeine. The machine ate my money and my headache was a borderline migrane. Someone gave me their soda and I was only praying that it had my beloved drug. It was what I feared: Caffeine Free. 

As I was talking to my teacher, he offered me a drink from his fridge which is open to all students. I was going to take a Mountain Dew, because I know that has caffine,  but I would rather drink iced tea, so I was checking the ingerdients to make sure it had caffine in it. 

The label on the Brisk revealed 8mg of caffine, the Mountain Dew is 54 whopping mg. I'm goin' for the Mountain Dew right away next time. Fifty fucking four. 

I'm almost 3/4  through my can of my first caffinated beverage and it hasn't had the effect I need it to have. Now, I know why. 

One of my friends just said if he needs a shot of caffine, he takes a five hour energy, and a monster energy drink. That's another type of caffine I won't resort to: ENERGY DRINKS.

Yet.

Cassidy 

Writer's Block

I'm having a hard time writing this week. Why you ask? I guess it's just because I have a bad case of "Writer's Block" or "The Curse." 

We've all been there when we've had a paper, a short story, a poem, a song, a letter, or A BLOG, where we sure as hell can't figure out what to write about. 

Writers Block has plagued me this evening if you haven't figured that out already. 

Being a writer has it's drawbacks. You have to come up with your own shit. All the time. 

Coming up with your own shit is fun, but draining sometimes. You can make up stories like this: 

It was a dark and stormy day on the campus of LCCC at an early 8am. The buildings are silent, and half asleep students try to catch some z's. We bring the camera to Jourdaine, a blonde tattooed girl sleeping and engrossed in her sleep. She is deeply entranced for she is experiencing the classic journalism dream. "What should I do, and how should I do it? When two little figments of her imagination appear on her shoulders. One is Andrew Petonak he symbolizes the doubt and grief of writing. The other is Ed Ackerman who symbolizes the hopes, dreams and aspirations to make it seem like everything is possible. She is faced with a personal dilemma. She is wondering if she should move to Idaho and take a writing job for crappy pay and lousy hours or should take a risk to take time off with no pay and try to write a best selling novel. Hope she isn't cursed with writer's block like me. 

I mean making up your own stuff does have it's benefits. You made it up, but what sucks in media is, YOU CAN'T LIE.

Now, technically I'm not supposed to make stuff up in news-writing, or advertising. Doesn't mean I can't write fictional stories on my blog today. 

I've tried to conduct research on everything from people's views on tattoos, to people's views about being a certain gender, and I just can't put it together tonight.

I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me.  This usually happens when I can't focus on one particular thing at once. 

I started blogging about tattoos. Now I'm writing fictional stories. That's a shift. 

We come downstairs in the ATC to see a vibrant Callen. Callen is present, but his mind is somewhere else. His mind is contemplating how he is being oppressed by his religion. His religion is keeping him from sitting in a hot tub naked with hot girls. Cal is over this at this point. He looks for guidance when the only person around is Ronald McDonald. Ronald is a common resident of the ATC. He begins talking to the plant that I call Verto, to help him sort his brain out, oh, wait there is a person underneath the plant, and his name is Vito telling him how to mellow.  

It is a midmorning, and a beautiful women graces the ATC. She has long black hair with a style that is all her own. Her smile lights up the room, but her attitude is radiant and vibrant like her feisty personality. This is Connie. Connie awaits for class to start patiently. She is easily distracted by wandering gypsies like myself talking to people all over. She is contemplating issues bigger than most college students ponder. She writes about her struggles, her successes in ways that are therapeutic. We see her laughing all the time, and she is never upset. She cares for everyone genuinely. She is writing about babies and marriage when she can. The smile never leaves her face, she is incapable of frowning. She writes about anything and everything and can not write a piece of bad writing. She too has the journalism dreams with our favorite characters Ed and Andy. 

This is not the first time I've been hit with the curse, and it sure won't be the last. 

In my science class my brain wanders. It does more than  just wander, it runs away screaming at the speed of light and comes back when class is over. 

I think the whole time, and never have anything to type for this damn blog. Why can't I come up with something to write about? 

You pull out the guitar and start strumming along and the music speaks, but you can't make any words come out of your mouth. You can't figure out what to write about for your live news project, (Thank You Andy Petonak). You can't figure out what to write Ed's feature writing assignment this week, you can't figure out what to write for your long awaited novel that will be a best seller. 

Having Writer's Block is a curse that every artist, poet and writer, faces. Writer's block isn't always a negative thing, look what I pumped out. 

Thanks for reading! 

Cassidy

Happy Birthday to Me. And Oh Yea, My Sister Too.

Last week when I was killing some time at my college, one of my instructors asked me, "How can you say it's 'my' birthday, if it's also her birthday, wouldn't it be 'our' birthday?" he said while pointing to my identical twin sister. It was really a game of semantics.  Oh by the way, it is "our" birthday today.

My mom always told me that she would love to be a twin. She said she would always have someone to talk to.

Well , sometimes that's true, but  it's not all close sisterhood all the time.

There are some times I wish I wasn't a twin. It's not as great as you might think.

When I was in elementary school, I went to a Catholic school from grades 1-5. My mom taught there, so it was not really a big deal. So Catholic school only means one thing: uniforms.When we were kids, my mom never dressed us the same. We already look like twins, we didn't want to dress like them too!

So from the get-go, all the girls had to look the same, with the same ugly plaid jumper.  The other problem with the Catholic school was this: One class per grade. Since Steph and I were the same age, we were in the same class, every single year. That was no easy endeavor. The struggle to be different was being obstructed.

The killer  for me and my sister was this:  This may not seem like a big deal, but when you are established as a "twin", the term automatically implies "two"! Like, "Well if this is one of you, there must be another one!" You look the same!"

 Therefore you must be the same.

Some people in our class would consider us as  the "same person". It used to bug me. A lot.

It was such a big deal, because since Steph and I were in the same class all the time, the teachers would screw up our names all the time. I guess the students would too.

That would drive me crazy. When the kids would mess up my name, they would say something  like, "Oh, it doesn't matter". That was hard to hear, because it's your name. It's your identity, so when someone demeans it in a way that says your name is not important, it's because they think you're not important.

 Several years of  passed. I was however old you are in fifth grade, and was bitching at mean girls, and just didn't care who I pissed off at that point, I was so ready to leave and finally get a new start. Not as a "twin", but as Cassidy.

One of the other things about being a twin is you live in each other's shadow. All the fucking time. It's different than living in an older brother or sister's shadow. When you have an older sibling, you are a compared to them, but eventually show you are not them. 

 In middle school, the problem wasn't as large, because there were so many people. People hardly realized, the girl that kinda looks like you. By this point, my mom made sure we never were in the same class. From that point on, we never were in the same classes, until high school that was.

Some more issues came with acting in theatrical productions and music programs.  Now neither of us was going to "not" do theatre  or sing because the other one did. My middle school shows and choirs were very competitive. However,  there were times, when I felt jipped, or Steph felt jipped because we felt that they looked over us, because one twin was great, but the other was just ok, and they didn't "want us to fight about it or something, " so neither of us got the part or the solo. You're already being compared to everyone else who auditioned, as well as your identical twin.

Our high school was a pretty small school district, not a lot of options for course times. One year, my sister and I had three courses together. We were less than thrilled. Actually very upset about it, but it was the only time the courses were offered. You can escape your older sibling's shadow, by doing something they would never do, and to your friends, they don't know your older sibling. You can't escape the shadow with a twin. You're always the same age, and in the same grade in school! The only was to escape the shadow is to go to different places and fight to be different, because being the same was so expected. But we're not the same person! Different personalities run rampant on us.

Now, enough with the bad things, there are some good things that come with the twin territory.

You can share clothes! I have so many clothes i can go two months without doing laundry because we share all of our clothes. When you're a twin, you learn to share at a very early age. You share just about anything and everything since you are little. We share hair stuff, make-up, and everything in between.  We share shoes too, mostly everything now that I think about it.

The other cool thing is about being a twin, is that you can talk about the same things, because you're at the same point in your lives. My sister and I can talk about almost anything, because we share so much of our experiences at the same time such ascollege, graduation, job searching, boys, girls, our family, and events. Oh yea, and stupid people. Can't forget stupid people.

In college, my sister and I know the same people, because we go to a community college in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. If we didn't have a similar career path, our college experience probably would be very different from each other. Since they are very similar, we have the same teachers. Yet again, all the teachers in our happy fun, awesome broadcasting/journalism department, still compare us.

I've kind of gotten over it,  it's kind of inevitable! How do you not? Two people who grew up in the same household with the same parents, how do they not act exactly the same?   We have the same teachers! I'll tell you how. We're not the same people! Twin does not mean clone! 


I've been dealing with people working to understand the term, "twin" with me my whole entire life. People ask me questions like, "Do you have twin telepathy?" "Do you feel something when something happens to the other one?"  Sometimes, i get mad when people talk about her, but I don't really know if she fell off a cliff.

There seems to be one more term associated with the term "twin" in my opinion:  COMPETITION
Twins compete for attention since the day they are born!  We argue who will get help first, who will get the better clothes, the better phone, the better car, the better deal. All the time.

In my college, I am always meeting new people. My sister and I have some of the same same friends, but we hang around with many of the same people. Steph and I have very different personalities. People who are our friends know that for a fact. Some people like me better, and some people like her better, and some like us both the same, but for different reasons.

 Some people don't even know I have a twin! There are some people who are completely oblivious to the fact that we are twins! Being a twin is a cool thing, not your identity.

Thanks for reading guys. It means a lot! I hope you liked it, I'm really proud of it!   I decided to write this because it's my birthday today! But hey it's also my sister Stephanie's birthday. Feedback is nice! Hope you enjoyed reading, hope to see you next week!

Cassidy