Bragging

I have the best bedside table known to man, y’all.  Things it is currently holding?  Tissues, iPod dock/clock, a small aloe plant, mini fan, Villette, phone charger plus phone, cup of water, and mini passion flower candle.  And it is barely crowded up in here.  You jeallyyyyyyy?

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.

I woke up late today, the absolute picture of grace and elegance, with a scratchy throat and crusty nose, unable to breathe out of my left nostril, and carrying a head that felt like a basketball.  My roommate and I were both grumbly and grumpy on our walk to campus, but when we parted, she said “Today is going to be a good day.  We’re going to get through everything we have to do, and when we see each other tonight, we’ll both have our shit together and be in very good places.”  And you know what?  I think she may be right, because inexplicably my day just keeps getting better and better.  Despite having sneezed more in the past 24 hours than most people do in, say, a LIFETIME, I’m ridiculously pleased.  I got to watch a movie about babies in my 10:30 class, spent wayyyy less time in the library than I was planning on, and am on the brink of orgasm over this WEATHER.  My God, THE WEATHER.  I’m just going to keep capitalizing WEATHER until you understand just how perfect and beautiful and welcome it is that it’s in the 40′s and sunny, and I can see the GRASS because the nasty grey snow is melting, and we heard GEESE this morning on the way to campus, and the SKY is BLUE, and the SUN is OUT, and hello, THE WEATHERRRRR.  I’m amped on ICED Starbucks right now (because it’s JUST THAT NICE OUT), and my ipod has been playing songs that remind me of high school and/or spring.  There are still things keeping me up at night, like my thesis’ bibliography due Friday, or grad school apps (or lack thereof, on my part), or my snotty nose, or boy issues, but honestly…. I’m pretty damn content right now.  I turned the heat down, the sun is shining in my window, and Ben Kweller is playing harmonica and flashing me back to senior year spring break.  Doesn’t get much better than this, folks.

A Year In The Life: Jan-Jun 2010

So!  Time again to recap another year.  Usually, doing these posts, I’ve found that chopping things up by calendar year is really helpful and efficient, but not this time.  If you’ll recall, 2009 ended in a bit of a mess, and it’s sad to say, but that mess sort of seamlessly transitioned into 2010, so at least this time, the calendar year divide doesn’t fit the frame of my experience so well.  I know it’s played out to say, but the end of December and beginning of January were all a blur: of phone calls, worry, hospital rooms, and tears.  And ohhhh the endless conversations.  The arguing, updating, comforting, explaining.  I thought, therefore, that getting back up to BG and back to school would ease my mind.  Ha.  HahahahahahaHAAAA.  You know, one of the best parts of writing these recaps is that I get to look back at just how idiotic and naive I was the year before.  I never fail to bring it on that front, let me tell you.  And boooooy did I ever start this year off with one stupid assumption, Bubba.  I hit the end of my driveway, burst into tears, and my week did not really improve from there.  I got off to a great start at work by getting written up my first night back, and came home from work only to hear that my brother-in-law had been officially diagnosed with MS that day.  At the time, he and my sister had only been married for eight months.  They were still newlyweds.  I remember spending practically all of the next morning crying.  I woke up, got ready for the day, and then sat down on the futon and wept.  I’m talking black tears, raccoon eyes, snotty tissues, full-on meltdown.  It was then that I decided to go spend the weekend, my first official, yay!-we’re-back-at-school-let’s-party weekend at home in Dayton.  Things had just been so relentlessly, all-goddamn-consumingly awful and out of my control lately, and what I thought would help hadn’t and I was finally just at a loss.  So, I took the weekend, regrouped, and came back pretending that the semester was just starting.  And the cool thing is… it worked.

Thank the fucking LORD for that, because this has all been so awfully dreary, hasn’t it?  I mean, I’ve literally been procrastinating writing this non-mandatory piece because shit got so rough.  I wanted to skip all the ugly bits and just get to April and May, the best months of the year (so far, at least; I’m writing this part at the end of July).  But I’ve definitely learned that you gotta take the bad with the good, and that a lot of times the bad comes all at once, but a lot of other times, the good does, too.  Which brings us to the rest of this recap….

Well, almost.  Poor February.  It’s kind of like the bastard red-headed stepchild month of my years, it seems.  I NEVER remember details from February.  Seriously.  This is getting comical.  I just scoured Facebook for pictures from February to jog my memory and found TWO.  So here’s the only thing I KNOW happened in February ’10: my future (now current) roommate designed some sort of environmental promotional banner that was to be displayed in Toledo, and we went to the gallery opening of all the banner winners.  Scintillating stuff.  Actually, though, it was fun to go and mingle and be in and amongst a crowd that I literally have NO contact with on a day-to-day basis.  I also know that during February, my roommate was in the midst of a tailspin brought on by a bad breakup; I was starting to worry that she had changed so completely and was no longer the person I had committed to living with for eight months the spring before, so I was generally pretty unhappy in that relationship on top of everything else still plaguing me from Christmas Break and the semester before.  (UPDATE from November: I just got an email from myself written back in February, and I wrote about the stupidest shit.  Like, should I kiss this boy or not?  The Nanny.  Where I was going to dinner that night.  Well, and also how I was still pretty unhappy and trying to root myself on and pull myself out of it.  But, you know, aside from that.  Just junk.)  However, March is when things all start to really, truly turn around and take off and get good and fun, so let’s head that way, shall we?

Spring Break was really when life did a 180.  I had planned on going to Vermont to visit a friend, but it fell through at the last minute; thankfully, I had a back-up plan.  I instead spent a few days in a cabin in the mountains of Tennessee overlooking a huge lake with my roommate and some of her friends from home and some of their friends.  Essentially, a group of people who all barely knew each other.  But it was ok, because we got along great and spent our days doing Jesus jigsaw puzzles, boating, and playing video games, and our nights drinking and playing cards.  It was incredibly relaxing, incredibly fun, and incredibly beautiful, and I don’t know, maybe there are some serious supernatural forces at work in them thar hills or something, because this is when my roommate and I effectively switched lives.  It was some seriously Freaky Friday shit.  She pulled up and out of her downward spiral of partying and drunken debauchery, and I dove headfirst into mine.  Honestly, I turned 21 a week after break, and spent the next solid six months drinking.  I believe there was ONE weekend, JUST ONE, in which I did not have a drop to drink between Spring Break and mid-September, and that was the weekend where I dressed up like a prostitute to appear in a movie.  Yes, I could elaborate on that plot point, but I’m going to leave you wondering.  Classy, I know, I know,  but also?  SO FUCKING FUN.  I think I can attribute at least part of my descent into constant drunkenness to a new friendship.  Except, it’s not like an after-school special kind of friendship where I was getting pressured into drinking so that I could hang out with the cool kids.  We just kind of fell in together at exactly the right time to produce some of the MOST extraordinary months of my life.

April.  Ohhhhhh April.  Favorite month of the year, undoubtedly.   Here’s why.  Firstly (but not necessarily most inportantly), it was at this point in my life that I had managed to strike the delicate balance between being a total co-worker flirt without actually being a make-out slut.  I was toeing a fine line, juuuuust managing to stay upright on the balance beam.  I had baby crushes on a few boys I worked with, and was really just relishing in them when April started.  And then I got SLOPPY drunk on April Fools’ Day.  The fool was played by your truly that night, that’s for goddamn sure.  Kissed someone I shouldn’t have in front of someone I should have, was witnessed easily by several coworkers because I was in the middle of an EMPTY dancefloor, and went on to be falling-over drunk at a diner with said coworkers, out til four in the morning.  Auspicious.  And I feel like I spent my whole month that way.  Wasted.  Thursday nights became my favorite, running into co-workers out became my favorite, hell, KISSING co-workers became my favorite, being teased at work for my drunken antics became my favorite.  It’s kind of embarrassing to look back now and see how I totally just drank it all in, so obviously enjoying it, but it really, really was making me happy.  Whatever.  You live, you learn, right?  Just wait til I tell you about fall.  I’m a little bit more grown up now, I swear.  And it’s not like I ever really lost myself in all of it; I remember one night in particular, when I heard some particular shit that had been talked about me, and just worked myself up into a frenzy of righteous indignation adn was like, “Oh, let’s motherfucking GO!  I will pull my shit together like you have never before SEEN, assholes!”  I didn’t, not fully, anyway, but just knowing that at least I hadn’t turned into those trashy “haters ‘gon hate” kind of girls is comforting now.  Hum.  I kind of lost the framing technique I was using at the beginning of this paragraph.  Them’s my writing skills for ya.

It’s really interesting to compare the first and last days of April.  So similar.  Kissing a co-worker, getting wasted, late night food run, HILARIOUS stories to recount the next day.  And so May came in on a tide of alcohol and end-of-school stress.  It broke my heart to be packing up and leaving my room and my beautiful roommate.  I hadn’t really felt at home there at all during fall, but spring was treating me so right that life had morphed into something so easy and pleasant and safe, and summer was so up in the air and scary.  My last night there my best friend surprised me by coming up and helping me pack, clean, and move, and then by being game to go out and get shitfaced with all my co-workers whom she had never met.  Best. 

And the hosue I moved to….. was so utterly perfect.  Exactly the kind of place I needed to be, and the type of experience I needed to have the summer before senior year of college.  I said it so exactly right in my summer recap, that I have never before had a place become home to me so quickly.  The first week or so was trying, but then I realized how extraordinary my roommates were, how fun summertime can be when you’re 21 in a nearly-deserted college town, and how easily I could strike a balance between BG and Dayton.  And that’s just what I did: spent weeks in BG, sleeping late every day, being absolutely lazy, watching Grey’s, playing cards, reading, TFunding, loving my roommates.  And then, come Friday, I’d roll out of bed and throw some clothes in a suitcase and head to Dayton til Monday afternoon for some special event, party, birthday, what have you.

June, for me, was the month where it really started to hit me over the head how happy I was.  I really became aware of it with every fiber of my being more and more often, and I think the posting I did here reflects that.  Therefore, I started to spend a couple more weekends in BG living it up, which led to (dun dun DUNNNN) my first of MANY Four Loko nights.  Looking back, it’s ridiculously weird (and also probably a saving grace, let’s be real) that I hadn’t been drinking them all spring to fuel my adventures.  Because adventures they most assuredly led to.  The first night I had one was probably one of my favoite nights of the summer.  Just your typical overly-happy, wastedddddd, dancing college girl in a dress at the bars.  It felt special to me, like those nights always feel special to the girls living them.  Sweet summertime.  And of course, one of my most beautiful memories of summer 2010 was just watching the sun rise on the last day of June with my roommate who had quickly become one of my best friends, and realizing just how good 2010 was treating me, and being so, so thankful, and so, so ready for more.

Funday Monday

Today’s Monday is miles and miles away from last week’s Monday.  Like Pacific Ocean amounts of miles.  Is it dickish to always be talking about how happy I am?  I mean, I’m not gonna apologize for my life or anything, but it’s OK if you wanna walk away now, too.  Because it’s one of those days where I feel like I’m living in a movie and everything is going right, and I’m like a bulldozer of motherfuckin sunshine.  I’m rocking a sundress and it’s gorgeous outside.  There’s a tattooed boy in my 8:30 AM class, and here’s a mini-confession: one quick way to instill a baby crush in me is to be tatted all up and down your arms.  In something other than gay ass tribal tattoos.  I don’t know why this works, but I’ll be damned if I don’t smile more at those boys than any other kind.  I’ve had Starbucks, made by my favorite Starbucks employee (yes, I have a favorite Starbucks employee.  Don’t YOU?).  More than once, a butterfly flitted across my path on the way home, like I was some magical, orphaned Disney princess and they had just arrived to dress me or do my laundry or escort me to the ball.  My iPod is playing all the right songs.  Songs I didn’t even know I wanted to hear until I did.  And while I was walking past the field right before the Spooky Shack on my way home, I looked up to see a BG biplane flying past the faint outline of the moon in the pale blue sky.  Doesn’t that sound like something Pocahontas would sing about?  Except minus the airplane and maybe plus a crow as black as night or something?  It was such a bizarre, surreal sight that I think I just decided that the first painting I commission will be that image.  God I hope my life is opulent enough one day that I just run about commissioning paintings.  Maybe I hope that.  Cause life is cool right now, too.  I just emailed a friend in China all my secrets and stories, even though I wasn’t sure I had the right address.  My legs are smooth, I get paid tonight, and I seriously don’t give a fuck about reading right now, and I don’t give a fuck that I don’t give a fuck.  I get to see my family and puppies this weekend.   I kissed a stranger Friday night.   

Does it make me seem simple when I talk about the things that make me happy?  It really doesn’t take much.  I’m like a cat in that regard: I get pissy if I’m not fed regularly, but all I really require is a sunny spot and moderate human interaction daily to be really content.  And maybe a nap here or there.  Just pet me sometimes and tell me you love me, and I promise I’ll always be OK.

You know,

something that has eternally* confused me is how to properly pronounce the name “Siobhan”.  Nothing I know about the rules of the English language help me out when I encounter it, and I’ve NEVER heard it said aloud, just seen it written various places.  You should have heard me five minutes ago trying it out different ways.  “Shabaaaaaaahn.”  “Shobin?”  “See-o-ban?!”  And so I think today might be the day I finally Google it and have that internet lady robotically murmur the name in my ear.**

On an ENTIRELY unrelated note, the sun has been out almost all week here, and GOD I have spring fever something fierce and I swear on (something important and meaningful) that if I come back from Spring Break to a frozen tundra and ten inches of snow, HEADS WILL ROLL.

*and by eternally, I mean occasionally

**I did this with the word “jodhpurs” a year or so ago, and it was a life-changing experience.  Really revolutionized my thinking.  Evidently, something about the letter h behind a consonant just really throws me.  Something to work through with my therapist.  That I don’t have.  But probably should.

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.

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.

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.

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…