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.

On The Move

Two and a half weeks, two and a half weeks, two and a half weeks.  That’s been my mantra the past couple of days, because in just two and a half short weeks, I will be packing all my shit up and getting the hell out of BG, heading to a brand new town, a brand new school, a brand new apartment.  It’s not that I’m anxious to leave Bowling Green necessarily.  The summer house?  Yes.  It’s full of strangers, my room is crowded, I never eat well, and I have much less patience for all of it than I did before my three week break in Dayton.  I’m either bored or irritated most of the time, and that lately includes every single second that I’m at work, too.  There are about three people I work with that don’t manage to piss me off on a regular basis.  I have no idea why, but suddenly, my love affair with work is over.  But this town?  Oh my god, this TOWN.  It’s home.  It’s teeny tiny and surrounded by cornfields, and I hated it almost the moment I got here, but four years later, I well up even thinking about leaving.  My school is here.  My best friends are here.  Even silly things like the tiny bookstore/coffee shop or ultra-friendly local bank tellers, I cherish.  There isn’t even a PNC in Athens.  I say the first of my goodbye-for-nows tomorrow, at lunch with my sophomore year roommate, K., and they’ll only keep coming faster and faster as these two and a half weeks roll by, and mannnn, holy shit, why did I ever grow up?

ON THE OTHER HAND.  Let’s talk my new apartment finally.  IT’S GORGEOUS.  Well, okay, maybe I should edit that a little.  The memory I have in my mind from the ten minutes I spent in it three weeks ago is GORGEOUS.  Who knows how close that is to the real thing at this point, but let me tell you, it was a motherfuckin’ relief to stumble into this place after a long day of apartment-hunting with my dad.  Like the clouds just opened up, scattering sunshine and hallelujahs around our feet.  Most of the places we had seen that day resembled drug dens.  Dark, half of the top floor of a falling-down house, uneven floors, desperately in need of a paint job or seven, etc.  The best place, the VERY BEST of these, the one I was on the verge of choosing, was a little apartment built into the side of a hill whose insides resembled a cabin my youth group used to frequent for high school retreats.  Dark wood walls, red plaid curtains in the bedroom, and I guess reminiscent of a time when I liked Jesus.  Luckily, we decided to try a landlady that I had left a message for earlier in the day, even though it had gone unanswered.  She picked up, arranged to meet us, and when we walked in, I keep saying this, but when we walked in it was like that moment in the Sex And The City movie where SJP goes, “So THIS is where they keep the light!”  Seriously, that was the first impression I had of my new apartment.  Light.  Everywhere.  It’s a corner unit, so it’s got two living room windows.  I say this in the same tone someone might talk about an in-ground swimming pool in thei backyard.  I’m easy that way.  Everything is freshly painted and the bathroom’s remodeled and it’s cheaper than the cabinpartment, and gahhhh, don’t even get me started on the place I almost decided on a full WEEK before any of this, with my sister.  I guess that place is pretty much where the drug dealers of Athens live?  But instead I get to live in this nice little building with only fifteen other units and only grad students are allowed and there’s plenty of parking and laundry on-site and light everywhere and I have my own stoop and this is around the time when I start thinking two and a half weeks cannot go by quickly enough.

Back In The Saddle

Boy, less than one week back in BG and I’m already drinking away paychecks, and kissing inappropriate people in front of even more inappropriate people, and walking myself home at 3 A.M., and being hungover until 9 o’clock at night, and barely managing to feed myself real meals regularly.  Home sweet home.  I guess I just know that all of this will disappear overnight when I move into my new apartment by myself in Athens come late August (which I promise promise promise to write about soon.  The search was…interesting, to say the least), so I might as well drink in my last few weeks of genuine college-town antics while they’re still available to me.  But still.  Maybe if it could involve a little bit fewer attempts to break into my own house with my debit card in the middle of the night, things would be swelly.

Status Update

I came here all prepared to write about how everything has changed, about moving out of my old place and into this new one and missing my roommates and settling into a summer routine and how hot it’s gotten all of a sudden and blah blah blah, but mostly all I can think of now is: I totally thought ,when I moved into this new house with three random roommates and one of my best friends, that I would spend waaaaaay less time walking around in my underwear than when I just lived with my two really close friends and BOY WAS I WRONG.

But p.s. everything is so different, moving kicked my ass, don’t even get me STARTED on the fucking shelf liners in the kitchen and the bruises that ensued, this new house is almost always empty and overly air-conditioned, I miss my roommates more than I have ever actually missed anyone or anything, I’m pretty sure, so much so that it’s like a weird swirly hole in my chest opening up if I think about it too hard, I have yet to establish any real summer routine, and Jesus God, it’s been in the mid-80′s to upper-90′s for a week now.  SO HOT.

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.

The Bitter End

Well, hello there!  I am officially a BGSU alum! 

That still doesn’t feel right.  I still FEEL like a college student, and as I will remain in BG all summer again, I’d wager that I won’t really feel properly graduated until I move in August.  Oh, did I mention I’m moving in August?  Yeah….about that.  I’ve been accepted into OU’s mental health counseling program and will, more likely than not, be moving down to Athens come late August.  But!  We’re not here to talk about the future because, as always, the future is a big, scary, gaping black pit of a place I prefer not to face until I absolutely must.  So let’s talk graduation instead.  After I finished my thesis (which: that was fun, wasn’t it?) I had just one more exam to take before wrapping up my undergraduate college career.  I drank more than I studied for that exam, as anyone should, finished in about fifteen minutes, chatted with a cute boy who had lingered outside the classroom until I came out, hell yes, and then started drinking.  My family came up, we went to dinner, I went back out to the bars, I got about four and a half hours of sleep, and then all of a sudden it was graduation morning. 

I was the only one awake in my apartment, which was probably the first time that had happened all year long, no joke, and I was in a flurry.  Shoes were flung around my room, makeup was hastily reapplied and touched up (I graduated wearing the ngiht before’s makeup, oh yes I did), and my key was somewhat precariously hairbanded onto my bra strap.  I actually ended up walking my own ass to graduation, which felt like a pain in the ass until I was actually doing it; then, I realized it was actually the perfect way to go out.  I left carrying nothing but my cap and gown, and walked in the slightly chilly sunshine one last time (total sentimental exaggeration) the familiar path to campus.  Sounds like a misty water-colored memory, but really my walk takes me past the utility shack that houses hissing gas pipes, a dumpster that smells like rotting peanut butter, and a construction site on campus.  But still.  I was surprisingly happy to be by myself, taking in the sights and sounds, feeling a little reflective and a lot grown up.  This place has become home in a way I absolutely never expected, and this year has been one of the happiest of my life, and having that fifteen minutes to soak it all in just a bit more was exactly what I needed.  I was literally the only person around until I started approaching the building where the ceremony was being held.  And….it definitely wasn’t momentous at aall.  I sat next to one of my supervisors from work, actually, who reeked of booze, was wearing the wrong robe, and acted completely obnoxious throughout the entire ceremony until the end, when I think he started to pass out a little, chin resting in hand.  Our speaker was an explorational geologist who sure did love a tortured adventure metaphor and went on about us getting our “compasses” from the university and setting out to explore the peaks of discovery and the valleys of disappointment, etc.  And then it was over, we were recessing out, picture were taken, lunch was had, a nap was taken, and the partying began.

A week ago I was turning in my thesis.  Now, I’m a college graduate alone in her half-empty apartment.  Roommate H. is on a trip with other students from her major and won’t return to move out for another week and a half, and roommate M. just packed up and left about two hours ago.  I sat for a good two hours in the corner of her emptied-out room last night, listening to Mumford and Sons, eating my hobo dinner, chatting about boys and avoiding saying goodbye or reflecting or doing anything that would allow us to tear up.  We made a half-hearted attempt at a bar crawl, but it was Tuesday, and a lot of our favorite places were closed, and we were chilly and tired and had to be up early this morning.  So we came home, got ready for bed, and said our roommate goodnights one last time.  That’s when the tears really hit me.  I’m terrible at change, loss of routine, and goodbyes, and this is all three wrapped up in one monstrous package.  So here I am, missing the two people I’ve been closest with all year, feeling the full weight of the realization that I’ll most likely never live with them again, and certainly won’t ever have an experience like this again.  I know this is veering into maudlin territory, so I’ll put it to bed soon.  I’m very, very sad today, and at quite a bit of a loss, BUT, I have a full-blown BG summer ahead of me, and we all know the potential that lies therein, and then, beyond that is just the next chapter of my life.  Somethng ends, something new begins, circle of life, etc.  I just know I’ll be here, chronicling it all as I figure it out.

A History Of Intoxication

A few weekends ago I celebrated my 22nd birthday.  I was really excited for all the festivities that ensued, but honestly, I was a little hesitant, too.  The past year, pretty much from the day after my last birthday, has been the happiest of my life, easily.  I made new and better relationships, I spent a summer living in BG, I moved into my first apartment, I started to actually actively enjoy going to my job, I fell rapidly in love with my roommates, and I went out much, much more.  Don’t get me wrong- there have definitely been mistakes made, heartaches, losses, tears, fights, and disappointments.  I’m just so much better equipped to handle all of the above than ever before, and the good has far outweighed the bad, like to a ridiculous degree.  And of course I also realize that it’s not like I only get some finite amount of happiness- one year and that’s it, it’s over.  I know that I’ll probably continue to be just as happy at 22 as I was at 21, but this is the first 365 days of my life, from birthday to birthday, that I can remember not having a significant blue period; in fact, this is the first year that I have been acutely aware from day to day and week to week how blissfully happy I was.  Sometime around June, I started realizing just what a good year I was having, and began chronicling my weekends, since those tended to be when the most adventures happened.  And so I bring to you today, without further ado, my year’s most memorable, fun, or just all out wild weekends:

• March 19th:  My 21st birthday was actually kind of a mess, and not the joyful occasion I had been looking forward to; thankfully, the next night a few friends from home came up to BG and took me out and got me properly wasted.  It was a beautiful shitshow of a night.
• April 1st:  April Fools’ Day.  This is kind of the kick-off of a spree of heavy (for a girl who went out probably about five times throughout fall semester) drinking on my part that lasted allllll the way through summer.  I made stupid decisions, had Corner Grill, a local haven for hungry drunks, for the first time, and mildly regretted my life the next morning.
• May 7th: This was quite possibly one of my favorite days of the past year.  I woke up in my empty, lonely dorm room, did a half-ass job on a take-home final, then started packing up my things to move out to my summer home.  My best friend from home called and announced her intention to come up and drink with me that night.  She arrived just in time to help me pack my car for the haul across town, and just as we shut the last load up in my backseat, the tornado sirens starting wailing.  It was barely spitting rain, so we looked at each other, shrugged, and said “Eh, let’s just start driving”.  We piled all of my shit in my new room in a new house, changed, and headed to dinner and the bars, where an all-out end of the year party was taking place.  There were many shots taken, many co-workers drunkenly clutched at, and someone that looked like Tiger Woods hit on my new roommate’s 18-year-old sister.  Summer had officially begun.
• June 18th-19th: My absolute FAVORITE summer weekend.  Also, incidentally, the first weekend I had Four Lokos.  It’s probably for the best that they revamped the drink and took out the caffeine.  That Friday night, we weren’t even sure we were going to go out.  It had been storming all evening, the tornado sirens were going off again, and the sky was the color of a four-day-old bruise.  However, things had cleared up by about 11:00, so we threw on sandals and sundresses, went to a party to play flip cup with the aforementioned Four Lokos, danced like maniacs, lost the key to my car, threw up in front of the city’s courthouse, recorded drunken videos, nearly concussed myself with our shower curtain rod, drunkenly solicited a boy I had had a crush on, and laid in my bed all day Sunday nursing a hangover and watching the World Cup.  Weekend of epic proportions.
• July 8th: We developed this bad habit over the summer of running through a fountain on campus at the end of our drunken nights, and around the middle of the summer, the BG cops started to realize this.  That was why, this night, the water in the fountain was blue.  The Four Loko is why, this night, I didn’t realize it and woke up with a white skirt with blue swaths all over it.  And that blue fountain water was why, this night, I slipped, ripped open a rather long strip of foot skin, and limped around for literally the next two weeks.  That’s now one of my favoite scars.
• August 27th: It was the weekend after classes started, and I got a ride to the bars on the handlebars of a French man’s bicycle.  Let that sink in for a moment.  I took jaeger bombs with my roommate’s business fraternity, went to a party for international students, and kissed a stranger on the sidewalk after the bars let out.  Totally auspicious start to my senior year, right?
• October 28th-30th: Not only was this Halloween weekend, but it was also one of my best friends’ birthdays.  We went hard Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  We’re talking shots everywhere, boys boys and more boys, texts like mad, drunken walks home.  All that, PLUS costumes.
• December 31st: Ok, confession time: I’ve really NEVER had a proper drunken New Year’s celebration, so I was motherfuckin determined this year to do it up right.  Well.  That backfired somewhat.  There was this boy…. God, how many sad, sad stories of fucked up nights begin like that??  Anyway, I had really counted on seeing him at a New Years’ party that night, but we ended up never making it because my roommate didn’t want to go to a party with a bunch of people she’d never met before.  We went to the bars instead, and come 1:30 in the morning, I was definitely that girl stumbling down stairs and crying.  It was raining, I was drunker and unhappier than I had wanted to be, and I ended the night by throwing every single thing on my bedside table across the room.  Happy 2011.
• January 8th: Ooooooh, but the next weekend I spent in Ann Arbor visiting a friend of a friend and I got the perfect amount of tipsy and just danced my ASS off at this club, and mannnn it was such a good night, I still daydream about it sometimes.
• February 12th: Really, all of February was one drunken, adventurous mess.  February was a great, rdiculous month.  But this night….this was probably one of the better drunken nights.  It was the formal for my job, which is not nearly as lame as it sounds.  It was basically an excuse for us all to get drunk together.  And did we ever.  There was pre-gaming and post-gaming at this guy’s apartment, Iwas coming off the rush of the weekend before, where many many happy events occurred, and I was surrounded on all sides by people who seemed intent on hitting on me.  Late February was kind of messy and things got weird around Spring Break, but this night my life was still just at that precipice, about to head into free-fall, but still at that okay point.  Looking back, it’s kind of a “If I knew then what I know now” kind of nights. 

And now…. here we are.  I thought about including my birthday night on the list, but it was really kind of lackluster this year.  I got drunk, don’t get me wrong, but one of my roommates had a friend in from out of town, my summer roommate stayed sober, I had been teary and sad earlier that day, I texted someone I should have not texted, etc.  It was a bit of a let-down.  BUT, I’ve got the rest of the school year ahead of me, as well as potennnnnnntially another summer spent here in BG (??) and then who the FUCK knows, so I really do believe the next 365 days hold a lot more crazy, adventurous, ridiculous, fun, drunken weekends, too, and i kind of can’t wait.

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.

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.

The Not Even Remotely Dog Days Of Summer

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

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