Happy November 10th!

Honestly, I’ve been feeling a little restless and unhinged lately.  Impulsive.  Irrational.  By lately, I mean for like the last month.  But today is different.  My morning can be summed up thusly: It finally feels like fall outside.  And I mean the kind of fall where the leaves are crunchy and and it’s chilly and I get coffee and walk home feeling hopeful and like I’m in a movie, which is the feeling I’ve been waiting for and waiting for that’s taken it’s dear sweet time getting here.  And then, I get home and the fall magic continues with a canceled class and babies dancing to Beyonce.  And finally, I made the best mixed CD known to man.  It involves “Can’t You See” by the Marshall Tucker Band, followed directly by “Rehab”, and then that song from Mulan.  No, not the weepy one by the pond; the kickass one about fires and typhoons and the dark side of the moon.  That one.  I made this CD with the express purpose of listening to it on the drive home for Thanksgiving, which is two weeks away, but it’s all I’ve been listening to this week anyway.  “American Pie” is on right now, and MAN I love that song.  One of my all-time favorite lines in any and all of music is when Don MacLean forcefully declares “I KNOW that you’re in love with him cause I saw you dancin in the gym”.  It always reminds me of high school and it always makes me kind of wistful.  Today is a really good day.  Finally.

Love In This Club

Ok, so I’m just sitting here minding my own business and listening to my “In The Cluuuuuub” or whatever mix on iTunes, when that Janet Jackson song comes on.  You know, that one where she has a lisp when she says “sexy” those million times?  Yeah, that one.  Well, she was talking about how she has a lot of swag, which, I mean, you’re Michael Jackson’s sister so I should hope so, when she busts this line: “I’m heavy like a first day period”.  Whoa.  Whoawhoawhoa.  I actually stopped, rewound, and listened again, vainly hoping that she was talking about like a class period or something?  Surely she’s not mentioning the menstrual cycle in song!  That’s just absurd!  But no.  She really, really went there exactly, so let’s just evaluate.  You and me, Janet; let’s discuss this.  I mean, Janet, lady, are you sure you want to draw this comparison?  To blood from one’s uterus which exits the body through the vagina?  Have you thought this through?  Because having mad swag and being similar to the flow of a period are….not the same thing.  At all, in anyone’s world.  One is admirable, the other is horrifying.  Perhaps having flow like a period….. no.  Not even that.  I’m sorry, I tried.  Comapring oneself to blood and tissue exiting the body just will not fly.  Not today, not ever.

In other “In The Cluuuuuub” news, do you know how often I find it appropriate to mention someone “hatin like a city cop”?  Embarrassingly often.

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.

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.

Juxtaposition

Currently: reading Richard III while listening to “Get Buck In Here”.

But it’s ONLY because I really like the part where Ludacris says, “If you wanna learn something, bring your mother!”

Basic Training

So tonight I talked to a really huge asshole on the phone who basically made me sit there fuming for a good half hour because he was telling me all this shit about not looking a gift horse in the mouth and patience wearing thin and how dare you even think about calling at Christmastime? because yeah, we do that just to piss you off, clearly that’s our aim when contacting alumni.  Right.  Anyway, so I thought I’d just go ahead and publish this, but do know that when I’m bitching about my job, it’s usually in good fun, because I know I got really lucky with this job coming to me out of left field and that financially, things could be alot worse for me and despite what some people may think (Charles), this is one pretty huge gift horse whose mouth I don’t want to look in.  And so I present:

Things I Have Learned While Working At The Fund:

• There seriously are people out there who do not have or use e-mail.  This is unimaginable to me.  I’m such a child of the 90’s.  I talked to one lady who graduated in the 50’s who didn’t even own a computer.  IT IS 2008, NOT THE STONE AGE.  What is with this, people?!
• There are people in this world who would prefer that you call them “B-rent” instead of “Brent”.  There are also people in this world are not going to call you that, ever.  Added bonus: This guy is most likely going to end up being my supervisor one day.
• Dude, people who graduated from here in the 70’s are basically all douches.
• Computer monitors from the 90’s?  Yeah, those’ll trigger a migraine.
• Some people do not like to be called during dinner.  I get this, I really do.  My family doesn’t like to be called during dinner, either.  You know what we do about that?  DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE, YOU 70’s ASSHOLE.
• Saying “I understand” is basically like swearing at someone on the phone.  Seriously, it’s a big no and that is not something I ever would have expected.
• People will really tell you the most personal things while trying to avoid giving you money.  You had a terrible four years here at the University because the faculty was too liberal for your liking?  Um, ok…?  You’re holding a vendetta against the University because we did away with our track team eight years ago, even though you graduated in 1976?  Sensible!  You’re getting a divorce?  Sorry to hear it, mostly because I DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS.
• Evidently, my phone voice is totally Palin-y.  Shit.
• I am not one of those people who will make their four-year-old record the answering machine message.  Not ever.
• I mean, I guess I basically already knew that people could get really, uh, creative with spelling and stuff, but today I dealt with someone whose e-mail address had to do with charisma@aol or whatever, except that for the “charisma” part, there were definitely z’s involved.
• I used to think that I had a lot of patience for graceless assholes, but now I find that I use up all of my patience for that particular type of person while at work, so that when I come home, I don’t have one iota of willpower to deal with someone who steps to me with shit.  Maybe I’m not as patient, then, as I thought?
• Tedious tasks are always made better by a great song running through your head.

Singin’ in St. Louis of Oz

Someone in my hall has some old musical with like Judy Garland and some dude in it turned way up so that I can hear the music in my room.  Let me just say now that I am all about this.  It’s making my studying way more enjoyable.

A Million Little Paragraphs

I woke up this morning with “Bury Me With It” in my head and briefly considered just rolling over and going back to sleep and skipping Chemistry class, but forced myself up since I plan on skipping Monday’s class.  Wandering back from the bathroom, after I had been awake for less than ten minutes, I noticed that someone had scrawled a message about making love to Edward Cullen one day on my board.  I reallllly did not have the energy to deal with that shit so early in the morning, so instead I just stood there and glared at the message for a minute and then shook my head and went inside. 

On my way out of the dorm, I opened the door into the stairwell and it collided with a cardboard box stuffed inside of a trash bag, and do you know what my first thought was when this happened?  ”What if there were a baby in that trash bag?”  What the hell?  I mean, I had been awake for at least half an hour when this happened, so what the fuck was I thinking with that?  I mean, whose first thought upon seeing a trash bag in a stairwell is “Hmmm, maybe someone’s abandoned their child in there”?  Who thinks like this?  I do.  On a Friday morning before I’ve had Starbucks when all I can think about is turning around and going back to bed, I do.

This morning was the coldest it’s been all school year, and I really had forgotten the way the cold can cut straight through your pants.  Three minutes into my 15 minute walk to class I was so cold my teeth hurt.  And the wind was back too, the kind of wind that makes you want to stop and through a temper tantrum in the middle of the sidewalk, like “We get it!  You’re freezing fucking cold and plan on blowing in my face for the remainder of my walk, constantly and irritatingly.  Consider your point made!”  But then, you know, you’re just the girl that yells at invisible things in the middle of campus, and that’s really not a label I can deal with at this point in life.

Then I was at Chem class, and there was a girl with a really bad weave sitting in the front row.  Now, I’m not normally a person who knows what a bad weave looks like at all, but I mean, this one basically looked like a mop had settled comfortably on top of this poor girl’s head.  So I guess the moral of this story is that if even I can tell your weave’s fucked up, you know it’s bad.

Would you like to know the kind of things I think about during International Relations?  Artie, from Pete and Pete.  You know, like “the strongest man in the woooooooooorld” Artie.  I ate that shit up when I was a kid.  I though that was fucking hilarious.  (I still kind of do.)

So after class, I headed over to Starbucks, and while I was waiting for my drink to be made I was sort of checking out this totally adorable guy in Weezer glasses, a button-up-the-front sweater, and a bow tie.  He was sitting up really straight, quietly reading and there was old-timey Christmas music playing and I’m pretty sure I fell in love for a minute.

I stopped to get some snacks on the way back from class and Starbucks, and my cashier at Chily’s was really friendly and happy and babbling away about something.  Her accent was so heavy I couldn’t understand her at all, but she was making herself laugh so hard that I couldn’t help but to smile and laugh along.

And then my walk home was nice and not as cold as this morning and I got to the lobby and picked up my free copy of The Road and there was a handwritten note inside that said ” *Congrats* “ and this girl who looks like she’s from the ’90’s said hi to me like she was some character on Saturday Night Live and I’m pretty sure the first half of today was almost perfect.

The only lowlight I have is that my precious, beautiful show Pushing Daisies got canceled by the fools at ABC.  There will be a little less happiness and gorgeous set design on my TV next fall…

Well, I feel like I had an update or two, but they’re all gone form my head right now, so I’ll just say this: today I saw the video for Death Cab For Cutie’s “I’ll Follow You Into The Dark” and as that hole in his floor kept getting bigger and bigger everyday, it just kept reminding me, God knows why, of The Metamorphosis.  This makes twice in two entries that Franz Kafka’s made an appearance.  He’s getting his own tag.