Mischievious Isn't a Word (And Yet Here We Are)

 I was watching a 20/20 interview when an investigative reporter confidently dropped the word “mischievious.”

Not mischievous — the real one. The bonus syllable version. The “buy one, get one free” pronunciation. And the worst part? Nobody flinched. Not the interviewer. Not the editors. Not the universe.

Which is how I know we’re officially living in the era of confidently wrong English being treated like a personality trait.  But it isn't a cute little personality quirk.

It’s not the language naturally changing — it’s the rest of us being told, “Stop being annoying. Just accept it.”  And it doesn't just stop with this one word.

“Accepted Vernacular” is just a fancy way to say “we gave up.”

We used to have a system:

Someone says something wrong. Someone corrects it. Everyone moves on

Now it’s:

Someone says something wrong. Enough people repeat it. It becomes “common.” And suddenly it’s rude to act like it’s wrong

At some point, the error stops being an error and starts being a choice.

And if you don’t accept the choice, you’re the problem. You’re the uptight one. You’re the villain in the story.

Not the phrase that makes no sense.

“I could care less” is the hill I will die on!

People confidently say “I could care less” when they mean they do not care at all.

Which is like saying:

“I am starving.”
“Oh wow, when was the last time you ate?”
“Two hours ago. I could eat less.”

If you could care less, then you still care.
You have room to care less.
There is emotional wiggle room left in the tank.

What you mean is couldn’t.
As in: “My caring has hit rock bottom. It cannot go lower. We are done here.”

But no — now it’s so common that we’re expected to just accept it as “a phrase people say.”

Not because it’s correct.
Not because it makes sense.
But because it’s so common.

We're not evolving, we're just lowering the bar—  and I think that’s what bothers me most.

It’s not that people misspeak sometimes. We all do. Everyone has a word they’ve been saying wrong since 2006 and only found out last week. That’s normal.

It’s that we’re now treating correction like it’s a hate crime.

Like the mere idea of saying, “Hey, just so you know…” is somehow worse than the phrase being wrong in the first place.

We’ve created a culture where: accuracy is “snobby,” clarity is “nitpicky,” and being correct is somehow less important than being confidently incorrect.

So now we just… move on.

We accept it.
We absorb it.
We watch the English language slowly become a group project where nobody proofreads, but everyone insists it’s fine.

And I guess it is fine.

It’s just also annoying.

A Hero’s Journey, But It’s Just Me Getting Out of Bed

There are days when getting out of bed feels like climbing Mount Everest.

Not literally — no frostbitten fingers, no oxygen tanks, no Sherpa watching me cry because my sock seam feels “wrong.” But emotionally? It’s the same mountain. And the worst part? I can see the summit. It’s right there. The summit is: Stand up. Walk downstairs. And yet my brain acts like I’m gearing up for a National Geographic documentary.

People say things like “Just put your feet on the floor!” with the same confidence of someone telling you the secret to losing weight is “Just eat less.” If it were that easy, Karen, I wouldn’t be lying here calculating whether I have the energy to blink.

I wish I could be one of those people who wakes up, stretches, springs out of bed, and decides it’s a great day to go for a jog or scrub baseboards or alphabetize the spice rack.

Meanwhile I’m over here negotiating with myself like:

“If you get up now, you can sit on the couch instead.”

“If you walk to the kitchen, you don’t even have to cook — just vibe in front of the fridge like a sad little goblin.”

“If you check the mailbox, there’s a 1% chance it’s not bad news.”

There’s this invisible weight that sits on my chest some mornings — the kind of heavy that isn’t dramatic enough to write about in a medical journal but is absolutely heavy enough to keep me from standing up. It’s not laziness. It’s not lack of motivation. It’s not “needing a better morning routine” (thanks, reels).

It’s mental illness.

It’s exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix.

It’s depression creeping in like a fog machine at a middle-school dance.

It’s anxiety whispering, “Don’t move, something might go wrong.”

It’s trauma saying, “You’re safer here.”

And yet — I still want to be the person who can just will themselves into action. I want to be the person who throws on shoes and checks the mailbox without giving themselves an internal TED Talk about perseverance. I want to be the person whose brain doesn’t turn a simple task into a death-defying expedition.

But here’s the thing I’m slowly learning:

Getting out of bed is climbing Mount Everest for some of us.

That doesn’t make us weak.

It just means we’re hiking a different mountain.

And on the days I finally swing my legs over the edge of the mattress, stand up, and take even five steps?

That’s my summit. That’s my flag at the top. That’s my “Hey, look, Ma, I made it!”

Some people climb Everest for bragging rights.

Some of us climb it just to get to the couch.

Both are victories.

The Thesis That Never Was: Christopher Pike, Twilight, and the Year My Advisor Was a Piece of Shit

Back in 2011, the biggest academic question on my mind wasn’t Shakespeare, or Milton, or whatever canonical old white guy we were supposed to be fawning over in grad school. It was this:

Why has no one ever compared Christopher Pike’s Last Vampire series to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight through a feminist lens?

And I don’t mean casually compared — I mean deeply, academically, unapologetically.
Like:
Sita vs. Bella. Female autonomy vs. female self-erasure. Ancient, ruthless agency vs. sparkly abstinence metaphors.

My brain eats pop culture for breakfast, and in my teens I was a hardcore Christopher Pike fan. So when it came time to choose a thesis topic — literally ANY thesis topic in the entire world — my manic little grad-student brain lit up like a Christmas tree. Suddenly I could see it:

A thesis that challenged, analyzed, subverted, questioned womanhood, monstrosity, power, and desire in YA vampire lit.

It was bold.
It was original.
It was academically juicy.
It was… honestly GOLD.

And then—

my advisor was a piece of shit (but dressed in a blazer with elbow patches to throw people off).

There’s really no softer way to say it. The man (or woman — but let’s be honest, it was definitely a man) managed to squash that spark with the precision of someone who was far more skilled at extinguishing ideas than nurturing them.. 

So the world never got my Christopher Pike vs. Twilight analysis.
The world never saw the feminist argument that lived in my head like a feral cat scratching at the wallpaper.
And honestly? I still think about it.

Because here’s the thing: I had something.
Something smart, weird, fresh, and genuinely worth saying.

And every time someone gushes over vampire feminism discourse — the Buffy takes, the Sookie Stackhouse takes, the endless Dracula re-re-re-interpretations — I think, Y’all don’t even know. You missed the Pike angle. The Sita reclamation arc. The contrast with Bella’s passive self-sacrifice.

We could have had it all.

I could have been the bitch who wrote that thesis.

But instead, I ended up with a graduate-school trauma origin story and a really good excuse to write a future blog post titled, “My Year at WIU: The Academic Horror Story Nobody Asked For.” And just when you’d think the experience couldn’t get more absurd, my advisor — a flaming, self-interested, ego-inflated dumpster fire of a human being with the shamelessness of a raccoon chewing through drywall — had the audacity to ask to be on my thesis panel when he was the reason the thesis never came to fruition.

Honestly, this post is just me finally putting the idea somewhere so it stops pacing angrily in the back of my skull. Maybe one day I’ll resurrect it — with fangs, feminism, and the perspective of someone who now teaches college rather than surviving it.

But for now?
This is the thesis that never was.

And the advisor?
Still a piece of shit.