I have been spending, lately, an inordinate amount of time wishing I were 19 again.

I want it to be spring, but like the perfect weather spring where the temperature is always just warm enough but never makes you sweat, and it’s always bright and sunny, blue skies all around.  I want to be discovering Bishop Allen’s The Broken String for the first time and playing it on repeat in my old Honda.  I want to have just come home from a miraculous trip to New York City.  I want Starbucks to be included in my meal plan.  I want to go camping with my high school friends.  I want to harbor a crush on the older guy that works at the music store downtown.  I want my only worry to be when my next shift at Coldstone is.  I want to feel the immense relief of the loneliness letting up.  I almost want to be too young to buy alcohol, so that it feels like a thrill when my best friend’s older sister invites us to a party.  I want to have so much time left in college.  I want to feel like a kid and feel like it’s ok to feel like a kid.  I want to steal the neighbor’s wireless because my parents still use dial-up.  I want to be able to look out my window and see the highway.  I want to work at the freaking AIR SHOW this summer!  Oh man!

I really just want to be 19 again.

Things I Yelled At Passerby And Fellow Motorists From The Safe Confines Of My Car, Addled By Coffee And Too Little Lunch, Adrenaline Pumping Through My Veins From Turning A Paper In Juuuuust Under Deadline And Running Late:

• “You are a bus.  You are bigger than the pedestrians walking in front of you.  JUST START DRIVING.  They’ll move!  Run them over if you have to!”
• “Tights are not paaaaaaants!”
• “Roads are for pedestrians to cross, not wander down like the dazed sole survivor of the apocalypse.”
• “OMG, the stop hand means STOP WALKING not ‘Stop using your brain to interpret this symbol into a meaningful directive to keep yourself from getting run over’.  I WILL RUN YOU OVER.”

February Finale

Happy last day of February.  Can I just tell you that I will NEVER again tempt fate the way I did by continuously proclaiming February the most boring month of the year?  Talk about bating the universe.  THAT was stupid.  I did like I wanted and posted more in February 2011 than maybe any other month in the history of my little blog, and myyyyy good God, what a fucking month it was.  Hit the ground running a few days in with our luau party, which provided more than expected amounts of personal drama and excitement, and things have not slowed up since.  If I were to provide you with a few sentences to recap my Saturday night/Sunday morning, you just wouldn’t believe me.  Straight up.  I barely believe me.  There were scenes straight out of a Lifetime movie, only things could have turned out so much, much worse for a friend and I than they did.  I would go so far as to say that I was criminally stupid.  Suffice it to say that at one point, around 4:30 in the morning, I was in my car in downtown Toledo convinced that I was about to get knifed.  It is a mystery to me why I didn’t.  I still am trying to wrap my mind around things, and am still trying to decide how much of my Saturday story is really appropriate to publicize, but once I get all that figured out, more details may be forthcoming.  I learned a few lessons, that’s for sure.  The main one being, never crow about how February is usually sooooo boring, but this one is going to be sooooo good and exciting, because the universe doesn’t appreciate cockiness, and WILL knock you on your ass just to show you who’s boss.  Consider me put in my place, cosmos.

Numbers Game

• At this time one week ago, I was heading to the bars with my roommate, M.  That night ended at Corner Grill, and MAN, I just cannot express to you how much Corner Grill reminds me of last spring.  I fully plan on spending many more hours and dollars there before I graduate, because I just feel so fondly toward it.
• At this time last Friday, I was already in bed, 100% exhausted, and getting drunk-texted by roommate M.
• At this time on Saturday (technically Sunday? I’m not playing this whole “technically the next day” game all post, so just roll with it.) I was cozied up in a booth at The Pub, drinking with two of my oldest friends and various cohorts.  THAT night ended with my car getting puked in and a trip to the hospital.
• At this time on Tuesday night, I was watching Inception for the first time.  Mind.  Blown.  That night ended with Ican’ttellyou, a drive around BG, and cereal at 4 in the morning.
• At this time last night, I was gettnig drunk on vodka crans with my roommate, H., and our 31-year-old neighbor.  He hit on us and bought our drinks all night.  That night ended with karaoke at a dive bar and a rowdy, drunken photo shoot.  Also, my determination to not see four in the morning again for a WHILE was clearly weak sauce.
• At this time tonight, I’m in my bed in my underwear, doing some general internetting and texting, happily getting some much-needed me time.  This night will probably end with finishing (?) Emma, which I’ve been reading since Christmastime, and maybe some sexting?  Just kidding.  But really.  Am I serious?  Am I not?  THE WORLD MAY NEVER KNOW.

The Apple And The Tree

Sitting here watching Jeopardy in my empty apartment, my heart was warmed by the fact that I know without a single doubt in my mind that my dad is at home in Dayton doing this exact same thing at this exact same moment, his feet probably propped up in his armchair, my mom on the computer in the other room.  I haven’t been home in about a month, and I’m starting to get that feeling in my chest, the one that alerts me that I’m just ready to see my family room again.  I’m prepped to have a pretty kickass weekend starting tomorrow, but next Friday?  I am gonna hit I-75 SO HARD for Dayton.  Sigh.  February, winter, I am so over both of you.

The Not Even Remotely Dog Days Of Summer

Geeeeeez.  I promised myself I would have this up sometime in September.  And then, BAM, the last week of September really kicked my ass school-wise, and then it was a new month out of nowhere, so I was like, cool, no problem, I’ll at least get it posted earlier than last year’s.  And then ALL OF OCTOBER happened in what felt like about a week.  So, now it’s November, we’re three weeks away from Thanksgiving (!) and summer was three damn months ago. However, don’t let my tardiness with this post keep you from thinking that I’m not COMPLETELY psyched to write it.  Because this summer?  This summer kicked last summer’s ass. 

This summer was a terrifying propsect to me back in April.  I knew I would be staying in BG, spending my first summer away from Dayton ever, so this summer was kind of like freshman year in that I had no idea what to expect, and so was completely terrified to begin.  This summer, I arranged to stay in a humongous, gorgeous house with two (and late in the summer, three) girls I didn’t know very well, one of whom ended up becoming one of my closest friends.  Nowhere has ever become home to me faster than that house did this summer.  This summer got off to such a great start oh my god I don’t know if I can articulate it.  Coworkers everywhere, shotsshotsshots.  This summer started with tornado sirens, my oldest friend from home, and a kiss with a boy I really liked, whom I haven’t seen since (ehhhh, this isn’t true anymore after this past weekend, but it sounds so much more romantic this way, don’t you think?).  This summer started in a whirlwind of a night, lost keys, and a miserable all-day hangover.  This summer started lonely and shaky, and went nowhere but up, up, and away.  This summer was spent in bars, bars, and more bars.  This summer was Four Lokos and fountains and a ucked-up foot.  My time this summer was divided between BG and Dayton, as I spent nearly every weekend at home for some event or another.  This summer was up and down, up and down on I-75.  This summer was sundresses and parties on people’s side lawns.  I spent my days so lazily this summer, sleeping til noon, working at night, staying up and out late.  Lest you think all I did this summer was get wasted (which, ok, was a rather large part of my summer, but not ALL of it), pretty much all I did on my weeknights was wait for my roommate to get home from the RUBBER FACTORY where she worked so we could play cards and watch Whose Line?  Titillating stuff right there.  This summer was Grey’s Anatomy for hours on end, curled up on the futon that served as my bed, killing time before work.  In fact, I’d wager that a good majority of my time this summer could be described as “killing time before work”.  And work itself….was such a large part of me this summer.  It was the only responsibility I had, the only structure or definition that provided any shape to my days and weeks.  This past spring and summer really transformed the way I feel about that place, so that now it’s not a chore to go in at night; it’s almost enjoyable.  Although, to be fair, there were nights over the summer that I would come home so incredibly exhausted of working with the people I did.  This summer nerves were tried, that’s for goddamn sure.  This summer involved tiny baby kittens moving in to my house about halfway through, so this summer was cute and cuddly and sweet and troublesome.  This summer was also (man this is so hard to write) probably the last chunk of time I will ever work at Coldstone.  Oh man, that’s making me tear up.  I spent very little time thinking about my future this summer, and much more time thinking about my past.  This summer also contained what may or may not turn out to be an auspicious meeting; I’ve been holding my cards close to my chest on this one.  Hell, I’m nervous just throwing this out there, and I’ll probably come back here in three months and be like “….Idiot”.  This summer felt like it went by fast and slow all at once.  I was ready for people to be back in town, ready for another crazy great semester like spring had been, but was so busy just enjoying myself, the laziness and lack of responsibility, the drinking, that I never wanted summer to end.  Spending this summer up here really cemented my love of this place that I’ve ended up in, my love for this town, and my love for all the crazy twists and turns that have brought me right up to where I am now.  At the end of the summer, as I and one of my other summer roommates were spending a few days packing up and preparing to move out of our summer home, I wandered into her room to find her fast asleep on her stripped bed in the afternoon light, with a cat by her shoulder and a cat curled up in the crook of her legs.  It was one of the sweetest sights of my summer.  Moving out of the summer home was so, so hard; I was leaving the place that had made this unexpectedly one of the greatest summers on record into a new apartment with a roommate who would be gone all day for the final weeks of summer, leaving me lonesome and on rocky ground once again.  However, this summer really ended beautifully, at the bar where it began, conveniently enough, kissing another boy, and reuniting with people I love and had desperately missed all summer long.  This summer was quiet, soothing, sweet, lazy, crazy, adventurous, drunken, fun, and so overwhelmingly happy that I feel I’m bound to be disappointed by whatever comes next summer.  This summer taught me, though, not to let my expectations fool me, because above all else, the time I had this summer surprised the hell out of me by being unadulteratedly AWESOME.

I feel like I only ever update on Mondays.  Bullet list, cause I’m just in one of those moods:

• I keep telling people I had a long weekend.  I don’t think I’ve ever before uttered that sentence, but God, Friday was the longest day of my life.  I was surrounded by people from 8:30 to almost 1:30 AM, and when I was finally alone after my late-night shower, I read the Wordsworth poem a friend had posted on my wall and just burst into tears.  Even after having been amongst family members all freakin’ day long, what I wanted most when I was finally by myself was someone’s shoulder to cry on.
• On the other hand, despite the circumstances of my visit home, the drives both there and back were two of the BEST I’ve ever had.  I needed both of them.
• I think the new tramp stamp I want is, “Bitches try to kick me while I’m down, I’ll break ya leg”.  In script.
• If you can think of a better way to start a Monday than with white chocolate mocha and macaroons, I demand that you share it.
• The combination of a variety of factors this morning has me feeling like I’m 19 again.  I don’t have any very strong feelings about this other than it’s just kind of eerie and disconcerting.

2 more things I forgot earlier but definitely merit a mention:

• One of my roommates came into my room while I was midway through writing this and described her romantic entanglements to me through a complex analogy in which she likened herself to a pre-made cake at a grocery store.  Have I mentioned just how much I LOVE living with the ladies I do?  Because I really, really do.
• Also, I was friended by and am now actively messaging with a legit gang member.  This makes me a little nervous, but I’m rolling with it for now.  We went to grade school together, so this must be kosher, right?!

Five More Places

This has been sitting in my Drafts folder for a good month and a half, and the content of it is older than that even, so I figured I’d finally take the time to post it.  Also, because I don’t feel like doing homework.  What else is new?  I almost wrote another of these last night, because I was feeling much the same way I did when I originally wrote this: a little lonely, a little teary, a little bereft.  I’m much better today.  The night I wrote this, I remember really missing one of my summer roommates, who had left town for a few days (God, I’m so delicate), and being very close to the end of All The Pretty Horses.  In an attempt to distract myself from being all broken up, I set a goal to finish the novel that night, but ended up having to put it aside to sob into my pillow.  As one does.  And then I sat down and wrote this instead, which is in the same vein as these.  It’s really hard not to go back and self-edit now, but I will say my favorite is the second bullet.

5 Places I Would Rather Be Right Now

• Christmastime, at home around the dinner table with my mom, dad, and all my sisters, probably laughing
• 3 months ago, before I had turned 21 and started making out with inappropriate people, just quietly happy and living in easy rhythm with my roommate, but always able to look out the window and sight the trucks moving by out on I-75
• Summertime, Claire’s basement, wrapped in a blanket and ready to watch an obscure movie
• 8th grade English class, with an awesome teacher at the front of the class, giggling and making stupid jokes with my friends
• On a road trip to anywhere but here

18 Days

Well, I’ve been mysteriously absent!  Wonder what that was all about…

No, really, I’m not quite sure what I’ve been up to.  How about a bullet list to get my thoughts in order?  It’s been a while.

• Attended a Reds game with my family for my dad’s belated birthday present
• Came back up to BG after spending three weeks at home in Dayton
• Met the house’s new kittens!
• Spent a weekend in Kentucky with my sister, watching Weeds, playing with dogs, being on a boat, tubing for the first time in my life
• Left my laptop at home in Dayton and promptly descended into a black pit of despair without it permanently attached to my fingers
• Went a week using other people’s computers, which drove me to distraction; I never realized how much I use my laptop before I went without it for five days
• Spent a weekend in Michigan for a mini-family reunion; there was more boating and tubing and a visit to the family Christmas tree farm (yes!), dirtbiking, dogs, kids, haunted woods, exhaustion
• Sprinkle in a couple of drunken nights, lots of roommate time and Dayton-friend time, and tons and tons of sleeping, and you’re all caught up
• And now?  I’m just hanging out in my sundress, waiting for work and yelling at the cats… The livin’, she is easy

End Of An Era (Or At Least A Decade…) Part TWO

Welcome back!  Look what I FINALLY did!  I really did mean to get this up by the beginning of July, so that it had only been at most a year since these events transpired, but, eh, you know, it’s summer and I’m on my own schedule, but anyways, here we finally fuckin’ go!  It’s time to recount the last six months of 2009, for posterity’s sake, I guess!  Let’s go!  (I’m so excited, apparently, evidenced by the superfluous exclamation points after each and every sentence!!!!)

One big thing I remember about July is that it was wet.  It rained or was misty and cool for the good majority of the month, and it didn’t feel like summer at all.  I was cooped up in the house a lot.  Oftentimes, I’d get home from work around five and not leave until work again the next morning.  I could completely be exaggerating this, of course, but that’s how my memory sees it.  I probably spent a good majority of that time driving my parents crazy with a practically DAILY countdown of when I’d be back in BG.  ”Only a month and a half!”   *stony silence*   “I’m so exciteddddddddd!”  *blank stares*  “I miss BG soooooo much, OMG, I’m not saying I don’t love you guys, I just really, really, really, really miss it!!!”  *my mother initiates light conversation with my father about the possible goings-on of other daughters of hers that aren’t currently acting like excited 4 month old beagle puppies*   According to my bank account book, I shopped a lot at the end of July.  I did regular mall, outlet mall, and Easton Mall shopping all within about a week of each other.  The disastrous/COMPLETELY AWESOME barbecue in August has kind of served as the signal to the end of my summer in my memory, but looking back at time stamps on photos (because I’m THAT invested in my journalistic integrity here, folks), it was actually only the beginning of August.  I still had three weeks of summer left.  Huh.  I…don’t really know what I did with them.  I was on a HUGE Mad Men kick and would watch like four episodes a night sometimes, so that’s a good bet right there, I guess.  My August = Mad Men.  I think I also went to a baseball game?  And went dancing probably?  I just honestly don’t know.  We’ll refer to those three weeks as my lost years, I guess, in some hazy far-off future where I’m telling the story of my life to my grandkids.  One upshot of my mostly solitary and extremely boring summer life is that I saved so much money.  Whereas last fall I overdrafted my bank account buying books for the semester and dropped the f-bomb on my mother in the resulting fracas, this fall I had more than enough in the bank on that fateful day when I finally, finally, FINALLY returned to BG. 

And then, the world ended, not with a bang, but with a whimper.  Or something like that.  Ok, not really.  But at the time, it sure as hell felt like that.  The rest of August was ok, a flurry of settling into a new dorm, new roommate, new classes, catching up with friends, getting into new routines.  But when things calmed down and the year started to rev up, I fell apart.  I think I believed that living with who I was living with would be the quick and easy solution to recapturing the magic of sophomore year, and when that didn’t happen, when I realized just how much time she had invested in various organizations, and when I got the news that she was joining a sorority that would take up even more of her time, I fell the fuck apart and ran away from college.  No, you did not read that wrong.  September 1st.  I had had a shitty, awful day, what with finding out that my roommate was getting her bid and most likely joining this sorority and dealing with an atrocious work day as well, so that by 9:00 I was willing myself not to burst into tears while still on the job, willing myself to make it through the last half hour so that I could bust it to my car and just drive.  I didn’t know what I wanted or needed other than to get the hell out of town.  On my way out to the lot, I ran into last year’s roommate’s boyfriend, and I absolutely melted into tears when he asked if I was ok.  No, no I was not ok, but I just needed to drive.  Yes, I can see through my tears to do so.  Please don’t worry about little old sobbing mess me.  Embarrassing?  Oh absolutely, yes, but as it turns out, also completely necessary, because he ended up telling his girlfriend she might want to see if I was ok, and she ended up calling and talking me down from my proverbial ledge, and this is the second post today that mentions just how great this girl is.  I don’t know where I was going or what I had intended on doing in terms of sleeping arrangements that night, but she talked me into turning around and eating ice cream with her instead.  It’s sad to say, but the next four-ish months were a lot like this.  2009 did not end well, and 2010 did not begin well. 

I have never said this out loud or put it down into writing, only ever thought it and re-buried it in the back of my brain, but from late September to about the end of November, I think I might have been battling a bout of acute depression.  That made my face warm just to write.  Things were so bad and so hard, and I spent a lot of nights giving myself a headache trying to cry silently so my roommate didn’t hear.  I was in a panic about my future, upset over a boy and work shit, and missing the support system that had just naturally existed around me when I lived with all of my friends the year before.  Not seeing them on a daily basis has got to be one of the biggest reasons I just felt hopeless all the time.  And I didn’t tell a single soul the whole time how much I was struggling, because I hate to be someone else’s problem.  Now, I have always known that I do not have the balls (if you could call it that?) to actually go through with suicide because I have ZERO pain tolerance, but there were so many days when I wondered what the hell the point was.  My life felt like it was going nowhere, I would never have great friends again, I would never be loved, never get into grad school, never be satisfied professionally; what did I have to live for?  One of the only things that helped me keep my head up was reminding myself that my circumstances were not nearly as awful and lonely and hopeless as freshman year had felt, and if I lived through that, then I could damn sure live through this.  Thankfully, luckily, my blues didn’t last, and I was able to pull out of the funk that I was in; I know that’s not the case for far too many people out there.

And while all of that was going on, there were some bright spots, some moments of happiness and light.  September was still a huge adjustment period, and weekends were hard again because usually my roommate wanted to be out with sorority sisters who, by and large, I couldn’t tolerate, but one Thursday near the end of the month, I had quite the drunken spectacle of a night, which would turn out to foreshadow much of my April 2010.  Meaning I got wasted and kissed someone inappropriate.  BUT, since it was the first time it had happened in a looooong time and not the fifth, it was all very fresh and fun and exciting, and everything I wanted my junior year of college to be.  Sigh.  I was so naive back then… That night actually kicked off a romantic entanglement of epic proportions whose fallout and bullshit I am still dealing with NEARLY TEN MONTHS LATER.  Jesus.  There’s a wake up call for me.

October seems pretty non-descript in my brain.  I went home a lot, I think?  I kicked off the month in Dayton, attending my best friend’s grandmother’s funeral; I heard, in the middle of the month, one of my professors utter the sentence, no, no, the maxim, ”You can’t just go sticking things in other peoples’ orifices” and started a new tradition known as wine night; I ended the month dressed as a pirate wench, soaking wet from head to toe, mascara smudged all over my face, desperately wishing I could rip my tongue from my mouth.   And that’s all you need to know about October.  Now, November.  Things were starting to lighten up a little as I got a lot closer to one of my future roommates, and we started hanging out more and more often.  She got me out of my lonely room a lot, and I (hope I) provided a good listening ear and lots of silliness for her.  I spent a lot of November (hell, a lot of first semester) sick, and also a lot of it stressed out, about school stuff and my future, boy stuff and roommate stuff and apartment stuff.  However, my roommate’s birthday weekend and Thanksgiving break both served to yank me out of the awful funk I had been in for ohhhhh, only most of the semester.  Thank God, thank God, thank God.

And then December.  Hooooo Lord, I don’t even know what happened in December, other than the awful end.  I’ll try.  Honestly, I just….I remember finals week, and how I ended up being so swamped that I laid out a very strict, hour-by-hour schedule for myself and then promptly veered right off course, allowing myself to watch any dumb movie I came across on TV and attend birthday parties and sleep.  But I survived, and made it home, and Christmas was lovely, and then the day after Christmas I got some Very Bad News.  I think the days of, ohhhh, December 26th-January 2nd were the absolute worst of the year (well, the December days, at least), if not my life.  Seriously, at one point, the very very worst day, I took a shower and did not even turn the light on in my room afterwards.  I just wanted to sit in the dark, play Mahjong, and listen “Don’t Rain On My Parade” on repeat for hours.  That’s bad, America.  I cried on New Year’s Eve, threw my phone, drank some champagne with a few very close friends, and went to bed early.

And when I woke up the next day, it was a brand new year, and while things didn’t get better right away, they did eventually, and I promise you the first half of 2010 was so, so good.  In fact, I loved it so much (well, aside from half of January) that I’m going to start the first-half recap now, so I don’t wait until 7 months after the fact to publish it.  Now that would just be a travesty.