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.

My Mother’s Daughter

I just got really sad and nervous because I didn’t know if Johnny Mathis was still alive, so I looked it up just to make sure.  Alive and kicking.  THANK GOD.

Suggestions

Amazon thinks that since I viewed Mumford & Sons Sigh No More, I might also like Cee-Lo Green’s The Lady Killer.  What?  And also, yes, true!

Amazon also thinks that since I viewed The Kings of Leon’s new CD, I might also enjoy some Josh Groban.  What?  And also, NO.

Four Years In One Hour

At the Union this morning, I saw a girl a few tables back sitting by herself and reading A Thousand Acres.  It made my heart warm, because I knew exactly what class she was reading for, and exactly what professor she had, and it made me want to be a freshman all over again just so I could be in that class with her (a minor miracle, considering freshman year was a hellish black hole of an experience).  Then I came home, and “Blame It On The Tetons” came on my iTunes while I was sipping Starbucks, and it made me want to be a sophomore again, killing time with my roommate before jazz class.  AND THEN I posted something silly on my former roommate C’s wall, and I wanted to be a junior all over again, waiting to go pick her up from class for brunch at Mac.  I’m still waiting for something to happen today that makes me want to be the senior that I am, because right now “Stop This Train” is playing, and I am graduating in just over two months with NO plan for my future, and I cannot even handle the prospect of being without everything I have now.

5 More Places I Would Rather Be

• Summertime, around 1997 or so, between dinnertime and sunset, on the old stone grill on our back patio, reading Little House in the Ozarks, or exploring the backyard in my bare feet, desperately wishing I could stop the sun from moving further down in the sky.
• Spring break senior year of high school, laying out at the pool in my best friend’s aunt’s backyard, getting burnt to a crisp and listening to Cute Is What We Aim For on shared headphones.
• I was just doing a little Facebook creepin, and this guy I know had a profile picture of him walking a bike down a driveway, and everything around him was shady and leafy and damp and green and there were these AMAZING ferns to his left, and MAN, I just wanted to be able to smell the way the place in that picture smelled.
• March 2009.  I was so gloriously happy, blissfully unaware of all the twisty, turny, complicated places my life would visit starting in August.  I still remember the way the sun streamed through my window that spring, how happy I was to just walk around campus with my ipod, the late nights spent goofing around with people that changed the way I felt about this school.  Easy, uncomplicated, golden. 
• The summer after sophomore year of high school (2005?), in my best friend’s back yard, making our own slip n’ slide with a tarp and a hose, and drinking unsolidified Jell-o like it was Kool-Aid, turning our tongues blue.

I just realized that all of these are set in either spring or summer.  It’s snowing outside my window again some more right now, and I’m hungover, sick, and feeling pretty gloomy about sooooo many aspects of my life.  So I suppose what we’ve learned here is that I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is MORE SUNSHINE.

After This Weekend:

• I would be happy not to see 4 AM again for a while.
• My car smells like vomit and there’s baking soda sprinkled all over the back seat and floor.
• I have a nasty scratch on the back of one leg that manages to get bumped, brushed, or scraped at least once every 24 hours, making my eyes well.
• There are at least four fresh inches of snow on the ground.  FUCK that.
• My computer keeps intermittently making noises like an air raid siren.
• My post from the 13th still holds true.
• I’m relatively sure I’ll never get Sean Kingston’s “Letting Go” out of my head.
• I am so many, many, many, many, MANY dollars lighter.
• I can’t wait to see what spring has in store for me.

I am on a MISSION here to just post the shit outta February (does that even make sense?  Does it need to?) since the Februarys past have been so under-documented and unmemorable (apparently).  Actually, I’m lookin’ to have a pretty solid February 2011, thank God.  Had a whirlwind of a weekend which included an impomptu dance party with my roommate, spontaneous bar outing on Friday night with accompanying near-blackout wherein my friends played me songs from Sweeney Todd while I hugged the toilet, lazy Saturday that dreams are made of, and a luau party held on a day that saw almost six inches of snow fall on BG.  Perfect timing.  I think I’ve slept about ten hours total this weekend, and now I’m preparing to watch the Super Bowl, maybe take a little nap in front of it.  THAT’S a real American pasttime in my mind: falling asleep in front of football.  Dear God.  I’m turning into my father faster and faster with each passing day.

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 Looking for Alaska.  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.

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.