I’m sorry, but I’m just not to the stage in my relationship with one of my older sisters wherein I feel comfortable playing “ORAL” against her in our Words With Friends game.  I’m just not.

So, yes, I am still at home, and yes, I still miss my apartment/Athens like crazy, but I gotta say, this break has been pretty great lately.  My sisters are all home, and I’ve spent the last several days with all or most of them, mainly just sitting around in various rooms drinking, talking, and laughing.  I wrapped presents with them just before the holiday, escaped early Christmas Eve craziness with them (and wine), and just today, went shopping and spent an admirably small amount of money, even though we were out for something like five hours.  And, about an hour ago, my oldest sister marched into my room, rolled around on my bed, announced, “I’ve had four glasses of wine!”, and read the back of one of my new books in a ridiculous English accent.  I’m going to miss her when she’s gone.

Another great thing about being home is that I get to see my niece SO MUCH.  Like, every day for the past week, I think?  I’m going to have withdrawals when I head back to school.  I’ve never been one for babysitting or being around infants, so it’s pretty astounding to me how much I love her and want to hang out with her, and miss her when I don’t see her; sometimes, a few hours after she leaves, I’ll already be lonesome for her.   And, watching her grow and learn new things, even just since I’ve been in town, is one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced.  She has huge cheeks, fingers I love to munch on, and the loudest baby yells EVER.  Ugh, I love her so much, you guyssssss!

Nevertheless, I was daydreaming in the shower about how I wish there were a way to scoop up my whole apartment in my arms when I get back and hug it.

Grim

Something about late October and early November has just been really bleak.  I think it’s because this whole grad school Big Girl Adventure thing doesn’t feel so much like a fun adventure anymore.  The last bit of August and all of September and even the beginnings of October were bright and fun and exciting and fresh, but now…I’m not unhappy, necessarily, but I’m not as happy as I was.  Something is just off.  My classes are still wonderful, and my program still feels like the right fit for me, and the people in it are lovely, but…sigh.  I miss my close friends, and my town, and having a social life.  Practically all of my social interactions now come in class, and when I get home I just watch TV or read, and it’s all a bit gloomy.  I know part of this feeling is just the way the daylight’s been changing, and that things will look up, and that December will be spent with family and friends at home in Dayton, but UGH.  Add to that the frustration of watching my money run out and having to tell myself again, like I did for most of September, that things will be better when my loans come in again in January, and you get a girl who’s tearing up on her couch several nights a week, and getting migraines the rest.

I suppose I should recognize, too, that it isn’t all bad.  My weekends have actually been somewhat busy for the last month, with family and friend visits and trips home and to BG, so it was nice to have a lazy weekend with absolutely nothing to do but a few school things.  Also, I called home tonight when my family was finishing up dinner, and my sister’s family was there, plus another sister, plus two dogs, and my mom, dad, and a third sister who are always there, and there was chaos and laughter and I could hear everyone talking to everyone else, and it gave me heart pangs a little, but it made me much more excited for being home for a month.  Thus far I had just been looking around my apartment going “I don’t want to leeeeeeeave you!”, but hearing what’s waiting for me on the other end of the phone line did me some good.  And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to grab a few beers and my novel and take a BATH, which I haven’t done since I don’t even know when, and it’s going to be exquisite.

I’m Going To Make You My Pet! Or: Belle Gardiner, You Bitch

I feel bad a bit because classes started a week and a half ago, and I straight up quit writing.  I’m busy for sure, but not Grad School Busy like I always heard everyone talk about.  I’m settling into a routine that is vastly different from any other routine I’ve had before, though.  I wake up (most days before noon, but somedays….not) and basically just hang around my apartment until classes.  I have an 11 o’clock lab on Wednesday and a 2 o’clock class on Tuesday, and Monday/Thursdays don’t start until 4, so I have varying amounts of time to kill.  Sometimes I run errands or do school stuff, keep in touch with home/BG people, and make lunch.  Then class, and then, when I get home (most days just past 7), it’s dinnertime, and then I do homework til 11, usually with the game or music on for background noise.  No excuses; this is homework time.  I’ve always been a terrible procrastinator with meine Hausaufgaben, and now that I live alone and have basically no friends (I only put “basically” in to make myself feel better, shut up), I’m less distracted and better able to stick to this new, strict routine.  If I get done in less than four hours, great!  I get to shower early!  But the hours from 11-1 or 2 AM have become sacred.  They’re when I read, do my internetting, my writing, my movie/TV watching, and, honestly, crying.

I have had some really high-high days here, but they come balanced out with my fair share of low-low days.  Including yesterday.  Well, scratch that.  YesterDAY was fine, but that night?  For once, I finished my shower and didn’t have a CLUE how I wanted to kill the next few hours, so I browsed through my movies and picked out Little Women.  YOU GUYS.  That movie is delightful with the sisterly fun and all of the numerous quotes that have worked their way into my daily vernacular, and Christian Bale being THE BOY OF YOUR DREAMS, but for real, you are going to need a box of tissues for the last half hour straight.  Weeping.  Every other scene.  Especially if you happen to have numerous sisters, like I do.  And you started your period that morning, like I did.  And you’re in a new place and are kind of lonely and desperate for a hug or a new friend or a new cute boy, like I was/am.  I went to bed right after it was over but ended up crying into my pillow, like the big, heaving, can’t-catch-a-breath sobs, because I miss people, and I have nothing to look forward to, and it was just the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and it’s almost the one-year anniversary of my grandma’s death, and there is so much sadness in the world!  Death!  War!  Loneliness!  Shedding uterine linings!  God am I playing into the most basic and offensive female stereotype out there right here or what.

But today was oh so much better.  I’m writing again!  And I focused pretty well on my HW and talked to a friend from home and celebrated a really happy thing with ex-roommate M., and put music on while I showered and if you have not experienced dancing whilst shampooing what are you even doing reading this?  Go!  Now!  Your hair’s looking kind of greasy, and I hear there’s a new Blitzen Trapper album coming out.

A Year In The Life, Part Two

Alright!  I am motherfuckin’ determined to get this posted MUCH earlier than last year’s part two.  Fall ’10 is so much happier to write about than fall ’09, so that helps the process.

July was largely spent in Dayton when my BG job went on hiatus for a few weeks.  During those three weeks home, I came to a few realizations: this was probably the last solid amount of time I would ever spend working at Coldstone, and also the last solid amount of time I would spend living in my childhood home.  Both of those things simultaneously wrench at my gut and feel right to me.  I didn’t fit in with the high schoolers at Coldstone and was increasingly just short on patience with my boss, and home just seemed lackluster compared to BG.  Probably because I was in the midst of the best summer of my life here, and didn’t appreciate the interruption to go home, work a job with coworkers I didn’t really care to know, live with my parents instead of my roommates, and spend quiet nights in instead of at college bars.  Not so shocking, then, to have the reaction I had.  The majority of my July was actually spent away from BG, come to think of it.  I drank a bit with friends from home, spent the first part of the month in Dayton like I mentioned, and the last two weekends in Kentucky visiting my sister and in Michigan at a family member’s Christmas tree farm.  Yes, you read that right.  It was AWESOME.  I went tubing for the first time in Kentucky, and four-wheeling for the first time in Michigan, and loved both.  I feel like those are some quintessential Midwestern summertime distractions, right there.  Garsh.  August was a weird month of waiting for things.  The first two weeks were my final two weeks at my beautiful summer home, and I spent them alternately eagerly anticipating moving into my new apartment and holding on like hell to the place and people I was with.  And then I spent the first week in my new apartment lonesome for my summer house and my new roommate, who spent the whole week working all day, and waiting, waiting, waiting for classes to start.  And then, BAM, I was a senior.

Once my other roommate moved in and the school year kicked off, I settled in really quickly.  Summer, as a season, was winding down, but still infusing my first few weeks of school with so much sunshiney bliss.  I guess it helps that I fell rapidly in love with my roommates, as well.  I wore a dress every day for the first week of classes.  Someone professed their deep and intense crush on me, and then left for Europe.  The feeling was not mutual; in fact, I was so weirded out that I shut that person out of my life entirely.  Sometimes I’m kind of a dick.  Don’t worry, though!  Things are better now!  But that’s for next year’s recap.  Late August and early September are practically indistinguishable in my mind.  It was all just breezey warmth, learning my routine, starting to figure out what the year was going to be like.  Mid-September, my grandmother passed away.  Ugh, I remember that morning so clearly.  The texts from my sister implying something was wrong, until I just snapped “WHAT is going on?”  Crying alone in my room, before I told anyone.  My half-hearted attempt to cheer myself up by going to the football game.  It was so terrible.

Fortunately, things did look up from there.  I did not descend into the depths of despair.  The rest of September was a little gray, but October really livened things up.  I think I managed to drink every weekend, despite being the sickest I’ve been in a while mid-month.  I know I started the month off terribly.  TERRIBLY.  Let’s not revisit the decision I made that night.  I kissed at least three different coworkers this month, so you know it was a shitshow.  I think we can measure the stability of my life in any given month by the number of coworkers I kiss therein.  SCIENCE.  Anyway, October, hummmmm, hewwww hawwwww.  God, I think this is the shortest year in review segment I’ve ever written.  It’s not that October wasn’t good, or that first semester wasn’t good, it’s just that second semester was SO MUCH BETTER.  I don’t even give a shit about October, I wanna talk about January and February!  That’s when the real adventures were!  But, okay, focus, focus.  Fall break happened.  It started out really promisingly, with a visit to one of my best lady friends in Cincinnati, where men ten years older than us tried to pick us up at the bar and what we drunkenly thought were members of an opposing campaign (my friend was an intern on a Senate race) ate in a booth behind us at a diner at 3 AM.  Duh, we tried to spy on them.  We were drunk, so I don’t think it was spying so much as me leaning back verrrrrry obviously and then whispering everything I could hear back to my friend across the table.  And then I went home for a few days, got in a HUGE fight with my dad about green olives because my life is funny that way, and drove back to BG angry.

Halloween weekend was one of my favorite weekends of senior year.  The Halloweens of my freshman, sophomore, and junior years were, respectively, the first time I ever kissed a boy at/got drunk at college, completely unmemmorable, and relatively underwhelming with a side of regret.  But this year, we (and every time I say “we”, I’m most likely referring to my roommates and best friend A.) went out and went hard Thursday, Friday, Saturday.  My favorite part, which I didn’t tell anyone about, was drunkenly holding hands with the guy I liked on Saturday’s walk home.  We got lost, peed in a front yard, A. knocked over a mailbox on a post, and all went our separate ways eventually.  This is kind of a bittersweet memory now, but again, that’s something for the Spring ’11 recap.  And then November rolled in.

One of my favorite people, my friend C., came up to visit just when I needed someone around to whom I could confess this burgeoning crush I had goin’ on.  She was in a remarkably similar situation, and it was incredibly comforting to me just to hear her story.  We were ladies unlucky in love together that weekend.  Then I went to a concert with said crush, and….MISTAKE.  My darling roommate H. has a hypothesis that it’s dangerous territory to listen to songs you love with or start to recognize the smell of the guy you like, because that’s when the heartstrings REALLY start to get tangled, and….yep.  That’s all I can say.  Yep.  I was a bit lovelorn in November.  But I don’t mean to make this sound more serious than it really was, because I still managed to flirt with some bad-idea people and crush on yet another coworker (this one the worst idea of all, no lies). 

Jesus.  From the way I write in these recaps, you’d think all I ever did was flirt and make out with coworkers and develop crushes that go nowhere.  I promise you, in November I did do some positive, productive things.  I fucking rocked out on the GRE!!!  I scheduled myself a much-needed haircut!  AND my classes for the spring!  What else, what else.  November seems pretty unmemorable, too, which is frustrating because I know I was happy and the world felt sweet, I just can’t remember any of the specifics.  I was listening to crappy music, spending time at the summer home, seeing movies for cheap, going to classes and doing homework, TFunding.  Regular life.  OK, so I did some Facebook excavating, and also roommate M. and I were really obsessed in November with that one AFLAC commercial with the goat, too.  So there’s your random memory for the month.  Thanksgiving was lovely but uneventful.  I went, as I have for the past I-don’t-know-how-many years, to the Christmas tree lighting in downtown Dayton, and then got STUPID drunk by ten that night and confessed that huge crush to A., who was a mutual friend of the guy and me.  OK, so December.  I got a haircut, I drank some wine, I went to an Ugly Christmas Sweater party, I kissed a pretty consistent KUI, and struggled through finals week.  Roommate M. actually needed emergency transporting home mid-finals-week, which led to my first all-nighter of senior year.  That was an eerie night.  All of us had been in our beds, but none of us had been sleeping when the bad news hit.  We drove her halfway, to be picked up by a family friend, and then roommate H. and I drove home in the wee small hours of the morning, wailing along with Tegan and Sara, and ate breakfast together while the sun rose.  I had a paper to finish, she had a final to study for.  Shortly thereafter, we had finally, mercifully made it to Christmas break.  And within a few days, I had figured out my future in more clearly defined ways than ever before, so that was neat.  I feverishly shopped for Christmas, loved on my family, got in a lot of good sister time, and was overall a decently happy girl.  Nevertheless, I was still overjoyed to come back to BG for a night on December 31st.  I spent the day with A. shopping for dresses, and then started drinking.  I was a little blue welcoming in 2011, because of that GODDAMNED crush, but not to worry!  In just a few days, life got AWESOME and so so so so much happier than I realized was possible.  I thought, throughout all of fall semester, that I knew what happy was, but the fall just doesn’t even compare when I think about the last five months.  Stay tuned for 2011, Part I, y’all, cause everything got SO GOOD.

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)

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!

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.

Trip Around The Sun, Part Two

Aaaaaaaaaaaand, apparently I have so much to say about last year that I ran out of room in one entry!  There’s a reason my father nicknamed me Gabriella von Flappingtongue when I was little.  So.  Here’s the second half of my year, in riveting detail:

July….man, the summer months run together in my head a little.  July brought my best friend to town unexpectedly, so you know it was good.  Honestly, most of the things I remember from June and July are things I already wrote about on here, which cemented them in my brain, so it feels kind of cheap to keep this up.  So let’s move onto August.  The Olympics happened, and I was in Florida with two of my sisters and several cats.  I spent my days at the beach, then reading, showering, napping, and snacking in various combinations, and my evenings out to dinner and then in my sister’s apartment watching the Olympics with some of the people I love most in the whole world.  It was pretty perfect.  It was exactly what vacation should feel like, that feeling of wet beachy hair and old armchair comfort while you just sit and listen to the people around you talk because you’re too golden to function at the moment.  In sad news, August brought the death of the best car known to man, and this death is on my hands.  I have still not dealt with it fully.  I miss that car so hard, all the time.  She was so… so stalwart.  And if I hadn’t totaled her, I know she would’ve stuck with me for at least the next three years.  I’m sorry I’m so serious about my car; I’m not sure how it happened, but I am sure I can’t stop.

August also brought my return here, to BG.  I was so panicked.  And then things turned out okay.  I don’t know how else to say it, because it really was that simple.  The world did not end, it only got better, and I know I am really one lucky bitch.  September flew by.  Really.  My sister got married and looked good doing it.  I got to see the Florida sister for the second time in as many months, which is so rare and so happy-making.  I threw up in the bushes outside of my house one night after a taxi ride home in which my driver may have popped some pills while stopped at a red light.  Incidentally, this was the night before the wedding.  Funny how these things happen!  I feel like mostly in September I just got to hang out with a bunch of cool people and get to know them better.  Did you know that I’m also at school?  You wouldn’t, from the way I would describe my September.  There’s nothing of note school-wise that happened in September, and that’s weird to me.  Anyways, September also brought a job that sort of tumbled into my lap, as all the jobs that I have ever had have.  Again, I am one lucky bitch.  October brought glorious fall weather.  It started to get cool and breezy and the leaves changed and it was gorgeous.  I love the change of seasons, so I was in bliss.  I think that in October I began to find every single boy around me attractive; there’s a lot of eye candy around here, man, and in October I took full advantage of it.  October also brought four migraines in eight days, so therefore, there was one week where basically all I did was go to bed early and lie around moaning and feeling nauseous.  But!  I also went to the doctor and got these magic pills that melt under your tongue and get rid of your headache.  I have never experienced anything that did that ever before, ever, besides an hour-and-a-half nap, and I have literally had migraines for my entire life.  Thank GOD for October, then.  I feel like October was more of the same socially, but that is the furthest thing from bad, because for once in my life “the same socially” is not crying and constantly worrying about what others think of me and wondering if I’ll ever have friends and if I’ll ever fit in and stop wanting to go home and why does nobody like meeeeeee?  Yeah.  No more of that.  As the clock changed from October to November, I cast my vote for change while listening to “Charlemagne in Sweatpants”.  And four days later, surrounded by the people that have been my saving grace this fall, I watched him give his acceptance speech and held back tears.  It was breathtaking.  I remember when the family walked onstage, smiling and waving to the adoring crowds, I freakin’ squealed with glee, “Awww, look how great they are!”  It was one of my favorite nights of the year.

I’m sorry, I know that this second part is sort of a copout on month-describing, but November too feels like it went by really fast.  I went to classes, had lazy weekends, ate lots of bacon, spent a disgusting amount of time dicking around on the internet, probably drank some beer, got new brown boots, ate turkey, called people and asked them for money.  You know.  Same old, same old.  December was a weird, patchwork month, because half was spent at school and half was spent here at home.  Exams were gross, but I attended a silent dance party (glowsticks included!) and ate Mexican food, and spent many a night staying up talking to and laughing with my adorable roommate.  And packing up to go home, I was actually sad.  I had people I loved and would miss over the next three and a half weeks, and I had trouble leaving them for home.  That was a new feeling.  And then I came home and was absolutely engulfed by family time.  I don’t see my sisters enough, but over break I got to spend a LOT of time with them, and I’m glad that happened.  There wasn’t a whole lot of time with friends because of all of the aforementioned family time, but there was just enough for me to be happy, and I know there’ll be some more here in the next few days, so it’s all good.

Aaaaaaand, that was my year.  The first four months? I’d like to keep the tags on and return ‘em, please.  But the last eight were amazing, better than I ever expected, and now I think 2009 will be absolutely magical, so anything less than the absolute best simply will not do.  Even though two hours into 2009 saw me vigorously scrubbing at carpet to get out the vomit stains, I still have high hopes for the next twelve months.  I’m wishing on an eyelash I won’t be disappointed.

Thanksgiving ’08

Man, my Thanksgiving Break was pretty great.  I spent the majority of it either with the people I love or curled up in my favorite chair at home reading TIME magazine and watching football.  I saw one of my sisters whom I hadn’t seen since Wedding Weekend, and I ate lots of food not purchased from a school cafeteria.  I woke up early Thursday morning to watch the parade, and I have to say, one of my favorite experiences of break came that morning when, amongst all the other “Happy Thanksgiving” and “Eat lots of turkey!” texts I had already received, I got one from my best friend Emily saying “Rick Roll is on the parade!”, which is something that probably only makes sense if you a.) are in my group of friends, or b.) play World of Warcraft online.  These two circles don’t generally overlap.  Seriously!

Anyway, the day itself was pretty nice, lots of cousins and food and football.  There was family crossword-puzzle bonding time, Sudoku with my sister, an adopted brother stopping by, and lots of talk about Christmas and the perfect gift.  Friday night I went downtown to see our annual Chistmas tree lighting at Courthouse Square and got caught up in the freaky, theme-less parade afterward.  I mean, what do unicycles, Star Wars, and trolleys have in common?  Historical roots in Dayton?  The capacity to conjure up fond childhood memories for, like one person each in the crowd?  I…don’t know.  Come on, Dayton!  Don’t make me make excuses for you!  Anyways, so Saturday night I acted like a 40 year old and got together with three great friends and drank sangria and played with a baby and was home by midnight, which is great because I was falling asleep.  Should have my hip replacement scheduled aaaaaaany day now.

And, since I feel like this is absolutely worth noting, my roomie just yelled, “I can’t stand it anymore!  I’m taking my pants off!”  You have no idea how often I want to say exactly that.