A Major Sleep Problem

I'm going to be honest with you. Our family's always been sort of messed up in terms of sleep. There's no schedule that anyone adheres to, and even after my dad tells us all to finally go up, everyone has their own routines and doings that take up their own time and there's no one time that I can guarantee that all of us will be fast asleep.
Take that, thieves.
I'm sure that's one of the reasons they haven't tried anything despite the large tree that conveniently leads right outside my window. They're scared that they'll enter my house and find my sister eating spaghetti or something.
I don't know what's happening at four a.m.
I myself spend weeknights up until 2-3 a.m. Unlike my siblings, I actually have a genuine reason for staying up so late. I study and finish my homework for school.
My brother's in his room on his phone. I know he's on his phone because he doesn't actually use headphones. It doesn't actually make any sense because he has headphones and they're functional. In fact, he uses them on his laptop every single day of his life. It's only at night that he feels is the perfect time to blast audio, when everyone's in bed trying to sleep. I feel like that's his way of protesting. Let me know if you have any sort of idea about what he might be protesting. Help a sister out.
My sister who's thirteen finds sleep unappealing. She lays there for God knows how many hours. Nobody is available to entertain her at that time, so she often stares at me while I do my homework. It's absolutely terrifying to rest your head for a minute and open them to see eyes staring at you. I try telling her that she has it great and to take advantage of her opportunities because when I was thirteen, no one told me to appreciate sleep as it was.
She still resumes the staring, so I'm not sure she got the message. I'm counting on fate to teach her a lesson.
When you're younger, I get it. Sleep is for the weak. It's boring, it takes forever, on and on. When you're older, however, you praise God for inventing something like sleep. A time where it's acceptable to knock out of the world. Imagine if we didn't have the need to sleep. We'd just be awake twenty-four seven, and life for robbers would be a lot more difficult. I can just imagine one trying to pop in through my window in broad daylight. Even if I wouldn't be there, my sister would probably be, eating a bowl of spaghetti with a look of blank, pure boredom.

Sometime in February, this actually became a problem. My brother left for college like he usually does on Mondays. He comes home late because he decided evening classes were cool. (In reality, evening classes mean that you don't come home before seven, eight p.m. My dad picks him up on Mondays, so that means coming home even later. Anyways. It's not like he minds, so. There's no room for pity here. That comes later.)
My dad called to say that my brother hadn't come to the car that day. Normally he's late, so we were like, "ok, just wait some more." But after waiting a good forty-five minutes, people start to worry. Even unemotional, unattached people who don't hug their siblings.
I'm talking about me running around making phone calls that aren't getting picked up. I'm talking looking at his last snapchat update. I even went so far as to contact his friend.
I don't know my brother's friends, okay. This isn't a normal sibling relationship. He may know the names of some of my friends, but I haven't an inkling about who he hangs out with. My parents presumably do, so I'm okay with not knowing who his waking hours are spent with.
What this meant was scouring the people he follows on Instagram for some sort of familiar name. Now, trying to distinguish a friend from someone's following list on Instagram is a terrible way of going about it. For one, half of them are people who are friends of your friends, which basically means you forget they exist until they post. But I was the only link in my family who had a sort of a connection to his friends because for some reason we don't have even one of his friend's numbers.
I ended up finding some random dude who my mom then sent a message too. Poor dude, honestly.
He replied later on that he didn't know.
By that time, I had scoured up the number for the college's Lost People number. My brother wasn't answering his calls, my dad had walked the streets of the university, and went to the nearby buildings to ask if they had seen him. The whole evening in the house became a fluster of panic, crying people because it's college and college is a dangerous place and it's like, nine p.m.
I had just sent my dad the Lost People number when my dad texts us to say my brother had finally come in contact. Guess where this genius had been "missing" for a good two hours?

Dead asleep, in the campus library.

Now, everyone started crying again, because it was just something innocent like sleeping. I, on the other hand, was like of course he was sleeping! of course!!

God. It was a stressful day for everyone.
Except him.

I Made Fruit Tart and It Went Fine

I know what you're thinking: "How dare she start with clickbait in the title! First it was the youtubers, now it's the bloggers?!?! Outrageous!"

Really, though. I mean it. I didn't screw up. It's hard to believe, so I took pictures.

It started off with realizing that if I didn't get off the computer soon, I was about to get yelled at. So, in order to prevent Disaster, I went and did the work before It could occur.
I had midterms last week, which resulted in a four day break to relax and remember that nothing actually matters. (That's what breaks are meant for. To pretend you didn't have a mental breakdown in the middle of the week because Chemistry has taken over your life to the point that you dream about it.)
During that four-day break, instead of mourning grades, I decided to be productive and bake. And Fruit Tart it was.
The significance of Fruit Tart is that no one has objections to it. (Besides my older brother, but nobody asked him.) It isn't too sweet, isn't too bland, so the kids and adults make peace with each other over one dessert. Fruit Tart.
It's pure, smells great, brings together the family. Take that, Sara Lee. I'm pretty sure you guys don't even sell Frozen Fruit Tarts. *

Initially, while one searches for Fruit Tart recipes on the internet, they may say something like, "Oh, look at this! A ten-minute tart! Perfect for my busy schedule!"
And that may be true, too, until you open up the recipe and realize that the only reason it takes ten minutes is because all the ingredients are store bought by the baker and they simply spend ten minutes decorating the damn thing.

Now, I have nothing against pre-made items. They make life simple. The profit gives money to the people who are running a business on pre-made crusts. It makes the world spin a little faster.

Except I had to make everything. The crust I usually make by myself anyways, but for pudding I make exceptions. So, for the first time in my life, I made homemade pudding. It made me feel like I was in the nineteenth century, churning corn starch and egg whites, but it wasn't bad, I mean.

So, when I saw recipes for "Ten-Minute Fruit Tarts," you may understand, I was not amused. That thing took me two hours.

(Side note: It takes me forever to bake stuff. Whenever I see a recipe that says something like, "Prep time: 25 minutes," I know better. I automatically double the time because that's the time it takes actual humans. Am I saying that professional cooks aren't human? Yeah, kindofsortofmaybe.)

The crust called for "softened" butter. One thing you should know about me is that I completely ignore all prerequisites  of baking. I don't preheat the oven to three-fifty, I don't take the eggs out of the fridge, (Lord knows that cold eggs have the potential to ruin stuff.) and I certainly don't take the butter out of the fridge the morning of so that it can achieve a room temperature by the time I start baking.

Thus, when the recipe said "softened," my brain transmitted, "throw it in the microwave, for pete's sake."

So, that's what I did. Did I pay for it later on? Yes. Will I change the way I read prerequisites in the future? No.

I overheated the butter, causing a portion of it to completely liquefy. Which was supposed to not matter, by the way. I just learned about the Law of Conservation of Mass, which states that during a reaction, matter is neither created nor destroyed. Thus, the butter liquefying did not alter any of my measurements, which is one thing I'm better at. But it did ruin the crust forever and make it greasy. And delicate. And terribly un-photogenic from one side where I kept ruining the scalloped edges by pressing against the crust. But it's okay because I just took a picture from the other side.

Ah, technology.

The pudding itself wasn't difficult, except I obviously wasn't the ideal demographic in mind. They merely brushed over the process,  like, "yeah pour the milk in the egg mixture and spin a spoon  in there," while I tried to analyze where in the recipe it said to get out the milk. Then again, I do require extensive detail to semi-decently complete any given task. So, don't go hating on allrecipes.com. They do their best.

Then, I finally topped it off with some good ole' fruits. My family loved it. They praised my baking skills. One cool thing about being totally mediocre is that the mediocre tasks you accomplish look fantastic to people around you, since they've learned to keep their expectations incredibly low. It works great for everyone.

Thank God for Fruit Tart.











*Disclaimer: Sara Lee Apple Pie is amazing and this was simply a joke. My family is indeed brought together by the delight that is your pie. Please don't sue. I want to go to college.

Writer's Block

Writer's Block is like the neighbor on the block that coincidentally shows up when you're getting ready to relax and not move from the same position for a solid three hours. They're like, "Hey! Thought it's been a while since I last saw you!"  (It's been like, five minutes. Ten if we're being precise.)

I'm on winter break now, all ready to write and everything! Guess who decides to show up? The neighbor, that's who! I've been trying to write stuff for this blog and I might as well hand it to my imaginary cat to write it for me. At least people will find the nonsense cute.
(Seriously, I don't understand the world's obsession with cats??! A post for another day.)
See, many people think writer's block is where your brain literally shuts down and your hand is unable to move to make any progress, thus-

I'm just kidding. Nobody thinks that.

In reality, writer's block is sitting for hours trying to piece together some semblance of a paragraph. It often goes like this.

Me, typing: "So, like, I was on my bike the other day."
Brain: That's the most boringest opening sentence in the history of literature.
Me: "Boringest" isn't even a word.
Brain: You're the one who thinks that the brain is a separate entity from yourself.

The computer screen: *continues to remain blank*

It can take a very long time to overcome a case of Writer's Block. If you're one of those rich bloggers who have a view of the ocean and are currently writing your autobiography whilst listening to Mozart, you can easily overcome this disease by taking a week-long vacation halfway across the world. You'll have the ideas by the time you get back!

For nobodies like myself who have a view of the decaying landscape as the snow melts, transforming into brown slush and/or aren't old/interesting enough to be writing an autobiography, we resort to other cures for this dreaded case.
Cures like:

• Staring out the window.
• For an extended period of time
• Not being able to sleep because of all the ideas that come to you at 3:24 A.M
• Writing down these ideas in the "notes" app
• Trying to make sense of the note when it comes to actually writing
• Having a midlife crisis

Sigh.