the title goes here

my mom’s made carrot juice.

a substantial percentage of them are me with my eyes closed.

nice.

harini was right, it was a really good movie. she was also right about how it makes you feel guilty for being a human, pretty much. if i ever buy something with diamonds you can bet i’ll make sure they’re conflict-free. 

movies like that make you want to get up and do something, join the peace corps, anything.

sliding around on the ice, feeling the cold air on your nose, that moment of fear when you almost fall over, the envy of the little kids passing you, the breathlessness from the effort to go faster, the freedom of zooming along.

i, ellen jacobs, have officially finished the grapes of wrath.

yes i know it’s a semester too late, but i have finished it now, which in the end is all that matters. the reason i didn’t finish it at the end of summer was that i spent so much time studying for french, which i had procrastinated on. i don’t regret this choice in the least because i passed my french test and did well on the test about the grapes of wrath. that’s why i think our literature classes are flawed—i didn’t read the last 100 pages and yet got  good score on the test.

but regardless of all of that, i wanted to finish the book. and so i did.

whenever i get stuff i really like but will someday run out of (like stickers, candy, that sort of thing) i keep it rather than use it. i’m a save-the-best-for-last kind of person, and i always save up all this stuff for just the right moment. the problem is then i never use it. i forget about it or i just never find a time that i deem sufficiently perfect for its use. 

this christmas, i got both stickers and candy. and one of my new year’s resolutions will be to actually USE this stuff, rather than just hoard it. so i’m starting now, by eating my all my chewy sweet tarts. i’m not going to let this stuff go to waste.

the evening played out close to exactly as i had expected. almost immediately after i wrote the post predicting the start of the card games, guess what started? the card games. the only difference was the games they were playing, so i played too.

my mom’s friends left so it was just ten of us (ten is still a LOT of people) and we played a round of skip-bo. it’s kind of a tradition. i love that game, and i am pretty dang awesome at it, i have to say. i won the first game. it was hilarious because my aunt and my brother’s friend’s mom (but i call her an aunt because we’ve known them since before sam was born) are both bubbly, loud, vivacious people who are the life of the party. add in a whole lot of wine, and they’re hiiiiilarious. plus we were all joking together, making fun of each other. they’re a lot of fun.

then sam’s friend’s family left, so the seven remaining played zombie fluxx, the card game i got my dad. that game is insane, because the goal of the game and the rules all change as you play. that was so much fun, even if it was so confusing that our heads were all hurting after. and i won the third game of that.

i may not like a lot of card games but the ones i do like i am pretty good at, if i do say so myself. it was a lot of fun to hang out with all of them, too.

only one more round of christmas this year! usually we have at least two more groups of people to see and exchange gifts with, but this year only one, which is tomorrow. going to have dinner with my ex-step-grandpa (it’s complicated, i know), one of my favorite “relatives” (not actually related—sort of—it’s complicated, like i said). 

all in all, this was a (mostly) successful christmas.

aside from the downer previously mentioned, christmas has been a lot of fun.

i got some great stuff, like one of the reindeer piggy banks from target (i REALLY wanted one of these, don’t judge), some nice sweaters, a rockband extension that i intend to play later, some amazing stationary supplies that have motivated me to clean off my desk (i LOVE LOVE LOVE stationary supplies), some gift cards, and some other little things. christmas presents are a big thing in my family. if i’m related to them they sent me a present. also, my grandma is a champion online shopper, and so she always gets my brother and i waaayy too many presents. on christmas we are very spoiled.

this morning my brother woke me up at 8:45 by standing in my doorway shouting “ELLEN WAKE UP WAKE UP IT’S CHRISTMASSSSSS!” while jumping up and down, but it was all good because i was already awake (my internal clock will NOT let me sleep through christmas). we did our presents with our parents and each other, and then my grandma came over and presented us with a plethora of gifts. we had breakfast and did our stockings. stockings in our house have never been from “santa,” we’ve always known it was our family. my parents put stuff in and then my grandma does too when she comes. stockings have always been my favorite. they’re all the tiny things that are too small to wrap individually, but they’re the most fun. 

then we went to go visit my great grandpa, which to describe to you i will have to refer you to my last post because this is a happy post right here.

after, my grandma went home to go change before everyone else came over for dinner. i made mashed potatoes and helped set up the table and stuff, and then everyone came over. we had twelve people around our table, and with both leaves in we were squished. my family of four, sam’s friend’s family of three, my aunt and uncle, my grandma, and one of my mom’s best friends and her husband. yum, i love christmas food. so much stuff, from turkey and tofurkey to two kinds of cranberry sauce to casseroles of every imaginable type, followed by pie and cookies and stuff. we’ve got so much weird food, because my uncle is vegetarian and my aunt and grandma have celiac disease, which means they don’t eat gluten, and thus about half of our food had to be made differently. but i have to say, tofurkey is pretty good, and the fake pie crusts taste fine. craziness in my family is the norm.

any moment now the card games will start, and probably not let up for at least another three hours, probably more. i’m not a fan of card games, but i’ll go play rockband or read my new book or something. christmas is an all-day affair, to be sure. i love christmas because i get to see my relatives and family friends, and we all get together and have fun. they make me feel really lucky to have what i have.

i hope your christmases (or whatever you’re doing today, christmasy or not) are fun!

no one is supposed to cry on christmas.

anyway, i put this one as a click-through because i’m not sure who’s going to want to read it. some people will read it, i don’t know. i just don’t want to force it on anyone since it’s so long and depressing, honestly. i just wanted to write something about what happened, so here it is.

we went to visit my great grandpa today.

he’s about 94 now i think, and he lives in a house with a few other old people and some care takers. my mom goes to visit him 3 or 4 times a week. i used to go more but lately it’s been hard to have enough time to go visit. the last time i saw him was when our family went to see him at thanksgiving. he’s blind and paralyzed from the waist down, but now he can’t move much. he’s sam’s and my great grandpa, but we call him grandpa like my mom does.

sometimes, he has these hallucinations. in the past whenever i’ve come he’s been okay, but it happens a lot when my mom comes, i hear. she laughs it off but one time she was telling me about one and i could tell it really hurt her. mostly they’re harmless, he’s on a train or something. sometimes he has this whole other life, where he has a girlfriend and he’s younger and can see. mostly he doesn’t mind, because if he’s on a train the people he’s talking to just “get on the train with him” and stuff like that. still, it’s really sad. it’s really hard for him to get reoriented because he can’t see anything, so he doesn’t have anything to ground himself with. 

today, we went and the first thing he told us was he was having trouble with his brain. he was on a train that was going to fast, and he knew his mind was playing tricks with him but he didn’t know what he could do about it. he needed us to help him stop the train.

my brother and i were silent. neither of us had ever been there when he was having one, and it was kind of indescribable. disturbing, sad, i don’t know how to say it. my dad was fixing his radio and my mom and grandma (his daughter) tried to help him. they couldn’t DO anything, because of course there was no train, just him in his wheelchair in his room, but they tried to help him. they told him the train was slowing, going down from 15 miles per hour to 10 to 6 to 2 and finally stop. we thought it would be okay as soon as the train stopped, so he’d be able to “get off” like he wanted to. 

but that didn’t work. he accepted that the train had stopped, but now he was “stuck in his seat.” he was wedged somehow, he thought, and he couldn’t get up. it probably had to do with the fact that he can’t really move himself normally, so he couldn’t get up in his hallucination either. my mom and grandma tried to help him get “unwedged” but they didn’t want to actually pick him up (and they couldn’t, really) so they could only help so much. we got one of the helpers to come, and she took him into the living room, hoping that he would be better out there. he wasn’t, he was still stuck in his imaginary chair. they gave him a sort of weak sedative to calm him down, but it didn’t seem to help. finally they thought maybe it’d be okay if he got taken out of his wheelchair, and although he wanted to be actually stood up and we couldn’t do that, they thought it’d be best to put him on his bed. he got put into the bed via harness and some sort of metal apparatus (because he can’t lift himself and neither can the care takers without the help of this), and he was still uncomfortable. by then it’d been about an hour though so we thought it’d be best if we left. two caretakers were there trying to help, and we were obviously not helping.

the thing that hurt me the most was that he told us more than once that he knew it was a hallucination. he knew his brain was messing with him, but there was nothing he could do about it. he had to get off the train. he was so upset, too. after my mom and grandma “stopped the train” and he couldn’t get “unwedged,” my mom was at a loss about what they could do and told him. he told us he was really scared and upset that everyone seemed to be treating it as a joke. it was real to him, and it was really scaring him. he knew everyone was doing what they could but he didn’t think we were really sympathetic enough. later he was so angry that there was nothing anyone could do. he had a christmas gift to open, but he didn’t want to because he “would prefer to deal with stopping the train first.” he was aware that we were all there, aware that there were other things going on, that he was being moved from his bedroom to the living room, but he was still on this train. he had begun to get more and more agitated and scared after we moved the living room, and it broke my heart to see the fear on his face. he looked about on the verge of tears. i’ve never seen him, or any adult for that matter, look like that.

it took a lot of effort for me not to cry. it hurt me a lot to see him like that. my brother came and sat with me, and he just wanted to lean on me because he was scared too, scared for grandpa. i saw my grandma sitting next to us too, because she couldn’t help him anymore either, and her eyes were read and shiny like mine. i can’t even imagine how hard it was for her, to see her father like this. he’s been blind since before i was born, but i know he was a really amazing man before he had his strokes. to see him so scared, so vulnerable must’ve been awful. i really wished grandpa would “wake up” for her, so that the both of them would feel better. she doesn’t get to come and see him as much, because she lives farther, and so she’s not used to the hallucinations like my mom is. even she was having a hard time too, because normally they don’t make him upset, they’re just a fact. 

i can’t even put into words how much it broke my heart to see him like this. i tried to stifle tears as much as i could for sam so he wouldn’t be as scared, but it was really hard. it’s hard to explain, but it killed me. when my mom was telling me about one time when my grandpa “introduced her to his new girlfriend,” while it made me sad we both agreed that if it made him happy, it was all for the best. since he moved to california 5 years ago after his wife died, we’ve done our best but his life has kind of sucked. we visit him, but there’s only so much we can do. if he can find some joy in imagining something, than it’s not that bad. really what we were doing was trying to find some good in whatever we could.

when we were leaving, sam and i said goodbye. he recognized our voices and said he didn’t know we were there, and we said yes we were and wished him a merry christmas. he seemed calm for a moment, but i don’t know how long it lasted. he must’ve thought we were just on the train with him, but i was glad we could talk to him normally for a second. he’s never seen me (he went blind right before i was born) but whenever i visited him he always told me i was beautiful and he loved me. i love him too.

it really shook me up. he’s really old and i know he’s probably not going to get to see me get married or maybe even graduate high school, but i can’t face that, not even begin to face it. besides his wife, no one close to me has died. i’ve been lucky. but even when my great grandma passed, i was really really sad but it didn’t change my life very much because they lived in arkansas and we only saw them once a year. but now, grandpa is a part of my everyday life. even if i don’t see him, my mom goes a lot and we buy things for him and we go as a family on every holiday. 

i hid this post because not only is it really long, i also don’t know how many people are going to want to read it, but i really wanted to just write it down. one thing it’s taught me is that anyone can have problems like this, things you wouldn’t know just by looking at or even talking to. i know i’ve got some friends who have lost people recently or in the past, but my guess is there’s more than i know. everyone’s going through something, and i need to make sure i give people a break sometimes, because i don’t know everything that may be going on in their life. 

if you’ve made it this far, thanks. i don’t know how this is all going to play out but i know that i’m going to do the best i can.

we were watching youtube videos, and i had to educate him in the ways of music videos and mashups. 

first we watched eminem + taio cruz + katy perry = sam tsui

then we watched the instrument wars and he nearly died laughing. i’m not kidding you, he was gasping for air. watching him was funnier than the actual videos. 

then we watched random kurt and sam videos for a while, until he wanted to show me how to be a ninja and some other videos he thought were funny, along the lines of charlie the unicorn and such. my feelings toward charlie the unicorn, however, remain unchanged; i’m not a fan. he and i share very different tastes in humor. 

it was fun, though. ellen & sam bonding <3

sam has got this motion detector thing, that when you cross through its range it beeps like crazy and annoys the heck out of the rest of the family.

he thought he’d be clever and put it facing right out of his door, which happens to cut across the stairs. that would mean that any time anyone else tried to leave their rooms and go downstairs or come back upstairs, it would go off. he was sitting there smugly grinning for a while because he thought i didn’t know about it, and then he went downstairs to get something to eat (stepping over the motion detector so it wouldn’t go off).

little did he know, i know how to turn that thing off. while he was gone i flipped the off switch. now i’m downstairs too and he’s really confused as to how i got past his “hidden” motion detector.

dinner time!

this is what happens when my mom doesn’t make us dinner. it doesn’t happen until 11:20.

today, my family went out to go and eat lunch at taco bell. we ended up at armadillo willy’s for some reason, though. then we were going to go home, but then somehow we ended up at vallco to finish our christmas shopping. a few hours and two christmas present purchases later, we were going to really go home. but then somehow we ended up seeing tangled instead. finally, many hours later, we’re home.

planning is not our strong point, you see.

and i feel like i have accomplished absolutely nothing.

but of course, that is exactly what i intended. 

between being bored, and being bored enough to go do something productive.

today while we were at the mall, a girl walked by and said hi to all of us. i’ve seen her around school and i kind of knew her name, but i didn’t think she knew me. 

then she said, “hi ellen!”

turns out she went to my elementary school and has been in choir for all of high school, though no one could remember if she was in cantos last year with me.

really? am i really so unobservant that i wouldn’t know someone who was in my class last year? or even someone who knows my name well enough to say hi to me in the mall. i felt really stupid because they all seemed to know her, and i should have too. 

i think i need to pay attention more.

i’m best at alienating the ones closest to me.

there’s no “cents” sign on a keyboard.

there’s the $ sign, but never the c with a | through. 

you may say that’s because we can just go $0.01 and such but that’s not the point. we used to always use that sign in elementary school when learning to do addition or count or stuff like that. at garage sales and other places where things under a dollar are priced, they use the sign. it’s got to be handwritten, because there’s no key on the computer to type it with.

i want a little c with a | through it. i want a cents sign. and i don’t even know why.

woooah.

just finished watching it. and i don’t want to give away the ending, but i really liked it.  tom cruise may be a creep in real life but he’s a good actor.

it’s so thought provoking. how would our society handle a discovery like the precogs? what would we do with them? would we charge the premurderers the same as murderers? how much control over our own fates do we really have? 

ahh i don’t want to say too much. it was really cool. you should go watch it.

it’s a beautiful night,
we’re looking for something dumb to do.
hey baby,
i think i wanna marry you.

today i was in the car with my mom and somehow we got to talking about that bruno mars song, marry you, that is really popular right now. my mom said she thinks that’s a bad idea, marrying someone on a whim. DARN THERE GOES MY—no duh it’s a bad idea. 

but then of course, she says, if you’re already married it’s okay. so i was confused, and asked her what she meant. apparently, one time my parents went to las vegas together. this was pre-ellen, of course. one afternoon at the end of their trip, they had nothing to do. they were tired of gambling, but there wasn’t enough time to go to a show, so they were looking for something to do. hey, they thought, let’s go get married! so they did. they went and got “married” in one of those cheesy chapels with an elvis impersonator. it was their… 7 1/2 anniversary, something random like that. they were literally looking for something dumb to do, and so they decided to get married.

coming from my parents, why does this not surprise me at all?