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.

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.

Constructive Summer

This summer…. man, how can I even begin to explain this summer?  This summer was probably the best one of my life so far.  This summer was a respite, first and foremost, from the awful.  This summer was everything I needed and had been looking forward to from August to May.  I’d have to say this summer really delivered.  This summer brought the arrival of a beautiful new baby boy into the life of a not-so-close-anymore friend.  This summer saw the realization of a lifelong dream, and it was better than I ever ever ever could have imagined.  This summer I walked down Fifth Avenue, ate lunch in Central Park, drank in a cramped Manhattan apartment with one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met, hailed my first taxi, and had a magical moment on the Brooklyn Bridge.  This summer another dream was reaffirmed.  This summer was work, almost daily sometimes, mostly with people I love and adore and miss to death right now.  This summer was constantly being with my three best friends, whom my heart hurts thinking about sometimes, because the three of them are together and I am here.  This summer I met some interesting characters.  This summer was driving, driving, driving, and loving every minute of it.  I miss that.  This summer was a mini-roadtrip by myself, just me and the open road, to visit someone I loved.  This summer was freedom and money.  This summer was spent partially sleeping on my best friend’s hardwood floor.  This summer was my first shot in a bar, so this summer was sort of illegal.  This summer was the burning of some significant things, things that still cross my mind from time to time.  This summer I cleaned, I cooked, I read not nearly as much as I told myself I would, I stayed up late, I drank, I saw and spent time with everyone I loved.  This summer there was a boy, just as there has always been a boy, but this summer the boy-crush turned out to be a little more lasting and intense than I expected.  Shit.  This summer involved discovering lots of new music at my new favorite music store.  This summer was The Hold Steady, The Hold Steady, The Hold Steady, The Hold Steady.   This summer I totally jinxed myself.  This summer was late night decorating for one of the most wonderful people I know.  This summer was drunken camping and lots of girl talk.  This summer was a mystery knock at the door and the best surprise I’ve ever gotten.  This summer brought the death of a kid that I didn’t even know, yet still brought me to tears during an absolutely bereft moment late one night.  This summer was a walk in the rain.  This summer was worrying about a friend who sometimes seems to be changing too fast for me to keep up with, so this summer was kind of anxious and sad.  This summer was terror at the thought of August, which means this summer was ignoring the fact that August 24th even existed.  This summer was the Olympics, and the Rinehart Olympics.  This summer took me to Florida for some quality sister time, and one relaxing, perfect week with people who share the same ideas about vacation as I do.  This summer was my first flight, but for a very good reason.  This summer was some damn crying into my ice cream in the middle of a Florida street, so don’t think this summer was not occasionally embarassing.  This summer I think I must have met more people who intrigued me or made me laugh or fleetingly crush than any other time in my life.  And finally, this summer literally ended with a bang.

I can’t wait til May.

Plane Jane

I’ve been thinking a lot about flying lately.  Mostly because I worked at the Air Show this weekend, where I learned the names of planes like the SR-71 and the F-22 and the B-52, which, up till now I had always believed to be just the name of a band.   Anyways, I spent the weekend schlocking overpriced souvenir airplanes to parents, or rather their whiny children, who demanded to have the B-2 Stealth Bomber, and pouted when they found out we had sold out of the Chinook helicopter.  I really hope these children grow up to go on dates someday, because man, I also interacted with alot of their Future Sleves if they don’t get their shit together.  I’m talking 30 somethings with tube socks and ham radios who show up at the Air Show at 8 in the morning and stay all day and also buy toy airplanes.  I have seen your future, children, and it is lonely….

But also, I’ve been thinking about flying because, in a little less than 3 weeks, I will fly for the first time, down to Florida to visit my oldest sister and her fiance.  I am really quite horrified at the notion of this.  I know that it is highly unlikely that my plane will go down in flames, but even as I sit here writing this, I feel like I’m definitely jinxing myself… Sorry, fellow flyers!  If the plane goes down, it’s definitely because this random girl in Ohio thought it might happen!  Honestly though, I have no idea how I’m going to keep myself calm, but plans definitely include listening to “Flight 180″ on repeat and averting my eyes from the windows.  I really don’t think I could handle being in amongst the clouds for an extended period of time without losing my shit.  And it doesn’t help that I’m traveling with another first time flyer, my older sister Whitney, or that we have a plane switch (or whatever they’re called…. told you, I’m not good at this) in Atlanta, which is supposed to be one massively busy and hellish airport.  Great!  Good times all around!

On a completely unrelated side note, IMDB suggests that if I loved Death At A Funeral (which: I really, really did; any movie containing Matthew McFadyen, poop jokes, and madcap British hijinx?  I’m there), I would also enjoy The Godfather.  I sincerely doubt this, but then again, maybe it is time that I give The Godfather a try….

See You Around Town…

Whenever I start to feel like I’ve been having a completely lazy, unproductive summer, I just remind myself that I already accomplished a lifelong dream in May: I visited New York City.  Ok, so that’s not really very productive of me, but it’s not average, either, which is sometimes what my life veers into…  Anyway, the trip itself was perfect.  I mean, seriously, I could not have asked for anything more out of it.  I got to go with my three very best friends: Kimber, Claire, and Emily, we had mostly lovely weather, no fighting (except for some cold shouldering that lasted about three hours, but we don’t talk about that), tons of sightseeing and amazing food, a night of drinking and debauchery (…okay, more drinking than debauchery, but I love to sounding like the bad ass I so obviously am not) and TAXI RIDING!  And honestly, most of the negative things I had ever heard about New York were proven false.  Everywhere we went, people were lovely, not rude or snide or too in a hurry to notice any measly tourists.  Waiters and waitresses offered to take group photos on our cameras for us.  We struck up a lovely conversation with two men on the subway late at night.  We didn’t have to ask for directions on the subway on Sunday because a very nice Hispanic man in a poncho walked up and helped us of his own accord.  Even the ones who hit on us or cat-called did so in utterly charming ways that made me want to sit and talk with them instead of ignoring them like you do a regular creeper, like calling us “mamis” or identifying us by shirt color. I didn’t find the city to be any dirtier than downtown Dayton, and honestly, as far as the smell of the city, I’ll repeat what I told my mother: the worst-smelling part of the city, in my estimation, came from standing outside of the Fifth Avenue Abercrombie and Fitch and inhaling whatever rancid pubescent boy cologne they were brewing inside that managed to waft out onto the sidewalk, assaulting the nostrils of us unsuspecting tourists.

While in New York, we were lucky enough to become acquainted with two of Claire’s charming family members: Aunt Madeline and Jeremy, a cousin.  We stayed with Madeline in Brooklyn, and she was the perfect hostess.  She offered to parallel park the car when we arrived and had a bottle of wine waiting for us upstairs in her gorgeous apartment, where she had written in charcoal all over one brick wall, just little phrases; my favorite: “I liked it the way I found it”.  It just rings true to my whole experience in the city.  Seriously, we’re so lucky we got to stay with Madeline: she showed us how to ride the B train into Manhattan, didn’t mind when we came in at 6 A.M. obnoxiously drunk and woke her up, and sat and drank coffee with us on one of her precious free evenings, asking us about our lives back in Dayton and telling us about hers, which includes travels abroad at the age of 18 and dating various news anchors.  Yeah so I’m pretty sure she’s rad. 

And then there’s Jeremy, or Jeremiah, as he has come to be known.  Jeremiah is awesome for many reasons: he has a hat full of bones in his tiny one room apartment, the skin of a puff adder that he skinned himself, outrageous polka-dotted flip-flops given to him in a small African village, and a vast knowledge of anything you ever wanted to know or were just wondering about, ever.  In the space of about three days, he taught us about Manhattan schist, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the art form that is slingshotting, demon hunting in Mexico, and many more valuable lessons that I’m going to be selfish with and keep for myself.  I will say that after a night spent drinking beer and whiskey with the guy, I came away with five new injuries, but a whole new appreciation for trilobites and ammonites.  Everyone needs to drink with a biology professor at least once in their lives.

 

Honestly, every time I’ve tried to write about New York in the past two months, it’s come out as incoherent garbage that’s basically me spouting various quotes or anecdotes and not doing any actual writing, but I guess this’ll have to suffice.  Don’t worry, I have a list of all the things that make me smile or laugh out loud when remembering them, as well as hundreds of pictures, but I will keep them to myself because I know how boring it is to sit and listen to someone blather on about their hilarious stories and oh my gosh remember that one night right after we got off the Brooklyn Bridge?!  Oh my GOD, that was just too funny OH WAIT YOU WEREN’T THERE YOU TOTALLY DON’T CARE.  This is probably bad enough as it is, so I guess you’ll just never have to sit through the telling of the cute boy with the Narnia tattoo….