I have the worst case of writer’s block that I think I’ve had in months, maybe years. I’ve been working my brain as hard as I can to crank out a paragraph or two for the Prophet, Incorporated proposal and for the website, but I’m getting nothing but cheese. Blogs, even those have been tough, hence why you haven’t seen anything since the grand Mitsubishi review (which, I’m proud to say, has pushed me into the top five of most variations on a google search for that Galant commercial I referenced – thank goodness for google.) I’m stuck on everything, be it an explanation of the Daily Prophet, to my own short bio. It’s nothing but schmaltzy cheese and I hate that. *sigh* I really hate these headaches; I’ve had this one for the past week, constant, without any relief at all. Hence why I’m blogging at four in the morning. Fun, fun, fun.

I also have another mental block – what should I do for my birthday? I have all of two items on my birthday wish list, the grand total of which is a whopping $20. I want to go somewhere, but can’t decide where because all of my true desires are far too outlandish, or just over the cusp of being reasonable. Honestly, I’d really love to go on a roadtrip through Texas, from Dallas to out in western Texas where the Chinati Foundation is. I want to go see big blue skies, wide open spaces, deserts, mountains, and – I can’t believe I’m saying this – dirt. Living in Virginia for so long has made me miss the openness of the west, how you could see out for miles on end. Of course, where we were in Arizona there wasn’t really anything to *see* in all that wide open space, so that was a bit of a problem. There were the Huachuca mountains right there, but they were really up close, not far off in the distance, with a lovely frame of grass and sky. Instead it was brown dirt, brown mound out there somewhere, and more brown in the sky. Not as nice.

Anyway. I’d really love that roadtrip. Starting out in Dallas so I can meet a good friend of mine, David, and then hop in a car to that modern art foundation in the middle of nowhere. It looks like a remarkable place to take photographs, and that’s exactly what I want to do with all this wide open space: take pretty pictures. I’m tired of the same ole’ same ole’ in my recent photography. Time for a drastic change in scenery.

I think I’m actually just suffering from the Gypsy Syndrome. After spending so much of my life as a military brat, I get this urge to move after two or three years. I’ve lived in Virginia now for nearly four years and something just doesn’t feel right. We should be boxing things up by now, we should be heading for some new place. I’m afraid if I don’t go some place different I’m going to explode from the unanswered anticipation. It really is quite an affliction, you know. Talk to any military brat, they all tend to have the same feeling if they’re still fresh out of the system. There should be therapy for this or something. Although, I wouldn’t take that therapy – I rather like it. I find it hard to imagine myself ever settling in one place. The world’s too big for that, and I have too much left to see. Sure, you can take vacations, but it’s not the same as actually living. You don’t get that same sense of having fully experienced a location, understanding its idiosyncracies, and immersing yourself in the day-to-day culture. And for some reason, I want to experience Texas that way.

Maybe I’ve been listening to Lyle Lovett too much.

Thankfully I may get to go to at least a part of Texas in May. Every Memorial Day weekend my distant relatives have a family reunion in Reagan, Texas and my Grandmother has been going year after year for quite a while. This year, we want to go together. My Mom took Grandma last year, I think it was, and she said it was hilarious. So many old Texans in one place, having a barbeque, is apparently as close as you can get to heaven. You’re accepted immediately, blood related or not, and then you get to eat ribs and cornbread. You talk, you listen to old ladies say things like ‘Oh hell’ in gentile voices, and the deadpan humor is so sly you have to perk your ten gallon hat up off your ears in order to catch it. Or so I’ve been told. I’m eager to try this out and see if I like it. Maybe it’s not just Lyle Lovett after all; maybe it’s my roots. I really hope I can make it for the reunion in May. What Grandma was hoping for would be a trip in a brand new BMW – especially a Z4 – just her and I and the open farm-to-market roads of Texas. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to deliver the car, but I can sure try. I can imagine how much fun it’d be for her to show up in Reagan in a sports car like that.

I still wish I could go to Chinati for my birthday, but it’s just too expensive to get there. I want to spend a day wandering around the area and taking as many pictures as my digital camera will hold (which is somewhere around 400, what with all the memory cards I’ve collected.) Actually, I’ve been thinking – there are these big concrete rectangles out in the middle of a field there at Chinati. Wouldn’t that be the coolest place to have family portraits every year? I have this amazing image in my head of the desert, framed by this huge concrete rectangle, and a baby crawling along the concrete, all with a sunset in the background. The next year, a toddler walking along in the same place. And so on and so forth. Whenever I get married and have children and can afford to do that, that’ll be my yearly tradition. It would be so unique. Typically I can’t stand the traditional “Family Wall of Photos” in your average family home. There always seems to be one wall in every house that’s devoted to extremely cheesy portraits of everybody, all of which nobody’s entirely happy with. That’s too… normal for me. I want it to be different, I want my portraits to be more than just, “Look how proud I am of my family.” That’s all well and good and wonderful, but instead I want, “Look, my family is a work of art.” I would want that picture to be comfortable in an art gallery, an issue of Architectural Digest; something that will last forever. That’s what family portraits should be. Families are beautiful; they deserve more than a stock Sears Photo Center background and canned smiles.

This is quite tangenty, isn’t it? Oh well. It was a nice tangent.

Back around to where I started, I at least got a little bit of work done on Prophet today. I spoke to Monica – my new CFO – on the phone this morning. She said that I did a remarkably good job on the forms to get 501(c)3 status, which was surprising, since her boss refers to it as “the form from hell.” It’s that bad. Even people who love doing taxes hate that form. So, I’m rather proud of myself. Also, Monica guided me through the process of getting an EIN – Employee Identification Number – which I need in order to file forms and hire people. Thanks to IRS.gov, I got that done immediately and had my EIN at 2:00 this afternoon.

So, after a few mental and emotional set-backs, things are looking up again. And this time they’re looking up because of *me*, and because of my dear sister-in-law whom I know I can trust with my whole heart. No more relying on strangers. Now if only I could figure out what I wanted to do for my 19th birthday. A girl only turns 19 once, it should be good, right? Last year of teenagerdom and all that. Got any ideas? Please, please, please, post a comment and help me out here.