General Update

Pros:

• dinner with my ex-roommate, in which we talked about salsa dancing, stutterers, and the Medieval Club
• also, when she hugged me goodbye, she paused while pulling away and said “Whoa.  You smell like a Cabbage Patch Kid!”
• no class on Fridays next semester, officially!
• our room smells like chili right now, which is one of my very favorite smells of the fall ever
• there was this commercial on TV just now with pipes speaking in crazy Eastern Bloc accents that cracked me up
• Bones reruns on TV right now
• shout out to my main man Glenn of Glenn’s Shoe Repair for fixing my brown flats, making them better than ever for a mere $8

Cons:

• it is hotter than the depths of hell in this room, JESUS GOD
• Bones might or might not be making me tear up a little right now; I blame the Christmas music, so shut up
• my intestines or something are revolting and attempting to scrabble their way out of my body

But really, my life isn’t even that bad right now.  Sometimes it helps to get that shit into perspective real quick.

Summa Summa Summatime

Hello.  I’ve missed you.  Like, a lot.  Only for some reason I didn’t realize it until it hit me hard in the face this morning.  And then I had to go to four hours of class.  Figures.  But because of my lack of writing over the summer, I decided that I should definitely do an extensive recap, in the same vein as this, but totally way better.  I’m trying to type fast here, which is hard on a practically empty stomach, plus I’ve got this funky Batman ring on, which is all sorts of awkward, but also all sorts of awesome, but I want to finish this soon because I feel like I owe this to…somebody.  Maybe myself.  So let’s talk about this summer, in depth and in detail:

This summer was so so SO different from last summer.  It was not the best summer of my life, and while I was in it, I didn’t appreciate it at all, but now, looking back, it was pretty fucking golden.  This summer started with tears in the arms of my (now ex-) roommate over having to leave so much of what I had loved and grown comfortable with.  The beginning of summer brought an end to something else; it brought an end to my “rescue year”.  The people and places I encountered through the year saved me time and time again, and leaving them behind was so scary because I knew that when I returned in the fall, everything would be different, would have changed.  And change is very hard for me.  So this summer was a little scary.  This summer I readjusted to being in Dayton, to working there instead of here, to being with those friends more often than BG friends.  This summer I didn’t have a freakin’ CAR for the first month-ish of being home, so I felt isolated and bored and frustrated alot.  My dad took me to and from work, so this summer was kind of like being 14, only I didn’t work when I was 14, so maybe not.  Anyways, this summer there was a Florida family vacation for my oldest sister’s wedding, which was understated and perfect and made me believe in true love and all that icky stuff.  This summer was waves and sand and dinners out and lots and lots of family time in the evenings.  This summer was Coldstone, Coldstone, Coldstone day in, day out, working with some people I knew and loved from last summer and some new people whom I now know and love, too.  There were regulars, Virgil the ice cream machine, a broken freezer door, and in general alot of fun that consisted of the last memories I may ever make there.  This summer was also pretty fattening.  This summer was a drunken late-night walk up ghetto Main Street in search of food; instead we found goth kids and prostitutes.  Not a bad trade-off.  This summer two of my very best friends in the whole wide world left for month long trips to Spain and Cameroon, and I felt stranded without them.  I threw myself into working as much as possible because there was not a whole lot else to do.  This summer I spent so much time with Martha, trying to make up for the fact that we won’t see each other a whole lot this year.  I think the people working at the local cheap movie theater started to recognize our faces this summer because of the sheer amount of nights we went to see crap like Obsessed and 17 Again.  Yes, I paid money to see both of those films.  We all know how I feel about Beyonce, people!  And Zac Efron…well, that was a sacrifice I made for Martha’s sake.  This summer I got Lost in Austen, and MY GOD it was horribly wonderful, and I highly suggest it.  This summer saw the return of the trip to Indian Lake for Martha’s yearly family reunion, which oh my GOD, I have missed.  Her family is HUGE and doesn’t mind when I get drunk on whiskey, and her cousins and uncles all do their best to charm me.  It always works.  This summer was a spectacular camping trip involving sangria and apple pie, as well as dirtbikes and whole flaming tree branches.  I like a mix of classy and hillbilly, sometimes.  I saw this band in concert this summer, only to be severely disappointed when their lead singer acted like a total dick, insulting other bands and actually criticizing the way Columbus was laid out, like when was the last time you worked professionally as a city planner, dude?  Shut your trap.  I spent alot of time this summer lonely for school and school people, which meant I traveled back and forth to Springboro alot to visit my future/now current roommate, after, oh yeah, I GOT A FREAKING CAR!!!  That might have been the highlight of my summer.  That or the time I threw up in an East Side Wendy’s parking lot.  Oh yes.  Highlights galore.  This summer was Gossip Girl, Dorm Life, and Mad Men at the very end, so this summer was super dramatic and award-winning.  Because I was so lonely for BG, this summer I also took a trip up here to see some of the people I missed the most.  The trip involved me touching snakes and lizards, standing by while a train sped past my face, eating dinner with a motley crew of friends and friends of friends, and having the exact same conversation with a drunken co-worker while he was well and truly plastered and then sober the next morning.  This summer was baseball, like every other summer, which is not bad, but cozy.  The Cold War Kids and My Morning Jacket came into my life this summer, so as far as music goes, this summer was pretty damn satisfactory.  You would probably be surprised how many times I carted drunk friends to Waffle House this summer.  Once, the cops were called, and the giant, imposing chef bellowed at people to get out.  They listened.  With good reason, trust and believe.  This summer I almost skipped the best barbeque of my life.  Thank God Martha is so persuasive, otherwise I wouldn’t have the memory of waking up (miraculouslyalone in my own bed at home, to an alarm someone had had the good sense to set for me) still drunk in purple frog pajama shorts on backwards with puncture wounds in both my arms.  No, it wasn’t heroin.  It was almost as trashy, though.  Sigh.  Can that be the motto of my summer?  Or, better yet, my life?  “No, it wasn’t heroin.  It was almost as trashy, though.”  That’s the life of every Daytonian.  This summer…wasn’t all that bad.  I’m glad to be back where I am, but part of me now misses it a little.  This summer, I was spoiled, working at an easy job, making decent money, driving around in a new-to-me car, seeing the people I love as much as possible, while still having PLENTY of me time.  So in the end, this summer was pretty OK.

Hang In There!

Oh my gosh, I’m attempting to work furiously on getting a couple new updates posted here, since it’s been, ohhhhhhhh a solid 3 months since the last time I bothered to write shit.  And I don’t even know why, because this summer I was completely listless the majoity of the time, but more on that later.  Just bear with me; I’m writing in the cracks of time I have free from class and work and homework and my life up here, but new things are coming soon, and hopefully with much more regularity than they did last spring and summer.  Fingers crossed.

Eve of Destruction

I just realized that I spend alot of time looking forward or backward in time increments.  Like, for example, counting down by ten minutes the time I have left in class, or by half hours the time I have left at work.  Last year, I counted how many weekends I had to survive between trips home.  And today, I remembered exactly what I was doing one year ago today.  I was going home.  I woke up, had my last Starbucks of the year, walked to the on-campus convenience store one last time, and then headed back to my dorm to play Mahjong and listen to music until my parents arrived.  I ended up packing and moving out at the same time as my ex-roommate, but I don’t remember saying goodbye to her.  I remember eating Wendy’s with my parents, and I remember driving home and having an immediate sense of calming down.  Things could finally settle back into place.  Like freshman year had been a hiccup in the space-time continuum and now my life could go back to the way it was always supposed to be.  I made no forward progress.  It was a lateral, a failed attempt at moving down the field.

And now I’m facing down the end of my second year here and…… all of that, the bad memories, the desperation and unhappiness, everrything has been washed away like dried dirt after a muddy game.  That girl of one year ago today is so foreign to me.  When I see people I knew last year, I’m me, not the girl they knew last year.  I wonder if they’re confused.  I use phrases and mannerisms learned from being around my best friends here, I laugh and question and react un-self-consciously, I talk more and differently.  I keep using the same adjective over and over again to describe how I feel, because sometimes it just overwhelms me; I’m just so lucky.  I’m right now sitting in the same chair I was curled up and crying into back in September, when I was terrified that I was once again making futile laterals in an attempt to get my life going.  The beginning of this year was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced, even moreso than the beginning of freshman year.  Freshman year, I was full of naive hope, completely unaware of how lonely things could get.  Coming  back this year, that’s all I could think about.  Knowing the negative possibilities is wayyyyyyy worse than blindly seeing only the positive possibilities.  However, luckily, I landed with a marvelous roommate, wonderful next-door and across-the-hall neighbors, and generally terrific floormates.  I morphed into a better form of me.  It’s stunning to me still; I’m not quite convinced that freshman year wasn’t just a bad movie I saw, or a three-week camp that went sour.  I can’t believe it was a year, an actual, whole 8-month school year, of my life. 

And now I’m counting in another increment: a week and a day.  That’s how much time I have left here, and it is, once again, scary as hell.  Because this year the sun rose, and I was living mostly in the light of day, but what if I leave this place and come back after almost four months and things have gone dark again?I know atleast that I will have anchors; the friends I have made here will still be here, we’ll just be more spread out, and we’ll have to work a little harder.  And hopefully there will be some wondeful new kids next year, not just nasty slutty people who smell overly-fragrant and puke in the hallways.  I’ve had my share of them.  So, after I live through this next round of time, this weekd and a day, I’ll be counting down again: just a little less than four months.  And then, I come back home.

Man I Gotta Get Out Of This Town

When I was home for Spring Break at the beginning of the month, I went through my notebooks and folders from last semester, and found a piece of writing I’d done in my Social Psych class back in October.  I remember the exact day I wrote it; it was the day I was going home for Fall Break, and I was in the most boring class I’ve ever had, at 4:30 in the afternoon.  I couldn’t sit still for the life of me because I was so excited to go home; it had been a while since I’d seen people in Dayton.  So instead of listening to lecture, I wrote this, and then just walked out of class.

5 Places I Would Rather Be Right Now

• Sunday morning, 1996, Grandma’s house, sitting down to bacon and eggs with her and Lydia and Whitney
• Home, now, lounging in the green chair, chili cooking, football on TV
• May 2008, Brooklyn Bridge, with the beer and the wind and the lights
• In bed, under covers, in soft afternoon light, Ben Lee singing in my ear
• Whenever, wherever, driving my old, wrecked Honda, windows down, music up

And then, after I found it, I stuck it in the folder I use for my Shakespeare class now and forgot about it.  Until St. Patty’s day, sitting in class listening to a boring presentation, when I took it out, reread it, and added to it:

• About 15 hours less than a year ago today, drunk off my ass with my best friends, in the room of two trashy boys
• January of my senior year, driving home from work with a song in my head and the biggest crush
• August, my sister’s, with beach hair and a book
• Springtime at OLOM, 2002 or so, outside in the early morning cool, on the bike racks waiting for the bell to ring
• 4 hours from now, taking a walk around campus with coffee and my iPod

I think this might become a thing I do.

Catch Up

It doesn’t feel like it’s been a month and a half.  I don’t understand how time is just flying by so quickly this year.  I still feel like it ought to be the middle of February, not the end of March.  I think that’s a good sign.  I’m enjoying myself.  Even though I’ve been gone for a while, and even though I know I’ve been occupied, I cannot for the life of me tell you with what.  Uhhhhh, listening to Beyonce and Ludacris on my iPod?  Yes.  Swooning after several boys?  Oh my God, yes.  Pumping the brakes as hard as I can so that this semester doesn’t ever end because I love this place that I’m in?  Yes, even though it isn’t working.  I’m just busy being happy.  Here are some things I’ve been thinking about lately:

• My Morning Jacket’s “Lay Low” makes me want to long for someone.  It makes me feel like I’m falling for someone I could never have.  I don’t know why, but it just sounds like wanting.
• I found this scribbled in my little notepad I keep in my desk drawer: “Why hasn’t Keira Knightley done Shakespeare?!”  On the one hand, something about how indginant I am over KK’s lack of Shakespearean acting just makes me laugh.  On the other: for real, though.
• Also in the notepad is a note to myself: “Meredith- You will always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.  Take this shot.”  You know, sometimes you just need a pep talk.  And even though that particular shot didn’t pan out the way I planned, I’m still gonna follow that advice.
• Can we talk about Lexi for a moment?  I don’t think I’ve written about her before, but Lord does she ever need to be written about… She’s my TA for my Bio 101 Lab, and honestly, the only positive thing I can say about her is that she hasn’t murdered anyone in her lifetime (to my knowledge).  She is condescending, rude, inconsistent, bitchy, immature, unprofessional, and all around unqualified to be teaching anyone anything, except maybe how to be an unapologetically heinous beast.  I mean, I feel juvenile saying I can’t wait to write a course eval for her, but it’s true.  I just want to give her the worst write-up for being a snot.  I don’t even know if that will affect her in any way, but it’s the only reourse I feel I have besides maybe being an ultra-bitch and talking to my lecture professor about her, which feels waaaaaaay too dramatic a step to take.  So instead, I’ll just bitch about the bitch here! 
• This is the worst thing I have seen in the month and a half I’ve been away from writing; my German professor showed it to us today during our discussion on art.  The second guy, the guy who lays his head on that block of… marble?  clay?  talcum? and then turns and breathes on it like the creepiest serial killer who ever walked the Earth is the artist we’re learning about in our chapter.  Once, he covered his head in goldleaf and honey and carried around a dead rabbit, talking to it and explaining pieces of art to it.  And called it an art installation.  Like, people actually came to a museum and watched it unfold.  What the fuck, Internet?  I was so fucking bershon about this in class today, I was legit rolling my eyes like a sullen teen.  I was pissed off.  Ha, and then my prof asked the class our opinions about it, and the exact people I had expected to like this pretentious, avant garde artsy bullshit were the ones saying “I think it’s wonderful because it holds such deep meaning for the artist” and “It’s very interesting and a unique way to express oneself outside of the normal artistic modes” and when my prof asked me all I could say was “Ich finde das sehr, sehr blod” because I don’t know the German for “drama-queeny”, “insane”, or “intolerable”.  I mean, what feelings could you possibly need to express through conversing with dead animals?  Isn’t that called having a personality disorder?
• It is crazy how into T.I. I am getting.
• My urge to drive, and the amount to which I miss driving around with the wondows down and my music up, has started to manifest itself in completely unnecessary walks around campus with my iPod.  Sometimes after classes, I don’t head directly back to the dorms, but instead loop all around campus, into the old section by the chapel and the administration building, then over by the graveyard and up the alley between Anderson and the BA building, and then home.  It’s exactly like the loops I used to drive after getting off work at night over the summer.  Sometimes I’m just not finished feeling the wind on my face or listening to my very favorite music.  I’m just not done being in motion.

A Detour Is a Choice Between Two Tasks, Each With Its Own Pros And Cons

Well!  It’s February!  Would you look at that!  I feel like such a shithead for not writing here for the past three weeks.  Seriously, like I couldn’t sleep last night because my mind was racing with things I wanted to write about.  I know I’m not really accountable to anyone with regards to this blog because no one reads it, but the whole reason I started writing here wasn’t to become some famous-on-the-internet blogger.  It was more for my peace of mind than anything, because writing clears my head tremendously, and it’s actually something I’ve been doing mentally my whole life.  Seriosuly, when I was younger, I would just imagine how some writers would set down the most mundane daily events of my life in my head, narrating everyday shit to myself, like “As she exited her school building, Meredith scanned the mass of cars in the parking lot for her father’s distinguishable red [whatever kind of car that was].  She spotted it easily, strode over, and climbed in, pulling the door shut behind her.”  WHAT?  What is that, internet?  It’s so frightening that things like that happen in my head, but that’s something that happens all the time.  Only, uh, I think I’m a better writer now than I was when I would’ve thoguht something like that, which was 5th grade.  I mean, a better writer in my head.  And in real life too, I guess, but I ain’t tryin to give myself props here, people.  That’s your job.  Man, probably the only reason I have friends is because I’ve never told anyone about that habit, ever. 

Another reason I write is summed up in one of my favorite quotes: “Writing is opening up a crack just wide enough to let some light into you, and some you onto the page, so that the next person feels less alone”.  I hope someday someone stumbles across what I have written here and sees something they can relate to, apply to their life, or just laugh at because they’ve been there before.  That’s what I want.  And in the meantime, if it means that a little light is let into me in the process, so that I figure out something abut myself as well?  All the better, I say.  It’s why I keep this up and why I don’t really think I’ll ever be able to stop writing; it’ll always go on, I hope, in some capacity.  And that quote, by the way, was taken from one of these, believe it or not. 

So, ok, I sat down to write an update with some of the silly and, yes, mundane things that have been going on in my life, and ended up accidentally getting all philisophical on your ass.  It happens.  Next time, maybe, I can tell you all about dancing with creepers and my thoughts on Keira Knightley.  But for now, I have to go learn how to write a sentence using the phrase anstatt…zu for my German test tomorrow.  Auf Wiedersehen!

Working Some Magic

Below is the entry I wrote, ohhhhh, I don’t know, less than seven hours ago, and I was going to publish except that I was so distracted and aggravated that I couldn’t think how to spell “tyrannosaurus” and I wanted to call it “Tyrannosaurus Tuesday” because that was the first alliteration I could think of that went with Tuesday.  Right.  Anyway, because I double-checked the spelling of the old title (I had the double n as a double r) and my mood was vastly improved after going to work (unnatural, highly), I thought, “Eh, why the hell not?” and went on ahead with the publishing.  This is, to warn you, fairly stream of conscious, frustrated, angry, irritated, upset me, not bothering to censor myself or make anything funny or well-articulated.  And because I’m also kind of sleep-deprived, I will tell you that it took me a minute to decide if I needed “accept” or “except” up there.  All the English majors say heyyyyyyyy!

Today has just been full of frustration, and it’s the kind of frustration that makes me feel lame for even complaining about, because it’s silly stuff that normally wouldn’t get in my way, but I’m getting hung up on it, for some reason, today.  I’ve had this feeling before, like my insides are unsettled and are shifting against each other, grating and trying to right themselves, and while they do that in there, out here I’m a raving bitch.  I am usually slow to anger and slow, even, to annoyance, but today everything is setting me off on rampages.  It starts with being awake too early, which guarantees grumpiness, then with not eating regularly, another way to make sure I’m irritated, which then leads to feeling sorry for myself because I always have a weird eating schedule, I never get to eat with my friends because of schedule differences, and nothing is ever going to get better EVER.  Adding to the two surefires are minor roommate issues, a bitchface TA, and the fact that I can’t even really finish this entry properly because I have to go to damn work and be pretend-happy, and the thought of forcing myself to act cheerful and fake is making me nauseous.  What I know would make me feel better is going to bed.  Unfortunately, after work there’s German sentence revisions and a reading quiz for Biology yet, plus a shower and possibly Stats homework.  Yikes.  This day has been fucking bleak.  I desperately need to have a sense of humor about all this, but that which is usually quick to come to me seems out of reach too.  I don’t got jokes.  Not today, at least.

Shakespeare Class Trivia Fun Facts!

Number of girls in the class: 20+

Number of guys in the class: 4

Number of guys who already talk way too much about how drunk they got this weekend: 1

Number of times my favorite professor cursed in class already: like, 3

Number of people wearing scarves indoors: at least 5

Why I Missed BG, Reason #237

Someone just walked past my door while saying “Man, probable cause is a mothafucka“. 

Indeed it is, my friend.  Indeed it is.