The Chapstick

      Greetings, earthlings! I speak in such an extraterrestrial tongue because a different planet is the only explanation I have for where I have been this past year. While my heart, and my mind have been right here, writing, scribbling, thinking, I, myself have been in a galaxy far, far away. I have written this particular article in many fashions, tongues, many times, and I have just looked at my reflection in my laptop,and felt unrecognizable. That is more or less how I have felt this past year, unrecognizable, I have been growing and becoming someone I felt could slam away at these keys in a vessel that I could stand behind. Since we've last parted I have lost parts of myself both physically and metaphorically. I have jotted down the many intimacies of my mind that I have let both consume, enamor, and expand the woman I have become, and I have much to share with you all. While I am sure the viewership of this particular blog either knows me on a personal enough basis, or is of

         I am sure you've heard it before from your mom, your friend, the little voice in your head: "How will I know if he/she really loves me?" Well, Whitney definitely hit it on the head when she says "I say a prayer with every heart beat" because it sure can be intimidating to love someone who loves differently than you, but it isn't impossible. I personally think it can be very rewarding to master your partners love language. Everyone you meet will love and want to be loved differently and mastering not only how to love them, but to be able to identify that they are showing you that they love you is a beautiful and necessary task for a balanced and fulfilling relationship. Trying to pretend that I am a professional at these "love languages" would be wrong because I suffer from doubts when my partner loves me different than how I love her, or what I have been made to feel that love looks like. It can be daunting and make you second guess, but w

    I was sitting in a french fry place in Amsterdam, eating 3600 calories worth of fast food covered up as a cultural delicacy when my phone buzzed. It was my cousin, my second cousin as my girlfriend corrected, but someone close to me none the less. She was reaching out to me to call her immediately from tens of thousands of miles away, and my face flushed, and my head tightened because something was clearly wrong. I couldn't make a call on my phone plan from Europe, and I figured she was letting me know someone was in the hospital. That's what always happens. Someone tries to reach out for communication, and you already know the answer by that effort alone. My first thought was my dad, hes heavier (sorry Dad, but almonds don't negate the nutritional facts of a snickers), and he has a bad heart, and temperamental diabetes. I had decided that she was reaching out to tell me that while I was running around Europe he had a heart-attack. My intuition was only half wrong. Diab

      As promised not all of my literary dwellings will be based on my sexual inhibitions both past and present. I want to take some time to really evaluate, and pat myself on the back for running away from my problems, and right over the half marathon finish line. This all started as I was making my new years resolutions. I have been telling myself since the day I stopped being a size 4 in 2015 that I was going to start running again because I know it is the most effective source of exercise for my body. I had always been a treadmill runner, but that was a private excursion that gave a lot of leeway to me to take the easy way out, and it didn't come with a lot of structure (something I desperately needed). Thus, birthed the goal of running a half marathon.      I was pretty gung-ho when I first started telling people I was going to run the race. Why it didn't occur to me to start with a 10k or something a little less far fetched I will never know, but in true Caitlin fashion

           Welcome to the shit show! I say this as a welcoming to the blogosphere that I will divulge all of my inner most musings whether homo-sexually charged or not. I have wanted to create this space of characters for most of my adult life, and to be honest several years prior when I was a teenager clutching to magazines as if they were the Holy Grail. I learned from a young age watching Elle Woods visit fitness mogul Brook Windam in jail that Cosmopolitan was in fact “the bible”. However, something was constantly missing. I loved perusing the fashion that I would never afford, and the makeup that wasn’t from a drug store, but going through a self-identity crisis I was not really searching for the answers on how to remember my birth control, or what to wear to make him think you’re a “bad girl” (even if you were a 15 year old virgin). Nothing in my life could relate to these articles, and in the mass of how-to's and personal accounts there was nothing there that looked like me,