the frisky african turtle isn't the important part of this post.

i was going to blog FOREVER ago. i really was.

but whenever i start a post out like that, you know what that means.

it means that it's going to be a huge conglomerate of stuff that i've gotten up to over the past two weeks and it's going to have fun headings.

let's just launch into it, yeah?

SO I DID THIS COOL THING CALLED TEARING MY MENISCUS

right. i should define the meniscus. from what i've gathered from various sources, most of them being IPHS majors that have taken human anatomy, the meniscus is a piece of cartilage in your knee that cushions the joint. so when that rubs away, you have arthritis.

i maybe sort of kind of... tore it.

how, you may ask?

here's the kicker: i was already on crutches.

remember that time i pulled my groin really bad and i iced my vagina with a veggie burger? yeahhh.

remember that time i pulled my groin again right before i left for florida? yeahhh.

remember that time i pulled my groin for the third time working out with barbara? yeahhh.

so i was already on crutches.

i was at a super top secret meeting off campus. and i was in a dress. always a good start. so i'm in this really small room full of tables and people's stuff is absolutely everywhere and i'm like, seriously guys i'm on crutches i cannot navigate this room at all because crutches take space and somebody called my name.

and i did this epic SOMEONE SAY MY NAME turn behind me.

and everything turned but my knee.

at the time i was like, huh. that felt weird. moving on with my super secret meeting.

at the end of the super secret meeting i was like, huh. my knee hurts. probably because it's the only one i've been using for two weeks. but you know what, my groin feels a lot better, i think i'm done with these crutches.

the next day, saturday, the twins came to visit me! woohoo! and i was like, look guys! no crutches! and we tromped all over campus. and had awesome stucchi's ice cream. and then i was on duty and we were watching perks of being a wallflower. and i was like, guys, my knee like, really hurts.

on sunday, after the twins left and we ran into my english professor at walgreens, i realized that i actually could not put weight on my knee. so i grabbed my crutches, my PMA brother colin, and we hightailed it to the emergency room.

this is how colin and i do hospital rooms.

after i got an x-ray and tried to steal the x-ray apron because it was lovely and heavy and the ER nurse asked me if i was random seizure girl from september (yes. i was.) they told me my knee was sprained and they gave me an ace bandage.

UH, NOPE. i knew straight off that wasn't okay.

i bought a knee brace and went to portland. but i already blogged about that.

when i got back from portland, i had an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon, who ordered an MRI because he was reasonably sure that my meniscus was torn. in the meantime, i needed to keep my weight off of it and wear this.

YEAH. HARDWARE.

the best part about that knee brace was that it kept my knee entirely immobilized.

the worst part was i had to take it off to pee.

after a fun jaunt in that knee brace, i got my MRI results, which showed a teeny weeny tear. and it was accompanied by the greatest four words i had ever heard.

1. you.

2. don't.

3. need.

4. surgery.

then my surgeon was like, i think you can start walking on it! and it was then that i realized that i hadn't walked without crutches in literally... two months. and when i did walk on it, holy crap did my knee swell up. and it turned purple.

i am now walking full time and i have this cool knee brace that's nowhere near as big. it lets my knee bend and it keeps my knee from dislocating. 

GO ME!

ALL THE COOL STUFF HAPPENED AT MY CARREL

it's been a rough year for me. i could list all the terrible shit that happened to me, but it would be depressing. eh. i'll list it anyway.

1. i was hospitalized for a week for seizures, which i had until december.

2. my boyfriend of two and a half years broke up with me.

3. my antidepressants gave me depression.

4. i tore my meniscus.

5. i strained my groin. three times.

6. my grandmother died.

let's just say i was ready for this year to be over.

the last two weeks of my semester was looking decently insurmountable. most of them do. but this year was looking extra sketchy, mostly because of my three ten page papers, my two finals, and my three education projects. on top of that, i had masterworks, which is this huge choir concert and i got all dressed up in this huge dress that was almost impossible to walk in with my crutches and i had to sit the entire concert behind the drums and nobody could see me. which was fine. i'm not that great to look at.

but anyway, i was totally living at my carrel.

here's a refresher of what my carrel looks like.

yep. my work station. with twitter open.

the biggest paper on my to-do list was my paper on john donne, 16th century metaphysical poet who may or may not have been gay, was a pirate, had a mistress, was a deacon in queen elizabeth's church, and was your run of the mill renaissance man and misogynist douchebag. i had procrastinated this paper quite heartily. i had specific books that i needed to check out for it and i couldn't carry any of them myself.

so i enlisted my new choir friend adam to help me. we wandered around and pulled all kinds of books off the shelves hoping that they would somehow help me write a ten page paper about a poem about john donne undressing his mistress.

the poem is disgusting, by the way. when he actually gets her naked? you don't wanna know.

i was already writing a ten page paper about frankenstein and a ten page paper about hair power (see previous post) so my carrel was absolutely covered in books.

alma college library policy dictates that all books not checked out must be reshelved within 24 hours. i had a stack of frankenstein books, a stack of john donne books, a stack of hair books, and a stack of feminist literature. i also couldn't return them without hands. 

so i wrote the library staff a really sweet and eloquent note that was this in a nutshell: yo. i'm on crutches. i need these books. don't reshelve them, pretty please?

i left it on the john donne stack and prayed when i left the library at one in the morning.

the next morning, the day before my john donne paper is due, i take the elevator up to my carrel, crutch my way over there, and i see that all of my books are gone. i start to panic. i'll have to facebook adam to have him help me get the books back. 

then i realize that someone had gone through and rearranged my carrel.

the note says, "Emily, in order to avoid troubles with the library bureaucracy, hide your books as demonstrated! Throw the white and pink slips away and carry on breaking carrel law. Good luck! Sincerely, The Library Defender of the Weak."

i made a new friend!

after starting on the paper and having books strewn absotively EVERYWHERE, i came back to find this note on my sticky-note to-do list.

my carrel is my life.

that fateful monday, i hardly left the library. i managed to get to class. i had lunch in the library. i almost had dinner there, but i wasn't sure about the to-go lunch policy for dinner. 

i finished the paper at one in the morning, right when the library closed.

ONE IN THE MORNING PAPER EUPHORIA.

the worst part about this whole paper ordeal was that i thought it was a damn good paper. i worked really hard on it. adam even drew me a little motivational cat and i taped it to my carrel.

it was a good paper.

apparently not. i got a big fat B on it with a note that said, "well, emily, it was a nice shot."

thaaaanks, professor.

the rest of the week was no different: two more papers and three education projects were had. and some serious finals studying for renaissance lit, which eventually culminated in me telling carrie that i color coded my life with black pen. black. like my heart.

she tweeted it.

BREAK WEEK IS ALWAYS FULL OF ANXIETY

skipping over the sob story of my older brother graduating from alma and how i cried halfway home after moving entirely out of my room with the help of adam, who i think scared my mother with his long hair and lip rings, i had a plan for break week.

1. unpack ALL THE THINGS!

2. do my shopping. preferably in one day.

3. say goodbye to the friends i had in fort wayne. sooo... the twins.

4. pack for england.

5. read my shakespeare plays.

it is ten o'clock the day before i leave for england and i haven't done much of that.

i did manage to go to target four times in five days. a new record. after searching every single target in fort wayne, they did not have rain boots in my size.

IT'S NOT MY FAULT I WAS BORN WITH BIG FEET, GUYS.

my cousin and i went shopping and i got a really cute infinity scarf, so that was fun. i then searched fruitlessly for someone to unlock the sim card in my phone so i could make it international.

after going to three stores and having my mother make about eight phone calls because i have too much anxiety to call businesses, we quickly realized that everybody has beef with virgin mobile.

no international phone for me!

on tuesday, i finally got around to unpacking. i left most of my stuff at school, but i still had a hefty amount of stuff in my room.

i have a lot of stuff.

once that was all unpacked, i was obviously going to read my shakespeare plays for spring term. you know, the ones in my stephen greenblatt annotated norton anthology of shakespeare's entire works that i got for ten dollars.

ha. haha. hahaa. HAHAHAHA. ha. 

i totally watched netflix. i also watched the lion king thirteen times in three days.

instead of packing, i found reasons to leave the house and to drive places. like going to target four times. having a sleepover with my cousin. going to the outlet mall. going to the library to check out a book i didn't have time to read. going to the bank.

i made the biggest cash withdrawal of my life, guys.

after i drove aaron across town to drop off a resume, we went to the pet store. you know, the one with the six foot long green moray eel. while i wistfully looked at tarantulas, i fell in love with the teeniest tiniest spur tortoise who took a nose dive into his water dish. SQUEE.

unfortunately, he was a hundred thirty dollars.

even more unfortunate, he was sold.

it was there that i saw the really frisky african turtle. from the title of this post. 

after all the breakdowns that i've had trying to get ready to go to england tomorrow, that frisky african tortoise has been one of the highlights of my week.

break down number one: emily tries to call radioshack and bursts into tears.

break down number two: emily tries to pack and realizes that she wants to take her entire wardrobe with her to england.

break down number three: emily loses her four hundred dollar brit rail passes.

yeah. i know.

i put them a super specific pocket of my backpack because i knew that it was going to be my carry-on and the perfect bag to take for my weekend in scotland.

they totally weren't there when i went through the backpack.

after lots of tears, anguish, self-loathing, and my dad calling my professor to alert him that i needed new tickets in stratford, i got my suitcase packed.

i am still completely lost as to what happened to those rail passes. but now i'm down four hundred bucks. 

i leave my house in twelve hours to head to the motherland for a whole month.

A WHOLE MONTH. IN ENGLAND.

today while i was doing laundry, i went out to talk to my dad about calling somone for me, since obviously calling businesses is a thing i can't do very well, and i stood on my driveway and i screamed and screamed and screamed.

then i thought to myself: i leave in one day. one. day. and i have been counting down for this moment since last year.

that's a long time, kids.

i'll be taking kip, my trusty dusty laptop with me. 

i have this idea in my head that i'm going to blog every day that i'm there. will that happen?

probs not.

but rest assured, i will return to america in one piece. if they don't drag me kicking and screaming home. 

WELL. I AM OFF TO THE MOTHERLAND! 

play nicely, kids. see you stateside in a month. :)

oh. this is me in my suitcase. obviously not packing for england. 

hair power.

i've been really angsty lately.

some of that could be my work load, which i'm totally ignoring right now. i'll probably blog about that later.

i have a lot of posts to crank out before i hop the pond and spend a blissful month in england where i won't return. at least not without a lot of kicking and screaming.

but as of late, i have been angsty.

this post is probably not going to be that funny. it's probably going to be full of angst, such as i am. it's also probably going to be vulgar. because you know what, sometimes i just have a lot of feelings and the only way that i can convey those with the emotion that i want is to just yell FUCK really loudly.

what have i been really angsty about?

hair culture.

this semester, i'm taking a women's studies class. WGS 101.01, to be exact. there are maybe... fifteen of us in the class. in the beginning, we all defined ourselves as feminists. two of us are guys. we spent most of the semester reading from this really big book called women's voices, feminist visions. it's full of articles about all kinds of stuff.

1. women's health.
2. reproductive rights.
3. sexual harassment.
4. women in the workplace.
5. women in literature.

stuff. about women. it's a women's studies class.

i love women. i'm a woman. i'm an angry feminist. this class has really helped solidify my hatred of patriarchal culture. and definitely opened to my eyes that postfeminism is definitely not a thing yet.

postfeminism: noun, the idea that feminism is dead or no longer needed.

i'm just going to say that THAT right there is bullshit.

so, for the end of the year (tomorrow is my last actual women's studies class) we have to write a research paper on a topic of our choosing. eight to ten pages. some form of issue in women's health, feminism, blah blah, whatever.

while in the course, i realized that there was a lot of talk about intersectionality, which basically means that feminism is about all women. ALL WOMEN. intersectionality includes poor women, black women, white women, old women, young women, poor women, rich women, women that live here, women that live there, women that speak english, women that don't speak at all. while i was reading about all of this wonderful intersectionality, i realized that mental health wasn't included in it. THAT is an entire blog post in and of itself, but i decided that i wanted to write my paper about how mental health is never mentioned.

eventually, my thesis got cut down to this basic premise: we live in a culture that sees hair as powerful. and for people with trichotillomania, like me, this is a BIG. FAT. PROBLEM.

if you don't know what trichotillomania is, click here and educate yourself.

to read about my struggle with trichotillomania, click here.

in my class, we read an article about hair as power. it was titled "what we do for love" and i didn't realize that it was going to be about hair. and suddenly i was headfirst into this five page article about hair and how women use it to do all kinds of fantastic things.

i was very uncomfortable with it.

mostly because it was absolutely and one hundred percent right. and now we get into the really angsty part of my post.

this is what it comes down to: hair. is. power.

in american society, women with long hair are more attractive to men. to test this theory, i asked a number of my guy friends if they preferred women with long or short hair. all of them said long, but they could find a few girls with short hair attractive if they could "pull it off".

men have hair color preferences, too. and hair color has ALWAYS had stereotypes, whether they're true or not. blondes have more fun. blondes are ditzier. women that have blonde hair are more likely to considered to be slutty. of the women that dye their hair, over fifty percent of them dye their hair blonde.

the rest dye their hair red, because apparently if you have red hair, you're wild, passionate, and intelligent.

the article didn't tell me about brown hair. i have brown hair that gets red highlights in the summer. i guess i'm boring and possibly passionate.

have you ever actually thought about how much power our hair has on us and other people? i mean, jeez, i spend time doing my hair every morning. i have a special hair stylist named cheryl, and she's super great. women dye their hair. they cut it, they mouse it, they braid it, they tease it, they frizz it, they do anything and everything on this green earth to their hair.

they do it for themselves and they do it for others.

haircuts totally change the way you see yourself and the way you see other people. one time my mom cut my bangs wrong and i thought i was going to die. granted, i was in eighth grade, but at the time, it was horrific. i don't leave my room unless my hair is done. some of my sorority sisters spend forever on their hair; blowing drying it, curling it, straightening it, puting it up, leaving it down, i mean, the possibilities are endless.

for girls with long hair.

if you have long hair, congratulations, you've followed society's standard for beautiful and feminizing hair.

it's no secret that society prefers women with long, lustrous hair. and if you don't have it, your femininty is put into question. the article talked about how professional athletes, the big bulky women that can bench like, five times as much as i weigh, they all have long, blonde hair to make up for the fact that their bodies are less feminine.

that makes me sad. and really angry.

when i was in kindergarten, i used to stare at this girl that stood in front of me in line. she was taller than me and she had long, brown hair that was about the same shade as mine. she'd wear it in a high ponytail and when we walked down the hall to go to art or gym or whatever, i'd watch her ponytail sway back and forth.

and i vividly remember wanting my hair to do that. i've always wanted to have hair that sways when i move.

when i was in first grade, my mom chopped all my hair off. granted, i wanted her to, but she went a little overboard. in first grade i played soccer (god help us all) with my brother and one time we went to pizza hut still in our soccer clothes. the waitress said, "oh, your two little boys are so cute."

also in first grade, while i was walking into my elementary school building one morning, a boy came up to my best friend and said, "why are you talking to a boy?"

i am obviously not a boy. nor do i see myself as a boy.

and yes, these two things actually happened.

this is about as long as my hair got in elementary school.
i'm cute, right?

now that i'm older and i obviously look like a girl, people are always telling me that my hair is oh-so-cute. and you know what, to be completely vain and self centered, hell yes, my hair is cute. i love my hair. i spend a lot of time on it. i put bows in it every day. i'm very proud of my hair.

but what people always tell me is this, oh emily, your hair is so cute, i wish i could pull off short hair. you do it so well.

what is this "pull off" bullshit? anybody can have short hair. women aren't born with naturally and lustrous long hair to please men and attract them with the "bend and snap". we don't all naturally have long and gorgeous hair to fit your societal standards.

my whole entire life i've wanted long hair. i've always wanted to put it back in a ponytail and actually do things with it, but my hair just doesn't grow long. it genetically doesn't work like that. so it's always going to be short.

i'm okay with having short hair. i've gotten over all that angst about never having long, wavy hair that men will run their fingers through. i'm never going to get to use my hair power to attract men or to feel good about myself. i've finally accepted the fact that my hair is just short.

and all through high school people thought that i was a lesbian and that was bullshit on two levels because:

1. there's absolutely nothing wrong with being a lesbian so why would you even think that that's demeaning, and

2. what the fuck does my hair have to do with my sexuality?

nothing. absolutely nothing.

just because i have short hair doesn't mean that suddenly i'm any less feminine. i could be completely bald and still be just as feminine.

i have a lot of repressed anger toward hair and hair power. A LOT. the only reason why i wanted long hair in the first place was because society told me that if i had long hair i'd be prettier and more feminine and boys would like me.

i don't care anymore. i'll never have long hair.

i'm sick of society telling me that i can "pull off short hair." fuck yes i can. but i don't need society to tell me that i'm one of those special people that can pull off short hair, like i was supposed to be born with long hair and i've just decided to ditch the status quo.

fuck society. i'm done with this partiarchal bullshit.

MY NAME IS EMILY. I HAVE AND WILL ALWAYS HAVE SHORT HAIR.

even before i had trichotillomania, i've had short hair. now that i have trichotillomania, i understand even more about hair power. i have all this power in my hair, which isn't even that powerful because it's naturally short. but now that power is completely stripped away because i pull out my own hair.

and i pull it out. i'm stripping away my own hair power. and society is always telling me how fucked up that is, how fucked up i am, and that i should love my hair and myself.

i do love my hair. and i love myself. and you know what, i love my short hair. society might not, but i love it. i absolutely love it. and whether or not you tell me that i can pull it off, i'm going to keep having it.

society, it's also really hard to love yourself and when you're telling me that i don't have the beauty hair ideal that i'm supposed to have.

but i'm done with that. i'm done being insecure about the length of my hair.

i will always be insecure with trichotillomania. it will always try to make me feel worthless. i will spend copious amounts of time hiding bald patches and hair loss. that's not going to change.

but i'm over this patriarchal bullshit.

i have short hair. and i have trichotillomania.

society tells me that that makes me worthless.

BUT I AM NOT WORTHLESS.

AND NEITHER ARE YOU.

here's a collage of the major hair points in my life.

short hair toddler.

short hair elementary school.

this is the longest my hair has ever been.
this is when i was thirteen right before my trich started.

high school hair. 

average college-length hair. 

i have learned to love my hair. i hope you can love yours too.

PORTLAND: the story of STD convention.

i've been thinking for a week about how i want to start this post off, because it's going to be long and epic, and long and epic blogs need to have epic beginnings.

so i guess i just started this post about how i couldn't figure out how to start it.

typical me.

this post is about how i went to portland, oregon for five days for STD convention.

"hi, my name is emily and i have chlamydia." "hi, emily."

i hope that made you laugh.

i don't have any STDs, and i think they're called STIs now anyway, but that's like saying that pluto isn't a planet anymore, BECAUSE IT TOTALLY IS. STD convention is not actually about sexually transmitted diseases. STD is sigma tau delta, the international english honor society that i happen to be a member of.

every year they have a convention somewhere cool. and in november you submit your scholarly or creative work to it. and if they pick it, you get to go to a swanky hotel with 800 other english majors that like shakespeare just as much as you do.

i submitted my poetry portfolio, hunting whales (lack of capitalization purposeful as a tribute to e. e. cummings, my main man) and it got in. they also capitalized it and i was very frustrated. nobody understands my undying love for e. e. cummings. except maybe my ex-boyfriend.

that was a thing that happened, by the way. we won't get into it.

ANYWHOO. 

on wednesday march 20th, i packed my bags for the mystical land of portland, oregon, home of the hipsters, where i would fit right in, being a hipster. there were six of us going to present our work, and dr. aspinall, our fearless advisor, was along for the ride and to make sure that we didn't die. 

the trip there was nineteen hours of fun that involved a one hour van ride, a short wait in the tiniest amtrak station i'd ever been in, a four hour train ride to chicago, a six block walk to the chicago l, an hour ride on the l, a five hour wait in o'hare, a four hour flight to portland, and an hour max light rail ride to the hotel.

i did this on crutches. like a badass. (i kind of did this thing where i tore my meniscus five days before departure. fun.)

i would be sharing my hotel room with erika and christina. i knew erika somewhat, i knew christina possibly a little bit less even though we sat near each other in critical theory, but boy would i get to know them over the next three days. still feeling like we were moving and adjusting to the three hour time difference, we slept.

thursday we were up bright and early and ready to discover PORTLAND as my phone put it. see, i'm really excited about portland because it's a hipster city, it's in a state i'd never been to, and i was there for a really cool convention. so whenever i type portland into my iphone, it corrects it to PORTLAND so i'm just always excited about portland. i also signed up for the twitter contest.

i know. perfect for me.

if you follow me, i'm sorry that that had to happen to you. i lost about five followers. i had two hundred tweets tagged @EnglishCon at one point. and i took a lot of dumb pictures.

so day one of portland consisted of us registering for the actual convention, where we got our STD swag.

swag.

then we begged the hilton for a wheelchair. i was not about to wander around portland on my crutches because i couldn't put weight on my left leg. which i still can't. i'll probably blog about that later.

erika and christina decided to name me DAVE, disabled and vegetarian emily, because when we discussed the prospect of venturing out into portland and grabbing some lunch, i said nervously, "remember that i'm disabled AND a vegetarian."

they are still calling me dave. it's been over a week.

we venture out into the city and erika's pushing me in the wheelchair and portland is breathtaking. we're smack downtown on sixth avenue and it's basically like new york city but smaller, greener, and nicer. everything is eco-friendly, there are hipsters everywhere, and i'm seriously taking pictures of every building that i can see. 

NOM.

we come across a sandwich place called great harvest bread. we go inside. there's a cute hipster boy taking my order. cute hipster boy flirts with me but i don't notice because i haven't been flirted with in two and a half years and i don't understand this thing called "newly single" so erika and christina start making fun of me. while i'm waiting for my order, he reaches around me seductively and says, "did you drop this pen?"

don't try to cop a feel, bro. i have crutches that will take you DOWN.

so my veggie sandwich comes. it's slathered in hummus. i take a bite.

INSTANT. FOODGASM.

seriously, i didn't know that hummus could be orgasmic. christina had to tell me to stop moaning.

when we leave the hipster sandwich shop, we decide that we need to go to powell's books, which is the biggest bookstore in the world. on the way there my wheelchair somehow ends up in the street and a car is coming and it's all very scary, but we make it to powell's in one piece, and when i say it's the biggest bookstore in the world, it is the biggest damn bookstore in the world.

i check my wheelchair in at the front desk. we say we'll meet up in two hours. we split ways.

i think the pictures speak for themselves. that was one section of the store.

i ended up buying looking for alaska (what up, john green?!) and the UK version of the goblet of fire. i now own the fourth harry potter book (my personal favorite) in american english, UK english, and spanish. 

after getting lost at powell's, we get starbucks and it's figuring out which one to go to that's the problem because there's seriously one on every single corner. after starbucks, we head back to the hilton to the convention because the first keynote speaker is ursula k. le guin, a poet and sci-fi writer that my friend santino would probably kill a man to meet.

she's eighty-three. and she was the sassiest lady i had ever met in my life. 

after some dinner, we went to a little midwest networking circle thing that looked like AA. i sat down next to this cool guy in a wheelchair who introduced himself as tim and said that he went to IPFW in fort wayne.

me: no way. i'm from fort wayne.

tim: WHAAAAT

me: no kidding. my best friend goes to IPFW. her name is hannah easter.

tim: GET OUTTA HERE, HANNAH'S IN MY ASTRONOMY CLASS.

later, i get a text from hannah: YOU MET TIM?!

small world. out of eight HUNDRED english majors, i run into tim.

after the really boring networking session, we want to explore portland at night. we get the wheelchair and head out into the humid night and take pictures of literally everything. then we get hungry. so we go to tartberry, the land of yogurt. 

tartberry was underground, which was cool, and they had a wheelchair ramp, which was even cooler, and i've never had frozen yogurt quite like it. the walls were neon and covered in pictures and we were next to a pillar that had notes from all over the world that people had left.

we left our own.

afterwards, we run into a really legit old church from the eighteen hundreds and lying on a bench in the portico is...

THIS.

after finding the fun vegetables, we kept wandering and taking pictures and we eventually found ourselves on the edge of portland state university's campus. feeling that we had wandered too far, we headed back.

portland day one = success.

portland day two = PRESENTATIONS.

erika presented her poetry at eight in the morning. we were up by seven, showering, putting on our make up and our presentation clothes, rereading through our papers and poetry, and generally feeling anxious. 

erika presented her fabulous poetry and as soon as she was done being grilled at her panel, we crutched off to mine, where i thought i was going to pee my tights. i was going first. i sat right by the podium so i wouldn't need my crutches, but when i was introduced, i tripped over them. smoooooth, emily.

i read my poetry. i only fumbled on one word. i sat down. four people read after me.

my panel was oddly... formalist. they were like, "YEAH STRUCTURE!" and i was like "YEAH ORGANIC FREE FORM!" and this girl was like, "WOW I'M GOING TO ASK YOU A RUDE QUESTION" and in my head i was like "WOW YOU'RE A RUDE BITCH" but i actually said "to me, poetry is incredibly personal and i believe that we have preferences in nearly everything that we encounter. how i write my poetry is based on personality and preference."

then she looked at me like, but you can't just forgo structure.

uh, yeah i can.

after my panel was done grilling me for not being a stuck up formalist from penn state altoona, we went to voodoo doughnuts. 

i cannot even describe voodoo doughnuts.

the doughnuts were so... beautiful. the entire place was pink and yellow. it was run by awesome hipsters with strange body piercings and tattoos. there was a giant doughnut on the wall. they had ropes outside of the shop for people to line up when they couldn't fit into the shop. i was so overwhelmed by doughnut that i wanted to die.

we got a voodoo dozen.

 

OM NOM NOM.

basically, i was the best. and we took the rest of them back to the hotel.

after nomming on the best doughnuts in existence, it was time for christina to present her paper on brutus from shakespeare's julius caesar, which reminded me of this one project that i did in sophomore high school lit about brutus's servant who i couldn't remember the name of. it was a shakespeare panel and christina went first. after her was a nice girl on hamlet that i named rosencrantz, and after her was a girl that talked about astrology in king lear, and after her was a kid named evan that had a deep voice and had two theses working at the same time but didn't really have a critical dialogue going so he sounded smarter than he was.

then we went to kelsey's presentation on women in the picture of dorian gray, and it was after her panel that we met chris.

chris was tall. chris was handsome. chris was going to grad school at harvard or something crazy like that. chris wore oxford shoes. chris had a deep voice and wavy hair. chris was nice. chris wrote poetry and played guitar. chris went to college two hours away from us.

chris was also carrying a book that said "spicy" on it.

his friend kait was presenting in kelsey's panel and we all hit it off real fast. we invited them to go out to dinner with the six of us and dr. aspinall.

it was an hour wait, so the eight of us decided to leave aspinall to his beer and we went back to voodoo doughnuts because chris and kait hadn't been there yet, and on the way there, we were passed by a hipster bike posse.

it was a bunch of hippies all riding bikes and passing out pamphlets on tourist induced pollution. there were two guys on a huge cart that they had rigged up like a bike and they were leaning back and pedaling pretty nonchalantly. there were two large speakers on the cart and they were pumping the bass. you could hear them three blocks up the street.

fuggin' portland, man.

on saturday, day three, we spent our time going to different panels. we went to a really depressing panel of original fiction called coping mechanisms where one girl's entire short story happened in the span of a girl jumping off of a building and falling to her death. (eight in the morning. it was rough.) then erika and i went to a poetry workshop where i wrote a poem called the grapefruit war. we got some lunch at the sandwich shop from thursday (sandwich boy was not there to lean over me seductively) and then we went to chris's poetry panel to support him. after that christina and i went to the last keynote speaker, a creative nonfiction writer named anne who talked about the difference between carnal book lovers and courtly book lovers.

i am somewhere in the middle. but she talked about how one time a harvard librarian found a used condom inside of a book. carnal indeed.

after a nice nap, we got ready for the red and black gala dinner, where we all dressed up and had a fancy dinner in the ballroom. let me tell you, eight hundred english majors know how to get dressed up. and we know how to eat good food. the food was superb. we sat with a small chapter from south carolina and i wanted to take their advisor home with us. he was a cute little asian professor that had been a vegetarian longer than me, and he was wearing a bowtie.

after the gala dinner and all of the convention awards, we got a picture with the executive director of sigma tau delta, which should've gotten me like, a million points for the twitter contest. dr. aspinall couldn't figure out how to work the camera on my phone, and while he was working it out, the executive director, who was like, sixty-five, was like, "i'm surrounded by six lovely women, this is so nice" and i was like, "dude don't be a perv, we're all like, twenty-two."

alpha alpha pi. with creepy dude.

convention was over, and it felt like we had literally just gotten to the hotel.

we slept in our clothes for three hours and then made the nineteen hour journey home.

on the plane, they played silver linings playbook and i fangirled. i took my vicodin on the l in chicago heading to union station, where i then crutched up five flights of steps like a badass. once i reached union station, my vicodin kicked in and i got wonderfully high. i thought that my ears had left my head, i said that my french fries tasted like the seashore, i yelled loudly about the hand dryers being magical but how we actually lived in the muggle world, and when erika told me she was a slytherin, i burst into tears like a five year old.

i'm really fun on narcotics, guys.

i slept on the train. after leaving portland at three thirty in the morning, we got back to campus at ten fifteen that night. once i got out of kelsey's van in front of my dorm, i almost threw up in the parking lot.

it was truly an adventure.

HERE ARE SOME MORE PICTURES OF STD CONVENTION. AND I'M SO GLAD YOU STUCK THROUGH THIS LONG POST, BECAUSE IT WAS A LONG WEEKEND OF AWESOME.

PORTLAND. :)

nighttime portland!

that's me. presenting my poetry. WOO.

erika, me, and christina at the gala dinner!

my main man, e.e. cummings in the street.

portland. was. AWESOME.

PORTLAND.

THE OSCARS!

welcome to my politically incorrect and totally opinionated blogpost about the oscars!

while i blog about the oscars, i am currently residing at home in indiana in my seventies armchair. so obviously i took a weird picture of myself and labelled it SEVENTIES ARMCHAIR!

if this is your first time, here's my face.
read the rest of my stuff.

the best part about this picture is that you can't actually see my seventies armchair.

also while i blog about the oscars from my seventies armchair while watching the lion king, i have a guest in my room. her name is alexandria and she happens to be a tarantula. due to humanity's natural fear of spiders, i didn't feel the need to put a picture of her on here.

you can thank me later.

but i will be getting my own tarantula as a pet soon (alex is my brother's) and then i'll post ALL THE PICTURES! eheheh.

but now it's time for EMILY BLOGS ABOUT THE OSCARS!

due to the not so unfortunate circumstances of watching seventies variety shows with my parents, i didn't actually get to the oscars until nine, so i missed the first hour. this meant that i missed the wonderful christoph waltz getting his award for django unchained. i'm sure he deserved it. a lot of people that i follow on tumblr are really huge fans of the guy, so i didn't have go to far to figure out what i'd missed.

many of the posts went like this: CHRISTOPH KAEJSHGSG I CAN'T EVEN BABYYYYY CHRISPEARGH

this is how we type on tumblr. and as you'll soon see, how i type on twitter.

i am a notorious livetweeter. if you follow me on twitter, you understand this. if you don't follow me on twitter, you can find it @emilyyxh, but i guarantee that you do NOT want to follow me. simply for livetweting purposes. 

that and i also tweet uncomfortable things.

so i settle down for the oscars. get nice and comfy with my blanket on the basement couch. open up my laptop. 

first tweet: AAAAND EMILY IS LIVE AT THE OSCARS! WHAT UP BRAVE AND PAPERMAN?!

best animated film and animated short film. which were both well deserved. i can't speak to wreck-it-ralph because i haven't seen it, and i was also grabbing a large dr. pepper from the garage when the nominees were announced. but the guy for brave walked up in a kilt and i was like, ALMA COLLEGE DAS WASSUP.

i then learned very quickly that seth macfarlane, our fearless oscars host, had performed something called the boob song while i was watching uproariously funny seventies variety shows. i went to youtube to find it and came out with this:

i, for one, was not amused. and neither was that blond actress i forget the name of and charlize theron.

it was then announced that the cast of the avengers was going to be coming onto the stage and i promptly fangirled. the avengers, guys! the avengers! the movie i saw five times in theatres and bought the day it came out!

and then scarlet johansson didn't come out with them and this happened.

there are farrrr more twitter pictures coming. to show my love of twitter. and how i spent the evening.

no but seriously, where was the only female avenger?!

and then suddenly this blond guy with glorious locks was on stage accepting some award that i hadn't paid attention to because i was too busy being an angry feminist (which takes up a lot of my day). this guy had like, waist length hair and suddenly voldemort shows up on my twitter all like, nobody told me that lucius malfoy was nominated for an oscar!

well played, lord voldemort, well played.

the lucius malfoy guy (winner of best cinematography) was doing his speech and from the depths of the theatre emerged something terrying, electric, and worthy of pants-peeing.

jaws music.

at first i thought it was a joke. but i quickly realized it was the oscars' way of saying "STFU AND GTFO WE DON'T WANNA BE HERE ALL NIGHT, BRO."

this promptly showed up on tumblr with this caption:

"YOUR SPEECH IS TOO LONG MOTHERFUCKER"

that happened.

next came channing tatum and jennifer anniston, who seth macfarlane blatantly called a stripper. that was unsettling. what was more unsettling (on a personal level) was the backlash that i received on twitter for stating that channing tatum is not attractive.

uhhhh because he's not. i'm more into british men.

then the hobbit was nominated for something, i fangirled, it didn't get it, and i pouted. then in the background they started playing "do you hear the people sing" and of course this was tweeted.

it really was suggested.

there was a huge tribute to bond and i realized very quickly how few bond movies that i'd seen. then the stage got dark and a figure rose onto it through a dark mist... and i thought... ADELE!

wrong. it was not adele. i was disappointed.

i then got into an argument with kara nic over a retirement commercial. some old guy was like, RETIREMENT! THE AMERICAN DREAM! and my tweet was something like, "hey old guy in this commercial, my american dream has nothing to do with retirement, or america for that matter" and kara was like, "EMILY ARE YOU DUMB THAT'S TOMMY LEE JONES."

oh. sorry, tommy lee jones. but you still don't change my mind about my american dream and how it's actually about moving to england.

by now facebook statuses are cropping up. "watching the oscars with emily, carrie, annalise, and lydia on twitter. though we live far apart, we are together through tweets."

damn straight we were.

periodically, the oscars shows detailed clips of the nine nominated best pictures. lincoln was up next and while watching it, i discovered it was a movie that i didn't really want to see. at the end of the clip, seth macfarlane made this joke: "daniel day-lewis really got into lincoln's head. but i feel like the only person who really accomplished that was john wilkes booth."

i have never seen a more uncomfortable theatre in my life.

the following tweet is a direct quote of macfarlane's reaction to his joke: "150 years and it's still too soon."

next up was a short documentary and the only film that won was one that wasn't about war, starvation, disease, and death. the guys were really really excited and talked for wayyy too long and jaws ate them. very loudly. john williams will one day rule the world.

then it was a tribute to musicals. YES! MUSICALS! I LOVE MUSICALS!

first off was chicago. it was a wonderful performance, but i was off-put by the sexualized dancing on top of a piano. i've played the piano for sixteen years. that is an expensive, beautiful instrument. there is no need to shake what your mother gave you on top of it.

then it was jennifer hudson and good lord, that was incredible. THE SASS. THE BEAUTY. THE POWER. i literally screamed "JENNIFER HUDSON I WILL LOVE YOU SO GOOD" out loud at my TV and on twitter.

then it was les miserables.

right. they all came out on stage. they were all beautiful. they were all singing one day more. everybody on my twitter feed was crying.

and then there's me.

i have only heard one day more performed with the vocals replaced by... kazoos.

and it is seriously the funniest thing that i have ever heard.

my twitter feed is exploding with sobs and i am snorting into my giant bowl of popcorn while eddie redmayne looks like he's going to pee his pants he's singing with so much force. hashtag #mylife.

then ted came on stage. you know, the adorable teddy bear voiced by seth macfarlane. i was forcibly reminded of last summer when my grandma was like, "emily, i really want to see ted!" and i was like, "grandma, i don't think you understand how NOT cute that teddy bear is." 

while ted and mark wahlberg were on stage riffing off each other, the cameras panned to bradley cooper, one of my favorite actors, and i tweeted "bradley cooper is like, "awww this teddy bear is adorable but we ALL KNOW THAT IT'S NOT"" and i watched in horror as ted made a jewish joke. 

uh, how is that okay on national television? ted was like, "hey, your last name ends in berg, are you jewish? and you have a huge nose."

uhhhhhh.

THEN THERE WAS A TIE!

don't ask me what it was for. i have no recollection. i just know that life of pi won one of the tied oscars. like it won everything else. (not that i'm bitter. except i totally am.)

when skyfall got its first oscar, the guy that accepted it was straight out of the sixties. butt-lenghth hair. bad teeth. old suit. huge round glasses. the perfect man.

then it was time for the fourth biggest award of my evening: best actress in a supporting role. presented by none other than the wonderful christopher plummer.

i prayed hard for jacki weaver. but we all knew it was going to anne hathaway. and of course, it was. i love anne hathaway. she's a brilliant role model for young women. but like the rest of twitter, we were all expecting a huge acceptance speech. i tweeted about waiting for the jaws music. it didn't come. anne hathaway kept it short, snappy, and beautiful. i was proud.

i probably should've said this a whole lot earlier, but i'll say it now, and i tweeted it too: if silver linings playbook is nominated for ANYTHING, i want it to win. if anybody from silver linings playbook is nominated for anything, i want them to win. hands down. no ifs, ands, or buts. hence the jacki weaver/anne hathaway dilemma.

THEN ADELE WAS ON STAGE AND EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT. 

i didn't even tweet during her performance. i was that captivated.

then came a sad part of the oscars for me: the kristen stewart hating. she came on stage with daniel radcliffe, which got ALL of social media abuzz. i have a few things to say about this.

1. she was limping because she was supposed to be on crutches and they wouldn't let her take them on stage.

2. she looked high because taking pain medication makes you look high.

3. don't be all like, "euw she shouldn't be on the same stage as harry potter" because she is NOT bella swan, and daniel radcliffe is NOT harry potter. so just don't even.

4. just because she was in twilight does not make her a bad person or a bad actress. move on with your lives.

moving forward.

then it was in memoriam, which is always incredibly depressing. i felt a sharp pang for michael clarke duncan. i cried like the emotional fangirl that i am, and barbra streisand came on stage and sang a very heartfelt and upsetting song about remembrance. luckily i had a commercial break to compose myself in which tim burton talked about zombie unicorns for samsung galaxy note product placement.

adele got the best original song oscar as we knew she would, and then carrie and i wondered why the hobbit wasn't nominated for best adapted screenplay. then i pouted that silver linings playbook didn't get it. things were really starting to get rolling. awards people actually cared about!

then it was attack of the capslock just before best actress.

i obviously had my sights set on jennifer lawrence. i have seen silver linings playbook twice and there was no other way to go.

so. capslock. best actress.

jean dujardin is very attractive, by the way. and they did play lion king music. a bunch of people were like, "@emilyyxh, DID YOU HEAR THE LION KING MUSIC?!" so i responded. and then i fangirled about jennifer lawrence. 

we can talk about how she tripped on her dress, how hugh jackman and bradley cooper rushed to help her, and how she's so down to earth and funny. she is so great. and her dress was BEAUTIFUL. i told my dad that i could've lived happily under her train. on twitter, i protrayed my love of her dress in a different way, spelling errors and all.

excitement is bad for spelling.

then it was best actor.

when i first saw silver linings playbook, i wanted to blog about it. it's a movie that's very near and dear to my heart, and i see myself in bradley cooper's character, in jennifer lawrence's character. it's a movie about humanity, about mental illness, and about the reality of our lives, and i truly believe that it was the best movie of the year. and i believe with one hundred percent conviction that bradley cooper deserved that oscar.

when they showed a clip of his acting, they showed the scene where he has a panic attack looking for his wedding video at three in the morning. this was my third time seeing this clip, and it still does not get any easier, because i see myself when i watch it. and sitting alone in my basement, my fingers ready to tweet, i cried watching the thirty second clip of him. i sat there and i cried.

the oscar went to daniel day-lewis.

i do not want to undermine is role in lincoln or his acting. lincoln was a superb movie (although i haven't seen it) and i know that he is a truly gifted actor.

but i truly believe that that oscar should've gone to bradley cooper's outstanding performance.

then michelle obama skyped in to read best picture.

i was still upset about bradley cooper. i'd vented about it on twitter and tumblr. i was trying not to hate daniel day-lewis's perfect acceptable speech. and i prayed very hard for silver linings playbook.

well, you know what happened. argo got best picture.

i was pissed.

yes, i cried. i was very upset. i had actually forgotten that argo was even nominated. a true underdog.

but ben affleck's acceptance speech was beautiful, and i think it's something that we can all learn from. and now i have to go see argo.

i'm still thinking about doing a full post on silver linings playbook. i really am. i believe firmly that it deserved to win all of its nominations. it only came away with one for jennifer lawrence, and she deserved that award. i do believe that bradley cooper deserved best actor. and i do believe that it deserved best picture.

i also believe that if you haven't seen silver linings playbook that you should go see it.

i was drying my very real tears when seth macfarlane then sang a song about all of the oscar losers as a kind of send off for the evening. and when he made poked fun at bradley cooper not getting the best actor and then jabbed at silver linings playbook as a movie, i screamed obscenities at my TV and might've thrown a remote.

i was less than impressed by seth macfarlane's hosting. i found the boob song to be petty and cheap, his jewish jokes were not warranted at all, his jab at selma hayek was completely rude, and basically, he's a misogynist douchebag. i could say a lot more about it, but i'd just get angry. and right now i'm super chill, just watching the lion king and hanging out with my brother's tarantula.

the oscars were a great time. i sat on my couch with my laptop, my never failing dr. pepper, a bowl of popcorn, and twitter at my fingertips. i laughed. i cried. i retweeted. i got 56 twitter notifications. i was offended. i was ecstatic. i was angry. i was sad. i screamed. i threw some stuff. i said some bad words.

it was awesome.

if you want the full scale of my oscar tweeting (all four hours' worth), click here. you'll have to scroll down through my previous tweets to get to the oscars, but hopefully it's worth it.

you can learn a lot about a person through their twitter.

until then, "I'M JUST THE CRAZY SLUT WITH THE DEAD HUSBAND!"

it makes sense if you've seen silver linings playbook, i swear.

and finally, i leave you with a beautiful picture of bradley cooper and jennifer lawrence, whom i now officially ship.

i matter. you matter. we matter. we are stories.

i want to preface this by asking you to actually pay attention to the title.

i matter. you matter. we matter. we are stories. you are a story. tell it. 

rewind to the middle of december when i was scrolling through to write love her arms' website. if you don't know what TWLOHA is, please click HERE.

i clicked on their heavy and light tour button, looking to see where the tour was going to be headed.

i've always been unfortunate with tours. like, when frightened rabbit had their US tour, i couldn't go. it's always in places that are too far out of reach, like chicago. and then it's like, wait, i'm a broke college student, i can't pay for gas and food and tickets.

heavy and light was in detroit, two hours away from my college. tickets were fourteen bucks each.

i bought two without thinking about it.

they were at my house in an envelope within a week. i put them in a special part of my purse and brought them up to school. this was going to be a once in a lifetime experience.

i was going to TWLOHA heavy and light detroit with annalise.

annalise and i!

at three fifteen yesterday, annalise shows up at my room. i'm actually wearing makeup. i've been charging my camera all day. i'm wearing the TWLOHA deon i got online when i was seventeen and i first heard of their movement. annalise borrows a shirt that i bought when jamie tworkowski visited my college my freshman year. we get a quick middle of the afternoon dinner, tell my iphone to take us to detroit, get in my car, and we head off into the glorious michigan countryside heading to d-town.

most of the ride there is taking pictures of scenic snowy michigan, trying to find a decent radio station, and talking about family drama. we have dr. peppers. the music we can find is good. a car passes us with a license plate that says GOT MLK?! and annalise snaps a picture of it. we laugh about the fact that we're RAs and taking pictures so we can "document the situation". there's excitement. we sing "hey there delilah" in a terrible opera.

i haven't been to detroit in years. and annalise and i realize that we've didn't really tell anybody that we were doing this. we just... left for detroit for a night of music, conversation, and hope.

we cruise into detroit. it's all one way streets and large buildings and police cars and i feel completely out of my element. i have to pee. i'm thinking about the head and the heart concert that jacob and i went to and how this feels almost the same; pulling into a new place, a new city, getting ready for a once in a life time experience. we park, put all of our valuables in the trunk of my car, and then we're rushing into st. andrew's hall, showing our tickets and our IDs to prove that we're twenty-one.

the hall is big and open and we get as close to the stage as we can. we're shoved next to some guys that are pushing seven feet tall. my phone is dying from directing us all the way here. i'm tweeting about how we have ten minutes until jamie tworkowski walks into the stage and i can't even stand it because i just love his movement so much, and i'm remembering the time that he hugged me when he came to alma, and i know that this is what i need right now, that this show is going to blow my mind.

the lights go out. and there are words on a screen. words telling me that i am important, that i am a story, that i matter in this world. and that i need to live my story, that my story is unique, is important to me, to other people.

i am invincible and i matter.

jamie tworkowski.
i love this man.

and then jamie tworkowski came out and talked about heavy and light, the TWLOHA movement, and how tonight was a night of hope, stories, words, conversations, and music.

there is god in music.

the next three hours were a blur. the show started with noah and abbie gunderson who were breathtakingly beautiful. i tried to figure out how noah could play the guitar and the harmonica at the same time. then it was a small band called now, now that had two girl lead singers that looked like they were my age. they made me question that i'm doing with my life because when i looked at them, i thought i could do anything.

then anis mojgani came on stage.

he was a spoken word poet and the moment he opened his mouth, it felt like i knew what i wanted to do with my life, i knew what it meant to be loved, i knew everything that i ever needed to know. his words were beautiful and meaningful and my words trying to describe it will never, ever do it justice.

anis mojgani. check it out.

i sang with aaron gillespie and bryce someone from the rocket summer, and then the main show of the evening began after a heartfelt story from a heroin addict named dennis and a powerful message from jamie.

JON FOREMAN.

have you heard of jon foreman? probably not.

have you heard of switchfoot?

now you've heard of jon foreman.

jon foreman started his part of the show alone. he unplugged himself from any time of electrical outlet, stepped to the front of the stage, and started to play dare you to move. to the entire theatre sang it with him, all of our voices rising together. i have a video and you can hear me singing in the background, but it's hard to tell that i'm singing because i was crying so hard.

he was joined by his other band the fiction family and they played for a good hour. annalise and i held hands and swayed together, feeling what it was to live through music, to feel like we mattered, to feel like we really were a story.

we are.

too soon, all of it was over. we stood there for a while, not entirely sure what had happened. we had stood for four hours in a theatre surrounded by beautiful people, all their own stories, and we had listened to beautiful moving music and poetry, and all too soon, it was over.

i didn't know what to do. but i did know one thing.

I WAS HUNGRY.

after annalise had her heavy and light pamphlet signed by aaron gillespie, we managed to find our way out of the winding downtown streets of detroit. annalise tells me that she'll buy me dinner, even though it's eleven o'clock at night. i want doughnuts. we get onto the highway to head back to alma. about ten miles in we see a sign for tim hortons.

we scream. veer the car. get off in some detroit suburb that we've never been to before.

and we get doughnuts and coffee at tim hortons at eleven thirty at night.

doughnut. om nom nom.

the mocha that i get is absolutely disgusting. we snarf down two doughnuts each. annalise gives her latte because it actually tastes good. after a half hour of sitting alone in a tim hortons and laughing and talking about the greatness of heavy and light, we head back toward lansing.

annalise and i talk about all kinds of things on the way home. what would we do if we weren't held down by anything? if we could truly do anything we wanted to do? i would be a professional blogger. annalise would direct a music video.

what if we could just buy a plane ticket and go wherever we wanted whenever we wanted? have you ever just wanted to leave?

while we drive back to alma, we are invincible.

i tell annalise that i don't want to go back to alma, i want to keep adventuring. because when else are we going to do this? we're not going to do it tomorrow, or the next day, or the next week. we've just gone to detroit and had this incredibly moving once in a lifetime experience. if we're going to do it, we're going to do it now.

she agrees.

so we blow by the alma exit and keep taking the highway toward lansing.

there was this moment where i panic. we're still cruising down 96 at seventy-five miles an hour, but now i have no idea where we're going because we've passed our exit. we can't just turn around and head back. we've done what we've always talked about; we've taken the exit we've wanted to, we haven't taken the exit we were supposed to.

we are adventuring.

we drive twenty miles to lansing. we get off at an exit to the capitol building, the capitol building of michigan. annalise's phone is barely keeping up with the car, trying to get us directions there. we turn on a one way street and follow it toward the large building, just blindly trying to get there as best we can, and we pull over in front of it, pay the parking meter, and it's one in the morning.

it's one in the moring and annalise and i have driven from detroit and somehow we've wound up at the capitol building of michigan.

capitol. one in the morning.

we bundle up. we run up the capitol building steps. we dance on them. we take pictures. we look to the heavens and shout. we did this, and we are invincible. this is our story. 

when it becomes too hold to hold onto my camera properly and it's nearing one thirty in the morning, we get back in my car and head back to alma. we get on 127 and start heading north, 53 miles to campus. we talk about the fact that we just did this thing, this thing where we purposely missed our exit, wandered around lansing, and danced on the steps of the capitol.

as we near alma, the radio plays we are young by fun.

it has never been more appropriate. we are young. we are setting the world on fire. we are invincible. we matter.

all day today i've thought about ways that i want to convey last night on this blog. i want to tell you everything that i felt, describe each tear that i shed while listening to testimonials, to poetry, to music. every scream that i gave when there was a musician, every shout of happiness, every shout of laughter. every sway of my hips, every clap along to the music, every time that annalise squeezed my hand to let me know that i wasn't alone in this room, that we were all people, that we were all stories.

i cannot do it.

all day today people have been asking me "how my concert in detroit was." i tell them it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

i don't tell them that i wasn't just a concert. i don't tell them that i came alive in st. andrew's hall in detroit, that i had a glimpse of who i am meant to be.

i tell them that it was fun and annalise and i went to lansing at one in the morning on a whim. they tell me it was lucky that we didn't get arrested.

i don't tell them what moved us to do this. i can't explain it. i don't have the words to convey it.

but if you take anything away from me attempting to describe my experience of to write love on her arms' heavy and light detroit, please take this away.

you are a story. and you matter.

now here are some pictures from last night for your enjoyment. :)

HEAVY AND LIGHT.

jon foreman was a badass.

st. andrew's.

annalise and i ate the capitol. :)