Dinosaur

Week one of classes is down. Under my belt. Finished with that. Week two of classes is about to begin.

Bring it on, college.

Oh wait, it already did. I had to read two chapters of psychology (which equaled about 75 pages (and we're talking textbook pages, not normal people pages (ew))) and four chapters of ecology that I tried not to page count because I would just be depressed at what I spent my Sunday doing.

(I'm not really sure if that multiple-parenthesis thing I do is grammatically legal, but I really hope it is because I'm quite fond of it.)

Even though I had a ton of homework, I've also been having a ton of fun! It's really nice to have roommates who don't want to go out all the time, because then we can spend our Saturday nights doing awesome things like baking cookies with hot chocolate mix because we don't have any cocoa and playing Taboo until 2 a.m. while drinking Caprisuns. Like a boss.

Plus, we're beautiful. Fourth floor heartbreakers. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. Everybody loves us.

Especially Chris, the guy on the fifth floor who is actually so creeped out by me that he intentionally looks the other way whenever he sees me. Which, lucky for him, is quite frequently. Whatever. We're getting married.

I have so many funny, random, mostly retarded things to share from this week that I can't even decide where to start. So I will pick a spot like a monkey throwing a dart, and we will wheel away freely from there.

Girl in my German class: GO.

So I don't know who among you watches Scrubs, but if you do, think back to about season 7. New crop of interns, Cox hates them all, blah blah same old drill. But do you remember the one intern who has a voice that is so squeaky and annoying she is actually not allowed to talk?

Like, trying-to-imitate-a-child-on-helium kind of annoying?

Good. Now take that voice and apply to a short blonde girl and picture her saying "Wie geht es ihnen?"

Hilarious.

Also, very startling. I was actually taken slightly aback each time she spoke the first day.

And the second day.

And the third day.

Hell, it still hasn't set in that that is actually her natural voice. Every time she talks people in my class look at their friends like "is this real life?" and try to stifle a giggle.

I'm sorry, Kaylee. You just sound so ridiculous. And I get to hear her every day.

Other than that and the fact that some kid in my psychology class looks exactly like a kid I knew in high school and hate very much, classes have been pretty regulation.

It's back in my dorm where things get weird.

Weird... or awesome.

Such as the white board that I got for our door on Saturday and put up with a note saying "draw us beautiful pictures," all the while fully aware that nobody actually likes me and expecting all of the notes to be written by us. But then I got this one:

That note was definitely written by Chris, the boy from the fifth floor that I'm going to marry. Not Meghan. Chris.

My little heart was warmed.

Haha jokes. I didn't care about the note from Chris. (Sorry Meghan.) (Chris I still love you.) I cared about the awesome dinosaur that somebody drew me.

You guys. Somebody drew me a dinosaur. SOMEBODY DREW ME A DINOSAUR.

And I have no idea who it was. It wasn't even Meghan.

<3

Then tonight I saw that, in the midst of all of our ridiculous drawings that we added last night when we were drunk (on cookies! Got you, no alcohol here) the mystery artist had given his dinosaur a longer back and spikes all the way down his spine.

That dinosaur is going to live on my board forever.

Moral of this story (can I call this post a story?) is my suite is ridiculous, you should follow my Tumblr and then you can keep updated on all of the ridiculous things that we say all of the time (because I know that's totally high up on your agenda), and college life is so far suiting me well, even if I'm not quite going the traditional route.

Oh yeah, and somebody drew me a dinosaur.

Can You Even Get a Ticket for Riding a Unicorn?

Orientation went out with a bang tonight, at the last scheduled event of the week: Hypnotism.

My roomies and I went to Dueling Pianos... and that shit sucked. So we were a little skeptical about tonight. But seeing as how I had spent all afternoon sitting in my room and my one roomie who was actually here had friends to entertain, we decided it was for the best to just go to see the hypnotist.

Best. Decision. Ever.

The guy himself wasn't a comedian, but the stuff that he made people almost made you walk away thinking that he was.

There were probably about 30 people onstage, in chairs, heads slumped in their laps, patiently awaiting his every command. But it wasn't the stuff that they did that was the best, it was the outrageous things that they said. I... I can't even... I just can't. Awesome.


Example 1:

(For the sake of these examples, we will call the Hypnotist "Jim", because hypnotist is really annoying to type and I like that name. And he looked like a Jim.)

Jim: What dream car do you want?

Dude: The jeep from Jurassic Park.

Jim: Any accessories with that?

Dude: A dinosaur.

(Later. Everybody has won their dream car by playing slots, and then gotten pulled over by a cop for speeding away.)

Jim the Cop: That's a nice Jeep. Where did you get it?

Dude: ...Jurassic Park.

Jim the Cop: ...mm-hm. And what's that in the backseat?

Dude: ...

Jim the Cop: ...?

Dude: I have a dinosaur.

Jim the Cop: ...why?

Dude: I need to take him home.

Jim the Cop: And why did you need to go that fast?

Dude: ...I have a dinosaur.


Example 2:

Jim: What dream car are you looking at?

Girl: A unicorn.

Jim: Alright, so you just won your car... or creature...


Example 3:

Jim: He seems to have lost his butt.

Ass-less guy: Yeah, I can't find it.

Jim: Would you mind telling us what it looks like, so we can help you locate it?

Ass-less guy: Well, it's white... and round, and has two cheeks. That's about it.


Example 4:

(Jim just told them all that they were watching a porno (to which one guy deeefinitely tried to jack off onstage (awkward)) and then informed them that the people they just watched... were their parents.)

Jim: What would you say to your parents?

Guy: TEACH  ME.


Example 5:

Jim: When I say 3, you all will go out in the audience and do an erotic dance for these judges. No grinding, just dancing. Alright? 1... 2... 3.

All guys take their shirts off.


And there are so so so many more examples, but luckily for you I have borderline the shittiest memory ever and therefore don't really remember enough full conversations to actually want to type any more out. But, yeah. It was awesome. Y'all should be jealous.

Oh, and by the way, it was decided that you can not, in fact, get a ticket for speeding on a unicorn. Lucky break.

Friends Don't Let Friends Clap on 1 and 3

When at a concert, it seems like clapping along to the beat should be easy, especially given the fact that the musicians onstage are already playing that beat out for you.

Wrong.

When at a concert filled with an audience of rhythmically challenged people, clapping along to the beat is apparently the hardest thing ever.

There was a concert in our dorm tonight called "Dueling Pianos". Two people. Two pianos. Two loudly belting voices. One retarded audience.

It wouldn't even take a full measure before everybody was already off-beat. Clap on 2 and 4? Fuck that. I'll clap on 1 and 7. And in case you were wondering, beat 7 is 5/9 of the way between 2 and 3, and beat 1 is wherever the hell I want it to be.

It was bad.

Now I'm trying not to include myself in this generalization, given that I could at least detect that the rest of the audience was full of slow kids. And I'm sure there were other musicians there as well who knew that the beat was progressively getting faster and could think of nothing to do to stop it. It couldn't be helped.

But come on, let's be honest with ourselves. If we can't even keep a basic beat, what are we supposed to do when we're counting to three in our head before we say something stupid? It's not going to be a real three, it's going to be a fast three, or a non-existent three, or we're going to be thinking so hard about how to evenly count to three that we will forget to think about how wise it is to say that stupid thing and end up saying it anyway.

It was sad. I wanted to round up all of those clapping people and tell them to tape their hands to their sides until they pass a music theory class, and then maybe they'll be allowed back in to the audience.

On an unrelated note, when I got back to my dorm the bottom button of my shirt was undone. I don't know how this happened, but I am perplexed.

Maybe it was so flustered at the inability to keep a beat that it tried to run away.

Yes, I know that was a lame ending. Shut up. I couldn't think of anything else.

Be thankful you got an ending at all.

Burning Brighter

People think the stars come out at night, like a child hiding under the kitchen cupboard in search of a better place to sleep. But they're always there, always watching. Stars are the girl at the coffee shop observing every soul that wanders past from behind her tinted lenses, but never receiving a glance in return. Stars are the texture on a wall that nobody notices until they accidentally get their face too close. Stars are the best friend. Stars are the wallflower. Stars are the perpetual presence. Stars are all of these things, but stars... stars are not scared.

Uncertain.

Things I did on my last day of summer:

• Wore pajamas until 3
• Went to the post office barefoot
• Ate bacon for lunch
• Made a dollhouse out of cardboard boxes and duct tape
• (Stayed up two hour later than Paige)

Things I did on my first day of college:

• Made a joke about a serial killer with a hockey stick

Click "Like" If You Welcome the Flames

They say that the best artists are usually unbalanced. Faulkner was an alcoholic; Van Gogh was chronically depressed; Sylvia Plath was suicidal. But what these people produced, what they poured their passion and heart into creating, was on a legendary scale.

I don't really know what I want this post to be about, and usually I would just save it as a draft or copy it into a word document and leave it until such a time when I could actually incorporate it into a coherent thought, but tonight it just feels like it needs to be written, and I'm sure it will find its way eventually.

Last night I dreamed about destruction. I had just read the chapters in A Tale of Two Cities where the revolutionaries murdered people by the carriage-load, dragging prisoners through the streets to the guillotine for days and nights in a row. In my dream, there were school buses that carried death.

They would drive into a town, running over anyone they could, and when they stopped you had better hope that you had made it inside, because if you were still out in the open you were going to get shot. It wasn't adults doing the shooting, though, it was kids. The kinds of kids you would expect to find in a gang or a home, but also the nice kids who were persuaded to join their cause and weren't nice any more.

Anyway, they shot everyone, regardless of who they were or whether they deserved it. I don't know what they were fighting for; I don't know why they thought it was necessary to shoot the people that they did. But I do know that they did it with a sense of righteousness, and that it was one of the most disturbing dreams I've ever had.

I usually don't even remember my dreams. But I remembered that one, and then I also remembered the one I had next, though I don't remember it any more.

I heard once that dreams are an old psychological training program, essentially a way for our brain to prepare us for things that we may need to be ready for in order to survive.

There has been so much destruction lately, and so many people shooting others that they don't even know for reasons that are purely selfish. It's as if the country was in relative peace for too long, and there had to be an inflated amount of turmoil to account for the fact that no tragedies had occurred in recent years. Humanity has a way of reminding us of its true nature whenever we start to forget and think that people may actually be good, for a change.

Or maybe that's just the earth's way of keeping beauty alive. When everything is falling to pieces, the littlest things can seem extraordinary. If you numb a nature like ours to the beautiful things in the world, we no longer care to indulge in the creativity and the love and the passion that make our world worth inhabiting. So instead, why not shoot it all to shit and, while we watch the world we have forgotten how to love, burn, maybe we can take a moment and create beauty where it never would have existed before.

I Peed You a Poem

A common phrase,
"I should have known"
for placating
a sullied mind.
But his betrayal
of low-fat treats
surpassed excusal
and I should have known
when he denied
Tarantino.

Sugar-free

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When life takes away your lemons, embrace the coolness of the water you're left with.

If the water is warm, add more heat. Then embrace the herbal nature held in a bag of tea, and create something new.

If the heat doesn't hold, wait for it to cool and pour it over ice. A summer evening has never been better.

And when your tea is gone, and you're back with nothing but water and a want for lemons, remember the tea.

Somebody Push the Rollercoaster, Quick

There are some times in life when everybody is starting on the same journey at the same time, some times when you feel like you're the only one. And there are times like now, where I should be starting on the same journey, but for some reason I look around to find myself sitting in the back row, the end car, still stagnant at the top of the climb but watching everyone in front of me plunge headfirst, screaming out with a scared joy.

My bed smells like coffee. Just a little, not enough to taste, but enough to smell like sunshine. My face is puffy from the holes in my gums where, up until this Monday, three little wisdom teeth sat. My best friend (at least, one of them) is gone to another state, and even though I felt like crying when I gave her one last hug for the moment I've realized nothing is really different. My guitar sits next to my bed, neglected for weeks, but the callouses on my fingers are still hanging in there because they know I'll pick it up again soon. My little stuffed ewok is in my lap, staring up at me through the lopsided hole in its cape, a soft reassurance of the things that I will always love, even when I'm not sure if I really do.

And my glasses that at first seemed too big have grown onto my countenance like a vine wrapping itself around a bench that has been established, shielding it with an oldness that cannot be left unaccepted.

My world starts in 17 days.

This Should Be My Job

I was hanging out with one of my old teachers a few weeks ago (try to curb your jealousy, she's really awesome) and somehow, while talking about literature and film and other classy things, we got to the fact that I've seen Magic Mike twice.


What.


Anyway, for those of you who haven't seen it (guys) it was actually a potentially decent movie that just ended up being about strippers. Who knew.


I told her all about that, and she told me that I should write a literary analysis of it on my other teacher's wall.


So I did.


And here it is:


So, I've been keeping up with the media and literature scene this summer, as I'm sure you're glad to hear. There have been so many great movies and wonderful books that I've just read though they're really not new, in fact many of them are actually very old, but they're new to me. Anyway, I do appreciate all types of media, which is exactly why I've seen Magic Mike twice. Channing Tatum was just a

 bonus, I swear. And that is why, as a voracious learner and critic or all things intellectual (or whatever you want to call it, I mean, it was about strippers), I have decided to do you the wonderful courtesy of describing the movie to you in all of its virtues and flaws (I'll try to keep it PG). So here it is... my literary analysis of the stripper movie, Magic Mike.
May I just start by saying that it actually could have been a good movie. For the most part, movies like that put about as much thought into the plot as the strippers in them put into picking out their names ("Bubbles. Because I like bubbles. Perfect!"), but this one contradicted that almost immediately. Within the first two minutes of the film, the subplot of Mike's custom furniture business had already been introduced, complete with the conflict of the banks not being willing to give him the competitive loans he wanted because he dealt mostly in cash. It was so promising that I almost believed it would actually be a movie equally balanced in plot and visual attraction. Alas, I was proved horribly wrong when they proceeded to ignore that subplot for the next hour, replacing it instead with (mostly) naked men and Matthew McConaughey's obnoxious voice and overall existence. Sorry, not a fan. Only near the end did they decide to return to real substance and give the quick and dirty version of "conflict-climax-resolution" by cramming it all into roughly twenty minutes of film and replacing "resolution" with "magical lack of conflict." And though the final product was somewhat disappointing, I was still impressed by the existence of a more complex plot at all, eliminating all guilt that I may have felt at going back to see it again. After all, responsible journalism does require extensive research, does it not?
I bet you want to go see it now, don't you. Yeah, you're welcome.

I got a double-like from both of them. And he said he needs "time to compose a proper response."

When that happens, it will be on here. Guaranteed.

I bet everybody wishes they taught me lit.