Maaaaaaaan, it’s nights like this.  Fat flakes drifting down in the soft evening light, catching and clinging on hair and clothes, shining in the street lamps on the walk across campus.  It’s got me in the mood for kissing strangers.

End Of An Era (Or At Least A Decade)

OK, so I did this post last year, and it remains one of my favorite pieces of writing I’ve ever done, both in the experience of actually sitting down to do it and the part where I get to go back, re-read, and remember everything all over again, so here I am at the end of ‘09, fixin’ to do the same thing  (fixin’?  Lord?  Who am I?).  I actually should be reading Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwhich for my Brit Lit class right now, but this sounds so much more fun to me, so I chose it instead!  That’s like a core tenet of my being: do whatever the hell I want at all or most times, regardless of how hard it fucks me up the ass in the long-run. But seriously, who in their right minds would choose Margery Kempe over, ohhhhh, anything?  Maybe I’d rather read her than fall in that acid lake from Dante’s Peak….maybe.  But there’s no way in hell I’d choose her over examining the last year of my life in excruciating detail, so let’s begin! 

 So January is where it started, and boooooy, let me tell you, January ‘09 was a complete 180 away from January ‘08 in that I did not, in fact, hate everything about my life this year.  Cheerful!  In fact, I really, really liked my life, despite the fact that the first really clear memory I have of 2009 is cleaning puke out of my best friend’s new basement carpet.  That was not so super.  However, one of my favorite January memories, which I had actually stored away and forgotten about until just last week, involved a night spent at one of my closest friend’s houses.  We were supposed to be doing some all-night bedroom painting (not a euphemism!), but instead we drank margaritas and watched Vanity Fair and made snow angels at 1:30 in the morning.  There was muffled shrieking and cursing and awesomeness, and this memory helps explain why she remains such a wonderful friend.  One of the overwhelming impressions I have of January in my mind is curling up at the Union to read and drink coffee.  I had a new class schedule and a funky, long but not-long-enough-to-make-the-effort-and-go-back-to-my-room  hour and a half-long break between classes, so I’d take Edgar Sawtelle, get Starbucks, and read.  This routine ended after that book made me cry in public.  Awkward.  Anyway, January was such a happy, golden month.  I was so overjoyed to be back in BG, and fell in love all over again with that place and those people.  February, though, started to get a little rough.  I was sick of winter, I think, and work, and school a little, too.  For some reason, things from February don’t stick in my mind very well.  I DO remember going dancing on Valentine’s Day weekend, and coming home with what appeared to be blood on the back of my dress.  Yes, blood.  From someone else’s body.  So I spent a few days fearing for my health in February, for sure.  I know I also started to get a lot closer to a group of my roommate’s friends, too, and they are one of the reasons the next few months were so fucking great.  I can’t even guess at the number of nights the whole group crowded into our room and convinced each other to stay awake until 2, 3, 4 in the morning just so that we could keep laughing and enjoying each other’s company.  I also for the life of me do not know how we were never written up for a noise violation in that tiny, cramped dorm room, especially when my bookish, quiet, stern RA lived only two doors down. 

Anyway, March.  I know I stayed up all night one Saturday reading Finding Arizona.  Great read.  I also had another birthday that was mostly underwhelming.  However, I did come back to my room that night from preparing for bed in the bathroom to find four close friends holding a small cake with burning candles just for me.  They sang and I made a wish, and I think it came true.  Is that too much?  Maybe a little.  I’d like to remark in the discussion on March that I was also in the midst of seriously one of my favorite classes I’ve ever had the pleasure of taking here at BG: History of Jazz.  My professor just derived so much joy from teaching, and I got totally immersed in this music to which I had never given a second thought, and all of a sudden I found that I liked it, and wanted more of it, and I wanted to be able to speak intelligently and in an informed manner about my opinions of it, and also there was this a-DORABLE bass player in that class whom I am still kind of in love with, but mostly I dug the music.  Yeah, that’s what it was all about.  It might sound cheesy, or nerdy, or silly to say, but whatever, when have I ever given a fuck about that, but I seriously think I enjoyed spring semester so much because I had a class that I just wholeheartedly loved and threw myself into.  That’s been the case every spring for me here, and since I’m writing this practically one year later, I can say that the trend is holding true for the third year running.  But that’s for next year’s update.  Some favorite activities from March were: playing Sudoku and lounging in my next-door neighbor’s blue chair, drinking Starbucks and walking around campus with my iPod every Tuesday afternoon like clockwork, listening to Beyonce and TI, being consistently silly with my roommate, watching Gossip Girl, going to charity events drunk (OK, that was just once), and sleeping.  March and April flew by.  April was definitely the best month of the year, and if we’re being brutally honest, maybe one of the best of my life.  Again, too much?  This time I’m gonna go with probably NOT.  It’s so true.  I can’t remember an upsetting memory from April.  Everything was rainbows and butterflies and puppies and sunshine and also good music, good classes, perfect friends, totally situated life.  I walked four miles to and from my bank one day, which in and of itself is insignificant, but helps to explain how I had the time to discover and get really into my two favorite albums of this month and May: Ben Folds’ Way To Normal, which, in my humble opinion, is his best solo effort to date, and Bishop Allen’s Charm School, which I should have been listening to all school year.  Two of my best friends came up for a weekend, and we spent the night drinking and dancing and the next day exploring the outskirts of the town.  I had a song dedicated to me by a saxophonist.  Shit, that might be the highlight of my LIFE.  He was so charming! 

I spent my last few weekends in BG drinking, dancing, goofing, lounging, absorbing the presence of my wonderful floormates before it all changed and fell apart, and just generally being one cheerful motherfucker.  Moving out in May was so, so terrifying.  I already wrote about why, so I’ll just say that it rained on move out day again, I broke the zipper on my suitcase, and the very instant I turned to hug my roommate goodbye I burst into uncontrollable sobbing, and so did she.  Also, I found out later that day in a McDonald’s that someone was suing me.  I was back in Dayton for a few days, and then my family embarked on a road trip to Florida.  I fucking LOVE road trips with my family.  My eldest sister got married, I went swimming in the ocean, and my dad drunkenly walked through a screen door.  Needless to say, everyone enjoyed themselves.  The rest of May was taken up with hanging out with home friends, some of whom were leaving soon for various parts of the world, and working, working, working.  And not driving.  I didn’t get a car until JUNE, and God, the day my dad picked me up from work and asked if I wanted to go look at some cars was probably the best of the summer.  OK, not really, but I was overjoyed because I had been under the impression that he was not doing a damn thing to find me a car, and wouldn’t take any suggestions from me, and was secretly plotting to see how long I could go without one before having a full-blown mental breakdown (The answer: probably about two more weeks).  Anyway, two of my very best friends left the country and I was bored out of my mind.  I already covered a lot of my summer in the summer post and I’m trying to come up with things I didn’t include there, and honestly, I don’t have much because I was SO inactive this summer.  In June, I made the only post here that I wrote ALL SUMMER, and it was on a night where I was probably doing what I spent most of the beginning of the summer doing: staying up late re-watching the first two seasons of Gossip Girl.  Not kidding.  I’m not complaining; I mean, I love that show, I just, now, looking back, wish I had gone out a little more.  I wish I had more stories. 

Well, that’s the first six months of 2009 covered.  I have yet to even begin July-December, so who knows when it’ll go up.  Things got quite a bit more eventful in August, and have yet to slow up, even now, in 2010.  Just a little something to look forward to!

Can I just admit real quick how much I love “Body Language”?  Sooooo catchy, love the way he sings “parle-ez vous”, and when little whitey white boy Jesse McCartney says he wants to holler at anything, I just giggle.  Also, “bangin like a speakerbox” is my new go-to compliment before going out at night.  What can I say?  Sometimes I’m just unabashedly 20 years old.  Doesn’t explain why I stayed in on a Saturday night watching Project Runway reruns, but it does explain why I dance like a fool to this ridiculous collaboration.

Dreamurder

I started to write this post forever ago, like over a year ago, and for the life of me I cannot remember how the dream ended.  I’m so pissed I didn’t finish this; it cuts off right when things are getting so good and I desperately want to know how it ends.  I think someone died.

I woke up completely creeped out from a dream this morning.  I was trapped in a hotel with a murderer, and Juliet and Lassiter from Psych were there to protect me.  I was hanging out in a room stressing (mind you, I was not crying or flailing about; the fact that someone was after my head only had me mildly perturbed) to my three best friends (who were there… why?) when I get some sort of map from the murderer

Perspective

I’ve written about this before; not on here, somewhere else, but the situations are so similar it’s striking.  Start with me having a problem that seems really bad (then: forgetting to turn in a paper; now: getting written up).  Add in a bit of feeling sorry for myself, a dash of brimming eyes, just a touch of anger and self-doubt.  Let simmer for an hour.  Then, stir in an ACTUAL, life-altering problem that someone very close to me is experiencing (brother in the hospital, husband inthe hospital), and the concoction should EXPLODE into me realizing what an a-hole I’m being, drying my tears, and understanding that I don’t have anything nearly so bad as most of the rest of the world.  The resulting delcacy, if you’e done it right, should taste kind of like those cheap, over-iced cookies from Sam’s Club.

Status Update

I just sat on my floor blow-drying my feet for the last five minutes, then accidentally flung a ruler straight into my face, and am now listening to Judy Garland and worrying about my brother-in-law.  So, things are pretty much the norm here.

I have to leave to meet my roommate in 20 minutes for lunch, so I thought this would be the perfect time to write an update.  I just got back to BG from Christmas break, and people keep asking me how it was, and here are some of the words I have used to describe it thus far: “OK”, “so-so”, “rocky”, “eventful”, “….[extended silence with accompanying staring until they feel uncomfortable and move on to a new topic]“.  So, my break was rough.  Ok, I take that back.  The first week, including all Christmas festivities, was GREAT.  I saw friends and family in just the right amount, was fed several proper meals, got all my Christmas shopping done a whole two days before the holiday, spoiled myself and others, and in general just enjoyed the shit outta being home.  And then everything went to hell for reasons I don’t dare speak about on the Internet, but basically you should know that the last week of December was the worst week of my year by far, and I don’t say that humorously or ironically or expecting pity or sympathy, but just as a hard, cold fact.  Also, there was cursing and phone-throwing and weeping on New Year’s that had nothing to do with alcohol at all, and I think I went to bed by 1:00.  And then last week was pretty cozy.  People would text me and ask me what I was up to and the overwhelming majority of the time the answer was “reading and half-watching football with my dad”.  There was some minor stress and freakouts in there, again, of course, but I tried to chill out and calm myself before my return here.  I was not at all prepared to come back, despite the stress, or maybe because it made me feel like I hadn’t had an actual break and I still deserved another week, but probably mostly because I was getting fed and sleeping til noon and drinking on weeknights, so when I pulled away from my house on Sunday night and reached the end of my driveway, I burst into tears.  It was surprising, because I didn’t realize how strongly I didn’t want to leave, but it was also kind of funny, too, to drive down my street with one part of me sobbing and the other part of me leccturing myself to pull that shit together before I got in an accident.  I kept crying (and, I’ll admit, singing along to my iPod like a fifteen-year-old MESS) until I had to stop at a gas station to clean my windshield.  Then I got out, all sniffly and puffy-eyed, and got checked out by a teenage boy, and then my night started to look up.  I stopped crying but kept singing along to my music and came back to school and within the hour saw the two people I missed the most over break.  I have three back-to-back-to-back classes coming up this afternoon, but I’m feeling pretty equal to it.  That’s the power of my new purple tights, friends.  Lesson learned.

Rendering Death And Forever

While I was Google image-searching for my favorite poem in the whole wide world, I came across this little gem, and while, admittedly, alot of those are a little Tuesdays With Morrie-ish, I really like “Send lots of valentine cards.  Sign them.”  I’m in that kind of mood.

All of the other images of my poem were like, scripty calligraphy pink writing with peonies in the background, which was frustrating because I imagined something carved in stone and black and…enduring, not fragile and delicate.  But I couldn’t find it.

In Which I Judge People Just To Amuse Myself

So, today in my Brit Lit prior to 1660 class (yes, it’s exactly as disgusting as it sounds), there were two group presentations on the schedule.  Cool, I thought, because all previous presentations have been fun and engaging and enjoyable, involving Monty Python and BBC shows and DIY astrolabes, for Christ’s sake.  Can’t wait to see what these two groups have in store for us today!

Oh.  Wait.  These two groups consisted entirely of poor public speakers and tragically dressed young women.  To the girls who presented today, some feedback:

• Ok, girl in the pink sweater dress.  You look adorable and don’t speak like you have marbles in your mouth, so even though all you did was read directly off of your paper, you get a pass.
• However, you, sporty looking girl, do not.  I realize that you are athletic and are on the curling team and are a little bit offbeat, and I even appreciate that you were the only member of your group actually talking to the class and not acting like a court stenographer being asked to repeat lines back to the jury, BUT!  There are things called hairbrushes and they make them for a reason.  Maybe it’s acceptable to just toss your hair in a ponytail and then smoosh it all back with a headband for the post-game curlers’ party, but you are being graded on how you present, and part of that is how you appear.  So, while you’re at it, take off that ridiculous fleece-lined zippy vest and throw on a damn sweater already.  Also, your lip ring makes you look like one of these.
• Ok, now, Final girl From This Group- here’s the deal.  I chose to read the selection by Hobbes about the Leviathan rather than listen to your monotone recitation of your entire paper.  Your fake blonde hair looks very cute today all curled and hairsprayed up, but seriously, princess, invest in a public speaking skills training class.  For all of us!
• Now, second group, my hopes were low.  And you did not exceed them.  But by now I was resigned to people droning out exactly what was on their papers, but ok, Tracy or whatever your name is, next time you present in this or any class, put on some real pants, and for God’s sake, at least ditch the North Face for the duration of the presentation.  Would that kill you?  Also, thanks for the comedic relief after you used the “word” chronologicler.  The puzzled way our professor said “Chronologer? Chronicler?” and your reply of an eye roll and “I don’t know, I’m not that good at pronouncing things” was priceless.  Like the basic human task of speech is too much for you.
• Ok, and you, Hilary or Ashley or Tiffany or whomever, the previously mentioned North Face, or fleece-lined zippy vest, or basically anything in the whole damned world would have been better attire for your presentation than that baby pink sweatshirt emblazoned with “Party Like A Rockstar” and last year’s worn-out Uggs.  No one is going to take your assessments of Ben Jonson’s masques seriously when you look like a hungover sorority girl schlepping to her early Friday morning class after a totally crazyyyyy Thirsty Thursday.  You feel me, Amber?

Ok, now that I feel all Harriet the Spy (except it’s not like any of these people are my friends, just random classmates), here’s a positive: my professor for this horrid class is one of the most adorable, likeable, intelligent, literate, friendly, and sweetly dorky people I’ve had the good luck to encounter in two and half years at this University.  I really only stuck with this class all semester because she made a positive impression on me from day one, all trying to learn everyone’s names by making eye-contact and requesting an interesting fact about them.  Also, she totally complimented my first-day-of-classes dress and chatted with me about “The Lady of Shalott” when we ran into each other in the bathroom one day just before class.   So, yeah, she rules.

Hey there!  I’ve had a very busy past three weeks!  You?  …Oh, you want to hear about mine?  Well, how kind of you!  Tune into this:

The day after my last post, I and one of my future roommates found our apartment for next year.  MY GOD, how I wish I could move in after Christmas break, because I am so unbelievably ready to be up out of the dorms and into some place that is conducive to real-food-making.  I am typically not one of those people who is concerned with what she eats on any given day, but just listen to the straits that I am in: 2/3 of a parfait, Starbucks, and mozarella sticks intended to be cooked in an oven but actually amateurishly heated in a microwave instead.  IT IS 7:00 AT NIGHT.  Christ on a crutch, I just want a real meal!  I would even settle for being forced to make it myself in my own apartment, as long as it meant meat and potatoes!  So you can see why, after two and a half years of dorm life and dorm food, I am jonesing to move into that apartment, like, yesterday.

The week after was intense and hellish and unbelievable.  Like, just when I thought things could not get any worse, oh wait!  Something else climbed right on top of my load of stress and worry.  I had a major paper/project/exam/presentation every day all week and so was getting less than healthy amounts of sleep, was minorly sick, homesick out to HERE, dealing with apartment ridiculousness, worrying about my job, and ignoring a boy situation that needed to be addressed.  Have you ever had the type of interaction with someone where you go into it thinking, “Oh this is surely just a minor misunderstanding!  I am calm and capable and reasonable and will absolutely be able to deal with this situation effectively and in a timely fashion!” and then you talk to the other party involved and they are just BATSHIT CRAZY?!  I had one of those that week, one so bad where i got off the phone and hyperventilated a little, and then called my friend Morgan and laughed nervously/crazily, because if I didn’t do that I would have launched into hysterics, and I absolutely did not have time for that because I had to be at work in half an hour and hadn’t even eaten dinner yet and ohmygodcanijustbefiveagainthanks!  And then, a solution was offered to the situation, but it was the kind of solution where you’re like, “Well… that’s an option, sure, but it’s like asking me whether I’d rather go blind or deaf.  I know which one I’d choose, but I don’t really like or actively embrace either one”.  I remember lying in my bed on Friday, trying to cry silently because my roommate and her boyfriend were in the room being all cutesy and I just wanted them to leave so I could sleep, and I was stressed out about the aformentioned situation and just wanted to go home, but instead knew that I was going to her house that weekend for her birthday celebration and I would be expected to be happy and cheerful and fun, and those were three things I was not up to at all, all week long, and LORD was I ever a sloppy, sad mess. 

And then, because I strongly believe in the wheel of fortune taking people down and then bringing them right back up, nearly every issue that I had been struggling with that week resolved itself Friday evening.  Academically, socially, romantically, professionally, emotionally.  Better.  And we had a lovely time at my roommate’s home for the weekend, wherein floorboards were ripped up, Twister was played and bruises were accrued, real food was secured for all, babies were brought over, an old friend “surprised” us (except I totally knew beforehand that he was coming because I’m sneaky like that), camels appeared in a parade, awkward relationships were patched, and a LOT of fratty music was listened to.  It was precisely the weekend I wanted and needed after my week of stress from the depths of hell.

And then it was two short days of school and home for Thanksgiving break.  I didn’t get home til almost midnight Tuesday, but when I did, Letterman was on and Time magazines abounded, and one of the first things my dad did was assure me that the new hand-crafted Oriental area rug in our dining room “isn’t from no K-Mart parking lot” in a fake corn-pone voice.  I love home so much.  Break was absolutely perfect: I had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner, enjoyed listening to the men in my family watch football together more than I enjoyed the actual game, hung out with my sisters, went out Friday night, only to find myself in a hot tub in Brookville at two in the morning, drunk on wine, had waffles made for me the next day, slept late all the time, flipped my homework the bird, saw people at Coldstone and secured myself hours over Christmas break, and most importantly, was fed real food again some more.  Seriously, you’re underestimating the food situation here.  It is threat level orange. 

This week has kind of been full of minor annoyances and irritations, including rain on my drive home and the worst night of sleep last night I’ve ever had at school.  I literally slept in fits and starts and 20 minute catnaps for five hours.  But things are looking up, as they always do!  I didn’t have to work and am currently engaged in a Billy Madison quote-off with my friend Genna, and am now toying with the idea of lounging around and watching an old episode of Alias or something.  I’m working right now on really appreciating the fact that I have very few actual responsibilities in this world, and those that I do have are easily blown off or simple to deal with.  it won’t be like that much longer, so I might as well live it up while I can.  Stress is for people in the real world, and I’m not living there just yet, so I need to just chill the fuck out.

Mission accomplished, I think.