A Decemberous Miracle

I'm writing for the first time in months because this story is far too good for me to pass up.

Finally through with the semester, you're safe to assume I've spent all day lazing about.  I've even managed to run out of snackables, which is tragic, considering food is a source of supplemental entertainment for me.

Today was marked by stretching to the absolute limit of passing time just... because... I had to. While on my 4th hour of watching online show re-runs, something out of the corner of my screen-affixed eyes caught my attention: my mother stood in the dining room, with a box.

This was not very extraordinary. Boxes are relatively common to receive at houses wherein the residents shop online or have generous relatives during the holidays. But what WAS extraordinary was my mother's hesitance to open it.

Emitting various "Hmm!"s and "huh"s, I found upon further inquiry that while the address was 100% ours, the names attached were NOT ours. My mother is no more a "Laurence" than I am.  What's more, it was from a Judy and a Cliff, with love - I kid you not when I say I have never even MET a Judy nor a Cliff, let alone in combination.  And I certainly expect no love from them.

My mother, being honorable and moral, called the company that sent it - a holiday gift-basket type company, y'know, the kind that sends fruits and nuts - and after a good ten minutes on the phone with a representative, they came up with only one solution: ENJOY IT. That's right. There was no return address or number to contact. It was ours.

Overwhelmed with the glee of impending free edibles, I expected my mother to open it. The box even SAID "Open Immediately". But my mother refused on the grounds of the upcoming dinnertime and - more likely - maternal rights to torture.  Luckily my aggressive older sister caught word of the free package and ripped into it before my mother even knew she was in the house.

And more miraculous than receiving it was its contents: AN ENORMOUS BASKET OF COOKIES.

It's a Decemberous Miracle for me, my family, and my sweet-teeth! There's enough even for it to last until my twin sister gets home at the end of the week (maybeeee...)!

Now some of you reading this might be sitting there, thinking. "How horrible! That belongs to somebody else and you know it!" "That's it? You're not going to look into this further?" "Have you no guilt? Have you no SOUL?"

All I can say is that while I may be lacking a conscience or maybe even a human soul, I do not lack one thing: cookies.

NEW THINGS

A new blog post! I'll admit it. I forgot I even had a blog for a while. I kinda go to college, which makes me kinda busy. Apparently.

ALSO: I have a new laptop! It's shiny and black and ultimately terrifying. I've technically had it for a month or so but I've been afraid to actually use it, to the disdain of my fellows. I guess this blog serves to show my official transition to the Shiny McGee. (Though my trusty green Monster's still right next to my desk, just in case.)

Though there are perks to any new computer, I just hit a major speed bump:
MICROSOFT PAINT IS TOTALLY NEW AND DIFFERENT.

I think I know how to get its settings close to the janky old version we all know in love.

... Close enough.

broken laptop

As you may have inferred from the title, my laptop is broken.

And I don't mean broken like I'm dumb and it's slow cuz, being dumb, I download everything I click on.  I don't even mean it's broken like hyper-virus infection broken (though there have been those moments).

When I say "broken", I mean my laptop and life source for the past three years is Schwarzenegger-as-Terminator, shot-up-and-falling-apart broken.

Not even duct tape can rescue it at this point.  It's become so unholy as to resist the duct tape. It RESISTS the duct tape! What kind of evil machine can - WOULD - do such a thing?!

A laptop past its warranty is apparently its own free agent.  If it tries to kill me, I may just have to put it down.
OH GOD IT KNOWS I'M TYPING THIS. AUUGHH---

Trip, fall, fail

This happens to me a lot.

Followed by this.

Because I trip and fall often, and mostly on stairs, my legs almost always look like this.

You can tell that I have a problem here.  I'm trying to identify the source of the problem in order to find a solution.  I don't think my toes have grown longer, and I doubt my center of gravity is shifting.  I'm just a klutzy lady and that's all there is to it.

Amputation seems like the most illogical, impractical, and sure-fire option to me at this juncture.  I don't know whether to cut off my toes, saw at the knee, or just lop off my entire lower half.  I shall consult a surgeon post-haste!

Extra Meat

The dining hall has switched from serve-yourself buffet style to a more personable ask-and-ye-shall-receive method.  The food is surprisingly better, but it would seem they almost anticipated the dangers of all-you-can-eat goodness and added the asking policy for better security.

The idea is that everybody gets one serving, fair and square.

This presents a problem for people (like me) who want - rather, NEED - extra breakfast meat.  The early dose of protein is what gets the carnivore inside me through the day.  If I am not allowed to have an overflowing plate of bacon at least twice a week, things get ugly.

Luckily I'm not one to give up on my usual routine so easily.  I realized early on that the only thing stopping me from unlimited meaty breakfastry is an old lady with a chef's hat and serving tongs.  Compared to the usual brick wall or giant fallen sycamore, that's not that much of an obstacle.

As effective as it would be to overpower her in a brief altercation and steal the entire tray of bacon, I know this would only work once and I'd probably be arrested long before I could finish consuming my greasy delicious trophy.  No, the only way to get past the serving drone was through... her heart.

With wide-eyed and bright-smiled wonder that would match any cartoon princess, I bat my eyes at the food-woman and feign interest in her well-being, all the while slightly sucking in my more prodigious parts to seem like I'm slightly starving and in dire need of extra scraps.

I noticed an almost immediate result when the girl in front of me in the line asked for "lots of bacon".  Disappointed in the amount, she asked for "extra".  Upon my turn, I simply asked the breakfast granny 1. how her morning has been and 2. for bacon.

Here's a visual aid of the result.

Sure, there's not much difference in mass between three and three and a HALF, but think of those ratios! That halfish one is like four pieces.  So a poor girl asked for extra and got only 3 pieces instead of my unrequested (yet deserved)  4. Her bacon ratio of 3/4 is like 75% which is like a C grade.  That is WAY sub-par to my 100% A+ bacon satisfaction.

I guess my point is: I'm cute and I get extra bacon for it.

bugs.

I am not afraid of insects. Ants are quite fascinating and butterflies are beeeauuuutiful.  But some bugs are just AWFUL. Like flies.  Flies vomit and poop a lot and lay eggs on things.

LIKE RIGHT ON THE NALGENE I WAS DRINKING OUT OF A SCANT TWO MINUTES BEFORE THIS PICTURE WAS TAKEN.

I noticed the fly... birthing... but by the time it flew off, it was too late. It had nastyy nastyyy fly-birth in close proximity to my delicious drinkables, forever tainting the bottle's sanctity.  It's been hours and I'm still soaking the bottle in lava-hot detergent-water.

Another gross stinky-lookin bug ruined my life by playing "human train ride" and stowed away on my empty-box-car shoulder for who even KNOWS how long.  When my friend noticed it, we both ska-REEECHED and it buzzed off, landing on a window.  This picture does not do much for scale considering the rather hilarious perspective of the background.  But know that it was big, and it moved creepily, and was therefore gross.

Look! He's terrorizing the city!

Such a high capacity for nasty.

Secret Sneezer

I've grown up with a wonderful, loving mother.  She's still wonderful and loving to this day! She's even a loyal fan of my blog and there's a good chance that she is reading this right now. Hello, mother!  As admirable a person my mother is, there is one small character flaw of hers that I have long since vowed never to inherit.  It is the way she sneezes.

It's not just the wild gesticulations but also the sudden cannon-blast of noise that strikes fear into the hearts of unsuspecting passers-by.  It also forces a measurable deal of embarrassment into the blushing face of her daughter (yours truly).

I was at the tender insecure age of middleschoolteen when I first acknowledged the burden of my mother's sneeze.  At that age, I was seldom in any company from which I would enjoy drawing attention.  As pleasant and thoughtful as a resounding "bless you" seems, to me, it has been a nuanced controversy that I find as embarrassing as it is outdated.  Seeing a need to avoid any further sneeze-related run-ins, I consciously began to alter the effects of my sneeze.  Mediating between the extremes of the sonorous and trite "ACHOO!" and the tiny parakeet-esque "pip", I developed the perfect sneeze without any vocals or theatrics.

I taught myself how to sneeze like a cough.

And not just any cough. No bells, whistles, or phlegm. I manage to sneeze out several miniature low-decibel coughs that one might attribute to a mere throat-tickle.  It's an amazing ability and luckily it is one that's far away from the snotsplosion of a previously mentioned relative.

For years now I've been able to fly under the "bless you!" radar.  I find that classes stay on better track and conversations flow with fewer interruptions.  Until now, only a few people have known my secret.  Such as my roommate, who finds my infrequent sets of mini-cougheezes quite hilarious.

And the loneliness from not being reassured that a higher religious power has saved me from a sneezely death? Negligible.

Unwanted Guest

I’m not one to self-diagnose, but I’ve spent the past few days talking myself into believing I have a tapeworm. 

I don’t know the symptoms of hosting such a parasite, but here are reasons that (in my opinion at least) logically support my conclusion.

1.  Weight.  As I reconnect with college friends after the past several months apart, they seem to believe I have lost weight, complimenting me on my skinny looks.  This baffles me considering I have actually gained a significant deal of weight this summer.  I would never call myself “fat”, but I just feel heavier, like I’m hefting around somethin' extra.  LIKE THE WEIGHT OF A TEN POUND TAPEWORM.

2.  Appetite.  I keep finding myself racked with hunger, yet the instant I start eating I lose the urge to take any further chomps, bites, or even tiny nibblies.  This occurs often enough to cause me great distress.  I haven’t really made any changes to my diet or exercise routine or lifestyle that would explain this.  EXCEPT PERHAPS THE ACQUISITION OF A TAPEWORM. Stealin' all my foods.

This presumptuous tapeworm may just be eating until it’s full and then selfishly telling my body to also feel full so I don’t keep droppin’ food on its gross lil head.

3. Uhh… bathroom.  To avoid gross details, let’s just say I haven’t been “regular” lately, and there’s been some ouchy cramps happening at odd hours. And it’s because my tapeworm’s dancing around, raising the roof at its own intestine-party, while stealing all the food matter from me so I have nothing solid to process.  What a despicable guest to which I could potentially be leasing my body. AND THE TAPEWORM ISN’T EVEN PAYING ANY RENT. What an unreliable tennant.

At this point, I have properly Google’d the symptoms of a tapeworm infection.  These three that I’ve listed above are apparently among the most common side-effects of a one-worm intestine-fest. 

Does this mean that the worst could be true?  I am currently pregnant with an intestinal parasite?!! Nahh, not really. I probably don’t have anything infecting me except pre-semester college-kid anxiety.

But was it fun to write and draw and research all this? Yes.  Yes it was.

Table of Grossness

I saw something recently that has puzzled me greatly and almost continues to do so on a daily basis.  Whilst leaving a rest area on another one of my summer trips, I noticed a nuclear-style family in the small park across the way.  The parents had placed a blanket-esque tablecloth on a picnic table and were laying their small infant atop it.

What was going to happen next was unclear from the distance I viewed it. Either they were about to devour their child...

Or they were going to change the baby's nastily-clad diaper right there on the table.

Both of these actions are quite unethical.  Infanticide is like tiny murder and cannibalism has always been frowned upon by society, yet changing a pootful diaper on a surface intended for food is just grossly irresponsible.

Because I am weird about babies (having no experience with them whatsoever), when I need to decide if a family is destroying their baby on a picnic table or destroying a picnic table with a baby, I have no clue which is truly more unethical.

Since I don't condone cannibalism of defenseless mini-people OR dining surfaces covered in latent crap, I'll probably just resolve this situation by never sitting at a picnic table ever again.

Remembering Petticoat Lane...

I do not ask you to understand. I only ask that you appreciate.

Lord of the Waterfowl

I didn't know apartments in my father's price range had the capacity for snazziness. Yet here I am, in a living room with a vaulted ceiling.  There's even a decent view from the balcony, which impresses me.

Usually, "decent view" in apartment talk means "not completely overlooking concrete". Luckily, this apartment's view doesn't even contain a single street. Though the balcony itself is not impressive in size, it overlooks a pond with an aesthetic variety of reeds, native cattail, and waterfowl.

The other day I grew guilty and weary of my internetting and decided to take a break out there on that balcony.  Not one to pass up a theatrical moment of somber self-reflection, I worked up my wistful stare and a majestic pose.  My concentration was soon interrupted by a low rumble of alternating quacks and honks.

The nearby ducks and geese were rushing as best as they can with those legs to surround my balcony.  I'm not sure if you've ever seen a web-footed stub-legged creature run (I use this description because I don't know if that is truly limited to ducks and geese only. A great aunt of yours, perhaps?), but it is fairlyyy ridiculousss.

After tiring their lil weirdo legs out and parking their tailfeathers in a crude semi-circle around me, they looked up at me expectantly, imploring some response with their subtle muted "henk"s and "uack"s. Silence fell and the focus was on me. I felt like some new birdish-goddess.

As always with quickly gained power, it was quickly lost.  You see, I did not do much to please my people.  I had no interesting morsels of wisdom or bread crumbs to share with these masses.  When no food fell to their greedy beaks, they lost interest in me and returned to the pond. 

A slice of toast, a slice of toast! My kingdom for a slice of toast!

the makings of a scary movie

I've spent the majority of my summer having scary movie marathons late into the night with my good hometown friend.  It's great fun.  Up until I have to go home.

One particularly frightening night, my friend was driving me home at about 2am.  The night, by the way, doesn't get much darker than it does 2am.  Desperate to feel safe and contained, we threw ourselves into the most available car in her driveway, which coincidentally was a smelly Jeep storing a broken lawnmower in the back seat.  We fended off our terror with loud pop music and fast driving.

A stop sign quickly approached us and my friend hit the brakes fairly hard.  I didn't mind the harsh driving if it got me to my house faster. But what I did NOT like at ALL was the lawnmower flying up from the behind and slamming into the back of my seat.

I shat myself and screamed explosively for half a second until I realized it wasn't a grody ghost orphan or a nightmarish homicidal pervert.  Just... just a lawnmower.  Right? Right.

Just realized I didn't draw seatbelts. Am I lazy, or dangerous?! YOU decide!!

Lemonade Stand... OFF?

This summer, I am so far unemployed.  I do nothing all day.  I also find that if I have nothing to do, I don't do ANYTHING.  As a part of my nothing-doing, I've created a nest of my personal belongings so I never really have to leave a five-foot radius.  I'm fairly protective of my nest.

Well, today, while brooding inside my air-conditioned nest with the lights off (save for the TV since I don't miss a single episode of Maury), I heard noises outside.  Noises of... youth.  Youth selling lemonade.

Why had they picked MY corner?!  They weren't on my property or anywhere too near my nest, but it was close enough! They were laughing, playing, and comercializing, completely ignorant of their being stalked by yours truly.  Because I'm not normal, I wandered around the house for a few moments, trying to decide what to do. I couldn't just ignore them.  I narrowed my options down to yelling at them like an elderly troll...

or inconspicuously walking my dog past them and donating some chump change to their cause.

I went for the latter (sans-trench coat and sunglasses) and I must admit I have no good explanation for why I was so tense.  It turned out okay.  They gave Wolfgang some love and thanked me for my donation.  Maybe the next generation isn't so doomed, after all...  Hey, if you were self-imprisoned in a house for about forty days (seventy years in unemployed time), you'd be just as strange.

Bacon Bandits

Exam week really took me away from any form of reality that wasn't a word document.

On the last day of exams, my suitemates and I found ourselves done with the last of our papers quite late in the morning.  Though we had the option of just sleeping all day until we moved out, we heard word of something that motivated us to wake up earlier than socially acceptable:

Bacon.

The dining hall was going to serve bacon, and it was worth waking up at 7:30 for it.  Eyes crusty, pants in their most pajama'd state, we strolled into the dining hall like bad-ass demi-gods who needed to feast on some human equivalent to their divine parent's meals of ambrosia and nectar.

It was a good way to break up with the dining hall after our problematic year-long relationship.  We'll probably make up again in a couple months after my summer flings with various Coney Islands get tiresome.

Neglect!

As you've probably noticed or maybe haven't, I've been neglecting my blog lately.  This is due to many reasons, including but not limited to final exams and road trips and family obligations.  Blogging for hours on end would have been impolite, inconvenient, or both.

I'll get back on it soonsiiieees.

Garter Snakes

I brake for garter snakes.

Driving up north last year, I stopped the car because a big one was basking in the middle of the road.  That part is understandable - who wants to run over a sleepy snake? That's just rude.  But I did manage to park the car and get out and follow it until it escaped into the roots of a tree.

It doesn't matter what I'm doing or where I'm at.  If I see one, I will stop whatever I'm doing and attempt to snatch it.  No matter how mature I've grown, the sight of snake plunges me into child mode where my only goal is to GIT IT!!!  Just last weekend, as I get out of the car in my Easter-Sunday Best, I noticed a slithering motion in the patch of grass next to where we parked.  I was on the ground before I even realized what it was.

These occasions of snake sighting are usually few and far between, but I have seen two in the past week!  While most superstitious people would find this as a bad omen, to me, this is the best of luck! I have less than five days until summer break and the past few weekends have been gorgeous and I've been blessed by the presence of some rather adorable sneaky-snakes.  

This summer's gonna be good.  I can feel it in the air when I flick out my lil forked tongue.

raptor ate my homework

what's the likelihood that several velociraptors will manifest, get up to the 4th floor of a building, break into a room, and destroy a laptop with a bunch of unfinished papers saved on it?

I guess I'll try my luck.

ajar

My friends and I will never get enough of certain jokes. Some make no sense, and some make perfect sense but would not be funny to anybody else.

One that I'm compelled to draw:

You see, anything that's ajar could actually BE A JAR at any given moment! Your doors, your drawers, your windows and your washing machines! They could all be a jar at this VERY MOMENT!

And, scene.

Oranges

There's a small patch of land behind the dining hall with a very tightly niched ecosystem.  Trees, grass, and squirrels all coexist, relying on people to keep the plants well-kept and to throw the food upon which the squirrels thrive.  People throw things like apple cores and banana peels and stale cookies.  You know, the usual dining hall rejections that nobody is willing to hold onto long enough to find a decent trashcan.  So, to the squirrels they go!

Lately I noticed that somebody has been throwing entire oranges back there.  As if they took one look inside the peel, remembered they hated oranges, and chucked it at high velocity towards the nearest tree trunk in disgust.  It was interesting at first when there were two or three oranges out there, but now...

Squirrels, you'd think, would enjoy these oranges, but they still seem quite whole and there are less squirrels in the area than I remember. Almost like oranges are invasive species upon the squirrels.  In the competition for space, are these oranges MURDERING SQUIRRELS?!

On a more serious note: What? Is it some sort of... trend? Or a plague? I'm not sure what to call it. And it could be more than one person doing it.  I wish I knew their motives.  Nobody hates oranges THAT much without doing something a little more mature about it.  Seems like a pretty ineffective way to speak against the commercialism of oranges.

Well. Anyway. Whoever is doing this, I commend you on your attempt at chaos, but you need to do a lot of work if this is going to develop into a major scheme.

Do Not Touch

Over the weekend, I went to an art museum for the first time in a good eight years.  It's been a big eight years apparently because I have a developed reverence for art.  Everything in the museum was beautiful and fascinating and I wanted to know everything about everything, everrr.  I was proud to point out uses of tenebrism, chiaroscuro, linear perspective, monumentalism, and so on.

Naturally I didn't go by myself.  I begged my dad to take me dragged my dad along and it was quite an adventure.  He and I feigned our way through pretentious attempts at scholarly debate and discussion of certain works.  We actually impressed each other with our imagined knowledge.  I could tell that even though we were pretending like it was boring, we were having a great time.

But there was one thing that I did not enjoy: my father's proximity to works of art.

Be it a hollow 4-foot Korean ceramic sculpture or a bust of George Washington, my dad felt free to gesticulate animatedly around sculptures and just barely avoid scratching the paintings.  I nearly had a heart attack every single time.  But he never faltered.  No security guards seemed concerned.  No alarms went off.  Other patrons did not seem to take notice.  My dad totally got away with exchangin' electrons with one-of-a-kind works of art.

Why? Have I been wrong in thinking that squinting from four or five feet away yields a reasonably close-up view of a work of art?  In his more experienced age, does my father have a better grip on the volume he takes up in space? Is he just confident in his movements?  Or does he have no art bubble and just thinks that that's okay?  Cuz it wasn't okay with me.  Maybe he interpreted my mild panic attacks as an attempt at hilarity, if he noticed them at all.

Yknowww, I could probably ask him about all this.  But I probably won't.  If you're reading this dad, hello, and please help me understand your ways of a graceful bull in a very fine china shop.

Rewarded for Procrastination

I should be writing a textual analysis paper.  But I'm not.  I've been procrastinating for weeks, days, and hours now.  I have about 8 hours to turn it in.  It'll get done, of course, but not before I push all my limits.

I wouldn't procrastinate so much if I wasn't continuously rewarded for it.  Despite producing horribly last-minute and slip-shod work, I keep getting decent grades.  It's like goofin' off pays off.  I can live in a world like this.

The ultimate reward came tonight.  Instead of writing my paper all day, I slept. I got in a good 18 hours.  Guilt eventually settled in so I sat down at my desk, typed six words of an introduction sentence, considered which books I'd need to consult, and then decided I was ready for a break.  I went to dinner and attended a three-hour play before actually sitting down to get serious.

I think it was at this point that the Karmic wheel in the sky took notice of me.

Within moments I realized I was severely lacking energy and went down to the lobby to buy myself a soda.  Err, a pop.  Soda-pop.  Anyway, I bought a Pepsi, and as it was vending, I heard several clunks and thuds and bumps.  The flap seperating me from my sugary carbonated drink was jammed shut! Refusing to accept this I punched it until it loosened.  To my ultimate surprise I had been vended not one but THREE PEPSI PRODUCTS.

That's right.  Karma noticed that I needed some caffeine for my fateful night of paper-writing and granted me three doses of caffiene for the price of one.  Sky-wheel, you spin in some odd directions, but I praise you nonetheless.

ice cream puddle

I could spend time discussing the tragedy of what happens when one forgets about an ice cream cone and it sits out in the sun, but instead I'll show you a picture of it edited by yours truly!

It was a beautiful mess, but a mess nonetheless.

Sunburn

Today was a lovely day. Naturally, I went outside for like five seconds, and that's all it took for me to get a sunburn.  This wouldn't be so big a deal, burning is natural - sunburns are to pale kids as hibernation is to bears - except for the fact that I wore an undergarment of criss-crossing nature, and received a very distinctive x-shaped tan on my back.

This has happened to me before, but on a much worse scale: four years ago I wore a one-piece with thick straps and got a similar (though wayyy worse) V-shaped second-degree burn that kept me tan through the next several winters.

I decided to look up a picture of it for comparison.

Please do take note that I am wearing THE EXACT SAME TANK TOP IN BOTH PICTURES.  This could mean several things:
1. every time I wear that tank top, I flash fry like a chicken leg.
2. every time I flash fry like a chicken leg, I'm wearing that top.
3. I have not changed my top in the past 4 years.

I kinda miss my Victory V.  At least people knew and respected the fact it's a swim suit tan.  With my X of Shame though... a sassy bra is the only thing that would leave such a mark.

At least I've upgraded from an insecure thickstrap one-piece to scanty Victoria's Secret bras.

Chips. Dips.

My suitemates and I are addicted to chips and dip.  It started simply as our preferred snack but now it's an obsession.  Despite our knowledge of the lack of nutritional value, we gorge upon chips/dips as often as possible.  Sometimes it's what motivates us through our days.  We've even discussed making meals of it and possibly devoting an entire shelf to chips and another to dips, arranging them carefully like books in a library.

Sadly as college students, we can't afford 1. to pay for that many brands of chips and varieties of dips 2. the unnecessary calories.

But we can dream.

Door

I've recently discovered that the door to my bathroom does not latch on the inside, meaning that to enter the room from the bathroom requires only a shove to the door.

This simple fact has changed my life dramatically.

Moving around in the suite is so much easier.  I can bounce from room to room in less than a second.  If I need to carry something heavy or awkward I only need to turn the handle of the initial door and slam myself into the second one.  It is also easier to escape darkness-monsters.

On a negative note, I've become too accustomed to the hands-off method of opening doors, and I find myself slamming into normal doors that do not give way, rather painfully.  The feeling is comparable to turning into a human accordion. Womp, womp.

I feel like I've accessed magic but only for a moment and returning to a life without that magic takes a painful several-second transition.